Preface

There has recently been a renewal of interest in anarchism. Books, pamphlets, and anthologies are being devoted to it. It is doubtful whether this literary effort is really very effective. It is difficult to trace the outlines of anarchism. Its master thinkers rarely condensed their ideas into systematic works. If, on occasion, they tried to do so, it was only in thin pamphlets designed for propaganda and popularization in which only fragments of their ideas can be observed. Moreover, there are several kinds of anarchism and many variations within the thought of each of the great libertarians.

Rejection of authority and stress on the priority of individual judgment make it natural for libertarians to “profess the faith of anti dogmatism.” “Let us not become the leaders of a new religion,” Proudhon wrote to Marx, “even were it to be the religion of logic and reason.” It follows that the views of the libertarians are more varied, more fluid, and harder to apprehend than those of the authoritarian socialists whose rival churches at least try to impose a set of beliefs on their faithful.

Just before he was sent to the guillotine, the terrorist Emile Henry wrote a letter to the governor of the prison where he was awaiting execution explaining: “Beware of believing anarchy to be a dogma, a doctrine above question or debate, to be venerated by Its adepts as is the Koran by devout Moslems. No! the absolute freedom which we demand constantly develops our thinking and raises it toward new horizons (according to the turn of mind of various individuals ), takes it out of the narrow framework of regulation and codification. We are not ‘believers’!” The condemned man went on to reject the “blind faith” of the French Marxists of his period: “They believe something because Guesde has said one must believe it, they have a catechism and it would be sacrilege to question any of its clauses.”

In spite of the variety and richness of anarchist thinking, in spite of contradictions and doctrinal disputes which were often centered on false problems, anarchism presents a fairly homogeneous body of ideas. At first sight it is true that there may seem to be a vast difference between the individualist anarchism of Stirner (1806–1856) and social anarchism. When one looks more deeply into the matter, however, the partisans of total freedom and those of social organization do not appear as far apart as they may have thought themselves, or as others might at first glance suppose. The anarchist societaire is also an individualist and the individualist anarchist may well be a partisan of the societaire approach who fears to declare himself.

The relative unity of social anarchism arises from the fact that it was developed during a single period by two masters, one of whom was the disciple and follower of the other: the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and the Russian exile Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). The latter defined anarchism as “Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its furthest conclusion.” This type of anarchism called itself collectivist.

Its successors, however, rejected the term and proclaimed themselves to be communists (“libertarian communists,” of course). One of them, another Russian exile, Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), bent the doctrine in a more rigidly utopian and optimistic direction but his “scientific” approach failed to conceal its weaknesses. The Italian Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), on the other hand, turned to audacious and sometimes puerile activism although he enriched anarchist thinking with his intransigent and often lucid polemics. Later the experience of the Russian Revolution produced one of the most remarkable anarchist works, that of Voline (1882–1945).

The anarchist terrorism of the end of the nineteenth century had dramatic and anecdotal features and an aura of blood which appeal to the taste of the general public. In its time it was a school for individual energy and courage, which command respect, and it had the merit of drawing social injustice to public attention; but today it seems to have been a temporary and sterile deviation in the history of anarchism. It seems out-of-date. To fix one’s attention on the “stewpot” of Ravachol is to ignore or underestimate the fundamental characteristics of a definite concept of social reorganization. When this concept is properly studied it appears highly constructive and not destructive, as its opponents pretend. It is this constructive aspect of anarchism that will be presented to the reader in this study. By what right and upon what basis? Because the material studied is not antiquated but relevant to life, and because it poses problems which are more acute than ever. It appears that libertarian thinkers anticipated the needs of our time to a considerable extent.

This small book does not seek to duplicate the histories and bibliographies of anarchism already published. Their authors were scholars, mainly concerned with omitting no names and, fascinated by superficial similarities, they discovered numerous forerunners of anarchism. They gave almost equal weight to the genius and to his most minor follower, and presented an excess of biographical details rather than making a profound study of ideas. Their learned tomes leave the reader with a feeling of diffusion, almost incoherence, still asking himself what anarchism really is. I have tried a somewhat different approach. I assume that the lives of the masters of libertarian thought are known. In any case’ they are often much less illuminating for our purpose than some writers imagine. Many of these masters were not anarchists throughout their lives and their complete works include passages which have nothing to do with anarchism.

To take an example: in the second part of his career Proudhon’s thinking took a conservative turn. His verbose and monumental De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise (1858) was mainly concerned with the problem of religion and its conclusion was far from libertarian. In the end, in spite of passionate anti-clericalism, he accepted all the categories of Catholicism, subject to his own interpretations, proclaimed that the instruction and moral training of the people would benefit from the preservation of Christian symbolism, and in his final words seemed almost ready to say a prayer. Respect for his memory inhibits all but a passing reference to his “salute to war,” his diatribes against women, or his fits of racism.

The opposite happened to Bakunin. His wild early career as a revolutionary conspirator was unconnected with anarchism. He embraced libertarian ideas only in 1864 after the failure of the Polish insurrection in which he played a part. His earlier writings have no place in an anarchist anthology. As for Kropotkin, his purely scientific work, for which he is today celebrated in the U.S.S.R. as a shining light in the study of national geography, has no more connection with anarchism than had his prowar attitude during the First World War.

In place of a historical and chronological sequence an unusual method has been adopted in this book: the reader will be presented in turn with the main constructive themes of anarchism, and not with personalities. I have intentionally omitted only elements which are not specifically libertarian, such as the critique of capitalism, atheism, anti-militarism, free love, etc. Rather than give secondhand and therefore faded paraphrases unsupported by evidence, I have allowed quotations to speak directly as far as possible. This gives the reader access to the ideas of the masters in their warm and living form, as they were originally penned.

Secondly, the doctrine is examined from a different angle: it is shown in the great periods when it was put to the test by events — the Russian Revolution of 1917, Italy after 1918, the Spanish Revolution of 1936. The final chapter treats what is undoubtedly the most original creation of anarchism: workers’ self-management as it has been developed in the grip of contemporary reality, in Yugoslavia and Algeria — and soon, perhaps, who knows, in the U.S.S.R.

Throughout this little book the reader will see two conceptions of socialism contrasted and sometimes related to one another, one authoritarian, the other libertarian. By the end of the analysis it is hoped that the reader will be led to ask himself which is the conception of the future.

The Basic Ideas of Anarchism

A Matter of Words

The word anarchy is as old as the world. It is derived from two ancient Greek words, av (an), apxn (arkhe), and means something like the absence of authority or government. However, for millennia the presumption has been accepted that man cannot dispense with one or the other, and anarchy has been understood in a pejorative sense, as a synonym for disorder, chaos, and disorganization.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was famous for his quips (such as “property is theft”) and took to himself the word anarchy. As if his purpose were to shock as much as possible, in 1840 he engaged in the following dialogue with the “Philistine.”

“You are a republican.” “Republican, yes; but that means nothing. Res publica is ‘the State.’ Kings, too, are republicans.” “Ah well! You are a democrat?” “No.” “What! Perhaps you are a monarchist?” “No.” “Constitutionalist then?” “God forbid.” “Then you are an aristocrat?” “Not at all!” “You want a mixed form of government?” “Even less.” “Then what are you?” “An anarchist.”

