Chapter 3 : The Characteristics of Anarchism

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Since the anarchists value reforms for what they are — the ballast the bourgeoisie throws overboard to lighten its old boat in the hope of saving the sad cargo of its privileges from sinking in the revolutionary storm — they have no particular interest in them except to discredit their dangerous mirage, for they are sure that social reforms will come anyway, faster, more often and more radically, as attacks against the existing social institutions become more forceful and violent.

Hence, they have always firmly resisted appeals that favor legal action, especially electoral and parliamentary action, because anarchists are convinced that: “In the electoral process, the working people will always be cheated and deceived; that they will never succeed in sending their own comrades to Parliament, but even if they did manage to send one, or ten, or fifty of them there, they would become spoiled and powerless. Furthermore, even if the majority of Parliament were composed of workers, they could do nothing. Not only is there the senate, the king, the court, the ministers, the chiefs of the armed forces, the heads of the judiciary and of the police, who would be against the parliamentary bills advanced by such a chamber and who would refuse to enforce laws favoring the workers (it has happened); but furthermore laws are not miraculous; no law can prevent the capitalists from exploiting the workers; no law can force the owners to keep their factories open and employ workers at such and such conditions, nor force shopkeepers to sell at a certain price, and so on.”[22]

Contrary to electoral and parliamentary action, which requires disciplined authoritarian organizations, anarchists favor direct action by the workers and abstention from political activity.

The anarchists’ electoral abstentionism implies not only a conception that is opposed to the principle of representation (which is totally rejected by anarchism), it implies above all an absolute lack of confidence in the State. And this distrust, which is instinctive in the working masses, is for the anarchists the result of their historical experience with the State and its function, which has, at all times and in all places, resulted in a selfish and exclusive protection of the ruling classes and their privileges. Furthermore, anarchist abstentionism has consequences which are much less superficial than the inert apathy ascribed to it by the sneering careerists of ‘scientific socialism’. It strips the State of the constitutional fraud with which it presents itself to the gullible as the true representative of the whole nation, and, in so doing, exposes its essential character as representative, procurer and policeman of the ruling classes.

Distrust of reforms, of public powers and of delegated authority, can lead to direct action in the struggles of demolition and vindication. It can determine the revolutionary character of this two-fold action; and, accordingly, anarchists regard it as the best available means for preparing the masses to manage their own personal and collective interests; and, besides, anarchists feel that even now the working people are fully capable of handling their own political and administrative interests, and, made conscious by the experience of past mistakes, they are advancing towards the ultimate forms of liberation — social revolution, economic communism, anarchy!

The antithesis between socialists and anarchists is also evident in the means of propaganda and action.

The socialists need authoritarian organizations, centralized and disciplined, for their legal and parliamentarian activities. Their action lies in the ceding of power by all to someone, the delegate, the representative, individual or group, and their action is therefore condemned to be circumscribed within the choking confines of the existing laws.

Anarchism rejects authority in any form: to the principle of representation, it opposes the direct and independent action of individuals and masses: to egalitarian and parliamentarian action, it opposes rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.

Having thus briefly defined the traits that distinguish anarchist theory and the anarchist movement from those of the socialists, we have only to relate them to the notion of progress.

According to Metchnikoff — and we refer to him because we think that nobody else has defined progress in a better way — progress means a continuous succession of phenomena in which energy manifests itself at each stage of evolution with an ever-growing variety and intensity; the series is called ‘progressive’ when, at each one of its stages, it reproduces all its previous traits plus a new one that did not exist in the preceding phases, and which becomes, in its turn, the germ of a new plus in the following stages.

Now, in the succession of those social phenomena which mark the evolutionary steps of property and the State, of economic and political forms, what place do anarchist-communism and socialist-collectivism occupy? Which of these two doctrines and movements reproduces all the traits of the preceding phases, adding a new trait non-existent in preceding phases, and will be the embryo of a new trait appearing in all subsequent stages?

By solving this first point we will arrive at the solution of the main problem.

Obviously, if it can be proven that anarchist-communism conforms to this definition of progress much more than does socialist-collectivism, one could no longer speak about decadent and moribund anarchism; one would conclude instead that socialism is decadent and moribund. As vitality, energy, and the possibility of realization, are the conditions of progress, so inertia, stillness and death are its contradiction and denial.

For us this demonstration seems to be easy. A mere glance at the historical evolution of property is enough to see the progressive succession of the steps marking the way from slavery to economic freedom.

