#AnarchistOfTheDay

In 1917 he was one of the leading lights of the Petrograd Federation of Anarchist Communists, and subsequently the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda -Voice of Labour and then of the . He was an active participant in the July and October uprisings against the Provisional Government of Kerensky. He wrote the famous and well known statement Why I Am An Anarchist on 23rd October 1917 in the paper Vol’nyi Kronshtadt. During the Civil War, he was a leading light in the Moscow bakers union, a member of the Secretariat of the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalists (1918) and of the Secretariat of the Moscow Workers’ Union of Anarchists (1920-1922), and of the Provisional Executive Bureau of the Russian Confederation of Anarchist-syndicalists(1920-1921). He and other Moscow anarchist-communists and anarcho-syndicalists united to set up the Moscow Union of Anarcho-Syndicalists-Communists in early 1919.

Pavlov was repeatedly elected by workers to the Moscow City Soviet. When the Communist regime attempted to replace delegates to the bakers’ union with their own appointees, the bakers revolted and threatened to stop work. When the Cheka attempted to arrest Pavlov, the elected candidate, the bakers surrounded him, allowing him to get home safely. They subsequently issued an ultimatum which meant that the authorities backed off from deposing their choice of Pavlov.

The Moscow bakers union was a stronghold of anarchism, along with similar sections in Kiev and Kharkhov. It heavily criticised the official Communist unions as controlled by the State and operating to police workers. Alongside the anarchists and working closely with them were SR-Maximalists. Maximalists like Nyushenkov were also elected as delegates by the bakers, as well as one Left SR, I. Steinberg. The bakers worked in two large cooperatives (artels), Freedom of Labour and Anthill.

Writing about the Freedom of Labour cooperative in the anarchist paper The Initiative Pavlov wrote: “There was a developed charter that puts forward the following objectives: the most complete and fair satisfaction of the vital needs of its members. This goal is achieved through co-operative sustainable use of technical means and the comradely use of manpower in accordance with the basic principles of the socialist system. The artel with the same purpose, puts the problem of raising the cultural level of its members through the device of lectures, courses, schools and so on. …Upbringing of the growing generation in the spirit of the new free-communist development. ”

Subsequently the Moscow Trade Union Council, controlled by the regime, made a decision to dissolve the bakers’ union on 17th-18th June 1920. Pavlov and another anarchist, Kamyshov, were arrested, along with Niushenkov. Also arrested were two section members Kusnetsov and Viurgov.

A complete report by Melnitschansky , Chair of the Council appeared in No. 125 of Pravda. “The meeting thereupon adopted the following resolution : Due to the systematic abuse and breach of union discipline by the members of the union committee of the Moscow bakers, it was decided to dissolve the section of the Moscow bakers and include the bakers in the union of the foodstuff workers. The members of the former committee of the section of the bakers’ union, N. Pavlov, Kamyshov, Niushenkov, Viurgov and Kusnetsov are excluded from the union movement and shall, furthermore, be held to answer before a judiciary board. They lose their right to speak before any assembly and can never more be elected to a responsible post in the unions.”

Pavlov was driven from holding positions in the union and of the mandate of delegate to the Moscow Soviet.

Pavlov’s home at 18 Bolshoi Cheryshevsky was raided by the Cheka on October 24th , 1920 when a meeting of anarchists took place there. Pavlov was arrested along with Volin who had only just been released from a Cheka prison, and fifty others. Later on December 1st of that year he, Volin and all the participants in a conference of anarcho-syndicalists in Kharkhov were arrested by the Cheka.

On February 8th 1921 , learning of the grave condition of Kropotkin, he went with Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Alexander Schapiro to visit him. Unfortunately the train was delayed and Kropotkin died one hour before they arrived. Pavlov was subsequently heavily involved in the committee to prepare for Kropotkin’s funeral. He can be seen in the short film dedicated to the funeral which has recently re-emerged.

Later on June 8th of the same tear, Pavlov was arrested with Vasily Lukich Panyushkin,(1) the Kronstadt sailor. He was exiled for a year to the mouth of the North Dvina river.

Pavlov’s various spells in prison had severely affected his health, and the constant pressure and recurring arrests forced him to withdraw from the anarchist movement. However this did not stop him from being arrested as an “anarchist underground fighter” in 1930 and exiled to Tashkent in Central Asia for three years, where he soon died on July 29th 1932.

By Afed Nick Heath

(1) Panyushkin , born in 1887 emigrated to St Petersburg, where he worked as a tool-maker. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. He later was drafted into the Navy and was a leading light in the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors in February 1917. He left the Party in disgust in 1921, forming his own Workers and Peasants Socialist Party. After his arrest he was sentenced to two years hard labour. He later rejoined the Communist Party, was again arrested in 1937 and served over 10 years more in prison, dying in 1960.

He was born Vero Recchioni in London in 1915. He was educated at Emanuel School, and Kings College London, where he trained as a civil engineer. He helped his father Emidio Recchioni with propaganda work against Mussolini, was arrested in Paris in January 1935 and extradited from France. In 1936, he published in collaboration with Camillo Berneri, a bilingual anarchist and antifascist, the paper Italia Libera/Free Italy.

Richards founded and edited Spain and the World, which became Revolt in 1939, and eventually was followed by War Commentary 1939–1945, all filling the gap left by the cessation of Freedom in 1932, and the title naturally reverted to Freedom from 1945. With his co-editors Philip Sansom and John Hewetson, he was tried at the Old Bailey and imprisoned for nine months in 1945 for conspiring to publish an article allegedly inciting soldiers to disaffect from their duty or allegiance. (Marie-Louise Berneri was excluded from the indictment because spouses are legally incapable of conspiring with each other.) He was a conscientious objector during the war. He continued as editor of Freedom until 1964, and ran Freedom Press for longer. Among his publications were Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1953), Errico Malatesta – Life and Ideas (1965) and “Protest Without Illusions”, a critique of CND (1981). He was a personal friend and official photographer of George Orwell and a close friend of fellow Anarchist writer, Colin Ward.

Richards was involved in a long-running dispute with fellow and former contributor to Freedom Albert Meltzer which entangled many of their associates and the organisations with which they were involved and continued after both their deaths. Although the feud started in a dispute arising from the possibility of Meltzer’s Wooden Shoe Press moving into Freedom premises, there were also political differences. Meltzer advocated a more firebrand and proletarian variety of anarchism and often denounced Richards and the Freedom collective as “liberals”.

Vernon Richards returned to Franco’s Spain in the late 1950s. He was of the view that tourism would act as catalyst of change, opening up a hitherto closed society. Working for the Wayfarers Travel Agency he escorted the first British Tourists to the Catalan fishing village of L’Escala (Girona Province) in 1957. He took a series of photos documenting the life of the village and its inhabitants at that time. A book of these photos (Vernon Richards. L’Escala, 1957–61. La visió d’un estranger −31 fotografies- (Aj. l’Escala, 1999) was published by the Municipality of La Escala in 1999. He is still well remembered (2013) by many people in the town.

In his later life, Richards became interested in Bio-Dynamic gardening, based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. Richards ran a Bio-Dynamic smallholding near boxford, north of Colchester from the 1970s up to his death. Richards died in Hadleigh, Suffolk in 2001. His publications include

-Lessons Of The Spanish Revolution
-The impossibilities of social democracy
-Protest without Illusions
-George Orwell At Home (and Among the Anarchists). Essays and Photographs
-Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society
-Violence and Anarchism

He was born in Ukrainian in 1891, died in Mexico 1956. He is notably known for the assassination of a police chief responsible for the killings of workers.

Szymon Radowicki (more usually known in Argentina as Simon Radowitzky) was born on either the 10th of September or November 1891 into a workers family in the Jewish community in the little Ukrainian village of Stepanice (Stapanesso).

The family moved to the industrial city of Ekaterinoslav, because Simon’s father wanted his children to get a good education, and Simon received a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing and maths. At the age of 10 he had to leave school to work as a blacksmith’s apprentice because of his family’s poverty. He had to sleep on a hard cot under his master’s dining table. From here, he heard the revolutionary conversations of his master’s daughter and her friends.

At the age of 14, he got work in a hardware factory. He took part in his first strike for shorter hours, but was wounded in the chest by a sabre wielded by a Cossack at a street demonstration. He was forced to lie in bed for 6 months of recuperation. He was then sentenced to four months imprisonment for the distribution of leaflets. In 1905, during the revolutionary events, and despite being still only 15 years old, he was elected second secretary of the soviet of the factory where he worked. With the repression that followed the 1905 Revolution, Simon was forced into exile to escape being deported to Siberia.

He arrived in Argentina in March 1908, where he got work as a mechanic. He read the anarchist press there, in particular La Protesta, the paper of the FORA, the anarcho- syndicalist union that organised among the workers. He associated with a group of Russian anarchist exiles that included the intellectuals Petrov, Karaschin, Ragapelov, Scutz and Buwitz and lived in a tenement with some of these. On the 1st of May 1909, he participated in the big workers’ demonstration in the Plaza Lorea. A cavalry detachment under the command of the police chief Colonel Ramon Falcon charged the crowd and twelve workers were killed and 100 seriously wounded. In the following “Red Week” Falcon pursued his terror against the workers. The police began to fan an anti-Semitic campaign against “Russian Jewish instigators”.

Radowitzky, like the German Wilckens was a gentle soul and advocated the use of as little violence as possible in the revolutionary struggle. Like Wilckens, he was horrified and disgusted by the murders of workers and proposed to act. Falcon was returning from the funeral of the prison service, when Radowitzky, lying in wait along the route, threw a bomb into his coach. Falcon and his secretary were mortally wounded. Radowitzky was apprehended not far away. At his trial, the public prosecutor asked for the death penalty. Radowitzky’s cousin was able to produce a birth certificate that showed that Simon was only 18 and thus was excused the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment, and to be put in solitary on bread and water for 20 days near the anniversary of Falcon’s death.

Radowitzky gained the respect of both prisoners and jailers in the National Penitentiary where he was incarcerated. Following a breakout of 13 prisoners that included 2 famous anarchists, Radowitzky was transferred to the dreadful prison of Ushuaia in Patagonia in 1911. He was one of 62 prisoners transported there in the coalbunker of a ship. At the end of the voyage the prisoners were blackened with coal dust and their ankles ulcerated by leg- irons.

At Ushuaia, Radowitzky showed immense strength of character. He stood up to all the humiliations and indignities meted out, and moreover, became the spokesperson of all the prisoners, leading hunger strikes and “protest choirs”. When the prison officials realised his standing among the prisoners they increased their torments. Lanterns were swung in front of his face every half hour at night. He was anally raped by the deputy governor and 3 warders in 1918.

When the anarchist movement in Buenos Aires heard this, they launched a campaign, covering the walls with messages demanding his freedom and publishing a pamphlet on the treatment he had received. Radowitzky “the martyr of Usuaia” became the subjects of songs sung by Creole payadores (songsters) at workers’ meetings and assemblies. The liberal press took up the call for his freedom, but it was not forthcoming. Tired of waiting, some anarchists planned his escape. In league with a smuggler, they got Radowitzky on board his schooner.

But the Chilean Navy intercepted them and Radowitzky was returned to prison after just 23 days of freedom. He was punished with solitary confinement and half rations up to January 1921.

The campaign to secure his release continued. Finally in 1930 after 20 years of hell, Radowitzky was released. Expelled from Argentina, he took refuge in neighbouring Uruguay, again taking up the work of a mechanic.

His involvement with the anarchist movement there and the struggle against the dictator Gabriel Terras in 1933 led to his arrest and deportation to the isolated Isla de Flores.

When the Spanish Revolution broke out, Simon headed for Spain in 1936. By now he was in his mid-forties and in poor health. He went to the Aragon front where he fought with the anarchist 28th Division led by Gregorio Jover. Here he met Antonio Casanova, originally from Galicia in North Spain, who had emigrated to Argentina at an early age and had been one of the founders of the Federación Anarco-Comunista Argentina in 1935. The two became good friends.

Later Simon worked in Barcelona for the cultural division of the mass anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT. At a time of strict rationing he happened to get hold of a bottle of milk that he immediately gave to a pregnant woman that he felt needed it more than him.

With Franco’s victory, he had to flee to France, where like so many others, he was interned in the concentration camp at St. Cyprien. From there, he got away to Mexico. Here, a poet managed to get him a job as a clerk at the Uruguayan Consulate. At the end of the World War, he worked in the Mexican branch of the International Rescue and Relief Committee to help political refugees in Europe, alongside the German anarchist Augustin Souchy, sending CARE food packages. He wrote for anarchist publications in Mexico.

Simon’s last years were plagued by ill health. The prison years had taken their toll. When not in hospital, he lived in a shabby attic of an apartment building.

He died of a heart attack on February 29, 1956 whilst working in a toy factory.

“With Radowitzky’s passing one of the last social revolutionaries of the Russian Revolution of 1905, one of the finest idealists of the international labour movement was gone.” – Augustin Souchy.

Postscript: In November 2003, a popular assembly, meeting in the Plaza named after Ramon Falcon, voted to change its name to that of Simon Radowitzky.

Taken from Organise! Magazine of the Anarchist Federation Edited by libcom

Since 1999, Alston has produced four issues of the zine, anarchist Panther Zine. He refers to himself as a post modern anarchist.

In “Beyond Nationalism, but Not Without It”, Alston rejects traditional anarchist dogma and says “Every time I hear someone talk about my people as if we are just some ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’ I want to get as far away from that person or group as possible, anarchist, Marxist, whatever”. Opponents of this perspective within the Anarchist People of Color camp insist that opposing authority yet placing the needs of people of color above others represents racism, that black nationalism would mean using force to exclude people based on the color of their skin and is utterly incompatible with anarchism, and that one cannot deny a “white nationalism” if one is to have a “black nationalism” and thus it is best that neither exist. While Alston supported a nationalist position in the first issue of his publication, it was a far milder version of the position.

Alston occasionally speaks at events as diverse as animal rights events and union activist conferences. He currently resides in the U.S.

“When we talk about property, State, masters, government, laws, courts, and police, we say only that we don’t want any of them”.

Luigi Galleani was a major figure in the anarchist movement, specifically among Italian anarchists, known as an unflinching advocate of propaganda by the deed. Galleani savored insurrectionary anarchism, seeing the Idea (as they termed anarchism) as a crusade and anarchists as martyrs pursuing holy vengeance and retribution against State, Capital, and Church.

Galleani was most influential Italian anarchist of the early 20th century. He was an accomplished radical orator, strongly charismatic, and inspired countless followers among his Italian comrades. He edited the principal Italian anarchist paper, Cronaca Sovversiva, which ran for fifteen years until its eventual suppression by the US government.

Born to middle class parents, Galleani became an anarchist in his late teen years while studying law at the University of Turin. He refused to practice law, which he now held in contempt, and turned his attentions to anarchist propaganda. He was forced to flee to France to evade threatened prosecution in Italy, but was expelled from France for taking part in a May Day demonstration.

Galleani later lived briefly in Switzerland, where he spent some time with students of the University of Geneva before again being expelled as a dangerous agitator, this time for arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. He went back to Italy only to run afoul of the police again as a result of his insurgent activities. His return to Italy ended with his arrest for charges of conspiracy, where he spent five years in jail, exiled on the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily.

Escaping Pantelleria in 1900, Galleani fled to Egypt, staying among Italian comrades for a year until threatened with extradition, whereupon he fled to London. He was 40 years old at this time, and arrived at the United States in 1901, barely a month after the assassination of President McKinley at the hand of a self-proclaimed anarchist.

Settling in Paterson, New Jersey, Galleani assumed editorship of La Questione Sociale, the leading Italian anarchist periodical in America. In 1902, the Paterson silk workers engaged in a strike, and Galleani threw his oratorical talents in with the strikers, urging workers to declare a general strike and overcome capitalism, spellbinding his audiences with his rhetorical flourish and clarity of thought.

When police opened fire on the strikers, Galleani was wounded in the face and was later indicted for inciting a riot. However, he managed to escape to Canada before being apprehended by the authorities.

“Continue the good war. . .the war that knows neither fear nor scruples, neither pity nor truce.”

Galleani later slipped back into the United States via Vermont, living under an alias among his comrades, who by now regarded him with zealous devotion.

It was during this period that he founded Cronaca Sovversiva on June 6, 1903, what historian Paul Avrich has described as “one of the most important and ably edited periodicals in the history of the anarchist movement.” (Sacco and Vanzetti, pg. 50).

While its circulation never exceeded four to five thousand, this periodical was of considerable influence within the movement and held sway wherever there were Italian anarchists–from North and South America, Europe, to North Africa and Australia.

Galleani was captured by authorities in 1906 after a socialist (Giacinto Menotti Serrati, editor of Il Proletario) revealed Galleani’s whereabouts in the wake of lengthy personal dispute he had with Galleani. Galleani was tried in 1907 for his role in the 1902 strike, but the trial ended in a hung jury and he was set free.

Galleani’s force of personality as a living example of revolutionary anarchism won him more converts than any single individual in the movement. A prolific writer, he produced hundreds of pamphlets, articles, and essays, reaching tens to hundreds of thousands of readers on several continents, although he never wrote a full-length book.

Galleani merged Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid with unfettered insurgency, defending communist anarchism against authoritarian socialism and reformism, speaking of the value of spontaneity, variety, autonomy and independence, direct action and self-determination in a world of industrialized conformity.

He spoke of militant anarchism, advocating the overthrow of the government and capitalism by violent means, including use of dynamite and assassination as the chosen methods of bringing this change about. Galleani detested partial, incremental reforms, seeing them as betraying anarchist ideals.

He later relocated to Lynn, Massachusetts in 1912, where he continued his polemics unabated, urging violent reprisals against the enemies of the anarchist movement. By this time, Galleani’s followers, almost all manual laborers, numbered in the thousands, coming to America from all parts of Italy.

The affinity groups of Galleanists were not mere satellites orbiting around Galleani; conversely, they were fiercely independent and were awash with squabbles, disputes, and rivalries. A dangerous dynamic had grown among the Galleanists, as each affinity group sought to outdo the other in revolutionary acts.

Paradoxically, Galleani was, despite his proclamations in favor of liberty and diversity, absolutely intolerant of dissent, castigating those who challenged him as allies of State and Capital, and even accusing them of being traitors and spies!

The Italian anarchists, particularly the Galleanists, were deeply suspicious of formal organizations, seeing them as likely to turn into hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. As a result, they played little role in the union movement, although they did participate in strikes and demonstrations. This shortcoming on their part would prove to isolate them from the rest of working society.

