While covering some of the same ground as Kropotkin’s justly famous Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Anarchism, these extracts from Modern Science and Anarchism place far more stress upon the class struggle origins of anarchism, the birth of revolutionary anarchism in the First International and its role in the labour movement. These excerpts are from the revised edition published by Freedom Press in 1912.
The Origin of Anarchism
Anarchy does not draw its origin from any scientific researches, or from any system of philosophy. Sociological sciences are still far from having acquired the same degree of accuracy as physics or chemistry. Even in the study of climate and weather (in Meteorology), we are not yet able to predict a month or even a week beforehand what weather we are going to have; consequently, it would be foolish to pretend that with the aid of such a young science as Sociology is, dealing moreover with infinitely more complicated things than wind and rain, we could scientifically predict events. We must not forget either that scientific men are but ordinary men, and that the majority of them belong to the leisured class, and consequently share the prejudices of this class; most of them are even in the pay of the State. It is, therefore, quite evident that Anarchy does not come from universities.
Like Socialism in general, and like all other social movements, Anarchism originated among the people, and it will preserve its vitality and creative force so long only as it remains a movement of the people.
From all times, two currents of thought and action have been in conflict in the midst of human societies. On the one hand, the masses, the people, worked out, by their way of life, a number of necessary institutions in order to make social existence possible, to maintain peace, to settle quarrels, and to practise mutual aid in all circumstances that required combined effort. Tribal customs among savages, the village communities, later on industrial guilds in the cities of the Middle Ages, the first elements of international law that these cities elaborated to settle their mutual relations; these and many other institutions were developed and worked out, not by legislation, but by the creative spirit of the masses.
On the other hand, there have always flourished among men, magi, shamans, wizards, rain-makers, oracles, and priests, who were the founders and the keepers of a rudimentary knowledge of Nature, and of the first elements of worship (worship of the sun, the moon, the forces of Nature, ancestor worship). Knowledge and superstition went then hand in hand—the first rudiments of science and the beginnings of all arts and crafts being thoroughly interwoven with magic, the formulae and rites of which were carefully concealed from the uninitiated. By the side of these earliest representatives of religion and science, there were also the experts in ancient customs—those men, like the brehons of Ireland, who kept in their memories the precedents of law. And there were also the chiefs of the military bands, who were supposed to possess the magic secrets of success in warfare.
These three groups of men formed among themselves secret societies for the keeping and transmission (after a long and painful initiation) of the secrets of their knowledge and crafts, and if, at times, they opposed each other, they generally agreed in the long run; they leagued together and upheld one another in different ways, in order to be able to command the masses, to reduce them to obedience, to govern them, and to make them work for them.
It is evident that Anarchy represents the first of these two currents, that is to say, the creative, constructive force of the masses, who elaborated common-law institutions in order to defend themselves against a domineering minority. It is also by the creative and constructive force of the people, aided by the whole strength of modern science and technique, that today Anarchy strives to set up institutions that are indispensable to the free development of society, in opposition to those who put their hope in laws made by governing minorities.
We can therefore say that from all times there have been Anarchists and Statists.
Moreover, we always find that institutions, even the best of them, that were built up to maintain equality, peace, and mutual aid, become petrified as they grow old. They lose their original purpose, they fall under the domination of an ambitious minority, and gradually they become an obstacle to the ulterior development of society. Then individuals, more or less isolated, rebel against these institutions. But while some of these discontented, who rebel against an institution that has become irksome, strive to modify it for the common welfare, and above all to overthrow the guilds, etc., others strive only to set themselves outside and above the social institutions altogether, in order to dominate the other members of society and to enrich themselves at society’s expense.
All really serious political, religious, economic reformers have belonged to the first of the two categories; and among them there have always been individuals who, without waiting for all their fellow citizens, or even a minority of them, to be imbued with similar ideas, strove to incite more or less numerous groups against oppression, or advanced alone if they had no following. There were Revolutionists in all times known to history.
However, these Revolutionists appeared under two different aspects. Some of them, while rebelling against the authority that oppressed society, in nowise tried to destroy this authority; they simply strove to secure it for themselves. Instead of a power that had grown oppressive, they sought to constitute a new power, of which they would be the holders, and they promised, often in good faith, that the new authority, handed over to them, would have the welfare of the people at heart and would be their true representative—a promise that later on was inevitably forgotten or betrayed. Thus were constituted Imperial authority in the Rome of the Caesars, ecclesiastical authority in the first centuries of our era, dictatorial power in the decaying cities of the Middle Ages, and so forth. The same line of thought brought about royal authority in Europe at the end of feudal times. Faith in an emperor “for the people,” a Caesar, is not yet dead, even in the present day.
But side by side with this authoritarian current, another current asserted itself, every time the necessity was felt of revising the established institutions. At all times, from ancient Greece till nowadays, there were individuals and currents of thought and action that sought, not to replace any particular authority by another, but to destroy the authority that had grafted itself on popular institutions, without creating a new one to take its place. They proclaimed the sovereignty of both the individual and the people, and they tried to free the popular institutions from authoritarian overgrowths; they worked to give back full liberty to the collective spirit of the masses, so that popular genius might freely reconstruct institutions of mutual aid and protection, in harmony with new needs and conditions of existence. In the cites of ancient Greece, and especially in those of the Middle Ages—Florence, Pskov, etc.—we find many examples of this kind of conflict.
We may therefore say that Jacobins and Anarchists have existed at all times among reformers and Revolutionists.