He sometimes made the concession of spelling anarchy “an-archy” to put the packs of adversaries off the scent. By this term he understood anything but disorder. Appearances notwithstanding, he was more constructive than destructive, as we shall see. He held government responsible for disorder and believed that only a society without government could restore the natural order and re-create social harmony. He argued that the language could furnish no other term and chose to restore to the old word anarchy its strict etymological meaning. In the heat of his polemics, however, he obstinately and paradoxically also used the word anarchy in its pejorative sense of disorder, thus making confusion worse confounded. His disciple Mikhail Bakunin followed him in this respect.

Proudhon and Bakunin carried this even further, taking malicious pleasure in playing with the confusion created by the use of the two opposite meanings of the word: for them, anarchy was both the most colossal disorder, the most complete disorganization of society and, beyond this gigantic revolutionary change, the construction of a new, stable, and rational order based on freedom and solidarity.

The immediate followers of the two fathers of anarchy hesitated to use a word so deplorably elastic, conveying only a negative idea to the uninitiated, and lending itself to ambiguities which could be annoying to say the least. Even Proudhon became more cautious toward the end of his brief career and was happy to call himself a “federalist.” His petty-bourgeois descendants preferred the term mutuellisme to anarchisme and the socialist line adopted collectivisme, soon to be displaced by communisme. At the end of the century in France, Sebastien Faure took up a word originated in 1858 by one Joseph Dejacque to make it the title of a journal, Le Libertaire. Today the terms “anarchist” and “libertarian” have become interchangeable.

Most of these terms have a major disadvantage: they fail to express the basic characteristics of the doctrines they are supposed to describe. Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State. Adolph Fischer, one of the Chicago martyrs , claimed that “every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist.”

Some anarchists consider themselves to be the best and most logical socialists, but they have adopted a label also attached to the terrorists, or have allowed others to hang it around their necks. This has often caused them to be mistaken for a sort of “foreign body” in the socialist family and has led to a long string of misunderstandings and verbal battles — usually quite purposeless. Some contemporary anarchists have tried to clear up the misunderstanding by adopting a more explicit term: they align themselves with libertarian socialism or communism.

A Visceral Revolt

Anarchism can be described first and foremost as a visceral revolt. The anarchist is above all a man in revolt. He rejects society as a whole along with its guardians. Max Stirner declared that the anarchist frees himself of all that is sacred, and carries out a vast operation of deconsecration. These “vagabonds of the intellect,” these “bad characters,” “refuse to treat as intangible truths things that give respite and consolation to thousands and instead leap over the barriers of tradition to indulge without restraint the fantasies of their impudent critique.”

Proudhon rejected all and any “official persons” — philosophers, priests, magistrates, academicians, journalists, parliamentarians, etc. — for whom “the people is always a monster to be fought, muzzled, and chained down; which must be led by trickery like the elephant or the rhinoceros; or cowed by famine; and which is bled by colonization and war.” Elisee Reclus explained why society seems, to these well-heeled gentlemen, worth preserving: “Since there are rich and poor, rulers and subjects, masters and servants, Caesars who give orders for combat and gladiators who go and die, the prudent need only place themselves on the side of the rich and the masters, and make themselves into courtiers to the emperors.”

His permanent state of revolt makes the anarchist sympathetic to nonconformists and outlaws, and leads him to embrace the cause of the convict and the outcast. Bakunin thought that Marx and Engels spoke most unfairly of the lumpenproletariat, of the “proletariat in rags”: “For the spirit and force of the future social revolution is with it and it alone, and not with the stratum of the working class which has become like the bourgeoisie.”

Explosive statements which an anarchist would not disavow were voiced by Balzac through the character of Vautrin, a powerful incarnation of social protest — half rebel, half criminal.

Horror of the State

The anarchist regards the State as the most deadly of the preconceptions which have blinded men through the ages. Stirner denounced him who “throughout eternity... is obsessed by the State.”

Proudhon was especially fierce against “this fantasy of our minds that the first duty of a free and rational being is to refer to museums and libraries,” and he laid bare the mechanism whereby “this mental predisposition has been maintained and its fascination made to seem invincible: government has always presented itself to men’s minds as the natural organ of justice and the protector of the weak.” He mocked the inveterate authoritarians who “bow before power like church wardens before the sacrament” and reproached “all parties without exception” for turning their gaze “unceasingly toward authority as if to the polestar.” He longed for the day when “renunciation of authority shall have replaced faith in authority and the political catechism.”

Kropotkin jeered at the bourgeois who “regarded the people as a horde of savages who would be useless as soon as government ceased to function.” Malatesta anticipated psychoanalysis when he uncovered the fear of freedom in the subconscious of authoritarians.

What is wrong with the State in the eyes of the anarchists?

Stirner expressed it thus: “We two are enemies, the State and I.” “Every State is a tyranny, be it the tyranny of a single man or a group.” Every State is necessarily what we now call totalitarian: “The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose.... Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it.” “The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men... unless they are its own.... Otherwise it shuts me up.”

Proudhon wrote in the same vein: “The government of man by man is servitude.” “Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy.” He launched into a tirade worthy of a Moliere or a Beaumarchais:

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue.... To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonored. That is government, that is its justice and its morality!... O human personality! How can it be that you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?”

Bakunin sees the State as an “abstraction devouring the life of the people,” an “immense cemetery where all the real aspirations and living forces of a country generously and blissfully allow themselves to be buried in the name of that abstraction.”

According to Malatesta, “far from creating energy, government by its methods wastes, paralyzes, and destroys enormous potential.” As the powers of the State and its bureaucracy widen, the danger grows more acute. Proudhon foresaw the greatest evil of the twentieth century: “Fonctionnairisme [legalistic rule by civil servants]... leads toward state communism, the absorption of all local and individual life into the administrative machinery, and the destruction of all free thought. Everyone wants to take refuge under the wing of power, to live in common.” It is high time to call a halt: “Centralization has grown stronger and stronger..., things have reached... the point where society and government can no longer coexist.” “From the top of the hierarchy to the bottom there is nothing in the State which is not an abuse to be reformed, a form of parasitism to be suppressed, or an instrument of tyranny to be destroyed. And you speak to us of preserving the State, and increasing the power of the State! Away with you — you are no revolutionary!”

Bakunin had an equally clear and painful vision of an increasingly totalitarian State. He saw the forces of world counter-revolution, “based on enormous budgets, permanent armies, and a formidable bureaucracy” and endowed “with all the terrible means of action given to them by modern centralization,” as becoming “an immense, crushing, threatening reality.”

Hostility to Bourgeois Democracy

The anarchist denounces the deception of bourgeois democracy even more bitterly than does the authoritarian socialist. The bourgeois democratic State, christened “the nation,” does not seem to Stirner any less to be feared than the old absolutist State. “The monarch... was a very poor man compared with the new one, the ‘sovereign nation.’ In liberalism we have only the continuation of the ancient contempt for the Self.” “Certainly many privileges have been eliminated through time but only for the benefit of the State... and not at all to strengthen my Self.”