La Salute è in voi! (“Health is in You!”) was a 46-page bomb manual adapted from a guide to explosives from a chemist friend of Galleani’s, Professor Ettore Molinari. Galleani’s handbook was characterized as accurate and practical by the New York City bomb squad, but this turned out not to be the case, as several unfortunate anarchists soon discovered–there was an error in the formula to nitroglycerine that had to be emended.

This work of Galleani’s was eventually put to use by his followers (the first instance of its use occurred in 1914). Three anarchists were blown up while creating a bomb with which to destroy John D. Rockefeller’s home in Tarrytown, New York (in retaliation for the Ludlow Massacre). Later that year, several bombings occurred in different areas of New York by Galleanists, including several police stations.

Faccia a facciao col nemico (“Face to Face with the Enemy,” 1914) was a collection of Galleani’s articles defending propaganda by the deed and exalting the anarchists who practiced it. This book was described the the Justice Department as “the glorification of the most anarchistic assassins the world has ever seen” and even possessing this book marked one as a dangerous subversive in the eyes of the government.

One Galleanist, Nestor Dondoglio, a chef by profession, poisoned some two hundred guests at a banquet in 1916 to honor Archbishop Mundelein by lacing the soup with arsenic. None of the guests died–Dondoglio, under the alias of Jean Crones, had used too much poison, which prompted the victims to vomit it back up. Dondoglio was never apprehended.

The Galleanists engaged in numerous high-profile acts of terrorism, including a systematic bomb plot with thirty targets, all high officials or wealthy people directly or indirectly responsible for persecuting anarchists and workers; none of whom were actually hurt by the bombs — out of sheer luck, not for lack of trying on the part of the Galleanists.

Another Galleanist, Mario Buda, to protest the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti, bombed Wall Street (September 16, 1920, pictured below), leaving 30 dead, over 200 seriously injured, and creating a conflagration causing $2 million in property damage (including demolishing J.P. Morgan’s office).

These bombings caused a panic among the authorities that served as the main impetus for the Red Scare, and led to the unparalleled expansion of the FBI’s powers. In fact, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s first cases with the FBI was tracking down the bombs carried by the Galleanists.

The authorities invoked the idea of a giant anarchist “conspiracy” to overthrow the government, which was actually false. The infamous “Palmer Raids” whereby the government raided and jailed radicals across the country, were a direct response to the Galleanists’ terrorism (Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer being one of their bombing targets). The American Civil Liberties Union was created in reaction to the unconstitutional Palmer Raids.

Between 1919 and 1920, hundreds of radicals, including many anarchists, were deported (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), as part of a nationwide reaction against radical insurgency, largely instigated by the bombings of the Galleanists.

Galleani himself was deported in 1919, along with a number of his comrades, forced to leave his wife and children behind. Interestingly, these deportations were not carried out juridically, but instead were done by the Department of Labor, mostly because the courts proved unable to convict anarchists and radicals, either from lack of evidence or from hung juries. The government relied on the executive power of the Labor Department to treat it as an immigration issue, allowing them to bypass the court system entirely.

Galleani arrived in Italy on the eve of Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, and was eventually arrested by the Fascists, who had been provided reports on Galleani by the FBI. Bouncing in and out of jail in Fascist Italy, Galleani never wavered in his opposition to Mussolini’s thugs. He spent the rest of his life under police surveillance, living in exile off the coast of Italy.

Galleani died of a heart attack on November 4, 1931, at the age of 70.

The terrorism of the Galleanists forever created the association in people’s minds that anarchism was synonymous with terrorism–the image of the “bomb-wielding anarchist” grew directly in the wake of the massive Galleanist bomb plot. With Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions in 1927, the anarchist movement in the United States was pronounced dead.

Several books that bear his name are excerpts from Cronaca Sovversiva. The one exception is La Fine dell’anarchismo? (The End of Anarchism?) in which Galleani asserts that Anarchy is far from dead, but in fact is a force to be reckoned with.

Activist, Writer and political agitator, he’s written for ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Xtra’ magazine. In the 80’s he became involved with the group Class War.

He spent his childhood and teens in North London, Islington, and describes his neighbourhood then as (a festering slum). Being sent to the local Catholic primary school, by the age of 7 he had completely rejected the God doctrine, he says “Ironically culminating on his first communion”. Having left school at the age of 16, his childhood was spent in poverty where he learnt to survive. From that he developed a first hand understanding of oppression.

In his mid teens he was heavily influenced by underground press. He had access to a different world and the theory of Anarchism. Having learnt about the Anarchist movements throughout history, he declared himself an Anarchist at 17 years of age. Till this day his perspective on Anarchism is working class, anti authority and revolutionary. In the 1970’s his main political activity was Antifascist, which involved almost exclusively violent confrontation against Fascists and police on the streets. In the early 1980’s he was part of the Brixton riots and other riots across London such as the poll tax disruptions culminating in the famous Trafalgar sq riot. Still not one to miss out on a anti establishment disturbance, he also witnessed the August 2011 London riots first hand located in Hackney.

In the late 80’s he gained a degree in History as a mature student but as an avid reader (has read thousands of books), he says it had no impact on his already formed self taught politics. Having himself been involved in industrial workplace struggle (as one of the strikers in the winter of discontent), he argues against arm chair politicos and says true politics is out on the streets, organising for example in your work place, community etc.

He has a love for seeing the world and his travels include North, West, East and South Africa, India and Ice Land. Despite suffering from many serious chronic conditions throughout his life, has managed to overcome them. His other keen interests are the blues particularly 20’s/30’s blues piano. And he’s a film buff (a genre he has passion for is film Noire), and fondly remembers as a young boy going to watch films on the big screen.

He has 2 books published ‘Anti Fascist’, an account of his experience of fighting the Fash on the streets in the 1970’s and ‘Camden Parasites’ a true story of his brothers life in the lumpen and crime scene (which is also a critique of the Bohemian middle classes). Both books have attained a semi cult status.

He has been retired since 1985 and been involved in actions and protests such as ‘Movement Against the Monarchy’ which was the largest Anti-Monarch demonstration in England in the 21st century. He has lived in London his entire life and has set up an Anarchist library at the London Action Resource Centre aka Larc (in Whitechapel). He also was involved in setting up a monthly social at Larc called Red&Black, and currently (despite being as he says technology phobic) has got a youtube channel (Red&Black TV) where he regularly delivers his opinions on current topical news.

Living minutes away from Algate East station (Tower Hamlets), he describes the rapid gentrification there, as having a front seat on the Manhattanization of london by the global super rich, and the marginalisation of the majority of london from any form of housing security. He has squatted in his younger years and is passionate about housing issues. Most of his close relationships and comrades have been from working class backgrounds, this is an indictment of the british class system he says.

He was a key member of the infamous Whitechapel Anarchist Group (WAG), a highly active local East End group circulating a paper, hosting talks/events and attracting some publicity. He recently participated in the ‘Poor Doors’ and anti ‘Jack the Ripper museum’ demonstrations with Class War. And has frequently done history tours of the East End. He gives talks at social centres in the UK and Europe.

He’s has never given up hope or faith in an Anarchist class struggle based uprising.

90. Ian Bone, labelled ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’ by the Sunday People in 1984, notably founder of the group and newspaper ‘Class War’, Bone is from England and has been an active publisher of anarchist newspapers and an outspoken orator since the 1960s up to the present day.Ian Bone was born in the post war years to socialist parents with a proud working class heritage. He grew up with an awareness of the inequality and injustice in society, something reinforced by the experiences of his father during his years as a butler. Stories of the contempt that the rich held towards their servants, alongside his family’s political values, resulted in that contempt running both ways.

He studied politics at Swansea University and established the Swansea Anarchists in 1966, many of whom were present in the Grosvenor Square clashes with the police outside the US Embassy in 1968 following an Anti-War demonstration in London. After University in 1971 he was involved with the Swansea Solidarity Group and was part of the defence campaign for the Stoke Newington Eight producing the Swansea SN8 Bulletin as part of the Angry Brigade trial.

In 1977 he produced a 20 page pamphlet entitled the Swansea Mafia, printing and distributing 5,000 copies in one night, it ignited local interest exposing the dodgy dealings of the Council and resulting in the collapse of Swansea’s Labour Council as five of it’s Councillors faced prison sentences on corruption charges. Following this success the local people’s paper Alarm was established, written and distributed in rough working class pubs, it’s initial print run started with 50 copies which grew over two years to a distribution of six thousand a week. In 1979 Alarm stood candidates in the elections for Swansea District Council the same year that they also flour bombed Councillors in the Guildhall from the public gallery.

Moving to London Bone produced (with the help of friend Jimmy Grimes) the first copy of the Class War paper in 1983, a confrontational style newspaper aimed at the Crass punk anarchists, with the hope of moving them away from the stranglehold of pacifism and allying them with the inner city rioters of the early eighties. The success of the first edition quickly saw the formation of the London Class War group (which included anti-fascist Martin Lux) who regularly produced and distributed the paper. Bone was famously dubbed ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Britain’ in 1984 by British tabloid newspaper The Sunday People. In 1985 the group held a Bash The Rich march on Henley Regatta and by 1986 had formed into a nationwide Federation. The outspoken and angry style of Class War led to Bone becoming an infamous figure in the politics of the 1980s and in 1991 he appeared on the Jonathan Ross show. Ian Bone left the Class War Federation in 1992, briefly setting up the short lived rival Class War Organisation, the CW Federation was ended by it’s members in the summer of 1997 though a small group continued as London Class War.

In October 1994, Ian Bone organised the Anarchy in the UK festival, billed as 10 days that shook the world and described in the festival program as an attempt to have the largest gathering of international anarchists. In 1997, Bone helped to set up the Movement Against the Monarchy. With them he helped to organise the biggest Anti-Monarchist march Britain saw in the 20th century. Around 1500 people were estimated to have attended this march.

Now living in Bristol Bone started the Vote Nobody Campaign in 2001 which encouraged residents in Easton, Bristol to turn out for the local election and vote for ‘Nobody’. In that same year he started The Bristolian, a scandal sheet distributed for free in bars and pubs, and by Bone himself in Bristol’s Corn Street, the news-sheet gained a weekly circulation of over 15,000. He wrote much of the paper himself, but was assisted by local journalist Roy Norris, and by his long-term partner Jane Nicholl. In 2003, the success of The Bristolian led to the Bristolian Party, which stood in the local elections in an attempt to mobilise widespread discontent with Bristol City Council’s policies. The Bristolian was runner-up for the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism in 2005.

On 6 December 2006, Bone appeared on Channel 4’s current affairs discussion show Starkey’s Last Word, alongside Ed Vaizey and Harriet Harman, discussing the Iraq war. In it, Bone contended that the solution to the failing war was that British soldiers serving in Iraq should take part in mass desertion, that 10 Downing Street should be blockaded on May Day (International Workers’ Day), and that the two speakers beside him, both of whom were pre-war advocates of the Iraq invasion, should be put on trial for war crimes.

In 2006 he wrote his auto-biography Bash The Rich: True Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK and sold the film rights for ten pounds in a pub to film maker Greg Hall. Returning to London in November 2007 Bone organised a “Bash the Rich” march through Notting Hill with the aim of marching on David Cameron’s house but the demonstration was heavily policed. It marked Ian’s return as he re-joined the London Class War group while also maintaining his highly successful wordpress blog up until 2015.

Today Ian Bone still continues to be as active and as fiery as ever. He most recently has been involved with the Class War picket at the Poor Doors of 1 Commercial Road, the Class War Party standing candidates in the 2015 Election and the still ongoing Class War Women’s Death Brigade campaign to close the Jack The Ripper Museum on Cable Street.

89. Maria Silva Cruz, was born into a family of day labourers and charcoal burners in the impoverished village of Casas Viejas in Andalucia on 20 April 1915.

88. Benjamin Fletcher, an early 20th-century African-American labor leaders in the revolutionary IWW. The union that he helped lead for a decade, Local 8, the largest, most powerful, and longest lasting interracial union of the World War I era. He stands as a rare example of interracial equality in the early 20th century.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1890. He worked as a day laborer and a longshoreman, loading and unloading ships. Fletcher joined the IWW and the Socialist Party around 1912. He first heard IWW soapbox speakers addressing working class audiences in riverside neighborhoods. Shortly thereafter, Fletcher became a leader of the IWW in Philadelphia, beginning a long career in public speaking that won him a great many accolades for his fine voice and incisive arguments for overthrowing capitalism.

As America formally entered World War I, Philadelphia became one of the most important ports for the war effort. Though they engaged in but a single work stoppage (Local 8’s anniversary was celebrated annually with a one-day strike), the federal government targeted Local 8’s leaders, Fletcher included, in its national raids on the IWW. Demonstrating his importance and singularity, Fletcher was the only African American among the hundred members of the IWW tried in 1918 for treasonous activities.

While no direct evidence was provided against Fletcher, Local 8, or even the IWW (most of the “evidence” were statements of the IWW’s anti-capitalist-beliefs, not any planned actions to interrupt the war effort), all of the defendants were found guilty—the jury came back in under an hour, all guilty on all counts. Fletcher was fined $30,000 and sentenced to ten years in the Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas. As the sentences were announced, the Wobbly leader Bill Haywood reported that, “Ben Fletcher sidled over to me and said: ‘The Judge has been using very ungrammatical language.’ I looked at his smiling black face and asked: ‘How’s that, Ben? He said: ‘His sentences are much too long.’” While in jail, Fletcher’s release became a celebrated cause among African American radicals, championed by The Messenger, a monthly co-edited by A. Philip Randolph. Fletcher served around three years, before his sentence was commuted, along with most of the other jailed Wobblies, in 1922.

After his release, Fletcher remained committed to the IWW, though never played as active a role as he had prior to his imprisonment. He stayed involved in Local 8 but generally remained in the background. He still gave occasional speeches, on tours and street corners into the 1930s. Fletcher’s health failed while still young, typical of longshoremen and other manual laborers. He also moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn with his wife, where he worked as a building superintendent, until he died in 1949. He is buried in Brooklyn, New York.

87. Jonathan Pollak, a founder of ‘Anarchists Against the Wall’, which protests the Israeli West Bank barrier. A direct action group composed of Israeli anarchists and anti-authoritarians who oppose the construction of the Israeli Gaza Strip barrier and Israeli West Bank barrier. The AAtW calls the West Bank barrier the ‘Apartheid Wall’. Although AAtW has no official membership, it claims to have around 100 active participants who coordinate with Palestinians and groups like the International Solidarity Movement to organize nonviolent marches, civil disobedience, and direct action.

Born in 1985, his father is actor Yossi Pollak, and his brothers Avshalom and Shai also work in the film industry. He grew up in Tel Aviv and works in graphic design. As a teenager, he participated in protests in Budrus in 2003 and 2004. In the mid-2000s, he joined protests against the barrier wall in Bil’in.

Pollak was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by an Israeli soldier in April 2005, briefly losing consciousness and requiring stitches. He later accused Israeli forces of violating their regulations by deliberately firing the canister at him. An IDF spokesperson stated that the canister had first struck a rock and then hit Pollak on a ricochet.

In October 2010, Pollak was fined $1,250 for participating in an illegal demonstration against the barrier; Palestinian activist Abdullah Abu Rahma was sentenced to a year in prison at the same hearing. On 27 December 2010, he was sentenced to three months in prison for illegal assembly for having participated in a January 2008 bicycle ride protest. A prison term for illegal assembly was an unusually severe sentence, attributed by one official to three previous convictions of Pollak’s on protest-related charges. He declined an offer by the court to have his sentence commuted to a community service requirement. Pollak was released from prison in February 2011 after having his sentence reduced for good behavior, and returned to demonstrating at the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh within the week.

After the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmahin January 2011, allegedly from tear gas, Pollak criticized Israel’s use of the gas against Palestinians, stating, “This death was caused by the fact that they are using tear gas that was banned in Europe in the 60s and 70s, because it is lethal. But here, on Palestinians, they continue using it”. In May 2012, Pollak protested at the trial of Bassem al-Tamimi, a Nabi Saleh protest leader accused of organizing stone throwers and holding illegal demonstrations. In December, Pollak criticized the Israel Defense Forces for shooting Mustafa Tamimi, a Nabi Saleh resident throwing stones at a military vehicle, in the face with a tear gas canister; Tamimi later died from his injuries.

Pollak supports the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions(BDS) movement against Israel in protest of occupation of Palestinian territories. He has stated, “‘Ni’lin, just like Soweto, needs the world to stand behind it and generate significant pressure. … In Palestine, just as in South Africa, a strong BDS movement can make that change.”He has defended Palestinian stone throwing against the occupation as a moral act of self-empowerment.

87. Maria Roda, “Who knows poverty more than woman? Let’s show to the man who suppresses our will, who does not allow us to think and act freely, who considers us inferior to him, imposing on us his authority, as father, brother and husband, and, believing himself stronger than us, tramples us, oppresses us, and sometimes even hits us …. Let’s show him that we want freedom and equality too”.

86. Goliardo Fiaschi! In 1943, the young Italian anarchist falsified his birth certificate – to make himself seem older than his 13 years – and joined the wartime Italian partisans. Armed with a captured rifle almost as big as himself, he accompanied the women who regularly crossed the Apennines on foot to carry food from Parma, Reggio or Modena, some 150 miles away, back to the starving inhabitants of his Tuscan birthplace, Massa di Carrara. In 1944, he was adopted as a mascot by the Costrignano Brigade, and, in that role, entered Modena as standard-bearer on its liberation in April 1945.

Fiaschi, who has died aged 69, was one of the youngest of the generation of anti- fascist partisans who fought against Mussolini’s rule in Italy and Franco in Spain.

The natives of Carrara are reputedly descendants of Phoenician slaves who quarried marble for Rome. The city is also the cradle of Italian anarchism and a historical centre of rebellion. The fascist years in Italy, from 1922 onwards, were particularly bitter in Carrara. The city itself was twice liberated from the Nazis by anarchist partisans prior to the arrival of allied troops

After the liberation, Fiaschi returned to the quarries, where he had worked from the age of eight, alongside his father and uncle. By the early 1950s, he was involved with the Spanish refugee committee and became friendly with Jose Lluis Facerias, a veteran Spanish anarchist of the Ascaso column in the Spanish civil war, who had been freed from a Francoist jail in 1945 and had lived illegally in Carrara since 1952.