Formidable popular movements, stamped with the character of Anarchism, took place several times in the past. Villages and cities rose against the principle of government, against the supporters of the State, its tribunals, its laws, and they proclaimed the sovereignty of the rights of man. They denied all written law, and asserted that every man should govern himself according to his conscience. They thus tried to found a new society, based on the principles of equality, full liberty, and work. In the Christian movement in Judea, under Augustus, against the Roman law, the Roman State, and the morality, or rather the immorality, of that epoch, there was unquestionably much Anarchism. Little by little this movement degenerated into a Church movement, fashioned after the Hebrew Church and Imperial Rome itself, which naturally killed all that Christianity possessed of Anarchism at its outset, gave the Christian teachings a Roman form, and soon made of it the mainstay of authority, State, slavery, and oppression. The first seeds of “Opportunism” introduced into Christianity are already strong in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—or, at least, in the versions of the same that are incorporated in the New Testament.
The Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, which in the main inaugurated and brought about the Reformation, also had an Anarchist basis, but crushed by those Reformers who, under Luther’s rule, leagued with princes against the rebellious peasants, the movement was suppressed by a great massacre of peasants and the poorer citizens of the towns. Then the right wing of the Reformers degenerated little by little, till it became the compromise between its own conscience and the State which exists today under the name of Protestantism.
Thus, to summarise: Anarchism had its origin in the same creative, constructive activity of the masses which has worked out in times past all the social institutions of mankind—and in the revolts of both the individuals and the nations against the representatives of force, external to these social institutions, who had laid their hands upon these institutions and used them for their own advantage. Those of the rebels whose aim was to restore to the creative genius of the masses the necessary freedom for its creative activity. so that it work out the required new institutions, were imbued with the Anarchist spirit.
In our times, Anarchy was brought forth by the same critical and revolutionary protest which gave rise to Socialism in general. However, one portion of the Socialists, after having reached the negation of Capitalism and of society based on the subjection of labour to capital, stopped in its development at this point. They did not declare themselves against what constitutes the real strength of Capitalism: the State and its principal supports—centralisation of authority, law, always made by a minority for its own profit, and a form of justice whose chief aim is to protect Authority and Capitalism. As to Anarchism, it did not stop in its criticism before these institutions. It lifted its sacrilegious arm, not only against Capitalism, but also against these pillars of Capitalism: Law, Authority, and the State.
The Anarchist Ideal and the Preceding Revolutions
Anarchism, as we have already said, arises from the course taken by practical life.
Godwin, contemporary of the Great Revolution of 1789–93, had seen with his own eyes how the authority of the Government, created during the Revolution and by the Revolution itself, had in its turn become an obstacle to the development of the revolutionary movement. He was also aware of what went on in England under cover of Parliament: the pillage of communal lands, the sale of advantageous posts, the hunting of the children of the poor and their removal from workhouses, by agents who travelled all over England for the purpose, to the factories of Lancashire, where masses of them soon perished. And Godwin soon understood that a Government, were it even that of the Jacobin “One and Indivisible Republic,” would never be able to accomplish the necessary Social, Communistic Revolution; that a Revolutionary Government, by virtue of its being a guardian of the State, and of the privileges every State has to defend, soon becomes a hindrance to the Revolution. He understood and openly proclaimed the idea that for the triumph of the Revolution men must first get rid of their faith in Law, Authority, Unity, Order, Property, and other institutions inherited from past times when their forefathers were slaves.
The second Anarchist theorist, Proudhon, who came after Godwin, lived through the Revolution of 1848. He was able to see with his own eyes the crimes committed by the Republican Government, and at the same time convince himself of the impotence of Louis Blanc’s State Socialism. Under the recent impression of what he had seen during the Revolution of 1848, he wrote his powerful work, General Idea on the Revolution, in which he boldly proclaimed Anarchism and the abolition of the State.
And lastly, in the International Working Men’s Association the Anarchist conception also asserted itself after a Revolution—that is, after the Paris Commune of 1871. The complete revolutionary impotence of the Council of the Commune, although it contained, in a very just proportion, representatives of all the revolutionary parties of that time: Jacobins, Blanquists, and Internationalists; and the incapacity of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, which was sitting in London, and its silly, harmful pretensions to govern the Parisian movement by orders issued from England; both these lessons opened the eyes of a great number. They led several Federations of the International, and several of its prominent members, including Bakunin, to meditate on the harmfulness of every kind of authority, even when it is elected with as much freedom as that of the Commune or that of the Workers’ International.
Some months later, the decision taken by the General Council of the International at a private meeting convened in London in 1871, instead of an annual Congress, made the dangers of a Government in the International still more evident. By this baneful resolution the forces of the Association, which up till then gathered together for an economic, revolutionary struggle, for the direct action of the Labour Unions against the Capitalism of employers, were to engage in an electoral, political, and Parliamentary movement, which could but waste and destroy their real forces.
This resolution brought about open rebellion among the Latin Federations of the Association—Spanish, Italian, Jurassic, and partly Belgian—against the General Council; and from this rebellion dates the Anarchist movement which we see going on.
We thus see that the Anarchist movement was renewed each time it received an impression from some great practical lesson: it derived its origin from the teachings of life itself. But no sooner had it sprung up than it began to work out a general expression of its principles, and the theoretical and scientific basis of its teachings. Scientific—not in the sense of adopting an incomprehensible slang, or clinging to ancient metaphysics, but in the sense of finding a basis for its principles in the natural sciences of the time, and of becoming one of their departments.
At the same time it worked out its own ideal.
No struggle can be successful if it is unconscious, if it has no definite and concrete aim. No destruction of existing things is possible if men have not already settled for themselves, during the struggles leading to the destruction, and during the period of destruction itself, what is going to take the place of that which is to be destroyed. Even a theoretical criticism of what exists is not possible without one picturing to oneself a more or less exact image of that which he desires to see in its place. Consciously or unconsciously, the ideal, the conception of something better, always grows in the mind of whoever criticises existing institutions.
