The Isocracy Network interviews Mr. Carson on the theory and practice of mutualism, worker self-management, anarchist thinkers and his critics.

3 Nov 09 | The Isocracy Network

Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism. Describing his politics as being “the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism”, he certainly will find a welcoming audience among our group—which is why he’s been asked several difficult questions.

“The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” is available in HTML format and Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective are both available as PDF files.

Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The Isocracy Network.

Thanks for inviting me.

Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial definition offered by the anarchist, Proudhon, to contemporary examples and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?

Well, first of all, it’s important to distinguish between mutualism as a general form of praxis, and mutualism as a theory. Mutualist practices (friendly societies and lodges, guilds, arrangements for mutual aid, etc.) are probably old as the human race. Proudhon, Owen, Warren, et al simply created a theoretical framework that emphasized such forms of organization as a building block of society. It’s a bit like the centipede trying to figure out how it’s been walking all this time, or the man who was astonished to learn he’d been speaking in prose all along and didn’t even know it.

For that matter, there have been important anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin who emphasized mutual aid and other mutual organizations, without in any strict sense being mutualists. Cooperatives and mutuals have been central to the counterinstitution-building of much of the decentralist Left in the U.S. since the 1960s, but their thought is not explicitly mutualist either.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the important examples of mutualist practice (the cooperative movement, the local currency and alternative credit movements, etc.) are not explicitly or self-consciously mutualist in ideology.

Having read Proudhon for some years, his thought is so complex and at times even seemingly self-contradictory, that I still hesitate to summarize it. But I’d venture to say, as an approximation, that his programme centered on: 1) abolishing artificial property rights in land and artificial scarcity of credit, so that the working class could secure cheap access to the prerequisites of production; and 2) organizing the economy around associations of producers. Of course Proudhon was an important founding thinker for anarchism as a whole as well as for mutualism; so these ideas, in modified form, have heavily influenced later collectivist, communist and syndicalist variants of anarchism.

Mutualist praxis was central to the Owenite movement in the U.K. (e.g. Owenite craft unions organized cooperative production and distribution by strikers in their own shops), as well as such things as the Rochedale cooperatives, the Chartists, and land colonization movements. Owenism, by way of Christian socialism and guild socialism, probably had a significant (if indirect) influence on distributism.

In the U.S. mutualism’s primary founder was the Owenite Josiah Warren. Warrenism, cross-pollinated with J.K. Ingalls’ occupancy-and-use view of land ownership and William Greene’s mutual banking theories, together led to the plumbline individualism of Benjamin Tucker. Tucker focused almost entirely on the abolition of artificial property rights and privilege in land and credit, assuming that when the legal props to rent and interest were removed and cheap land and credit were universally available, the forms of organization would take care of themselves. He displayed almost no interest whatever in cooperatives, associations for mutual aid, etc., as such.

Dyer Lum, John Beverley Robinson, and Clarence Swartz, all heavily influenced by Tucker, supplemented his focus on eliminating monopolies with some positive speculation on cooperative forms of organization; in so doing, they represented a partial fusion of Tucker’s version of individualism with the older cooperativist tradition of Proudhon and Owen. Lum, in particular, was also friendly to the radical labor movement and had fairly close ties to the I.W.W.

Would a highly successful large worker’s cooperatives, like the John Lewis Partnership in the U.K., and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain [centered in Basque Country] serve as evidence that mutualist economics can and does work in the large scale? Are credit unions evidence that mutualist economics can replace capitalist banking?

Although I’m quite friendly to both Mondragon and credit unions, and consider their influence to be decidedly positive, I believe their form is still distorted considerably by the capitalist milieu within which they exist. I like Mondragon’s federated system of cooperative producers, distributors and banks within a single umbrella organization. But it’s much too centralized a system in my opinion, with worker representation only effected at the level of the board of directors for the system as a whole; below the level of the Mondragon system as a whole, it’s a fairly top-down system of conventional management, with no significant self-management at the level of individual departments or factories.

I would greatly prefer local markets with lots of stand-alone cooperative manufacturing shops on the Emilia-Romagna model, integrated with cooperative banks in some sort of barter or local currency network of the sort promoted by Tom Greco.

Most credit unions, unfortunately, have adopted the culture of the conventional banking industry, and have almost no ideological affinity for the larger cooperative or counter-economy movement. Of course they are still greatly preferable to capitalist banks; being controlled by many small, local depositors, they are far less prone to the excesses of the capitalist banking system that we’ve seen in recent years.

Proudhon, although arguing that he opposed the idea of individuals deriving an income through rent and investments, said that he never wished “to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree” such activities. A contemporary mainstream economist may argue that Proudhon’s position here would be particularly utopian in those markets that have high barriers to entry or other monopolistic features, that a worker’s cooperative versus an entrenched capitalist enterprise in such a market would require a miracle on the scale of David vs, Goliath for success.

That sounds a bit like Tucker’s pessimistic view of things in his later years, when he seemed resigned to the idea that the large industrial trusts had grown to the point that their market power would persist even after the Four Monopolies were removed.

I think such a view neglects the extent to which capital-intensiveness is a source of high overhead cost and inefficiency, and is only made artificially profitable by the state’s subsidies and protections. In fact production as such has become far less capital-intensive over the past three decades, with the old mass-production core outsourcing increasing shares of total production to flexible manufacturing networks and job-shops, and some of them retaining little more than control over marketing and “intellectual property.” The development of cheap, small-scale CNC tools in the 1970s meant that the capital outlays required for manufacturing imploded by one or two orders of magnitude. That was the beginning of a long shift from older mass-production industry to Emilia-Romagna, the Toyota supplier network, the job-shops of Shenzhen and Shanghai, etc.

The process continues even further in the same direction with the desktop manufacturing revolution of recent years: cheap, homebrew CNC machines scalable to the small shop and garage.

When physical capital costs are so low, most of the financial role of the old industrial core is becoming redundant. And with small-scale production driven by local orders on a lean, demand-pull, JIT basis, marketing is similarly redundant.

“Intellectual property” is the main surviving buttress to the old corporate walls, and it’s becoming increasingly unenforceable.

A follower of Henry George would argue in the realm of natural resources it would be impossible for success and that land-rents should be socialised. How would you respond to these claims?

I’m quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed. But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalities created by taxpayers—not to mention by removing state enforcement of title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own miniature “downtown” cores, differential rent would be far less significant. I think a majority of George’s aims could be achieved by Tucker’s means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard’s means.

With examples of worker’s self-management in the former Yugoslavia, and modelling by economists such as Jaroslav Vanek and Benjamin Ward, it has been shown in some cases (especially in critical infrastructure) it is advantageous for labor-managed firms, in their objective of increasing income per worker, to either lay-off workers or—like a monopolistic capitalist firm – to reduce productivity and thus derive monopoly profits. How would a contemporary version of mutualism prevent these problems?

It’s been a long time since I read Vanek’s work on worker-managed economies, but my immediate reaction is that there’s probably no fool-proof set of governance rules. When the firm is controlled by capital-owners, they’ll behave in such a way as to maximize returns on capital; when it’s controlled by managers, as in most large Western corporations, they’ll maximize benefits to management at the expense of both labor and capital. At least in a worker-managed firm, the decisions will reflect the interests of a bare majority, which can’t be said of the other two mechanisms. Beyond that, I think the answer to the kind of behavior you describe lies in exit as much as in voice: the lower the capitalization requirements and the lower the barrier to entry for most forms of production, and the lower the cost threshold for comfortable subsistence, the less catastrophic changes in employment will be. I’d like to see an economy where a much larger share of total consumption needs are met through production for subsistence or barter in the household/informal sector, and the average time spent in wage employment is much less than at present.

That would mean a significantly larger share of the population would be self-employed than at present, a very large share would work hours that we would regard as “part-time,” household arrangements for pooling wages and hoarding labor-time would be much more resilient, and even wage-earners would tend to accept as normal prolonged periods of unemployment during which they lived off subsistence resources while waiting for a job to their liking.

Pro-capitalist neoliberals, such as George Reismann, Roderick T. Long have criticised your advocacy of mutualism. Reisman and Long both argue that you do not support John Locke’s ownership of landed property that has been mixed with labour or, to use the peculiarly U.S. vernacular, “homesteading”. It seems that both this critics have fundamentally misunderstood Locke’s concept of land ownership, which recognises a public cost for exclusion and use in addition to the right of added value. How do you respond to these criticisms?

To be frank, I can’t say with any degree of confidence what Reisman understands about anything. But I think Long acknowledged Locke’s Proviso and explicitly characterized his own position as “non-Proviso Lockeanism.” I’m not a Georgist myself, although I’d be well-disposed to a local property rules system based on some form of common ownership and community collection of rent. In any case, justifiably or not, when answering Lockean critics I tend to tacitly work from the premise that “Lockean” means “non-Proviso Lockean.” And for the most part, I think a radical and consistent application of non-Proviso Lockean rules would go most of the way toward achieving the aims of the Tucker-Ingalls land theory.

… all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous band of nature: … Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property… For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

–John Locke, Of Civil Government – Second Treatise

For that matter, over time I’ve come to see the bounderies between the Tucker-Ingalls and non-Proviso Lockean systems as less distinct, and to perceive some practical problems with the Tucker system (at least the more radical variant–he seems to promote different versions of the system at different times). At times Tucker himself seemed to concede the existence of house-rent, but to argue that the nullification of titles to vacant land would (through market competition) cause the land-rent component of rent to disappear and overall rent to fall to the value of rent on buildings. Now, to me, that seems to imply that Tucker wasn’t necessarily (at least at times) dead-set against absentee ownership in principle. That variant of his land theory, at least, seems to imply that the important thing was to eliminate large-scale absentee title to vacant and unimproved land.

In any case, I tend to think that doing so would go a long way to eliminating landlord rent through market competition.

Another critic, Walter Block argues that you are actually some sort of Marxist because you use the labour theory of value for deriving a theory of exploitation. It would seem that (a) Block is unaware that Adam Smith and David Ricardo also used the labour theory of value and (b) using it to calculate a rate of exploitation is hardly the same as using it as an anchor to exchange values.

I think the Austrians also, for the most part, exaggerate the extent to which marginalism/subjectivism is a radical departure from classical labor and cost theories. It’s closer to the truth to say that marginalism provides a mechanism for explaining the tendency that Ricardo et al described. The marginalist/subjectivist claim that “utility determines value” is true in a technical sense, if you add the qualification “at any point in time given the snapshot of supply and demand in the spot market.” But it’s not true in the ordinary way we use those words. If you allow changes in supply over time to enter the picture, then supply alters until the utility of the marginal unit reflects the cost of producing it—i.e., exactly what Ricardo said.

It makes far more sense to treat marginalism as a complement or fulfillment to classical political economy, rather than as supplanting it.

Politically, where do you think mutualists should align themselves. Should they spend their efforts in building cooperative organisations, like Proudhon’s advocacy of dual power? Or is there some mileage to be made in being involved in existing political organisations, such as the Labour Party—Cooperative Party groups in the U.K.? What about in the United States; is the Libertarian Party salvageable?

I think by far the most important, and the most interest, of our tasks is actually building the kind of society we want, and doing so so far as possible without regard to the state. But there’s something to be said for putting external pressure on the state, and participating in political coalitions to remove as much state interference with our activities as possible. Of course the primary emphasis of such coalition-building should be forming pressure groups, rather than attempting to become part of a governing coalition.

A lot of this parallels Daniel DeLeon’s disputes with the anarchists in the I.W.W. DeLeon argued that “building the structure of the new society in the shell of the old” (i.e. building industrial unions to serve as organs of self-management) would not be enough by itself. So long as the capitalists controlled the state and its armed force, and the significant minority of people whose class interest was tied up with it, there was the danger of the “Iron Heel” being brought to bear against counter-organizations. On the other hand, political victory alone wasn’t sufficient; he gave the example of threats by Jay Gould to organize a national capital strike and lockout if the socialists ever captured the national government. Workers, DeLeon argued, should be focused on building counter-institutions, but also be prepared to seize the commanding heights of the state long enough to dismantle them and prevent them from being used against themselves.

What we need is a primary focus on institution building, without entirely neglecting the need for a political movement to run interference for the counter-institutions.

What’s more, there’s the very real danger an authoritarian state might make a concerted effort to stamp out the counter-economy through (for example) the kinds of totalitarian surveillance Richard Stallman described in “The Right to Read,” intensified licensing and zoning to suppress low-capital producers, etc. It’s a waste of effort and probably corrupting to seriously run our people for Congress or the White House. But it’s perfectly sensible to carry out propaganda against legislation like the DMCA, to support lobbying campaigns organized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NORML, etc.

Proudhon argued that through a society of contracts between individuals, a federal structure could arise. This of course must presume that individuals have the capacity to engage in uncoerced contractual arrangements. What other political requirements do you think have a particular priority in breaking down authoritarian elements in statist rule?

Well, it could be that the authoritarian elements of statist rule will persist on paper right up to the point at which they become irrelevant. But in my opinion it’s at least worth a shot to pressure the state from outside, and form ad hoc alliances to pressure the state, in order to minimize its interference and fend off attempts at intensified interference. That includes local efforts against licensing and zoning that impede household microenterprise and micromanufacturing, local pressure to defend peaceful squatters and vagrants, pressure against the regulatory suppression of self-organized mutual-aid efforts, pressure at the national level against further expanding “intellectual property” law, and so forth.

Kevin, thank you for your time and views.

Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society, contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective. Mr. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Så när jag färskade upp min grundläggande kunskap om anarkistiskt tänkande kom jag över två fina citat som har mycket gemensamt, och, tror jag, en stor kärna sanning:

Alla som har haft med barn att göra vet att de är nyfikna och kreativa. De vill utforska saker och komma underfund med vad som händer.  Mycket av skolans verksamhet går ut på att driva ut detta ur dem och få dem att passa i en form, få dem att uppföra sig väl, sluta tänka, inte ställa till besvär.