Greedy and autocratic at its origins, which were fraud and violence, property; ie, the right to use and misuse one’s own things without restraint (and it is well to remember that at that time human beings were among the things owned), knew no opposition nor limitations, not even the need to explain or justify it. It was the right sanctioned by the well-known aphorism: “Blessed be the owners, for asked why they own, they can reply simply: ‘Because we do!’”

But insolent, arrogant abuse arouses anger, instigates protests, ignites rebellion, and dispels the curse from the hearts of the resigned serfs. The gospels, the holy fathers of the church the christian doctrine, brand wealth as a crime, the rich as god’s enemies, admonishing that a camel can more easily pass through the eye of a needle than a rich person through the gates of heaven; Christianity opposes the absolute right of property with charity, as a prize for renunciation, as a token of grace.

Human rights — barely dawning on the horizon of Rome — will, through Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius,[23] take from property as a first conquest, the right of life and death over slaves, and then, reaching maturity, will require that it live with honesty, not offend anyone, and give each person his own due.

Notwithstanding the bloody rebellion of the Anabaptists, property will remain privileged, feudal, lordly during the middle ages, but it will humble itself and will seek to justify itself. Therefore, the fief is the due and fitting reward for bravery in war, or for the political wisdom one’s forebears have displayed in the service of king’s cause, or the church, or the country. It is, above all, the reward for the continued loyalty and devotion of their descendants.

After the rights of man and citizen, the equality of rights and obligations have been proclaimed upon the ruins of the Bastille, a much more profound revolution than the one that sprouted from the Encyclopedists begins, one that is based upon the substitution of individual effort with mechanical and collective means. And property no longer seeks its justifications from investiture, legal gifts, or rights, but from genius, from savings, from the indispensable cooperation that the bourgeoisie and the capitalists have given to the revolution, from the indisputable improvement of the general condition of life.

Though in real life things have remained unchanged in their essence, what a distance has been traveled in the ethical and juridical field from the old Roman concept of property, which gave the owner absolute right of life and death over his slaves, to the laws now existing in the more developed of our nations, which, by recognizing the workers’ right to security and pensions, sanction the social function of property!

The social function of property, which is after all the pure and plain negation of the right to private properly, was perceived by the Jacques, who rose under Caillet’s leadership in the fourteenth century, crying, “Fire to the castles!”; by Thomas Muentzer’s anabaptists, in the sixteenth century, who in their proclamation of faith advocated “The perfect community of property, redeemed by the spirit”;[24] by Babeuf’s and Buonarroti’s egalitarians who — after the French Revolution had been usurped with impunity by the bourgeoisie, “... mainly because it had wanted to impose one form of government over another, without caring about the conditions of those for whom any government that considers itself legitimate is supposed to look after and provide for” — proclaimed that the “... main sources of all the evils that harass mankind are the inequality of fortunes and private property”;[25] and by the English Levelers, who in the nineteenth century maintained that “The land owners are thieves and murderers who must be destroyed and proclaimed that all land is the common property of mankind.[26]

It was the task of modern socialism — the clear diagnosis and the implacable criticism of Godwin and Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier, Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin[27] — to point out the horrible symptoms from which all kinds of miseries and pains spring; to search deeply for their causes; to identify and define the social function of property; and to draw from this bold premise the unbiased conclusion that everything must belong to everybody and must present the hypothesis of a world without god, without king, without government, without masters.

But the tendency to blunt the insolence of private property (a tendency that is nothing but the longing of those who produce to be free from capitalist oppression) is not extinguished nor abated by the State and the law agreeing to and accepting some symbolic concessions that say property must have a social function.

Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from this concession, strictly theoretical and formal, begins a slow and relentless investigation of the institution of private property, concluding with its unavoidable condemnation. Proudhon is the main unrelenting investigator, and, although he has later been repudiated by his disciples in almost all the branches of socialism, the proofs and the elements of guilt collected by him, arise mockingly every time the criticism of private property resumes its destructive task.[28] From Proudhon’s tragic conclusions, the ideal and the movement of socialism were born to present a new concept and to bring to the series of phenomena that mark the progressive evolution from slavery to freedom in the field of economy a new characteristic that did not exist in the preceding phase and that will be the germ of a new evolutionary period in the following phases.

The Socialist theory reached the conclusion that “Being itself the result of the mind and energy of men and women from all times and all nations, capital, a property which renews itself perpetually only by virtue of this universal activity, cannot be a source of personal power but should be a social force that therefore must lose its class character and become the social property of every human being.”