Some anarchists object to the identification of anarchism with its best-known writers. They point to the fact that its aspirations can be traced through the slave revolts of the ancient world, the peasant uprisings of medieval Europe, in the ideology of the Diggers in the English revolution of the 1640s and in the revolutions in France in 1789 and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the twentieth century, anarchism had a role in the Mexican revolution of 1911, the Russian revolution of 1917 and most notably in the Spanish revolution that followed the military rising that precipitated the civil war of 1936. In all these revolutions the fate of the anarchists was that of heroic losers. But anarchists do not necessarily fit the stereotype of believers in some final revolution, succeeding where the others failed, and inaugurating a new society or utopia.
Anarchism has, in fact, an endless resilience.
Every European, North American, Latin American and Oriental society has had its anarchist publicists, newspapers, circles of adherents, imprisoned activists and martyrs. Whenever an authoritarian or repressive political regime collapses, the anarchists are there, a minority among the emerging ideologists, urging their fellow citizens to learn the lessons of the sheer horror and irresponsibility of government. The anarchist after Franco, in Portugal after Salazar, in Argentina after the generals and in the Soviet Union after seventy years of suppression. It represents, they claim, a universal human aspiration. The main varieties of anarchism are resolutely hostile to organised religion.