Chuck Munson writes: 'The classic anarchists were pretty effective at what they were doing.'
Blowing people up, mostly:
"Enough of organisation," thundered Luigi Parmeggiani's L'Internationale in London in 1892, "let's busy ourselves with chemistry and manufacture: bombs, dynamite and other explosives are far more capable than rifles and 'barricades' of destroying the present state of things, and above all to save our precious blood" (Alex Butterworth, 309).
But decidedly not making any converts:
In 1877, Bakunin's disciple Errico Malatesta, with Carlo Cafiero tried to launch an insurrection among the peasants of Matese, in the Southern Italian highlands, ransacking government offices. "If you want to, do something," shouted Cafiero, "if not, then go fuck yourselves" (Butterworth, 118).
Octave Garnier, a leader of the anarchist "Bonnot Gang"-the first stick-up crew to use a getaway car-wrote in 1911, "Why kill workers?-they are vile slaves without whom there would not be the bourgeoisie and the rich." (Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang).
Of course, terrorism and disdain for the masses led quickly towards dictatorial methods: In 1879, Russian populists met at Voronezh to debate a new path. Lev Tikhomirov demanded violence and the "formation of an organisational elite to coordinate the new strategy" (141). At the same meeting, the anarchist Andrei Zhelyabov argued that he should be made 'Revolutionary Dictator' once they had killed the Tsar (149). Two years later, at the anarchist international meeting in London in July 1881, Élisée Reclus convinced Kropotkin of the need for small conspiratorial groups (167).
Chuck says, 'There would be no radical labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th century without the anarchists.'
But the record says otherwise. The anarchists begged and pleaded to be admitted to the reformed Socialist International in 1896 - but the workers' movement, exhausted by the trail of bombings, police spies and conspiratorialism excluded them. Anarchists like Louis Michel and her sponsor Rochefort descended into anti-Semitic and other backward causes. No surprise there, of course, since anti-Semitism was in the movement from the beginning, when Bakunin rubbised Marx and the International as "a dire conspiracy of German and Russian Jews" who were "fanatically devoted to their dictator-Messiah Marx".
Kropotkin ended his days pleading for Soviet Russia to re-enter the war against Germany, rallying to the lost cause of the creep Kerensky.