In August 1957, the two men crossed the Pyrenees on bicycles to join the guerrilla struggle against Francoism. They were detected within a fort night; Fiaschi was arrested in a forest hideout and Facerias murdered in a guardia civile ambush in the Barcelona suburbs. After beatings and torture, Fiaschi was brought before a military court in August 1958, where he was sentenced to 20 years and one day in jail.

For more than a decade, in 40 Spanish prisons, Fiaschi sent thousands of postcards, decorated with precisely detailed paintings, to friends and acquaintances. I met him first in one of those jails, and I was to receive those cards throughout the 35 years of our friendship, the last of which arrived only a few weeks be fore his death. With amnesties, he was released in 1966.

He returned to Italy to serve a 10-year prison sentence – passed in absentia, without his knowledge, without any notification of the charges and without representation in court. This conviction was for alleged involvement in a 1957 bank robbery in Monferrato with Facerias. Following an international campaign, he was finally released from prison after 17 years in March 1974.

Fiaschi became a key figure in the local anarchist movement. He ran a bookshop and cultural circle, and was a prime mover in the occupa tion of the Germinal Centre located, embarrassingly for the city fathers, in the most prestigious building in Carrara’s main square. Occupied by anarchist partisans during the liberation in 1945, the building had been the defiant focus of anarchist activity until 1990, when the local authority finally wrested it back.

After last year’s May Day celebrations in Carrara, which he had always helped organise, Fiaschi announced that he was terminally ill and was preparing to end his life. Persuaded to shelve this plan, instead he went into hospital saying: “There was a time when suicide would have been the right thing. I could have left my body to science and for the advancement of medicine. Now, I must surrender myself alive, so they can study me. I realise they will carry out all sorts of experiments on me, but, since my death is inevitable anyway, I will try to be equal to the task.”

Brought home after 14 months in a cancer ward, Fiaschi died the following day. His coffin was borne around the town on the shoulders of friends, followed by a band, and anarchists from all over Italy carrying red and black flags. He was laid to rest beside Gino Lucetti and Steffano Vatteroni, both would- be assassins of Mussolini, and Giuseppe Pinelli, who was defenestrated from police headquarters in Milan in 1969.

Such was the esteem in which Goliardo Fiaschi was held that even the ranks of Tuscany, in the person of the mayor of Carrara, could scarce forbear to cheer with a farewell notice, which ended with the words: “Thanks, Goliardo!”

Written by Stuart Christie

84. Jules Bonnot! The son of a factory worker was born in Pont-de-Roide, on 14th October, 1876. His mother died in 1881 and as a teenager was arrested and spent time in prison for assaulting a police officer.

In 1897 Bonnot was conscripted into the French Army. He served three years as a mechanic working on army vehicles. This experience gave him a keen interest in cars. After leaving the army he associated with anarchists. He also developed a terrible temper and in 1907 he hit his boss with an iron bar.

Bonnot escaped to Geneva. He joined a gang that specialized in stealing luxury-cars in France and Switzerland. During one of these operations he accidental killed a fellow gang member. According to Victor Serge: “Joseph the Italian, a little militant with frizzled hair who dreamed of a free life in the bush of Argentina, as far away as possible from the towns, was found murdered on the Melun Road. From the grapevine we gathered that an individualist from Lyons, Bonnot by name (I did not know the man), who had been traveling with him by car, had killed him, the Italian having first wounded himself fumbling with a revolver.”

Bonnot decided to move to Paris where he soon formed a gang that included local anarchists, Raymond Callemin, André Soudy, Octave Garnier, Stephen Monier, René Valet and Edouard Carouy. The author of The Bonnot Gang has argued: “His early flirtation with anarchism, which might once have been dismissed simply as youthful exuberance, now became a fully- fledged liaison but although his turn to crime may well have been influenced by his new-found anarchist contacts, he must have felt that he had very little to lose; he’d worked for years, done his military service, tried to support a family, and what had he got at the end of it? – nothing. Ideas and theories on the one hand, social experience on the other, it was a dialectical process that produced illegalism, and each individual’s particular set of circumstances that produced illegalists.”

These men shared Bonnot’s illegalist philosophy that is reflected in these words: “The anarchist is in a state of legitimate defence against society. Hardly is he born than the latter crushes him under a weight of laws, which are not of his doing, having been made before him, without him, against him. Capital imposes on him two attitudes: to be a slave or to be a rebel; and when, after reflection, he chooses rebellion, preferring to die proudly, facing the enemy, instead of dying slowly of tuberculosis, deprivation and poverty, do you dare to repudiate him? If the workers have, logically, the right to take back, even by force, the wealth that is stolen from them, and to defend, even by crime, the life that some want to tear away from them, then the isolated individual must have the same rights.”

Richard Parry, the author of the The Bonnot Gang (1987) has argued: “The so-called ‘gang’, however, had neither a name nor leaders, although it seems that Bonnot and Garnier played the principal motivating roles. They were not a close-knit criminal band in the classical style, but rather a union of egoists associated for a common purpose. Amongst comrades they were known as ‘illegalists’, which signified more than the simple fact that they carried out illegal acts. Illegal activity has always been part of the anarchist tradition, especially in France.”

On 21st December, 1911 the gang robbed a messenger of the Société Générale Bank of 5,126 francs in broad daylight and then fled in a stolen Delaunay-Belleville car. It is claimed that they were the first to use an automobile to flee the scene of a crime. As Peter Sedgwick pointed out: “This was an astounding innovation when policemen were on foot or bicycle. Able to hide, thanks to the sympathies and traditional hospitality of other anarchists, they held off regiments of police, terrorized Paris, and grabbed headlines for half a year.”

The gang then stole weapons from a gun shop in Paris. On 2nd January, 1912, they broke into the home of the wealthy Louis-Hippolyte Moreau and murdered both him and his maid. This time they stole property and money to the value of 30,000 francs. Bonnot and his men fled to Belgium, where they sold the stolen car. In an attempt to steal another they shot a Belgian policeman. On 27th February they shot two more police officers while stealing an expensive car from a garage in Place du Havre.

On 25th March, 1912, the gang stole a De Dion-Bouton car in the Sénart Forest by killing the driver. Later that day they killed two cashiers during an attack on the Société Générale Bank in Chantilly. Leading anarchists in the city were arrested. This included Victor Serge who complained in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951): “A positive wave of violence and despair began to grow. The outlaw anarchists shot at the police and blew out their own brains. Others, overpowered before they could fire the last bullet into their own heads, went off sneering to the guillotine…. I recognized, in the various newspaper reports, faces I had met or known; I saw the whole of the movement founded by Libertad dragged into the scum of society by a kind of madness; and nobody could do anything about it, least of all myself. The theoreticians, terrified, headed for cover. It was like a collective suicide.”

The police offered a reward of 100,000 in an effort to capture members of the gang. This policy worked and on information provided by an anarchist writer, André Soudy was arrested at Berck-sur-Mer on 30th March. This was followed a few days later when Edouard Carouy was betrayed by the family hiding him. Raymond Callemin was captured on 7th April.

On 24th April, 1912, three policemen surprised Bonnot in the apartment of a man known to buy stolen goods. He shot at the officers, killing Louis Jouin, the vice-chief of the French police, and wounding another officer before fleeing over the rooftops. Four days later he was discovered in a house in Choisy-le-Roi. It is claimed the building was surrounded by 500 armed police officers, soldiers and firemen.

According to Victor Serge: “They caught up with him at Choisy-le-Roi, where he defended himself with a pistol and wrote, in between the shooting, a letter which absolved his comrades of complicity. He lay between two mattresses to protect himself against the final onslaught.” Bonnot was able to wound three officers before the house before the police used dynamite to demolish the front of the building. In the battle that followed Bonnot was shot ten times. He was moved to the Hotel-Dieu de Paris before dying the following morning.

83. Lola Ridge! (1873-1941). An Irish-American anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry. Described as a gifted rebel poet, she drew the cover for Goldman’s “Patriotism” pamphlet and contributed poetry. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was 13 when her mother emigrated with her to New Zealand. Ridge emigrated to the United States after her mother died, settling first in San Francisco in 1907. She later moved to New York, settling in Greenwich Village.

She was the first manager of the Francisco Ferrer Association in New York and first editor of The Modern School magazine; she was arrested for protesting the execution of Sacco &Vanzetti. She also wrote a poem, “The Effects of Public School Education,” for a special issue of Everyman on the Modern School, edited by Leonard Abbott (Dec 1914) to which Goldman contributed “The Child and Its Enemies”.
While her writing was widely admired, Lola Ridge’s astonishingly intense personality and revolutionary zeal contributed to her reputation. People “felt the necessity of either defending or abusing her whenever her name came up”. She was an early advocate of women’s rights, gay rights and of blacks, Jews and other immigrant groups, and she used her poetry to advocate publicly on behalf of the issues she felt most passionately.
Her published collections of poetry won the most prized literary awards in the US. She was a close friend of Emma Goldman and other well-known anarchists, and also of the leading US writers of the 20s and 30s, including William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and Marianne Moore. Unlike many of the leftwing writers of her time she had authentic experience of working-class life, most of it gained in mining towns on the west coast of New Zealand. Above all, she showed through her life a commitment to combining avant-garde creative work with political action.
Born in Dublin in 1873, Lola Ridge’s father was a medical student and after his early death she arrived in New Zealand. Her mother Emma had relatives on the West Coast and in 1880 she married a goldminer in Hokitika. Her daughter’s dedication to writing emerged early and Lola’s first poem was published in a Canterbury newspaper when she was just 19. Later work appeared in other New Zealand papers and magazines and in the Australian Bulletin. When she was 22, Lola also married a miner, Peter Webster, a partner in a gold-sluicing operation in the small settlement of Kaniere, near Hokitika. The marriage was not a happy one. Webster seems to have been a heavy drinker and at the age of 30 Lola divorced him and moved with her mother and three-year-old son to Sydney, where she studied painting and continued to publish her poems and short stories. When her mother died a few years later, Lola and her son moved again, this time to the US. She settled in New York’s Greenwich Village and became active in the anarchist movement. In 1909 her poem ‘The Martyrs of Hell’ appeared on the cover of Mother Earth, the anarchist monthly edited by Emma Goldman.
Ridge spent the rest of her life in the US, becoming a celebrated figure in New York’s radical literary scene. To support her writing she initially worked as a factory worker and artists’ model. Soon she became organiser for a radical educational movement, the Ferrer Association, established by followers of the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer. An early advocate of education as a liberatory activity, Ferrer was executed in 1909 during a purge against anarchist activity in Catalonia. Through the Association Ridge met David Lawson, a young Scottish-born engineer and fellow anarchist. They lived together for almost ten years before marrying.
An earlier poem, Frank Little at Calvary, describes the death of the part-Native American labour organiser Frank Little, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’, during World War One. Both Ridge and Little had protested vehemently against the war and the repressions that accompanied it. Little said that the war “will mean the end of free speech, free press, free assembly, everything we ever fought for”. In June 1917, 200 miners at a copper mine in Butte, Montana burned to death below ground because the mining company ignored safety regulations. Two months later Frank Little arrived to organise a union of the surviving workers. He was tortured, castrated and lynched by hired thugs in the pay of the Anaconda Copper Co.
The couple became a focus of the revolutionary social protest in the period around and after World War One. Their “large, barely furnished, windswept, cold water loft… in downtown Manhattan” became a meeting point for New York’s radical intelligentsia and Ridge gave a party there every time she sold a poem or an article. Her first collection of poems, The Ghetto, appeared in 1918 and described the life of the working-class Jewish immigrants she saw around her on New York’s East Side. Two years later another sequence of poems, Sun-up, drew on her unconventional Irish and Antipodean childhood. Together these books established her name for socially engaged free verse.
Ridge was described by her friend and editor as “The frailest of humans physically and the poorest financially”. She was seldom in good health and died of TB in 1941, aged 67. Her New York Times obituary described her as one of America’s ‘leading contemporary poets’. Her reputation is now being revived in the US and a number of her poems are back in print, but she is barely known in the country where she grew up. She’s fondly known as “The nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism.”

82. Dolores Prat Coll! She was born on 8th March 1905 into a poor Christian family in Ripoll in Catalonia. When her mother died when she was seven, she was sent to live with nuns, who treated her abysmally and made her work as a housemaid.

Ripoll was almost completely dependent on the textile industry and at the age of fourteen Dolores witnessed a bitter nine week strike for the eight hour day. As a result she developed a lasting hatred of scabs. She decided she would become a textile worker, rejecting her father’s suggestion to become a teacher because she had had a bellyful of nuns or running a fruit and veg stall because she would end up giving the food away to hungry workers.

At the age of fifteen she started work as a textile worker in Ripoll and she soon joined the CNT. She was later to say that she had joined the CNT “because they were real revolutionaries”. She served on the factory committee at work. She had a prominent role in the fight for the eight hour day. She became known as “the little Montseny” because of her indomitable character , after the anarchist Federica Montseny.

Between 1936 and 1939 she was secretary of the textile workers union of the CNT in Ripoll. With the defeat she escaped over the Pyrenees into France with her family. They were interned in the concentration camp at Magnac-Laval. She was deported back to Spain in February 1940 but then secretly climbed back over the Pyrenees to France via Prats de Mollo on May 15th of that year. She worked in a quarry in Prades. She subsequently lived in Toulouse and continued her activity within the local federation of the CNT in exile and within International Antifascist Solidarity (SIA). At the age of ninety one she became involved in supporting immigrants without documentation (Sans Papiers).

She can be seen in the film by Lisa Berger Road To Freedom/Chemin de Liberté (English-French versions) in 1997. She also appeared in the documentary Living Utopia made in the same year by Juan Gamero. She died on 12th September 2001 in Toulouse. After her death her son Progreso Marin wrote a book about her : “Dolores : une vie pour la liberté”(2002).This was translated into Catalan from French in 2007.

Every year since 1996 a group of people (caminodelibertad.com) takes the same route between Prats de Mollo and Ripoll to remember Dolores’s journey over the Pyrenees.

81. Concha Perez ! A Spanish anarchist, she joined an anarchist affinity group at age 14 and later fought in the anarchist militia in Barcelona.

Concha Perez Collado was born in Barcelona on October 17, 1915, in the Les Corts neighbourhood. She was the third of six children, children from two different mothers. Her father was Juan Pérez Güell, an anarchist who suffered imprisonment for his political views and who was widowed by his first wife, dead of tuberculosis when Concha was only two years old. Her father then married his first wife’s sister. Juan, whilst illiterate, was a staunch anarchist and a founder member of the CNT. Concha remembered that their home was a meeting place for anarchists and how she and one of her brothers used to peer through a crack in the door at the intense meetings taking place.

Concha had a happy childhood but her family could not afford to keep her at school and she went out to work in a graphic arts workshop at the age of thirteen. She became active in the libertarian movement and at last received an education in the schools-cum-clubs-cum social centres of the ateneos, run by anarchists to raise the educational level of the working class. She attended the Ateneo Libertario Faros (Lighthouse Libertarian Ateneo) and the Ateneo Agrupación Humanidad (Humanity Association). One of her friends there was the anarchist militant José Virgili Martorell, later known as Barcelona’s Public enemy no 1 because of his bank robberies for the cause. She only learnt as late as 2011 that he had been arrested and executed in 1941 by the Franco regime.

In April 1931, with the coming of the republic, she participated with her family in the liberation of detainees from the prisons and in the demonstration for a lowering of rents on the Placa Sant Jaume. In 1932, she he joined the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and a year later she was arrested and detained for carrying a hidden pistol to another anarchist on a picket line during the insurrectional strikes. She spent five months in prison for this. She learnt how to use bombs and pistols as self-defence against the attacks of the police.

She left home in 1935 because she insisted during an argument with her mother that her brother Pepe share household tasks. She worked as a machinist in a carpentry workshop, where she was a CNT delegate, and helped set up a rationalist school the Escuela Eliseo Reclus in the neighbourhood of Torrassa where she now lived. A few days before the outbreak of the civil war she joined the Revolutionary Committee of the Les Corts neighbourhood, where the first barricades went up and where armoured trucks were constructed.

She knew the Mujeres Libres grouping but she never joined it, insisting that her place was alongside anarchist males where she would fight for respect despite dominant macho attitudes.
Concha Pérez took part in the attack on the Pedralbes barracks (to be re-named the Bakunin Barracks) and the seizure of a convent. She also assisted in the opening of the gates of the Modelo prison. She was part of the armed group Los Aguiluchos (The Young Eagles) of Les Corts, a centuria (100 militia) with seven women in its ranks.

After fighting on the fronts of Caspe and Belchite where she saved the life of a comrade, she returned to Barcelona with the prohibition of women from the fighting. She had fought in the Sur-Ebro Column, one of whose leaders, the anarchist Antonio Ortiz, was to boast that he had been the first to expel women from his column. On the front Concha fought alongside the redoubtable anarchist women Carmen Crespo, Maria Rius and Libertad Rodenas. She never forgot her friend Martirio Romero of Cordoba, a female militant of the Libertarian Youth and the CNT since the age of 17 who fought on the Huesca front, was captured by the Francoists, tortured and sentenced to death, to have this commuted at the last moment but not to be released until 1945.

In Barcelona she worked as a labourer in a factory producing arms.

During the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona, she volunteered for reconnaissance work but was wounded in an ambush by the Stalinists on the Plaza Catalunya on May 3rd. A metal fragment remained in her leg for many years.

With the defeat of the Republic, in December 1938, he left Barcelona crossed the border where she was confined in the concentration camp Argelès. Later, she worked as a volunteer nurse in a camp, where he met the socialist doctor Madrid Alonso Isidoro, who for a time was her partner, and with whom she had her only child, born in Marseilles.

She returned to Barcelona in September 1942, where she had to leave her son in foster care in an orphanage .Then, the family of Jewish origin who she worked for as a maid helped her regain custody of the child.

In Barcelona, Concha met up with an old friend from the Ateneo Faros, Mauricio Palau, who had just spent four years in prison. They began a relationship that lasted 30 years. They set up a stall in the neighbourhood market of Sant Antoni, where they sold jewellery and lingerie that they had made themselves and which served as a meeting place for anarchists during the Franco regime.

After the death of Franco, she participated in the organization of the first neighbourhood associations and the resurgence of the CNT. In 1997, she was one of the founders of Mujeres del 36 (Women of 36) sponsored by the City of Barcelona, which gathered together women that had taken part in political and social movements during the civil war in Barcelona. Her final days were spent in a retirement home at Barceloneta, where she had many anarchist visitors. She died at dawn on April 17th, 2014 at the age of ninety nine.

