Political Resistance and the Underworld: Four Studies of Sabotage in Historic and Literary Anarchism 1885-1915

There is today a popular myth which sees all protesters as belonging to a shadowy species of sub-humans. The far-left of politics is represented as a form of underworld. Like the past, they do things differently there. You couldn't get a better example of that mystification at work than the media hullabaloo in the run-up to this year's May Day protests. The 'troublemakers' were a diverse coalition of groups, borrowing their tactics from Gandhian non-violent direct action, theories of class struggle and Bakuninite propaganda of the deed. None of the groups involved attempted to conceal their motives or their tactics from the public. But in the tabloid and broadsheet press, they were discussed in a language evocative of much older traditions, including the darkness of Hades, and the half-world of the permanent outcast. One paper which defended the protests (in advance) was the Observer, and it is worth quoting their account, simply because it was more sympathetic than the rest:

Some of the shadowy groups behind Tuesday's march live in an anarchist demi-monde, whose culture and ideology excuse violence to serve the cause to which they obsessively adhere. They undermine and delegitimise a rally that is otherwise giving expression to deeply held and genuine feelings of outrage at the growing power of corporations, not least in their subversion of the public realm. Any violence will both justify a disproportionate police response as well as grievously weaken the protester's argument. We condemn the argument both for itself and for its wider stupidity.

There is a notion here of a dark underworld which exists beneath society and emerges only to destroy that which is healthy, a sort of King-Arthur myth in-reverse. There is also a suggestion of another familiar stereotype, the bomb-throwing anarchist of the late nineteenth-century. If it is in these dark terms that anarchists have been described in literature and in the popular press, then it is no surprise that many of them have done their best to confound the impression. One alternative to the propaganda of the deed is the symbolism of the joke. In the run-up to May Day, this tradition was represented by the pie-chuckers of Operation Dessert Storm, 'What better way to draw attention to the often faceless leaders of the corporate worlds, shameful "journalists", dodgy politicians and anyone who deserves a full face of dissent? The "global movement" is often represented in the mainstream media. You can't misrepresent a face full of cream.' This second anarchist tradition has recently tended to acquired the label 'fluffy' to distinguish it from the 'spikies' of the physical-force tradition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the contrast between these and other competing images of anarchism, which have appeared in historical-writing, in literature, and in the works produced by these radicals themselves. Some of the people I am interested might be described as libertarians, or revolutionary socialists, because at certain points the traditions have converged. To limit the range of material in this paper, material is only included if it relates to the theme of sabotage. Certainly in the literary accounts of anarchism, the wilful destruction of property was one practical point at which anarchists appear to have marked themselves off from the rest of society. This paper will draw on a range of sources, discussed in chronological order, including Emile Zola's Germinal (1885), Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), Victor Serge autobiographical account of his time spent in anarchist Paris (1910-1914), and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's pamphlet, Sabotage (1916). One key question will be to ask whether the images of the anarchist demi-monde which appeared in fiction have much in common with the descriptions written by the participants themselves? This question can be answered directly. But this paper shall also address some more complex, literary and historical themes. As we shall see, the images of sabotage which appear in these texts are diverse. So what explains the contrast between these different accounts? Were there different political traditions in different countries? Were Eastern Europeans for example more prone to act of wilful destruction? Or are we merely witnessing the contrast between different stages in the life-history of the political left?

Emile Zola: Germinal

One first source to examine is Émile Zola's novel, Germinal. First published in 1885, this is an account of a miners' strike which ends in violence. The book opens with its hero, Étienne, walking in search of work. The pit where he finds employment is represented as an unnatural and diabolical machine. Indeed one underworld is the mine itself, which is variously described as a 'fantastic apparition' with 'smoky eyes', 'a hungry beast', assembled 'to eat the world'. During the strike, a mob of women castrate the owner of the town store, Maigrat. Various strategies are proposed to obtain the victory of the miners - including parliamentary socialism (represented by Rasseneur), evolutionary Marxism (Étienne) and anarchism (Souvarine). Towards the end of the strike, Souvarine, attempts to blow up the mine where the men work. Ultimately, the strikers are starved and defeated, and return to the pit. In the final scene, Étienne walks into the distance, his thoughts taken up with a desire to seek vengeance on behalf of the men and their class.