In Proudhon’s view “democracy is nothing but a constitutional tyrant.” The people were declared sovereign by a “trick” of our forefathers. In reality they are a monkey king which has kept only the title of sovereign without the magnificence and grandeur. The people rule but do not govern, and delegate their sovereignty through the periodic exercise of universal suffrage, abdicating their power anew every three or five years. The dynasts have been driven from the throne but the royal prerogative has been preserved intact. In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected the ballot is a cunning swindle benefiting only the united barons of industry, trade, and property.

The very theory of the sovereignty of the people contains its own negation. If the entire people were truly sovereign there would no longer be either government or governed; the sovereign would be reduced to nothing; the State would have no raison d’etre, would be identical with society and disappear into industrial organization.

Bakunin saw that the “representative system, far from being a guarantee for the people, on the contrary, creates and safeguards the continued existence of a governmental aristocracy against the people.” Universal suffrage is a sleight of hand, a bait, a safety valve, and a mask behind which “hides the really despotic power of the State based on the police, the banks, and the army,” “an excellent way of oppressing and ruining a people in the name of the so-called popular will which serves to camouflage it.”

The anarchist does not believe in emancipation by the ballot. Proudhon was an abstentionist, at least in theory, thinking that “the social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes about through the political revolution.” To vote would be a contradiction, an act of weakness and complicity with the corrupt regime: “We must make war on all the old parties together, using parliament as a legal battlefield, but staying outside it.” “Universal suffrage is the counter-revolution,” and to constitute itself a class the proletariat must first “secede from” bourgeois democracy.

However, the militant Proudhon frequently departed from this position of principle. In June 1848 he let himself be elected to parliament and was briefly stuck in the parliamentary glue. On two occasions, during the partial elections of September 1848 and the presidential elections of December 10 of the same year, he supported the candidacy of Raspail, a spokesman of the extreme Left. He even went so far as to allow himself to be blinded by the tactic of the “the lesser evil,” expressing a preference for General Cavaignac, persecutor of the Paris proletariat, over the apprentice dictator Louis Napoleon. Much later, in 1863 and 1864, he did advocate returning blank ballot papers, but as a demonstration against the imperial dictatorship, not in opposition to universal suffrage, which he now christened “the democratic principle par excellence.”

Bakunin and his supporters in the First International objected to the epithet “abstentionist” hurled at them by the Marxists. For them, boycotting the ballot box was a simple tactical question and not an article of faith. Although they gave priority to the class struggle in the economic field, they would not agree that they ignored “politics.” They were not rejecting “politics,” but only bourgeois politics. They did not disapprove of a political revolution unless it was to come before the social revolution. They steered clear of other movements only if these were not directed to the immediate and complete emancipation of the workers. What they feared and denounced were ambiguous electoral alliances with radical bourgeois parties of the 1848 type, or “popular fronts,” as they would be called today. They also feared that when workers were elected to parliament and translated into bourgeois living conditions, they would cease to be workers and turn into Statesmen, becoming bourgeois, perhaps even more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself.

However, the anarchist attitude toward universal suffrage is far from logical or consistent. Some considered the ballot as a last expedient. Others, more uncompromising, regarded its use as damnable in any circumstances and made it a matter of doctrinal purity. Thus, at the time of the Cartel des Gauches (Alliance of the Left) elections in May 1924, Malatesta refused to make any concession. He admitted that in certain circumstances the outcome of an election might have “good” or “bad” consequences and that the result would sometimes depend on anarchist votes, especially if the forces of the opposing political groupings were fairly evenly balanced. “But no matter! Even if some minimal progress were to be the direct result of an electoral victory, the anarchist should not rush to the polling stations.” He concluded: “Anarchists have always kept themselves pure, and remain the revolutionary party par excellence, the party of the future, because they have been able to resist the siren song of elections.”

The inconsistency of anarchist doctrine on this matter was to be especially well illustrated in Spain. In 1930 the anarchists joined in a common front with bourgeois democrats to overthrow the dictator, Primo de Rivera. The following year, despite their official abstention, many went to the polls in the municipal elections which led to the overthrow of the monarchy. In the general election of November 1933 they strongly recommended abstention from voting, and this returned a violently anti-labor Right to power for more than two years. The anarchists had taken care to announce in advance that if their abstention led to a victory for reaction they would launch the social revolution. They soon attempted to do so but in vain and at the cost of heavy losses (dead, wounded, and imprisoned).

When the parties of the Left came together in the Popular Front in 1936, the central anarcho-syndicalist organization was hard pressed to know what attitude to adopt. Finally it declared itself, very halfheartedly, for abstention, but its campaign was so tepid as to go unheard by the masses who were in any case already committed to participation in the elections. By going to the polls the mass of voters insured the triumph of the Popular Front (263 left-wing deputies, as against 181 others).

It should be noted that in spite of their savage attacks on bourgeois democracy, the anarchists admitted that it is relatively progressive. Even Stirner, the most intransigent, occasionally let slip the word “progress.” Proudhon conceded: “When a people passes from the monarchical to the democratic State, some progress is made.” And Bakunin said: “It should not be thought that we want... to criticize the bourgeois government in favor of monarchy.... The most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.... The democratic system gradually educates the masses to public life.” This disproves Lenin’s view that “some anarchists” proclaim “that the form of oppression is a matter of indifference to the proletariat.” This also dispels the fear expressed by Henri Arvon in his little book L’Anarchisme that anarchist opposition to democracy could be confused with counter-revolutionary opposition.

Critique of Authoritarian Socialism

The anarchists were unanimous in subjecting authoritarian socialism to a barrage of severe criticism. At the time when they made violent and satirical attacks these were not entirely well founded, for those to whom they were addressed were either primitive or “vulgar” communists, whose thought had not yet been fertilized by Marxist humanism, or else, in the case of Marx and Engels themselves, were not as set on authority and state control as the anarchists made out.

Although in the nineteenth century authoritarian tendencies in socialist thought were still embryonic and undeveloped, they have proliferated in our time. In the face of these excrescences, the anarchist critique seems less tendentious, less unjust; sometimes it even seems to have a prophetic ring.

Stirner accepted many of the premises of communism but with the following qualification: the profession of communist faith is a first step toward total emancipation of the victims of our society, but they will become completely “disalienated,” and truly able to develop their individuality, only by advancing beyond communism.

As Stirner saw it, in a communist system the worker remains subject to the rule of a society of workers. His work is imposed on him by society, and remains for him a task. Did not the communist Weitling write: “Faculties can only be developed in so far as they do not disrupt the harmony of society”? To which Stirner replied: “Whether I were to be ‘loyal’ to a tyrant or to Weitling’s ‘society’ I would suffer the same absence of rights.”

According to Stirner, the communist does not think of the man behind the worker. He overlooks the most important issue: to give man the opportunity to enjoy himself as an individual after he has fulfilled his task as a producer. Above all, Stirner glimpsed the danger that in a communist society the collective appropriation of the means of production would give the State more exorbitant powers than it has at present:

“By abolishing all private property communism makes me even more dependent on others, on the generality or totality [of society], and, in spite of its attacks on the State, it intends to establish its own State,... a state of affairs which paralyzes my freedom to act and exerts sovereign authority over me. Communism is rightly indignant about the wrongs which I suffer at the hands of individual proprietors, but the power which it will put into the hands of the total society is even more terrible.”