Noam Chomsky, samtal med David Barsamian (Propagandans makt, Ordfront 2002)

Jag har i alla fall anekdotiskt, personligt bevis för denna tes. Skulle vara förvånad om det inte fanns några studier om det. 

Barnasinnet är mjukt. Det är så lätt att bringa det till underkastelse med hjälp av skrämseln. Det är det de [härskande] göra. De göra det ängslig och tala till det om helvetets pina; de omtala för det de fördömda själarnas lidande, en oförsonlig gudoms hämnd. Nästa ögonblick tala de till det om revolutionens fasor; de använda revolutionens spöke för att göra barnet till en “vän av ordningen”.

Peter Kropotkin (Anarkismens moral, Tragus 2004)

…Men nu är spökena mer subtila idag. Man kan så klart imponeras av Kropotkins fina prosa, men som alltid är det nog Lord Russell som gör det bäst:

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal

Author:  Pëtr Kropotkin
Publication date:  1898

Ever reviled, accursed, — n’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 striven,
The 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,
That sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! -Thine secure
When each at last 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 will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!
— John Henry Mackay.

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It is not without a certain hesitation that I have decided to take the philosophy and ideal of Anarchy as the subject of this lecture.

Those who are persuaded that Anarchy is a collection of visions relating to the future, and an unconscious striving toward the destruction of all present civilization, are still very numerous; and to clear the ground of such prejudices of our education as maintain this view we should have, perhaps, to enter into many details which it would be difficult to embody in a single lecture. Did not the Parisian press, only two or three years ago, maintain that the whole philosophy of Anarchy consisted in destruction, and that its only argument was violence?

Nevertheless Anarchists have been spoken of so much lately, that part of the public has at last taken to reading and discussing our doctrines. Sometimes men have even given themselves trouble to reflect, and at the present moment we have at least gained a point: it is willingly admitted that Anarchists have an ideal. Their ideal is even found too beautiful, too lofty for a society not composed of superior beings.

But is it not pretentious on my part to speak of a philosophy, when, according to our critics, our ideas are but dim visions of a distant future? Can Anarchy pretend to possess a philosophy, when it is denied that Socialism has one?

This is what I am about to answer with all possible precision and clearness, only asking you to excuse me beforehand if I repeat an example or two which I have already given at a London lecture, and which seem to be best fitted to explain what is meant by the philosophy of Anarchism.

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You will not bear me any ill-will if I begin by taking a few elementary illustrations borrowed from natural sciences. Not for the purpose of deducing our social ideas from them — far from it; but simply the better to set off certain relations, which are easier grasped in phenomena verified by the exact sciences than in examples only taken from the complex facts of human societies.

Well, then, what especially strikes us at present in exact sciences, is the profound modification which they are undergoing now, in the whole of their conceptions and interpretations of the facts of the universe.

There was a time, you know, when man imagined the earth placed in the center of the universe. Sun, moon, planets and stars seemed to roll round our globe; and this globe, inhabited by man, represented for him the center of creation. He himself — the superior being on his planet — was the elected of his Creator. The sun, the moon, the stars were but made for him; toward him was directed all the attention of a God, who watched the least of his actions, arrested the sun’s course for him, wafted in the clouds, launching his showers or his thunder-bolts on fields and cities, to recompense the virtue or punish the crimes of mankind. For thousands of years man thus conceived the universe.

You know also what an immense change was produced in the sixteenth century in all conceptions of the civilized part of mankind, when it was demonstrated that, far from being the centre of the universe, the earth was only a grain of sand in the solar system — a ball, much smaller even than the other planets; that the sun itself — though immense in comparison to our little earth, was but a star among many other countless stars which we see shining in the skies and swarming in the milky-way. How small man appeared in comparison to this immensity without limits, how ridiculous his pretensions! All the philosophy of that epoch, all social and religious conceptions, felt the effects of this transformation in cosmogony. Natural science, whose present development we are so proud of, only dates from that time.

But a change, much more profound, and with far wider reaching results, is being effected at the present time in the whole of the sciences, and Anarchy, you will see, is but one of the many manifestations of this evolution.

Take any work on astronomy of the last century, or the beginning of ours. You will no longer find in it, it goes without saying, our tiny planet placed in the center of the universe. But you will meet at every step the idea of a central luminary — the sun — which by its powerful attraction governs our planetary world. From this central body radiates a force guiding the course of the planets, and maintaining the harmony of the system. Issued from a central agglomeration, planets have, so to say, budded from it; they owe their birth to this agglomeration; they owe everything to the radiant star that represents it still: the rhythm of their movements, their orbits set at wisely regulated distances, the life that animates them and adorns their surfaces. And when any perturbation disturbs their course and makes them deviate from their orbits, the central body re-establishes order in the system; it assures and perpetuates its existence.

This conception, however, is also disappearing as the other one did. After having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe. And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, invisible, infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers. Among those masses, some, like the bolide that fell in Spain some time ago, are still rather big; others weigh but a few ounces or grains, while around them is wafted dust, almost microscopic, filling up the spaces.

It is to this dust, to these infinitely tiny bodies that dash through space in all directions with giddy swiftness, that clash with one another, agglomerate, disintegrate, everywhere and always, it is to them that today astronomers look for an explanation of the origin of our solar system, the movements that animate its parts, and the harmony of their whole. Yet another step, and soon universal gravitation itself will be but the result of all the disordered and incoherent movements of these infinitely small bodies — of oscillations of atoms that manifest themselves in all possible directions. Thus the center, the origin of force, formerly transfered from the earth to the sun, now turns out to be scattered and disseminated: it is everywhere and nowhere. With the astronomer, we perceive that solar systems are the work of infinitely small bodies; that the power which was supposed to govern the system is itself but the result of the collisions among those infinitely tiny clusters of matter, that the harmony of stellar systems is harmony only because it is an adaptation, a resultant of all these numberless movements uniting, completing, equilibrating one another.

The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new conception. The idea of force governing the world, of pre-established law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other in equilibrium.

×××

If it were only astronomy that were undergoing this change! But no; the same modification takes place in the philosophy of all sciences without exception; those which study nature as well as those which study human relations.

In physical sciences, the entities of heat, magnetism, and electricity disappear. When a physicist speaks today of a heated or electrified body, he no longer sees an inanimate mass, to which an unknown force should be added. He strives to recognize in this body and in the surrounding space, the course, the vibrations of infinitely small atoms which dash in all directions, vibrate, move, live, and by their vibrations, their shocks, their life, produce the phenomena of heat, light, magnetism or electricity.

In sciences that treat of organic life, the notion of species and its variations is being substituted by a notion of the variations of the individual. The botanist and zoologist study the individual — his life, his adaptations to his surroundings. Changes produced in him by the action of drought or damp, heat or cold, abundance or poverty of nourishment, of his more or less sensitiveness to the action of exterior surroundings will originate species; and the variations of species are now for the biologist but resultants — a given sum of variations that have been produced in each individual separately. A species will be what the individuals are, each undergoing numberless influences from the surroundings in which they live, and to which they correspond each in his own way.

And when a physiologist speaks now of the life of a plant or of an animal, he sees rather an agglomeration, a colony of millions of separate individuals than a personality one and indivisible. He speaks of a federation of digestive, sensual, nervous organs, all very intimately connected with one another, each feeling the consequence of the well-being or indisposition of each, but each living its own life. Each organ, each part of an organ in its turn is composed of independent cellules which associate to struggle against conditions unfavorable to their existence. The individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.

And in this world of aggregated beings the physiologist sees the autonomous cells of blood, of the tissues, of the nerve-centers; he recognizes the millions of white corpuscles — the phagocytes — who wend their way to the parts of the body infected by microbes in order to give battle to the invaders. More than that: in each microscopic cell he discovers today a world of autonomous organisms, each of which lives its own life, looks for well-being for itself and attains it by grouping and associating itself with others. In short, each individual is a cosmos of organs, each organ is a cosmos of cells, each cell is a cosmos of infinitely small ones; and in this complex world, the well-being of the whole depends entirely on the sum of well-being enjoyed by each of the least microscopic particles of organized matter. A whole revolution is thus produced in the philosophy of life.

×××

But it is especially in psychology that this revolution leads to consequences of great importance.

Quite recently the psychologist spoke of man as an entire being, one and indivisible. Remaining faithful to religious tradition, he used to class men as good and bad, intelligent and stupid, egotists and altruists. Even with materialists of the eighteenth century, the idea of a soul, of an indivisible entity, was still upheld.

But what would we think today of a psychologist who would still speak like this! The modern psychologist sees in man a multitude of separate faculties, autonomous tendencies, equal among themselves, performing their functions independently, balancing, opposing one another continually. Taken as a whole, man is nothing but a resultant, always changeable, of all his divers faculties, of all his autonomous tendencies, of brain cells and nerve centers. All are related so closely to one another that they each react on all the others, but they lead their own life without being subordinated to a central organ — the soul.

×××

Without entering into further details you thus see that a profound modification is being produced at this moment in the whole of natural sciences. Not that this analysis is extended to details formerly neglected. No! the facts are not new, but the way of looking at them is in course of evolution; and if we had to characterize this tendency in a few words, we might say that if formerly science strove to study the results and the great sums (integrals, as mathematicians say), today it strives to study the infinitely small ones — the individuals of which those sums are composed and in which it now recognizes independence and individuality at the same time as this intimate aggregation.

As to the harmony that the human mind discovers in Nature, and which harmony is, on the whole, but the verification of a certain stability of phenomena, the modern man of science no doubt recognizes it more than ever. But he no longer tries to explain it by the action of laws conceived according to a certain plan preestablished by an intelligent will.

What used to be called “natural law” is nothing but a certain relation among phenomena which we dimly see, and each “law” takes a temporary character of causality; that is to say: If such a phenomenon is produced under such conditions, such another phenomenon will follow. No law placed outside the phenomena: each phenomenon governs that which follows it — not law.

Nothing preconceived in what we call harmony in Nature. The chance of collisions and encounters has sufficed to establish it. Such a phenomenon will last for centuries because the adaption, the equilibrium it represents has taken centuries to be established; while such another will last but an instant if that form of momentary equilibrium was born in an instant. If the planets of our solar system do not collide with one another and do not destroy one another every day, if they last millions of years, it is because they represent an equilibrium that has taken millions of centuries to establish as a resultant of millions of blind forces. If continents are not continually destroyed by volcanic shocks, it is because they have taken thousands and thousands of centuries to build up, molecule by molecule, and to take their present shape. But lightning will only last an instant; because it represents a momentary rupture of the equilibrium, a sudden redistribution of force.

Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot — a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions. Let but one of those forces be hampered in its action for some time and harmony disappears. Force will accumulate its effect; it must come to light, it must exercise its action, and if other forces hinder its manifestation it will not be annihilated by that, but will end by upsetting the present adjustment, by destroying harmony, in order to find a new form of equilibrium and to work to form a new adaptation. Such is the eruption of a volcano, whose imprisoned force ends by breaking the petrified lavas which hindered them to pour forth the gases, the molten lavas, and the incandescent ashes. Such, also, are the revolutions of mankind.

×××

An analogous transformation is being produced at the same time in the sciences that treat of man. Thus we see that history, after having been the history of kingdoms, tends to become the history of nations and then the study of individuals. The historian wants to know how the members, of which such a nation was composed, lived at such a time, what their beliefs were, their means of existence, what ideal of society was visible to them, and what means they possessed to march toward this ideal. And by the action of all those forces, formerly neglected, he interprets the great historical phenomena.

So the man of science who studies jurisprudence is no longer content with such or such a code. Like the ethnologist he wants to know the genesis of the institution that succeed one another; he follows their evolution through ages, and in this study he applies himself far less to written law than to local customs — to the “customary law” in which the constructive genius of the unknown masses has found expression in all times. A wholly new science is being elaborated in this direction and promises to upset established conceptions we learned at school, succeeding in interpreting history in the same manner as natural sciences interpret the phenomena of Nature.

And, finally, political economy, which was at the beginning a study of the wealth of nations, becomes today a study of the wealth of individuals. It cares less to know if such a nation has or has not a large foreign trade; it wants to be assured that bread is not wanting in the peasant’s or worker’s cottage. It knocks at all doors — at that of the palace as well as that of the hovel — and asks the rich as well as the poor: Up to what point are your needs satisfied both for necessaries and luxuries?

And as it discovers that the most pressing needs of nine-tenths of each nation are not satisfied, it asks itself the question that a physiologist would ask himself about a plant or an animal: “Which are the means to satisfy the needs of all with the least lose of power? How can a society guarantee to each, and consequently to all, the greatest sum of satisfaction?” It is in this direction that economic science is being transformed; and after having been so long a simple statement of phenomena interpreted in the interest of a rich minority, it tends to become (or rather it elaborates the elements to become) a science in the true sense of the word—a physiology of human societies.

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While a new philosophy — a new view of knowledge taken as a whole — is thus being worked out, we may observe that a different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation. Under the name of Anarchy, a new interpretation of the past and present life of society arises, giving at the same time a forecast as regards its future, both conceived in the same spirit as the above-mentioned interpretation in natural sciences. Anarchy, therefore, appears as a constituent part of the new philosophy, and that is why Anarchists come in contact, on so many points, with the greatest thinkers and poets of the present day.

In fact, it is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities. A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labor of preceding generations, organizing itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constituting itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. It comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims. Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.

It seeks the most complete development of individuality combined with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new forms, which answer best to the multiple aspirations of all.

A society to which preestablished forms, crytalized by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces and influences of every kind, following their own course, — these forces promoting themselves the energies which are favorable to their march toward progress, toward the liberty of developing in broad daylight and counter-balancing one another.

