tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81151449375139885862024-03-13T10:38:45.463-07:00Anarcho Maesaanarkho minahasahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03413204462560131485noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8115144937513988586.post-64181244203690866432008-07-28T08:17:00.000-07:002008-07-28T08:20:29.801-07:00"ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR" by: Emma Goldman<div align="justify">Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays(Third revised edition, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1917)<br /><br /><br />ANARCHY.Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,Thou art the grisly terror of our age."Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,"Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage."O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have strivenThe truth that lies behind a word to find,To them the word's right meaning was not given.They shall continue blind among the blind.But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.I give thee to the future! Thine secureWhen each at least unto himself shall waken.Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I willNot rule, and also ruled I will not be!JOHN HENRY MACKAY.<br /><br />THE history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict's garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.<br />Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.<br />To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for.<br />The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. "Why?" "Because." Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man.<br />What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.<br />A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.<br />The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,--a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.<br />Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.<br />Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.<br />Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.<br />ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.<br />The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,--individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.<br />A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,--the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.<br />The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the Leitmotiv of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.<br />Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence--that is, the individual--pure and strong.<br />"The one thing of value in the world," says Emerson, "is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates." In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.<br />Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.<br />Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.<br />Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.<br />"Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.<br />It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.<br />Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.<br />Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as "one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger." A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,--the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.<br />Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,--the dominion of human conduct.<br />Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.<br />Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."<br />Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls."<br />Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,--the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.<br />In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.<br />Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that "it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force." This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist.<br />Unfortunately, there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions.<br />A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, "Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature."<br />Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government--laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,--is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.<br />The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.<br />Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin:<br /><br />"Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end."<br /><br />The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.<br />To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.<br />But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?<br />Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?<br />John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?<br />Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.<br />Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.<br />This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.<br />As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.<br />"All voting," says Thoreau, "is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.<br />What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.<br />Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.<br />It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.<br />The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for "men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through."<br />Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King's coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions), direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.<br />Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.<br />Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.<br />Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.</div>anarkho minahasahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03413204462560131485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8115144937513988586.post-69263128521235383542008-07-24T10:03:00.000-07:002008-07-24T10:04:57.935-07:00"Notes on Anarchism" by: Noam Chomsky<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Excerpted from <span class="excerptbk">For Reasons of State</span>, <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:State></st1:place>, 1973</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that "anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything''---including, he noted those whose acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.'' [1] There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as "anarchist.'' It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guerin does in <i>Anarchism</i>, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guerins work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown. [2] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">One might ask what value there is in studying a "definite trend in the historic development of mankind'' that does not articulate a specific and detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature'' or "the demands of efficiency'' or "the complexity of modern life'' requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement''; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather "to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.'' </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor from all the fetters which economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P. 108] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted "that the serious, final, complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the workers.'' [3] As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers' organizations create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in themselves the structure of the future society---and he looks forward to a social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well as expropriate the expropriators. "What we put in place of the government is industrial organization.'' </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers.<br />We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.<br />Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else. [4] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this conception as follows: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must <i>begin</i> by doing away with the political organization of the state....But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune. [5] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In contrast, the anarchists---most eloquently Bakunin---warned of the dangers of the "red bureaucracy,'' which would prove to be "the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created.'' [6] The anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: "Must even the transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?'' [7] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote: "One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.'' [8] The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx. [9] In one form or another, the problem has arisen repeatedly in the century since, dividing "libertarian'' from "authoritarian'' socialists. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims of contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as "Marxism in practice.'' Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the historical circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to the point. [10] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their environment and used the international radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The "bourgeois'' aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical issues. [11] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist tradition, it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each---an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom. [12] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's <i>Discourse on Inequality</i>, Humboldt's <i>Limits of State Action</i>, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, <i>The Limits of State Action</i>, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx., with his discussion of the "alienation of labor when work is external to the worker...not part of his nature... [so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself... [and is] physically exhausted and mentally debased,'' alienated labor that "casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,'' thus depriving man of his "species character'' of "free conscious activity'' and "productive life.'' Similarly, Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who <i>needs</i> his fellow men.... [The workers' association becomes] the real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human relations.'' [13] It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of "possessive individualism''---all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as "the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>: Socialism and Liberalism.'' The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man.'' But anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man.'' It insists that "<i>socialism will be free or it will not be at all</i>. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of anarchism.'' [14] From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in <i>Anarchism</i> and other works. [15] Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist.'' Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto'' of 1865, the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,'' [16] an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.'' [17] A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power... [18] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to "replace the detail-worker of today...reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours...to whom the different social functions...are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers.'' [19] The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor state'' or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to serve their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create "free associations of free producers'' that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve as "a practical school of anarchism.'' [20] If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often quoted phrase, merely a form of "theft''---"the exploitation of the weak by the strong'' [21]---control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about "the third and last emancipatory phase of history,'' the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848). [22] The imminent danger to "civilization'' was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended---or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself? [23] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The workers of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. [24] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the "civilization'' that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their attack on "the very foundations of society itself'' was revealed, once again, when the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris from its population. As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar. [<i>Ibid</i>., pp. 74, 77] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris opens a new era, "that of the definitive and complete emancipation of the popular masses and their future true solidarity, across and despite state boundaries...the next revolution of man, international in solidarity, will be the resurrection of Paris''---a revolution that the world still awaits. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He will, in short, oppose </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">the organization of production by the Government. It means State-socialism, the command of the State officials over production and the command of managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">These remarks are taken from "Five Theses on the Class Struggle'' by the left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of the council communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist currents. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of "revolutionary Socialism'': </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the other will be the <i>social revolution.</i> The political State throughout history has meant the government <i>of men</i> by ruling classes; the <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">Republic</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:placename st="on">Socialism</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> will be the government <i>of industry</i> administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many; the latter will mean the economic freedom of all---it will be, therefore, a true democracy. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">This programmatic statement appears in William Paul's <i>The State, its Origins and Functions</i>, written in early 1917---shortly before Lenin's <i>State and Revolution</i>, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was a member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one of the founders of the British Communist Party. [25] His critique of state socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its principle that since state ownership and management will lead to bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the industrial organization of society with direct workers' control. Many similar statements can be cited. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in <st1:country-region st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region st="on">Italy</st1:country-region> after World War I and in <st1:country-region st="on">Spain</st1:country-region> (not only in the agricultural countryside, but also in industrial <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Barcelona</st1:place></st1:City>) in 1936. One might argue that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard'' party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer will remain "a fragment of a human being,'' degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The phrase "spontaneous revolutionary action'' can be misleading. The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' organizations must create "not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of the popular revolution in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region>, in particular, were based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the social and economic organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes "The Spanish revolution was relatively mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the popular consciousness.'' And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes: </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region> considered their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of the social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic fashion. [26] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work of the Spanish Revolution. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized character in the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, for reasons that are not obscure). [27] But there has been a rekindling of interest in the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group (<i>Informations Correspondance Ouvrière</i>). The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers' Control in <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Sheffield</st1:City>, <st1:country-region st="on">England</st1:country-region></st1:place>, in March 1969. The workers' control movement has become a significant force in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> in the past few years. It has organized several conferences and has produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active adherents representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' <st1:place st="on">Union</st1:place>, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic industries under "workers' control at all levels.'' [28] On the Continent, there are similar developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism and related ideas in <st1:country-region st="on">France</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region st="on">Germany</st1:country-region>, as it did in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region>. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it is not too surprising that the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> has been relatively untouched by these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it possible to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed to action. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the social revolution will be "that intelligent and truly noble part of youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people.'' Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a fulfillment of this prophecy. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has described as a "process of rehabilitation'' of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that "the constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may, when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a new departure... [and] contribute to enriching Marxism.'' [29] >From the "broad back'' of anarchism he has selected for more intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of anarchism. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Guérin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has been a time of "revolutionary practice.'' [30] <i>Anarchism</i> reflects that judgment. His interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the future. Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions characteristically seek to replace "a feudal or centralized authority ruling by force'' with some form of communal system which "implies the destruction and disappearance of the old form of State.'' Such a system will be either socialist or an "extreme form of democracy... [which is] the preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual freedom.'' This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists. [31] This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing tendency towards centralization in economic and political life. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> "felt there was but one alternative---the Commune, or the empire---under whatever name it might reappear.'' </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the <i>frères Ignorantins</i>, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the disappearance of the empire. [32] </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The miserable Second Empire "was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.'' </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of "freeing man >from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement'' remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an inspiration and guide. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel Guérin's <i>Anarchism: From Theory to Practice</i>. In a slightly different version, it appeared in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, May 21, 1970.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Notes</b></p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[1] Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, <i>The Anarchists</i>, pp. 145--6.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[2] Rudolf Rocker, <i>Anarchosyndicalism</i>, p. 31.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[3] Cited by Rocker, <i>ibid</i>., p. 77. This quotation and that in the next sentence are from Michael Bakunin, "The Program of the Alliance,'' in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., <i>Bakunin on Anarchy</i>, p. 255.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[4] Diego Abad de Santillán, <i>After the Revolution</i>, p. 86. In the last chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun, he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region>, see my <i>American Power and the New Mandarins</i>, chap. 1, and references cited there; the important study by Broué and Témime has since been translated into English. Several other important studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz, <i>L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionaire</i> (Paris: Editions Bélibaste, 1971); César M. Lorenzo, <i>Les Anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir, 1868--1969</i> (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston Leval, <i>Espagne libertaire, 1936--1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole</i> (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also Vernon Richards, <i>Lessons of the Spanish Revolution</i>, enlarged 1972 edition.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[5] Cited by Robert C. Tucker, <i>The Marxian Revolutionary Idea</i>, in his discussion of Marxism and anarchism.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[6] Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel Guérin, <i>Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire</i>, p. 119.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[7] Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, <i>Anarchists</i>. The source is "L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers,'' <i>Les Temps nouveaux</i>, 1895. The full text appears in Daniel Guérin, ed., <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[8] Martin Buber, <i>Paths in Utopia</i>, p. 127.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[9] "No state, however democratic,'' Bakunin wrote, "not even the reddest republic---can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves....'' "But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the people's stick' '' (<i>Statism and Anarchy</i> [1873], in Dolgoff, <i>Bakunin on Anarchy</i>, p. 338)---"the people's stick'' being the democratic Republic.<br />Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.<br />For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this dispute, see Daniel Guérin's comments in <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>; these also appear, slightly extended, in his <i>Pour un marxisme libertaire</i>. See also note 24.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[10] On Lenin's "intellectual deviation'' to the left during 1917, see Robert Vincent Daniels, "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,'' <i>American Slavic and East European Review</i>, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[11] Paul Mattick, <i>Marx and Keynes</i>, p. 295.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[12] Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état,'' reprinted in Guérin, <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>. Bakunin's final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the rationalist and romantic traditions. See my <i>Cartesian Linguistics</i> and <i>Language and Mind</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[13] Shlomo Avineri, <i>The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx</i>, p. 142, referring to comments in <i>The Holy Family</i>. Avineri states that within the socialist movement only the Israeli <i>kibbutzim</i> "have perceived that the modes and forms of present social organization will determine the structure of future society.'' This, however, was a characteristic position of anarchosyndicalism, as noted earlier.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[14] Rocker, <i>Anarchosyndicalism</i>, p. 28.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[15] See Guérin's works cited earlier.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[16] Karl Marx, <i>Critique of the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Gotha</st1:place></st1:City> Programme</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[17] Karl Marx, <i>Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie</i>, cited by Mattick, <i>Marx and Keynes</i>, p. 306. In this connection, see also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control,'' in Priscilla Long, ed., <i>The New Left</i>; and Avineri, <i>Social and Political Thought of Marx</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[18] Karl Marx, <i>Capital</i>, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a "frustrated producer'' than a "dissatisfied consumer'' (<i>The Marxian Revolutionary Idea</i>). This more radical critique of capitalist relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[19] Marx, <i>Capital</i>, cited by Avineri, <i>Social and Political Thought of Marx</i>, p. 83.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[20] Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme.''</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[21] "Qu'est-ce que la propriété?'' The phrase "property is theft'' displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri, <i>Social and Political Thought of Marx</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[22] Cited in Buber's <i>Paths in Utopia</i>, p. 19.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[23] Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, <i>Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism</i>, p. 60.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[24] Karl Marx, <i>The Civil War in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">France</st1:country-region></st1:place></i>, p. 24. Avineri observes that this and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer pointedly to intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his considered assessment was more critical than in this address.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[25] For some background, see Walter Kendall, <i>The Revolutionary Movement in Britain</i>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[26] <i>Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole</i>, p. 8.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[27] For discussion, see Mattick, <i>Marx and Keynes</i>, and Michael Kidron, <i>Western Capitalism Since the War</i>. See also discussion and references cited in my <i>At War With Asia</i>, chap. 1, pp. 23--6.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[28] See Hugh Scanlon, <i>The Way Forward for Workers' Control</i>. Scanlon is the president of the AEF, one of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Britain</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s largest trade unions.<br />The institute was established as a result of the sixth Conference on Workers' Control, March 1968, and serves as a center for disseminating information and encouraging research.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[29] Guérin, <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>, introduction.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[30] <i>Ibid.</i></p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[31] Arthur Rosenberg, <i>A History of Bolshevism</i>, p. 88.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">[32] Marx, <i>Civil War in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region></i>, pp. 62--3.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Bibliography</b></p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Avineri, Shlomo. <i>The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx</i>. <st1:city st="on">London</st1:City>: <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Cambridge</st1:PlaceName> <st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> Press, 1968.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Bakunin, Michael. <i>Bakunin on Anarchy</i>. Edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Buber, Martin. <i>Paths in Utopia</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:City>: Beacon Press, 1958.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Harper & Row, 1966.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------. <i>American Power and the New Mandarins</i>. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Pantheon Books, 1969.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------. <i>At War with <st1:place st="on">Asia</st1:place></i>. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Pantheon Books, 1970.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole</i>. 2nd ed. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Toulouse</st1:place></st1:City>: Editions C.N.T., 1965. First edition, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Barcelona</st1:City></st1:place>, 1937.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Daniels, Robert Vincent. "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology.'' <i>American Slavic and East European Review</i>, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Guérin, Daniel. <i>Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>: Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1959.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------. <i>Anarchism: From Theory to Practice</i>, translated by Mary Klopper. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Monthly Review Press, 1970.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------. <i>Pour un marxisme libertaire</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>: Robert Laffont, 1969.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------, ed. <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Lausanne</st1:place></st1:City>: La Cité Editeur, n.d.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Jackson, J. Hampden. <i>Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism</i>. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Collier Books, 1962.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Joll, James. <i>The Anarchists</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:City>: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Kendall, Walter. <i>The Revolutionary Movement in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Britain</st1:country-region></st1:place></i> 1900--1921. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Kidron, Michael <i>Western Capitalism Since the War</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Mattick, Paul. <i>Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy</i>. Extending Horizons Series. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:City>: Porter Sargent, 1969.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">------. "Workers' Control.'' In <i>The New Left: A Collection of Essays</i>, edited by Priscilla Long. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:City>: Porter Sargent, 1969.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Marx, Karl. <i>The Civil War in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">France</st1:country-region></st1:place></i>, 1871. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: International Publishers, 1941.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Pelloutier, Fernand. "L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers.'' <i>Les Temps nouveaux</i>, 1895. Reprinted in <i>Ni Dieu, ni Maître</i>, edited by Daniel Guérin. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Lausanne</st1:place></st1:City>: La Cité Editeur, n.d.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Richards, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Vernon</st1:place></st1:City>. <i>Lessons of the Spanish Revolution</i> (1936--1939). Enlarged ed. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>: Freedom Press, 1972.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Rocker, Rudolf. <i>Anarchosyndicalism</i>. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City>: Secker & Warburg, 1938.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Rosenberg, Arthur. <i>A History of Bolshevism from Marx to the First Five Years' Plan</i>. Translated by Ian F. Morrow. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Russell & Russell, 1965.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Santillan, Diego Abad de. <i>After the Revolution</i>. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: Greenberg Publishers, 1937.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Scanlon, Hugh. <i>The Way Forward for Workers' Control</i>. Institute for Workers' Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1, Nottingham, <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region>, 1968.</p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tucker, Robert C. <i>The Marxian Revolutionary Idea</i>. <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969.</span>anarkho minahasahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03413204462560131485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8115144937513988586.post-1200356863861600942008-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:002008-07-24T10:02:20.404-07:00"Anarchism" by: Peter Kropotkin<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span class="excerptbk">Encyclopædia Britannica</span>, 1910</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">(from the Gr.<i> an</i>, and <i>archós</i>, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international temporary or more or less permanent - for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary - as is seen in organic life at large - harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">If, it is contended, society were organized on these principles, man would not be limited in the free exercise of his powers in productive work by a capitalist monopoly, maintained by the state; nor would he be limited in the exercise of his will by a fear of punishment, or by obedience towards individuals or metaphysical entities, which both lead to depression of initiative and servility of mind. He would be guided in his actions by his own understanding, which necessarily would bear the impression of a free action and reaction between his own self and the ethical conceptions of his surroundings. Man would thus be enabled to obtain the full development of all his faculties, intellectual, artistic and moral, without being hampered by overwork for the monopolists, or by the servility and inertia of mind of the great number. He would thus be able to reach full <i>individualization</i>, which is not possible either under the present system of <i>individualism</i>, or under any system of state socialism in the so-called <i>Volkstaat</i> (popular state). </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The anarchist writers consider, moreover, that their conception is not a utopia, constructed on the <i>a priori</i> method, after a few desiderata have been taken as postulates. It is derived, they maintain, from an <i>analysis of tendencies</i> that are at work already, even though state socialism may find a temporary favour with the reformers. The progress of modern technics, which wonderfully simplifies the production of all the necessaries of life; the growing spirit of independence, and the rapid spread of free initiative and free understanding in all branches of activity - including those which formerly were considered as the proper attribution of church and state - are steadily reinforcing the no-government tendency. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As to their economical conceptions, the anarchists, in common with all socialists, of whom they constitute the left wing, maintain that the now prevailing system of private ownership in land, and our capitalist production for the sake of profits, represent a monopoly which runs against both the principles of justice and the dictates of utility. They are the main obstacle which prevents the successes of modern technics from being brought into the service of all, so as to produce general well-being. The anarchists consider the wage-system and capitalist production altogether as an obstacle to progress. But they point out also that the state was, and continues to be, the chief instrument for permitting the few to monopolize the land, and the capitalists to appropriate for themselves a quite disproportionate share of the yearly accumulated surplus of production. Consequently, while combating the present monopolization of land, and capitalism altogether, the anarchists combat with the same energy the state, as the main support of that system. Not this or that special form, but the state altogether, whether it be a monarchy or even a republic governed by means of the <i>referendum</i>. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The state organization, having always been, both in ancient and modern history (Macedonian Empire, Roman Empire, modern European states grown up on the ruins of the autonomous cities), the instrument for establishing monopolies in favour of the ruling minorities, cannot be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies. The anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all the main sources of economical life - the land, the mines, the railways, banking, insurance, and so on - as also the management of all the main branches of industry, in addition to all the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, state-supported religions, defence of the territory, etc.), would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny. State capitalism would only increase the powers of bureaucracy and capitalism. True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both <i>territorial</i> and <i>functional</i>, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In common with most socialists, the anarchists recognize that, like all evolution in nature, the slow evolution of society is followed from time to time by periods of accelerated evolution which are called revolutions; and they think that the era of revolutions is not yet closed. Periods of rapid changes will follow the periods of slow evolution, and these periods must be taken advantage of - not for increasing and widening the powers of the state, but for reducing them, through the organization in every township or commune of the local groups of producers and consumers, as also the regional, and eventually the international, federations of these groups. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In virtue of the above principles the anarchists refuse to be party to the present state organization and to support it by infusing fresh blood into it. They do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men not to constitute, political parties in the parliaments. Accordingly, since the foundation of the International Working Men's Association in 1864-1866, they have endeavoured to promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organizations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><b>The historical development of anarchism</b></p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The conception of society just sketched, and the tendency which is its dynamic expression, have always existed in mankind, in opposition to the governing hierarchic conception and tendency - now the one and now the other taking the upper hand at different periods of history. To the former tendency we owe the evolution, by the masses themselves, of those institutions - the clan, the village community, the guild, the free medieval city - by means of which the masses resisted the encroachments of the conquerors and the power-seeking minorities. The same tendency asserted itself with great energy in the great religious movements of medieval times, especially in the early movements of the reform and its forerunners. At the same time it evidently found its expression in the writings of some thinkers, since the times of Lao-tsze, although, owing to its non-scholastic and popular origin, it obviously found less sympathy among the scholars than the opposed tendency. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As has been pointed out by Prof. Adler in his <i>Geschichte des Sozialismus und Kommunismus</i>, Aristippus (b. c. 430 BC), one of the founders of the Cyrenaic school, already taught that the wise must not give up their liberty to the state, and in reply to a question by Socrates he said that he did not desire to belong either to the governing or the governed class. Such an attitude, however, seems to have been dictated merely by an Epicurean attitude towards the life of the masses. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The best exponent of anarchist philosophy in ancient <st1:country-region st="on">Greece</st1:country-region> was Zeno (342-267 or 270 BC), from <st1:place st="on">Crete</st1:place>, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, who distinctly opposed his conception of a free community without government to the state-utopia of Plato. He repudiated the omnipotence of the state, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual - remarking already that, while the necessary instinct of self-preservation leads man to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by providing man with another instinct - that of sociability. When men are reasonable enough to follow their natural instincts, they will unite across the frontiers and constitute the cosmos. They will have no need of law-courts or police, will have no temples and no public worship, and use no money - free gifts taking the place of the exchanges. Unfortunately, the writings of Zeno have not reached us and are only known through fragmentary quotations. However, the fact that his very wording is similar to the wording now in use, shows how deeply is laid the tendency of human nature of which he was the mouthpiece. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In medieval times we find the same views on the state expressed by the illustrious bishop of Alba, Marco Girolamo Vida, in his first dialogue <i>De dignitate reipublicae</i> (Ferd. Cavalli, in <i>Mem. dell'Istituto Veneto</i>, xiii.; Dr E. Nys, <i>Researches in the History of Economics</i>). But it is especially in several early Christian movements, beginning with the ninth century in Armenia, and in the preachings of the early Hussites, particularly Chojecki, and the early Anabaptists, especially Hans Denk (cf. Keller, <i>Ein Apostel der Wiedertaufer</i>), that one finds the same ideas forcibly expressed - special stress being laid of course on their moral aspects. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Rabelais and Fenelon, in their utopias, have also expressed similar ideas, and they were also current in the eighteenth century amongst the French Encyclopaedists, as may be concluded from separate expressions occasionally met with in the writings of Rousseau, from Diderot's <i>Preface</i> to the <i>Voyage</i> of <st1:place st="on">Bougainville</st1:place> , and so on. However, in all probability such ideas could not be developed then, owing to the rigorous censorship of the Roman Catholic Church. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">These ideas found their expression later during the great French Revolution. While the Jacobins did all in their power to centralize everything in the hands of the government, it appears now, from recently published documents, that the masses of the people, in their municipalities and 'sections', accomplished a considerable constructive work. They appropriated for themselves the election of the judges, the organization of supplies and equipment for the army, as also for the large cities, work for the unemployed, the management of charities, and so on. They even tried to establish a direct correspondence between the 36,000 communes of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> through the intermediary of a special board, outside the National Assembly (cf. Sigismund Lacroix, <i>Actes de la commune de Paris</i>). </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">It was Godwin, in his <i>Enquiry concerning Political Justice</i> (2 vols., 1793), who was the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work. Laws, he wrote, are not a product of the wisdom of our ancestors: they are the product of their passions, their timidity, their jealousies and their ambition. The remedy they offer is worse than the evils they pretend to cure. If and only if all laws and courts were abolished, and the decisions in the arising contests were left to reasonable men chosen for that purpose, real justice would gradually be evolved. As to the state, Godwin frankly claimed its abolition. A society, he wrote, can perfectly well exist without any government: only the communities should be small and perfectly autonomous. Speaking of property, he stated that the rights of every one 'to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit of a human being' must be regulated by justice alone: the substance must go 'to him who most wants it'. His conclusion was communism. Godwin, however, had not the courage to maintain his opinions. He entirely rewrote later on his chapter on property and mitigated his communist views in the second edition of <i>Political Justice</i> (8vo, 1796). </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Proudhon was the first to use, in 1840 (<i>Qu'est-ce que la propriete?</i> first memoir), the name of anarchy with application to the no government state of society. The name of 'anarchists' had been freely applied during the French Revolution by the Girondists to those revolutionaries who did not consider that the task of the Revolution was accomplished with the overthrow of Louis XVI, and insisted upon a series of economical measures being taken (the abolition of feudal rights without redemption, the return to the village communities of the communal lands enclosed since 1669, the limitation of landed property to 120 acres, progressive income-tax, the national organization of exchanges on a just value basis, which already received a beginning of practical realization, and so on). </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Now Proudhon advocated a society without government, and used the word anarchy to describe it. Proudhon repudiated, as is known, all schemes of communism, according to which mankind would be driven into communistic monasteries or barracks, as also all the schemes of state or state-aided socialism which were advocated by Louis Blanc and the collectivists. When he proclaimed in his first memoir on property that 'Property is theft', he meant only property in its present, Roman-law, sense of 'right of use and abuse'; in property-rights, on the other hand, understood in the limited sense of <i>possession</i>, he saw the best protection against the encroachments of the state. At the same time he did not want violently to dispossess the present owners of land, dwelling-houses, mines, factories and so on. He preferred to attain the same end by rendering capital incapable of earning interest; and this he proposed to obtain by means of a national bank, based on the mutual confidence of all those who are engaged in production, who would agree to exchange among themselves their produces at cost-value, by means of labour cheques representing the hours of labour required to produce every given commodity. Under such a system, which Proudhon described as 'Mutuellisme', all the exchanges of services would be strictly equivalent. Besides, such a bank would be enabled to lend money without interest, levying only something like I per cent, or even less, for covering the cost of administration. Everyone being thus enabled to borrow the money that would be required to buy a house, nobody would agree to pay any more a yearly rent for the use of it. A general 'social liquidation' would thus be rendered easy, without violent expropriation. The same applied to mines, railways, factories and so on. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">In a society of this type the state would be useless. The chief relations between citizens would be based on free agreement and regulated by mere account keeping. The contests might be settled by arbitration. A penetrating criticism of the state and all possible forms of government, and a deep insight into all economic problems, were well-known characteristics of Proudhon's work. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">It is worth noticing that French mutualism had its precursor in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region>, in William Thompson, who began by mutualism before he became a communist, and in his followers John Gray (<i>A Lecture on Human Happiness</i>, 1825; <i>The Social System</i>, 1831) and J. F. Bray (<i>Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy</i>, 1839). It had also its precursor in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Josiah Warren, who was born in 1798 (cf. W. Bailie, <i>Josiah Warren, the First American Anarchist</i>, Boston, 1900), and belonged to Owen's '<st1:place st="on">New Harmony</st1:place>', considered that the failure of this enterprise was chiefly due to the suppression of individuality and the lack of initiative and responsibility. These defects, he taught, were inherent to every scheme based upon authority and the community of goods. He advocated, therefore, complete individual liberty. In 1827 he opened in Cincinnati a little country store which was the first 'equity store', and which the people called 'time store', because it was based on labour being exchanged hour for hour in all sorts of produce. 'Cost - the limit of price', and consequently 'no interest', was the motto of his store, and later on of his 'equity village', near <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>, which was still in existence in 1865. Mr Keith's 'House of Equity' at <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:City>, founded in 1855, is also worthy of notice. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">While the economical, and especially the mutual-banking, ideas of Proudhon found supporters and even a practical application in the United States, his political conception of anarchy found but little echo in France, where the Christian socialism of Lamennais and the Fourierists, and the state socialism of Louis Blanc and the followers of Saint-Simon, were dominating. These ideas found, however, some temporary support among the left-wing Hegelians in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Moses Hess in 1843, and Karl Grün in 1845, who advocated anarchism. Besides, the authoritarian communism of Wilhelm Weitling having given origin to opposition amongst the Swiss working men, Wilhelm Marr gave expression to it in the forties. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">On the other side, individualist anarchism found, also in Germany, its fullest expression in Max Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt), whose remarkable works (<i>Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum</i> and articles contributed to the <i>Rheinische Zeitung</i>) remained quite overlooked until they were brought into prominence by John Henry Mackay. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Prof. V. Basch, in a very able introduction to his interesting book, <i>L'lndividualisme anarchiste: Max Stirner</i> (1904), has shown how the development of the German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, and 'the absolute' of Schelling and the <i>Geist</i> of Hegel, necessarily provoked, when the anti-Hegelian revolt began, the preaching of the same 'absolute' in the camp of the rebels. This was done by Stirner, who advocated, not only a complete revolt against the state and against the servitude which authoritarian communism would impose upon men, but also the full liberation of the individual from all social and moral bonds - the rehabilitation of the 'I', the supremacy of the individual, complete 'amoralism', and the 'association of the egotists'. The final conclusion of that sort of individual anarchism has been indicated by Prof. Basch. It maintains that the aim of all superior civilization is, not to permit <i>all</i> members of the community to develop in a normal way, but to permit certain better endowed individuals 'fully to develop', even at the cost of the happiness and the very existence of the mass of mankind. It is thus a return towards the most common individual ism, advocated by all the would-be superior minorities, to which indeed man owes in his history precisely the state and the rest, which these individualists combat. Their individualism goes so far as to end in a negation of their own starting-point - to say nothing of the impossibility for the individual to attain a really full development in the conditions of oppression of the masses by the 'beautiful aristocracies'. His development would remain unilateral. This is why this direction of thought, notwithstanding its undoubtedly correct and useful advocacy of the full development of each individuality, finds a hearing only in limited artistic and literary circles. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><b>Anarchism in the International Working Men's Association</b></p> <p style="text-align: justify;">A general depression in the propaganda of all fractions of socialism followed, as is known, after the defeat of the uprising of the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> working men in June 1848 and the fall of the Republic. All the socialist press was gagged during the reaction period, which lasted fully twenty years. Nevertheless, even anarchist thought began to make some progress, namely in the writings of Bellegarrique (Caeurderoy), and especially Joseph Déjacque (<i>Les Lazareacute'ennes, L 'Humanisphère</i>, an anarchist-communist utopia, lately discovered and reprinted). The socialist movement revived only after 1864, when some French working men, all 'mutualists', meeting in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:City> during the Universal Exhibition with English followers of Robert Owen, founded the International Working Men's Association. This association developed very rapidly and adopted a policy of direct economical struggle against capitalism, without interfering in the political parliamentary agitation, and this policy was followed until 1871. However, after the Franco-German War, when the International Association was prohibited in France after the uprising of the Commune, the German working men, who had received manhood suffrage for elections to the newly constituted imperial parliament, insisted upon modifying the tactics of the International, and began to build up a Social Democratic political party. This soon led to a division in the Working Men's Association, and the Latin federations, Spanish, Italian, Belgian and Jurassic (<st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> could not be represented), constituted among themselves a Federal union which broke entirely with the Marxist general council of the International. Within these federations developed now what may be described as <i>modern anarchism</i>. After the names of 'Federalists' and 'Anti-authoritarians' had been used for some time by these federations the name of 'anarchists', which their adversaries insisted upon applying to them, prevailed, and finally it was revindicated. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Bakunin (q.v.) soon became the leading spirit among these Latin federations for the development of the principles of anarchism, which he did in a number of writings, pamphlets and letters. He demanded the complete abolition of the state, which -- he wrote -- is a product of religion, belongs to a lower state of civilization, represents the negation of liberty, and spoils even that which it undertakes to do for the sake of general well-being. The state was an historically necessary evil, but its complete extinction will be, sooner or later, equally necessary. Repudiating all legislation, even when issuing from universal suffrage, Bakunin claimed for each nation, each region and each commune, full autonomy, so long as it is not a menace to its neighbours, and full independence for the individual, adding that one becomes really free only when, and in proportion as, all others are free. Free federations of the communes would constitute free nations. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As to his economical conceptions, Bakunin described himself, in common with his Federalist comrades of the International (César De Paepe, James Guillaume, Schwitzguébel), a 'collectivist anarchist' - not in the sense of Vidal and Pecqueur in the 1840s, or of their modern Social Democratic followers, but to express a state of things in which all necessaries for production are owned in common by the labour groups and the free communes, while the ways of retribution of labour, communist or otherwise, would be settled by each group for itself. Social revolution, the near approach of which was foretold at that time by all socialists, would be the means of bringing into life the new conditions. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The Jurassic, the Spanish and the Italian federations and sections of the International Working Men's Association, as also the French, the German and the American anarchist groups, were for the next years the chief centres of anarchist thought and propaganda. They refrained from any participation in parliamentary politics, and always kept in close contact with the labour organizations. However, in the second half of the 'eighties and the early 'nineties of the nineteenth century, when the influence of the anarchists began to be felt in strikes, in the 1st of May demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours' day, and in the anti-militarist propaganda in the army, violent prosecutions were directed against them, especially in the Latin countries (including physical torture in the Barcelona Castle) and the United States (the execution of five Chicago anarchists in 1887). Against these prosecutions the anarchists retaliated by acts of violence which in their turn were followed by more executions from above, and new acts of revenge from below. This created in the general public the impression that violence is the substance of anarchism, a view repudiated by its supporters, who hold that in reality violence is resorted to by all parties in proportion as their open action is obstructed by repression, and exceptional laws render them outlaws. (Cf. <i>Anarchism and Outrage</i>, by C. M. Wilson, and <i>Report of the Spanish Atrocities Committee</i>, in 'Freedom Pamphlets'; <i>A Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists</i>, by Dyer Lum (New York, 1886); <i>The Chicago Martyrs: Speeches</i>, etc.). </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Anarchism continued to develop, partly in the direction of Proudhonian 'mutuellisme', but chiefly as communist-anarchism, to which a third direction, Christian-anarchism, was added by Leo Tolstoy, and a fourth, which might be ascribed as literary-anarchism, began amongst some prominent modern writers. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The ideas of Proudhon, especially as regards mutual banking, corresponding with those of Josiah Warren, found a considerable following in the United States, creating quite a school, of which the main writers are Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Grene, Lysander Spooner (who began to write in 1850, and whose unfinished work, <i>Natural Law</i>, was full of promise), and several others, whose names will be found in Dr Nettlau's <i>Bibliographie de l'anarchie</i>. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">A prominent position among the individualist anarchists in <st1:country-region st="on">America</st1:country-region> has been occupied by Benjamin R. Tucker, whose journal <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i>Liberty</i></st1:place></st1:City> was started in 1881 and whose conceptions are a combination of those of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer. Starting from the statement that anarchists are egotists, strictly speaking, and that every group of individuals, be it a secret league of a few persons, or the Congress of the United States, has the right to oppress all mankind, provided it has the power to do so, that equal liberty for all and absolute equality ought to be the law, and 'mind every one your own business' is the unique moral law of anarchism, Tucker goes on to prove that a general and thorough application of these principles would be beneficial and would offer no danger, because the powers of every individual would be limited by the exercise of the equal rights of all others. He further indicated (following H. Spencer) the difference which exists between the encroachment on somebody's rights and resistance to such an encroachment; between domination and defence: the former being equally condemnable, whether it be encroachment of a criminal upon an individual, or the encroachment of one upon all others, or of all others upon one; while resistance to encroachment is defensible and necessary. For their self-defence, both the citizen and the group have the right to any violence, including capital punishment. Violence is also justified for enforcing the duty of keeping an agreement. Tucker thus follows Spencer, and, like him, opens (in the present writer's opinion) the way for reconstituting under the heading of 'defence' all the functions of the state. His criticism of the present state is very searching, and his defence of the rights of the individual very powerful. As regards his economical views B. R. Tucker follows Proudhon. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">The individualist anarchism of the American Proudhonians finds, however, but little sympathy amongst the working masses. Those who profess it - they are chiefly 'intellectuals' - soon realize that the <i>individualization</i> they so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economist or they retire into a sort of Epicurean amoralism, or superman theory, similar to that of Stirner and Nietzsche. The great bulk of the anarchist working men prefer the anarchist-communist ideas which have gradually evolved out of the anarchist collectivism of the International Working Men's Association. To this direction belong - to name only the better known exponents of anarchism Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, Sebastien Faure, Emile Pouget in France; Errico Malatesta and Covelli in Italy; R. Mella, A. Lorenzo, and the mostly unknown authors of many excellent manifestos in Spain; John Most amongst the Germans; Spies, Parsons and their followers in the United States, and so on; while Domela Nieuwenhuis occupies an intermediate position in Holland. The chief anarchist papers which have been published since 1880 also belong to that direction; while a number of anarchists of this direction have joined the so-called syndicalist movement- the French name for the non-political labour movement, devoted to direct struggle with capitalism, which has lately become so prominent in Europe. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">As one of the anarchist-communist direction, the present writer for many years endeavoured to develop the following ideas: to show the intimate, logical connection which exists between the modern philosophy of natural sciences and anarchism; to put anarchism on a scientific basis by the study of the tendencies that are apparent now in society and may indicate its further evolution; and to work out the basis of anarchist ethics. As regards the substance of anarchism itself, it was Kropotkin's aim to prove that communism at least partial - has more chances of being established than collectivism, especially in communes taking the lead, and that free, or anarchist-communism is the only form of communism that has any chance of being accepted in civilized societies; communism and anarchy are therefore two terms of evolution which complete each other, the one rendering the other possible and acceptable. He has tried, moreover, to indicate how, during a revolutionary period, a large city - if its inhabitants have accepted the idea could organize itself on the lines of free communism; the city guaranteeing to every inhabitant dwelling, food and clothing to an extent corresponding to the comfort now available to the middle classes only, in exchange for a half-day's, or five-hours' work; and how all those things which would be considered as luxuries might be obtained by everyone if he joins for the other half of the day all sorts of free associations pursuing all possible aims - educational, literary, scientific, artistic, sports and so on. In order to prove the first of these assertions he has analysed the possibilities of agriculture and industrial work, both being combined with brain work. And in order to elucidate the main factors of human evolution, he has analysed the part played in history by the popular constructive agencies of mutual aid and the historical role of the state. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, like his predecessors in the popular religious movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Chojecki, Denk and many others, took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of the Christ and from the necessary dictates of reason. With all the might of his talent he made (especially in <i>The Kingdom of God in Yourselves</i>) a powerful criticism of the church, the state and law altogether, and especially of the present property laws. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of the Christ he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;">It would be impossible to represent here, in a short sketch, the penetration, on the one hand, of anarchist ideas into modern literature, and the influence, on the other hand, which the libertarian ideas of the best contemporary writers have exercised upon the development of anarchism. One ought to consult the ten big volumes of the <i>Supplément Littéraire</i> to the paper <i>La Révolte</i> and later the <i>Temps Nouveaux</i>, which contain reproductions from the works of hundreds of modern authors expressing anarchist ideas, in order to realize how closely anarchism is connected with all the intellectual movement of our own times. J. S. Mill's <i>Liberty</i>, Spencer's <i>Individual versus the State</i>, Marc Guyau's <i>Morality without Obligation or Sanction</i>, and Fouillée's <i>La Morale, I'art et la religion</i>, the works of Multatuli (E. Douwes Dekker), Richard Wagner's <i>Art and Revolution</i>, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's <i>War and Peace</i>, Zola's <i>Paris</i> and <i>Le Travail</i>, the latest works of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known authors, are full of ideas which show how closely anarchism is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern thought in the same direction of enfranchisement of man from the bonds of the state as well as from those of capitalism.</p>anarkho minahasahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03413204462560131485noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8115144937513988586.post-7698973446692780082008-07-24T09:53:00.000-07:002008-07-24T09:56:03.464-07:00"The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State" by: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin<h3 style="text-align: center;" align="center">First Published in 1871<br />Alfred A. Knopf, <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:State></st1:place>, NY.</h3> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This work, like all my published work, of which there has not been a great deal, is an outgrowth of events. It is the natural continuation of my <i>Letters to a Frenchman</i> (September 1870), wherein I had the easy but painful distinction of foreseeing and foretelling the dire calamities which now beset France and the whole civilized world, the only cure for which is the Social Revolution.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> My purpose now is to prove the need for such a revolution. I shall review the historical development of society and what is now taking place in <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>, right before our eyes. Thus all those who sincerely thirst for truth can accept it and proclaim openly and unequivocally the philosophical principles and practical aims which are at the very core of what we call the Social Revolution.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> I know my self-imposed task is not a simple one. I might be called presumptuous had I any personal motives in undertaking it. Let me assure my reader, I have none. I am not a scholar or a philosopher, not even a professional writer. I have not done much writing in my life and have never written except, so to speak, in self-defense, and only when a passionate conviction forced me to overcome my instinctive dislike for any public exhibition of myself.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Well, then, who am I, and what is it that prompts me to publish this work at this time? I am an impassioned seeker of the truth, and as bitter an enemy of the vicious fictions used by the established order - an order which has profited from all the religious, metaphysical, political, juridical, economic, and social infamies of all times - to brutalize and enslave the world. I am a fanatical lover of liberty. I consider it the only environment in which human intelligence, dignity, and happiness can thrive and develop. I do not mean that formal liberty which is dispensed, measured out, and regulated by the State; for this is a perennial lie and represents nothing but the privilege of a few, based upon the servitude of the remainder. Nor do I mean that individualist, egoist, base, and fraudulent liberty extolled by the school of Jean Jacques Rousseau and every other school of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the rights of all, represented by the State, as a limit for the rights of each; it always, necessarily, ends up by reducing the rights of individuals to zero. No, I mean the only liberty worthy of the name, the liberty which implies the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral capacities latent in every one of us; the liberty which knows no other restrictions but those set by the laws of our own nature. Consequently there are, properly speaking, no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed upon us by any legislator from outside, alongside, or above ourselves. These laws are subjective, inherent in ourselves; they constitute the very basis of our being. Instead of seeking to curtail them, we should see in them the real condition and the effective cause of our liberty - that liberty of each man which does not find another manpis freedom a boundary but a confirmation and vast extension of his own; liberty through solidarity, in equality. I mean liberty triumphant over brute force and, what has always been the real expression of such force, the principle of authority. I mean liberty which will shatter all the idols in heaven and on earth and will then build a new world of mankind in solidarity, upon the ruins of all the churches and all the states.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> I am a convinced advocate of economic and social equality because I know that, without it, liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of nations, will never amount to more than a pack of lies. But since I stand for liberty as the primary condition of mankind, I believe that equality must be established in the world by the spontaneous organization of labor and the collective ownership of property by freely organized producerspi associations, and by the equally spontaneous federation of communes, to replace the domineering paternalistic State.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> It is at this point that a fundamental division arises between the socialists and revolutionary collectivists on the one hand and the authoritarian communists who support the absolute power of the State on the other. Their ultimate aim is identical. Both equally desire to create a new social order based first on the organization of collective labor, inevitably imposed upon each and all by the natural force of events, under conditions equal for all, and second, upon the collective ownership of the tools of production.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The difference is only that the communists imagine they can attain their goal by the development and organization of the political power of the working classes, and chiefly of the proletariat of the cities, aided by bourgeois radicalism. The revolutionary socialists, on the other hand, believe they can succeed only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working classes in city and country, including all men of goodwill from the upper classes who break with their past and wish openly to join them and accept their revolutionary program in full.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This divergence leads to a difference in tactics. The communists believe it necessary to organize the workerspi forces in order to seize the political power of the State. The revolutionary socialists organize for the purpose of destroying - or, to put it more politely - liquidating the State. The communists advocate the principle and the practices of authority; the revolutionary socialists put all their faith in liberty. Both equally favor science, which is to eliminate superstition and take the place of religious faith. The former would like to impose science by force; the latter would try to propagate it so that human groups, once convinced, would organize and federalize spontaneously, freely, from the bottom up, of their own accord and true t their own interests, never following a prearranged plan imposed upon "ignorant"; masses by a few "superior" minds.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The revolutionary socialists hold that there is a great deal more practical good sense and wisdom in the instinctive aspirations and real needs of the masses than in the profound intelligence of all the doctors and guides of humanity who, after so many failures, still keep on trying to make men happy. The revolutionary socialists, further more, believe that mankind has for too long submitted to being governed; that the cause of its troubles does not lie in any particular form of government but in the fundamental principles and the very existence of government, whatever form it may take.