Proudhon was just as dissatisfied with the “governmental, dictatorial, authoritarian, doctrinaire communist system” which “starts from the principle that the individual is entirely subordinate to the collectivity.” The communist idea of the State is exactly the same as that of the former masters and much less liberal: “Like an army that has captured the enemy’s guns, communism has simply turned property’s artillery against the army of property. The slave always apes his master.” And Proudhon describes in the following terms the political system which he attributes to the communists:

“A compact democracy — apparently based on the dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have only power enough to insure universal servitude, according to the following prescription borrowed from the old absolutism: The indivisibility of power; All-absorbing centralism; The systematic destruction of all individual, corporate, or local thought believed to be subversive; An inquisitorial police force.”

The authoritarian socialists call for a “revolution from above.” They “believe that the State must continue after the Revolution. They preserve the State, power, authority, and government, increasing their scope still further. All they do is to change the titles... as though changing the names were enough to transform things!” And Proudhon concludes by saying: “Government is by its nature counter-revolutionary... give power to a Saint Vincent de Paul and he will be a Guizot or a Talleyrand.” Bakunin extended this criticism of authoritarian socialism:

I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty and I cannot conceive anything human without liberty. I am not a communist because communism concentrates all the powers of society and absorbs them into the State, because it leads inevitably to the centralization of property in the hands of the State, while I want to see the State abolished. I want the complete elimination of the authoritarian principle of state tutelage which has always subjected, oppressed, exploited, and depraved men while claiming to moralize and civilize them. I want society, and collective or social property, to be organized from the bottom up through free association and not from the top down by authority of any kind.... In that sense I am a collectivist and not at all a communist.

Soon after making the above speech Bakunin joined the First International And there he and his supporters came into conflict not only with Marx and Engels but with others far more vulnerable to his attacks than the two founders of scientific socialism: on the one hand, the German social democrats for whom the State was a fetish and who proposed the use of the ballot and electoral alliances to introduce an ambiguous “People’s State” (Volkstaat); on the other hand, the Blanquists who sang the virtues of a transitional dictatorship by a revolutionary minority. Bakunin fought these divergent but equally authoritarian concepts tooth and nail, while Marx and Engels oscillated between them for tactical reasons but finally decided to disavow both under the harassment of anarchist criticism.

However, the friction between Bakunin and Marx arose mainly from the sectarian and personal way in which the latter tried to control the International, especially after 1870. There is no doubt that there were wrongs on both sides in this quarrel, in which the stake was the control of the organization and thus of the whole movement of the international working class. Bakunin was not without fault and his case against Marx often lacked fairness and even good faith. What is important for the modern reader, however, is that as early as 1870 Bakunin had the merit of raising the alarm against certain ideas of organization of the working-class movement and of proletarian power which were much later to distort the Russian Revolution. Sometimes unjustly, and sometimes with reason, Bakunin claimed to see in Marxism the embryo of what was to become Leninism and then the malignant growth of Stalinism.

Bakunin maliciously attributed to Marx and Engels ideas which these two men never expressed openly, if indeed they harbored them at all:

“But, it will be said all the workers... cannot become scholars; and is it not enough that with this organization [International] there is a group of men who have mastered the science, philosophy, and politics of socialism as completely as is possible in our day, so that the majority... can be certain of remaining on the right road to the final emancipation of the proletariat... simply by faithfully obeying their directions?... Vie have heard this line of reasoning developed by innuendo with all sorts of subtle and skillful qualifications but never openly expressed — they are not brave enough or frank enough for that. “

Bakunin continued his diatribe:

“Beginning from the basic principle... that thought takes precedence over life, and abstract theory over social practice, and inferring that sociological science must became the starting point of social upheaval and reconstruction, they were forced to the conclusion that since thought, theory, and science are, for the present at any rate, the exclusive possessions of a very small number of persons, that minority must direct social life. The supposed Popular State would be nothing but the despotic government of the popular masses by a new and very narrow aristocracy of knowledge, real or pretended. “

Bakunin translated Marx’s major work, Das Kapital, into Russian, had a lively admiration for his intellectual capacity, fully accepted the materialist conception of history, and appreciated better than anyone Marx’s theoretical contribution to the emancipation of the working class. What he would not concede was that intellectual superiority can confer upon anyone the right to lead the working-class movement:

“One asks oneself how a man as intelligent as Marx could conceive of such a heresy against common sense and historical experience as the notion that a group of individuals, however intelligent and well-intentioned, could become the soul and the unifying and directing will of a revolutionary movement and of the economic organization of the proletariat of all countries.... The creation of a universal dictatorship..., a dictatorship which would somehow perform the task of chief engineer of the world revolution, regulating and steering the insurrectionary movements of the masses of all nations as one steers a machine..., the creation of such a dictatorship would in itself suffice to kill the revolution and paralyze and distort all popular movements.... And what is one to think of an international congress which, in the supposed interest of this revolution, imposes on the proletariat of the civilized world a government invested with dictatorial powers?”

No doubt Bakunin was distorting the thoughts of Marx quite severely in attributing to him such a universally authoritarian concept, but the experience of the Third International has since shown that the danger of which he warned did eventually materialize.

The Russian exile showed himself equally clear-sighted about the danger of state control under a communist regime. According to him, the aspirations of “doctrinaire” socialists would “put the people into a new harness.” They doubtless profess, as do the libertarians, to see any State as oppressive, but maintain that only dictatorship — their own, of course — can create freedom for the people; to which the reply is that every dictatorship must seek to last as long as possible. Instead of leaving it to the people to destroy the State, they want to “transfer it... into the hands of the benefactors, guardians, and teachers, the leaders of the Communist Party.” They see quite well that such a government, “however democratic its forms, will be a real dictatorship,” and “console themselves with the idea that it will be temporary and short-lived.” But no! Bakunin retorted. This supposedly interim dictatorship will inevitably lead to “the reconstruction of the State, its privileges, its inequalities, and all its oppressions,” to the formation of a governmental aristocracy “which again begins to exploit and rule in the name of common happiness or to save the State.” And this State will be “the more absolute because its despotism is carefully concealed under obsequious respect... for the will of the people.”

Bakunin, always particularly lucid, believed in the Russian Revolution: “If the workers of the West wait too long, Russian peasants will set them an example.” In Russia, the revolution will be basically “anarchistic.” But he was fearful of the outcome: the revolutionaries might well simply carry on the State of Peter the Great which was “based on... suspension of all expressions of the life of the people,” for “one can change the label of a State and its form... but the foundation will remain unchanged.” Either the State must be destroyed or one must “reconcile oneself to the vilest and most dangerous lie of our century...: Red Bureaucracy.” Bakunin summed it up as follows: “Take the most radical of revolutionaries and place him on the throne of all the Russias or give him dictatorial powers... and before the year is out he will be worse than the Czar himself.”