This conception and ideal of society is certainly not new. On the contrary, when we analyze the history of popular institutions — the clan, the village community, the guild and even the urban commune of the Middle Ages in their first stages, — we find the same popular tendency to constitute a society according to this idea; a tendency, however, always trammelled by domineering minorities. All popular movements bore this stamp more or less, and with the Anabaptists and their forerunners in the ninth century we already find the same ideas clearly expressed in the religious language which was in use at that time. Unfortunately, till the end of the last century, this ideal was always tainted by a theocratic spirit; and it is only nowadays that the conception of society deduced from the observation of social phenomena is rid of its swaddling-clothes.

It is only today that the ideal of a society where each governs himself according to his own will (which is evidently a result of the social influences borne by each) is affirmed in its economic, political and moral aspects at one and the same time, and that this ideal presents itself based on the necessity of Communism, imposed on our modern societies by the eminently social character of our present production.

In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.

“Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery!” is not a vain formula; it has penetrated into the ideas of the great working-class masses; it filters through all the present literature; it even carries those along who live on the poverty of others, and takes from them the arrogance with which they formerly asserted their rights to exploitation.

Millions of Socialists of both hemispheres already agree that the present form of capitalistic appropriation cannot last much longer. Capitalists themselves feel that it must go and dare not defend it with their former assurance. Their only argument is reduced to saying to us: “You have invented nothing better!” But as to denying the fatal consequences of the present forms of property, as to justifying their right to property, they cannot do it. They will practice this right as long as freedom of action is left to them, but without trying to base it on an idea. This is easily understood.

For instance, take the town of Paris — a creation of so many centuries, a product of the genius of a whole nation, a result of the labor of twenty or thirty generations. How could one maintain to an inhabitant of that town who works every day to embellish it, to purify it, to nourish it, to make it a centre of thought and art — how could one assert before one who produces this wealth that the palaces adorning the streets of Paris belong in all justice to those who are the legal proprietors today, when we are all creating their value, which would be nil without us?

Such a fiction can be kept up for some time by the skill of the people’s educators. The great battalions Of workers may not even reflect about it; but from the moment a minority of thinking men agitate the question and submit it to all, there can be no doubt of the result. Popular opinion answers: “It is by spoliation that they hold these riches!”

Likewise, how can the peasant be made to believe that the bourgeois or manorial land belongs to the proprietor who has a legal claim, when a peasant can tell us the history of each bit of land for ten leagues around? Above all, how make him believe that it is useful for the nation that Mr. So-and-So keeps a piece of land for his park when so many neighboring peasants would be only too glad to cultivate it?

And, lastly, how make the worker in a factory, or the miner in a mine, believe that factory and mine equitably belong to their present masters, when worker and even miner are beginning to see clearly through Panama scandals, bribery, French, Turkish or other railways, pillage of the State and legal theft, from which great commercial and industrial property are derived?

In fact the masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert exploited! Peasants and workers, crushed by misery and finding no support in the well-to-do classes, have let things go, save from time to time when they have affirmed their rights by insurrection. And if workers ever thought that the day would come when personal appropriation of capital would profit all by turning it into a stock of wealth to be shared by all, this illusion is vanishing like so many others. The worker perceives that he has been disinherited, and that disinherited he will remain, unless he has recourse to strikes or revolts to tear from his masters the smallest part of riches built up by his own efforts; that is to say, in order to get that little, he already must impose on himself the pangs of hunger and face imprisonment, if not exposure to Imperial, Royal, or Republican fusillades.

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But a greater evil of the present system becomes more and more marked; namely, that in a system based on private appropriation, all that is necessary to life and to production — land, housing, food and tools — having once passed into the hands of a few, the production of necessities that would give well-being to all is continually hampered. The worker feels vaguely that our present technical power could give abundance to all, but he also perceives how the capitalistic system and the State hinder the conquest of this well-being in every way.

Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough. When a peasant covets the parks and gardens of industrial filibusters and Panamists, round which judges and police mount guard — when he dreams of covering them with crops which, he knows, would carry abundance to the villages whose inhabitants feed on bread hardly washed down with sloe wine — he understands this.

The miner, forced to be idle three days a week, thinks of the tons of coal he might extract, and which are sorely Deeded in poor households.

The worker whose factory is closed, and who tramps the streets in search of work, sees bricklayers out of work like himself, while one-fifth of the population of Paris live in insanitary hovels; he hears shoe-makers complain of want of work, while so many people need shoes — and so on.

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In short, if certain economists delight in writing treatises on over-production, and in explaining each industrial crisis by this cause, they would be much at a loss if called upon to name a single article produced by France in greater quantities than are necessary to satisfy the needs of the whole population. It is certainly not corn: the country is obliged to import it. It is not wine either: peasants drink but little wine, and substitute sloe wine in its stead, and the inhabitants of towns have to be content with adulterated stuff. It is evidently not houses: millions still live in cottages of the most wretched description, with one or two apertures. It is not even good or bad books, for they are still objects of luxury in the villages. Only one thing is produced in quantities greater than needed, — it is the budget — devouring individual; but such merchandise is not mentioned in lectures by political economists, although those individuals possess all the attributes of merchandise, being ever ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by Capital and State. Now, this sort of over-production remains fatally characteristic of the present capitalist production, because — Proudhon has already shown it — workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.
The very essence of the present economic system is, that the worker can never enjoy the well-being he has produced, and that the number of those who live at his expense will always augment. The more a country is advanced in industry, the more this number grows. Inevitably, industry is directed, and will have to be directed, not towards what is needed to satisfy the needs of all, but towards that which, at a given moment, brings in the greatest temporary profit to a few. Of necessity, the abundance of some will be based on the poverty of others, and the straitened circumstances of the greater number will have to be maintained at all costs, that there may be hands to sell themselves for a part only of that which they are capable of producing; without which, private accumulation of capital is impossible!

These characteristics of our economical system are its very essence. Without them, it cannot exist; for, who would sell his labor power for less than it is capable of bringing in, if he were not forced thereto by the threat of hunger?

And those essential traits of the system are also its most crushing condemnation.

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As long as England and France were pioneers of industry, in the midst of nations backward in their technical development, and as long as neighbors purchased their wools, their cotton goods, their silks, their iron and machines, as well as a whole range of articles of luxury, at a price that allowed them to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients, — the worker could be buoyed up by hope that he, too, would be called upon to appropriate an ever and ever larger share of the booty to himself. But these conditions are disappearing. In their turn, the backward nations of thirty years ago have become great producers of cotton goods, wools, silks, machines and articles of luxury. In certain branches of industry they have even taken the lead, and not only do they struggle with the pioneers of industry and commerce in distant lands, but they even compete with those pioneers in their own countries. In a few years Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the United States, Russia and Japan have become great industrial countries. Mexico, the Indies, even Servia, are on the march — and what will it be when China begins to imitate Japan in manufacturing for the world’s market?

The result is, that industrial crises, the frequency and duration of which are always augmenting, have passed into a chronic state in many industries.

Likewise, wars for Oriental and African markets have become the order of the day since several years; it is now twenty-five years that the sword of war has been suspended over European states. And if war has not burst forth, it is especially due to influential financiers who find it advantageous that States should become more and more indebted. But the day on which Money will find its interest in fomenting war, human flocks will be driven against other human flocks, and will butcher one another to settle the affairs of the world’s master-financiers.

All is linked, all holds together under the present economic system, and all tends to make the fall of the industrial and mercantile system under which we live inevitable. Its duration is but a question of time that may already be counted by years and no longer by centuries. A question of time — and energetic attack on our part! Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

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That is why such powerful minorities constitute themselves in the midst of civilized nations, and loudly ask for the return to the community of all riches accumulated by the work of preceding generations. The holding in common of land, mines, factories, inhabited houses, and means of transport is already the watch-word of these imposing fractions, and repression — the favorite weapon of the rich and powerful — can no longer do anything to arrest the triumphal march of the spirit of revolt. And if millions of workers do not rise to seize the land and factories from the monopolists by force, be sure it is not for want of desire. They but wait for a favorable opportunity — a chance, such as presented itself in 1848, when they will be able to start the destruction of the present economic system, with the hope of being supported by an International movement.

That time cannot be long in coming; for since the International was crushed by governments in 1872 — especially since then — it has made immense progress of which its most ardent partisans are hardly aware. It is, in fact, constituted — in ideas, in sentiments, in the establishment of constant intercommunication. It is true the French, English, Italian and German plutocrats are so many rivals, and at any moment can even cause nations to war with one another. Nevertheless, be sure when the Communist and Social Revolution does take place in France, France will find the same sympathies as formerly among the nations of the world, including Germans, Italians and English. And when Germany, which, by the way, is nearer a revolution than is thought, will plant the flag — unfortunately a Jacobin one — of this revolution, when it will throw itself into the revolution with all the ardor of youth in an ascendant period, such as it is traversing today, it will find on this side of the Rhine all the sympathies and all the support of a nation that loves the audacity of revolutionists and hates the arrogance of plutocracy.

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Divers causes have up till now delayed the bursting forth of this inevitable revolution. The possibility of a great European war is no doubt partly answerable for it. But there is, it seems to me, another cause, a deeper-rooted one, to which I would call your attention. There is going on just now among the Socialists — many tokens lead us to believe it — a great transformation in ideas, like the one I sketched at the beginning of this lecture in speaking of general sciences. And the uncertainty of Socialists themselves concerning the organization of the society they are wishing for, paralyses their energy up to a certain point.

At the beginning, in the forties, Socialism presented itself as Communism, as a republic one and indivisible, as a governmental and Jacobin dictatorship, in its application to economics. Such was the ideal of that time. Religious and freethinking Socialists were equally ready to submit to any strong government, even an imperial one, if that government would only remodel economic relations to the worker’s advantage.

A profound revolution has since been accomplished, especially among Latin and English peoples. Governmental Communism, like theocratic Communism, is repugnant to the worker. And this repugnance gave rise to a new conception or doctrine — that of Collectivism — in the International. This doctrine at first signified the collective possession of the instruments of production (not including what is necessary to live), and the right of each group to accept such method of remuneration, whether communistic or individualistic, as pleased its members. Little by little, however, this system was transformed into a sort of compromise between communistic and individualistic wage remuneration. Today the Collectivist wants all that belongs to production to become common property, but that each should be individually remunerated by labor checks, according to the number of hours he has spent in production. These checks would serve to buy all merchandise in the Socialist stores at cost price, which price would also be estimated in hours of labor.
But if you analyze this idea you will own that its essence, as summed up by one of our friends, is reduced to this:

Partial Communism in the possession of instruments of production and education. Competition among individuals and groups for bread, housing and clothing. Individualism for works of art and thought. The Socialistic State’s aid for children, invalids and old people.

In a word — a struggle for the means of existence mitigated by charity. Always the Christian maxim: “Wound to heal afterwards!” And always the door open to inquisition, in order to know if you are a man who must be left to struggle, or a man the State must succor.

The idea of labor checks, you know, is old. It dates from Robert Owen; Proudhon commended it in 1848; Marxists have made “Scientific Socialism” of it today.
We must say, however, that this system seems to have little hold on the minds of the masses; it would seem they foresaw its drawbacks, not to say its impossibility. Firstly, the duration of time given to any work does not give the measure of social utility of the work accomplished, and the theories of value that economists have endeavored to base, from Adam Smith to Marx, only on the cost of production, valued in labor time, have not solved the question of value. As soon as there is exchange, the value of an article becomes a complex quantity, and depends also on the degree of satisfaction which it brings to the needs — not of the individual, as certain economists stated formerly, but of the whole of society, taken in its entirety. Value is a social fact. Being the result of an exchange, it has a double aspect: that of labor, and that of satisfaction of needs, both evidently conceived in their social and not individual aspect.

On the other hand, when we analyze the evils of the present economic system, we see — and the worker knows it full well — that their essence lies in the forced necessity of the worker to sell his labor power. Not having the wherewithal to live for the next fortnight, and being prevented by the State from using his labor power without selling it to someone, the worker sells himself to the one who undertakes to give him work; he renounces the benefits his labor might bring him in; he abandons the lion’s share of what he produces to his employer; he even abdicates his liberty; he renounces his right to make his opinion heard on the utility of what he is about to produce and on the way of producing it.

Thus results the accumulation of capital, not in its faculty of absorbing surplus-value but in the forced position the worker is placed to sell his labor power: the seller being sure in advance that he will not receive all that his strength can produce, of being wounded in his interests, and of becoming the inferior of the buyer. Without this the capitalist would never have tried to buy him; which proves that to change the system it must be attacked in its essence: in its cause — sale and purchase, — not in its effect — Capitalism.

Workers themselves have a vague intuition of this, and we hear them say oftener and oftener that nothing will be done if the Social Revolution does not begin with the distribution of products, if it does not guarantee the necessities of life to all — that is to say, housing, food and clothing. And we know that to do this is quite impossible, with the powerful means of production at our disposal.

If the worker continues to be paid in wages, lie necessarily will remain the slave or the subordinate of the one to whom he is forced to sell his labor force — be the buyer a private individual or the State. In the popular mind — in that sum total of thousands of opinions crossing the human brain — it is felt that if the State were to be substituted for the employer, in his role of buyer and overseer of labor, it would still be an odious tyranny. A man of the people does not reason about abstractions, he thinks in concrete terms, and that is why he feels that the abstraction, the State, would for him assume the form of numberless functionaries, taken from among his factory and workshop comrades, and he knows what importance he can attach to their virtues: excellent comrades today, they become unbearable foremen tomorrow. And he looks for a social constitution that will eliminate the present evils without creating new ones.

That is why Collectivism has never taken hold of the masses, who always come back to Communism — but a Communism more and more stripped of the Jacobin theocracy and authoritarianism of the forties — to Free Communism — Anarchy.

Nay more: in calling to mind all we have seen during this quarter of a century in the European Socialist movement, I cannot help believing that modern Socialism is forced to make a step towards Free Communism; and that so long as that step is not taken, the incertitude in the popular mind that I have just pointed out will paralyze the efforts of Socialist propaganda.

