The Manifesto of the Sixteen (French: Manifeste des seize), or Proclamation of the Sixteen, was a document drafted in 1916 by anarchists Peter Kropotkin (pictured) and Jean Grave, which advocated an Allied victory over Germany and the Central Powers during World War I. It was the position of Kropotkin and the other signatories that the forces of German imperialism constituted a major threat to the working class of the world and must be defeated.

The document is named after the original number of signatories, but incorrectly counts sixteen names, rather than the proper fifteen, due to a misreading of the text. It was first published in La Bataille Syndicaliste. The position of the manifesto was in stark contrast to that of most anarchists of the day, many of whom denounced the signatories and their sympathizers, and accused them of betraying anarchist principles. (read more...)

Credit: Memphis Commercial Appeal (Alley), July 5, 1919

A cartoon published in 1919 in the Memphis Commercial Appeal which depicts a monstrous "European Anarchist" seeking to blow up the Statue of Liberty. The caption ironically reads "COME UNTO ME YE OPPREST", a welcoming slogan to immigrants from less free nations. Anti-anarchist sentiment was high during the turn of the century, and was legislated into US law as the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1901 and again in 1918. Each barred European anarchists from entering the country.

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• ... that the Russian anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Golos Truda (header pictured) relocated from New York to Petrograd when its entire editorial staff decided to move to Russia following the February Revolution?
• ... that Pierre Monatte was one of the few French trade-unionists and members of the French Left to oppose the Union sacrée national bloc during World War I?
• ... that the Situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life accused French students of taking refuge from their ideological subservience in miserabilism and bohemianism?
• ... that there were two unrelated Jewish anarchists named Alexander Schapiro active in Russia during the civil war, one in the Bolshevik government and the other leading a cadre of anarchist revolutionaries against it?
• ... that post-anarchism theorist Saul Newman saw the publication of volume one of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas as a sign of a resurgent interest in anarchist philosophy?

“ The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the present struggles for economic and political power, are only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead us to a universal catastrophe if social development does not take a new course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged today to spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly. The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of all against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems of religious theology, God is everything and man nothing, so for this modern political theology, the state is everything and the man nothing. And just as behind the "will of God" there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the "will of the state" only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people. ” —Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1938.

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• 1849 - Giovanni Passannante is born in Salvia di Lucania, Italy.
• 1919 - Georges Clemenceau was shot five times by anarchist Louis-Emile Cottin, who served ten years in prison for the act.
• 1920 - John Creaghe died in Washington D.C.
• 1947 - Pierre Besnard, founder of the French General Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions died.
• 1962 - Émile Armand died

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