In Russia Voline was participant, witness, and historian of the Revolution, and afterward recorded that events had taught the same lesson as the masters. Yes, indeed, socialist power and social revolution “are contradictory factors”; they cannot be reconciled:

“A revolution which is inspired by state socialism and adopts this form, even ‘provisionally’ and ‘temporarily,’ is lost: it takes a wrong road down an ever steeper slope.... All political power inevitably creates a privileged position for those who exercise it.... Having taken over the Revolution, mastered it, and harnessed it, those in power are obliged to create the bureaucratic and repressive apparatus which is indispensable for any authority that wants to maintain itself, to command, to give orders, in a word. to govern.... All authority seeks to some extent to control social life. Its existence predisposes the masses to passivity, its very presence suffocates any spirit of initiative.... ‘Communist’ power is... a real bludgeon. Swollen with ‘authority’... it fears every independent action. Any autonomous action is immediately seen as suspect, threatening,... for such authority wants sole control of the tiller. Initiative from any other source is seen as an intrusion upon its domain and an infringement of its prerogatives and, therefore, unacceptable. “

Further, anarchists categorically deny the need for “provisional” and “temporary” stages. In 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Revolution, Diego Abad de Santillan placed authoritarian socialism on the horns of a dilemma: “Either the revolution gives social wealth to the producers, or it does not. If it does, the producers organize themselves for collective production and distribution and there is nothing left for the State to do. If it does not give social wealth to the producers, the revolution is nothing but a deception and the State goes on.” One can say that the dilemma is oversimplified here; it would be less so if it were translated into terms of intent: the anarchists are not so naive as to dream that all the remnants of the State would disappear overnight, but they have the will to make them wither away as quickly as possible; while the authoritarians, on the other hand, are satisfied with the perspective of the indefinite survival of a “temporary” State, arbitrarily termed a “Workers’ State.”

Sources of Inspiration: the Individual

The anarchist sets two sources of revolutionary energy against the constraints and hierarchies of authoritarian socialism: the individual, and the spontaneity of the masses. Some anarchists are more individualistic than social, some more social than individualistic. However, one cannot conceive of a libertarian who is not an individualist. The observations made by Augustin Hamon from the survey mentioned earlier confirm this analysis.

Max Stirner rehabilitated the individual at a time when the philosophical field was dominated by Hegelian anti-individualism and most reformers in the social field had been led by the misdeeds of bourgeois egotism to stress its opposite: was not the very word “socialism” created as antonym to “individualism”?

Stirner exalted the intrinsic value of the unique individual, that is to say, one cast in a single unrepeatable mold (an idea which has been confirmed by recent biological research). For a long time this thinker remained isolated in anarchist circles, an eccentric followed by only a tiny sect of intelligent individualists. Today, the boldness and scope of his thought appear in a new light. The contemporary world seems to have set itself the task of rescuing the individual from all the forms of alienation which crush him’ those of individual slavery and those of totalitarian conformism. In a famous article written in 1933, Simone Weil complained of not finding in Marxist writings any answer to questions arising from the need to defend the individual against the new forms of oppression coming after classical capitalist oppression. Stirner set out to fill this serious gap as early as the mid-nineteenth century.

He wrote in a lively style, crackling with aphorisms: “Do not seek in self-renunciation a freedom which denies your very selves, but seek your own selves... Let each of you be an all-powerful I.” There is no freedom but that which the individual conquers for himself. Freedom given or conceded is not freedom but “stolen goods.” “There is no judge but myself who can decide whether I am right or wrong.” “The only things I have no right to do are those I do not do with a free mind.” “You have the right to be whatever you have the strength to be.” Whatever you accomplish you accomplish as a unique individual: “Neither the State, society, nor humanity can master this devil.”

In order to emancipate himself, the individual must begin by putting under the microscope the intellectual baggage with which his parents and teachers have saddled him. He must undertake a vast operation of “desanctification,” beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie: “Like the bourgeoisie itself, its native soil, it is still far too close to the heaven of religion, is still not free enough, and uncritically borrows bourgeois laws to transplant them to its own ground instead of working out new and independent doctrines.”

Stirner was especially incensed by sexual morality. The “machinations” of Christianity “against passion” have simply been taken over by the secularists. They refused to listen to the appeal of the flesh and display their zeal against it. They “spit in the face of immorality.” The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people. “The people furiously urge the police on against anything which seems to them immoral or even improper, and this public passion for morality protects the police as an institution far more effectively than a government could ever do.”

Stirner foreshadowed modern psychoanalysis by observing and denouncing the internalization of parental moral values. From childhood we are consumed with moral prejudices. Morality has become “an internal force from which I cannot free myself,” “its despotism is ten times worse than before, because it now scolds away from within my conscience.” “The young are sent to school in herds to learn the old saws and when they know the verbiage of the old by heart they are said to have come of age.” Stirner declared himself an iconoclast: “God, conscience, duties, and laws are all errors which have been stuffed into our minds and hearts.” The real seducers and corrupters of youth are the priests and parents who “muddy young hearts and stupefy young minds.” If there is anything that “comes from the devil” it is surely this false divine voice which has been interpolated into the conscience.

In the process of rehabilitating the individual, Stirner also discovered the Freudian subconscious. The Self cannot be apprehended. Against it “the empire of thought, mind, and ratiocination crumbles”; it is inexpressible, inconceivable, incomprehensible, and through Stirner’s lively aphorisms one seems to hear the first echoes of existentialist philosophy: “I start from a hypothesis by taking myself as hypothesis.... I use it solely for my enjoyment and satisfaction.... I exist only because I nourish my Self.... The fact that I am of absorbing interest to myself means that I exist.”

Of course the white heat of imagination in which Stirner wrote sometimes misled him into paradoxical statements. He let slip some antisocial aphorisms and arrived at the position that life in society is impossible: “We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.” “The people is dead! Good-day, Self!” “The people’s good fortune is my misfortune!” “If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!”

However, these occasional outbursts are probably not a fundamental part of his thinking and, in spite of his hermit’s bluster, he aspired to communal life. Like most people who are introverted, isolated, shut in, he suffered acute nostalgia for it. To those who asked how he could live in society with his exclusiveness he replied that only the man who has comprehended his own “oneness” can have relations with his fellows. The individual needs help and friends; for example, if he writes books he needs readers. He joins with his fellow man in order to increase his strength and fulfill himself more completely through their combined strength than either could in isolation. “If you have several million others behind you to protect you, together you will become a great force and will easily be victorious” — but on one condition: these relations with others must be free and voluntary and always subject to repudiation. Stirner distinguishes a society already established, which is a constraint, from association, which is a voluntary act. “Society uses you, but you use association.” Admittedly, association implies a sacrifice, a restriction upon freedom, but this sacrifice is not made for the common good: “It is my own personal interest that brings me to it.”

Stirner was dealing with very contemporary problems, especially when he treated the question of political parties with special reference to the communists. He was severely critical of the conformism of parties: “One must follow one’s party everywhere and anywhere, absolutely approving and defending its basic principles.” “Members... bow to the slightest wishes of the party.” The party’s program must “be for them certain, above question.... One must belong to the party body and soul.... Anyone who goes from one party to another is immediately treated as a renegade.” In Stirner’s view, a monolithic party ceases to be an association and only a corpse remains. He rejected such a party but did not give up hope of joining a political association: “I shall always find enough people who want to associate with me without having to swear allegiance to my flag.” He felt he could only rejoin the party if there was “nothing compulsory about it,” and his sole condition was that he could be sure “of not letting himself be taken over by the party.” “The party is nothing other than a party in which he takes part.” “He associates freely and takes back his freedom in the same way.”