There are in effect two central themes to the book. At one level, Germinal is a straightforward political narrative. Different philosophies are tested in practice. Their working-out reflects the place of the novel within Zola's series, Les Rougon-Macquart, which was designed as a twenty-volume history of France under Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet the tone of the series also reflects Zola's personal belief in the defining importance of heredity. Étienne for example is related to Gervaise the anti-heroine of another novel in this series, L'Assomoir. Gervaise is a dignified washer-woman and housewife with an innate (but unknown) tendency towards alcoholism. She literally drinkers herself to death. Her decline is mirrored in Germinal by fits of temper on the part of Étienne. Indeed, not just Étienne is the victim if low-birth. Throughout Germinal, the miners and their families are described in bestial metaphors. The strike is seen to destroy their basic humanity - most clearly in the castration scene, which sees the women ululating in joy, like wolves.

So any opinion of Germinal's politics must be based on an opinion of which theme, class struggle, or biological necessity, is seen to triumph. You can witness the two themes conflicting in the very last sentence of the book, which describes the potential for the miners beneath to break out and capture the world. 'The men would push, an army dark and full of the desire for vengeance, which was growing like seed beneath the ground, growing for the harvests of the coming century, and whose flowering would break open the earth.' Critical opinion remains divided. Is it more important that Zola was one of a minority of novelists who were then writing about workers with sympathy? Or does it matter more that he portrayed the workers in a condescending, and often sub-human light?

These considerations affect any opinion of Souvarine, who embodies in Zola's allegory the idea of sabotage. We first encounter him in the company of Étienne. Souvarine is described as the last born of a noble Russian family. He was studying medicine, when a love of the people forced him to turn instead towards engineering. Having failed in a plot to kill the Tsar, Souvarine then fled and was accepted at last - we are told - by the miners. This is how Zola describes his appearance: 'He must have been around thirty, thin, blond, with a fine figure, crowned off with long hair and a light beard. His white, pointed teeth, his thin nose and mouth, the pink of his complexion, gave him the air of a young girl.' The other things we are told of Souvarine are that he smokes, that he has the wide eyes of a mystic, and that he likes to stroke a rabbit, named Poland. In his first scene, Souvarine exists largely to condemn the evolutionary philosophy which he detects in Étienne's Marxism.

What nonsense, Souvarine said again. Your Karl Marx wants to leave everything to natural forces. No politics, no conspiracy, aren't I right? All to the great day, and all to raise wages. Don't bother me, with your evolution. Light the fire at each end of the town, raise the people, clear everything away, and when there is nothing left of the old world, perhaps something better will be able to force its way through.

Souvarine then reappears, some three hundred pages on. By now, the men are on strike and nearing the end of their dispute. At first, Souvarine resumes his critique of Marx for accepting Darwin, 'the apostle of scientific inequality, whose famous theory of natural selection is only good for aristocratic philosophers.' Then the conversation breaks off. After some period of silence, Souvarine tells Étienne of his wife, who died in their joint attempt on the Tsar's life. He blames his and his wife's ill-fate on their foolish belief that they could be happy. 'We were to blame for loving each other … Yes, it is good that she is dead, heroes will be born from her blood, and I, I have nothing left in my heart.' Souvarine's motive in attempting to blow up the mine is his 'immense sadness'. The old slogan, 'No God, no Master', is replaced with 'No friend, no wife.' At the end, he is not afraid to put even his friend Étienne's life at risk, in his attempt to sabotage the mine.

In the context of Zola's argument, Souvarine's anarchism places him at the left extreme of debate among the miners. His theoretical critique of Darwinism is confounded by the facts of the miners' life. Given the conditions of mining, the argument of the book appears to validate Étienne's Marxism, situated as it is between the two extremes of anarchism and reformism. Personally and politically, Souvarine is isolated from the people around him. Unlike Étienne, he does not fit in. Souvarine rejects heredity - both as an idea, and as a fact of his life. By breaking personally with the Russian aristocracy, he has condemned himself to be in misery. His anarchism is the expression of a profound and destructive despair. In Germinal, Souvarine's existence is a futile, wasted life.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

