About
“Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.” - Matthew Arnold
"The state’s behaviour is violence, and it calls its violence ‘law’; that of the individual, ‘crime [Verbrechen].’ Crime, then - so the individual’s violence is called; and only by crime does he overcome [brechen] the state’s violence when he thinks that the state is not above him, but he is above the state.” - Max Stirner
“Mind your own business.” - Benjamin Tucker
“I am enemy of all invaders, and invader of none.
Being at peace with everyone who minds his own
business and leaves mine to myself.” - Jo Labadie“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
"Counterpower is first and foremost rooted in the imagination; it emerges from the fact that all social systems are a tangle of contradictions, always to some degree at war with themselves." - David Graeber
If you’ve heard Detroit and anarchy in the same sentence before, the connotation was almost certainly not positive. The terms have been nearly synonymous in discourses as microscopic as suburban parents warning their children about the dangers of the city to those as institutional as generations of media framing the city as a case study in the ravages of dispossession and lawlessness. In popular culture, Detroit and anarchy are each presented as ungovernable, unsafe, unpresentable, and unsustainable in ways that both fascinate and repulse but are rarely represented by or for their actual advocates. When their constituents do speak for themselves, their portrayals are almost as likely to playfully confirm negative expectations as advocate for the liberative possibilities in their geographic or ideological space both despite and through the infamy. Overall, detractors of Detroit and/or anarchy succeed in maligning the geographical and/or ideological space by extrapolating from relatively fleeting but highly publicized moments of violence by the spaces’ least-privileged constituents in response to far grander-yet-legalistic forms of violence by state, industry, or other authorities who ultimately benefit from the devaluation of these spaces.
Before proceeding, we must clarify what we mean by anarchy and anarchism. Peter Marshall’s magisterial Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism usefully defines these terms:
“Anarchy is usually defined as a society without government, and anarchism as the social philosophy which aims at its realization. The word 'anarchy' comes from the ancient Greek word αναρχία in which αν meant 'without' and αρχία meant first a military 'leader' then 'ruler'. In medieval Latin, the word became anarchia.” (Marshall, 3)
Marshall and other sources somewhat unanimously cite English writer William Godwin as the originator of philosophical anarchism. In philosophical anarchism, propaganda is popularly understood in two forms - propaganda by the deed (embodied, generally violent acts of anarchism) and propaganda by the word (mediations of anarchism showing how the philosophy is possible and necessary). While Godwin epitomizes propaganda by the word through his theoretical and fictional works, more sensational anarchists like Leon Czolgosz, the Haymarket rioters or Sacco and Vanzetti in turn epitomize propaganda by the deed. Controversies concerning propaganda by the deed account for a significant amount of the ensuing differentiation of the terms “anarchism,” “socialism,” “communism,” “radicalism,” and “libertarianism” by stigmatizing anarchism as the most extreme such that the other terms were appropriated by adherents who aspired to respectability.
While our project cannot possibly hope to determine which mode is more ethical nor more productive, the project’s focus on southeast Michigan through the University of Michigan’s exceptionally robust collection of anarchist ephemera does privilege propaganda by the word in order to highlight both its important role in propaganda by the deed and amelioration of some of propaganda by the deed’s more controversial aspects. Our project inherits much of this perspective from Jo Labadie, the Gentle Anarchist of Detroit, whose own commitment to propaganda by the word and archiving of it began the university’s rather singular collection as it was then expanded by other archives of anarchist ephemera from Agnes Inglis, Voltairine de Cleyre, Laurance Labadie, John and Leni Sinclair, Fifth Estate, Babyfish, Ted Kaczynski, and more tending to be both former UofM students and anarchist archivists themselves. Although propaganda by the deed might achieve more immediately concrete results, propaganda by the word identifiably transmits anarchism across more space and time, radicalizing people in circumstances otherwise devoid of such radical voices, in large part by not complicating identification with anarchism with the sensationalization of historic acts of anarchist violence or word counts of purely textual expressions. As such, we chose to feature propaganda by the word - published materials, photographic evidence of local anarchism, imagery - from across the 20th century in order to show how anarchism in Detroit is and has been as real and realistic as any idea it critiques or, more visibly, critiqued by. Through propaganda by the word, propaganda by the deed, whether that explicitly identified as anarchist or that as implicitly anarchistic as Detroit’s infamous riots, can be and has been recontextualized against sensationalism.
