Augustin Souchy

Augustin Souchy Bauer (28 August 1892 – 1 January 1984) was a German anarchist, antimilitarist, labor union official and journalist. He traveled widely and wrote extensively about the Spanish Civil War and intentional communities. He was born in Ratibor, Germany (now Racibórz, Poland).

"My goal is the establishment of a social order free of force, to replace organized compulsion and violence."

At the outbreak of the First World War, Souchy was living in Vienna, where he was arrested and deported to Germany. Although the anarchist group he belonged to was made up of followers of Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, his arrest warrant read, "Beware! Anarchist!" which many years later became the title of his autobiography. In 1914, Souchy went to Sweden to escape conscription. He was deported from Sweden for antiwar activism in 1917. He traveled illegally to Denmark and Norway. In 1919 he returned to Germany and joined the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers' Union of Germany and was editor of its paper "Der Syndikalist" from 1922 to 1933. He was a delegate to the Red International of Trade Unions in 1921, and met with Vladimir Lenin as a representative of the syndicalists. While in Russia he visited Peter Kropotkin, one of the most important anarchist theorists of the day. Kropotkin warned against using an authoritarian political party as an instrument to gain power.

In 1921 he worked in France and fathered a child, Jean, with Therese Souchy but was again expelled from the country for being an anarchist. He returned to Germany and worked as an editor of the newspaper The Syndicalist (Der Syndikalist) until the early 30s. Together with Rudolf Rocker he organized within the International Workers Association, which in itself was an international organization to counter the Bolshevik Profintern. During this time he met a number of anarchists from different countries, who repeatedly found refuge in Berlin, including the Russian anarchists who fled the Bolsheviks or Spanish anarchists such as Durruti. After the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 he undertook several trips to Spain under the behalf of the IWA. In a letter to Emma Goldman in 1936 he wrote:

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