Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind
by Eugenia C. DeLamotte
Buy on AmazonShe was an American writer, as well as a poet, but she came into the anarchist movement as a freethinker initially. She was called Voltairine by her father, after the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire . She’s brought up in a tradition of free thought, and her anarchism bears some of the hallmarks: she criticises the Church, she reads Thomas Paine , she’s immersed in an American republican tradition. She starts off as an educator in Philadelphia, but for her and many other anarchists at the time, there’s a major turning point with the execution of the Haymarket anarchists in 1887. The 1880s in America, particularly in Chicago, was a period of intensive labour struggle. Workers were campaigning for the 8-hour day, organising big labour protests, and these were put down with incredible violence by private Pinkerton armies, which employers hired and deployed against workers. Anarchist groups were very active in Chicago. There had been an influx of German immigrants wanting to escape the Old World and to find space for themselves in the New, only to discover that they weren’t that different in terms of repression. A lot of them had been through the Paris Commune and the unification of Germany; they had seen the rise of the State, and the ways in which education was being extended in nefarious ways. They came into an American context and discovered that America was not the “land of the free.” So they started organising themselves, particularly around the 8-hour-day movement. A demonstration took place in Haymarket Square in 1886 in Chicago. A bomb was thrown and several people were killed. But the key event is what happened after the demonstration: a number of anarchists were rounded up, simply because they were anarchists. They were put on trial; the jury was fixed, the process was utterly unfair, everybody could see that it was a corrupt trial, as there was no particular evidence against the accused men. One of the significant features of the trial is that the anarchists were given space to defend themselves, and what they did was give long statements to justify their anarchist beliefs. Albert Parsons, who was regarded as the most articulate of the men put on trial, gave an address to the jury that lasted for eight hours. These are incredibly powerful statements. There was a long series of appeals, and the trial became an international cause célèbre at the time, but eventually five were sentenced to death. One killed himself before the execution, and the other four were hanged. Some years later the verdict was quashed, the trial was recognised as utterly corrupt and unfair, but by this point the example of the Haymarket anarchists had become one the rallying cries for the early anarchist movement. Just at the time where anarchism was beginning to define itself against other forms of socialism, notably Marxist socialism, anarchists had a series of people they could identify with, statements that explained what anarchism was, and an annual celebration that brought people together. All of these things contributed to define the anarchist position. So from these events, Voltairine de Cleyre started to see herself as part of the movement. She took up the anarchist cause, not only in her everyday life, but also by writing essays, coming out for the Mexican revolution, and denouncing American colonial domination. Another reason I chose her is that she writes about what anarchism means for everyday social relations; she writes a series about what she calls ‘sex slavery’, and the question of marriage. She doesn’t call herself a feminist, because at that point feminism is mostly associated with women struggling for the right to vote; but she’s one of the most powerful voices for what would now be called anarchist feminism. Their general view was that the suffrage campaign was a pointless struggle. The anarchists had already had this argument with the Marxist social democrats, in the context of workers’ emancipation. They’d already established the general position that you can’t win power by contesting elections in representative institutions, because you will be sucked up by that power. You can’t make fundamental changes by entering into these institutions, because the institutions themselves are constituted in ways that limit your sphere of action. So the only thing that you can do is work outside them. The anarchist women, including de Cleyre and Goldman, make the same argument, by basically saying: you can struggle for the vote, or for certain rights, like going to university, but fundamentally that will not alter the dependency that exists within the system, through marriage laws, and your structural subordination to men. You have to fight that on the ground. In her essay called Direct Action , de Cleyre writes that the difference between anarchists and the people struggling for suffrage is that they’re using anarchist tactics, but only instrumentally. They’re not actually signed up to self-liberation, but only to protesting. She doesn’t deprecate suffrage campaigners, but she says that the only way you can really secure your rights is by continually using direct action, on a daily basis. In the essay “The Gates of Freedom” she writes: “They have rights who dare maintain them.” We can judge social systems by the rights that they grant to people, but in the end, the value of rights lies in the challenge the oppressed make in struggling for justice, not in settling for a set of arrangements. It’s interesting you mention John Stuart Mill, because like Mill, Voltairine de Cleyre was inspired by English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft . They both took that republican rejection of domination as a touchstone for their politics. If you think about tyranny, and the ways in which mastership works to make people servile, to subdue them and limit their imagination, there’s a commonality between what de Cleyre is saying and what Mill says in On Liberty , about encouraging diversity and letting people think differently, pursue their own interests and desires, follow their paths. This pursuit becomes anarchistic when it pushes in a certain direction. If your principle says, ‘Let’s follow any kind of desire and see where it takes us,’ it’s different from the anarchist rejection of exploitation and domination. Free thought is important, but not everything goes—as it doesn’t for Mill either. There’s an ethics. The argument itself comes after a shift within anarchism, which Kropotkin is part of, but also Errico Malatesta and other Italian anarchists. After the break up of the First International, the anarchists start to organise separately. Many anarchists have come from Proudhonist and Bakuninist traditions, and the dominant affiliation at the time is what’s called collectivism, which was then increasingly understood as a principle of distribution according to work. Kropotkin’s argument was that this is problematic, because it implies some kind of property, and he thinks that if anarchists want to be consistent, they need to call themselves communists. He and others fought against the idea of communism that extends from the French Revolution, where communism is understood as a system of government, highly-centralised and planned, inherited from Jacobinism through people like Gracchus Babeuf and other utopians. Kropotkin basically says that communism is just a principle of distribution according to need and that this is the most secure foundation for anarchy because it inhibits the emergence of economic inequalities and domination. As the movement shifts and Kropotkin wins the argument, communism became the prevailing strand within anarchism. But there were groups on the ground, particularly in Spain where Bakuninist traditions were deeply rooted , that ask: ‘Why should you be the one who tells us how we should organise our affairs? Actually, it may be that we do want to recognise some type of property. As anarchists, we should have the flexibility to determine this on the ground.’ So a movement develops within Spanish anarchism, which says that to be consistent revolutionaries, the people should be allowed to determine all their relations, including economic ones. Rather than calling themselves communists or collectivists they call themselves “anarchists without adjectives”. Voltairine de Cleyre agreed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The reason that so many subgroups appear – like eco-anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-syndicalism – is because the movement tends to develop through its practices, and with changes in political conditions. After anarchism appears on the scene, it’s possible to attach the label to any specific problem or campaign, such as patriarchy, economic sustainability, degrowth, etc. In any group, one can take a more or less anarchist view. People call themselves eco-anarchists within the environmental movement to express a rejection of hierarchy. In doing so, they’re picking up bits of the anarchist tradition. It all makes for a kind of family, and it helps to build a common ground. Possibly, but if you think about other traditions like Marxism, you could also be a Stalinist, a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Lukácsist, etc. But they have names, which somehow makes it more accessible.