Written by Nick Heath

80. Charles Mowbray! He was born at Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham in 1857 and as a young man served in the Durham Light Infantry. He worked most of his life as a tailor. He didn’t leave much record of his first contact with revolutionary ideas, but we do know that he moved to London and married Mary, the daughter of an exiled Paris Communard, with whom he had several children. Cores says that he was the ” first person I knew personally who described himself as an anarchist-communist…”

Living in the Boundary Street slum in London, he educated himself. He engaged in propaganda with Kitz and with him joined the Socialist League.

When the police began to harass open-air meetings in 1885, he was one of those involved in the agitation in Dod Street in Limehouse. On September 20th, he was beaten by the police there and arrested for obstruction along with other speakers, including Kitz. William Morris opined that Mowbray “had done the most” but fortunately he was set free. The publicity and outrage meant that 50,000 people turned out in support at Dod Street a following Sunday. The police left the meeting alone, and following ones, too. He was again arrested at a free speech rally in Trafalgar Square on June 14 th, 1886. He was fined £1 and costs.

He organised a number of unemployed meetings in Norwich in 1886 (see our biography of Fred Charles for more information) and became secretary of the local Socialist League branch. He was arrested with Fred Henderson on January 14th 1887 after the Battle of Ham Run, and received nine months on the treadmill in Norwich Castle prison. Before the sentence he had been a passionate opponent of capitalism but now he was consumed with hatred against it. He took part in annual Paris Commune and Chicago Martyrs meetings, speaking with famous anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Louise Michel. He returned to Norwich to chair a meeting where Lucy Parsons, widow of one of the Chicago Martyrs, spoke.

In 1889 he was elected onto a tailors’strike committee of 17 alongside John Turner and Woolf Wess. The three-week strike brought out both West End and East End tailors and was successful. Mowbray developed warm relations with Jewish workers in the East End, and often spoke at the anarchist Club in Berner Street off of the Commercial Road. Mowbray was now talking about dynamite and individual propaganda by deed. In an 1890 article in Commonweal he wrote: “I feel confident that a few determined men…who are prepared to do or die in the attempt could paralyse the forces of our masters providing they were acquainted with the power which nineteenth century science has placed within their reach”. This sort of talk had been the final straw for William Morris and he had left the League not long before. Kitz was to follow not long after.

In 1891 Mowbray and Fred Charles were involved in intensive anti-militarist propaganda. Mowbray’s son had been imprisoned and discharged from the Army for carrying out anti-militarist propaganda. Mowbray and Charles visited the barracks at Rochester, Colchester and Chatham, distributing thousands of leaflets and copies of Commonweal containing an Address to the Army. This reminded soldiers of their working class origins and urged them to refuse to fire on the people if ordered to do so. A No-Rent agitation was also carried on in the Boundary Street slum where Mowbray lived. He spoke alongside Louise Michel at the August tea party to keep the Jewish anarchist paper Arbeiter Fraint (Workers’ Friend) going in 1892.

Later, after the Walsall Anarchist trial in 1892 (see Fred Charles), the Socialist League paper Commonweal editorialised “Are These Men Fit To Live” referring to the Home Secretary and the policemen and judge who had been involved. The editorial had been written by David Nicoll and Mowbray was not present (he was nursing his dying wife) and would have vetoed its inclusion. He was arrested and charged with inciting to murder.

When the police came to arrest him, his wife Mary was already dead of TB a few hours before in a room upstairs. Mowbray and his children were sitting down to a meagre meal. He was taken away and children left alone in the house with their dead mother. Mowbray was remanded in custody, and the judge reluctantly let him attend his wife’s funeral. Yanovsky and the other anarchists at the Berners Street Club took charge of the funeral and it became a show of defiance, with thousands marching in the cortege and 20 anarchist banners flying.

Mowbray was finally acquitted in May, Nicoll receiving 18 months hard labour. In summer 1893 he was one of the delegates excluded from the Zurich Congress of the socialist Second International by August Bebel, along with Gustav Landauer and other anarchists.

They then held their own congress of protest. As a result of deliberations there, Anarchists turned to agitation in the workplace. Mowbray wrote an article “Trades Unionism and the Unemployed” where he called for unity of employed and unemployed, an overtime ban, an eight hour day, the abolition of piecework, and a rejection of political lobbying.

In 1894 Mowbray and the editor of Arbeter Fraint, Saul Yanovsky, attended scores of meetings in the East End, “both Trade Union and unemployed, at which they have done a remarkable amount of good” (Freedom newspaper).

The Socialist League had finally disappeared in 1894. Mowbray went on a speaking tour of the United States. He addressed many meetings on the East Coast, denouncing reformist trade unionism and calling for revolutionary action. The tour was highly successful, pulling in large crowds. But he was arrested on December 28th in Philadelphia, charged with incitement to riot and sedition against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Voltairine de Cleyre, who had chaired the meeting, immediately set up a defence Committee. Charges were dropped and Mowbray moved to Boston, where he started work as a tailor. Mowbray brought his family over in April 1895.

He went on another speaking tour in summer 1895, speaking in St. Louis and Chicago, where police attacked the meeting.

Mowbray continued his intensive activity on the East Coast. An anarchist-communist group was set up in Boston. Mowbray became secretary of the Union Cooperative Society of Journeymen Tailors and orientated it in an anarchist direction.

In 1895 Mowbray and Harry Kelly set up the paper The Rebel – a Monthly Journal devoted to the exposition of anarchist communism. He continued his speaking tours, and brought out another anarchist paper with Kelly called The Match, only two issues of which appeared. A few years later he moved to New York and then Hoboken. Here he opened a saloon and developed a taste for heavy drinking.

After the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist he was deported in 1903, returning to London.

In 1904 Mowbray was involved in the general strike activity propagated by Arbeter Fraint. He chaired a mass meeting at The Wonderland, Whitechapel where all 5,000 seats were taken and many had to be turned away. Rocker, Malatesta, Mainwaring and Kitz spoke and the Jewish Bakers Union came out for improved hours and working conditions. He was involved in the initiative by John Turner and Guy Aldred to set up the Industrial Union of Direct Actionists (see Charlie Lahr) in 1907.Guy Aldred says that he often spoke with him in Canning Town.

But now Mowbray dropped the political views he had held all his life Guy Aldred says that he “became a mere political adventurer, and organised Australian emigration schemes.” He also got involved with the tariff reform movement and lectured for it. He died of a heart attack in a Bridlington hotel he was staying in in December 1910. Harry Kelly believes he drank himself to death. As Aldred says: ” It was a sad conclusion to an active Anarchist career”.
Written by Nick Heath

79. Scott Crow, He is an American anarchist organizer, speaker and writer. A longtime activist, he is an advocate for the philosophies and politics of anarchism. In addition to a number of other groups, crow is a co-founder of ‘Common Ground Collective’ or ‘Common Ground Relief’, an anarchist organization formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans where he went to, among many things, help defend black communities in the area. His book ‘Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective’ details those efforts.

78. Albert Parsons! Born as Richard Parsons in Montgomery, Alabama, on 24th June, 1848. Orphaned at five years old, he was raised by Esther, an African American slave. In the Civil War he served as a member of the Confederate Army under the commanded by his brother, Major General William Parsons.

After the war Parsons condemned slavery and became a Radical Republican. Now a socialist, Parsons began publishing the Spectator, a journal that advocated equal rights for African-Americans.

In 1873 Parsons married Lucy Waller (Lucy Parsons), the daughter of a Creek Indian and a Mexican woman. Mixed marriages in Texas was unacceptable and so under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan, the couple moved to Chicago. Parsons became a printer but after becoming involved in trade union activities he was blacklisted.

Parsons and his wife joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1876. They were also founder members of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), a labor organization that supported racial and sexual equality. Parson also became editor of the radical journal, Alarm.

On 1st May, 1886 a strike was began throughout the United States in support a eight-hour day. Over the next few days over 340,000 men and women withdrew their labor. Over a quarter of these strikers were from Chicago and the employers were so shocked by this show of unity that 45,000 workers in the city were immediately granted a shorter workday.

The campaign for the eight-hour day was organised by the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA). On 3rd May, the IWPA in Chicago held a rally outside the McCormick Harvester Works, where 1,400 workers were on strike. They were joined by 6,000 lumber-shovers, who had also withdrawn their labour. While August Spies, one of the leaders of the IWPA was making a speech, the police arrived and opened-fire on the crowd, killing four of the workers.

The following day August Spies, who was editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, published a leaflet in English and German entitled: Revenge! Workingmen to Arms!. It included the passage: “They killed the poor wretches because they, like you, had the courage to disobey the supreme will of your bosses. They killed them to show you ‘Free American Citizens’ that you must be satisfied with whatever your bosses condescend to allow you, or you will get killed. If you are men, if you are the sons of your grand sires, who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms we call you, to arms.” Spies also published a second leaflet calling for a mass protest at Haymarket Square that evening.

On 4th May, over 3,000 people turned up at the Haymarket meeting. Speeches were made by Parsons, August Spies and Samuel Fielden. At 10 a.m. Captain John Bonfield and 180 policemen arrived on the scene. Bonfield was telling the crowd to “disperse immediately and peacebly” when someone threw a bomb into the police ranks from one of the alleys that led into the square. It exploded killing eight men and wounding sixty-seven others. The police then immediately attacked the crowd. A number of people were killed (the exact number was never disclosed) and over 200 were badly injured.

Several people identified Rudolph Schnaubelt as the man who threw the bomb. He was arrested but was later released without charge. It was later claimed that Schnaubelt was an agent provocateur in the pay of the authorities. After the release of Schnaubelt, the police arrested Samuel Fielden, an Englishman, and six German immigrants, George Engel, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab. The police also sought Parsons but he went into hiding and was able to avoid capture. However, on the morning of the trial, Parsons arrived in court to standby his comrades.

There were plenty of witnesses who were able to prove that none of the eight men threw the bomb. The authorities therefore decided to charge them with conspiracy to commit murder. The prosecution case was that these men had made speeches and written articles that had encouraged the unnamed man at the Haymarket to throw the bomb at the police.

The jury was chosen by a special bailiff instead of being selected at random. One of those picked was a relative of one of the police victims. Julius Grinnell, the State’s Attorney, told the jury: “Convict these men make examples of them, hang them, and you save our institutions.”

At the trial it emerged that Andrew Johnson, a detective from the Pinkerton Agency, had infiltrated the group and had been collecting evidence about the men. Johnson claimed that at anarchist meetings these men had talked about using violence. Reporters who had also attended International Working Men’s Association meetings also testified that the defendants had talked about using force to “overthrow the system”.

During the trial the judge allowed the jury to read speeches and articles by the defendants where they had argued in favour of using violence to obtain political change. The judge then told the jury that if they believed, from the evidence, that these speeches and articles contributed toward the throwing of the bomb, they were justified in finding the defendants guilty.

All the men were found guilty: Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, Louis Lingg and George Engel were given the death penalty. Whereas Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab were sentenced to life imprisonment. On 10th November, 1887, Lingg committed suicide by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth. The following day Parsons, Spies, Fisher and Engel mounted the gallows. As the noose was placed around his neck, Spies shouted out: “There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

76. David Graeber! He is an American anthropologist, Author and activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007 he specialised in theories of value and social theory. The university’s decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy, and a petition with more than 4,500 signatures. He went on to become, from 2007–13, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, “We are the 99 percent”.

He helped create the first New York City General Assembly, with only 60 participants. He spent the next six weeks involved with the burgeoning movement, including facilitating general assemblies, attending working group meetings, and organizing legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. A few days after the encampment of Zuccotti Park began, he left New York for Austin, Texas.

Graeber has argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement’s lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either existing political institutions or the legal structure, its embrace of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making and of prefigurative politics make it a fundamentally anarchist project. Comparing it to the Arab Spring, Graeber has claimed that Occupy Wall Street and other contemporary grassroots protests represent “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.”

He is a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World and of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.

75. Leonard Dalton Abbott, an English-born American publicist, politician, and freethinker. Originally a socialist, Abbott turned to anarchism and remained a Georgist later in life. He is best remembered as a leader of the so-called “Modern School movement” of those years.

 74. Olga Taratuta, a Ukrainian Jewish anarchist, she worked with the journals Buntar and Golos Truda; she participated in several attentats and established the Anarchist Black Cross, which provided aid to anarchist political prisoners. The Soviet government executed her. Olga Was fondly thought of as the “grandmother” of the Russian anarchist movement.

73. Hélène Patou, a French textile worker who lived at the anarchist colonies of Vaux and Bascon (a libertarian colony ‘Le Milieu Libre de Vaux’, & pioneered the colony of Bascon.) she was a writer, militant anarchist & néo-Malthusian and joined the Durruti column to fight with the anarchists in the Spanish revolution. She was a model for numerous artists, including Matisse and Picabia.

As a firm supporter of the Spanish revolutionists in 1936, she wrote Le domaine du hameau perdu (1972), prefaced by d’Henry Poulaille.

72. Madeleine Pelletier, a French physician, psychiatrist, first-wave feminist, and socialist activist. She wrote for numerous radical journals; during World War I she worked for the Red Cross, treating the wounded of both sides; she frequently cross-dressed, writing “I will show off mine [breasts] when men adopt a special sort of trouser to show off their…”. She wanted to distance herself from femininity, a concept that she saw as a sign of the oppression of women.

71. Sakae Ōsugi, was a radical Japanese anarchist. He published numerous anarchist periodicals, helped translate western anarchist essays into Japanese for the first time, and created Japan’s first Esperanto school in 1906. He, Noe Itō, and his nephew were murdered in what became known as the Amakasu Incident.

He was the eldest son of Kusui Yutaka and Japanese military captain Ōsugi Azuma. In his early teens, Ōsugi enlisted in Cadet School but was a poorly-motivated, rebellious student. He was reprimanded often and nearly expelled more than once. On one occasion it was implied that he took part in illicit homosexual behavior with a younger cadet; he was held in the school stockade for 10 days for this and received 30 days of confinement. Later he participated in a knife fight; fighting unarmed, fearing he’d injure his opponent, he received injuries which required a fortnight’s hospitalization. After this incident he was finally expelled.

In 1903 he eventually decided to attain higher education in French Literature at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, he later learned several languages. While in school he experienced independent living for the first time and began associations that would last years and lead to his experimental phase in Christianity and socialism. He graduated from the school in 1905.

After his mother’s death, he became depressed and redirected his energies into his studies. He began to read large numbers of books–only a handful of which he counted as having made an impression on him later in life–primarily works by Gorky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. He later wrote that he’d been most influenced by Oka Asjirō’s Discourse on Evolution.

His depression over his mother’s death also led him to search for a spiritual outlet in Christianity. He attended several churches, never fully accepted the miracles of the faith, and “believed that God is something within the self”. He was eventually baptised when others assured him he would understand the religion more if he did, but he later wrote that he was never fully satisfied.

He began to involve himself in socialism more at this time, mostly because of exposure to the most radical newspaper available in Tokyo: Yorozu Chōhō. He would further involve himself in the socialist movement when Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko formed the Commoners’ Society (Heimin-sha). He began to write letters to the editor of this organization’s paper, the Heimin Shimbun (Common People’s Newspaper), and hand out the paper in public. When the Heimin Shimbun folded, his first article, “Socialism and patriotism” (Shakaishugi to aikokushugi), was published in another radical paper, Hikari, in August–September 1905. However, his participation with socialism was largely superficial at this time, and he admitted later that he did so largely because he felt the need to take part in a paper he often read.

Later exposure to criticisms of Christianity from prominent socialists led him to question his faith, but it was not until the onset of the Russo-Japanese War that he fully cut his ties to the religion. When his local church began to merge its sermons with patriotic and pro-war sentiments,[citation needed] he felt this was a betrayal of his spiritual principles and left permanently.

Ōsugi still held military aspirations as a matter of practicality, since he had no other career ambitions. But a military career became impossible in 1906, when he was arrested during a demonstration-turned-riot against increasing trolley fares. In prison he took the time to fully study socialism and its tenets, and completed his transition to socialist. His interest in science would lay the groundwork for his eventual shift to anarchism. He also taught himself languages including Italian, Esperanto, Russian, English, French, and German.

His initial prison sentences were due to separate instances of activist-related activity. After the aforementioned trolley-fare protest riot, he was arrested for violating press laws in connection with two articles he published in late 1906 and early 1907. He served two more terms in 1908 for violating the Peace Police Law on two occasions, the early-1908 Rooftop Incident (Yane-jō jiken) and the late-1908 Red Flag Incident (Akahata jiken).

His arrest as part of the Red Flag Incident handed him his heaviest prison term, but it saved him and others convicted at the time from being associated with the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) of 1910. At the trials, twelve anarchists, including Kōtoku Shūsui and one of the few anarchists found not guilty during the Red Flag trials, were found guilty of conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor and were sentenced to death. Ōsugi encountered the defendants in prison but was afraid to speak to them too loudly. Kōtoku, nearly deaf, was unable to hear him. Ōsugi also encountered their executioner, who retired after their executions.

After this experience, he never challenged the state with open calls for violent revolution, and his future essays instead focused on individualism and criticisms of capitalism. He would not be arrested again until 1919 for assaulting a police officer, for which he received a 3-month term. He was also briefly held in detention in France in 1922 before being deported to Japan.
While in prison, Kōtoku, now an avowed anarchist, encouraged him to research the work of Bakunin and Kropotkin. Ōsugi was particularly receptive to Kropotkin’s scientific approach to anarchy, and he translated Kropotkin’s autobiography in 1920. September Itō published a translation of an article by Emma Goldman–which Osugi had also intended on writing. Her work impressed him, and he praised it highly in a review of articles on women’s liberation.

Ōsugi was married to Hori Yasuko in September 1906, but later pursued a relationship with Kamichika Ichiko and author Noe Itō as part of his philosophical and political beliefs in egoism and free love. In 1916, Ichiko stabbed him in an incident that led to an open scandal and has been a source for popular culture. It was the inspiration for the film Eros plus Massacre, by Yoshishige Yoshida and Masahiro Yamada (1969).

On September 16, 1923, in the chaos immediately following the Great Kantō Earthquake, Osugi and his lover/partner, Noe Itō, and his 6-year-old nephew, Munekazu Tachibana, were arrested, beaten to death, and thrown into a well by a squad of military police led by Lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko. The killing of such high-profile anarchists along with a child became known as the Amakasu Incident and sparked surprise and anger throughout Japan.

