Propaganda of the deed (or propaganda by the deed, from the French propagande par le fait[1]) is specific political direct action meant to be exemplary to others and serve as a catalyst for revolution.
It is primarily associated with acts of violence perpetrated by proponents of insurrectionary anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th century, including bombings and assassinations aimed at the State, the ruling class, and Church arsons targeting religious groups, even though propaganda of the deed also had non-violent applications.[2] These acts of terrorism were intended to ignite a "spirit of revolt" by demonstrating the state, the middle and upper classes, and religious organizations were not omnipotent and also to provoke the State to become escalatingly repressive in its response.[3] In 1881, the International Anarchist Congress of London gave the tactic its approval.[4]
Anarchist origins
Various definitions
One of the first individuals to conceptualise propaganda by the deed was the Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacane (1818–1857), who wrote in his "Political Testament" (1857) that "ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around."[5]Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), in his "Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis" (1870) stated that "we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda."[6]
Some anarchists, such as Johann Most, advocated publicizing violent acts of retaliation against counter-revolutionaries because "we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action as propaganda."[7] It was not advocacy for mass murder, but a call for targeted killings of the representatives of capitalism and government at a time when such action might garner sympathy from the population, such as during periods of government repression or labor conflicts,[8] although Most himself once claimed that "the existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion."[9] In 1885, he published The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, a technical manual for acquiring and detonating explosives based on the knowledge he acquired by working at an explosives factory in New Jersey.[10] Most was an early influence on American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Berkman attempted propaganda by the deed when he tried in 1892 to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick following the deaths by shooting of several striking workers.[11]
Beverly Gage, professor of U.S. history at Yale University, elaborates on what the concept meant to outsiders and those within the anarchist movement:
To outsiders, the talk of bombing and assassination that suddenly pulsed through revolutionary circles in the late 1870s sounded like little more than an indiscriminate call to violence. To Most and others within the anarchist movement, by contrast, the idea of propaganda by deed, or the attentat (attack), had a very specific logic. Among anarchism's founding premises was the idea that capitalist society was a place of constant violence: every law, every church, every paycheck was based on force. In such a world, to do nothing, to stand idly by while millions suffered, was itself to commit an act of violence. The question was not whether violence per se might be justified, but exactly how violence might be maximally effective for, in Most's words, annihilating the "beast of property" that "makes mankind miserable, and gains in cruelty and voracity with the progress of our so called civilization."[12]
By the 1880s, the slogan "propaganda of the deed" had begun to be used both within and outside of the anarchist movement to refer to individual bombings, regicides and tyrannicides. In 1881, "propaganda by the deed" was formally adopted as a strategy by the anarchist London Congress.[3]
As early as 1887, a few important figures in the anarchist movement had begun to distance themselves from individual acts of violence. Peter Kropotkin thus wrote that year in Le Révolté that "a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite".[13] A variety of anarchists advocated the abandonment of these sorts of tactics in favor of collective revolutionary action, for example through the trade union movement. The anarcho-syndicalist, Fernand Pelloutier, argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist involvement in the labor movement on the basis that anarchism could do very well without "the individual dynamiter."[14]
State repression (including the infamous 1894 French lois scélérates) of the anarchist and labor movements following the few successful bombings and assassinations may have contributed to the abandonment of these kinds of tactics, although reciprocally state repression, in the first place, may have played a role in these isolated acts. The dismemberment of the French socialist movement, into many groups and, following the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, the execution and exile of many communards to penal colonies, favored individualist political expression and acts.[15]
Later anarchist authors advocating "propaganda of the deed" included the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, and the Italians Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani. For Gustav Landauer, "propaganda of the deed" meant the creation of libertarian social forms and communities that would inspire others to transform society.[16]
At the other extreme, the anarchist Luigi Galleani, perhaps the most vocal proponent of "propaganda by the deed" from the turn of the century through the end of the First World War, took undisguised pride in describing himself as a subversive, a revolutionary propagandist and advocate of the violent overthrow of established government and institutions through the use of 'direct action', i.e., bombings and assassinations.[17][18] Galleani heartily embraced physical violence and terrorism, not only against symbols of the government and the capitalist system, such as courthouses and factories, but also through direct assassination of 'enemies of the people': capitalists, industrialists, politicians, judges, and policemen.[18][19] He had a particular interest in the use of bombs, going so far as to include a formula for the explosive nitroglycerine in one of his pamphlets advertised through his monthly magazine, Cronaca Sovversiva.[19] By all accounts, Galleani was an extremely effective speaker and advocate of his policy of violent action, attracting a number of devoted Italian-American anarchist followers who called themselves Galleanists. Carlo Buda, the brother of Galleanist bombmaker Mario Buda, said of him, "You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw".[20]