Socialists seem to me to be brought, by force of circumstances, to recognize that the material guarantee of existence of all the members of the community shall be the first act of the Social Revolution.

But they are also driven to take another step. They are obliged to recognize that this guarantee must come, not from the State, but independently of the State, and without its intervention.

We have already obtained the unanimous assent of those who have studied the subject, that a society, having recovered the possession of all riches accumulated in its midst, can liberally assure abundance to all in return for four or five hours effective and manual work a day, as far as regards production. If everybody, from childhood, learned whence came the bread he eats, the house he dwells in, the book he studies, and so on; and if each one accustomed himself to complete mental work by manual labor in some branch of manufacture, — society could easily perform this task, to say nothing of the further simplification of production which a more or less near future has in store for us.

In fact, it suffices to recall for a moment the present terrible waste, to conceive what a civilized society can produce with but a small quantity of labor if all share in it, and what grand works might be undertaken that are out of the question today. Unfortunately, the metaphysics called political economy has never troubled about that which should have been its essence — economy of labor.

There is no longer any doubt as regards the possibility of wealth in a Communist society, armed with our present machinery and tools. Doubts only arise when the question at issue is, whether a society can exist in which man’s actions are not subject to State control; whether, to reach well-being, it is not necessary for European communities to sacrifice the little personal liberty they have reconquered at the cost of so many sacrifices during this century? A section of Socialists believe that it is impossible to attain such a result without sacrificing personal liberty on the altar of the State. Another section, to which we belong, believes, on the contrary, that it is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism — the possession in common of our social inheritance, and the production in common of all riches.

That is the question outweighing all others at present, and Socialism must solve it, on pain of seeing all its efforts endangered and all its ulterior development paralysed.

Let us, therefore, analyse it with all the attention it deserves.

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If every Socialist will carry his thoughts back to an earlier date, he will no doubt remember the host of prejudices aroused in him when, for the first time, he came to the idea that abolishing the capitalist system and private appropriation of land and capital had become an historical necessity.

The same feelings are today produced in the man who for the first time hears that the abolition of the State, its laws, its entire system of management, governmentalism and centralization, also becomes an historical necessity: that the abolition of the one without the abolition of the other is materially impossible. Our whole education — made, be it noted, by Church and State, in the interests of both — revolts at this conception.

Is it lass true for that? And shall we allow our belief in the State to survive the host of prejudices we have already sacrificed for our emancipation?

It is not my intention to criticise tonight the State. That has been done and redone so often, and I am obliged to put off to another lecture the analysis of the historical part played by the State. A few general remarks will suffice.

To begin with, if man, since his origin, has always lived in societies, the State is but one of the forms of social life, quite recent as far as regards European societies. Men lived thousands of years before the first States were constituted; Greece and Rome existed for centuries before the Macedonian and Roman Empires were built up, and for us modern Europeans the centralized States date but from the sixteenth century. It was only then, after the defeat of the free mediæval Communes had been completed that the mutual insurance company between military, judicial, landlord, and capitalist authority which we call “State,” could be fully established.

It was only in the sixteenth century that a mortal blow was dealt to ideas of local independence, to free union and organization, to federation of all degrees among sovereign groups, possessing all functions now seized upon by the State. It was only then that the alliance between Church and the nascent power of Royalty put an end to an organization, based on the principle of federation, which had existed from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and which had produced in Europe the great period of free cities of the middle ages, whose character has been so well understood in France by Sismondi and Augustin Thierry — two historians unfortunately too little read now-a-days.

We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination. It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and mediæval cities. It was by confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects, who had no direct union more among themselves.

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It is now hardly thirty or forty years ago that we began to reconquer, by struggle, by revolt, the first steps of the right of association, that was freely practised by the artisans and the tillers of the soil through the whole of the middle ages.

And, already now, Europe is covered by thousands of voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial, for all that makes up the life of an active and thinking being. We see these societies rising in all nooks and corners of all domains: political, economic, artistic, intellectual. Some are as shortlived as roses, some hold their own since several decades, and all strive — while maintaining the independence of each group, circle, branch, or section — to federate, to unite, across frontiers as well as among each nation; to cover all the life of civilized men with a net, meshes of which are intersected and interwoven. Their numbers can already be reckoned by tens of thousands, they comprise millions of adherents — although less than fifty years have elapsed since Church and State began to tolerate a few of them — very few, indeed.

These societies already begin to encroach everywhere on the functions of the State, and strive to substitute free action of volunteers for that of a centralized State. In England we see arise insurance companies against theft; societies for coast defense, volunteer societies for land defense, which the State endeavors to got under its thumb, thereby making them instruments of domination, although their original aim was to do without the State. Were it not for Church and State, free societies would have already conquered the whole of the immense domain of education. And, in spite of all difficulties, they begin to invade this domain as well, and make their influence already felt.

And when we mark the progress already accomplished in that direction, in spite of and against the State, which tries by all means to maintain its supremacy of recent origin; when we see how voluntary societies invade everything and are only impeded in their development by the State, we are forced to recognize a powerful tendency, a latent force in modern society. And we ask ourselves this question: If, five, ten, or twenty years hence — it matters little — the workers succeed by revolt in destroying the said mutual insurance society of landlords, bankers, priests, judges, and soldiers; if the people become masters of their destiny for a few months, and lay hands on the riches they have created, and which belong to them by right — will they really begin to reconstitute that blood-sucker, the State? Or will they not rather try to organize from the simple to the complex, according to mutual agreement and to the infinitely varied, ever-changing needs of each locality, in order to secure the possession of those riches for themselves, to mutually guarantee one another’s life, and to produce what will be found necessary for life?

Will they follow the dominant tendency of the century, towards decentralization, home rule and free agreement; or will they march contrary to this tendency and strive to reconstitute demolished authority?

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Educated men — “civilized,” as Fourier used to say with disdain — tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.
But, frankly, do you need them as much as you have been told in musty books? Books written, be it noted, by scientists who generally know well what has been written before them, but, for the most part, absolutely ignore the people and their every-day life.

If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris, which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you rarely meet passers by, is it to the police that we owe this security? or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us? I am evidently not speaking of the one who carries millions about him. That one — a recent trial tells us — is soon robbed, by preference in places where there are as many policemen as lamp posts. No, I speak of the man who fears for his life and not for his purse filled with ill-gotten sovereigns. Are his fears real?
Besides, has not experience demonstrated quite recently that Jack the Ripper performed hie exploits under the eye of the London police — a most active force — and that he only left off killing when the population of Whitechapel itself began to give chase to him?

And in our every-day relations with our fellow-citizens, do you think that it is really judges, gaolers, and police that hinder anti-social acts from multiplying? The judge, ever ferocious, because he is a maniac of law, the accuser, the informer, the police spy, all those interlopers that live from hand to mouth around the Law Courts, do they not scatter demoralization far and wide into society? Read the trials, glance behind the scenes, push your analysis further than the exterior facade of law courts, and you will come out sickened.

Have not prisons — which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe — always been universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity? And so on.
When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!

Once a German jurist of great renown, Ihering, wanted to sum up the scientific work of his life and write a treatise, in which he proposed to analyze the factors that preserve social life in society. “Purpose in Law” (Der Zweck im Rechte), such is the title of that book, which enjoys a well-deserved reputation.

He made an elaborate plan of his treatise, and, with much erudition, discussed both coercive factors which are used to maintain society: wagedom and the different forms of coercion which are sanctioned by law. At the end of his work he reserved two paragraphs only to mention the two non-coercive factors — the feeling of duty and the feeling of mutual sympathy — to which lie attached little importance, as might be expected from a writer in law.

But what happened? As he went on analyzing the coercive factors he realized their insufficiency. He consecrated a whole volume to their analysis, and the result was to lessen their importance! When he began the last two paragraphs, when he began to reflect upon the non-coercive factors of society, he perceived, on the contrary, their immense, outweighing importance; and instead of two paragraphs, he found himself obliged to write a second volume, twice as large as the first, on these two factors: voluntary restraint and mutual help; and yet, he analyzed but an infinitesimal part of these latter — those which result from personal sympathy — and hardly touched free agreement, which results from social institutions.

Well, then, leave off repeating the formulæ which you have learned at school; meditate on this subject; and the same thing that happened to Ihering will happen to you: you will recognize the infinitesimal importance of coersion, as compared to the voluntary assent, in society.

On the other hand, if by following the very old advice given by Bentham yon begin to think of the fatal consequences — direct, and especially indirect — of legal coersion, like Tolstoy, like us, you will begin to hate use of coersion, and you will begin to say that society possesses a thousand other means for preventing antisocial acts. If it neglects those means today, it is because, being educated by Church and State, our cowardice and apathy of spirit hinder us seeing clearly on this point. When a child has committed a fault, it is so easy to hang a man — especially when there is an executioner who is paid so much for each execution — and it dispenses us from thinking of the cause of crimes.

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It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
Far from living in a world of visions and imagining men better than they are, we see them as they are; and that is why we affirm that the best of men is made essentially bad by the exercise of authority, and that the theory of the “balancing of powers” and “control of authorities” is a hypocritical formula, invented by those who have seized power, to make the “sovereign people,” whom they despise, believe that the people themselves are governing. It is because we know men that we say to those who imagine that men would devour one another without those governors: “You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, `What will become of my poor subjects without me?’”

Ah, if men were those superior beings that the utopians of authority like to speak to us of, if we could close our eyes to reality, and live, like them, in a world of dreams and illusions as to the superiority of those who think themselves called to power, perhaps we also should do like them; perhaps we also should believe in the virtues of those who govern.

With virtuous masters, what dangers could slavery offer? Do you remember the Slave-owner of whom we heard so often, hardly thirty years ago? Was he not supposed to take paternal care of his slaves? “He alone,” we were told, “could hinder these lazy, indolent, improvident children dying of hunger. How could he crush his slaves through hard labor, or mutilate them by blows, when his own interest lay in feeding them well, in taking care of them as much as of his own children! And then, did not `the law’ see to it that the least swerving of a slave-owner from the path of duty was punished?” How many times have we not been told so! But the reality was such that, having returned from a voyage to Brazil, Darwin was haunted all his life by the cries of agony of mutilated slaves, by the sobs of moaning women whose fingers were crushed in thumbserews!

If the gentlemen in power were really so intelligent and so devoted to the public cause, as panegyrists of authority love to represent, what a pretty government and paternal utopia we should be able to construct! The employer would never be the tyrant of the worker; he would be the father! The factory would be a palace of delight, and never would masses of workers be doomed to physical deterioration. The State would not poison its workers by making matches with white phosphorus, for which it is so easy to substitute red phosphorus. A judge would not have the ferocity to condemn the wife and children of the one whom he sends to prison to suffer years of hunger and misery and to die some day of anemia; never would a public prosecutor ask for the head of the accused for the unique pleasure of showing off his oratorical talent; and nowhere would we find a gaoler or an executioner to do the bidding of judges, who have not the courage to carry out their sentences themselves. What do I say! We should never have enough Plutarchs to praise the virtues of Members of Parliament who would all hold Panama checks in horror! Biribi would become an austere nursery of virtue, and permanent armies would be the joy of citizens, as soldiers would only take up arms to parade before nursemaids, and to carry nosegays on the point of their bayonets!

Oh, the beautiful utopia, the lovely Christmas dream we can make as soon as we admit that those who govern represent a superior caste, and have hardly any or no knowledge of simple mortals’ weaknesses! It would then suffice to make them control one another in hierarchical fashion, to let them exchange fifty papers, at most, among different administrators, when the wind blows down a tree on the national road. Or, if need be, they would have only to be valued at their proper worth, during elections, by those same masses of mortals which are supposed to be endowed with all stupidity in their mutual relations but become wisdom itself when they have to elect their masters.

All the science of government, imagined by those who govern, is imbibed with these utopias. But we know men too well to dream such dreams. We have not two measures for the virtues of the governed and those of the governors; we know that we ourselves are not without faults and that the best of us would soon be corrupted by the exercise of power. We take men for what they are worth — and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might — perhaps not strong enough — to put an end to it.

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But it is not enough to destroy. We must also know how to build, and it is owing to not having thought about it that the masses have always been led astray in all their revolutions. After having demolished they abandoned the care of reconstruction to the middle class people, who possessed a more or less precise conception of what they wished to realize, and who consequently reconstituted authority to their own advantage.

That is why Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement — at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist. Only, instead of demanding that those social customs should be maintained through the authority of a few, it demands it from the continued action of all.

Communist customs and institutions are of absolute necessity for society, not only to solve economic difficulties, but also to maintain and develop social customs that bring men in contact with one another; they must be looked to for establishing such relations between men that the interest of each should be the interest of all; and this alone can unite men instead of dividing them.

In fact, when we ask ourselves by what means a certain moral level can be maintained in a human or animal society, we find only three such means: the repression of anti-social acts; moral teaching; and the practice of mutual help itself. And as all three have already been put to the test of practice, we can judge them by their effects.

As to the impotence of repression — it is sufficiently demonstrated by the disorder of present society and by the necessity of a revolution that we all desire or feel inevitable. In the domain of economy, coercion has led us to industrial servitude; in the domain of politics — to the State, that is to say, to the destruction of all ties that formerly existed among citizens, and to the nation becoming nothing but an incoherent mass of obedient subjects of a central authority.

Not only has a coercive system contributed and powerfully aided to create all the present economical, political and social evils, but it has given proof of its absolute impotence to raise the moral level of societies; it has not been even able to maintain it at the level it had already reached. If a benevolent fairy could only reveal to our eyes all the crimes that are committed every day, every minute, in a civilized society under cover of the unknown, or the protection of law itself, — society would shudder at that terrible state of affairs. The authors of the greatest political crimes, like those of Napoleon III. coup d’etat, or the bloody week in May after the fall of the Commune of 1871, never are arraigned ; and as a poet said; “the small miscreants are punished for the satisfaction of the great ones.” More than that, when authority takes the moralization of society in hand, by “punishing criminals” it only heaps up now crimes!