Zola's Germinal is a complex book, written largely in support of human protest. The same cannot be said of Conrad's The Secret Agent, first serialised in 1906, and published in book form in 1907. The Secret Agent begins with the figure of Verloc, a British national with one French parent, and also a Russian spy. The spy's most important distinguishing feature is indolence, which Conrad describes as 'his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour - a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state.' Verloc is confronted by an embassy official, who threatens to sack him unless he can unleash at least one successful conspiracy. As it happens, Verloc's plot fails. His dumb accomplice Stevie blows himself up, and Stevie's sister Mrs. Verloc retaliates by killing Verloc. But this misadventure introduces the reader to a much more serious saboteur, 'The Professor'. This character represents a partial-antithesis of Verloc. The Professor is capable and industrious, but lacks 'the great social value of resignation'. This is how Conrad introduces him, when the Professor is mentioned for the first time:

His title to that designation consisted in his having been once assistant professor in chemistry at some technical institute. He quarrelled with the authorities upon a question of unfair treatment. Afterwards he obtained a post in the laboratory of a manufactory of dyes. There, too, he had been treated with revolting injustice. His struggles. his privations. his hard work to raise himself in the social scale. had filled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice - the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual.

In The Secret Agent, the Professor is the nearest we get to a real conspirator. He does very little, but he adds an air of menace to the plot - in contrast to the other anarchists who are presented as incompetent, verbose, self-destructive and fraudulent. The other anarchists are obsequious in the face of privilege, their common motivation is nothing more complex than a bruised ego. Verloc lacks this flaw, but is no real saboteur. The Professor shares this flaw, and takes it to an extraordinary degree. In another passage, we are given the few biographical details, which explain the Professor's hatred of the world. 'His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect … In the son, individualist by temperament … this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition.' Indeed the Professor does hate, with passion and true conviction. We learn his hatred from the speech he makes, on hearing something of Verloc's convoluted death:

The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters! - the weak, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame and son on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.

Perhaps the one point at which Conrad's narrative compares to Zola's Germinal, is in the final concluding sentences. At the end of the book, The Professor (like Étienne) is allowed his one final walk across the moor. 'And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail. insignificant. shabby. miserable. and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in a street full of men.'

Victor Serge, Memoirs

So far, the discussion of sabotage has taken place within the context of fictional accounts of anarchism. It is only right to progress from fiction to autobiography, the memoirs and pamphlets written by anarchists and socialists to defend the practice of sabotage. One historical figure who defended the idea was the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary, Victor Serge. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Serge had an extraordinary ability to find himself wherever social unrest was about to happen. His parents were refugees. Victor Serge became an activist an early age, his autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) describe Serge as taking anarchist positions from the age of 6 onwards! At around 15, Victor Serge and his circle of friends joined the Jeunes Gardes, the Belgian young socialists, but they were contemptuous of the main currents within the Belgian Socialist Party. It seemed to me that the party was becoming reformist and losing its revolutionary élan. Serge and his friends left the Jeunes Gardes, and joined Emile Chapelier's anarchist colony instead. From Belgium, Victor Serge made his way to Paris, and took part in the anarchist movement there.

It is Serge's Parisian period that concerns us here, but it is worth pointing out that his Memoirs were written some forty years later. By this time, Serge had taken part in the August 1917 uprising in Barcelona, had travelled to Russia where he sided with the Bolsheviks, had worked for the Communist International during the failed German revolution of 1918-1923, and had broken with Stalinism, joining Trotsky's Left Opposition instead. By 1951, Serge had also published a number of novels, including Men in Prison (1930), Birth of our Power (1931), Conquered City (1932), The Long Dusk (1946), The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948), as well as poetry, and several works of history and literature. Having escaped from jail under Stalin, Serge settled in Paris. Then in 1940, when the Nazis overran France, Serge was forced to flee again. Victor Serge died of natural causes in Mexico in 1947. His suit was threadbare and his shoes were worn through.

What of Serge's early anarchism? It was a moralistic, and profoundly individualistic creed. Serge edited the newspaper Anarchie, using the pseudonym Valentin. An article from 1910 catches the tone of romantic libertarianism which then dominated Serge's writings, and also provides an early justification for his later literary career:

Artists are faced with a dilemma: to work as they please, loving beauty, and thus accepting a permanent state of poverty: or else to submit to the general law of producing in order to sell. To work according to the orders of a boss or the dictates of fashion, depending on the situation. Most people submit, in this as in other cases? Nothing surprising there. Rebels are always exceptions. And that's it: artists are finished if they submit.