It is the more so with men of action. To tell men: “Let us first destroy Capitalism and Autocracy, and then we shall see what we shall put in their stead,” is but to deceive oneself and to deceive others. Never has a real force been created by deception. In fact, even the one who deprecates ideals and sneers at them always has, nevertheless, some conception of what he would like to see in lieu of what he is attacking. For example, while working to destroy Autocracy, some imagine an English or a German Constitution in the near future; others dream of a Republic, subject perhaps to a powerful dictatorship of their party, or a Monarchical Republic as in France, or a Federative Republic as in the United States; while there is now a third party which conceives a still greater limitation of State power, a still greater liberty for the cities, for the Communes, for the workers’ Unions, and for all sorts of groups united among themselves by free, temporary federation, than can be obtained in any Republic.
And when people attack Capitalism, they always have a certain conception, a vague or definite idea, of what they hope to see in the place of Capitalism: State Capitalism, or some sort of State Communism, or a federation of free Communist associations for the production, the exchange, and the consumption of commodities.
Each party has thus its own conception of the future—its ideal which enables it to pronounce its own judgement on all facts occurring in the political and economic life of nations, and inspires it in its search for suitable means of action, in order the better to march towards its aim. It is, therefore, natural that Anarchism, although it has originated in every-day struggles, has also worked to elaborate its ideal. And this ideal, this aim, these plans, soon separated the Anarchists, in their means of action, from all political parties, as also, in a very great measure, from the Socialist parties which have thought it possible to keep the ancient Roman and Canonical idea of the State and to transport it into the future society of their dreams.
Anarchism
It is seen from the foregoing that a variety of considerations, historical, ethnological, and economical, have brought the Anarchists to conceive a society, very different from what is considered as its ideal by the authoritarian political parties. The Anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society, and by a sum of social customs and habits—not petrified by law, routine, or superstition, but continually developing and continually readjusted, in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals.
No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallisation and immobility, but a continual evolution—such as we see in Nature. Free play for the individual, for the full development of his individual gifts—for his individualisation. In other words, no actions are imposed upon the individual by a fear of punishment; none is required from him by society, but those which receive his free acceptance. In a society of equals this would be quite sufficient for preventing those unsociable actions that might be harmful to other individuals and to society itself, and for favouring the steady moral growth of that society.
This is the conception developed and advocated by the Anarchists.
[…]
When we look into the origin of the Anarchist conception of society, we see that it has had a double origin: the criticism, on the one side, of the hierarchical organisations and the authoritarian conceptions of society; and on the other side, the analysis of the tendencies that are seen in the progressive movements of mankind, both in the past, and still more so at the present time.
From the remotest, Stone-Age antiquity, men must have realised the evils that resulted from letting some of them acquire personal authority—even if they were the most intelligent, the bravest, or the wisest. Consequently, they developed, in the primitive clan, the village community, the medieval guild (neighbours’ guilds, arts and crafts’ guilds, traders’, hunters’, and so on), and finally in the free medieval city, such institutions as enabled them to resist the encroachments upon their life and fortunes both of those strangers who conquered them, and those clansmen of their own who endeavoured to establish their personal authority. The same popular tendency was self-evident in the religious movements of the masses in Europe during the earlier portions of the Reform movement and its Hussite and Anabaptist forerunners. At a much later period, namely, in 1793, the same current of thought and of action found its expression in the strikingly independent, freely federated activity of the “Sections” of Paris and all great cities and many small “Communes” during the French Revolution.[57] And later still, the Labour combinations which developed in England and France, notwithstanding Draconic laws, as soon as the factory system began to grow up, were all outcome of the same popular resistance to the growing power of the few—the capitalists in this case.
These were the main popular Anarchist currents which we know of in history, and it is self-evident that these movements could not but find their expression in literature. So they did, beginning with Lao-tse in China, and some of the earliest Greek philosophers (Aristippus and the Cynics; Zeno and some of the Stoics). However, being born in the masses, and not in any centres of learning, these popular movements, both when they were revolutionary and when they were deeply constructive, found little sympathy among the learned men—far less than the authoritarian hierarchical tendencies.
The Greek Stoic, Zeno, already advocated a free community, without any government, which he opposed to the State Utopia of Plato. He already brought into evidence the instinct of sociability, which Nature had developed in opposition to the egotism of the self-preservation instinct. He foresaw a time when men would unite across the frontiers and constitute the Cosmos, and would have no need of laws, law-courts, or temples—and no need either of money for their exchanges of mutual services. His very wording seems to have been strikingly similar to that now in use amongst Anarchists.[58]
The Bishop of Alba, Marco Girolamo Vida, developed, in 1553, similar ideas against the State, its laws, and its “supreme injustice,” as also did the early precursors of Rationalism in Armenia (in the ninth century), the Hussites (especially Chojecki, in the fifteenth century), and the early Anabaptists.
Rabelais in the first half of the sixteenth century, Fénélon at the end of it, and especially the Encyclopaedist Diderot at the end of the eighteenth century, developed the same ideas, which found, as has just been mentioned, some practical expression during the French Revolution.
But it was Godwin, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, who stated in 1793 in a quite definite form the political and economic principles of Anarchism. He did not use the word “Anarchy” itself, but he very forcibly laid down its principles, boldly attacking the laws, proving the uselessness of the State, and maintaining that only with the abolition of Courts true Justice—the only real foundation of all society—would become possible. As regards property, he openly advocated Communism.[59]
Proudhon was the first to use the word “An-archy” (No-Government) and to submit to a powerful criticism the fruitless efforts of men to give themselves such a Government as would prevent the rich ones from dominating the poor, and at the same time always remain under the control of the governed ones.[60] The repeated attempts of France, since 1793, at giving herself such a Constitution, and the failure of the Revolution of 1848, gave him rich material for his criticism.
Being an enemy of all forms of State Socialism, of which the Communists of those years (the “forties” and “fifties” of the nineteenth century) represented a mere sub-division, Proudhon fiercely attacked all such attempts, and taking Robert Owen’s system of labour cheques representing hours of labour, he developed a conception of Mutualism, in which any sort of political Government would be useless.