70. Peter Gelderloos, is an activist and author from Virginia (United States).

Gelderloos was arrested in 2001 while attending a protest at the Georgia-based Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as School of the Americas), a controversial school that trains Central and South American soldiers and police. He was convicted and served the maximum sentence of 6 months in prison.

In ‘How Nonviolence Protects the State’ Gelderloos sets out to debunk the notion that non-violent activism is the only acceptable and effective method of struggle and to defenestrate the stranglehold that pacifism has on movements.

In April 2007, Gelderloos was arrested in Spain and charged with public disorder and illegal demonstration during a squatters protest. He faced between three and six years of imprisonment. Eventually he was acquitted.

In 2010 Gelderloos published Anarchy Works, a comprehensive book explaining basic principles of anarchism and their historic usage. He also published To Get to the Other Side, a narrative of his travels through Europe’s anarchist milieus.

He recently spoke at the London Anarchist book fair 2014.

69. Clara Thalma, a Swiss revolutionary, she fought with the Durriti column in Spain during the revolution and in the French resistance during the Nazi occupation; afterwards she and her partner Pavel Thalmann created an agricultural commune called La Séréna near Nice.

Clara Thalmann was born at Basel, Switzerland, in 1910. She was one of ten children from a working class family. Her father was German and had emigrated to Switzerland because, as a socialist and an internationalist, he opposed conscription for the German war against France in 1870.

Clara grew up in atmosphere of committed socialist activity. Early in life, influenced by the betrayal of social democracy with its pro-war attitude, and the success of the October revolution in Russia in 1917, Clara was attracted to communism. In the 1920’s when she was a young working woman she joined the communist party and worked on the French communist paper ‘Humanite’. Soon after Lenin’s death in 1924, however, the internal struggles within the communist movement began to be apparent. The new party leader in Russia, Joseph Stalin, systematically strengthened the bureaucratic apparatus at the expense of the influence of the few remaining revolutionaries within the party. Stalin’s campaign also affected the French communist party. It meant that committed activists like Clara could no longer carry out their political work where and how they saw fit, but rather had to follow instructions from party functionaries. A vivacious and passionate character like Clara could not stand it, and disillusioned, she returned to Switzerland in 1928. She immediately joined the Swiss communist party, but did so in order to fight against Stalinist policies. It brought her close to the disciples of Leon Trotsky, the former leader of the Red Army, now branded by Stalin as a “dangerous agent of the anti-Soviet counter-revolution”.

The night that Clara returned from Paris she met a young worker from her home town of Basel who had returned that same day from Moscow where he had spent four years as a student at the Workers University. He too was very disillusioned with Stalinism. His name was Paul (‘Pavel’) Thalmann and it was the start of a life-long relationship. They were soon expelled from the party, but continued to make anti-Stalinist propaganda, co-operating with Trotskyites and left-wing communists from Germany.

In 1936 the German Nazis arranged the big propaganda show which was the Berlin Olympic Games. In response, the international revolutionary movement had organized a workers’ olympics at Barcelona in Spain. Clara hitch-hiked south to take part. She went as a swimmer and as a Swiss working woman delegate. But the International Workers’ Olympic Games never took place.

On July 17th 1936 the military coup d’etat against the Spanish republic led to the outbreak of the civil war which was to last until 1939. When Clara arrived at the Spanish border the anti-fascists had already defeated the militarist conspirators in much of the country. She witnessed the enormous social revolution which was occuring. The Spanish anarchist movement, the biggest working class organization in Spain at that time, at once confiscated large estates and factories, transforming them into collectives run by the workers themselves. Soon almost two-thirds of the land and industry under the control of Republican forces was collectivised and organized by the anarchists of the CNT and the FAI. Revolutionary committees and militias, rather than the state, controlled politics and the economy as well as the anti-fascist military struggle.

Inspired by these events, Clara at once joined the anarchist militias of the famous Durruti columns to fight as a militia-woman at the Aragon front. Pavel also came down to fight for the revolution and joined her.

But all did not go well with the revolution. Clara and Pavel were among the first to warn of anti-revolutionary developments inside the Republican camp. Because of their previous experience of Stalinist politics they at once realized the dangers posed to the social revolution by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Together with the liberal-bourgeois parties like the Republican Left (IR), the Left Republican Party of Catalonia (ERC), and the middle class tenant farmers’ union (the UDR), the communist PCE defended private property and the existing legal system. During the “short summer of anarchy” in 1936, when the social revolution was overwhelmingly successful and powerful, the Spanish communists did not dare to attack the revolution openly. Nevertheless the Thalmanns noticed their dangerous intentions and constantly warned their anarchist comrades. As they report in their autobiographical “Revolution for Freedom” the Stalinists’ tactic to compromise the anarchist trend of the revolution was obvious to them. Under the influence of the Russians, the Spanish communists demanded that the anarchists had to join the government.

They had two reasons: firstly they calculated correctly when they thought the anarchists would then be more controllable, having to carry responsibility for things which the whole government had decided. Secondly, the communists, well aware of anarchist theory, thought that by persuading anarchists to join a government they would sow the seeds of a split within the anarchist movement. The resulting split in many of the committees enabled the communists to gain more control. They gained further influence once the Soviet Union began to supply quantities of arms to the Republican forces. The PCE demanded the dissolution of the militias and the reintroduction of a conventional hierarchical “People’s Army” in place of the rank and file organization of the militias

The anarchists, seeking to gain access to badly needed Soviet arms supplies, finally agreed to disbanding the militias, but things continued to get worse. In the spring of 1937 the Stalinists turned to direct military aggression against the revolution.

In May 1937 in Barcelona, communist provocation led to fighting between petit-bourgeois parties allied with the Stalinists on the one side and anarchists, POUM and UGT people on the other The fighting left at least 500 dead and 1,000 injured. Subsequently the anarchists and their revolutionary comrades suffered a decisive loss of political power. Clara and Pavel were fighting with the Anarchist group “Amigos de Durruti” (freinds of Durruti) At that time Clara met and got to know George Orwell (“He did not know what was going on and his eyes expressed amazement, he had a terrified look”) who was sitting with his gun on a roof close to her barricade.

Because of their pro-revolutionary participation in the Barcelona “May Days”, Clara and Pavel had to go underground in order to escape persecution by the S.I.M., the newly formed secret police organisation of the PCE. They decided to leave Spain and, some time later, were about to board a ship at Barcelona when they were recognised, arrested and taken to one of the SIM’s private prisons. They spent several months in Stalinist jails, while friends in Switzerland launched a campaign to get them out. Finally, after the intervention of a leading member of the Spanish socialist party, they were released. They immediately left Spain and travelled to Paris.

During the Nazi occupation of France in the second World War, Clara and Pavel built up a small, independent, revolutionary resistance group in Paris. Their home soon became a safe house for Jewish and revolutionary refugees trying to escape. They were never caught and were able to help many people in this way.

After the liberation from German Fascism, Clara and Pavel grew tired of life in Paris and eventually moved to the south of France to found an agricultural commune called ‘La Séréna’ on the northern outskirts of Nice. ‘La Séréna’ soon became a meeting place for revolutionaries from all over the world. Pavel died there in 1981.

She thought urban guerrilla struggles in Western Europe, she was sceptical of their usefulness. She always maintained that a guerrilla has to act in connection with a social revolutionary mass movement – militarily and politically. For her a guerrilla war only made sense if a revolutionary mass movement already existed. Otherwise the guerrillas were in danger of developing policies which the people could not understand and were also likely to become authoritarian and elitist.

On the other hand she saw very clearly the need for determined direct action, even if it is carried out by small groups. However, such action must be the actual expression of how the people feel and think.

Clara’s main hope for future social and political change rested with the young. Their increasing contempt for official policy and their readiness to get up and revolt seemed the mainspring of her political optimism. She never lost her belief in the revolution.

On the 27th January 1987, after a long illness, the Swiss revolutionary Clara Thalmann died at her home on the outskirts of Nice in the south of France.

Bio sourced from SolFed

65. Rose Witcop, a Pacifist, Feminist, Journalist and pioneer of birth control and sex education. She was born Rachel Vitkopski in Kiev, Ukraine to Jewish parents – Simon and Freda, who brought her to London, England when she was five years old. In the decades following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, many Jews left Russia and the surrounding countries as a result of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the Empire. Most went to the United Kingdom or the United States.

64. Alan Moore, an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history, he has been called one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years.

63. Captain Jack White,known as the man who drilled the Irish Citizen Army during the 1913 lock-out.

62. Albert Meltzer, one of the most enduring and respected torchbearers of the international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. His sixty-year commitment to the vision and practice of anarchism survived both the collapse of the Revolution and Civil War in Spain and the Second World War; he helped fuel the libertarian impetus of the 1960s and 1970s and steer it through the reactionary challenges of the Thatcherite 1980s and post-Cold War 1990s.

61. Helena Born, a labor organiser, poet and writer, was born in Devonshire, England. She became involved in the workers movement beginning with the London Dock Strike in 1889. In 1890 she emmigrated to the United States, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She learned typesetting and proofreading which became her life work. She wrote Whitman’s Ideal Democracy, and Other Writings (1902). Born was an apostle of simplicity and social regeneration. She appreciated the harmony and joys of nature and possessed the idealism of Thoreau. Her papers found after her death contain scrapbooks, correspondence, autographed letters, photographs, memorabilia, poetry, essays, a biography of Born (written by Helen Tufts), her will and printed material. Her organizing efforts in Bristol are documented as well as her writing and publishing work. (A photo of her could not be found online)

60. Anarchist of the day is Francesco Saverio Merlino! He was an Italian lawyer, anarchist activist and theorist of libertarian socialism.

59. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, American writer and activist. He is a former member of the Black Panther Party.

57. Anarchist of the day is Emiliano Zapata! He was of Indian and Spanish descent, his parents poor peasants, Zapata became the great agrarian leader in the Mexican Revolution. Zapata was partly influenced by an anarchist from Northern Mexico named Ricardo Flores Magón. The influence of Magón on Zapata can be seen in the Zapatismo Plan de Ayala, but even more noticably in the Zapatista slogan “Tierra y libertad” or “land and liberty,” the title and maxim of Magón’s most famous work. Zapata’s introduction to anarchism came via a local schoolteacher, Otilio Montano, who exposed Zapata to the works of Peter Kropotkin and Flores Magón at the same time as Zapata was observing and beginning to participate in the struggles of the peasants for the land. As a young boy, Zapata learned to hate the rich landowners in Morelos as he witnessed evictions of peasants from their land. In his youth, he had to leave his home state of Morelos and go into hiding on several occasions, being hunted by authorities for acts of village defence. He hated the city and distrusted men in suits and shoes. ‘They’re all a bunch of bastards,’ he said of the self-serving politicians of Mexico’s governing elite. So he shunned Mexico City, national politics, and attempts to suborn him with offers of high office. He hated the rich and the liberals. He grew wise from long experience of lies and betrayals. Like Ukrainian Makhno, he led an army of insurgent peasants and fought for an egalitarian society, inspired by a distrust of politics and contempt of personal gain, insisting that the people had to themselves fight “to re conquer the true freedom and to shake off once and forever the yoke of mayors and hacendados, who have always been the worst enemies and the worst tyrants.”

56. Noam Chomsky, an Anarcho Syndicalist libertarian Socialist, the son of an eminent Hebrew scholar who’s father William Chomsky, fled from Russia in 1913 to escape conscription into the Tsarist army. By the age of 13 Chomsky identified with ‘the anti-Bolshevik left’ and had come to reject the Tyranny under Lenin&Trotsky that the Left espouse as freedom.

55. Marie Le Compte! She was an American journal editor who was active during the early 1880s.

Marie was of French origin but settled in the United States, where she joined the Socialist movement, speaking and writing for that cause. Le Compte was a friend of John Swinton. She was an editor and a writer for Joseph Patrick McDonnell’s New York Labor Standard. According to Paul Avrich she was “an exotic and somewhat mysterious figure” with “a special sympathy for outlaws and tramps.” She called herself “Miss Le Compte, Prolétaire”.

Marie Le Compte attended the Anarchist Congress that met in London from 14 July 1881. By this time she was middle-aged. She represented the “Boston Revolutionaries”, an obscure group of whom little is known.

The Radical of 23 July 1881 reported that the congress met on 18 July 1881 at the Cleveland Hall, Fitzroy Square, with speeches by Marie Le Compte, “the transatlantic agitator”, Louise Michel, and Kropotkin. In addressing the congress Le Compte said that revolutionaries should join labor unions in order to radicalize the members. She supported the idea of having bomb-making manuals published in many languages by local groups. During her visit to England Le Compte and Kropotkin gave talks to the Homerton Social Democratic Club and to the Stratford Radical and Dialectical Club. At the Homerton club her topic was “the situation in America”. In October 1881 she gave a talk at Stratford, London, in which she praised pirates.

Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty was the first Anarchist paper in the English language to circulate in England. Marie Le Compte may have introduced it during her 1881 visit. She wrote several articles for the paper in 1883 reporting on the trial and imprisonment at Lyon of several anarchists, including Louise Michel, Émile Pouget and Kropotkin. In March 1883 she participated in the Paris bread riot and was wounded in a fight with the police. She fled to Switzerland to avoid being arrested. She settled in Berne where she translated Bakunin’s God and the State and Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young.

Marie ceased to participate in the movement some time after 1883. Her translation of Kropotkin’s An Appeal to the Young was serialized from 5–26 January 1884 in the San Francisco Truth.The first number of The Anarchist published in 1885 in London by Henry Seymour held an announcement of a translation by Le Compte of Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State. The International Publishing Company announced that the profits from God & The State would go to the Red Cross of the Russian Revolutionary Party.

53. Mollie Steimer! A leading anarchist and advocate for the rights of political prisoners, was a codefendant in one of the most publicized antiradical trials in American history.

Born on November 21, 1897, in Dunaevtsy, Russia, Steimer arrived in New York City at age fifteen, along with her father, her mother Fannie Steimer, and five brothers and sisters. To help support her family, she worked in a garment factory, where she was first exposed to radicalism. In 1917, she became an anarchist and joined a group of Jewish radicals calling itself Frayhayt [Liberty]. The group supported the Russian Revolution and, in addition to publishing a Yiddish journal, secretly distributed leaflets and other propaganda materials that were banned by wartime legislation. Among these materials were two brochures—one in English and one in Yiddish—opposing American intervention in the Russian Revolution and strongly criticizing the U.S. Government.

The two brochures soon got Frayhayt in trouble with government authorities. One of the group’s members was arrested for distributing the leaflets. After he agreed to cooperate with military intelligence, six other members, including Steimer, were arrested and charged with conspiring to violate the Sedition Act.

The subsequent trial became a cause célèbre, notable as the first major prosecution under the Sedition Act and for the blatant infringement of the defendants’ rights. Steimer and her codefendants were represented by Harry Weinberger, a well-known advocate for conscientious objectors, pacifists, and radicals. The two-week trial began on October 10, 1918. Weinberger argued that, since the actions of the defendants did not directly interfere with the war effort, they were not punishable under the provisions of the Sedition Act. Despite his defense, all but one of the defendants were found guilty, and four were given major sentences. Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky, and Samuel Lipman were each sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined one thousand dollars, while Steimer received fifteen years and a fine of five thousand dollars. All four appealed their case to the Supreme Court.

Released on bail, Steimer continued her radical activities. She was befriended by anarchist Emma Goldman, who had just been released from prison herself. Goldman admired Steimer’s uncompromising attitude toward anarchist ideals and called her “a sort of Alexander Berkman in skirts.” Steimer’s continued radical activities resulted in at least eight arrests while her case was on appeal, and finally led to her imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island in the East River toward the end of 1919. While she was there, the Supreme Court upheld her conviction and those of her colleagues. Steimer was transferred to a prison in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she was put to work sewing garments.

Meanwhile, Harry Weinberger continued his efforts to free the four anarchists, this time hoping to obtain a pardon, a decree of amnesty, or deportation to Russia. He was able to elicit a groundswell of support for the group, not only among Jewish radicals but also among a number of leading lawyers and intellectuals who were convinced that they had not received a fair trial. Despite such support, Steimer refused to sign a petition for amnesty or to request deportation to Russia. “I do not want any pardon,” she wrote to Weinberger. “The word ‘pardon’ drills my ears and affects my sense of right, which is bad already.” She objected to deportation on the basis of her belief that “each person shall live where he or she chooses,” and that “No individual has the right to send me out of this, or of any country!” Despite these objections, Weinberger secured the group’s release. In 1921, the four anarchists were permitted to be deported to Soviet Russia at their own expense, and received a full pardon on the condition that they never return to the United States.

After arriving in Russia, Steimer was disappointed to find that anarchists were little more welcome than in the United States. Goldman and Berkman, who had been deported a few months before her, had already left the country in disillusionment. The new communist regime tolerated no opposition to state policy and viewed the anarchists as a threat to its authority. Promising to “advocate my ideal, anarchist communism, in whatever country I shall be,” Steimer started spreading propaganda for anarchist causes and on behalf of Soviet political prisoners.

Not long after her arrival in Russia, Steimer met and fell in love with fellow anarchist Senya Fleshin, a Russian-born Jew who had immigrated to the United States and returned after the Revolution. Although the two never married, they became devoted companions. Like Steimer, Fleshin was disillusioned with the Soviet regime, and the two joined forces in their work to help political prisoners. In 1922, Steimer and Fleshin were arrested by the Soviet secret police, accused of having anarchist connections in Europe and the United States. They were sentenced to two years’ exile in Siberia, but were released when they staged a hunger strike. After being arrested a second time and staging another hunger strike, the two were expelled from the Soviet Union, leaving for Germany in 1923.

During the next fifteen years, Steimer and Fleshin moved between Berlin and Paris, aiding political prisoners and anarchist exiles. They maintained contacts with countless prisoners—to whom they sent care packages—and with radicals in several countries, many of whom they received as guests. The couple also took part in the major debates of the day concerning radical politics, including the controversy surrounding Peter Arshinov’s Organizational Platform. Arshinov proposed the creation of a central executive committee to guide the anarchist movement, a move that Steimer and Fleshin felt would lead to authoritarianism and a subversion of anarchist principles.

At the beginning of World War II, Steimer and Fleshin were living in Paris. With the invasion of France by the Germans they faced danger both as radicals and Jews. In 1940, Steimer was arrested and taken to an internment camp, while Fleshin fled to the unoccupied sector. Able to negotiate her release, Steimer was reunited with Fleshin in Marseilles, and the two fled to Mexico City, where they opened a photographic studio and became part of a growing group of political exiles. In 1963, they retired to the town of Cuernavaca. Steimer spent her final years corresponding with fellow radicals and receiving many visitors who admired her as a veteran of the international anarchist movement. She died on July 23, 1980, at age eighty-two. Written by The Jewish Women’s Archive.