Relationship to revolution
Propaganda of the deed thus included stealing (in particular bank robberies– named "expropriations" or "revolutionary expropriations" to finance the organization), rioting and general strikes which aimed at creating the conditions of an insurrection or even a revolution. These acts were justified as the necessary counterpart to state repression. As early as 1911, Leon Trotsky condemned individual acts of violence by anarchists as useful for little more than providing an excuse for state repression. "The anarchist prophets of the 'propaganda by the deed' can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses," he wrote in 1911, "Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise." Vladimir Lenin largely agreed, viewing individual anarchist acts of terrorism as an ineffective substitute for coordinated action by disciplined cadres of the masses. Both Lenin and Trotsky acknowledged the necessity of violent rebellion and assassination to serve as a catalyst for revolution, but they distinguished between the ad hoc bombings and assassinations carried out by proponents of the propaganda of the deed, and organized violence coordinated by a professional revolutionary vanguard utilized for that specific end.[21]
Notable actions
This timeline lists some significant actions that have been described as "Propaganda of the deed" since the 19th century.
Alexander Berkman's attempt to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick, as illustrated by W. P. Snyder for Harper's Weekly in 1892.Artist's rendition of the bomb thrown by the anarchist Auguste Vaillant into the Chamber of Deputies of the French National Assembly in December 1893
17 February 1880– Stepan Khalturin successfully blows up part of the Winter Palace in an attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Although the Tsar escapes unharmed, eight soldiers are killed and 45 wounded. Referring to the 1862 invention of dynamite, historian Benedict Anderson observes that "Nobel's invention had now arrived politically."[23] Khalturin is hanged on the orders of Alexander's son and successor, Alexander III, in 1882 after the assassination of a police official.
13 March[O.S. 1 March]1881– Tsar Alexander II of Russia is killed in a bomb blast by Narodnaya Volya.[24]
9 December 1893– Auguste Vaillant throws a nail bomb in the French National Assembly, killing nobody and injuring one. He is then sentenced to death and executed by the guillotine on 4 February 1894, shouting "Death to bourgeois society and long live anarchy!" (A mort la société bourgeoise et vive l'anarchie!). During his trial, Vaillant declares that he had not intended to kill anybody, but only to injure several deputies in retaliation against the execution of Ravachol, who was executed for four bombings.[4]
12 February 1894– Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus (a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris), killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, when asked why he wanted to harm so many innocent people, he declares, "There is no innocent bourgeois." This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda of the deed targets only specific powerful individuals. Henry is convicted and executed by guillotine on 21 May.[4]
15 November 1902– Gennaro Rubino attempts to murder King Leopold II of Belgium as he returns in a procession from a Requiem Mass for his recently deceased wife, Queen Marie Henriette. All three of Rubino's shots miss the monarch's carriage, and he is quickly subdued by the crowd and taken into police custody. He is sentenced to life imprisonment and dies in prison in 1918.[31]
21 July 1905– Members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation launch an attempt on the life of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, but the bomb missed its target, instead killing 26 people and wounded 58 others. One of the conspirators, the Armenian anarchist Christapor Mikaelian, was killed during the planning stages. The Belgian anarchist Edward Joris was also among those arrested and convicted for their part in the plot.[32]
31 May 1906– Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral tries to kill King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Victoria Eugenie immediately after their wedding by throwing a bomb into the procession. The King and Queen are unhurt, but 24 bystanders and horses are killed and over 100 persons injured. Morral is apprehended two days later and commits suicide while being transferred to prison.[33]
15 June 1910– The Bosnian anarchist Bogdan Žerajić attempts to assassinate the Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovian Marijan Varešanin, but failed and subsequently committed suicide.[35]
12 November 1912– Anarchist Manuel Pardiñas shoots Spanish Prime Minister José Canalejas dead in front of a Madrid bookstore. Pardiñas then immediately turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.[24]
9 February 1913– The farmers Mulatilo Virgilio, Fermin Perez and Fabian Graciano assassinate Salvadoran President Manuel Enrique Araujo with machetes.[36]
13 October and 14 November 1914– Galleanists – radical followers of Luigi Galleani – explode two bombs in New York City after police forcibly disperse a protest by anarchists and communists at John D. Rockefeller's home in Tarrytown.[38]
16 September 1920– The Wall Street bombing kills 38 and wounds 400 in the Manhattan Financial District. Galleanists are believed responsible, particularly Mario Buda, the group's principal bombmaker, although the crime remains officially unsolved.[40]
Anarchism and violence have been linked together by events in anarchist history such as violent revolution, terrorism, assassination attempts and propaganda of the deed. Propaganda of the deed, or attentát, was espoused by leading anarchists in the late 19th century and was associated with a number of incidents of political violence. Anarchist thought, however, is quite diverse on the question of violence. Where some anarchists have opposed coercive means on the basis of coherence, others have supported acts of violent revolution as a path toward anarchy. Anarcho-pacifism is a school of thought within anarchism which rejects all violence.