The values of all the commodities being measured by the amount of labour necessary to produce them, all the exchanges between the producers could be carried on by means of a national bank, which would accept payment in labour cheques—a Clearing House establishing the daily balance of exchanges between the thousands of branches of this bank.
The services exchanged by different men would thus be equivalent, and as the bank would be able to lend the labour cheques’ money without interest, and every association would be able to borrow it on payment of only 1 per cent. or less to cover the administration costs, capital would lose its pernicious power; it could be used no more as an instrument of exploitation.
Proudhon gave to the system of Mutualism a very full development in connection with his anti-Government and anti-State ideas; but it must be said that the Mutualist portion of his programme had been developed in England already by William Thompson (he was a Mutualist prior to his becoming a Communist) and the English followers of Thompson—John Gray (1825, 1831) and J. F. Bray (1839).
[…]
Such was the growth of Anarchist ideas, from the French Revolution and Godwin to Proudhon. The next step was made within the great “International Working Men’s Association,” which so much inspired the working classes with hope, and the middle classes with terror, in the years 1868–1870—just before the Franco-German War.
That this Association was not founded by Marx, or any other personality, as the hero-worshippers would like us to believe, is self-evident. It was the outcome of the meeting, at London, in 1862, of a delegation of French working men, who had come to visit the Second International Exhibition, with representatives of British Trade Unions and Radicals, who received that delegation.
[…]
The Association began to spread rapidly in the Latin countries. Its fighting power soon became menacing, while at the same time its Federations and its yearly Congresses offered to the working men the opportunity of discussing and bringing into shape the ideas of a Social Revolution.
The near approach of such a Revolution was generally expected at that time, but no definite ideas as to its possible form and its immediate steps were forthcoming. On the contrary, several conflicting currents of Socialist thought met together in the International.
The main idea of the Association was a direct struggle of Labour against Capital in the economic field—i.e., the emancipation of Labour, not by middle-class legislation, but by the working men themselves.
[…]
And now came the terrible Franco-German War, into which Napoleon III and his advisers madly rushed, in order to save the Empire from the rapidly advancing revolution; and with it came the crushing defeat of France, the Provisory Government of Gambetta and Thiers, and the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Saint-Étienne in France [1871], and at Barcelona and Carthagena in Spain [1873]. And these popular insurrections brought into evidence what the political aspect of a Social Revolution ought to be.
Not a Democratic Republic, as was said in 1848, but the free, independent Communist Commune.
Of course, the Paris Commune itself suffered from the confusion of ideas as to the economic and political steps to be taken by the Revolution, which prevailed, as we saw, in the International. Both the Jacobinists and the Communalists—i.e., the centralists and the federalists—were represented in the uprising, and necessarily they came into conflict with each other. The most warlike elements were the Jacobinists and the Blanquists, but the economic, Communist ideals of Babeuf had already faded among their middle-class leaders. They treated the economic question as a secondary one, which would be attended to later on, after the triumph of the Commune, and this idea prevailed. But the crushing defeat which soon followed, and the bloodthirsty revenge taken by the middle classes, proved once more that the triumph of a popular Commune was materially impossible without a parallel triumph of the people in the economic field.
For the Latin nations, the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Carthagena and Barcelona, settled the ideas of the revolutionary proletariat.
This was the form that the Social Revolution must take—the independent Commune. Let all the country and all the world be against it but once its inhabitants have decided that they will communalise the consumption of commodities, their exchange, and their production, they must realise it among themselves. And in so doing, will find such forces as never could be called into life and to the service of a great cause, if they attempted to take in the sway of the Revolution the whole country: including its most backward or indifferent regions. Better openly to fight such strongholds of reaction than to drag them as so many chains riveted to the feet of the fighter.
More than that. We made one step more. We understood that if no central Government was needed to rule the independent Communes, if the national Government is thrown overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation, then a central municipal Government becomes equally useless and noxious. The same federative principle would do within the Commune.
The uprising of the Paris Commune thus brought with it the solution of a question which tormented every true Revolutionist. Twice had France tried to bring about some sort of a Socialist revolution, by imposing it through a Central Government, more or less disposed to accept it: in 1793–94, when she tried to introduce l’égalité de fait—real, economic equality—by means of strong Jacobinist measures; and in 1848, when she tried to impose a “Democratic Socialist Republic.” And each time she failed. But, now a solution was indicated: the free Commune do it on its own territory, and with this grew up a new ideal—Anarchy.
We understood then that at the bottom of Proudhon’s Idée Générale [de] la Revolution au Dix-neuviéme Siècle (unfortunately, not yet translated into English[61]) lay a deeply practical idea—that of Anarchy. And in the Latin countries the thought of the more advanced men began to work in this direction.
Alas! in Latin countries only: in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the Wallonic part of Belgium. The Germans, on the contrary, drew from their victory over France quite another lesson and quite different ideals—the worship of the centralised State.
The centralised State, hostile even to national tendencies of independence; the power of centralisation and a strong central authority—these were the lessons they drew from the victories of the German Empire, and to these lessons they cling even now, without limit, that this was only a victory of a military mass, of the universal obligatory military service of the Germans, over the recruiting system of the French and over the rottenness of the second Napoleonic Empire approaching a revolution which would have benefited mankind, if it were not hindered by the German invasion.
In the Latin countries, then, the lesson of the Paris and the Carthagena Communes laid the foundation for the development of Anarchy. And the authoritarian tendencies of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, which soon became evident and worked fatally against the unity of action of the great Association, still more reinforced the Anarchist current of thought. The more so as that Council, led by Marx, Engels, and some French Blanquist refugees—all pure Jacobinists—used its powers to make a coup d’état in the International. It substituted in the programme of the Association Parliamentary political action in lieu of the economic struggle of Labour against Capital, which hitherto had been the essence of the International. And in this way it provoked an open revolt against its authority in the Spanish, Italian, Jurassic, and East Belgian Federations, and among a certain section of the English Internationalists.
In Mikhail Bakunin, the Anarchist tendency, now growing within the International, found a powerful, gifted, and inspired exponent; while round Bakunin and his Jura friends gathered a small circle of talented young Italians and Spaniards, who further developed his ideas. Largely drawing upon his wide knowledge of history and philosophy, Bakunin established in a series of powerful pamphlets and letters the leading principles of modern Anarchism.
The complete abolition of the State, with all its organisation and ideals, was the watchword he boldly proclaimed. The State has been in the past a historical necessity, which grew out of the authority won by the religious castes. But its complete extinction is now, in its turn, a historical necessity, because the State represents the negation of liberty, and spoils even what it undertakes to do for the sake of general well-being. All legislation made within the State, even when it issues from the so-called universal suffrage, has to be repudiated, because it always has been made with regard to the interests of the privileged classes. Every nation, every region, every commune must be absolutely free to organise itself, politically and economically, as it likes, so long as it is not a menace to its neighbours. “Federalism” and “autonomy” are not enough. These are only words, used to mask the State authority. Full independence of the Communes, their free federation, and the Social Revolution within the Communes—this was, he proved, the ideal now rising before our civilisation from the mists of the past. The individual understands that he will be really free in proportion only as all the others round him become free.
As to his economic conceptions, Bakunin was at heart a Communist; but, in common with his Federalist comrades of the International, and as a concession to the antagonism to Communism that the authoritarian Communists had inspired in France, he described himself as a “Collectivist Anarchist.” But, of course, he was not a “Collectivist” in the sense of Vidal or Pecqueur, or of their modern followers, who simply aim at “State Capitalism”; he understood it in the above-mentioned sense of not determining in advance what form of distribution the producers should adopt in their different groups—whether the Communist solution, or the labour cheques, or equal salaries, or any other method. And with these views, he was an ardent preacher of the Social Revolution, the near approach of which was foreseen then by all Socialists, and which he foretold in fiery words.[62]
[…]
In proportion as the workers of Europe and America began to know each other directly, without the intermediary of Governments, they grew more and more convinced of their own forces and of their capacity for rebuilding society on new bases. They saw that if the people resumed possession of the land and of all that is required for producing all sorts of necessaries of life, and if the associations of men and who would work on the land, in the factories, in the mines, and so on, became themselves the managers of production, they would be able, in such conditions, to produce with the greatest ease all that is necessary for the life of society, so as to guarantee well-being for all, and also some leisure for all. The recent progress in science and technics rendered this point more and more evident. Besides, in a vast international organisation of producers and consumers, the exchange of produce could be organised with the same ease—once it would not be done for the enrichment of the few.
At the same time, the ever-growing thinking portion of the workers saw that the State, with its traditions, its hierarchy, and its narrow nationalism, would always stand in the way of the development of such an organisation; and the experiments made in different countries with the view of partially alleviating the social evils within the present middle-class State proved more and more the fallacy of such tactics.
The wider the sphere of those experiments, the more evident it was that the machinery of the State could not be utilised as an instrument of emancipation. The State is an institution which was developed for the very purpose of establishing monopolies in favour of the slave and serf owners, the landed proprietors, canonic and laic, the merchant guilds and the moneylenders, the kings, the military commanders, the “noble-men,” and finally, in the nineteenth century, the industrial capitalists, whom the State supplied with “hands” driven away from the land. Consequently the State would be, to say the least, a useless institution, once these monopolies ceased to exist. Life would be simplified, once the mechanism created for the exploitation of the poor by the rich would have been done away with.
The idea of independent Communes for the territorial organisation, and of federations of Trade Unions for the organisation of men in accordance with their different functions, gave a concrete conception of society regenerated by a social revolution. There remained only to add to these two modes of organisation a third, which we saw rapidly developing during the last fifty years, since a little liberty was conquered in this direction: the thousands upon thousands of free combines and societies growing up everywhere for the satisfaction of all possible and imaginable needs, economic, sanitary, and educational; for mutual protection, for the propaganda of ideas, for art, for amusement, and so on. All of them covering each other, and all of them always ready to meet the new needs by new organisations and adjustments.
[…]
Passing now to the economic views of Anarchists, three different conceptions must be distinguished.
So long as Socialism was understood in its wide, generic, and true sense—as an effort to abolish the exploitation of Labour by Capital—the Anarchists were marching hand-in-hand with the Socialists of that time. But they were compelled to separate from them when the Socialists began to say that there is no possibility of abolishing capitalist exploitation within the lifetime of our generation: that during that phase of economic evolution which we are now living through we have only to mitigate the exploitation, and to impose upon the capitalists certain legal limitations.
Contrarily to this tendency of the present-day Socialists, we maintain that already now, without waiting for the coming of new phases and forms of the capitalist exploitation of Labour, we must work for its abolition. We must, already now, tend to transfer all that is needed for production—the soil, the mines, the factories, the means of communication, and the means of existence, too—from the hands of the individual capitalist into those of the communities of producers and consumers.
As for the political organisation—i.e., the forms of the commonwealth in the midst of which an economic revolution could be accomplished—we entirely differ from all the sections of State Socialists in that we do not see in the system of State Capitalism, which is now preached under the name of Collectivism, a solution of the social question. We see in the organisation of the posts and telegraphs, in the State railways, and the like—which are represented as illustrations of a society without capitalists—nothing but a new, perhaps improved, but still undesirable form of the Wage System. We even think that such a solution of the social problem would so much run against the present libertarian tendencies of civilised mankind, that it simply would be unrealisable.
We maintain that the State organisation, having been the force to which the minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges. The lessons of history tell us that a new form of economic life always calls forth a new form of political organisation; and a Socialist society (whether Communist or Collectivist) cannot be an exception to this rule. Just as the Churches cannot be utilised for freeing man from his old superstitions, and just as the feeling of human solidarity will have to find other channels for its expression besides the Churches, so also the economic and political liberation of man will have to create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those established by the State.