Practised for centuries, repression has so badly succeeded that it has but led us into a blind alley from which we can only issue by carrying torch and hatchet into the institutions of our authoritarian past.

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Far be it from us not to recognize the importance of the second factor, moral teaching — especially that which is unconsciously transmitted in society and results from the whole of the ideas and comments emitted by each of us on facts and events of every-day life. But this force can only act on society under one condition, that of not being crossed by a mass of contradictory immoral teachings resulting from the practice of insitutions.

In that case its influence is nil or baneful. Take Christian morality: what other teaching could have had more hold on minds than that spoken in the name of a crucified God, and could have acted with all its mystical force, all its poetry of martyrdom, its grandeur in forgiving executioners? And yet the institution was more powerful than the religion: soon Christianity — a revolt against imperial Rome — was conquered by that same Rome; it accepted its maxims, customs, and language. The Chriatian church accepted the Roman law as its own, and as such — allied to the State — it became in history the most furious enemy of all semi-communist institutions, to which Christianity appealed at Its origin.

Can we for a moment believe that moral teaching, patronized by circulars from ministers of public instruction, would have the creative force that Christianity has not had? And what could the verbal teaching of truly social men do, if it were counteracted by the whole teaching derived from institutions based, as our present institutions of property and State are, upon unsocial principles?

The third element alone remains the institution itself, acting in such a way as to make social acts a state of habit and instinct. This element — history proves it — has never missed its aim, never has it acted as a double-bladed sword; and its influence has only been weakened when custom strove to become immovable, crystallized, to become in its turn a religion not to be questioned when it endeavored to absorb the individual, taking all freedom of action from him and compelling him to revolt against that which had become, through its crystallization, an enemy to progress.

In fact, all that was an element of progress in the past or an instrument of moral and intellectual improvement of the human race is due to the practice of mutual aid, to the customs that recognized the equality of men and brought them to ally, to unite, to associate for the purpose of producing and consuming, to unite for purpose of defence to federate and to recognize no other judges in fighting out their differences than the arbitrators they took from their own midst.

Each time these institutions, issued from popular genius, when it had reconquered its liberty for a moment, — each time these institutions developed in a new direction, the moral level of society, its material well-being, its liberty, its intellectual progress, and the affirmation of individual originality made a step in advance. And, on the contrary, each time that in the course of history, whether following upon a foreign conquest, or whether by developing authoritarian prejudices men become more and more divided into governors and governed, exploiters and exploited, the moral level fell, the well-being of the masses decreased in order to insure riches to a few, and the spirit of the age declined.

History teaches us this, and from this lesson we have learned to have confidence in free Communist institutions to raise the moral level of societies, debased by the practice of authority.

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Today we live side by side without knowing one another. We come together at meetings on an election day: we listen to the lying or fanciful professions of faith of a candidate, and we return home. The State has the care of all questions of public interest; the State alone has the function of seeing that we do not harm the interests of our neighbor, and, if it fails in this, of punishing us in order to repair the evil.

Our neighbor may die of bringer or murder his children, — it is no business of ours; it is the business of the policeman. You hardly know one another, nothing unites you, everything tends to alienate you from one another, and finding no better way, you ask the Almighty (formerly it was a God, now it is the State) to do all that lies within his power to stop anti-social passions from reaching their highest climax.

In a Communist society such estrangement, such confidence in an outside force could not exist. Communist organization cannot be left to be constructed by legislative bodies called parliaments, municipal or communal council. It must be the work of all, a natural growth, a product of the constructive genius of the great mass. Communism cannot be imposed from above; it could not live even for a few months if the constant and daily co-operation of all did not uphold it. It must be free.

It cannot exist without creating a continual contact between all for the thousands and thousands of common transactions; it cannot exist without creating local life, independent in the smallest unities — the block of houses, the street, the district, the commune. It would not answer its purpose if it did not cover society with a network of thousands of associations to satisfy its thousand needs: the necessaries of life, articles of luxury, of study, enjoyment, amusements. And such associations cannot remain narrow and local; they must necessarily tend (as is already the case with learned societies, cyclist clubs, humanitarian societies and the like) to become international.

And the sociable customs that Communism — were it only partial at its origin — must inevitably engender in life, would already be a force incomparably more powerful to maintain and develop the kernel of sociable customs than all repressive machinery.

This, then, is the form — sociable institution — of which we ask the development of the spirit of harmony that Church and State had undertaken to impose on us — with the sad result we know only too well. And these remarks contain our answer to those who affirm that Communism and Anarchy cannot go together. They are, you see, a necessary complement to one another. The most powerful development of individuality, or individual originality — as one of our comrades has so well said, — can only be produced when the first needs of food and shelter are satisfied; when the struggle for existence against the forces of nature has been simplified; when man’s time is no longer taken up entirely by the meaner side of daily subsistence, — then only, his intelligence, his artistic taste, his inventive spirit, his genius, can develop freely and ever strive to greater achievements.

Communism is the best basis for individual development and freedom; not that individualism which drives man to the war of each against all — this is the only one known up till now, — but that which represents the full expansion of man’s faculties, the superior development of what is original in him, the greatest fruitfulness of intelligence, feeling and will.

Such being our ideal, what does it matter to us that it cannot be realized at once!

Our first duty is to find out, by an analysis of society, its characteristic tendencies at a given moment of evolution and to state them clearly. Then, to act according to those tendencies in our relations with all those who think as we do. And, finally, from to-day and especially daring a revolutionary period, work for the destruction of the institutions, as, weII as the prejudices, that impede the development of such tendencies.

That is all we can do by peaceable or revolutionary methods, and we know that by favoring those tendencies we contribute to progress, while who resist them impede the march of progress.

Nevertheless, men often speak of stages to be travelled through, and they propose to work to reach what they consider to be the nearest station and only then to take the high road leading to what they recognize to be a still higher ideal.

But reasoning like this seems to me to misunderstand the true character of human progress and to make use of a badly chosen military comparison. Humanity is not a rolling ball, nor even a marching column. It is a whole that evolves simultaneously in the mulitude of millions of which it Is composed; and if you wish for a comparison, you must rather take it in the laws of organic evolution than In those of an inorganic moving body.

The fact is that each phase of development of a society is a resultant of all the activities of the Intellects which compose that society; it bears the imprint of all those millions of wills. Consequently, whatever may be the stage of development that the twentieth century is preparing for us, this future state of society will show the effects of the awakening of libertarian ideas which is now taking place. And the depth with which this movement will be impressed upon the coming twentieth century institutions will depend upon the number of men who will have broken to-day with authoritarian prejudices, on the energy they will have used in attacking old institutions, on the impression they will make on the masses, on the clearness with which the ideal of a free society will have been impressed on the minds of the masses. But, to-day, we can say in full confidence, that in France the awakening of libertarian ideas had already put its stamp on society; and that the next revolution will not be the Jacobin revolution which it would have been had it buret out twenty years ago.

And as these ideas are neither the invention of a man nor a group, but result from the whole of the movement of ideas of the time, we can be sure that, whatever comes out of the next revolution, it will not be the dictatorial and centralized Communism which was so much in vogue forty years ago, nor the authoritarian Collectivism to which we were quite recently invited to ally ourselves, and which its advocates dare only defend very feebly at present.
The “first stage,” it is certain, will then be quite different from what was described under that name hardly twenty years ago. The latest developments of the libertarian ideas have already modified it beforehand in an Anarchist sense.

I have already mentioned that the great all-dominating question now is for the Socialist party, taken as a whole, to harmonize its ideal of society with the libertarian movement that germinates, in the spirit of the masses, in literature, in science, in philosophy. It is also, it is especially so, to rouse the spirit of popular initiative.

Now, it is precisely the workers’ and peasants’ initiative that all parties — the Socialist authoritarian party included — have always stifled, wittingly or not, by party discipline. Committees, centers, ordering everything; local organs having but to obey, “so as not to put the unity of the organization in danger.” A whole teaching, in a word; a whole false history, written to serve that purpose, a whole incomprehensible pseudo-science of economics, elaborated to this end.

Well, then, those who will work to break up these superannuated tactics, those who will know how to rouse the spirit of initiative in individuals and in groups, those who will be able to create in their mutual relations a movement and a life based on the principles of free understanding — those that will understand that variety, conflict even, is life, and that uniformity is death, — they will work, not for future centuries, but in good earnest for the next revolution, for our own times.

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We need not fear the dangers and “abuses” of liberty. It is only those who do nothing who make no mistakes. As to those who only know how to obey, they make just as many, and more, mistakes than those who strike out their own path in trying to act in the direction their intelligence and their social education suggest to them. The ideal of liberty of the individual — if it is incorrectly understood owing to surroundings where the notion of solidarity is insufficiently accentuated by institutions — can certainly lead isolated men to acts that are repugnant to the social sentiments of humanity. Let us admit that it does happen: is it, however, a reason for throwing the principle of liberty overboard? Is it a reason for accepting the teaching of those masters who, in order to prevent “digressions,” reestablish the censure of an enfranchised press and guillotine advanced parties to maintain uniformity and discipline — that which, when all is said, was in 1793 the best means of insuring the triumph of reaction?

The only thing to be done when we see anti-social acts committed in the name of liberty of the individual, is to repudiate the principle of “each for himself and God for all,” and to have the courage to say aloud in any one’s presence what we think of such acts. This can perhaps bring about a conflict; but conflict is life itself. And from the conflict will arise an appreciation of those acts far more just than all those appreciations which could have been produced under the influence of old-established ideas.

When the moral level of a society descends to the point it has reached today we must expect beforehand that a revolt against such a society will sometimes assume forms that will make us shudder. No doubt, heads paraded on pikes disgust us; but the high and low gibbets of the old regime in France, and the iron cages Victor Hugo has told us of, were they not the origin of this bloody exhibition? Let us hope that the coldblooded massacre of thirty-five thousand Parisians in May, 1871, after the fall of the Commune, and the bombardment of, Paris by Thiers will have passed over the French nation without leaving too great a fund of ferocity. Let us hope that. Let us also hope that the corruption of the swell mob, which is continually brought to light in recent trials, will not yet have ruined the heart of the nation. Lot us hope it! Let us help that it be so! But if our hopes are not fulfilled — you, young Socialists, will you then turn your backs on the people in revolt, because the ferocity of the rulers of today will have left its furrow in the people’s minds; because the mud from above has splashed far and wide?

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It is evident that so profound a revolution producing itself in people’s minds cannot be confined to the domain of ideas without expanding to the sphere of action. As was so well expressed by the sympathetic young philosopher, too early snatched by death from our midst, Mark Guyau, in one of the most beautiful books published for thirty years, there is no abyss between thought and action, at least for those who are not used to modern sophistry. Conception is already a beginning of action.

Consequently, the new ideas have provoked a multitude of acts of revolt in all countries, under all possible conditions: first, individual revolt against Capital and State; then collective revolt — strikes and working class insurrections — both preparing, in men’s minds as in actions, a revolt of the masses, a revolution. In this, Socialism and Anarchism have only followed the course of evolution, which is always accomplished by force — ideas at the approach of great popular risings.

That is why it would be wrong to attribute the monopoly of acts of revolt to Anarchism. And, in fact, when we pass in review the acts of revolt of the last quarter of a century, we see them proceeding from all parties.

In all Europe we see a multitude of risings of working masses and peasants. Strikes, which were once “a war of folded arms,” today easily turning to revolt, and sometimes taking — in the United States, in Belgium, in Andalusia — the proportions of vast insurrections. In the new and old worlds it is by the dozen that we count the risings of strikers having turned to revolts.

On the other hand, the individual act of revolt takes all possible characters, and all advanced parties contribute to it. We pass before us the rebel young woman Vera Zassulitch shooting a satrap of Alexander II.; the Social Democrat Hœdel and the Republican Nobiling shooting at the Emperor of Germany; the cooper Otero shooting at the King of Spain, and the religious Mazzmian, Passanante, striking at the King of Italy. We see agrarian murders in Ireland and explosions in London, organized by Irish Nationalists who have a horror of Socialism and Anarchism. We see a whole generation of young Russians — Socialists, Constitutionalists and Jacobins — declare war to the knife against Alexander II., and pay for that revolt against autocracy by thirty-five executions and swarms of exiles. Numerous acts of personal revenge take place among Belgian, English and American miners; and it is only at the end of this long series that we see the Anarchists appear with their acts of revolt in Spain and France.

And, during this same period, massacres, wholesale and retail, organized by governments, follow their regular course. To the applause of the European bourgeoisie, the Versailles Assembly causes thirty-five thousand Parisian workmen to be butchered — for the most part prisoners of the vanquished Commune. “Pinkerton thugs” — that private army of the rich American capitalists — massacre strikers according to the rules of that art. Priests incite an idiot to shoot at Louise Michel, who — as a true Anarchist — snatches her would-be murderer from his judges by pleading for him. Outside Europe the Indians of Canada are massacred and Riel is strangled, the Matabele are exterminated, Alexandria is bombarded, without saying more of the butcheries in Madagascar, in Tonkin , in Turkoman’s land everywhere, to which is given the name of war. And, finally, each year hundreds and even thousands of years of imprisonment are distributed among the rebellious workers of the two continents, and the wives and children, who are thus condemned to expiate the so-called crimes of their fathers, are doomed to the darkest misery. The rebels are transported to Siberia, to Biribi, to Noumea and to Guiana; and in those places of exile the convicts are shot down like dogs for the least act of insubordination. What a terrible indictment the balance sheet of the sufferings endured by workers and their friends, during this last quarter of a century, would be! What a multitude of horrible details that are unknown to the public at large and that would haunt you like a nightmare if I ventured to tell you them tonight! What a fit of passion each page would provoke if the martyrology of the modern forerunners of the great Social Revolution were written! — Well, then, we have lived through such a history, and each one of us has read whole pages from that book of blood and misery.
And, in the face of those sufferings, those executions, those Guianas, Siberias, Noumeas and Biribis, they have the insolence to reproach the rebel worker with want of respect for human life!!!

