[This text is excerpted from Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s book The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, chapter 1.]
Book Info: Title: The Eastern Mediterranean and the |
The Late Nineteenth-century World and the Emergence of a Global Radical Culture
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, various groups of people throughout the world-workers, peasants, intellectuals, activists-began agitating for social justice, using similar and interrelated discourses and adopting similar terminologies and praxis and circulating their ideas through print, performance, and word of mouth. Their activities fostered a plethora of ideas and practices pertaining to social justice, while simultaneously reflecting a convergence in the ways those ideas were articulated and implemented, and led to the establishment of an entangled worldwide web of radical networks. As a result, I would like to suggest, one can write about a global radical moment lasting roughly from the 1870s until the 1920s and about the making of a global radical culture during this period. In this chapter I examine the emergence of this global radical moment: its key players in the four corners of the world, the networks and institutions that helped them disseminate their ideas locally and globally, the movements' main ideas and causes célèbres, and their literary and political canons and reading lists. I focus on the players, movements, and networks that had a direct impact on the story of radicalism in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria and emphasize the links between world regions that help explain the interconnectivity of these radicalisms and the making of a global radical moment.
Most traditional histories of the Left have crafted their genealogies on the works of specific Franco-German (and occasionally British) thinkers. These genealogies start somewhere in the early nineteenth century, with ideas of the French Revolution overlapping with the effects of the Industrial Revolution and proletarianization. In this framework the seeds planted by Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen eventually climax with Marx's work and the establishment of the First International. After this peak the genealogies usually proceed by tracing the lines between the Second International, the establishment of socialist and social democratic parties, and the Russian Revolution and the dominance of communism and communist parties. My aim is different; it entails circumventing the whole project of genealogy and de-centering it from northwestern Europe. Instead, starting with the 1870s and using a synchronic lens, I will try to conjure up a polyvalent, polyglot, and global leftist radical moment in which various, and very often unofficial, impure, and popular interpretations of the Left were gaining ground all over the world. This will in no way be a comprehensive study; rather, I select certain networks, schools of thought, and ideas as well as particular trends and developments affecting different world regions and intertwining their histories. I focus on those that had a direct manifestation in the Eastern Mediterranean, specifically in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. These particular networks seem to have been both crucial and exemplary in spanning a global radical field and providing a radical matrix, or a radical package of ideas and practices. Hence rather than create a standard genealogy of the Left, I seek to show the matrix from which a global radical framework emerged. Some of the elements that shaped it were not always radical in nature but could nonetheless be vehicles for the articulation and dissemination of radical thought and praxis.
Globalization, Global Shifts, and Global Linkages:
Capital, Labor, Information, Imperialism, and Migration
The late nineteenth century ushered in developments that caused the world, or more accurately increasing numbers of regions, to become inextricably linked, responding to similar rhythms and flows in sync. The wave of globalization that began around the 1870s was associated with a deeper integration of regions that had been semiperipheral into the world capitalist system and the world economy, which made them more vulnerable to economic fluxes such as commodity production and price fluctuations, integrated their regional labor markets into a global market, and made them dependent on foreign investments and loans. Globalization meant faster and greater circulation of capital, commodities, and labor, as well as the building of necessary infrastructure: extensive railway networks, port expansions, the digging of the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, the establishment of various steamship lines connecting the four continents, banks and money wiring services, and the like. The circulation of all these elements was not random or among equals; rather, capital, labor, goods, and to a lesser degree information usually followed paths suggested by, if not dictated by some form of political and economic imperialism. Between 1870 and 1914 this circulation also seems to have exacerbated inequalities between peoples, regions, and states, or what Chris Bayly terms the "differentials of power." It also prompted a rethinking of both social order and world order. Globalization can thus be described as "a moment when crises in … global world orders produced an urgent attempt to rethink the very bases of politics, culture, and activism-on a local as well as a regional and global level." Globalization was also connected to the growing and faster circulation of information and ideas through the increased flows of people, but also through new media: telegraphs, newspapers and periodicals, and postal services. As such it allowed for the emergence of specific and global forms of challenge and resistance to the status quo. It is within this framework that radicalism can be best understood, both as an indicator as well as a maker of globalization.