Consequently, the chief aim of Anarchism is to awaken those constructive powers of the labouring masses of the people which at all great moments of history came forward to accomplish the necessary changes, and which, aided by the now accumulated knowledge, will accomplish the change that is called forth by all the best men of our own time.
This is also why the Anarchists refuse to accept the functions of legislators or servants of the State. We know that the social revolution will not be accomplished by means of laws. Laws can only follow the accomplished facts; and even if they honestly do follow them—which usually is not the case—a law remains a dead letter so long as there are not on the spot the living forces required for making of the tendencies expressed in the law an accomplished fact.
On the other hand, since the times of the International Working Men’s Association, the Anarchists have always advised taking an active part in those workers’ organisations which carry on the direct struggle of Labour against Capital and its protector,—the State.
Such a struggle, they say, better than any other indirect means, permits the worker to obtain some temporary improvements in the present conditions of work, while it opens his eyes to the evil that is done by Capitalism and the State that supports it, and wakes up his thoughts concerning the possibility of organising consumption, production, and exchange without the intervention of the capitalist and the State.
The opinions of the Anarchists concerning the form which the remuneration of labour may take in a society freed from the yoke of Capital and State still remain divided.
To begin with, all are agreed in repudiating the new form of the Wage System which would be established if the State became the owner of all the land, the mines, the factories, the railways, and so on, and the great organiser and manager of agriculture and all the industries. If these powers were added to those which the State already possesses (taxes, defence of the territory, subsidised religions, etc.), we should create a new tyranny, even more terrible than the old one.
The greater number of Anarchists accept the Communist solution. They see that the only form of Communism that would be acceptable in a civilised society is one which would exist without the continual interference of Government, i.e., the Anarchist form. And they realise also that an Anarchist society of a large size would be impossible, unless it would begin by guaranteeing to all its members a certain minimum of well-being produced in common. Communism and Anarchy thus complete each other.
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As to Anarchist Communism, it is certain that this solution wins more and more ground nowadays among those working men who try to get a clear conception as to the forthcoming revolutionary action. The Syndicalist and Trade Union movements, which permit the working men to realise their solidarity and to feel the community of their interests, much better than any elections, prepare the way for these conceptions. And it is hardly too much to hope that when some serious movement for the emancipation of Labour begins in Europe and America, attempts will be made, at least in the Latin countries, in the Anarchist Communist direction—much deeper than anything that was done by the French nation in 1793–94.
A Few Conclusions of Anarchism
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All Political Economy takes, in an Anarchist’s view, an aspect quite different from the aspect given to it by the economists, who, being unaccustomed to use the scientific, inductive method, even do not realise what a “natural law” is, although they very much like to use this expression. They even do not notice the conditional character of all so-called natural “laws.”
In fact, every natural law always means this:—“If such and such conditions are at work, the result will be this and that.—If a straight line crosses another line, so as to make equal angles on both its sides at the crossing point, the consequences will be such and such.—If those movements only which go on in the interstellar space act upon two bodies, and there is not, at a distance which is not infinitely great, a third, or a fourth body acting upon the two, then the centres of gravity of these two bodies will begin to move towards each other at such a speed” (this is the law of gravitation). And so on.
Always, there is an if—a condition to be fulfilled.
Consequently, all the so-called laws and theories of political economy are nothing but assertions of the following kind:
“Supposing that there always are in a given country a considerable number of people who cannot exist one month, or even one fortnight, without earning a salary and accepting for that purpose the conditions which the State will impose upon them (in the shape of taxes, land-rent, and so on), or those which will be offered to them by those whom the State recognises as owners of the soil, the factories, the railways, etc.—such and such consequences will follow.”
Up till now, the academic economists have always simply enumerated what happens under such conditions, without specifying and analysing the conditions themselves. Even if they were mentioned, they were forgotten immediately, to be spoken of no more.
This is bad enough, but there is in their teachings something worse than that. The economists represent the facts which result from these conditions as laws—as fatal, immutable laws. And they call that Science.
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On the other side, the State, considered as a political power, State-Justice, the Church, and Capitalism are facts and conceptions which we cannot separate from each other. In the course of history these institutions have developed, supporting and reinforcing each other.
They are connected with each other—not as mere accidental coincidences. They are linked together by the links of cause and effect.
The State is, for us, a society of mutual insurance between the landlord, the military commander, the judge, the priest, and later on the capitalist, in order to support each other’s authority over the people, and for exploiting the poverty of the masses and getting rich themselves.
Such was the origin of the State; such was its history; and such is its present essence.
Consequently, to imagine that Capitalism may be abolished while the State is maintained, and with the aid of the State—while the latter was founded for forwarding the development of Capitalism and was always growing in power and solidity, in proportion as the power of Capitalism grew up—to cherish such an illusion is as unreasonable, in our opinion, as it was to expect the emancipation of Labour from the Church, or from Caesarism or Imperialism. Certainly, in the first half of the nineteenth century, there have been many Socialists who had such dreams; but to live in the same dreamland now that we enter in the twentieth century, is really too childish.
A new form of economic organisation will necessarily require a new form of political structure. And, whether the change be accomplished suddenly, by a revolution, or slowly, by the way of a gradual evolution, the two changes, political and economic, must go on abreast, band in hand.
Each step towards economic freedom, each victory won over Capitalism will be at the same time a step towards political liberty—towards liberation from yoke of the State by means of free agreement, territorial, professional, and functional. And each step made towards taking from the State any one of its powers and attributes will be helping the masses to win a victory over Capitalism.
The Means of Action
It is self-evident that if the Anarchists differ so much in their methods of investigation and in their fundamental principles, both from the academic men of science and from their Social Democratic colleagues, they must equally differ from them in their means of action.