But the whole of our present life extinguishes the respect for human life! The judge who sentences to death, and his lieutenant, the executioner, who garrots in broad daylight in Madrid, or guillotines in the mists of Paris amid the jeers of the degraded members of high and low society; the general who massacres at Bac-leh, and the newspaper correspondent who strives to cover the assassins with glory; the employer who poisons his workmen with white lead, because — he answers — “it would cost so much more to substitute oxide of zinc for it;” the so-called English geographer who kills an old women lest she should awake a hostile village by her sobs, and the German geographer who causes the girl he had taken as a mistress to be hanged with her lover, the court-martial that is content with fifteen days arrest for the Biribi gaoler convicted of murder….all, all, all in the present society teaches absolute contempt for human life — for that flesh that costs so little in the market! And those who garrot, assassinate, who kill depreciated human merchandise, they who have made a religion of the maxim that for the safety of the public you must garrot, shoot and kill, they complain that human life is not sufficiently respected!!!

No, citizens, as long as society accepts the law of retaliation, as long as religion and law, the barrack and the law-courts, the prison and industrial penal servitude, the press and the school continue to teach supreme contempt for the life of the individual, — do not ask the rebels against that society to respect it. It would be exacting a degree of gentleness and magnanimity from them, infinitely superior to that of the whole society.

If you wish, like us, that the entire liberty of the individual and, consequently, his life be respected, you are necessarily brought to repudiate the government of man by man, whatever shape it assumes; you are forced to accept the principles of Anarchy that you have spurned so long. You must then search with us the forms of society that can best realize that ideal and put an end to all the violence that rouses your indignation.

Source

Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal – Petr Kropotkin (pdf)

I just wanted to share with you the following, taken from a Legal, Jurisprudence Textbook. It has to be one of the most objective overviews of Anarchism I’ve seen around, which is surprising considering the extract was contained in a textbook intended for potentially hostile audiences — law schools.

The Limits of Law: Anarchist Objections to Law and State

Laws, decrees, edicts, ordinances, resolutions, will fall like hail upon the unfortunate people.

Third philosophical thesis: We are not cabbages

All of which is to say that, beyond being boring, jurisprudence is about the ways that all sorts of laws which define our society, our political agendas, our sexuality, our visions of reality and our day-to-day struggles intersect.  Is law, then, simply a repressive agent from which we need to be freed in order to recover, or discover, our true selves? As I noted, one of the interesting things about Foucault’s Chinese encyclopaedia is that it demonstrates to us the limitations of our own thought processes. Is law only a distortion or reduction of what could otherwise be? Does it suppress our individuality and freedom?  DH Lawrence thought so. In his Study of Thomas Hardy, he wrote that under the influence of too many laws people are like “the regulation cabbage” — going rotten at the centre instead of blooming.

DH Lawrence

Study of Thomas Hardy

[Making laws] is like protecting the well-being of a cabbage in the cabbage patch, while the cabbage is rotting at the heart for lack of power to run out into blossom.  Could you make any law in any land, empowering the poppy to flower? You might make a law refusing it liberty to bloom. But that is another thing. COuld any law put into being something which did not before exist? It could not. Law can only modify the conditions for better or worse, of that which already exists.

But law is very, very clumsy and mechanical instrument, and we people are very, very delicate and subtle beings.  Therefore I only ask that the law shall leave me alone as much as possible. I insist that no law shall have immediate power over me, either for my good or for my ill.  And I would wish that many laws be unmade, and no more laws made.  Let there be a parliament of men and women for the careful and gradual unmaking of laws.

… we are like the hide-bound cabbage going rotten at the heart. And for the same reason that, instead of producing our flower, instead of continuing our activity, satisfying our true desire, climbing and clambering till, like the poppy, we lean on the sill of all the unknown, and run our flag out there in the colour and shine of being, having surpassed that which has been before, we hang back, we dare not even peep forth, but, safely shut up in bud, safely and darkly and snugly enclosed, like the regulation cabbage, we remain secure till our hearts go rotten, saying all the while how safe we are.

There may be much value in what Lawrence says. Insofar as laws (of society, thought, the legal system) provide us with a way of existing without giving too much thought to what comes next, and without having to make difficult decisions or reflect upon the assumptions we are making, they can be a deadening influence which both capitalise on our desire for safe answers and encourage complacency.  But, as we have seen, law is also arguable the basic condition of meaning: law defines, categorises and sets conditions for communication.

Lawrence’s sentiments raise the question of whether law is necessary to human society at all, and — supposing that it is necessary — what form it should take. These are the questions which have not traditionally been central to legal theory, so persuaded are we that law is a necessary and (probably) a positive element of social existence.  However, political philosophers and, in particular, anarchists, have challenged the traditional acceptance by Western cultures of the state and its associated concept of law imposed by a sovereign.  Although anarchist thought has never been regarded as “belonging” to legal philosophy, it does in my view offer some interesting contributions to an understanidng of law.

This neglect of anarchist thought is hardly suprising: law is typically regarded by legal theorists as imposing order on a society, while anarchism is frequently associated with chaos and disorder.  However, while the “anarchist” label is sometimes adopted by people wishing to reject order altogether, that is not the primary use of the term is political philosophy.  Anarchist theory does not reject order as such, but it does reject order imposed on a society by a centralised hierarchical authority such as a state.  The political motivations behind this rejection vary considerably between anarchists: broadly speaking, some are libertarians or anarcho-capitalists who see the state as an obstacle to radical individualism or a completely free market; others hold communitarian ideals, and regard the state as a violent institution which creates inequalities between people (through institutions such as private property), which prevents people from taking responsibility for ordering their own communities, which obstructs human potential and mutual co-operation, and which perpetrates more violence and war than it prevents.

Early anarchists tended to identify the concept of law with state-based authority, meaning that their rejection of the state also entailed a rejection of law.  For instance, Peter Kropotkin observed that law is seen to be remedy for all evils: “Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. — A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowards.”  In placing our reliance on laws given to us by the state, according to Kropotkin, we fail to exercise our own judgement and initiative in ordering our existences, and become subservient to both the law and the state.  Reliance on the state prevents us placing reliance on ourselves and from forming co-operative relationships with others.  Similarly, Leo Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist, defined laws as “rules, made by people who govern by means of organised violence for non-compliance”.  Rather than representing the will of the majority, for Tolstoy, law represents the subjective wishes if a few privileged people, who create laws which server their own interests and protect their private property.  Tolstoy argued that the violence of law cannot be justified: if people are irrational and need violence to exist, then everybody must have the right ot use violence, not just the few who have power; if, on the other hand, people were (as he thought) rational, “then their relations should be based on reason, and not on the violence of those who happen to have seized power”.

Any anarchist rejection of law is, however, tied to its rejection of the state.  Anarchism does not entail a rejection of law as such, as long as it is possible to disengage the concept of law from the presence of a state.  In other words, law may be acceptable, necessary, and even positive for anarchists, as long as it is not arbitrarily imposed by a superior and oppressive institution such as the state.  Such a non-state law may be difficult for modern Western lawyers to envisage: after all, our very concept of law tends to assume the existence of state coercion.  But anarchists have argued that we do not need to think of laws as a hierarchical institution which forces its subjects into compliance.  Nor should law necessarily be regarded merely as a set of rules or static limits.  Rather, it might be “a design, an experiment, and a learning process”.  More practically, it could be created and enforced by consensus and with the co-operation of all members of a society.  Such a law may seem idealistic, impracticable, even impossible. (Though when we think that something is impossible it is important first to remember Foucault’s Chinese encyclopaedia.  Is the object impossible, or are we simply limited in our imagination?)  Clearly, a greater awareness of the law of non-Western and indigenous cultures has led in recent years to some acceptance of broader concepts of law, which are not based upon the presence of centralised state authority…

All citations have been left out — it took me long enough to re-type the whole passage. (my apologies for any errors)  Extract taken from Margaret Davies, “Asking the Law Question” (3rd ed, 2008).  It should also be noted that the opening quote is taken from PJ Proudhon’s General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, page 132.



In maniera insperata, il progetto RIZOMI, è passato attraverso la sua prima presentazione ufficiale nell’aula 6N di Architettura al Politecnico di Torino.

Tra amici, conoscenti e studenti il feedback raccolto è stato sostanzialmente positivo… quantomeno… nessuno a cercato di scappare o si è addormentato!

La scelta è stata quella di centrare l’attenzione più sulla correlazione tra sviluppo urbano e agricoltura e sulle nuove ipotesi percorribili (il 70% dell’uditorio era composto da futuri architetti…) e meno sulle tecniche specifiche di orticoltura urbana.

Ricapitolando la scaletta dell’intervento:

(a memoria visto che la copia cartacea è stata dispersa grazie allo stato di confusione post presentazione di Nicola)

Intro

Crisi sistema Agricolo

cit. Jared Diamond

cit. Una fattoria per il futuro

Definizione differenza produzione agricola e produzione agro-alimentare

Rivoluzione Industriale

Abbandono impianto urbanistico “Gotico”

cit. Carolyn Steel

cit. Joseph Rykwert “il giardino del futuro fra estetica e tecnologia”

rottura unione di ruolo architetto – agronomo

Inizio separazione città – campagna e conseguenti deleghe

Sviluppo dei mercati finanziari

Progressivo spostamento da produzione agro-alimentare a produzione di utility

Disgregazione rapporto città – cibo

Disgregazione relazioni

Spin alternativi (urbanismo “anarchico”):

Disurbanisti Sovietici

Colin Ward

Kropotkin

Le Corbusier

François Hennebique

Eugene Hènard

La città di Utopia di Thomas Moore

Undertwasser

I minimal garden di Berlino

Le città lineari

…

…

Forse è ora di riprendere tutto in considerazione

Cambiamento da operare a più livelli:

politico

professionale

personale

presentazione progetto RIZOMI

Un grazie a Luca (prog.Rizomi), Emanuele e al responsabile dello spazio didattico, Matteo Robiglio.

…no, a questo giro niente pozioni miracolose per coltivare le melanzane sul balcone…

Magari la prossima volta.

Interestingly, I have been assessed by a facebook application, for a representational anarchist ideology.  My various friends within facebook have also attended the quiz relations, and in regard, they have established the same resolution.   According to this ‘facebook app,’ I’m regarded as an anarcho-communist, and peculiarly, this ideology is ostensibly similar to the intrinsically transcendental Zeitgeist Movement.  The movement, which I strongly predicate as an unparalleled deviance of a ‘normative’ ideology, is essentially a utopian society with inextricable ethics that propagates equality through a monetary-less system, devoid of any enforced labor in consequence to perpetual technological advancement.

Initially, you may think: “What similarities do anarcho communism and a resource based economy share?”  Well, the complete theoretical purpose of the resource based economy is to liberate the people from mindless, linear, and arduous labor.  Laborious activities such as the required commonplace factory worker are usually paid minimum wage, severe work hours, in a competitive and self demoralizing, harsh working environment.  These particular events are a disservice to that individual, ultimately generating resentment for community and relations to the state, amidst a growing depression, and the traditional “inflation” in society.  Beyond the individual’s perspective, particular environmental traditions are affirmed in today’s society, such as fossil fuels, inefficient energy production, and planned obsolescence.

Anarchism promotes the destabilization and gradual removal of government control in all aspects of society.  Moreover, Anarchists believe that government control advocates corrupt and ill-behavior among greedy and malevolent politicians.  It is often stated that there is no single determination of the ideology.

Communist’s believe that social stratification is a detriment and pernicious to complete society.  They collectively want to abolish capitalism and the inextricably evil symptoms it harbors.  Furthermore, they believe Capitalism breeds competition and a hierarchy of social class, therefore countries wellbeing is compromised via despotism and corruption.  Interestingly, there have been many attempted utopian societies under communist ideologies.  Particularly, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, they had developed the first utopian community called ‘New Harmony,’ in the 1800’s.

Anarcho Communism (libertarian communism) is essentially a divergence, a fundamental hybrid ideology.  To begin with, it harbors both the destabilization of the established state, as well as the decentralized promotion of the dictatorship of the proletariats, which creates various union forces for the good of society.  Just like in communism, it propagates socialistic industries and institutions, thus eliminating private property among individuals. Goods are distributed according to the physical needs of the individual, rather than according to labor.  Moreover, Anarchist communists recognize money as fundamentally quantitative in nature, rather than qualitative. They believe production should be a qualitative matter, and that consumption and distribution should be self-determined by each individual without arbitrary value assigned to labor, goods and services by others.  Peter Kropoktin was one of the most prolific dignitaries during the development of this ideology, which continues to perpetually expand.

Na przykład taki B. Traven. Albo Pynchon. Wiele razy znikali. Z każdym zniknięciem ich obecność była bardziej natarczywa.

Kropotkin, wiedziony nagłym kaprysem, postanowił na chwilę zniknąć. I znikł.

Niby nic specjalnego. A jednak.

Myśl, że przed zniknięciem powinien jednak obmyślić sobie sposób powrotu, próbowała pojawić się w głowie Kropotkina, ale nie mogła. Z powodów zasadniczych. I – mimo zamiaru uporczywości – nie pojawiała się.

Gdyby Kropotkin nie znikł, byłby zapewne zakłopotany.

Kolejność rzeczy bywa czasem ważniejsza niż się to z pozoru wydaje.

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.

Peter Kropotkin

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker’s Weblog.

‘Anarchy, Socialism and a Darwinian Left’, Ellen Clarke. An article Clarke originally published in 2006, now freely available.

Hat tip. PhilPapers (New papers)

I’ve linked to this largely because of the surprisingly large number of people who are not aware that Anarchism refers to a tradition in political theory, not a descent in chaos. The point of Anarchist theory is to show who rule governed societies can emerge without coercion on a purely voluntary basis. I’m not advocating this point of view, but I am startled by sometimes encountering people who work in political theory and appear to be unaware of this position. Clarke refers to Left Anarchism, but there are many varieties of Anarchism: capitalist and socialist; conservative and progressive, revolutionary and evolutionary; and many other gradations.