One can certainly argue that Detroit is not commonly recognized for its anarchism because its most notable anarchists have been so overwhelmingly bookish but would have much more difficulty in arguing that Detroit has been most popularly portrayed as an anarchic dystopia. Pop culture like Robocop, The Crow, or DC Comics’ Cyborg character are only a few classics in “the Detroit genre” that allegorize the city and its people to the world as effectively dead but for a supernatural intervention allowing the downtrodden to challenge the established order of society. In the words of Godwin’s daughter Mary Shelley, a self-empowering Detroit is most believable as a “modern Prometheus,” likely to be punished eternally for unnaturally empowering itself and others like it. At least as often, the Detroit genre negates this potentiality by offering audiences narratives without any supernatural force where Detroit appears to deserve its fate. In turn, Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic Brave New World has likely remained so compelling by projecting an explicitly Fordist dystopia across the planet without drawing much attention to how the Detroit area might already be such a place. In exploring UofM’s collections, we found that Detroit anarchists have been overwhelmingly prescient in seeing how such a dystopia was possible and already in the process of becoming. Over the latter half of the 20th century, "the experience of living for decades on one representational side of the Detroit genre - an apocalyptic landscape erased of human life or where the threat of murder triggers a sitcom laugh track - has produced a resentment that may deservedly be irreparable, that is, Detroit vs. Everybody.” (Haddad, 20)
Anarchism and Detroit, in their respective ways and to advocates such as ourselves, seem to be so emphatically portrayed as undesirable in modern and postmodern American culture to undermine audiences’ identifications with how relevant messages from Detroit and/or anarchism can be to their own embattled circumstances. “Once we understand that the drive for political order was paralleled by a drive for cultural order, that the push to organize the economic sphere was paralleled by a push to organize the cultural sphere, that the quest for social authority (‘the control of action through the giving of social commands’) was paralleled by a quest for cultural authority (‘the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value’), we can begin to place the cultural dynamics of the turn of the century in clearer perspective. (Levine, 228) Through UofM’s collections, we seek to document how American anarchism arrived in and through Detroit just about simultaneous with its appearance in the United States, primarily through Labadie and de Cleyre’s respective engagements with more famous American anarchists and their causes such as labor organizing, feminism, and vegetarianism, and has continued to anticipate the apparent downfalls of the city and/or movement that receive far more public attention.
To summarize, this archive is for anyone with doubts about Detroit and/or anarchism, especially as those doubts have been informed by widespread demagoguery developed over the same century that American anarchism and Detroit appeared to rise and fall. It is for scholars like ourselves who appreciate UofM’s commitment to preserving these anarchist collections but see so much opportunity to use these resources to advocate for a radically better world, especially in continuing to promulgate propaganda by the word. Unfortunately, it also reproduces the university’s collections’ apparent exclusions of local Black anarchism and any other anarchisms for and by identifiably non-white Michiganders, a severe problem that we would make top priority to resolve in further developing this archive. In lieu of those perspectives, our aim is to recontextualize otherwise apolitical or depoliticized events in Detroit history positively as anarchic or anarchistic in contrast to their historically negative portrayals. Without those perspectives in this archive at this time, we hope that the incidental focus on white anarchists allows more opportunity for identification with Detroit and/or anarchism by those most likely to perceive whiteness as somehow antithetical to either or both. - Ben Miotke (Dec 12, 2024)