There is only one weakness in Stirner’s argument, though it more or less underlies all his writings: his concept of the unity of the individual is not only “egotistical,” profitable for the “Self” but is also valid for the collectivity. The human association is only fruitful if it does not crush the individual but, on the contrary, develops initiative and creative energy. Is not the strength of a party the sum of all the strengths of the individuals who compose it? This lacuna in his argument is due to the fact that Stirner’s synthesis of the individual and society remained halting and incomplete. In the thought of this rebel the social and the antisocial clash and are not always resolved. The social anarchists were to reproach him for this, quite rightly.

These reproaches were the more bitter because Stirner, presumably through ignorance, made the mistake of including Proudhon among the authoritarian communists who condemn individualist aspirations in the name of “social duty.” It is true that Proudhon had mocked Stirner-like “adoration” of the individual, but his entire work was a search for a synthesis, or rather an “equilibrium” between concern for the individual and the interests of society, between individual power and collective power. “Just as individualism is a primordial human trait, so association is its complement.”

“Some think that man has value only through society... and tend to absorb the individual into the collectivity. Thus... the communist system is a devaluation of the personality in the name of society.... That is tyranny, a mystical and anonymous tyranny, it is not association.... When the human personality is divested of its prerogatives, society is found to be without its vital principle.”

On the other hand, Proudhon rejected the individualistic utopianism that agglomerates unrelated individualities with no organic connection, no collective power, and thus betrays its inability to resolve the problem of common interests. In conclusion: neither communism nor unlimited freedom. “We have too many joint interests, too many things in common.”

Bakunin, also, was both an individualist and a socialist. He kept reiterating that a society could only reach a higher level by starting from the free individual. Whenever he enunciated rights which must be guaranteed to groups, such as the right to self-determination or secession, he was careful to state that the individual should be the first to benefit from them. The individual owes duties to society only in so far as he has freely consented to become part of it. Everyone is free to associate or not to associate, and, if he so desires, “to go and live in the deserts or the forests among the wild beasts.” “Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone.” The society which the individual has freely chosen to join as a member appears only as a secondary factor in the above list of responsibilities. It has more duties to the individual than rights over him, and, provided he has reached his majority, should exercise “neither surveillance nor authority” over him, but owe him “the protection of his liberty.”

Bakunin pushed the practice of “absolute and complete liberty” very far: I am entitled to dispose of my person as I please, to be idle or active, to live either honestly by my own labor or even by shamefully exploiting charity or private confidence. All this on one condition only: that this charity or confidence is voluntary and given to me only by individuals who have attained their majority. I even have the right to enter into associations whose objects make them “immoral” or apparently so. In his concern for liberty Bakunin went so far as to allow one to join associations designed to corrupt and destroy individual or public liberty: “Liberty can and must defend itself only through liberty; to try to restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous contradiction.”

As for ethical problems, Bakunin was sure “immorality” was a consequence of a viciously organized society. This latter must, therefore, be destroyed from top to bottom. Liberty alone can bring moral improvement. Restrictions imposed on the pretext of improving morals have always proved detrimental to them. Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always extended and deepened it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous legislation which trespasses on individual liberty. Bakunin allowed only one sanction against the idle, parasitic, or wicked: the loss of political rights, that is, of the safeguards accorded the individual by society. It follows that each individual has the right to alienate his own freedom by his own acts but, in this case, is denied the enjoyment of his political rights for the duration of his voluntary servitude.

If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as treatment rather than as social vengeance. Moreover, the convicted individual must retain the right not to submit to the sentence imposed if he declares that he no longer wishes to be a member of the society concerned. The latter, in return, has the right to expel such an individual and declare him to be outside its protection.

Bakunin, however, was far from being a nihilist. His proclamation of absolute individual freedom did not lead him to repudiate all social obligations. I become free only through the freedom of others: “Man can fulfill his free individuality only by complementing it through all the individuals around him, and only through work and the collective force of society.” Membership in the society is voluntary but Bakunin had no doubt that because of its enormous advantages “membership will be chosen by all.” Man is both “the most individual and the most social of the animals.”

Bakunin showed no softness for egoism in its vulgar sense — for bourgeois individualism “which drives the individual to conquest and the establishment of his own well-being... in spite of everyone, on the backs of others, to their detriment.” “Such a solitary and abstract human being is as much a fiction as God.” “Total isolation is intellectual, moral, and material death.”

A broad and synthesizing intellect, Bakunin attempts to create a bridge between individuals and mass movements: “All social life is simply this continual mutual dependence of individuals and the masses. Even the strongest and most intelligent individuals... are at every moment of their lives both promoters and products of the desires and actions of the masses.” The anarchist sees the revolutionary movement as the product of this interaction; thus he regards individual action and autonomous collective action by the masses as equally fruitful and militant.

The Spanish anarchists were the intellectual heirs of Bakunin. Although enamored of socialization, on the very eve of the 1936 Revolution they did not fail to make a solemn pledge to protect the sacred autonomy of the individual: “The eternal aspiration to be unique,” wrote Diego Abad de Santillan, “will be expressed in a thousand ways: the individual will not be suffocated by levering down.... Individualism, personal taste, and originality will have adequate scope to express themselves.”

Sources of Inspiration: the Masses

From the Revolution of 1848 Proudhon learned that the masses are the source of power of revolutions. At the end of 1849 he wrote: “Revolutions have no instigators; they come when fate beckons, and end with the exhaustion of the mysterious power that makes them flourish.” “All revolutions have been carried through by the spontaneous action of the people; if occasionally governments have responded to the initiative of the people it was only because they were forced or constrained to do so. Almost always they blocked, repressed, struck.” “When left to their own instincts the people almost always see better than when guided by the policy of leaders.” “A social revolution... does not occur at the behest of a master with a ready-made theory, or at the dictate of a prophet. A truly organic revolution is a product of universal life, and although it has its messengers and executors it is really not the work of any one person.” The revolution must be conducted from below and not from above. Once the revolutionary crisis is over social reconstruction should be the task of the popular masses themselves. Proudhon affirmed the “personality and autonomy of the masses.”

Bakunin also repeated tirelessly that a social revolution can be neither decreed nor organized from above and can only be made and fully developed by spontaneous and continuous mass action. Revolutions come “like a thief in the night.” They are “produced by the force of events.” “They are long in preparation in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the masses — then they explode, often precipitated by apparently trivial causes.” “One can foresee them, have presentiments of their approach.... but one can never accelerate their outbreak.” “The anarchist social revolution... arises spontaneously in the hearts of the people, destroying all that hinders the generous upsurge of the life of the people in order thereafter to create new forms of free social life which will arise from the very depths of the soul of the people.” Bakunin saw in the Commune of 1871 striking confirmation of his views. The Communards believed that “the action of individuals was almost nothing” in the social revolution and the “spontaneous action of the masses should be everything.”

Like his predecessors, Kropotkin praised “this admirable sense of spontaneous organization which the people... has in such a high degree, but is so rarely permitted to apply.” He added, playfully, that “only he who has always lived with his nose buried in official papers and red tape could doubt it.”

