Introduction – Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna
Part I: The interventionist debate
1 Saving the future: the roots of Malatesta’s anti-militarism – Davide Turcato
2 The Manifesto of the Sixteen: Kropotkin's rejection of anti-war anarchism and his critique of the politics of peace – Peter Ryley
3 Malatesta and the war interventionist debate 1914–17: from the 'Red Week' to the Russian Revolutions – Carl Levy
Part II: Debates and divisions
4 Beyond the ‘People’s Community’: the anarchist movement from fin de siècle to the First World War in Germany – Lucas Keller
5 'No man and no penny': F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, anti-militarism and the opportunities of World War One – Bert Altena
6 ‘The bomb plot of Zürich’: Indian nationalism, Italian anarchism and the First World War – Ole Birk Laursen
7 The French anarchist movement and the First World War – Constance Bantman and David Berry
8 At war with Empire: the anti-colonial roots of American anarchist debates during World War I – Kenyon Zimmer
Part III: The art of war: anti-militarism and revolution
9 The anarchist anti-conscription movement in the U.S. – Kathy E. Ferguson
10 Aestheticising revolution – Allan Antliff
11Mutualism in the trenches: anarchism, militarism and the lessons of the First World War – Matthew S. Adams
Index

Anarchism, 1914–18 provides the first systematic analysis of anarchist responses to the First World War. Examining the interventionist debate between Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta which split the anarchist movement in 1914, it gives a fresh historical and conceptual account of debates conducted in European and America movements about class, nationalism, internationalism, militarism, pacifism and cultural resistance.

The collection discusses the justness of war, non-violence and pacifism, anti-colonialism and nationalism, pro-feminist perspectives on violence and the potency of the myths about the war for the reframing of radical politics in the 1920s and beyond. Notwithstanding the social, cultural and geo-political changes that the war hastened, promoting forms of socialism that marginalized anarchist ideas, the essays in this volume show how the bitter divisions about the war and the experience of being caught on the wrong side of the Bolshevik Revolution encouraged anarchists to reaffirm their deeply-held rejection of vanguard socialism and develop new strategies that drew on a plethora of anti-war activities. The implications of this re-framing were not fully felt until 1968 when the student movement dubbed Soviet communism obsolete and gave expression to a creative new left politics defined by civil disobedience and passive resistance, anti-racism, feminism, civil rights and personal liberation. Far from confirming anarchism's apparent obsolescence, these currents of ideas were first contested and crystallised in anarchist milieus during the war.

This book will be of interest to historians of socialist thought, and readers interested in anti-militarist politics and First World War studies.