Alexander Berkman was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing.
The Wall Street bombing was an act of terrorism on Wall Street at 12:01 pm on Thursday, September 16, 1920. The blast killed thirty people immediately, and another ten died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.
Narodnaya Volya was a late 19th-century revolutionary socialist political organization operating in the Russian Empire, which conducted assassinations of government officials in an attempt to overthrow the autocratic Tsarist system. The organization declared itself to be a populist movement that succeeded the Narodniks. Composed primarily of young revolutionary socialist intellectuals believing in the efficacy of direct action, Narodnaya Volya emerged in Autumn 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya. Predecessor groups had already started using the term "terror" positively and Narodnaya Volya in similar fashion self-identified as terrorists and venerated dead terrorists as "martyrs" and "heroes" as part of a propaganda driven campaign to attract attention to their moral justifications for using political violence.
The first Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of far-left movements, including Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included the Russian 1917 October Revolution and anarchist bombings in the U.S. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of socialism, communism, and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of concern.
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.
Anarchism in the United States began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
The Preparedness Day Bombing was a bombing in San Francisco, California, United States, on July 22, 1916, of a parade organised by local supporters of the Preparedness Movement which advocated American entry into World War I. During the parade a suitcase bomb was detonated, killing 10 and wounding 40 in the worst terrorist attack in San Francisco's history.
The history of terrorism involves significant individuals, entities, and incidents associated with terrorism. Scholars often agree that terrorism is a disputed term, and very few of those who are labeled terrorists describe themselves as such. It is common for opponents in a violent conflict to describe the opposing side as terrorists or as practicing terrorism.
A series of bombings were carried out or attempted by Galleanists from April through June 1919. The targets included anti-immigration politicians, anti-anarchist officials, and prominent businessmen, as well as a journalist and a church. Almost all of the bombs were sent by mail. The bombings were one of the major factors contributing to the First Red Scare. Two people were killed, including one of the bombers, and two injured.
Mario Buda (1883–1963) was an Italian anarchist active among the militant American Galleanists in the late 1910s and best known for being the likely perpetrator of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which killed 40 people and injured hundreds. Historians implicate Buda in multiple bombings, though the documentary evidence is insufficient to prove his responsibility.
The United States Immigration Act of 1918 was enacted on October 16, 1918. It is also known as the Dillingham-Hardwick Act. It was intended to correct what President Woodrow Wilson's administration considered to be deficiencies in previous laws, in order to enable the government to deport undesirable aliens, specifically anarchists, communists, labor organizers, and similar activists.
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory and tendency within the anarchist movement that emphasizes insurrection as a revolutionary practice. It is critical of formal organizations such as labor unions and federations that are based on a political program and periodic congresses. Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organization and small affinity group based organization. Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies.
The Chinese Assassination Corps was an anarchist group, active in China during the final years of the Qing dynasty. One of the first organized anarchist movements in China and fiercely anti-Manchu, it aimed to overthrow the then-ruling Aisin Gioro and the Empire of China through the use of revolutionary terror.
The Milwaukee Police Department bombing was a November 24, 1917, bomb attack that killed nine members of local law enforcement and a civilian in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. The perpetrators were never caught but are suspected to be an anarchist terrorist cell operating in the United States in the early 20th century. The target was initially an evangelical church in the Third Ward and only killed the police officers when the bomb was taken to the police station by a concerned civilian. The bombing remained the most fatal single event in national law enforcement history for over 80 years until the September 11 attacks.
