Chapter 9

Although he does not suspect it, the Anarchist usually lives in the ideal world, the world of reflexes. He battles against an abstraction called “Authority,” and imagines it to be the creator of the real world, the world of production and industrial exploitation. Too often he becomes crankish and endeavors to isolate himself from his fellows. He buries his head in the sand, leads the “simple life," and imagines that he has escaped from the evils of capitalism, and that everyone else can follow his example. He applauds his own mental greatness, and forgets that it is a parasite growth. He puts his own shoulder in the limelight, and forgets the amount of social labor-power necessary to produce his mental vigor.

This personal revolt, this individual vigor of Anarchism, is good in many ways. It makes for free love unions, it emphasizes contempt for the legal and moral reflexes of the system. And it gives Anarchism a psychological power bee cause Socialism too often insists only on the materialistic basis of all effort. If Church and State reflex capitalist interests, one should form free love unions in defiance of both, should oppose them on every occasion as the reflexes of capitalist exploitation, Anarchists see this usually. Socialists more often do not. But the latter point out that there can be no emancipation of man and woman, no real negation of domestic prostitution within the limitations of capitalism. Authority and the family are economic questions in the last analysis, evils which only Socialism can end. That is no reason why we should not revolt against their shadows, the Church, the State, and the Marriage lies. Capitalism is death, to be sure. Let us recognize as much. But to acknowledge too obsequiously all its venerable shams and hypocrisies is to cling with gladness to its bier, and even to insist on full funeral rites. This is only possible so long as we lack faith in the future and the life to come for our children on mother earth.