Holding the opinions we do about Law and the State, we evidently cannot see a source of Progress, and still less an approach to the required social changes, in an ever-growing submission of the individual to the State.
We cannot either go on saying, as superficial critics of present society often say when they require the State management of industries, that modern Capitalism has its origin in an “anarchy of production” due to the “non intervention of the State” and to the Liberal doctrine of “let things alone” (laissez faire, laissez passer). This would amount to saying, that the State has practised this doctrine, while in reality it never has practised it. We know, on the contrary, that while all Governments have given the capitalists and monopolists full liberty to enrich themselves with the underpaid labour of working men reduced to misery, they have never, nowhere given the working men the liberty of opposing that exploitation. Never has any Government applied the “leave things alone” principle to the exploited masses. It reserved it for the exploiters only.
In France, even under the terrible “revolutionary” (i.e., Jacobinist) Convention, strikes were treated as a “coalition”—as “a conspiracy to form a State within the State”—and punished with death. So we need not speak after that of the anti-Labour legislation of the Napoleonic Empire, the monarchic Restoration, even the present middle-class Republic.
In England, working men were hanged for striking, under the pretext of “intimidation,” as late as in 1813; and in 1834 working men were transported to Australia for having dared to found, with Robert Owen, a “National Trades’ Union.” In the “sixties” strikers were sent to hard labour for picketing, under the pretext of thus defending “freedom of labour”; and not further back than 1903, as a result of the Taff Vale decision, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants had to pay £26,000 to a railway company for having declared a strike.
Need we speak after that of France, where the right of constituting Labour Unions and peasant Syndicates was obtained only in 1884, after the Anarchist agitation which broke out at Lyon and among the miners in 1883; or of Switzerland, where strikers were shot at Airolo during the boring of the St. Gothard tunnel [in 1875]; to say nothing of Germany, Spain, Russia, and the United States, where State intervention in favour of capitalist misrule was still worse?
On the other side, we have only to remember how every State reduces the peasants and the industrial workers to a life of misery, by means of taxes, and through the monopolies it creates in favour of the landlords, the cotton lords, the railway magnates, the publicans, and the like. We have only to think how the communal possession of the land was destroyed in this country by Enclosure Acts, or how at this very moment it is destroyed in Russia, in order to supply “hands” to the landlords and the great factories.
And we need only to look round, to see how everywhere in Europe and America the States are constituting monopolies in favour of capitalists at home, and still more in conquered lands, such as Egypt, Tonkin, the Transvaal, and so on.
What, then, is the use of talking, with Marx, about the “primitive accumulation”—as if this “push” given to capitalists were a thing of the past? In reality, new monopolies have been granted every year till now by the Parliaments of all nations to railway, tramway, gas, water, and maritime transport companies, schools, institutions, and so on. The State’s “push” is, and has ever been, the first foundation of all great capitalist fortunes.
In short, nowhere has the system of “non-intervention of the State” ever existed. Everywhere the State has been, and is, the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses. Nowhere, since States have grown up, have the masses had the freedom of resisting the oppression by capitalists. The few rights they have now they have gained only by determination and endless sacrifice.
To speak therefore of non-intervention of the State may be all right for middle-class economists, who try to persuade the workers that their misery is “a law of Nature.” But—how can Socialists use such language? The State has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter. It has always granted him protection in robbery, given aid and support for further enrichment. And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions—the chief mission—of the State.
The State was established for the precise purpose of imposing the rule of the landowners, the employers of industry, the warrior class, and the clergy upon the peasants on the land and the artisans in the city. And the rich perfectly well know that if the machinery of the State ceased to protect them, their power over the labouring classes would be gone immediately.
Socialism, we have said—whatever form it may take in its evolution towards Communism—must find its own form of political organisation. Serfdom and Absolute Monarchy have always marched hand-in-hand. The one rendered the other a necessity. The same is true of Capitalist rule, whose political form is Representative Government, either in a Republic or in a Monarchy. This is why Socialism cannot utilise Representative Government as a weapon for liberating Labour, just as it cannot utilise the Church and its theory of divine right, or Imperialism and Caesarism, with its theory of hierarchy of functionaries, for the same purpose.
A new form of political organisation has to be worked out the moment that Socialist principles shall enter into our life. And it is self-evident that this new form will have to be popular, more decentralised, and nearer to the folk-mote self-government than representative government can ever be.
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Finally, being a revolutionary party, what we study in history is chiefly the genesis and the gradual development of previous revolutions. In these studies we try to free history from the State interpretation which has been given to it by State historians. We try to reconstitute in it the true role of the people, the advantages it obtained from a revolution, the ideas it launched into circulation, and the faults of tactics it committed.
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Without entering here into an analysis of the different revolutionary movements, it is sufficient to say that our conception of the coming social revolution is quite different from that of a Jacobin dictatorship, or the transformation of social institutions effected by a Convention, a Parliament, or a dictator. Never has a revolution been brought about on those lines; and if the present working-class movement takes this form, it will be doomed to have no lasting result.
On the contrary, we believe that if a revolution begins, it must take the form of a widely spread popular movement, during which movement, in every town and village invaded by the insurrectionary spirit, the masses set themselves to the work of reconstructing society on new lines. The people—both the peasants and the town workers—must themselves begin the constructive work, on more or less Communist principles, without waiting for schemes and orders from above. From the very beginning of the movement they must contrive to house and to feed every one, and then set to work to produce what is necessary to feed, house, and clothe all of them.
They may not be—they are sure not to be—the majority of the nation. But if they are a respectably numerous minority of cities and villages scattered over the country, starting life on their own new Socialist lines, they will be able to win the right to pursue their own course. In all probability they will draw towards them a notable portion of the land, as was the case in France in 1793–94.
