“Abolish the Monopolizing of the Earth”

Abstract

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an industrial capitalist order stretched its grasp across the globe, placing control of farms, mines, and forests in the hands of wealthy industrialists. Living through this period of rapid and unequal economic and environmental change, anarchists denounced what they called the monopolizing of the earth and its products. Anarchists were deeply critical of the privatization of the environment and saw restricting access to nature as a core component of inequality and poverty. This article considers the environmental politics of transnational anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With anarchism’s geographically and ideologically diverse participants in mind, it incorporates the natural science-informed utopian visions of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, the revolutionary and anti-colonial food and land politics of Ricardo Flores Magón, and the nature-informed radical sex politics of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It finds that “anarchism” did not just mean the destruction of the state and capitalism to its advocates, but the construction of a new political-economic-natural system that saw the liberation of people and the defense of nature as inextricably connected. The article concludes with a call to both include anarchism as a part of the genealogy of environmentalism and consider anarchism’s environmental politics in ongoing conversations about the relationships between environmental crises and human inequalities.