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Finally, there is the well-known contradiction between communism as developed scientifically by the German school and accepted in part by the Americans and the English, and Proudhonism, greatly developed and taken to its ultimate conclusion by the proletariat of the Latin countries. Revolutionary socialism has just attempted its first striking and practical demonstration in the Paris Commune.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> I am a supporter of the Paris Commune, which for all the bloodletting it suffered at the hands of monarchical and clerical reaction, has nonetheless grown more enduring and more powerful in the hearts and minds of Europepis proletariat. I am its supporter, above all, because it was a bold, clearly formulated negation of the State.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> It is immensely significant that this rebellion against the State has taken place in <st1:country-region st="on">France</st1:country-region>, which had been hitherto the land of political centralization par excellence, and that it was precisely <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>, the leader and the fountainhead of the great French civilization, which took the initiative in the Commune. Paris, casting aside her crown and enthusiastically proclaiming her own defeat in order to give life and liberty to France, to Europe, to the entire world; Paris reaffirming her historic power of leadership, showing to all the enslaved peoples (and are there any masses that are not slaves?) the only road to emancipation and health; Paris inflicting a mortal blow upon the political traditions of bourgeois radicalism and giving a real basis to revolutionary socialism against the reactionaries of France and Europe! Paris shrouded in her own ruins, to give the solemn lie to triumphant reaction; saving, by her own disaster, the honor and the future of France, and proving to mankind that if life, intelligence, and moral strength have departed from the upper classes, they have been preserved in their power and promises in the proletariat! Paris inaugurating the new era of the definitive and complete emancipation of the masses and their real solidarity across state frontiers; Paris destroying nationalism and erecting the religion of humanity upon its ruins; Paris proclaiming herself humanitarian and atheist, and replacing divine fictions with the great realities of social life and faith in science, replacing the lies and inequities of the old morality with the principles of liberty, justice, equality, and fraternity, those eternal bases of all human morality! <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> heroic, rational and confident, confirming her strong faith in the destinies of mankind by her own glorious downfall, her death; passing down her faith, in all its power, to the generations to come! Paris, drenched in the blood of her noblest children - this is humanity itself, crucified by the united international reaction of Europe, under the direct inspiration of all the Christian churches and that high priest of iniquity, the Pope. But the coming international revolution, expressing the solidarity of the peoples, shall be the resurrection of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This is the true meaning, and these are the immense, beneficent results of two months which encompassed the life and death of the ever memorable Paris Commune.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The Paris Commune lasted too short a time, and its internal development was too hampered by the mortal struggle it had to engage in against the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Versailles</st1:place></st1:City> reaction to allow it at least to formulate, if not apply, its socialist program theoretically. We must realize, too, that the majority of the members of the Commune were not socialists, properly speaking. If they appeared to be, it was because they were drawn in this direction by the irresistible course of events, the nature of the situation, the necessities of their position, rather than through personal conviction. The socialists were a tiny minority - there were, at most, fourteen or fifteen of them; the rest were Jacobins. But, let us make it clear, there are Jacobins and Jacobins. There are Jacobin lawyers and doctrinaires, like Mr. Gambetta; their positivist...presumptuous, despotic, and legalistic republicanism had repudiated the old revolutionary faith, leaving nothing of Jacobinism but its cult of unity and authority, and delivered the people of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> over to the Prussians, and later still to native-born reactionaries. And there are Jacobins who are frankly revolutionaries, the heroes, the last sincere representatives of the democratic faith of 1793; able to sacrifice both their well-armed unity and authority rather than submit their conscience to the insolence of the reaction. These magnanimous Jacobins led naturally by Delescluze, a great soul and a great character, desire the triumph of the Revolution above everything else; and since there is no revolution without the masses, and since the masses nowadays reveal an instinct for socialism and can only make an economic and social revolution, the Jacobins of good faith, letting themselves be impelled increasingly by the logic of the revolutionary movement, will end up becoming socialists in spite of themselves.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This precisely was the situation in which the Jacobins who participated in the Paris Commune found themselves. Delescluze, and many others with him, signed programs and proclamations whose general import and promise were of a positively socialist nature. However, in spite of their good faith and all their goodwill, they were merely socialists impelled by outward circumstances rather than by an inward conviction; they lacked the time and even the capacity to overcome and subdue many of their own bourgeois prejudices which were contrary to their newly acquired socialism. One can understand that, trapped in this internal struggle, they could never go beyond generalities or take any of those decisive measures that would end their solidarity and all their contacts with the bourgeois world forever.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This was a great misfortune for the Commune and these men. They were paralyzed, and they paralyzed the Commune. Yet we cannot blame them. Men are not transformed overnight; they do not change their natures or their habits at will. They proved their sincerity by letting themselves be killed for the Commune. Who would dare ask more of them?</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> They are no more to be blamed than the people of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>, under whose influence they thought and acted. The people were socialists more by instinct than by reflection. All their aspirations are in the highest degree socialist but their ideas, or rather their traditional expressions, are not. The proletariat of the great cities of <st1:country-region st="on">France</st1:country-region>, and even of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Paris</st1:City></st1:place>, still cling to many Jacobin prejudices, and to many dictatorial and governmental concepts. The cult of authority - the fatal result of religious education, that historic source of all evils, depravations, and servitude - has not yet been completely eradicated in them. This is so true that even the most intelligent children of the people, the most convinced socialists, have not freed themselves completely of these ideas. If you rummage around a bit in their minds, you will find the Jacobin, the advocate of government, cowering in a dark corner, humble but not quite dead.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> And, too, the small group of convinced socialists who participated in the Commune were in a very difficult position. While they felt the lack of support from the great masses of the people of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>, and while the organization of the International Association, itself imperfect, compromised hardly a few thousand persons, they had to keep up a daily struggle against the Jacobin majority. In the midst of the conflict, they had to feed and provide work for several thousand workers, organize and arm them, and keep a sharp lookout for the doings of the reactionaries. All this in an immense city like <st1:city st="on">Paris</st1:City>, besieged, facing the threat of starvation, and a prey to all the shady intrigues of the reaction, which managed to establish itself in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Versailles</st1:place></st1:City> with the permission and by the grace of the Prussians. They had to set up a revolutionary government and army against the government and army of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Versailles</st1:place></st1:City>; in order to fight the monarchist and clerical reaction they were compelled to organize themselves in a Jacobin manner, forgetting or sacrificing the first conditions of revolutionary socialism.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> In this confusing situation, it was natural that the Jacobins, the strongest section, constituting the majority of the Commune, who also possessed a highly developed political instinct, the tradition and practice of governmental organization, should have had the upper hand over the socialists. It is a matter of surprise that they did not press their advantage more than they did; that they did not give a fully Jacobin character to the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> insurrection; that, on the contrary, they let themselves be carried along into a social revolution.</p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> I know that many socialists, very logical in their theory, blame our <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> friends for not having acted sufficiently as socialists in their revolutionary practice. The yelping pack of the bourgeois press, on the other hand, accuse them of having followed their program too faithfully. Let us forget, for a moment, the ignoble denunciations of that press. I want to call the attention of the strictest theoreticians of proletarian emancipation to the fact that they are unjust to our <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> brothers, for between the most correct theories and their practical application lies an enormous distance which cannot be bridged in a few days. Whoever had the pleasure of knowing Varlin, for instance (to name just one man whose death is certain), knows that he and his friends were guided by profound, passionate, and well-considered socialist convictions. These were men whose ardent zeal, devotion, and good faith had never been questioned by those who had known them. Yet, precisely because they were men of good faith, they were filled with self-distrust in the face of the immense task to which they had devoted their minds and their lives; they thought too little of themselves! And they were convinced that in the Social Revolution, diametrically opposite to a political revolution in this as in other ways, individual action was to be almost nil, while the spontaneous action of the masses had to be everything. All that individuals can do is formulate, clarify, and propagate ideas expressing the instinctive desires of the people, and contribute their constant efforts to the revolutionary organization of the natural powers of the masses. This and nothing more; all the rest can be accomplished only by the people themselves. Otherwise we would end up with a political dictatorship - the reconstitution of the State, with all its privileges, inequalities, and oppressions; by taking a devious but inevitable path we would come to reestablish the political, social, and economic slavery of the masses. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Varlin and all his friends, like all sincere socialists, and generally like all workers born and bred among the people, shared this perfectly legitimate feeling of caution toward the continuous activity of one and the same group of individuals and against the domination exerted by superior personalities. And since they were just and fair-minded men above all else, they turned this foresight, this mistrust, against themselves as much as against other persons. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Contrary to the belief of authoritarian communists - which I deem completely wrong - that a social revolution must be decreed and organized either by a dictatorship or by a constituent assembly emerging from a political revolution, our friends, the Paris socialists, believed that revolution could neither be made nor brought to its full development except by the spontaneous and continued action of the masses, the groups and the associations of the people. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Our <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City> friends were right a thousand times over. In fact, where is the mind, brilliant as it may be, or - if we speak of a collective dictatorship, even if it were formed of several hundred individuals endowed with superior mentalities - where are the intellects powerful enough to embrace the infinite multiplicity and diversity of real interests, aspirations, wishes and needs which sum up the collective will of the people? And to invent a social organization that will not be a Procrustean bed upon which the violence of the State will more or less overtly force unhappy society to stretch out? It has always been thus, and it is exactly this old system of organization by force that the Social Revolution should end by granting full liberty to the masses, the groups, the communes, the associations and to the individuals as well; by destroying once and for all the historic cause of all violence, which is the power and indeed the mere existence of the State. Its fall will bring down with it all the inequities of the law and all the lies of the various religions, since both law and religion have never been anything but the compulsory consecration, ideal and real, of all violence represented, guaranteed, and protected by the State. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> It is obvious that liberty will never be <i>given</i> to humanity, and that the real interests of society, of all groups, local associations, and individuals who make up society will never be satisfied until there are no longer any states. It is obvious that all the so-called general interests of society, which the State is supposed to represent and which are in reality just a general and constant negation of the true interests of regions, communes, associations, and individuals subject to the State, are a mere abstraction, a fiction, a lie. The State is like a vast slaughterhouse or an enormous cemetery, where all the real aspirations, all the living forces of a country enter generously and happily, in the shadow of that abstraction, to let themselves be slain and buried. And just as no abstraction exists for and by itself, having no legs to sand on, no arms to create with, no stomach to digest the mass of victims delivered to it, it is likewise clear that the celestial or religious abstraction, God, actually represents the very real interests of a class, the clergy, while its terrestrial complement, that political abstraction, the State, represents the no less real interests of the exploiting class which tends to absorb all the others - the bourgeoisie. As the clergy has always been divisive, and nowadays tends to separate men even further into a very powerful and wealthy minority and a sad and rather wretched majority, so likewise the bourgeoisie, with its various social and political organizations in industry, agriculture, banking, and commerce, as well as in all administrative, financial, judiciary, education, police, and military functions of the State tend increasingly to weld all of these into a really dominant oligarchy on the one hand, and on the other hand into an enormous mass of more or less hopeless creatures, defrauded creatures who live in a perpetual illusion, steadily and inevitably pushed down into the proletariat by the irresistible force of the present economic development, and reduced to serving as blind tools of this all-powerful oligarchy. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The abolition of the Church and the State should be the first and indispensable condition for the real enfranchisement of society which can and should reorganize itself not from the top down according to an ideal plan dressed up by wise men or scholars nor by decrees promulgated by some dictatorial power or even by a national assembly elected through universal suffrage. Such a system, as I have already said, would inevitably lead to the creation of a new state and, consequently, to the formation of a ruling aristocracy, that is, an entire class of persons who have nothing in common with the masses. And, of course, this class would exploit and subject the masses, under the pretext of serving the common welfare or saving the State. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The future social organization should be carried out from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations, then going on to the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation. It is only then that the true, life-giving social order of liberty and general welfare will come into being, a social order which, far from restricting, will affirm and reconcile the interests of individuals and of society. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> It is said that the harmony and universal solidarity of individuals with society can never be attained in practice because their interests, being antagonistic, can never be reconciled. To this objection I reply that if these interests have never as yet come to mutual accord, it was because the State has sacrificed the interests of the majority for the benefit of a privileged minority. That is why this famous incompatibility, this conflict of personal interests with those of society, is nothing but a fraud, a political lie, born of the theological lie which invented the doctrine of original sin in order to dishonor man and destroy his self-respect. The same false idea concerning irreconcilable interests was also fostered by the dreams of metaphysics which, as we know, is close kin to theology. Metaphysics, failing to recognize the social character of human nature, looked upon society as a mechanical and purely artificial aggregate of individuals, suddenly brought together in the name of some formal or secret compact concluded freely or under the influence of a superior power. Before uniting in society, these individuals, endowed with some sort of immortal soul, enjoyed complete liberty, according to the metaphysicians. We are convinced that all the wealth of man's intellectual, moral, and material development, as well as his apparent independence, is the product of his life in society. Outside society, not only would he not be a free man, he would not even become genuinely human, a being conscious of himself, the only being who thinks and speaks. Only the combination of intelligence and collective labor was able to force man out of that savage and brutish state which constituted his original nature, or rather the starting point for his further development. We are profoundly convinced that the entire life of men - their interests, tendencies, needs, illusions, even stupidities, as well as very bit of violence, injustice, and seemingly voluntary activity - merely represent the result of inevitable societal forces. People cannot reject the idea of mutual independence, nor can they deny the reciprocal influence and uniformity exhibiting the manifestations of external nature. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> In nature herself, this marvelous correlation and interdependence of phenomena certainly is not produced without struggle. On the contrary, the harmony of the forces of nature appears only as the result of a continual struggle, which is the real condition of life and of movement. In nature, as in society, order without struggle is death. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> If order is natural and possible in the universe, it is only because the universe is not governed according to some pre imagined system imposed by a supreme will. The theological hypothesis of divine legislation leads to an obvious absurdity, to the negation not only of all order but of nature herself. Natural laws are real only in that they are inherent in nature; that is, they are not established by any authority. These laws are but simple manifestations, or rather continuous variations, of the uniformities constituting what we call 'nature.' Human intelligence and its science have observed them, have checked them experimentally, assembled them into a system and called them laws. But nature as such knows no laws. She acts unconsciously; she represents in herself the infinite variety of phenomena which appear and repeat themselves inevitably. This inevitability of action is the reason the universal order can and does exist. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> Such an order is also apparent in human society, which seems to have evolved in an allegedly anti natural way but actually is determined by the natural animal's needs and his capacity for thinking that have contributed a special element to his development - a completely natural element, by the way, in the sense that men, like everything that exists, represent the material product of the union and action of natural forces. This special element is reason, the captivity for generalization and abstraction, thanks to which man is able to project himself in his thought, examining and observing himself like a strange, eternal object. By lifting himself in thought above himself, and above the world around him, he reaches the representation of perfect abstraction the absolute void. And this absolute is nothing less than his capacity for abstraction, which disdains all that exists and finds its repose in attaining complete negation. This is the ultimate limit of the highest abstraction of the mind; this absolute nothingness is God. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> This is the meaning and the historical foundation of every theological doctrine. As they did not understand the nature and the material causes of their own thinking, and did not even grasp the conditions or natural laws underlying such thinking, these early men and early societies had not the slightest suspicion that their absolute notions were simply the result of their own capacity for formulating abstract ideas. Hence they viewed these ideas, drawn from nature, as real objects, next to which nature herself ceased to amount to anything. They began to worship their fictions, their improbably notions of the absolute, and to honor them. But since they felt the need of giving some concrete form to the abstract idea of nothingness or of God, they created the concept of divinity and, furthermore, endowed it with all the qualities and powers, good and evil, which they found only in nature and in society. Such was the origin and historical development of all religions, from fetishism on down to Christianity. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> We do not intend to undertake a study of the history of religious, theological, and metaphysical absurdities or to discuss the procession of all the divine incarnations and visions created by centuries of barbarism. We all know that superstition brought disaster and caused rivers of blood and tears to flow. All these revolting aberrations of poor mankind were historical, inevitable stages in the normal growth and evolution of social organizations. Such aberrations engendered the fatal idea, which dominated men's imagination, that the universe was governed by a supernatural power and will. Centuries came and went, and societies grew accustomed to this idea to such an extent that they finally destroyed any urge toward or capacity to achieve further progress which arose in their midst. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> The lust for power of a few individuals originally, and of several social classes later, established slavery and conquest as the dominant principle, and implanted this terrible idea of divinity in the heart of society. Thereafter no society was viewed as feasible without these two institutions, the Church and the State, at its base. These two social scourges are defended by all their doctrinaire apologists. </p> <p style="text-align: justify;"> No sooner did these institutions appear in the world than two ruling classes - the priests and the aristocrats - promptly organized themselves and lost no time in indoctrinating the enslaved people with the idea of the utility, indispensability, and sacredness of the Church and of the State. </p>anarkho minahasahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03413204462560131485noreply@blogger.com0