As to the Government, whether it be constituted by force, only or by election; be it “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as they used to say in France in the “forties,” and as they still say in Germany, or else an elected “Provisional Government,” or a “Convention”; we put no faith in it. We know beforehand that it will be able to do nothing to accomplish the revolution, so long as the people themselves do not accomplish the change by working out on the spot the necessary new institutions.
We say so, not because we have a personal dislike of Governments, but because the whole of history shows us that men thrown into a Government by a revolutionary wave have never been able to accomplish what was expected from them. And this is unavoidable. Because in the task of reconstructing society on new principles, separate men, however intelligent and devoted they may be, are sure to fail. The collective spirit of the masses is necessary for this purpose. Isolated men can some times find the legal expression to sum up the destruction of old social forms—when the destruction is already proceeding. At the utmost, they may widen, perhaps, the sphere of the reconstructive work, extending what is being done in a part of the country, over a larger part of the territory. But to impose the reconstruction by law is absolutely impossible, as was proved, among other examples, by the whole history of the French Revolution. Many thousands of the laws passed by the revolutionary Convention had not even been put into force when reaction came and flung those laws into the waste paper basket.
During a revolution new forms of life will always germinate on the ruins of the old forms, but no Government will ever be able to find their expression so long as these forms will not have taken a definite shape during the work itself of reconstruction which must be going on in thousands of spots at the same time. Who guessed—who, in fact, could have guessed—before 1789 the role that was going to be played by the Municipalities and the Commune of Paris in the revolutionary events of 1789–1793? It is impossible to legislate for the future. All we can do is to vaguely guess its essential tendencies and clear the road for it.
It is evident that in understanding the problem of the Social Revolution in this way, Anarchism cannot let itself be seduced by a programme that offers as its aim: “The conquest of the power now in the hands of the State.”
We know that this conquest is not possible by peaceful means. The middle class will not give up its power without a struggle. It will resist. And in proportion as Socialists will become part of the Government, and share power with the middle class, their Socialism will grow paler and paler. This is, indeed, what Socialism is rapidly doing. Were this not so, the middle classes, who are very much more powerful numerically and intellectually than most Socialists imagine them to be, would not share their power with the Socialists.
On the other hand, we also know that if an insurrection succeeded in giving to France, to England, or to Germany a provisional Socialist Government, such a Government, without the spontaneous constructive activity of the people, would be absolutely powerless; and it would soon become a hindrance and a check to the revolution.
In studying the preparatory periods of revolutions, we come to the conclusion that no revolution has had its origin in the power of resistance or the power of attack of a Parliament or any other representative body. All revolutions began among the people. None has ever appeared armed from head to foot, like Minerva rising from the brain of Jupiter. All had, besides their period of incubation, their period of evolution, during which the masses, after having formulated very modest demands in the beginning, gradually began to conceive the necessity of more and more thorough and deeper changes: they grew more bold and daring in their conceptions of the problems of the moment, they gained confidence, and, having emerged from the lethargy of despair, they widened their programme. The “humble remonstrances” they formulated at the outset grew step by step to be truly revolutionary demands.
In fact, it took France four years, from 1789 to 1793, to create a Republican minority which would be strong enough to impose itself.
As to the period of incubation, this is how we understand it.
To begin with, isolated individuals, profoundly disgusted by what they saw around them, rebelled separately. Many of them perished without any apparent result; but the indifference of society was shaken. Even those who were satisfied with existing conditions and the most ignorant were brought by these separate acts of rebellion to ask themselves: “For what cause did these people, honest and full of energy, rebel and prove ready to give their lives?” Gradually it became impossible to remain indifferent: people were compelled to declare themselves for or against the aims pursued by these individuals. Social thought woke up.
Little by little, small groups of men were imbued with the same spirit of revolt. They also with the hope of a partial success; for example, that of winning a strike and if obtaining bread for their children, or of getting rid of some hated functionary; but very often also without any hope of success: they broke into revolt simply because they could not remain patient any longer. Not one or two such revolts, but hundreds of small insurrections in France and in England preceded the Revolution. This again was unavoidable. Without such insurrections, no revolution has ever broken out. Without the menace contained in such revolts, no serious concession has ever been wrung by the people from the governing classes. Without such risings, the social mind wars never able to get rid of its deep-rooted prejudices, nor to embolden itself sufficiently to conceive hope. And hope—the hope of an improvement—was always the mainspring of revolutions.
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The same has occurred whenever a revolution drew near, and we can safely say that as a general rule the character of each revolution was determined by the character and the purpose of the insurrections that preceded it.
Consequently, to expect a Social Revolution to come like a Christmas-box, without being heralded by small acts of revolt and insurrections, is to cherish a vain hope. It would be shutting one’s eyes to what is going on all round, in Europe and America, and taking no notice of the hundreds of strikes and small uprisings occurring everywhere, and gradually assuming a more widespread and a deeper character.
57[] See The Great French Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1909).
58[] See article, “Anarchism,” in the forthcoming (eleventh) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica [included in this volume (Editor)].
59[] It is all in the first edition of 1793, made in two quarto volumes. In the second edition, published in two octavo volumes in 1796, after the prosecution of his Republican friends, he withdrew his views on Communism, and mitigated his views on government.
60[] Proudhon proclaimed himself an anarchist in the first memoir on property, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (first and second memoirs translated by Benjamin Tucker in 1876). Extracts included in Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (AK Press, 2011). (Editor)
61[] Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century was translated in 1923 by John Beverly Robinson and published by Freedom Press. It was reprinted with an introduction by Graham Purchase by Pluto Press in 1989. Extracts are included in Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (AK Press, 2011). (Editor)
62[] A number of Bakunin’s co-workers and friends—namely, Varlin, Guillaume, and the Italians—had already in 1869 described themselves as Communist Anarchists, but, forced to fight bitterly later on for the independence of their respective Federations, they gave only a secondary attention to this question, leaving it to be decided in the future by the Communes and Labour organisations themselves.