We owe much kudos to Tom Goyens for his second important book about anarchists in New York, following Beer and Revolution in 2007.Footnote 1 It is not as if there were an abundance of material on the anarchist movements in North America, even though the United States and Canada saw more, and stronger, anarchist tendencies than many comparable countries did. However, the torchbearers of American capitalism feared the various branches of anarchism even more so than their supposedly communist counterpart before and during the Cold War. Especially the cooperative system of anarcho-syndicalism is able to provide a viable alternative to the forces of raptor capitalism that are proving terminally destructive to the environment, and social networks (there were such things, really, before the Facebook era). This may have to do with the proximity of the role of the individual as the backbone of both capitalist and anarchist thinking. Unlike communism, anarchism demands the assumption of responsibility by the individual for their own life and decisions. There is even one crossover branch between capitalism and anarchism, the anti-ethical ego-anarchism of a Max Stirner, whose proximity to Ayn Rand, Paul Wolfowitz, and others does not, however, play a role in Tom Goyens’ collection of essays about anarchism in New York City.
Instead, this collection focuses on a geo-social myth (New York) and two more mythical lines of anarchist traditions, with all three going somewhat against the grain of traditional anarchist thought. Firstly, anarchism should, at least theoretically, not be location bound (though, of course, there are environmental conditions more likely to spawn and support anarchist prefigurations). Secondly, the strangely parochial German, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish-speaking Jewish ethnic clubs and associations, and their respective publications, indicate social environments that again support anarchist thinking and practice when anarchist theories claim to be universally applicable. And thirdly, the increasingly artistic-bohemian tendencies of small and smaller groups of activists and artists since World War II stand in odd contrast to the arch-serious early working-class-background anarchists trying to live their not-quite-American Dream in immigrant New York.
The arch that takes us from the serious German debaters of Schwab’s saloon in Tom Goyens’ introduction and his article on “Johann Most and the German Anarchists” to the “mother’s nightmare” UAW/MF in Caitlin Casey’s article on the “Street Gang with an Analysis” (p. 161) is less a bridge than a trajectory. This leaves the reader wondering whether there really is anything like coherence in the sequence of what has been assembled here under the heading of anarchist groups and movements in New York – that is, if one does not draw the borderlines too narrowly, or, like Tom Goyens’ introduction, avoid giving a systematic definition altogether. Given that Goyens himself is the author of a fascinating and comprehensive study of German anarchists in New York, to which his article on Johann Most in this volume is a useful companion piece, his introduction to the volume is surprisingly weak. Oddly, in what appears to be a case of excessive modesty, he even fails to mention his own contribution at that point in the introduction where he mentions other books in the field (p. 4). The two main wings of Bakunin and Kropotkin disciples, the main “schools” – if that is what they are – of syndicalism, communist-anarchism, and libertarians, might have received a few extra lines without pushing articles like Alan Moore’s on ABC No Rio or Adam Antliff’s on “The Living Theatre” over the edge. Still, the relative focus on the Bakunin and Kropotkin branches for the period 1880–1940 operates as a delimitation device.
Be that as it may, this collection is both useful and it warrants applause. Applause since it draws attention to the many, manifold, and largely untold attempts at preconfiguring life beyond the ultimately destructive logic of capitalism. There are many welcome additions to the canon, even though there are next to no happy endings. One of the most distressing, but also enlightening, readings is Erin Wallace’s reconstructions of the courageous attempts by “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark to counteract the wholesale destruction of the South Bronx at the behest of investors and speculators in the 1950s and 1960s, which resulted in the “War Years” for the New York City Fire Department. This chapter alone justifies the existence of the whole volume. Anne Klejment’s careful research draws attention to an often-overlooked phenomenon in anarchist history, the Catholic connection. She might have mentioned that Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker were not an isolated moment: the Jesuits behind the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia operated on a clearly syndicalist basis, too. This is one of the moments where the New York focus creates the impression of the present anarchist movement as an oddity, when there were others. Still, the work of Dorothy Day and others finally receives adequate consideration.
Another important article is Andrew Cornell’s meticulous analysis of the Why? / Resistance group. Included is an essay-within-an-essay that is, in one word, brilliant, because it explicates the gradual and painful process by which anarchist theory and practice shifted from the militant and strongly theory-based 1890s and subsequent decades to the pacifist, communitarian, and bohemian-artistic schools of anarchism that have dominated the scene ever since World War II.
The collection fills a number of gaps in our knowledge about anarchism, even though it is remarkably vague about what exactly anarchism is (though avoiding the endless theoretical debates about true anarchism has its merits, too). This begs the question as to whether all of this can really be described as anarchism, or whether the movements before and after World War II were two phenomena separated by just about everything except name. The most important link is probably the continuing insistence on the individual’s conscious decision to embrace anarchism, and the phenomenon of prefiguration: to live one’s life as if anarchist society was already a fact. This is more easily achievable in a community removed from the mainstream and the metropolis – and thus less likely to be manageable in New York City than in, for instance, rural Oregon. How saloons, anarchist-run guest houses, and later theatre and artist groups prefigured what they envisaged as anarchism is made more visible by and in this volume. For this, Goyens deserves our thanks.