So who created the laws? There is a tension in this passage between two notions of freedom. One is the traditional socialist idea of freedom, which is freedom from economic want. It is an idea expressed famously in a bitter quote from Anatole France, 'The poor … have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.' The other idea of freedom is freedom from authority. In this pure-anarchist idea all instructions should be resisted, whether they come from your brother, from your parents, from your teacher, from the tax-man, from your bank manager, or from your boss.

In Victor Serge's memoirs, there are literary portraits of dozens of activists within the movement. But the idea of sabotage is most clearly incarnated in the figure of Octave Garnier, 'a handsome, swarthy, silent lad whose dark eyes were astonishingly hard and feverish.' A worker by birth, Garnier had undergone a vicious beating in the course of a strike. Parading his troubled nature for all to see, Octave Garnier scorned all discussion with intellectuals. 'Talk, talk!', he would remark, and then leave 'on the arm of a blonde Rubanesque Flemish girl, to prepare some dangerous nocturnal task or other'. According to Serge, at the heart of Garnier's personality was a belief in violent adventure.

No other man that I have met in my whole life has ever so convinced me of the impotence and even the futility of the intellect when confronted with tough primitive creatures like this, rudely aroused to a form of intelligence that fits them purely technically for the life-struggle. He would have made an excellent seafarer for a Polar expedition, a fine soldier for the colonies; or, at another period, a Nazi storm-troop leader or an NCO for Rommel. There was no doubt of it, all he could be was an outlaw. His was a restless, uncontrolled spirit, in quest of some impossible new dignity, how or what he did not know himself.

Although Victor Serge was a committed anarchist, his Memoirs record a sense of futility which he claims to have experienced at the time. One by one, Serge's comrades were lost to individual doctrines and adventurism, becoming thieves and petty outlaws, defying the police, choosing mysterious notions of honour over life, '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 into the guillotine … 'Damn the masters, damn the slaves, and damn me!' … 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.'

This passage, with its attack on extreme individualism, is hardly accidental. After several years propagandising for anarchism, the French authorities held Serge responsible for instigating the crimes of the Bonnot gang, whose leader was accused of killing a fellow-comrade. Serge's account emphasises his refusal to collaborate. Not guilty of any crime, but determined not to plead his innocence, and refusing to denounce his friends, Serge was sentenced to five years imprisonment. But there is more than one version of the story. Quite recently, Richard Parry has suggested that Serge played a less creditable part, distancing himself from the outlaws on trial, in a way that he had not done in print.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage

Another historical figure who wrote in defence of sabotage was the Irish-American socialist, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She was also one of the great romantic figures, of the twentieth century US left. Born in 1890 to a family of Irish socialists, Flynn was a teenager when she met the anarchist speaker Emma Goldmann, and was encouraged by her example to take up an active role in the workers' movement. She mounted her first soapbox in 1905. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was first arrested in 1906, charged and released. In 1907 Flynn left school, to became an organiser for the radical American trade union movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or 'Wobblies'). Through 1908-14 Flynn led a series of strikes for the Wobblies. Joe Hill's song 'The Rebel Girl' was dedicated to her campaigning work. Although Flynn quarrelled with the leaders of IWW in 1914, she continued to work with them. In the same year Flynn helped to found the Workers' Defence Union (WDU) to defend Wobblies and other socialists against state repression. One of the WDU's proudest moments was to publicise the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists who were framed and murdered by the American state. In 1926, Flynn helped to lead Passaic New Jersey textile strike. Afterwards, she joined the American Communist Party. For many years Flynn was a leading figure in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the US Communist Party. She was expelled from ACLU with the first hint of McCarthyism in 1940. Arrested a dozen times, Flynn remained a prominent Communist until her death in 1964.