50. Kate Sharpley! She was a Deptford-born anarchist and anti-World War I activist. She is chiefly known today through the work of the library named in her honour.

During the war she left her job with a baker and worked in a Woolwich munitions factory. She was among the first people active in the shop stewards movement. Her father and brother were killed in action and her boyfriend (active in the anarcho-syndicalistic Horse Transport Union) was listed as missing believed killed. She suspected, though she had no proof, that he had been shot for mutiny. At the age of 22, when called to receive her family’s medals from Queen Mary (wife of George V) she threw the medals back at her, saying “if you like them so much you can have them”. The Queen’s face was scratched, Kate Sharpley was beaten by police, and imprisoned for a few days, though no charges were brought against her. She was fired from her job at the factory.

49. Rebecca (Becky) Edelsohn. In the photo she’s the one in the white clothing and white hat. She was a dynamic New York Anarchist active in unemployment protests, anti-militarism, and solidarity actions with both the Mexican Revolution and the Colorado miners strike at the time of Rockerfeller’s notorious Ludlow Massacre.

Beck Edelsohn is the first political hunger striker in America. Possessed of strong convictions and revolutionary temperament, of exceptional determination and courage, Becky refuses to compromise with the enemy. It is not given to the average to be strong and uncompromising. But Becky is not of the average. She is very exceptional—a strong personality, unusually gifted in mind and heart.

Though a very young woman, about twenty-three, Becky Edelsohn has been active in the Anarchist movement for a number of years. Not indeed as a “leader,” nor even as speakers or writer, but as one of the soldiers in the ranks, whose unobtrusive devotion and out-of-the-spotlight work for the cause is the very soul of the more conspicuous activities.

Famous for wearing red stockings during the political demonstrations she engages in. She came to the United States from the Ukraine with her family while still a young girl. Later, she lived for a time in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York until she was discharged on May 14, 1902. She lived in the home of anarchist Emma Goldman as a teenager, where she was introduced to the anarchist ideology of the day. In 1906, she became the close companion of Alexander Berkman after his release from prison, and became his lover the following year. She was arrested in 1906 at a meeting to discuss anarchist Leon Czolgosz. She was again arrested at a meeting of the International Brotherhood Welfare Association at Cooper Union on Labor Day, 1908. She was arrested again on May 23, 1909 along with Leopold Bergman and charged with disorderly conduct. Following the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, she helped to lead anti-Rockefeller demonstrations in Tarrytown, New York. On the first day of demonstrations, she and other anarchists were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after giving speeches at the public square. At her hearing, she was specifically cited for calling John D. Rockefeller, Jr. a “multi-murderer”. She was jailed at Blackwell’s Island where she refused to accept any nourishment other than water. In a letter smuggled to Alexander Berkman, she wrote, “I am still sticking to my programme, having fasted over twenty-seven days. I am very weak.” This letter prompted her friends to raise the $300 needed to post a bond for her release.

The Movement of the Unemployed of last winter found Becky within its ranks. The movement, started by a small group of obscure proletarians at the Ferrer School, at the very outset faced the problem of the lack of speakers from its own ranks. IT was in this manner that Frank Tanenbaum joined in the work. Similarly Becky Edelsohn came to the front, inner necessity and the demand for speakers causing her to ascend the public platform—her first experience of the king—at gatherings of the unemployed at various street corners of New York City, and later at Franklin Statue (Printers’ Row). Of good appearance and sympathetic voice, well versed in the subject matter of her talks, she proved effective and was soon much in demand as a speaker.

She later married fellow anarchist Charles Plunkett after World War I. Their marriage lasted nine years. The couple had a son. She died of emphysema in 1973.

“I am very low and suffering great torture. But there will be no giving in on my part. I can die but once. Many have died for the cause, and it will make good propaganda.”

46. François Rabelais he was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar.

44. Guiseppe Pinelli, a railwayman, Pinelli was active in the Italian Anarchist movement since the 1950’s, a good organiser of demonstrations, single-mindedly devoted to his cause.

43. Paul Goodman, reader for MGM, teacher, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, critic, psychotherapist, professor, social philosopher, pacifist, advocate of decentralism and experimental education. Goodman was born in New York (1911) and became famous among the 1960’s generation which claimed to ‘trust no one over 30’ but made him an exception, largely due to his book ‘Growing up Absurd.’

Paul Goodman was born in New York City on September 9, 1911. He never knew his father who abandoned the family when Paul was an infant. This left his bohemian mother a working single parent. His brother Percival left home early. He was raised without much supervision by his mother’s sisters and his older sister Alice in the rich atmosphere of the urban Jewish intellectual community of the early part of the century. He was a bookish and curious child who roamed freely in the streets, parks, museums and libraries of New York City absorbing a truly free education. He graduated from City College in the depression year of 1931 and snuck into classes at Columbia and Harvard. Through a Columbia professor he was invited to teach at the University of Chicago while he earned his Ph.D in Literature, but he was fired from his job (as he was fired from every teaching job in his life) because he insisted on his right to fall in love with his students. He was never in the closet about his bisexuality and saw no reason to hide it even in the face of the trouble it caused him in that less permissive time.

Through the next twenty-five years he lived with his common-law wife Sally. Goodman had two daughters, Susan (whose mother was Virginia Miller, Goodman’s first wife) and Daisy, and a son, Matthew Ready. During this time they lived in decent poverty and an ideal environment for serious people. They got by on little jobs including a $5 per story contract with the MGM story department in New York for plot synopses of French novels. During this time he wrote furiously. He considered himself an artist and produced mostly poems, plays and short stories. He promoted himself vigorously but met with little acceptance of his mostly avant-garde style. He was involved with little literary magazines, theater groups and political activities centered around the Spanish Anarchist Hall (Solidaridad International Anti-Fascista).

Midlife found Paul Goodman drained and fearful in the face of his status as a marginal artist with children to raise. He wrote in a journal: I am at a loss, in our great city, how to do anything at all that could make an immediate difference in our feeling and practice (and so in my own feeling and practice). Therefore I have ceased to want anything, I do not know what we want. It was at this time that he met Fritz Perls, a German Jew who spent the Hitler years in South Africa and fled to the United States as the apartheid regime arose there. Perls had studied with the founding generation of Freudians but soon developed a very unconventional therapeutic practice. Perls’ ideas blended well with Goodman’s and they were soon involved in a rich collaboration, founding the Gestalt Therapy Institute and writing Gestalt Therapy .

This exposure shifted Goodmanâs career from artist/writer to social critic. He wrote no more stories or plays and fewer poems. His breakthrough book, Growing Up Absurd, was rejected by a dozen publishers before finally seeing print in 1960 and becoming a huge success. Soon the rest of society began to catch up to him as young people began to rebel against the excessive conventionality of the fifties. He was well placed to address the anti-institutional critique which emerged at this time and led to massive change in the years to come. By the mid-sixties he was adopted as sort of an uncle of the youth/student movement, wrote a book a year, and made almost constant campus appearances. His contribution was scholarly yet personal, classical yet revolutionary, and thoroughly natural and anti-institutional.

As the movement became the Movement and shifted to a struggle between the Old Left and the New Left, Goodman remained unapologetically free. Many of his former followers abandoned him as he refused to offer a blueprint for building structures for the future, preferring the formulation of here, now, next. He seemed both saddened and relieved by this and soon settled into his familiar status as outsider critic, but now with a comfortable fame and some financial security.

In 1967 his son Mathew died tragically in a mountain climbing accident. Friends say he never recovered from the grief this caused him. Soon his health began to deteriorate and his writing mellowed into the reflections of an old warrior. He died of a heart attack on August 2, 1972, just short of his sixty-first birthday.

By: John Fitzgerald

38. Camille Pissarro! A painter (artist) Living in France permanently since 1855, he was strongly influenced by Corot, and one of the first impressionists, remaining a central figure of this movement all his life. A sympathiser of the Paris Commune, he became an Anarchist and supported the Anarchist movement and Publications both financially and with his works, especially the effort of Jean Grave and Émile Pouget to bring modern art to the workers.

“General suffrage, the instrument for the rule of the capitalist bourgeoisie…serves only the interests of the big bosses…how stupid to imagine the interests of the proletariate represented by a member of Parliament.”

37. Ba Jin the “grand old man of Chinese literature” according to The Guardian. He’s also known by just one name, Bakin.

36. Charlotte M. Wilson was an English anarchist who co-founded Freedom newspaper in 1886 with Peter Kropotkin, and edited, published, and largely financed it during its first decade. She remained editor of Freedom until 1895.

Born Charlotte Mary Martin, she was the daughter of a well-to-do physician, Robert Spencer Martin. She was educated at Newnham College at Cambridge University. She married Arthur Wilson and the couple moved to London. Charlotte Wilson joined the Fabian Society in 1884. In 1886, parliamentarians within the Fabian Society proposed that it organize as a political party; William Morris and Wilson opposed the motion, but were defeated. She subsequently resigned from the Society in April 1887, continuing her association with the anarchists from the Society.

In 1886, Wilson and Kropotkin co-founded Freedom, an anarchist newspaper. The newspaper’s mission statement is stated in every issue, on page 2, and summarises the writers’ view of anarchism:

“Anarchists work towards a society of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation. We reject all government and economic repression. This newspaper, published continuously since 1936, exists to explain anarchism more widely and show that only in an anarchist society can human freedom thrive.”

35. Anarchist of the day is Émile Jean-Marie Gautier! He was an anarchist and later a journalist. He coined the term “social Darwinism”.

34. Gerrard Winstanley! Born in a time when England faced civil unrest and technically before the term Anarchist was used to describe socialist libertarianism, his actions go well with the term “property is theft”.

Reclus was born at Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde). He was the second son of a Protestant pastor and his wife. From the family of fourteen children, several brothers, including fellow geographers Onésime  and Élisée, went on to achieve renown either as men of letters, politicians or members of the learned professions.

Reclus began his education in Rhenish Prussia, and continued higher studies at the Protestant college of Montauban. He completed his studies at University of Berlin, where he followed a long course of geography under Carl Ritter.

Withdrawing from France because of political events of December 1851, he spent the next six years (1852–1857) traveling and working in Great Britain, the United States Central America, and Colombia. Arriving in Louisiana in 1853, Reclus worked for about two and a half years as a tutor to the children of cousin Septime and Félicité Fortier at their plantation Félicité, located about 50 miles upriver from New Orleans. He recounted his passage through the Mississippi river delta and impressions of antebellum New Orleans and the state in Fragment d’un voyage á Louisiane, published in 1855.

On his return to Paris, Reclus contributed to the La Revue des Deux Mondes, the Tour du monde and other periodicals, a large number of articles embodying the results of his geographical work. Among other works of this period was the short book Histoire d’un ruisseau, in which he traced the development of a great river from source to mouth. From 1867 – 1868 he published La Terre; description des phénomènes de la vie du globe in two volumes.

32. Voltairine de Cleyre! An American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion over sexuality and women’s lives. She began her activist career in the free thought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to an “anarchism without adjectives.” She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force.

Family ties to the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, the harsh and unrelenting poverty that she grew up in, and being named after the philosopher Voltaire all contributed to the radical rhetoric that she developed shortly after adolescence. After schooling in the convent, de Cleyre moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan and began her intellectual involvement in the strongly anti-clerical freethought movement by lecturing and contributing articles to freethought periodicals, eventually becoming the editor of a freethought newspaper titled The Progressive Age.

She was close to and inspired by Dyer D. Lum. In 1890 she gave birth to a son, Harry, fathered by freethinker James B. Elliot.

Throughout her life she was plagued by illness and depression, attempting suicide on at least two occasions and surviving an assassination attempt in 1902. Her assailant, Herman Helcher, was a former pupil who had earlier been rendered insane by a fever, and whom she immediately forgave.

Voltairine de Cleyre died on June 20, 1912, at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, from septic meningitis.

31. Gustav Landauer! He was one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He was an advocate of social anarchism and an avowed pacifist. Landauer is also known for his study and translations of William Shakespeare’s works into German. One of his grandchildren, with wife and author Hedwig Lachmann, is Mike Nichols, the American television, stage and film director, writer, and producer.

He was of Jewish descent and he became known from 1892 as editor of Der Sozialist. Apart from politics, he was interested in bringing theatre and literature closer to ordinary people. He underlined the responsibility of the individual for ‘the system’, and for it’s change.

At the “International Convention of Socialist Workers” of the II. Socialist International in August 1893 in Zurich, Landauer, as a delegate for the Berlin anarchists, stood for an “anarchist socialism”. Against an anarchist minority the convention with 411 delegates from 20 countries passed a resolution in favour of participation in elections and political action in parliaments. The anarchists were excluded from the II. Socialist International.

Three days after the Soviet government had been taken over by functionaries of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) Gustav Landauer became disappointed with their policies and resigned from all his political posts on 16 April 1919.

As Commissioner for Public Instruction in the first Munich Council republic, he was tragically punished. After the City of Munich was reconquered by the German army and Freikorps units, Gustav Landauer was arrested on 1 May 1919. He was stoned and beaten to death by counter-revolutionary troops one day later in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison.

“Those are idle talkers…who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it…We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society.”

After the Nazis were elected in Germany in 1933 they destroyed Landauer’s grave, which had been erected in 1925, sent his remains to the Jewish congregation of Munich, charging them for the costs. Landauer was later put to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof (Forest Cemetery).

Together with other like-minded women she founded the Union of Women during the Paris commune, which additionally to its role as an organizational extension of the First Socialist International played a vital role in furthering feminist and socialist causes during the her time.

Additionally to her socialist activism, she also used her position to fight mainly equal salary for men and women and women’s right to vote should democracy be re-established. France at the time was ruled by Napoleon III in the style of an absolutist monarchy but in 1868 slow attempts at re-democratization were made. One of these measures was the repeal of the prohibition on public meetings. Additionally to the discussion of the social question, many meetings were held concerning the “question of women” mainly by socialists like Lemel. This lead to the general politicization of women in France, which should become a major factor in the Paris commune a few years later.

In 1870 war between France and Germany broke out. Paris was under siege by German forces and as unrest grew, riots broke out. Socialist and other left-wing revolutionaries seized this opportunity to form a city government that would govern the city according to socialist principles. The so-called Paris Commune was the first attempt in history to create a socialist order in any form of governance. It existed for two months. Nathalie Lemel was closely involved in the Commune. Not only did she fight against German as well as French government troops but also was closely involved in Commune politics. Together with other like-minded women she formed the Union of Women. The Union had about 1800 members and was the biggest women’s organization in Paris. Its members organized public talks on the rights of women, were involved in the fight against enemy troops not only by supporting men in combat but by fighting themselves. Lemel and the co-founders such as Elisabeth Dimtrieff were also big critics of Commune politics, especially since there was no woman in the Commune’s government and its rulers did not introduce women’s suffrage arguing that this was not the time given the precarious military situation.

One of the biggest achievements of Lemel and the Union was that they organized women’s labor. They created places to work and founded soup kitchens and other places of supply for all of the Paris’ population, opposed to the Commune or not. Lemel saw socialism as a movement for everybody.

The Paris Commune was ended in a very bloody fight in May of 1871. Unlike many of her fellow fighters Lemel did survive the Commune’s end and was banished from France’s mainland to New Caledonia from where she returned in 1880 to continue her fight for socialism and women’s rights through publishing several magazines until her death in 1921.

Lemel does not only stand out as a practical fighter in the field of activism and real military fighting (she stood on the barricades of Paris, rifle in hand) but one of her and her fellow founders of the Union of Women lasting contributions is that the socialist movement was forced to discuss feminist politics and women’s rights issues. Through their active participation in all areas of life during the time of the Commune Lemel and the members of her organization basically proofed that the cause of socialism could not go on without including women. Although it was a very slow process, later prominent female socialist activist such as Adelheid Popp or Rosa Luxemburg could find a political home also concerning women’s rights with the Socialist International, in part due to activists like Nathalie Lemel who pioneered the way.

29. Erich Muehsam ! He was a Bohemian German-Jewish Anarchist essayist, Poet and Playwright. He emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading Antimilitarism revolutionary agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic.

Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist.

He hated the school where he was sent, which was known for its authoritarian discipline and its unsparing use of corporal punishment. Erich was often a victim of “the unspeakable flailings which were supposed to beat out of me all my innate feelings” because his rebellious nature often clashed with the school regime. In 1896 he wrote an anonymous piece for the socialist paper Luebecker Volsboten denouncing one of the school’s most brutal teachers. This caused a scandal and Erich was expelled for taking part in socialist activities.

Erich Muehsam was one of the outstanding modern revolutionary poets in German literature. From his early youth he turned to socialism and soon enough reached anarchism, to which ideal he dedicated his talent and soul. In addition to his poetic creations that appeared in several volumes, he also wrote plays. His work received high praise from many critics. After the end of the World War he was very active in the uprising of Bavaria during 1919, and also was a member of the Red Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council that existed in Munich for a short period of the same year. When the revolt was crushed by the Social Democratic rulers, Muehsam was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. After serving five years he was freed in the amnesty granted at that time. Once again he became very active in the anarchist movement. That’s when he published and edited two journals that exerted great influence ‘Kain’and ‘Fanal’. Muehsam was about to escape from Germany when the Mad Dog of Europe, Hitler, came to power. Instead, he was one of the first victims of the Nazis.

When the official report of July 11 by the Nazi regime of Germany told of Erich Muehsam having hanged himself while in ‘protective custody’, many feared that his death came about in a more terrible manner. These fears were borne out by the following wireless message from Prague to the New York Times. It reads as follows:

“Prague, July 20th — Details of the killing of the poet Erich Muehsam in a German concentration camp were given tonight by his widow, who has just reached Prague from Germany. Herr Muehsam went through a Cavalry of Nazi concentration camps, passing through the three most notorious between February of last year and the slaying on July 10th, last. He was in the Brandenburg, Sonnenburg and the Oranienburg camps. His widow declared this evening that, when she was first allowed to visit her husband after his arrest, his face was so swollen by beating that she could not recognise him. He was assigned to the task of cleaning toilets and staircases and Storm Troopers amused themselves by spitting in his face, she added.”

Erich had wanted to be a writer and poet from an early age and he left Luebeck to pursue this aim in Berlin in 1900. He got involved in a group called Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society) which combined socialist ideology with experiments in communal living. Here he met Gustav Landauer who introduced him to anarchist communist ideas. Muehsam contributed to Kampf, the anarchist paper of his friend Senna Hoy.