The real merit of Clarke’s paper is to discuss the possibility of Left Anarchism, through game theory, in reaction to Peter Singer who uses ideas of game theory and co-operation to arrive at a more statist kind of leftism. Clarke’s comment on Anarchist ideology and its history are less detailed. Her main examples of Anarchist thought are Bakunin and Kropotkin, but she does not notes the differences between them. Kropotkin seems the most relevant to her case, since he was a biologist concerned with evolution. His vision was of anarcho-communism, while Bakunin advocated a society where economic property is taken over by workers’ collectives, but is not completely communistic in its attitude to private property. Kropotkin seems the most relevant to what Clarke argues, since he did write on Darwinism and the role of co-operation in evolution in his political theory.

Clarke’s argument focuses on the use of the ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ in theories of social choice and politics. For a full and expert explanation of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ in philosophy, go to Steven Kuhn’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Briefly, this refers to two prisoners in isolation from each other. Various formulations exist, but they have the pattern that the best outcome for each prisoner is to co-operate with the police if the other does not, since the co-operator goes free and the non-co-operator gets a long sentence. If both act the same way, the best outcome is if both refuse to co-operate which is a better outcome for both than if they both co-operate. The dilemma for the prisoners’ is whether they can trust the other prisoner not to co-operate with the police and so have a reason to not co-operate with the police as well. The prisoners have an incentive to co-operate with each other, but if one behaves co-operatively to the other and the other does not, the latter prisoner benefits. This expresses a social and political dilemma that as individuals we do best if we exploit other people’s trust, but the average benefit of all individuals in society benefits if there is trust. The kind of game theory that looks at the dilemma, suggests that over time rational actors will build up reciprocity and trust, and will co-operate after a sufficient number of repeated experiences which show that trust and co-operation beat distrust and betrayal.

Clarke is concerned with this as an evolutionary survival strategy of humans, arguing that rationality and times lead us to co-operate without a coercive agent to make us obey co-operative rules, such as the state. However, there are more people who take the position that Clarke refers to ‘Axelrodian co-operation’ in which a coercive agent is necessary for co-operation to trust to get established. I’m inclined to agree with the latter position, though in a lore mitigated fashion than the left-statism that Clarke is arguing against. The reason, I would limit the role of the state more than most social democrats and conservative is that I would argue the achievement structural order for society as a whole, is to allow voluntary co-operation to flourish through the market, and all other forms of voluntary association.

The important thing here is that anarchy is not just a name for collapse. In political theory, it refers to a rich and varied tradition according to which there can be an evolving order without the state.

W miasteczku S. jest dwóch fryzjerów. Pierwszy z nich jest człowiekiem pod każdym względem zaangażowanym, również w sprawy społeczności lokalnej, a przede wszystkim prawdziwym patriotą. Drugi umie strzyc.

Kropotkin, postawiony przed trudnym wyborem, z bólem serca decyduje się na wizytę u słusznego fryzjera. Wyniki przerastają jego najśmielsze oczekiwania. Dotychczasowe, nikłe raczej powodzenie u dam, ustępuje miejsca niemiłej samotności. Znajomi, widząc nową fryzurę, współczująco kiwają głowami, aby -  gdy odwróci się do nich plecami -  wybuchać niepohamowanym, nerwowym chichotem.

W miasteczku S. jest również dwóch dentystów. Pierwszy z nich to człowiek o nieposzlakowanej opinii, uczciwy i w ogóle pod każdym względem przyzwoity. Drugi zaś zna się na swym fachu i wierci bezboleśnie.

Kropotkin, obudziwszy się rano z dotkliwym bólem zęba, stara się nie myśleć o najbliższej przyszłości i próbuje znaleźć ukojenie w biografii Samuela Johnsona pióra niezapomnianego Jamesa Boswella. Johnson miał jakoby stwierdzić, że patriotyzm jest ostatnim schronieniem szubrawców. Jakoby. Zagadnienie, czyim schronieniem może ewentualnie być przyzwoitość, pozostaje, ku zakłopotaniu Kropotkina, otwarte.

De andere discussiebijeenkomt waar ik op dit blog wat aandacht aan wil besteden was “Socialisme of anarchisme”. Jeroen van der Starre hield daarover eerst een uitvoerige inleiding vol historische voorbeelden. Daarna deden een aantal aanwezigen, ik ook, een bijdrage uit de aal. Zowel inleiding als bijdragen uit de zaal bevatten veel goeds en leerzaams. Toch vond ik de bijeenkomst uiteindelijk op beide onderdelen niet bevredigend.

Eerst de inleiding. Daar was overduidelijk veel leeswerk in gaan zitten en tijd in gestoken. De spreker bezweek vrijwel onder de informatie, kwam in hevige tijdnood en moest flinke delen van wat hij wilde vertellen gaandeweg inkorten of schrappen. Dat is een frustratie die ik zelf maar al te goed ken uit tijden di dat ik dit soort inleidingen deed. Evengoed bleef er veel over.

We werden door Jeroen meegenomen in een historische rondleiding langs de grondleggers van het anarchisme: William Godwin, de individualist Max Stirner, Jean-Pierre Proudhon die het woord anarchie voor het eerst in zijn niet-negatieve beterkenis (anarchie als chaos), maar zijn zijn politieke betekenis (anarchie als maatschappij zonder autoriteit), en de eigenlijke grondlegger van het moderne anarchisme, Michael Bakoenin. Jeroen legde ondertussen wel redelijk uit hoe de totale ontkenning van iedere autoriteit als zodanig onwerkbaar is en abstract blijft. Hij haalde de zeer efficiënte weerlegging van anti-autoriteit-als-principe aan van Friedrich Engels aan, die uitlegde dat revoluties zelf heel autoritaire aangelegenheden zijn: de onderliggende klasse legt met gewapende machtsmiddelen haad dwingende autoriteit op aan de heersers, door ze omver te werpen en omvergeworpen te houden.

In de praktijk kwam er vaak niets van terecht, en Bakoenin pleitte tussen al zijn anti-autoritaire uitspraken ook voor een geheime dictatuur die van achter de schermen zo’n ‘anti-autoritaire’ revolutie moest leiden. Ook het vrij hilarische verhaal waarin Bakoenin in Lyon de afschaffing van de stata uitroept en iedereen die zich tegen  de nieuwe door Bakoenin opgelegde orde verette met de doodstraf bedreigde (maar Bakoenin is helemáál niet autoritair hoor…) - om binnen de kortste keren door de zojuist afgeschafte staat verjaagd te worden – kwam langs.

Daarna besprak Jeroen het isolement waarin de opkomende anarchistische beweging belandde, en de strategie van “propaganda van de daad”, het plegen van aanslagen, waartoe de beweging gedeeltelijk overging. Hij noemde Kropotkin en Malatesta als pleitbezorgers van deze vorm van terrorisme, maar legde veel te weinig nadruk op het feit dat 1. deze twee anarchisten daar heel snel afstand van namen, en 2. dat er naast de aanslagen-versie van het anarchisme ook allerlei andere activiteiten door anarchisten werden ontplooid, waaronder vooral ook theoretisch werk. Kropotkin bijvoorbeeld verdient een groot krediet als theoreticus en propagandist voor een maatschappij zonder opgelegde dwang, samenhangend via vrijwillige samenwerking en wederkerigheid. Zijn weerleggingen van de zin van strafrecht en gevangenissen, zijn bijvoorbeeld meesterlijk; in hoofdstuk 9 van zijn autobiografische “In Russian and french Prisons” vindt je een voorbeeld (teruggevonden via een mooie collectie anarchistische teksten in boekvorm: The Anarchist Reader, samengesteld door George Woodcock). Iedere revolutionair kan met het lezen van zulke teksten zijn of haar voordeel doen en er inspiratie aan ontlenen.

Later begon een deel van de anarchisten – en daar pakt Jeroen de draad weer op – zich te richten op vakbondsst rijd. Dit was de opkomst van het anarchosyndicalisme, dat in Spanje haar hoogtepunt vond. Vakbondsstrijd kwam in de plaats van politieke strijd, de vakbond kon als het ware de kiem van een vrije maatschappij van onderop vormen, daar kwam het op neer. Jeroen maakte duidelijk hoezeer in deze vleugel van het anarchisme een revolulutionair elan tot uiting kwam. Mara hij liet ook zien hoe de pricncipiéle afwijzing van elke autoriteit ertoe leidde dat het anarchisme de revolutionaire boot in Spanje 1936 miste. In dat jaar pleegden generaals een staatsgreep. Arbeiders kwamen daartegen in opstand. Anarchistische ideeén en organisaties waren prominent in die opstandige arbeidersbeweging. maar de Anarchosu yndicalistische vakbond CNT weigerde om door te bijten en de macht van de arbeidersklasse daadwerkelijk te vestigen in de vorm van een van ondereaf aangestuurde arbeiudersstaat. daardoor bleef de gevestigde burgerlijke staatsmacht intact. Uiteindelijk geionnen leiders van de CNT die staatsmacht zelfs tegen f de fac scisten en generaals te steunen door ministers te leveren voor de regering. Het anarchisme had hier laten zien geen gids te zijn voor een succesvolle revolutie. Het abstracte anti-autoritarisme deed he revolutionaire elan dat anarchistisch geïnspireerde bewegingen zo overduidelijk bezaten, niet tot zijn recht komen.

 Mijn overzicht van Jeroens inleiding is  incompleet. Hij besprak bijvoorbeeld ook nog de rol van anarchisten in de Russische revolutie. Omdatdie revolutie de sovjets – gekozen raden van arbeiders, boeren en soldaten- , onder Bolsjevistische leiding, tot staatsmacht verhief, keerden veel anarchisten zich daar tégen: elke staatsmacht was verdacht. Dat plaatste deze anarchisten aan de kant van de contrarevolutie, aldus Jeroen.

Ik denk dat dit veel te kort door de bocht is. Voor sommige anarchisten klopt dit. Andere anarchisten zagen dat sovjetmacht toch iets anders was dan reguliere staatsmacht, dat het veel dichter bij de anarchistische idealen stond, en dus waard om voor te vechten (Victor Serge was een voorbeeld daarvan, zoals een IS-er vanuit de zaal  naar voren bracht). Weer anderen anarchisten probeerden zowel tegen de Sovjet-macht als tegen de rechtse tegenstanders ervan te vechten.

Hoe illusoir dat laatste naar mijn mening uiteindelijk ook was, en hoezeer dat sóms de Witten ( de rechtse legers) in de kaart speelde, het gaat niet aan om dit soort bewegingen simpelweg af te doen als objectief contrarevolutionair. De hele historie vande Russische revolutie,de sovjetmacht en de relatie tussen Bolsjevieken en allerlei bewegingen waar anarchisten actief in waren en inspiratie aan ontlenen, verdient naar mijn mening een betere evaluatie, met een positievere inschatting van de rol van anarchisten en ander stromingen links van de Bolsjevistische hoofdstroom, en iets kritischer ten aanzien van die hoofdstroom, dan in de IS doorgaans te vinden is. Maar dat werk ik later nog wel eens uit.

De inleiding van Jeroen was dus informatief, maar bleef iets teveel steken in negatieve anecdotes en stereotypen over anarchisten. Complimenten die anarchisten van Jeroen en sommige andere aanwezigen kregen, hadden naar mijn idee vooral als doel om een al te sectarische indruk te voorkomen en kwamen wat obligaat over. 

Er was nog een manco: de titel, iets waar de IS en niet de spreker op zichzelf verantwoordelijk voor is. “Socialisme of anarchisme?” suggereert dat anarchisten géén socialisten zijn. Welnu, Jeroen gaf terecht aan dat iemand als Bakoenin zichzelf wel als socialist beschouwde. Ik denk dat we, vanaf uiterlijk die tijd, de hoofdstroom van het anarchisme als een stroming bínnen het socialisme moeten zien.

Kropotkin en Malatesta bijvoorbeeld hingen een anarchistisch communisme (en dus een vorm van socialisme; Marx noemde zich ook communist) aan. Heel veel anarchisten duiden hun opvattingen aan als libertair socialistisch. In Nederland had je bijvoorbeeld een anarchistisch netwerk dat zich de Federatie van Vrije Socialisten noemde.

Je kunt zeggen: maar dat is allemaal geen écht socialisme, het enige échte socialisme is het marxisme. Volgens mij is dat niet juist en niet slim. De erin besloten afwijzing-bij-voorbaat is niet bevorderlijk voor een echt en open discussie met anarchisten, en ook niet voor samenwerking. En we hebben elkaar veel te hard nodig om osn dit soort van nodeloze afstand te kunnen veroorloven. Het getuigt van een ideologische arrogantie, van vooringenomenheid, zo van wíj zijn de echte socialisten, jullie niet.

Ik ben zelf marxist en geen anarchist. Maar ik voer de discussie met anarchisten graag als een discussie binnen de socialistische beweging in brede zin, en ik plaats anarchisten daar niet bij voorbaat buiten door mezelf socialist te noemen en de anarchist niet. Over socialisme kun je verschillende opvattingen hebben, en natuurlijk prefereer ik de mijne boven die van een ander (totdat de ander me overtuigt!). Maar dat is een discussie bínnen het socialisme.

De echte titel van de bijeenkomst had moeten luiden: “Marxisme of anarchisme?” Het gaat hier twee stromingen binnen het socialisme, met een serieus meningsverschil. En in dat meningsverschil heb ik van anarchisten wel degelijk iets te leren, net als hopelijk ook andersom.

