Black International

BLACK INTERNATIONAL. Formed in London in 1881 to promote a revived and radicalized version of earlier leftist internationalism, the International Working People’s Association found its largest potential following and its gravest political disappointments in the United States. In the end, the American anarchist experience had produced most of all a martyrology that anarchists around the world could share. Along the way, immigrant and American-born anarchists around the Black International had translated and published an extensive literature of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and other leading anarchist intellectuals.

The largest segment of U.S. adherents existed in Chicago and gathered there to endorse the new international movement formally. Its inspiration had coincided with the disillusion of Chicago “social revolutionaries” with political socialism in general and with the Socialist Labor Party in particular. Inheriting and transforming various local socialistic institutions—craft union locals, social Vereins, and free-thought schools among others—the Chicago anarchists gathered elements of a mass movement that anarchism scarcely possessed anywhere in Western industrial societies.

Fidelity to Black International principles remained very much in the eye of the beholder. To more extreme anarchists, especially among the readers and the editors of the English-language Alarm, the actual anarchism of the dominant “social revolutionary” movement remained ambiguous, not wholly differentiated from the socialist assumptions of a few years earlier. (And, indeed, discussion of the Black International in most of the Chicago revolutionary-socialist movement was not extensive.) To the tabloid press and moderate labor leaders, who associated “anarchists” with bomb throwing, these differences seemed irrelevant or mere disguise.

A second segment of adherents took their cues from popular lecturer-thespian Johann Most and his Freiheit newspaper. Unwilling to work within unions, given to considerable rhetoric about violence, Most’s fellow anarchists established themselves as propaganda groups, mostly across the East Coast but also in other scattered cities. Wide varieties of anarchists, including near-individualist Americans, English former comrades of William Morris, Proudhonists, and others, mixed into these groups. To such propaganda clubs, the translation and publication of anarchist writings had the overwhelming value of making the great ideas accessible to their communities—with Bakunin’s God and the State the most popular of all.

The third segment, not actually an affiliate, claimed to be a surviving section of the First (“Red”) International. These so-called western “divisions” of the International Workingmen’s Association—itself no longer existence—owed their development to two extraordinary individuals, Joseph R. Buchanan and Burnette Haskell, and their vigorous activities in the early to middle 1880s. Buchanan, a former printer who turned to the rhetoric of violence after himself being exposed to armed attack by western strikebreakers, published the important regional labor paper from Denver, the Labor Enquirer, and led its supporting group, the Rocky Mountain Social League. Haskell, son of a prominent lawyer (and lawyer himself), provided initiative and skills for the formation of a West Coast sailors’ union, and published the Truth, a most philosophical agitational paper, from his political base in San Francisco.
Buchanan and Haskell proclaimed revolutionary-messianic doctrines inspired by Bakunin. Both papers urged the dissemination of anarchist ideas (offering extensive lists of English-language publications imported from England) and the formation of secret societies set upon direct—including violent—action when the final crisis of capitalism approached. In 1881 Haskell had unsuccessfully proposed the federation of U.S. anarchists and revolutionaries into one autonomous body with its own information bureau. Failing this, the two leaders jumped at the chance to affiliate with the Black International. Their own followings formed the first two official American divisions (Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain). For a few years, their groups contained a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand members, with a mixture of natural-rights propaganda, labor-education advocacy, and direct-action doctrine that resembled later expressions of the Industrial Workers of the World. So influential did they become that Buchanan in particular posed a threat to the moderate Powderley leadership of the Knights of Labor.

Efforts to coordinate these various tendencies into a single U.S. anarchist movement prompted the Pittsburgh conference of social revolutionaries in 1883. Unable to resolve key differences between the three disparate tendencies, the conference issued an important manifesto stating that only through force could workers obtain their just deserts, and the meeting closed sine die.

In the aftermath of the Haymarket events and accompanying mass repression, anarchist tendencies retreated to propaganda and occasional “propaganda of the deed.” Buchanan and Haskell had already gone over to popular anti-Chinese sentiment, Haskell indeed playing a central propaganda role on the West Coast. Thereafter, Haskell and his following relocated into a Utopian colony and disappeared politically. (His paper briefly appeared as a tiny proto-feminist sheet, Truth in Small Doses.) Buchanan, bringing his Labor Enquirer to Chicago, broke with the Chicago anarchists and drifted toward the Democratic Party.

Seen in retrospect, the formation of the Black International had actually tended to isolate anarchists from the radicalized workers in the new socialist movements. By 1889 and the formation of the Second International, the International Working People’s Association had given up the ghost. But during its brief history in the United States, the Black International had served as a symbolic meeting point of potential allies at anarchism’s highest level of mobilization.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Quint, Howard. The Forging of American Socialism. New edition. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.

Saxton, Alexander. Indispensable Enemy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

“Shall the Black and White Unite? An American Revolutionary Document of 1883.” In American Radicalism, 1865–1901, edited by Chester M. Destler. New edition. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.