Anarchist Printers and Presses

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591714531420
• Published date: 01 August 2014
• Date: 01 August 2014
• Author: Kathy E. Ferguson
• Subject Matter: Special Section: “Old” Media and Political Theory

Political Theory

2014, Vol. 42(4) 391 –414

© 2014 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714531420

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Special Section: “Old” Media and Political Theory

Anarchist Printers and

Presses: Material Circuits

of Politics

Kathy E. Ferguson1

Abstract

Printers and presses were central to the physical and social reproduction of

the classical anarchist movement from the Paris Commune to the Second

World War. Anarchists produced an environment rich in printed words by

creating and circulating hundreds of journals, books, and pamphlets in dozens

of languages. While some scholars and activists have examined the content

of these publications, little attention has been paid to the printing process,

the physical infrastructure and bodily practices producing and circulating

this remarkable outpouring of radical public speech. This paper brings the

resources of the new materialism into conversation with the networks

of anarchist printers and presses. Printers and presses operated as nodal

points, horizontal linkages among the objects, persons, desires, and ideas

constituting anarchist assemblages. In their publishing practices, anarchists

may have implicitly identified a constitutive condition of possibility for the

flourishing of radical political communities in our time as well as theirs.

Keywords

anarchist, printer, new materialism, press, actant

Printers and presses were central to the physical and social reproduction of

the classical anarchist movement from the Paris Commune to the Second

1University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, HI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kathy E. Ferguson, Departments of Political Science and Women’s Studies, University of

Hawai’i, 640 Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.

Email: kferguso@hawaii.edu

531420PTXXXX10.1177/0090591714531420Political TheoryFerguson

research-article2014

392 Political Theory 42(4)

World War.1 Anarchist communities usually organized around their publica-

tions. The technology of publishing required many skilled printers, and com-

mercial print shops often rejected anarchist materials, so the movement

needed its own printers and presses. Consequently, printing was one of the

most common occupations of anarchists. Anarchists produced an environ-

ment rich in printed words by creating and circulating hundreds of journals,

books, pamphlets, leaflets, cards, and posters in dozens of languages. While

some scholars and activists have examined the content of these publications,

little attention has been paid to the form, the physical infrastructure and

bodily practices producing and circulating this remarkable outpouring of

radical public speech.

My goal is to bring the resources of the new materialism into conversation

with the networks of anarchist printers and presses and with the “old materi-

alism” that has most often been called upon to analyze the printing trades. By

“new materialism,” I mean those directions of thought that mute the opposi-

tion between life and nonlife in order to theorize things themselves as lively.

I propose to encounter the print shops’ physical objects, pungent smells, and

laboring bodies as actants that are mutually constitutive of each other and that

enable anarchism’s politics. The printers’ swift hands and sharp eyes, and the

presses’ mechanical operations and physical components, knit together chains

of events in which each element acts upon and is acted upon by others.

Printers and presses operated as nodal points, horizontal linkages among the

objects, persons, desires, and ideas constituting anarchist assemblages. The

printers’ bodies and the printing apparatus were ubiquitous aspects of anar-

chist organizing, their materiality central to the merger of intellectual and

physical labor prized by anarchists in their schools and communities. The

printer–press relation, reframed with the conceptual tools of the new materi-

alism, provides a crucial supplement to older materialist analyses in account-

ing for the remarkable persistence of anarchism in the face of sustained

onslaughts by authorities. While the stock image of the bearded, black-clad,

bomb-toting anarchist prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure

for the classical anarchist movement would be the printer, composing stick in

hand, standing in front of the type case, making and being made by the mate-

rial process for producing and circulating words.

Research Challenges

Several challenges present themselves to this project. First, there is the diffi-

culty of finding thick descriptions of the work of the anarchist printers, whose

labors often went unrecorded. A few of the anarchist printers, including

Joseph Ishill (1888–1966) and Jo Labadie (1850–1933), have left substantial