La Salute è in voi! was an early 1900s bomb-making handbook associated with the Galleanisti, followers of anarchist Luigi Galleani, particularly in the United States. Translated as "Health Is in You!" or "Salvation Is within You!", its anonymous authors advocated for impoverished workers to overcome their despair and commit to individual, revolutionary acts. The Italian-language handbook offered plain directions to give non-technical amateurs the means to build explosives. Though this technical content was already available in encyclopedias, applied chemistry books, and industrial sources, La Salute è in voi wrapped this content within a political manifesto. Its contents included a glossary, basic chemistry training, and safety procedures. Its authors were likely Galleani and his friend Ettore Molinari, a chemist and anarchist.
Galleanisti are followers or supporters of the insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani, who operated most notably in the United States following his immigration to the country. The vast majority of Galleanisti or Galleanists were similarly poor and working class Italian immigrants or Italian Americans, and especially Italian anarchists and Italian immigrants or Italian-Americans involved in the labor movement of the time. Galleanists remain the primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920 in the United States.
The Jerez uprising was a 1892 peasant rebellion in Jerez, Spain. While the event itself was unexceptional amid the regional history of rebellions, the disproportionate repression following the uprising resulted in a series of protests and retaliatory bombings throughout the remainder of the decade. The uprising consisted of 500 to 600 fieldworkers who marched into Jerez with their farm equipment and demands of prisoner release and economic relief. They were shut down within hours, leaving three dead. The Spanish Civil Guard detained 315 fieldworkers, anarchists, and labor organizers from the countryside. They focused on quelling anarchism in the region, though the role of anarchism in the uprising itself has been the subject of inconclusive historiographical debate.
Carlo Valdinoci was an Italian Galleanist anarchist based in the United States and the publisher of Luigi Galleani's Cronaca Sovversiva. He is believed to have been involved in multiple Galleanist plots.
The Youngstown dynamite plot was a foiled attempt by Galleanist anarchists to move a case of dynamite by train from Steubenville, Ohio, to Chicago, from January 17–18, 1918. The 18-year-old Gabriella "Ella" Antolini Segata, part of the Italian Galleanist circle, was caught by a suspicious train porter. The dynamite was potentially en route to Milwaukee, where anarchists had been squaring off with police in a series of counter-retaliatory attacks stemming from the September 1917 Bay View incident. Antolini Segata was imprisoned for 18 months and the case was a big break for the Bureau of Investigation agent Rayme Weston Finch, who would come to lead investigations against the Galleanists.
In March 1871 the Commune took power in the abandoned city and held it for two months. Then Versailles seized the moment to attack and, in one horrifying week, executed roughly 20,000 Communards or suspected sympathizers, a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre's 'Terror' of 1793–94. More than 7,500 were jailed or deported to places like New Caledonia. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain and the United States. In 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the left. Not till 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned Communards. Meanwhile, the Third Republic found itself strong enough to renew and reinforce Louis Napoleon's imperialist expansion—in Indochina, Africa, and Oceania. Many of France's leading intellectuals and artists had participated in the Commune (Courbet was its quasi-minister of culture, Rimbaud and Pissarro were active propagandists) or were sympathetic to it. The ferocious repression of 1871 and thereafter, was probably the key factor in alienating these milieux from the Third Republic and stirring their sympathy for its victims at home and abroad. Anderson, Benedict (July–August 2004). "In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel". New Left Review. II (28). New Left Review: 85–129.
↑ Galleani, Luigi, La Fine Dell'Anarchismo?, ed. Curata da Vecchi Lettori di Cronaca Sovversiva, University of Michigan (1925), pp. 61–62: Galleani's writings are clear on this point: he had undisguised contempt for those who refused to both advocate and directly participate in the violent overthrow of capitalism.
1 2 Galleani, Luigi, Faccia a Faccia col Nemico, Boston, MA: Gruppo Autonomo, (1914)
1 2 Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press (1991), pp. 51, 98–99
↑ Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1996), p. 132 (Interview of Charles Poggi)
1 2 Esenwein, George Richard (1989). Anarchist Ideology and the Working-class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898. University of California Press. p.197. ISBN978-0520063983.
1 2 Newton, Michael (2014). Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p.134. ISBN978-1610692854.
1 2 Weir, Robert E. (2013). Workers in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. p.39. ISBN978-1598847185.
↑ Cannistraro, Philip V., and Meyer, Gerald, eds., The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, ISBN0-275-97891-5 (2003) p. 168
↑ Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press (1991), pp. 58–60
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