In 1904 Erich went to Ascona in Italian Switzerland to live in the artists’ colony of Monte Verita (the writer Herman Hesse, the dance theorist Laban, the psychotherapist Otto Gross and many Dadaists and Expressionists lived there at one time or other).

He began writing plays there, the first of which, The Con Men, mixed new political theory with traditional dramatic forms. He also continued contributing to many anarchist papers, which drew the attention of the German authorities. He was considered one of the most dangerous anarchist agitators.

He moved to Munich in 1908 and took part in the cabaret movement. He did not care much for writing cabaret songs, but he achieved much notice because of them.

In 1911 he founded the paper Kain which advocated anarchist communism. He castigated and ridiculed the German state, fighting capital punishment and theatre censorship, and prophetically analysing international affairs. The World War that he had predicted led to the suspension of Kain.

At first Erich publicly supported the war, but by the end of 1914 was persuaded that he had been wrong. He threw himself into anti-war activity taking part in various actions. He supported the strikes that were beginning to break out. As these became more widespread and began to take on a revolutionary nature, Erich was among those arrested and imprisoned in April 1918, and then freed in November.

With the fall of the Kaiser and King Ludwig of Bavaria, Munich burst into revolt. Muehsam and Landauer as well as Ret Marut (later known as the novelist B. Traven) were among those agitating for the setting up of Workers Councils which led on to the founding of the Bavarian Council Republic. This lasted only a week.

The Social Democrats, terrified by the thought of revolution, allied with the right. The Freikorps, a reactionary militia organised by the socialist minister Noske and composed of right wing military and students, crushed the Council Republic. Muehsam escaped but was later captured and sent to prison for 15 years. In prison, Erich continued with his writing, composing many poems and the play Judas. Released in the amnesty of 1924, he returned to a Munich in the grip of apathy. He joined the Anarchist Communist Federation of Germany (FKAD). He restarted Kain but this failed after a few issues. He then brought out Fanal (The Torch) where he attacked both the Communists and the far right. His openly revolutionary tone and his attempts to stop the rise of the right made him a hate figure among conservatives and Nazis.

He used satire to ridicule the Nazis with short stories and poems. This came to the personal attention of Hitler and Goebbels, arousing their anger. He agitated for the freeing of the revolutionary Max Hoelz and wrote a play, Staatsraeson (For reasons of State) in defence of Sacco and Vanzetti), in 1928.

In 1930 he completed his last play Alle Wetter (All Hang) which called for mass revolution as the only way to stop the seizure of power by the radical Right.

A few hours after Van der Lubbe had set fire to the Reichstag in February 1933, Muehsam (along with as many communists, branded the Red Pests, the Nazi’s could find – nearly 4000 people) was arrested and then spent the last 17 months of his life in the concentration camps.

His teeth were smashed in with rifle butts, his scalp was branded with a swastika from a red-hot iron and he was hospitalised. He was forced to dig his own grave for a mock execution, and his body became a mass of bruises and wounds. His tormentors tried to force him to sing the Nazi song Horst Wessel Lied. He refused to give in and sang the Internationale. ” Thanks to his will power he resisted all attempts to humiliate him”. And despite these tortures Erich remained intransigent to the end. Finally he was tortured and murdered in 1934.

After beatings, a Stormtrooper leader administered a lethal injection and then a suicide by hanging was faked.

28. Peter Kropotkin! Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, the son of Aleksei Petrovich Kropotkin and Yekaterina Nikolaevna Sulima, was born in Moscow, Russia in1842. The family was fairly wealthy and came from a noble lineage and Peter was in fact a prince, but he went to renounce his title when he fundamentally understood and rejected the privilege that it entailed.

Brought up in an aristocratic family and educated at an elite military school, kropotkin then attended St Petersburg university at the age of 15 and four years later became personal page to Tsar Alexander II. He was not terribly impressed with the school, feeling that “all the subjects were taught in the most senseless manner.” However, while at school, he did develop a strong interest in history and geography and went on to became a professor of Geography.

Kropotkin first became aware of political censorship in Russia when his older brother, Alexander, was arrested in 1858 while a student at St. Petersburg University as a result of having a copy of a book, Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book had been lent to him by one of the faculty, Professor Tikhonravof, but he refused to tell the police this because he did not want to get into trouble with the authorities.

In 1862 he applied for a commission in the Cossack Regiment serving in Eastern Siberia. After reading the work of Proudhon and the exploits of Fellow Russian, Bakunin, he developed an interest in Anarchism and a growing interest in politics. As Paul Avrich points out: “In Siberia he shed his hopes that the state could act as a vehicle of social progress. Soon after his arrival, he drafted, at the request of his superiors, elaborate plans for municipal self-government and for the reform of the penal system (a subject that was to interest him for the rest of his life), only to see them vanish in an impenetrable bureaucratic maze.”

Back in Russia, he was arrested in 1874 by the police. His house was searched and they found copies of a revolutionary manifesto that he had written. They also found his diary and several books that had been banned by the authorities. Although they found plenty of incriminating evidence, the police had to bribe several witnesses to get a conviction. Kropotkin was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress but in 1876 he was able to escape and fled to Switzerland where he lived until the Russian Revolution enabled him to return in 1917. In Switzerland, France and England, he became the leading exponent of Anarchist communism, trying to develop a scientific approach to Anarchist theory and practice.

After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II his radical socialist views made him unwelcome in the country and in 1881 he moved to France where he became a member of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), a federation of radical political parties that hoped to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist commonwealth.

Kropotkin continued to be interested in the work of Charles Darwin. He had profound respect for Darwin’s discoveries and regarded the theory of natural selection as “perhaps the most brilliant scientific generalization of the century”. Peter had his own take on human species development. In 1880 he read an article by Karl Kessler, a Russian zoologist, entitled On the Law of Mutual Aid. Kessler’s argued that cooperation rather than conflict was the chief factor in the process of evolution. He pointed out “the more individuals keep together, the more they mutually support each other, and the more are the chances of the species for surviving, as well as for making further progress in its intellectual development.” Kessler died the following year and Kropotkin decided to spend time developing his theories.

In 1883 Kropotkin was arrested by the French authorities. Sentenced in Lyon, under a special law passed on the fall of the Paris Commune, to five years’ imprisonment, on the ground that he had belonged to the International Working Men’s Association. While in prison Kropotkin’s first ideas on anarchism were published. He was eventually released in 1886 and moved to England.

In 1886 Kropotkin and his socialist friends organized a mass rally in London protesting against the death sentences imposed on the conviction of Albert Parsons and others for the Haymarket Bombing. That year he helped to establish the anarchist journal, Freedom. As anarchism’s most important philosophers he was in great demand as a writer and contributed to the journals edited by Benjamin Tucker (Liberty), Albert & Lucy Parsons (Alarm) and Johann Most (Freiheit). Tucker praised Kropotkin’s publication as “the most scholarly anarchist journal in existence.” Many of his books and pamphlets are regarded as classics of Anarchist thought. The following year he published In Russian and French. He argued that “Prisons neither improve the prisoners nor prevent crime; they achieve none of the ends for which they are designed.”

Kropotkin continued to develop his ideas on evolution. In 1888 Thomas Huxley published an article entitled The Struggle for Existence. He completely rejected Huxley’s argument that competition among individuals of the same species is not merely a law of nature but the driving force of progress (an argument often used in favour of Capitalism). Kropotkin replied to Huxley in a series of articles where he documented his theory of mutual aid with illustrations from animal and human life. In favour of kropotkin school of thought, Paul Avrich has argued: “Among animals he shows how mutual cooperation is practiced in hunting, in migration, and in the propagation of species. He draws examples from the elaborate social behavior of ants and bees, from wild horses that form a ring when attacked by wolves, from the wolves themselves that form a pack for hunting, from migrating deer that, scattered over a wide territory, come together in herds to cross a river. From these and many similar illustrations Kropotkin demonstrates that sociability is a prevalent feature at every level of the animal world. Moreover, he finds that among humans too mutual aid has been the rule rather than the exception. With a wealth of data he traces the evolution of voluntary cooperation from the primitive tribe, peasant village, and medieval commune to a variety of modern associations that have continued to practice Mutual support despite the rise of the coercive bureaucratic state. His thesis, in short, is a refutation of the doctrine that competition and brute force are the sole – or even the principal – determinants of social progress.”

Kropotkin rejected the idea of a secret revolutionary party that had been suggested by Mikhail Bakunin. He also criticized the views of Sergi Nechayev. He insisted that social emancipation must be attained by libertarian rather than dictatorial means. For Kropotkin the ends and the means were inseparable.

At Jersey City he was asked by a group of journalists for a statement on his political beliefs: “I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which I believe will be communistic in economics, but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual. As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and consumption…. The social democrats are endeavoring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre – the State and work toward the circumference, while we endeavor to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex.”

In his final years Kropotkin concentrated on writing. His works during this period he produced an autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Fields, Factories and Workshops, Mutual Aid and The Great French Revolution turned him into a world known political figure. Emma Goldman argued: “We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy and progressive thought.” Freedom Bookshop was founded in 1886 by a group of friends, including Charlotte Wilson and Kropotkin, who were already publishing a Freedom newspaper.

After the overthrow of the Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, Kropotkin returned home to Russia expecting the development of “anarchist communism”. When the Bolsheviks seized power he remarked to a friend that “this buries the revolution” and described government members as “state socialists”.

In June 1918, Kropotkin had a meeting with Nestor Makhno, the leader of the anarchists in the Ukraine. He told him about a conversation he had with Lenin in the Kremlin. Lenin explained his opposition to anarchists. “The majority of anarchists think and write about the future without understanding the present. That is what divides us Communists from them… But I think that you, comrade, have a realistic attitude towards the burning evils of the time. If only one-third of the anarchist-communists were like you, we Communists would be ready, under certain well-known conditions, to join with them in working towards a free organization of producers.”
Despite Lenin’s attempts, Kropotkin disliked the developments that took place over the next few months and in March 1920 he sent a letter to Lenin that claimed Russia was a “Soviet Republic only in name” and “at present it is not the soviets which rule in Russia but party committees”.

Peter Kropotkin died of pneumonia in the city of Dmitrov in 1921, and was buried in Moscow. His friend, Victor Serge, attended the funeral. “These were heartbreaking days: the great frost in the midst of the great hunger. I was the only member of the party to be accepted as a comrade in anarchist circles. The shadow of the Cheka fell everywhere, but a packed and passionate multitude thronged around the bier, making this funeral ceremony into a demonstration of unmistakable significance.” Kropotkin’s final book, Ethics, Origin and Development was published posthumously.

27. Guy Aldred! Aldred was born in Clerkenwell London on the 5th of November 1886 as a result of a short liaison at the beginning of 1886 between his father, a 22 year old Naval Lieutenant and a 19 year old parasol maker, Ada Caroline Holdsworth. Ada was socially unacceptable to the young Lieutenant, however he did the “respectable thing”, marrying Ada on the 13th September 1886 but leaving her at the church after the wedding to return to his mother. On Guy Fawkes night the 5th November 1886 Ada gave birth to a son, hence the name “Guy”, his middle name Alfred was after his father. Guy was brought up in the home of Ada’s father, Charles Holdsworth a Victorian radical.

26. John Cage! Researcher, author, printmaker, musical director, professor, composer, art director, Cage was a major figure in the music world for some 50 years. He experimented with the use of noise and of extended silence as musical material, invented the prepared piano, was America’s earliest proponent of electronic music, and originated the multi-media happening. Reflecting on society he states “We should learn to live without working. That would mean we would have to live creatively.”

He was born in 1912 in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage, Sr. was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia Harvey worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. The family’s roots were deeply American.

He was an avant-garde composer whose music relied on mathematical patterns, randomness, improvisation and chance to create unique sounds and rhythms. He was also one of the developers of modern dance. Cage’s pieces are controversial because they are vastly different from mainstream music. For example, his piece 4’33” is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. All of his compositions were difficult to reproduce and perform, which was an embodiment of his anarchist views. He believed that difficulty would ensure that “A performance would show that the impossible is not impossible” -this being Cage’s answer to the notion that solving the world’s political and social problems is impossible.

Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives. About the creative process he says “Logic, organisation, government should all be forgotten inasmuch as they begin theselves by making us forget the essential.”

In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

Cage was inspired by the work of Thoreau. In an interview in 1985 John Cage said, “I’m an Anarchist. I don’t know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don’t like government! And I don’t like institutions! And I don’t have any confidence in even good institutions.”

He visited several parts of Western Europe, following his trade and his political interests. He observed the second congress of the Second International in Brussels in 1891, began contributing to the anarchist press in 1892, and left Germany to escape police harassment in 1892. He lived for a couple of years in Paris, and then settled permanently in Britain in 1895.

Although Rocker was a Gentile, he became involved in the Jewish anarchist movement. He learnt Yiddish, lived in the Jewish community, and became the lifelong companion of Milly Witcop (1877-1953). He quickly became a prominent speaker and writer, on cultural as well as political topics, and for 20 years he was the most liked and respected person in the movement. In 1898 he edited Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), a new Yiddish weekly paper in Leeds, for a couple of months, and then became editor of Der Arbeiter Fraint (The Workers’ Friend), a revived Yiddish weekly paper in London, and in 1900 also of Germinal, a new Yiddish monthly.

The Jewish anarchist movement became larger than the native movement. A federation of Jewish anarchist groups was formed in 1902, the circulation of the papers and other publications increased, and a thriving social club was opened in Jubilee Street in East London in 1906. Rocker was the most influential figure in the movement, representing it at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, and becoming a member of the International Anarchist Bureau established there. The Jewish anarchists were very active in the growing trade union movement, and Rocker favoured the development of anarcho-syndicalism as a new form of anarchist theory and practice.

In 1914 Rocker vigorously opposed both sides in the First World War, and after a few months he was interned as an enemy alien. Soon afterwards the Arbeiter Fraint was suppressed and the Jubilee Street club was closed. The Jewish anarchist movement in Britain never really recovered, and most of its members were later attracted to Zionism or Communism.

In 1918 Rocker was deported from Britain to the Netherlands, and he soon returned to his native country. He became a leading figure in the German and indeed the international anarcho-syndicalist movement. He was an active member of the Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gerwerkschaften (Free Association of German Trade Unions) and then a main founder of the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (Free Workers Union of Germany) and editor of its paper, Der Syndikalist. He was the moving spirit of the International Congress in Berlin in 1922 which led to the formation of the International Working Men’s Association, and was one of its secretaries.’ He exerted his influence against anarchist support for the Bolshevik Revolution after 1917 or for Arshinov’s Organisational Platform (which advocated the reconstitution of the anarchist movement as a virtual political party) after 1926, and he led the libertarian opposition to the rising Nazi movement.

In 1933 Rocker had to leave Germany again to escape persecution by the new Nazi regime. He settled in the United States, which he had previously visited for lecture tours, and he continued to work as a speaker and writer, directing his efforts against the twin evils of Fascism and Communism. He spent the last 20 years of his life as a leading figure in the Mohegan community at Crompond, New York, and was the best-known anarchist in the country until his death. He supported the Allies in the Second World War, which caused a breach with some old comrades, but he continued to receive more admiration and affection than any veteran of the movement since Kropotkin or Malatesta. The most important of his many books is ‘Nationalism and Culture’.

24. Maria Luisa Berneri! She was born in 1918 in Arezzo near Florence, the elder daughter of Anarchists Camillo and Giovanna Berneri. Her father, originally a socialist, became an Anarchists in the early 1920s, and was soon one of the best-known (and at times most controversial) intellectuals in the Italian anarchist movement. He was a teacher who after Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 refused to accept the demands laid upon the teaching profession by the Fascists, and in 1926 he went into exile in France. In Paris his – and his family’s – home soon became a centre of anti-Fascist activities, and his two daughters grew up in a highly politicised environment.

From 1936 until her death twelve years later, every activity undertaken by Freedom Press was infused by Marie Louise Berneri’s personality. Already in Paris she had been closely involved (with her father and Tom Keell) in the preparatory discussions and collecting of funds for Spain and the World, which Vernon Richards started in December 1936. After coming to England in 1937 she took an active part in the production of the paper and in 1939 she took part in the attempt to provide some formal link for the Anarchist movement by the production of ‘Revolt!’, the successor of Spain and the World. She also was one of the small group which started War Commentary in 1939. Already knowing Italian, French and Spanish, she quickly mastered English and became one of the main editorial writers, specialising in international affairs. She was an effective public speaker, paper-seller, and meeting organiser. But above all she was the emotional and intellectual centre of the group.

In 1943 Berneri puts forth a scathing criticism of the hypocrisy of “left wing” parliamentary politics and of the capitalist war machine. Here is some of it.

“Political slogans have become like patent medicine advertisements promising health, beauty, and happiness in exchange for a tablet of soap, or a cup of cocoa. Vote Labour, and everything will be alright! Pay your trade union dues and security will be assured! A workers’ government will achieve the revolution. Write to your MP or to such-and-such a Minister, march through the streets in a disciplined manner, with a powerful band and shout till you’re hoarse, and all your wishes (demands) will be granted!

The leit-motif of left parties is that the workers should take as much control as they can of the government. This appears constructive enough. But it only means that Labour leaders will enter the Government by adopting the policy of the Right. For the workers it means sacrifices and the loss of every kind of liberty in order to secure the privilege of seeing “their” Ministers sitting on the Cabinet benches. No improvements are obtained and all official channels for making discontent heard are lost.

Another “practical” solution advocated by the Labour Party is to issue a declaration of war or peace aims. Apparently the world should know of our love of freedom and justice. May we “utopians” suggest to the editorial board of the [pro-Labour] Daily Herald that if the Labour Party is anxious to show the world how “democratic” we are, it could for instance refuse to be associated with a government which imprisons Nehru for four years (may we add that petitions, open letters, etc., etc., will not have the slightest effect?).

How many times in the past have we heard that Anarchism means bombs, that Anarchists work for wholesale destruction? How many times has ruling class police and repression been instituted because an Anarchist has attempted to assassinate a single ruler or reactionary politician? But one single Hamburgizing raid kills more men and women and children than have been killed in the whole of history, true or invented, of Anarchists bombs. The Anarchists bombs were aimed at tyrants who were responsible for the misery of millions; ruling class bombs just kill thousands of workers indiscriminately.