It was as part of her defence work that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency. First given as a speech, this text was published as a pamphlet in 1915, to support a New York socialist and occasional IWW activist Frederic Summer Boyd, who was sentenced to five years for advocating industrial damage. Ironically, Frederic Boyd soon changed his stance, and Flynn was later inclined to view him as an agent provocateur paid for by the state. In her work, Flynn defined sabotage as 'the withdrawal of efficiency … either to slacken up and interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality, of capitalist production … Sabotage is not physical violence, sabotage is an internal, industrial process … it is simply another form of coercion.' She associated sabotage with slow work, informal checks on food adulteration, interfering with service, following the rule book to the letter, even contraception, which was described here as a means of reducing the supply of labour!

When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn published her pamphlet, sabotage was in line with the policy of the IWW. The Wobblies endorsed sabotage at their 1914 convention, although this decision was reversed within three years. One influence on them was French anarcho-syndicalism. The French movement predated the IWW, and contributed towards the formation of Wobbly ideas in various ways. As well as sabotage, another idea borrowed from the French comrades was the general strike as one means to achieve the final liberation of labour. Even before 1914, the idea of sabotage was highly controversial on the American left. In 1912, Bill Haywood was expelled from the Socialist Party - in part for advocating sabotage - a charge he denied. In his words, 'I am opposed to sabotage and to "direct action" … The foolish and misguided zealots and fanatics are quick to applaud such tactics and the result is usually hurtful to themselves and the cause they seek to advance.'

Later in life, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn dismissed her pamphlet, saying that it had bobbed up in her life ever since 'like a bad penny'. Indeed as early as 1916, Flynn tried to distance herself form the pamphlet, in a letter to then American President Woodrow Wilson, appealing against charges of ruining the US war effort. Sabotage was also mentioned much later in the 1952 hearing into Flynn's activities by the Subversive Activities Control Board - the McCarthy panel. But it would be wrong to separate this contentious episode from the rest of her work at the time. Her argument in 1915 was that workers would always resist capitalist exploitation. There was no ought about this process, it was the only sensible response to speed-up and automation. If anyone was to blame it was the bosses, for subjecting workers to impossible and inhuman conditions. Flynn's defence of sabotage was part of her life spent supporting the workers in struggle.

Conclusion

How then should we make sense of these types? One approach might be to say that the four passages agree on all essentials. In these years, there was a mass movement of people who practised and believed in sabotage, and we might as well call them anarchists. Those who think of the people favourably might cite Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence, another text from this era. At the heart of Sorel's was a distinction between force, which was illegitimate, and violence which he described as potentially just. 'Force' meant any attempt by a governing minority to impose the organisation of the established social order. 'Violence', for Sorel, referred to any form of collective activity which tended to undermine the capitalist order. Georges Sorel did not so much defend violence. It would be more accurate to say that he represented it as a natural state of affairs, 'It would serve no purpose to explain to the poor that they ought not to feel sentiments of jealousy and vengeance against their masters; these feelings are too powerful to be suppressed by exhortations'.

Yet at least one of the literary accounts was written against revolutionary politics, and this fact suggests that we can't just say - all stories of anarchist violence are good. Is there any suggestion, then, in the sources of the same sort of distinction that we saw at the beginning, between the ways in which anarchism is represented in official society, and the ways in which anarchists have represented themselves? If we stack Verloc and Souvarine on one side, Serge and Flynn on the other, then certain binaries suggest themselves, almost naturally. The literary characters Verloc and Souvarine were both from Eastern Europe, more specifically Russia, while the historic activists, Serge and Flynn were both Westerners. Verloc, the Professor and Souvarine also seem to belong to an earlier period. Verloc was described by Zola in the 1880s, and while Conrad's Secret Agent was published 20 years later, his account has something of the feel of the 1890s about it. Serge and Flynn belonged to a different, and recognisably pre-war milieu. Verloc and Souvarine are pure anarchists, Serge and Flynn stood between anarchism and Communism, and by the time their autobiographies were published, both had moved decisively towards socialism. From these limited comparisons, a certain possibility emerges - that the actual published advocates of sabotage were exotic, and far more typical of the workers movement at large, than their counterparts in the underworld of the literary imagination.