Having made all these generous and optimistic affirmations, both the anarchist and his brother and enemy the Marxist confront a grave contradiction. The spontaneity of the masses is essential, an absolute priority, but not sufficient in itself. The assistance of a revolutionary minority capable of thinking out the revolution has proved to be necessary to raise mass consciousness. How is this elite to be prevented from exploiting its intellectual superiority to usurp the role of the masses, paralyze their initiative, and even impose a new domination upon them?

After his idyllic exaltation of spontaneity, Proudhon came to admit the inertia of the masses, to deplore the prejudice in favor of governments, the deferential instinct and the inferiority complex which inhibit an upsurge of the people. Thus the collective action of the people must be stimulated, and if no revelation were to come to them from outside, the servitude of the lower classes might go on indefinitely. And he admitted that “in every epoch the ideas which stirred the masses had first been germinated in the minds of a few thinkers.... The multitude never took the initiative.... Individuality has priority in every movement of the human spirit.” It would be ideal if these conscious minorities were to pass on to the people their science, the science of revolution. But in practice Proudhon seemed to be skeptical about such a synthesis: to expect it would be to underestimate the intrusive nature of authority. At best, it might be possible to “balance” the two elements.

Before his conversion to anarchism in 1864, Bakunin was involved in conspiracies and secret societies and became familiar with the typically Blanquist idea that minority action must precede the awakening of the broad masses and combine with their most advanced elements after dragging them out of their lethargy. The problem appeared different in the workers’ International, when that vast movement was at last established. Although he had become an anarchist, Bakunin remained convinced of the need for a conscious vanguard: “For revolution to triumph over reaction the unity of revolutionary thought and action must have an organ in the midst of the popular anarchy which will be the very life and the source of all the energy of the revolution.” A group, small or large, of individuals inspired by the same idea, and sharing a common purpose, will produce “a natural effect on the masses.” “Ten, twenty, or thirty men with a clear understanding and good organization, knowing what they want and where they are going, can easily carry with them a hundred, two hundred, three hundred or even more.” “We must create the well-organized and rightly inspired general staffs of the leaders of the mass movement.”

The methods advocated by Bakunin are very similar to what is nowadays termed “infiltration.” It consists of working clandestinely upon the most intelligent and influential individuals in each locality “so that [each] organization should conform to our ideas as far as possible. That is the whole secret of our influence.” The anarchists must be like “invisible pilots” in the midst of the stormy masses. They must direct them not by “ostensible power,” but by “a dictatorship without insignia, title, or official rights, all the more powerful because it will have none of the marks of power.” Bakunin was quite aware how little his terminology (“leaders,” “dictatorship,” etc.) differed from that of the opponents of anarchism, and replied in advance “to anyone who alleges that action organized in this way is yet another assault upon the liberty of the masses, an attempt to create a new authoritarian power”: No! the vanguard must be neither the benefactor nor the dictatorial leader of the people but simply the midwife to its self-liberation. It can achieve nothing more than to spread among the masses ideas which correspond with their instincts. The rest can and must be done by the people themselves. The “revolutionary authorities” (Bakunin did not draw back from using this term but excused it by expressing the hope that they would be “as few as possible”) were not to impose the revolution on the masses but arouse it in their midst; were not to subject them to any form of organization, but stimulate their autonomous organization from below to the top.

Much later, Rosa Luxemburg was to elucidate what Bakunin had surmised: that the contradiction between libertarian spontaneity and the need for action by conscious vanguards would only be fully resolved when science and the working class became fused, and the masses became fully conscious, needing no more “leaders,” but only “executive organs” of their “conscious action.” After emphasizing that the proletariat still lacked science and organization, the Russian anarchist reached the conclusion that the International could only become an instrument of emancipation “when it had caused the science, philosophy, and politics of socialism to penetrate the reflective consciousness of each of its members.”

However theoretically satisfying this synthesis might be, it was a draft drawn on a very distant future. Until historical evolution made it possible to accomplish it, the anarchists remained, like the Marxists, more or less imprisoned by contradiction. It was to rend the Russian Revolution, torn between the spontaneous power of the soviets and the claim of the Bolshevik Party to a “directing role.” It was to show itself in the Spanish Revolution, where the libertarians were to swing from one extreme to the other, from the mass movement to the conscious anarchist elite.

Two historical examples will suffice to illustrate this contradiction.

The anarchists were to draw one categorical conclusion from the experience of the Russian Revolution: a condemnation of the “leading role” of the Party. Voline formulated it in this way:

“The key idea of anarchism is simple: no party, or political or ideological group, even if it sincerely desires to do so, will ever succeed in emancipating the working masses by placing itself above or outside them in order to ‘govern’ or ‘guide’ them. True emancipation can only be brought about by the direct action... of those concerned, the workers themselves, through their own class organizations (production syndicates, factory committees, cooperatives, etc.) and not under the banner of any political party or ideological body. Their emancipation must be based on concrete action and ‘self-administration,’ aided but not controlled by revolutionaries working from within the masses and not from above them.... The anarchist idea and the true emancipatory revolution can never be brought to fruition by anarchists as such but only by the vast masses..., anarchists, or other revolutionaries in general, are required only to enlighten or aid them in certain situations. If anarchists maintained that they could bring about a social revolution by “guiding” the masses, such a pretension would be as illusory as that of the Bolsheviks and for the same reasons.”

However, the Spanish anarchists, in their turn, were to experience the need to organize an ideologically conscious minority, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), within their vast trade union organization, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT). This was to combat the reformist tendencies of some “pure” syndicalists and the maneuvers of the agents of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The FAI drew its inspiration from the ideas of Bakunin, and so tried to enlighten rather than to direct. The relatively high libertarian consciousness of many of the rank-and file members of the CNT also helped it to avoid the excesses of the authoritarian revolutionary parties. It did not, however, perform its part as guide very well, being clumsy and hesitant about its tutelage over the trade unions, irresolute in its strategy, and more richly endowed with activists and demagogues than with revolutionaries as clear-thinking on the level of theory as on that of practice.

Relations between the masses and the conscious minority constitute a problem to which no full solution has been found by the Marxists or even by the anarchists, and one on which it seems that the last word has not yet been said.

In Search of a New Society

Anarchism is not Utopian

Because anarchism is constructive, anarchist theory emphatically rejects the charge of utopianism. It uses the historical method in an attempt to prove that the society of the future is not an anarchist invention, but the actual product of the hidden effects of past events. Proudhon affirmed that for 6,000 years humanity had been crushed by an inexorable system of authority but had been sustained by a “secret virtue”: “Beneath the apparatus of government, under the shadow of its political institutions, society was slowly and silently producing its own organization, making for itself a new order which expressed its vitality and autonomy.”

However harmful government may have been, it contained its own negation. It was always “a phenomenon of collective life, the public exercise of the powers of our law, an expression of social spontaneity, all serving to prepare humanity for a higher state. What humanity seeks in religion and calls ‘God’ is itself. What the citizen seeks in government... is likewise himself — it is liberty.” The French Revolution hastened this inexorable advance toward anarchy: “The day that our fathers... stated the principle of the free exercise of all his faculties by man as a citizen, on that day authority was repudiated in heaven and on earth, and government, even by delegation, became impossible.”

