anarchism - article - 2011 - Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality”: Anarchism and the First of May, 1890-1892

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality”: Anarchism and the First of May, 1890-1892
Davide Turcato
Journal for the Study of Radicalism
Vol 5, No 1: 2011
pp. 1-32
Michigan State University Press

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” is the third article I will have annotated from Vol 5, No 1 of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  Author Davide Turcato, an independent scholar, challenges an assertion, that anarchist actions are often irrational eruptions, which is commonly expressed in anarchist scholarship.  Turcato suggests that activity that appears as irrational to previous anarchist scholars is likely the result of planning that has occurred out of view. Anarchist planning is often unseen and therefore not a part of in the historical record.  According to Turcato, this gap in the record has produced the stereotype of the irrational anarchist and has lead scholars such as Peter Marshall (who’s attempted to write a comprehensive history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible) and Eric Hobsbawm (the great Marxist historian who discusses the irrationality of anarchists in his work, Primitive Rebels) to take events as they appear, or to take the word of police or anarchist critics at face value because their words ARE the record.  Like Gabriel,  with his article, Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914, and Andrew Cornell with his article, A New Anarchism Emerges, Turcato is inventing new ways of looking at anarchist action and development.  

Turcato is listed by the Journal for the Study of Radicalism as an independent scholar, however he has received a doctorate in History from Simon Frasier University.  He has also earned a Govenor General’s Gold Medal award for his doctorate on Italian anarchism.  Aside from a very strong interest in historical Italian anarchism, Turcato is a language engineer... I don’t really know what a language engineer is, however most of the scholarly articles that appear on his publishing record pertain to the deployment of language by digital technologies.  

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” proceeds from the assumption that social formations that appear to engage in irrational behavior to distant outsiders (such as historians) should rather assume to be operating on their own set of rationale.  Furthermore, drawing from British historian E.P. Thompson’s studies of the 19th century Luddite movement, Turcato classifies 19th century European anarchism as an opaque movement, a social underground, that produced anarchist texts but not necessarily written evidence for specific actions.  

Violent anarchist events from First of May celebrations in France, Italy, and Spain from the years 1890-1892 are used as case studies, by Turcato, to give substance to his new perspective on anarchist history.  Turcato discusses at length these events to speculate on the underlying rationale that drove the spectacular irrationality that other historians have noted.  The author closely investigates the actions of the Italian anarchist leader Errico Malatesta during these years to demonstrate patterns of activity and planning that suggest that events did not spontaneously erupt into violence but were rather crafted insurrections.

Turcato’s article is interesting because, through his study of Malatesta and his interrogation of the existing historical literature, he demonstrates how even historians and thinkers who are sensitive to anarchist politics, such as the Canadian George Woodcock, or the aforementioned Peter Marshall, reinforce the stereotype of the irrational insurrectionist.  It is difficult for me to reconcile Turcato’s newfound rationality in anarchist activity with an understanding of anarchism that has, perhaps, been in part conditioned by the above authors to consider irrationality to be a component of anarchism’s appeal.