Díé houding – leren van elkáár, niet alleen de ander vertellen hoezeer diens opvattingen tekort schieten – miste ik in deze bijeenkomst – in de lezing, en in enkele van de bijdragen – toch enigszins. Het is een storende, tekortschietende houding die één van de mindere kanten is van de (hoofdstroom in de) IS, en van zeer veel trotskisten in het algemeen. Dat veel anarchisten andersom net zo’n houding innemen jegens marxisten, doet hier niets aan af. Ik kom hier op terug.

Esta es la primera de las frases que iré poniendo, las cuales tienen un contenido que, a mi punto de vista, pueden hacer llevar a un pensamiento crítico. Espero que les guste.

Cada descubrimiento, cada progreso, cada aumento de la riqueza humana es el resultado del trabajo intelectual y físico hecho en el pasado y el presente. Así que, ¿por qué alguien puede tener derecho a la propiedad de la más pequeña parte de este enorme todo, y decir esto es mío, no tuyo?

Piotr Kropotkin

Niezły łobuz z tego Golemana. Namieszał w głowach, że aż zęby bolą. Wobec faktu, że termin „inteligencja emocjonalna”, mimo uporczywych usiłowań panów Lockego, Zeidnera i Robertsa, nie daje się tak łatwo usunąć z masowej wyobraźni, zajmijmy się logiką emocjonalną. Dla odmiany. Twierdzącym, że czegoś takiego nie ma, polecić można szczególny przypadek postrzegania rachunku prawdopodobieństwa w przypadku gier losowych.

Bez zbędnego zagłębiania się w szczegóły przypomnijmy, że w przypadku skreślenia na kuponie totolotka sześciu liczb, prawdopodobieństwo wylosowania „szóstki” jest identyczna dla każdej dowolnej kombinacji. Również dla tej, która została wylosowana w poprzednim ciągnieniu. I tu zaczyna się problem. Zdumiewająca większość ofiar gier losowych, zapytana o to, czy ma sens zakreślania liczb, które komuś przyniosły materialne szczęście przed tygodniem, odpowiada, że nie. Szansa dwukrotnego wyciągnięcia takiej samej kombinacji w dwóch kolejnych odsłonach dramatu, wydaje im się nagle niebywale, ba, astronomicznie mała, o wiele mniejsza niż szansa wyciągnięcia daty urodzin żony sąsiada, rozmiaru butów rodzeństwa lub liczb które im się przyśniły w proroczym śnie. Nieodparcie nasuwa się analogia do irracjonalnej wiary żołnierzy chowających się w zamęcie bitwy do leja po bombie, w przeświadczeniu, że rachunek prawdopodobieństwa jest ich sprzymierzeńcem.

Logicznie rzecz biorąc, zakreślanie liczb wylosowanych w ostatnim ciągnieniu jest najlepszą z możliwych strategii. Wobec wzmiankowanej powyżej niechęci innych grających do tej kombinacji, szansa na to, że wygranej nie trzeba będzie dzielić z innymi, a zatem że będzie ona znacząco wyższa, wzrasta. Czy ktoś to robi? Wątpliwe. W przeciąganiu liny pomiędzy odpowiedzialnymi za podejmowanie trafnych decyzji, „logicznymi” obszarami kory znajdującymi się ponad ciałem modzelowatym, a ewolucyjnie starszymi warstwami zbliżonymi do układu limbicznego, z dziecinną łatwością wygrywa ten drugi. Wbrew logice rozumianej jako dyscyplina normatywna.

Kropotkin, w drodze do kolektury totolotka, zastanawia się poważnie nad zasadnością wprowadzenia terminu „emocjonalnej racjonalności”. Krótko przed osiągnięciem celu, sięga do kieszeni i dyskretnie wyrzuca do kosza na śmieci wypełniony uprzednio kupon. Zakreśli swe liczby na miejscu dbając, aby nie zabrakło wśród nich ulubionej siódemki. Jak również siedemnastki i czwórki. Teściowej można nie lubić, przenoszenie swej niechęci na jej datę urodzenia wydaje mu się jednak zupełnie pozbawione logiki.

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Szanowni komentatorzy Aspik i Nameste zwrócili mi słusznie uwagę na niestosowność bądź też nieadekwatność przykładu z lejem po bombie. Proszę zatem o traktowanie z należną ostrożnością i ewentualnym sceptycyzmem. Jestem na najlepszej drodze aby się samemu do leja zdystansować. Do czasu znalezienia lepszego przykładu lej (prowizorycznie) pozostanie.

ok no translation on this one sorry

the bombs say something like “think of the world”

Democracy in America

Po 1945 roku, popularność imienia Adolf spadła w krajach niemieckojęzycznych – jak również ościennych – do zera. Jest to w pewnym sensie zrozumiałe. Myli się jednak ten kto sądzi, że towarzyszące nazewnictwu dzieci idiosynkrazje dadzą się zawsze tak łatwo uzasadnić. Nikt nie daje dziecku imienia Hiob. Wobec faktu, że była to postać nader pozytywna i – jeśli wierzyć kanonowi – pod każdym względem godna naśladowania, może to najzwyczajniej dziwić.

Kropotkin, nie posiadając nigdy – nawet jako dziecko – żadnego zwierzęcia na własność (czy można posiadać zwierzę?), wykorzystywał skwapliwie coroczną obecność karpia wigilijnego w wannie i nadawał stworzeniu, w skrytości ducha i tajemnicy przed otoczeniem, imiona wielkich wodzów, odkrywców, a czasem nawet filozofów.

- W zasadzie – myślał – to chyba lepiej, że nikt nie wie, że w zeszłym roku spożyliśmy Hegla.

Ponieważ dalsze rozważania związane z tematem nadawania imion wydawały mu się jałowe i nie prowadzące do żadnych, nawet konstruktywnych, wniosków, postanowił położyć się do łóżka i zamknąć oczy. Natychmiast zapadł zmrok. Za zamkniętymi na klucz drzwiami szumiało życie zewnętrzne.

We, in civilized societies, are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could ensure comfort to all in return for a few hours of daily toil?

The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly. Daily they reiterate it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is necessary for production– the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge–all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few only allow the many to work on condition of themselves receiving the lion’s share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is the substance of all Socialism.

Hey Anwyn, if you’re reading this, I’m going to buy you one  of these:

Because, as evidenced in this post,  featuring a book on the topic of pogonology, or the study of beards, no poet worth their salt ever got far without one. Where does your little bald chin rank in ‘poetic gravity’ among the veritable shrubs sported by the likes of Walt Whitman, or Lord Tennyson, or Joaquin Miller (who?)? More importantly, how much wattage is the thing giving off? It’s not good enough to just write stuff, you know. You’ve got to be able to generate power, too.

On the topic of the famously bearded, I’ve often wondered, when I’m drifting into sleep or stuck in a traffic jam at the intersection of Parramatta Rd and Norton St for so long that my brain is overcome with noxious fumes and I begin experiencing visions, who’d win the pogonological show down between these guys:

I bet they had names for them.

I like to think that the beards are detachable and possessed of their own volition.  Or that they generate so much beard power that they are able to be fly great distances. Coming soon: Beard Wars 2.0 – Beards in space!

This in response to a thread at IrishRepublican.net:

Some extracts on Libertarian Republicanism, and the adaptation of universalist, general ideas to local, specific contexts –

Republican ideals & Anarchist thought:

“Two substantive aspects of anarchist thought…: the alternative conception of social contract elaborated in Proudhon’s ‘mutualism’ as a way of addressing the tendency towards factions or ‘coalitions of the willing’ in international society; and the wider influence of ‘republican’ ideals of civic virtue on anarchist thinking leading to a ‘republican anarchist’ conception of the society of states – an inchoate international republicanism without the state – where state autonomy is integrated with active participation in issues concerning the ‘common good’.”
Kazmi, Zaheer. “Rethinking Anarchy: ‘Classical’ Anarchist Thought and International Society” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Mar 17, 2004. 2009-04-14
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p74112_index.html

Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Republics” and the United Irishmen:

Jefferson’s proposal of the ward republic represented an attempt on his part to supply greater security to the political rights of citizens by overcoming anemia (a potential vulnerability in liberal polities) and encouraging citizen vigilance.
Webb, Derek. “Jefferson’s Ward Republic: Political Rights and an Engaged Citizenry” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, . 2009-02-05
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p139013_index.html

Thomas Jefferson idealistically remained attached to and hopeful of putting into practice his classical republican ideas. This paper analyzes Jefferson’s ward democracies and how they intended to support public education and active citizenship.
“… ward republics, which were to be divisions within each county ‘of such size as that every citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person’ to govern locally… Unlike many of the founders, Jefferson believed that a republic must be established on more than mere consent, and many of his republican proposals were considered by his critics to be of the ‘levelling’ sort… he was advocating his ‘little republics… where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward… and feels that he is a participant in the government… not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day…”
Dotts, Brian. “Thomas Jefferson’s Ward Republics and a Defense of Classical Republicanism” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, Apr 20, 2006 . 2009-02-05
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p138326_index.html
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/3/8/3/2/pages138326/p138326-1.php

Among the thousands of political refugees who flooded into the United States during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, none had a greater impact on the early republic than the United Irishmen. They were, according to one Federalist, “the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.” “Every United Irishman,” insisted another, “ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tyger.” [...]
[...] America served a powerful symbolic and psychological function for the United Irishmen as a place of wish-fulfillment, where the broken dreams of the failed Irish revolution could be realized. The United Irishmen established themselves on the radical wing of the Republican Party, and contributed to Jefferson’s “second American Revolution” of 1800; John Adams counted them among the “foreigners and degraded characters” whom he blamed for his defeat. After Jefferson’s victory, the United Irishmen set out to destroy the Federalists and democratize the Republicans. Some of them believed that their work was preparing the way for the millennium in America. Convinced that the example of America could ultimately inspire the movement for a democratic republic back home, they never lost sight of the struggle for Irish independence. It was the United Irishmen[...] who originated the persistent and powerful tradition of Irish-American nationalism.
http://www.amazon.com/United-Irishmen-States-Immigrant-Radicals/dp/0801431751

Bolton Hall & the “Free Acres” community:

“Selections from Free America and other works” Bolton Hall
(Introduction by Mark Sullivan)
(p.1) “Bolton Hall was a pioneer of what we may cal ‘alternative economics’ – what E.F. Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ ppopularized as ‘Economics as if Prople Mattered’…”
(p.2-3)”Bolton Hall was born August 5, 1854 in Ireland. He came to America in 1867 with his parents when his father had been chosen pastor of the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York… he took up the study of law, and founded the American Longshoreman’s Union. [...] He took part in other movements tending in anarchist or libertarian directions [...] Moving among these radical circles [he] eventually met Emma Goldman. Despite their differences on how best to realize a free society, they became friends and mutual supporters through thick and thin…”
http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=6&products_id=541

Founding of Free Acres
In 1910 Bolton Hall (1854-1938), a follower of Henry George, founded Free Acres. Hall’s background and intellectual predilections were strikingly similar to those of George. The son of a prominent New York City Presbyterian minister, Hall also combined religious and economic views to argue that humankind should serve as the “stewards” of the land. Hall’s philosophy is a combination of the law of love enunciated by Jesus, the economic views of Henry George, and the political rights of people defined by Thomas Jefferson.
He also followed American anarchists and antistatists in the tradition of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Brown. He was influenced by his contemporary anarchists like Russians Leo Tolstoy and Pyotr Kropotkin, Englishman William Morris and American Emma Goldman. He believed that governments generally interfere unjustly with individual liberty and should be replaced by the voluntary association of cooperative groups. He held a vision of small cooperative communities in which simple life can maximize opportunity for individual self-expression.
He founded Free Acres to serve as a working experiment in local democracy, a living testament to his beliefs. He had an abiding faith in small communities, that liberty, justice and greater equality would prevail among the face to face relationships provided by the Free Acres monthly meeting. Free Acres would be able to avoid the onerous burden of bureaucracy and the futility of civil service reform that he associated with state socialism.
http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~lyamane/free.htm

Jim Larkin, James Connolly, and the Revolutionary Syndicalism of Chicago culture & the IWW:

“The Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago’s Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot”
Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle in just a few years was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot…
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Dil-Pickle-Outrageously/dp/088286274X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239728898&sr=8-1

Industrial workers of the World: James Connolly
First and foremost James Connolly was a Socialist. And when asked to elaborate on his Socialist theory, he would always advocate Revolutionary Syndicalism. Readers of James Connolly may react by saying that almost nowhere in Connolly’s work can any mention of Syndicalism be found. This is simply because Connolly preferred to use the term ‘Industrial Unionism’ to Syndicalism.
http://www.iww.org/en/node/900

Jack White: Anarchist & Christian Communist

Jack White proposed the idea of workers’ militia, the Irish Citizens Army (ICA) in 1913 and played a key role in its early development and organisation. In April 1916 he was arrested in south Wales for attempting to organise a strike of miners in support of James Connolly.
In 1931, White was involved in a bitter street battle between unemployed workers and the RUC on the Newtownards Road in Belfast. 1936 at the age of 57 he travelled to Spain (as part of a Red Cross ambulance crew) to help fight fascism. Here he gravitated towards the anarchist CNT.
Impressed by the revolution that had unfolded in Spain, White was further attracted to the anarchist cause due to his own latent anti-Stalinism
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/jackwhite.html

“It is a fact, that the Barcelona churches were burnt, and many of them, where roof and walls are still standing, are used to house medical or commissariat stores instead of, as previously, being used by the fascists as fortresses. I suspect their present function is nearer the purpose of a religion based by its founder on the love of God and the Neighbour.”
First Spanish Impressions, Nov. 1936
“White travelled to Bohemia… lived in a ‘Tolstoyan’ commune in England and then travelled and worked in Canada… declaring himself to be a ‘Christian Communist’. He declared that ‘he was not prepared to go forward as the representative of any class or party, but only of a principle – the voluntary change to communal ownership of the land – and – the gradual withering of the poisoned branches of standing armies, prisons and the workhouse system.’”
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/jackwhite/bio.html