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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MOSTEST ANARCHIST  
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Paul Buhle
December 4, 2025
Portside

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_ These days “anarchism” has become an official swear word. A
little history should help. Only with the middle of the 19th century
does something clearly and (somewhat) strategically emerge as
“anarchism” — competing with Marxism to overcome capitalism _

Johann Most, a German immigrant and anarchist, speaking at Copper
Institute in New York City, April 4, 1887. He advocated the
'propaganda of the deed', acts of violence or destruction that would
inspire others to revolution. , Wood engraving in Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper, April 16, 1887 (Memoiren //epubli (Berlin))

 

These days, and once again, “anarchism” has become an official
swear word. For Trump’s Justice (or injustice) Department, every
anarchist appears to be a violent member of Antifa, remarkably so
because “Antifa” does not actually exist as an organization or
even a fixed set of ideas.

A little history should help. Scholars date the rise of anarchism to
the early nineteenth century and the British thinker William Godwin,
then to the famed utopians like Proudhon. Only with the middle of that
century does something clearly and (somewhat) strategically emerge as
“anarchism”— simultaneously with something that will compete
with Marxism but also serve as a fellow-actor in the global struggle
to overcome capitalism.

 

Johann Most, Life of a Radical
[[link removed]]By Tom
GoyensUniversity of Illinois Press; 296 pagesDecember 9,
2025Paperback:  $29.95;  E-book:  $14.95ISBN: 978-0-252-08903-9
 and  978-0-252-04847-0 

 
University of Illinois Press
Even today, after a mountain of scholarly literature in many languages
has found its audience, few seem to grasp that until the 1890s at the
earliest, these two, mostly competing ideologies had about the same
number of sympathizers and activists. Not only did the followers of
Bakunin and Marx struggle with each other, but hundreds of thousands
of local activists shifted back and forth in ideas and tactics across
the US, Europe and far beyond.

Thus Marx’s lieutenant in New York, music teacher Frederich Sorge,
famously purged an actual majority of the US wing of the First
International in 1871, including nearly all of its women
members—denied employment yet still guilty of not being wage
earners. They were also suspiciously anarchistic. The mass movement
around the struggle for Eight Hour Day, in Chicago (known then as
“Little Paris”) a decade later, was nevertheless led by social
revolutionaries, _i.e._, anarchists, with a vigorous press and
organized social life behind their politics.

Repression had a terrible effect on anarchists and not only in the US.
Nevertheless, until the 1890s at the earliest, anarchists competed
freely with socialists, more popular in some places, less in others.
After 1900, they held attention in syndicalist-minded labor movements
including the IWW, offering to the public talented educators and
agitators (free love and abortion, among other sentiments), also
experimental education and cooperative community experiments. Among a
few groups, Mexican-Americans among them, their influence continued
strongly. In general, 1920 marks a downward turning point. As
oldtimers told me almost sixty years ago, in letters to the office of
magazine _Radical America_, the world before 1920 had seemed more open
as well as more cheerful.  After that, the Russian Revolution offered
solace as much as hope. Somewhere, at least, capitalism had been
conquered.

Here we come to the magnetic, wild-eyed Johann Most, the very avatar
of anarchism. Tom Goyens’ biography is the best writing ever on
Most, by a long stretch, and is likely to remain so. The real Most
emerges as a highly cultured German artisan by training, a talented
and prolific writer and energetic newspaper editor with a powerfully
caustic sense of humor. Most of all, however, he was an orator. A bit
like Luigi Galleani, the Italian-American anarchist said to set off
riots by the sound of his voice, Most stirred the blood of listeners,
sometimes to the boiling point.

Most believed through much of his life that he should have had a great
destiny as an actor, cut off by a scar caused by an infected jaw, in
his youth, treated with surgery that saved his life but also shifted
the bones in his face. The effect of this personal tragedy upon his
volatile temper has always invited speculation.

Born out of wedlock in 1846 to a would-be musician/actor and the
daughter of a military officer, Most showed early promise in
school—until expelled, after leading a strike against his French
teacher in Augsburg, Germany. As an apprentice and then artisan
bookbinder, he traveled widely across Europe. The First International
formed in 1864, and as a corresponding secretary for an educational
association in Switzerland, he embraced socialistic ideas. By 1871, he
had already become a promising and locally admired radical leader. He
also experienced the first wave of repression that remained his lot in
life.

He could address crowds of thousands in Vienna, entertaining them with
jokes and banter along with messages of hatred for the rich. Critics
would say that he invited persecution. Indeed, when police in Vienna
were given orders to arrest dissidents, Most refused to go into
hiding. On the witness stand in 1870, he defended himself with
inflammatory language and was convicted of High Treason. Expelled from
Austria, he became editor of a socialist newspaper in Chemnitz,
Germany. By 1872, under arrest again—falsely convicted for leading a
strike that he regarded privately as doomed—he had become a public
personality across much of the German-speaking world.

Already, the same year, he published a selection of fifty proletarian
songs, some of them his own, at the historical moment when socialist
rallies so relied upon camaraderie that prospective attendees were
urged to bring along their songbooks! Here, the time and place become
especially alive in the biography, inviting us to mull the radical
cultures of their time and ours.

It has never been quite accurate to categorize Most as a rigid
anarchist, even as he drifted toward that camp around Bakunin rather
than Marx. Then and throughout his subsequent activities, he set his
task as awakening working people to their proper destiny. Like other
German socialists, he looked back upon a (perhaps) egalitarian ancient
world, viewing the rise of the State and a propertied ruling class as
the antecedent to real progress. Even by the middle 1870s, he proposed
a peaceful transformation, first of working class culture itself, and
then over property/class conditions, as peacefully as possible.