“Disorder,” “Anarchy,” cried the bourgeois Press when single-handed resolutes like [the anarchists] Sbardelotto, Schirru and Lucetti tried to kill Mussolini…Now the same capitalists want to rub whole cities off the map of Europe; want to reduce whole populations to starvation, with its resulting scourge of epidemics and diseases all over the world. This is the peace and order they want to bring to the workers of the world with their bombs.”

At the end of 1948 she gave birth to a still-born child, and in April 1949 she herself unexpectedly died from a virus infection. She was a highly intelligent and deeply committed revolutionary Anarchist; she was also a remarkably beautiful woman and a widely loved personality. Her sudden death at the age of only 31 was a tragedy not only for her friends and comrades but for the whole Anarchists movement. She deserves to be remembered.

Goldman emigrated with her family to the U.S. in 1885, fleeing the rising antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning Anarchist movement in 1889. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, they did a prison sentenced. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for “inciting to riot” and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

22. B. Traven aka Ret Marut ! A German stage actor and author. Traven wrote only 13 novels, and they sold by the millions in many languages. He lived in Germany as an actor under the name of Ret Marut from at least 1907, published an Anarchist journal the brick burner in Munich and then Cologne from 1917 to 1921, he took part in the revolution in Munich and then went underground. He re-emerged in Mexico with a new name.

In 1917, 29-year-old Nestor Makhno was released from a Tsarist Russian prison where for nine years he’d been kept chained hand and foot until liberated by the February Revolution. He returned to his Ukraine homeland to begin a peasants’ movement, expropriating land from the wealthy few to redistribute to the many poor. But when the Bolsheviks sold out Ukraine and handed it to the Germans and Austrians in the 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Makhno’s band of peasants were redeployed as guerrilla warriors who somehow managed to expel the interlopers within a year. By this time Makhno’s reconstructed anarchist society covered most of the Ukraine, in the face of strong opposition from Moscow. In the ensuing chaos, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary or Black Army fought a bewildering multi-front war – sometimes against the Reds, sometimes against the Whites, sometimes with the Reds against the Whites. After the Whites were defeated, Lenin and Trotsky conspired to destroy Makhno’s army – the very forces that had enabled the consolidation of their own power. The Bolsheviks even went so far as to prepare an ambush by inviting the officers of the Crimean Makhnovist army to take part in a military council, where they were immediately arrested and summarily executed.

The then all-mighty Trotsky ordered Makhno’s assassination on sight. Makhno eluded his pursuers for nearly a year, but was soon forced into retreat as the full weight of the Red Army and the Cheka bore down on him. Makhno managed to escape to Western Europe via Rumania and Poland, but by the time he arrived in Paris, the Bolsheviks – having failed to kill him – decided to morally destroy him by branding him a bandit, counter-revolutionary and worst of all a rampant anti-Semite and Jew killer. Yet never has any evidence emerged to support these vicious accusations. Rather, there is an abundance of evidence proving that Makhno possessed numerous close Jewish comrades (who all vigorously defended him), had issued proclamations forbidding pogroms and even personally and publicly executed the chief of a White band of notorious pogromers as an object lesson.

The unceasing stream of Soviet slander, vilification and propaganda in the form of history books, novels, short stories and even a spurious diary of “Makhno’s wife” succeeded in blackening the Ukranian hero’s name for the rest of his days. As he lay dying from tuberculosis in a Paris hospital, it would have been scant consolation to Makhno that the primary architect of his ruin – Trotsky – was in the same city, by then also driven out of Russia into exile.

Berger was born in Latvia, Russia in the 1890s. Around 1905, she left Russia for Western Europe. In Hamburg, Germany she met two other Latvian Anarchist Red Cross members, Charles Berg and Carl Hanson (her stepbrother), and accompanied them to New York City in 1911. When the three arrived in New York, the three joined the Lettish (Latvian) Anarchist Group, an organization primarily devoted to the publication and dissemination of anarchist literature.

The Ludlow Massacre in Colorado and police dispersal of the Tarrytown protests enraged most radicals. As a result, members of the Lettish Anarchist Red Cross began plotting a bomb attack to assassinate Rockefeller. And began to collect dynamite from various sources, storing it in Louise Berger’s apartment on New York.
The conspirators devised a plan in which they plant a bomb at Rockefeller’s home in Tarrytown. The plot was scheduled but for reasons unknown got called off. Louise Berger left her apartment and walked to the office of the Anarchist newspaper known as the Mother Earth Bulletin, where she worked as an editor alongside Alexander Berkman. It has been assumed by some who knew her that Berger was going there to inform Berkman that the bomb had been readjusted and was ready. At 9:15 it all went badly wrong and an explosion occurred from Berger’s apartment. The bomb had exploded prematurely killing the very people who organised the plot.

He had a series of unfortunate events later in his life. He started to become mentally-drained by an illness in the early 1880s. He saw spies everywhere, became frightened of the telephone, and tried to kill himself while imprisoned. He started to experience violent outbursts, and once was found in a cave half-naked sitting in a puddle of water. As a person who was hounded by the police and State his entire adult life, along with many other personal and social struggles and disillusionment, Its no surprise he started losing it. He ended up sadly dying in a mental asylum.

In better health he wrote a book called “A Compendium of Das Kapital,” in which even Marx himself praised (praise to an anarchist?!) “The Compendium was written in order to bring the theory of Capital to students, educated workmen and small proprietor” – It must be good, because typically books like this are painfully terrible.

16. Korean Kim Joa-Jin ! (I couldn’t find a pic of him but he’s in this one along with his comrades)

Kim Jao-jin was born in 1889 to a wealthy family. Like many of his generation, his life was shaped by the Japanese imperial government’s colonisation of Korea. This began formally in 1910, but key aspects of Japanese control dated to 1895. The year 1919 saw a massive wave of struggle against colonialism: the March 1st Movement. This was part of a global series of uprisings.

Kim became involved in the Korean Independence Army (KIA). In 1920, he helped lead a famous defeat by the KIA of a Japanese army division at the battle of Ch’ing-Shan. At the same time, he became drawn to Anarchism by his relative, Kim Jong-Jin. Anarchism / syndicalism was a very powerful force in the Korean national liberation and popular class struggles. Japanese anarchists worked closely with Korean anarchists: they knew the Japanese ruling class was also their enemy.

The Korean anarchist movement wanted to build an independent self-governing anarchist society, a cooperative system of the masses of the Korean people. They wanted to take civilisation from the capitalist class, and return it to the popular classes. By doing so, the capitalist and colonial society that existed in Korea (as elsewhere in Africa and Asia and east Europe) would be replaced with a new society. This new society would be based on the principles of freedom and equality, that guarantee the independent self-rule of the producing classes: the working class and the peasantry.

In 1925, Kim formed the anarchist group, the “New People’s Society.” Working closely with the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation, in 1929 he helped launch (with KIA support) a large anarchist revolutionary zone in Shinmin in Manchuria, in the Korean borderlands. A large Korean population lived here; Japanese imperial power was not as strong as in the Korean peninsula. The zone was run through the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, also called the “General League of Koreans.”

From 1929-1931 we can speak of an anarchist revolution in this area. It was based on the peasantry and the military.

Kim was assassinated by a Korean Communist Party member while working in a cooperative. The Communists hated the anarchists. They wanted to form a one-party dictatorship, as existed in Russia.

15. Ricardo Flores Magón! He was a noted Mexican Anarchist and social reform activist. His two brothers also shared the same politics and followers of the Magón brothers were known as Magonistas.

He has been considered an important participant in the social movement that sparked the Mexican Revolution. And as a result in Mexico the name of Ricardo Flores Magon is well known. Born to a poor family in 1873, he became a journalist on the opposition paper ‘El Demócrata’ after finishing school. In 1900, along with his brother Jesús, he founded “Regeneración’, a radical paper opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

After his release from a second prison sentence arising from his campaigning journalism, he moved across the border to the USA. Despite continual persecution and imprisonment by the U.S. authorities, at the instigation of the Mexican dictatorship – who had put a price of $20,000 on his head after he wouldn’t be bought off with the offer of a place in the government. He would not be silenced.

In 1905, Magon founded the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), a reformist organisation opposed to the excesses of the regime, which organised two unsuccessful uprisings against Diaz in 1906 and 1908. During his early years of exile he became acquainted with Emma Goldman, and it was partly through her that he moved from reformism to become an Anarchist.

With the outbreak of the revolution of 1910 (the revolution that he and the PLM more than any other group or person) he had paved the way. Magon devoted the rest of his life to the Anarchist cause, through the influence of his ideas, large areas of land were expropriated by the peasants and worked in common by them under the banner of ‘Land and Liberty’, the motto of the PLM. This motto was later adopted by Emiliano Zapata, whose legacy inspires the EZLN rebels of the 1994 Southern Mexican uprising whose struggle continues today.

A fortnight later he explained the difference between the PLM and other opposition movements:

“Governments have to protect the right of property above all other rights. Do not expect then, that Madero ( an upper-class politician in the Progressive Constitutional Party) will attack the right of property in favour of the working class. Open your eyes”.

By January, PLM forces were fighting in six of Mexico’s states. Major towns, as well as rural areas, were liberated by Anarchists. In March a peasant army led by Zapata, and influenced by the Magonistas of the PLM, rose up in Morelos. By now the nationalist opposition of Madero had turned some of its guns away from the troops of Diaz and begun to attack the Anarchists of the PLM.

In April, the PLM issued a manifesto to “the members of the party, to the Anarchists of the world and the workers in general”. Vast quantities were produced in Spanish and English to explain their attitude to the revolution:

“The Mexican Liberal Party is not fighting to destroy the dictator Porfirio Diaz in order to put in his place a new tyrant. The PLM is taking part in the actual insurrection with the deliberate and firm purpose of expropriating the land and the means of production and handing them over to the people, that is, each and every one of the inhabitants of Mexico without distinction of sex. This act we consider essential to open the gates for the effective emancipation of the Mexican people.”

In massively illiterate Mexico, where many villages had only a handful of people able to read, the circulation of “Regeneración” had reached 27,000 a week. When Tijuana was liberated in May, most of Baja California came under PLM influence. They issued a manifesto “Take possession of the land…make a free and happy life without masters or tyrants”.

That month saw Madero sign a peace treaty with Diaz and take over as President of Mexico. Military attacks on the PLM increased, and towns were retaken by government troops. Prisoners were murdered by the new regime, sometimes after being made to dig their own graves. At a meeting in Los Angeles, Magon was asked to accept the treaty but replied “…until the land was distributed to the peasants and the instruments of production were in the hands of the workers, the liberals would never lay down their arms”.

Along with many leading PLM organisers, Magon was arrested (again) by the US authorities. The rebels were slandered as “bandits” and repression in both Mexico and the US reached new heights. Despite the setbacks caused by their relatively small size in a gigantic country, the attacks they suffered from the armies of two countries, and the terrible revenge exacted by the rich and their agents, new uprisings broke out in Senora, Durango and Coahuila.

Such was the support for their ideas, that even the British TUC felt obliged to invite Honore Jaxon, Treasurer and European representative of the PLM, to address their 1911 conference. One solidarity action especially worth mentioning was the 24-hour strike by two army units in Portugal protesting against the arrest of PLM militants by the US government.

A new manifesto, emphasising their Anarchism, was issued in September:

“The same effort and the same sacrifices that are required to raise to power a governor – that is to say a tyrant – will achieve the expropriation of the fortunes the rich keep from you. It is for you, then, to choose. Either a new governor – that is to say a new yoke – or life redeeming expropriation and the abolition of all imposition, religious, political or any other kind”.

PLM and Zapatista rebellions continued until 1919, but their numbers and inadequate arms were not sufficient to defeat the state forces. However all was not in vain. In 1922 the Anarchist CGT trade union was founded in Mexico city, and today the rebellion in the state of Chiapas can be seen as, partly at least, a continuation of Magon’s struggle.

During the years of struggle Magon opposed and fought successive so-called “revolutionary regimes,” resisting both the old and new dictatorships with equal vigour. Imprisoned by the U.S. authorities in 1905, 1907, and 1912 he was finally sentenced to 20 years under the espionage laws in 1918. He died, apparently after suffering beatings, in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas, on November 22, 1922.

When his body was brought back across the border, every town where the cortege stopped was decked out in the red and black flags of Anarchism. In Mexico City, 10,000 working people escorted his body to Panteon Frances where it is buried. A flame had been lit that will not burn out until liberty becomes a living reality.

14. Ethel MacDonald! She was a Glasgow-based Scottish Anarchist and activist and, in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, a propagandist on Barcelona Loyalist radio.

13. Gaetano Bresci ! He was born in 1869 in small village in the commune of Prato in Tuscany, central Italy. His parents sent him out to work at a young age, during which time he was employed as a silk weaver, the profession he was to continue throughout his life.

At a time when Anarchist ideas were beginning to spread across Italy, with Tuscany in particular becoming a stronghold for radical activity, Bresci became involved in an Anarchist group. Little is known of the group’s activities however it is clear that Bresci served a short sentence in prison as the result of being involved in an “Anarchist disturbance”.

Upon his release Bresci emigrated to America, living first in New Hoboken, where he married an Irish immigrant girl in 1897. He and his wife moved away soon after, settling in the large manufacturing town of Paterson, New Jersey, where he took up work as a weaver in one of the city’s numerous mills.

Becoming involved in a local Anarchist group, Bresci and his comrades set about introducing Anarchist ideas to the sizeable Italian immigrant population in Paterson, eventually setting up a newspaper, La Questione Social. Gaining a reputation as a skilled propagandist, Bresci became one of the main contributors to the paper, devoting much of his free time to writing and organising amongst the immigrant mill workers.

Hearing and reporting news for the international labour and Anarchist movement in La Questione Social, Bresci was well aware of the increasingly unstable political and social situation in Italy. In 1898 he received news of an event in his homeland that was to forever change his life.

Following a prolonged campaign of strikes and demonstrations across Italy to protest the rising cost of living, a mass demonstration of workers had taken place through the streets of Milan in 1898. The march took an increasingly violent turn and, fearing an attack upon the Royal Palace, troops were ordered to fire on the crowd, who were unarmed. The protestors marched toward the palace, which was surrounded by a strong military force under the command of General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris. The crowd ignored the order to disperse, whereupon Bava-Beccaris gave the signal to fire with muskets and cannons, resulting in a massacre of the demonstrators, in which more than ninety people died. The shootings, known as the Bava-Beccaris massacre named after the general who had ordered the attack.
King Umberto later decorated Bava-Beccaris,complimenting him upon his “brave defense of the royal house” — as a result of which Bresci became determined to kill the king.

Unexpectedly, to his comrades, Bresci approached them at La Questione Social and demanded the return of a loan which had been used to set up the paper. Offering no explanation for his actions and leaving his comrades deeply bitter towards him, Bresci left the United States with the intention of assassinating King Umberto I of Italy (fulfilling the propaganda by the deed ethos).

Two months later Bresci had made his way to the small town of Monza, some 10 miles north of Milan. The town was the location of one of the king’s royal villas which he would be staying at for several weeks. It was here that Bresci committed his attentat. On the evening of July 29, while the king was handing out prizes to athletes after a sporting event, Bresci burst from the crowd and shot the king three times using a 32 revolver, killing him almost immediately.

Bresci was captured and put on trial, represented by the famous Anarchist lawyer Francesco Saverio Merlino, Bresci stood trial in Milan and was sentenced to a life of hard labour on Santo Stefano, the island prison infamous for its many Anarchists and socialist prisoners. He was not to stay long. Less than a year later he was found hanged in his cell, his body being thrown into the sea by prison guards soon after. Although suicide was given as the official explanation for his death, this was widely disputed at the time and it now seems more likely that he was killed by his guards.

Accounts of Bresci’s life tell us that he was a sensitive man, highly susceptible to the injustices committed towards working people. It was these characteristics that drove him to give his life for a deed which he believed would increase the social awareness of the Italian working class and hasten the path to revolution.

The city of Carrara dedicated a marble monument to Bresci. And The city of Prato named a street for him in 1976.

12. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ! A learned printer and proofreader, who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion ‘Property is Theft!’, contained his first master piece and major work, ‘What is Property?’ Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government.

Proudhon received no formal education as a child, but was taught to read by his mother, who had him spelling words by age three.

Proudhon’s mother began trying to get him admitted into the city college in Besançon. The family was far too poor to afford the tuition, but with the help of one of Claude-François’ former employers, she managed to gain a bursary. Proudhon was unable to afford books (or even shoes) to attend school, which caused him great difficulties, and often made him the object of scorn by his wealthier classmates. In spite of this, Proudhon showed a strong will to learn, and spent much time in the school library with a pile of books, exploring a variety of subjects in his free time outside of class.

Proudhon spent hours every day reading Christian literature and began to question many of his long held religious beliefs which eventually led him to reject Christianity altogether. By 1829, he began to become more interested in social issues than religious theory.

In September 1830, Proudhon became certified as a journeyman compositor. The period following this was marked by unemployment and poverty, with Proudhon travelling around France (and also, briefly, to Neufchâtel, Switzerland) where he unsuccessfully sought stable employment in printing and as a schoolteacher.

His friendship with with Gustave Fallot (a scholar who came from a family of wealthy French industrialists) was one of the most important events in Proudhon’s life, as it is what motivated him to leave the printing trade, and pursue his studies of philosophy instead.

He became the first to call himself ‘Anarchist’ in a positive sense in 1840, and in Bakunin’s words, “The master of us all’ Influenced all progressive writers of his age, including Marx. He became one of the most prolific authors of Anarchism. His concept was an Anarchist society based on mutualism and held together by federalism. He became a member of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848, whereupon and thereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.

Proudhon favored workers’ associations or co-operatives, as well as individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In ‘The Confessions of a Revolutionary’ Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the Anarchist circled-A symbol.

Proudhon was surprised by the Revolutions of 1848 in France. He participated in the February uprising and the composition of what he termed “the first republican proclamation” of the new republic. But he had misgivings about the new provisional government. the provisional government was dominated by liberals because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of the socio-economic reform, which Proudhon considered basic.

He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans. He laid out a program of mutual financial cooperation among workers. He believed this would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. The central part of his plan was the establishment of a bank issuing of exchange notes that would circulate instead of money based on gold.

Proudhon was arrested for insulting the president Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and was imprisoned from 1849 to 1852. After his release he remained in exile from 1858 to 1862 in Belgium. Upon the liberalization of the empire in 1863 he returned to France.

In his later life It has to be said (although racism was not overtly part of his political philosophy), he became hugely anti Semitic and Proudhon did publicly express sexist beliefs. It was the common attitude in France at the time unfortunately.