Yet on closer inspection, many of these contrasts again break down. The idea that there is something more 'literary' about the fictional accounts, breaks down against the actual, studied rhythms of Victor Serge's Memoirs. Many of the self-conscious mannerism of the novelist are employed, including shifts between personal pronouns, deliberate shifts of tense, and ellipses for effect. There are no footnotes, no guarantees of research beyond memories, which have only been recorded forty years hence. The most obvious chronological gap is not between the fictions and the memoirs, but between one source from the 1880s and three from 1907-15. Again, Serge and Flynn may have become socialists, but Flynn was in 1905 in near-permanent alliance with class struggle anarchists. Her pamphlet on Sabotage reflects the influence of French anarcho-syndicalist writers, including Émile Pouget. Indeed Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's Sabotage is sometimes described in the literature as a translation of Pouget's pamphlet of the same name. Flynn's work was not a translation, but the mistake is revealing, all the same.

One more unconvincing contrast is the distinction between the two fictional Russians and our Westerners, Serge and Flynn. The problem here is Serge's background. For all his cultural identification with France and Belgium, our Francophone author was in fact of Russian descent. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in 1890, his father was a supporter of Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), while his mother a member of the Polish aristocracy. One cousin, Nicholai Kibalich, had even taken part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It is almost as if Serge's life was fated to be stranger than Zola's fiction. On this count then, we have only one odd one-out, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and even she was the daughter of an Irish radical, who knew something of earlier insurrectionary, national traditions.

Given the Slavic origins of three of the main characters, it might be possible to argue that sabotage appears - in Western European literature and history - as a foreign import. It is the product of more barbaric climes. Indeed the sources of backwardness were legion. While Western Europe was split between Protestant and Catholic states, Eastern Europe was the home of Orthodoxy. In the early modern era, Eastern Europe suffered from a second serfdom - the areas that are today Poland and Russia returned to feudalism even as Western Europe inched towards capitalism. Russia, by 1900, was of course a predominantly rural country. The economy was underdeveloped. Only in 1861 were its peasants emancipated from feudalism. Indeed, Russia was still ruled as late as 1914 by a Tsar, whose coronation oath pledged him to rule as an outright autocrat. We can understand why sabotage fitted with people's lived experiences - and why, in the West, it seemed remote.

Such was the dominant approach in left-influenced social science, before the 1960s. Sabotage was seen as an infantile malady - the chicken-pox of the workers' movement. Writing in the 1950s, Eric Hobsbawm argued that machine-breaking was appropriate to an early era in the history of the working-class. Collective activity could not expected at a time of industrialisation. The labourers involved were divided into small firms and lacked strike funds. The strategy of machine-wrecking arose as one means of counteracting these weaknesses. With strike action not yet practical, collective sabotage could be used to guarantee that a plant would not be operated by its managers. The various French and Russian champions of sabotage can therefore be explained as the products of an immature social development. Once a British-style industrial proletariat had been created, the tactic of sabotage would be confined by workers themselves to the dustbin of history. But if history only ever pointed in one direction, then why has the idea of sabotage reasserted itself within the last few years? Surely something more is at stake.

Earlier, I listed certain partial contrasts between the accounts we have of anarchism in fiction, and in history. The distinction between the two can be accepted, so long as one very significant proviso is taken into account. Real, historic anarchists seem to have spent at least some of their time imitating the representations of them with which they were familiar from art. This seems to me to be a plausible interpretation of the Octave Garnier figure, who was referred to earlier. Surely one reason for his tempestousness was a feeling that true, anarchist heroes were supposed to act like that? Certainly, in Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's memoirs, a number of such types appear, including her lover the incendiary Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca. It may even have been under his influence that she wrote her Sabotage.

Reflecting once again on the different figures of anarchism cited here, it seems to me only right to grade the studies according to the simple human decency implied in the accounts of these people. At one extreme, we have the Professor, who represents sabotage as extreme misanthropy. At the other extreme, we have Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and her modest defence of over-performance and under-work. The most negative accounts of sabotage are the ones most clearly distorted by literary notions of the political underworld. At some stage, these notions are prior to the evidence of real people. This point, at least Conrad was willing to acknowledge, in an author's note from 1920. 'The purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as pity.' By the time he published his book, the author of The Secret Agent was himself a perfect English gentlemen, his exotic Polish origins left long behind. The subject of his book were anarchists. Clearly no other emotions than scorn or pity would be appropriate when discussing the lives of these wretched men!

Maybe that is the best point on which to end. In a complex, distorted form we have observed in Conrad and even to some extent in Zola literary scorn - not so much for pure-anarchism - but for the occasional use of force associated with the workers' cause.