In 1878, a failed attempt by a lowly plumber to assassinate Emperor
Wilhelm I prompted what became known as the “Anti-Socialist Law.”
Most lost his editor’s job, his pamphlets were confiscated and a
court sentenced him to six months in prison. He fled to London in the
last month of that year. There, cafe life glowed with the fire of
political exiles from across Europe. It did not help that the German
Social Democratic Party formally expelled him, in his absence, in an
attempt to make themselves more respectable.

When the Red Scare spread to Britain, he found himself behind bars
again and his exile-newspaper,_ Freiheit_, founded in 1879, could no
longer be smuggled into Germany. Just a year after he left Germany, he
left Europe altogether, for the US. There, he found himself in the
fresh excitement of a rising labor movement and a “social
revolutionary” following in various cities, mostly but not entirely
German-American in composition. His speeches held crowds and his
pamphlets circulated widely. He moved Freiheit, more and more an organ
of his personal and notably literary expression, across the Atlantic.

For the rest of his life, he struggled to escape the political
straight-jacket that the contemporary press put upon him: Most as the
apostle of terror. A campaign of assassinations and robberies in
Austria and Germany, widely credited to the followers and sometime
associates of Most, brought jail sentences and even executions. In the
US, and despite persecutions, only the Haymarket Martyrs of Chicago
were put to death—on non-existent evidence.

Socialists in the US, seeking to relaunch their movement after several
false starts, had attempted to distance themselves from Most and his
ideas. The contrast and the hard feelings would remain. More to the
point, Most himself or rather his image in newspaper cartoons and
drawings, had already come to represent anarchism-in-the-flesh. The
police repression in 1886 spread from Chicago across the US, and not
only where German-Americans could be found. The same year saw the apex
of the Knights of Labor, sweeping through textile villages and factory
towns, especially but not only among Irish-Americans. Notwithstanding
the peaceful content of the strike wave, meetings were broken up and
strikes busted. All of this seemed to push socialists further away
from Most.

Meanwhile, Most himself seems to have changed the nature of his
anarchist beliefs. By the late 1880s, he felt himself closer to the
violence-shunning philosophy of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. He
translated the published pamphlets by the Prince, urging social
transformation on a cultural, almost spiritual basis.

He still might have been isolated. Providentially, the 1890s saw the
influx of Italian and Jewish immigrants to the US, groups bringing
with them their own versions of anarchism. Many Jewish immigrants
could read German and catch up with _Freiheit_, which appeared
intermittently. Unlike German-American anarchists, the new Jewish
anarchist arrivals flocked to fledgling unions.

Most, meanwhile, found a new companion and, decades after an
unsuccessful first marriage in Germany, an eventual second wife,
Helene Minkin, who worked in a corset factory but would eventually
take over a lot of the production and editorial work of his paper.
Emma Goldman, another new acquaintance, became for a while his lover
and his student. Each of the women were a generation younger, but
Goldman had other lovers while Minkin would be wholly devoted to Most.

Defending himself for an incendiary address in a beer hall in 1889, he
became a major figure in the fight for freedom of speech, attracting
wide press attention and on his release in 1892, subject of a
thunderous welcome in Cooper Union. He also made a further turn toward
education, more firmly renouncing individual violence that he had been
leaning away from for several years. Emma Goldman, enraged at his
disavowal of Alexander Berkman in seeking to assassinate steel
executive Henry Clay Frick, leaped onto a stage where Most was
speaking and struck him with horsewhip!

He had already signalled his eagerness to encompass an
English-speaking audience, but found himself now more interested in
the stage where, with a full beard, he could hide his scar. In either
language, he could dramatize the struggles of the poor against the
rich. His leading performance in Hauptmann’s “Der Weber” (The
Weavers) met with audience enthusiasm. He also resumed his lecture
appearances, in German and English, to eager audiences, punished by
the economic crisis of the 1890s.

The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 inevitably brought a
fresh wave of repression, and the commercial press association of
anarchism with violence. He went back on trial, this time for the
crime of merely publishing_ Freiheit_, and once against faced
conviction, with a sentence of a year’s imprisonment. Released from
prison at age 57, weakened by age and political frustrations, he
resolved to write his memoirs.

Some described Most, at this age, as broken, Yet he set out on one
lecture tour after another. Too old to become part of the Industrial
Workers of the World at its founding convention in 1905, he had become
an admired senior revolutionary. He died on the road in March of that
year, leaving behind Minkin and their two sons. At his funeral in
Cincinnati, an anarchist choir sang, and the head of the local
brewers’ union praised him as the true friend of the working class.
Even some of the socialist notables who had attacked him took the
opportunity to pay their respect during the very large commemorative
event  for him at the Grand Central Palace on 43rd Street, New York.

Most had successfully published three volumes of his memoirs. His
widow, working as a midwife in the Bronx, raised the children, wrote
her own memoir in the Jewish _Forverts_, and lived until 1954. I can
recall hearing a play-by-play radio broadcast of the Boston Celtics by
“the famous Johnny Most” sometime during the 1980s. Like a small
number of other listeners, I was sufficiently interested to look up
the connection. Johnny, like his father, had a fine speaking voice.##

 

_[PAUL BUHLE, in youth a syndicalist and later a student syndicalist,
has a nagging sympathy for the peaceful wing of anarchism.]_

* Anarchism
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* anarchists
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* Johann Most
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* socialism
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* socialists
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* Revolutionary Thought
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* European revolutionary movements
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* capitalism
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* First International
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* Karl Marx
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* Marxism
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* German working class
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* German socialists
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