Let me offer three caveats. First, although I am generally arguing that radicalism, as it manifested itself in the late nineteenth century, was partly a global response to global changes, it is also important to understand it as more than a purely reactive movement and to characterize it (and the changes brought forth by globalization) as something other than a pure rupture. A second caveat concerns ideas and their material base. I am not suggesting an overly deterministic and materialist approach to the history of ideas, such as that the economic factors of globalization necessarily, or linearly, explain the various ideas (and therefore practices) that constitute radicalism. Rather, I argue that they certainly provided a framework for understanding why radicalism emerged as a worldview or mental structure. A third caveat is that by suggesting the existence of a global radical moment or culture, I am in no way pitting the global against the local nor suggesting a hierarchy of importance between the two in which the global would have the upper hand. Rather, I insist that the two are inextricably linked and so tangled in the period under study that they are necessarily complementary rather than opposite (albeit flawed) categories; as a result, they can be understood only in tandem.
The World Wide Web of Radicalism:
The Links That Made the Moment a Global One
In the late nineteenth century discussions and ideas pertaining to social inequality, wealth redistribution, the value of wage labor (versus capital), workers' rights, workers' housing, mutual aid associations, mass education, and generally the question of how to establish more just societies that would defuse the time bomb of class warfare became quasi-universal, transnational, and global. A multiplicity of communication channels circulated these discussions throughout various parts of the world. To explore some of the main communication channels, I suggest thinking of four interconnected units that played a central role in the articulation of radical leftist ideas and provided structures for their dissemination at a global level: international (and internationalist) organizations and associations, networks, nodal cities, and the printed word.
Any discussion on international organizations that articulated and disseminated radical ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century should include the International Socialist. Much has been written on the First International (1860-89) and the Second International (1889-1916), and my aim here is not to summarize the history of these organizations nor to add much to the body of writings on them. What I underline, in the case of the Second International, is the establishment of a structure that self-consciously and explicitly intended to spread socialism, help workers of the world unionize and gain rights, establish a global working-class consciousness, and, last but not least, foster the creation of socialist parties throughout the world. The extent to which the two Internationals were successful is debatable; certainly the International remained very much a European affair, with a handful of exceptions. What is undeniable, though, are the offices and services the Internationals provided, which were theoretically accessible to socialists all around the world: namely, political, financial, and infrastructural support to form workers' associations that would link to the International. Under "infrastructural support" came publications: pamphlets, booklets, and periodicals that would help spread socialism among the masses. Furthermore the International Socialist Congresses, regularly held starting in the 1880s, and the establishment of International Trade Secretariats (many of which were based in Western Europe, especially in Germany), gave socialism visibility and respectability as increasing numbers of European socialist parties became successful national parties and played the parliamentary game, a point to which I will return. However, if the International Socialist has figured prominently in the history of the Left, it has tended to overshadow another movement, whose principles and activities in fact gained much greater popularity outside of northwestern Europe. Indeed if there was one radical current which became global, or at least had a serious impact throughout the world in the late nineteenth century, it was anarchism.
Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism
Around 1870 anarchism emerged as a major political ideology in Europe, most vibrantly in Italy and Spain. Anarchism's main tenets were the elimination of private property and class differences and the economic and intellectual emancipation of workers. Visceral anticlericalism and the refusal to work within the system by playing the parliamentary card (in contrast to the policy followed by socialists in the 1890s) also occupied a central place. Following a "decade of regicide," political assassinations, and bomb attacks blamed, rightly or wrongly, on anarchists, after which many fled from repression during the concomitant rise in mass migrations, anarchism quickly gained ground throughout the world, from South America to East Asia. By the late nineteenth century anarchists and anarchist ideas were to be found, in different shades and degrees, in many parts of the world due to the strong connection between migration and anarchism. Indeed anarchism was theradical ideology that seemed to have had the greatest appeal for (or worked best for) workers on the move, as well as intellectuals in the diaspora. Specifically, but not exclusively, it was associated with Spanish and especially Italian migrant and diasporic communities and networks, most strongly in South America but also in the United States, Europe (including France, Belgium, and England), and the Eastern Mediterranean. Anarchists were particularly adept at establishing transnational networks of communications and exchange of information, propaganda, and militants. One of the most vivid manifestations of their success in this domain was the web of Italian anarchist periodicals circulating throughout various cities in Italy, as well as Alexandria, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Paris, and Paterson, New Jersey. This is not to say that anarchist ideas circulated exclusively within the confines of a diaspora, or exclusively along ethnic lines; there were certainly anarchist networks revolving around periodicals that were not exclusively connected to one specific diaspora but cut across ethnic and linguistic groups. Such was the case for Jean Grave's Le Révolté (which was initially founded by Kropotkin and subsequently was called Les Temps Nouveaux), one of the most famous and highly esteemed anarchist periodicals, issued in Paris after 1885, whose readership spanned continents and many ethnolinguistic groups, as attested by the subscribers' names, addresses, and letters to the editor. Le Révolté seems to have been a central node for information and news connected to various anarchist networks.
Nonetheless, although such periodicals di
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate