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How about the history of anarchism as a national social movement?
| I will start with a discussion of anarchism as a social movement for it is important to realize what kind of a movement the anarchist movement was. We may start with an im-portant observation by Jean Maitron: “What then is an anarchist group? It is a very dis-tinct organism, which in nothing looks like sections or groups of other parties. There is no steering committee, there are no fixed contributions and no comrade is obliged to tell where he comes from, what he does, and where he will go. The group’s meeting place is a place of passage where everybody talks as he wishes, place of education not of action.” What Maitron describes here is basically a nod in a network, for the anarchist movement should be seen as a networked movement. Of course, it knows organizations, but these organizations are no more than thicker nods and they are not more important for the maintenance of the movement than periodicals, traveling activists or individual people who propagate their own form of anarchism (like in Interbellum France E. Armand) and know how to defend the anarchist cause.
That causes some problems for the analysis of anarchism as a social movement: it is difficult to establish trustworthy data about membership e.g. This difficulty becomes bigger when we take into account that some currents within anarchism objected to unite as anarchists for the anarchist cause. You may find those anarchists in all sorts of movements: revolutionary syndicalist ones, theatrical clubs, antimilitarist unions, the free thought movement, organizations for sexual liberation etc. This will of course inhibit the applicability of social movement theory to anarchist movements.
Furthermore, that applicability might also suffer from the fact that the anarchist movements mostly were not national movements. Their activities were either relevant within local and regional contexts or as part of an international movement. That may have resulted from the fact that the anarchists were more concerned with reforming individuals than structures, it almost certainly will also have resulted from their resentments against the state and their preference for acting through and within counter-communities. Consequently the national level might not have the same relevance for the study of anarchism it has for other socio-political movements.
That too will inhibit the applicability of social movement theories, which usually accept the existing national political structures as the natural context for social movements.
My paper nevertheless will try to answer the question to which extent social movement theory can be relevant for the study of anarchism. I will focus on the work of Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, Mayer Zald, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. I have chosen these authors because of their interest in the development of social movements after their emergence. The first four authors focus on factors which might explain the durability and even success of social movements, whereas Tilly stresses relational aspects (between movement and context) in the development of social movements. Taken together, these theories will open new venues for analyzing anarchist movements. In return analysis of anarchism definitely will throw new light on these social movement theories.
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