The Industrial Revolution did the rest. From then on politics was overtaken by the economy and subordinated to it. Government could no longer escape the direct competition of producers and became in reality no more than the relation between different interests. This revolution was completed by the growth of the proletariat. In spite of its protestations, authority now expressed only socialism: “The Napoleonic code is as useless to the new society as the Platonic republic: within a few years the absolute law of property will have everywhere been replaced by the relative and mobile law of industrial cooperation, and it will then be necessary to reconstruct this cardboard castle from top to bottom.” Bakunin, in turn, recognized “the immense and undeniable service rendered to humanity by the French Revolution which is father to us all.” The principle of authority has been eliminated from the people’s consciousness forever and order imposed from above has henceforth become impossible. All that remains is to “organize society so that it can live without government.” Bakunin relied on popular tradition to achieve this. “In spite of the oppressive and harmful tutelage of the State,” the masses have, through the centuries, “spontaneously developed within themselves many, if not all, of the essential elements of the material and moral order of real human unity.”

The Need for Organization

Anarchist theory does not see itself as a synonym for disorganization. Proudhon was the first to proclaim that anarchism is not disorder but order, is the natural order in contrast to the artificial order imposed from above, is true unity as against the false unity brought about by constraint. Such a society “thinks, speaks, and acts like a man, precisely because it is no longer represented by a man, no longer recognizes personal authorities; because, like every organized living being, like the infinite of Pascal, it has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” Anarchy is “organized, living society,” “the highest degree of liberty and order to which humanity can aspire.” Perhaps some anarchists thought otherwise but the Italian Errico Malatesta called them to order:

“Under the influence of the authoritarian education given to them, they think that authority is the soul of social organization and repudiate the latter in order to combat the former.... Those anarchists opposed to organization make the fundamental error of believing that organization is impossible without authority. Having accepted this hypothesis they reject any kind of organization rather than accept the minimum of authority.... If we believed that organization could not exist without authority we would be authoritarians, because we would still prefer the authority which imprisons and saddens life to the disorganization which makes it impossible.”

The twentieth-century anarchist Voline developed and clarified this idea:

“A mistaken — or, more often, deliberately inaccurate — interpretation alleges that the libertarian concept means the absence of all organization. This is entirely false: it is not a matter of “organization” or “nonorganization,” but of two different principles of organization.... Of course, say the anarchists, society must be organized. However, the new organization... must be established freely, socially, and, above all, from below. The principle of organization must not issue from a center created in advance to capture the whole and impose itself upon it but, on the contrary, it must come from all sides to create nodes of coordination, natural centers to serve all these points.... On the other hand, the other kind of “organization,” copied from that of the old oppressive and exploitative society,... would exaggerate all the blemishes of the old society.... It could then only be maintained by means of a new artifice.”

In effect, the anarchists would be not only protagonists of true organization but “first-class organizers,” as Henri Lefebvre admitted in his book on the Commune. But this philosopher thought he saw a contradiction here — “a rather surprising contradiction which we find repeatedly in the history of the working-class movement up to present times, especially in Spain.” It can only “astonish” those for whom libertarians are a priori disorganizers.

Self-Management

When Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto of 1848, on the eve of the February Revolution, they foresaw, at any rate for a long transitional period, all the means of production centralized in the hands of an all-embracing State. They took over Louis Blanc’s authoritarian idea of conscripting both agricultural and industrial workers into “armies of labor.” Proudhon was the first to propound an anti-statist form of economic management.

During the February Revolution workers’ associations for production sprang up spontaneously in Paris and in Lyon. In 1848 this beginning of self-management seemed to Proudhon far more the revolutionary event than did the political revolution. It had not been invented by a theoretician or preached by doctrinaires, it was not the State which provided the original stimulus, but the people. Proudhon urged the workers to organize in this way in every part of the Republic, to draw in small property, trade, and industry, then large property and establishments, and, finally, the greatest enterprises of all ( mines, canals, railways, etc. ), and thus “become masters of all.”

The present tendency is to remember only Proudhon’s naive and passing idea of preserving small-scale trade and artisans’ workshops. This was certainly naive, and doubtless uneconomic, but his thinking on this point was ambivalent. Proudhon was a living contradiction: he castigated property as a source of injustice and exploitation and had a weakness for it, although only to the extent that he saw in it a guarantee of the independence of the individual Moreover, Proudhon is too often confused with what Bakunin called “the little so-called Proudhonian coterie” which gathered around him in his last years. This rather reactionary group was stillborn. In the First International it tried in vain to put across private ownership of the means of production against collectivism. The chief reason this group was short-lived was that most of its adherents were all too easily convinced by Bakunin’s arguments and abandoned their so-called Proudhonian ideas to support collectivism.

In the last analysis, this group, who called themselves mutuellistes, were only partly opposed to collectivism: they rejected it for agriculture because of the individualism of the French peasant, but accepted it for transport, and in matters of industrial self-management actually demanded it while rejecting its name. Their fear of the word was largely due to their uneasiness in the face of the temporary united front set up against them by Bakunin’s collectivist disciples and certain authoritarian Marxists who were almost open supporters of state control of the economy.

Proudhon really moved with the times and realized that it is impossible to turn back the clock. He was realistic enough to understand that “small industry is as stupid as petty culture” and recorded this view in his Carnets. With regard to large-scale modern industry requiring a large labor force, he was resolutely collectivist: “In future, large-scale industry and wide culture must be the fruit of association.” “We have no choice in the matter,” he concluded, and waxed indignant that anyone had dared to suggest that he was opposed to technical progress.

In his collectivism he was, however, as categorically opposed to statism. Property must be abolished. The community (as it is understood by authoritarian communism) is oppression and servitude. Thus Proudhon sought a combination of property and community: this was association. The means of production and exchange must be controlled neither by capitalist companies nor by the State. Since they are to the men who work in them “what the hive is to the bee,” they must be managed by associations of workers, and only thus will collective powers cease to be “alienated” for the benefit of a few exploiters. “We, the workers, associated or about to be associated,” wrote Proudhon in the style of a manifesto,

“do not need the State.... Exploitation by the State always means rulers and wage slaves. We want the government of man by man no more than the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the opposite of governmentalism.... We want these associations to be... the first components of a vast federation of associations and groups united in the common bond of the democratic and social republic.

Proudhon went into detail and enumerated precisely the essential features of workers’ self-management:

Every associated individual to have an indivisible share in the property of the company.

Each worker to take his share of the heavy and repugnant tasks.

Each to go through the gamut of operations and instruction, of grades and activities, to insure that he has the widest training. Proudhon was insistent on the point that “the worker must go through all the operations of the industry he is attached to.”

Office-holders to be elected and regulations submitted to the associates for approval.

Remuneration to be proportionate to the nature of the position held, the degree of skill, and the responsibility carried. Every associate to share in the profits in proportion to the service he has given.

Each to be free to set his own hours, carry on his duties, and to leave the association at will.

The associated workers to choose their leaders, engineers, architects, and accountants. Proudhon stressed the fact that the proletariat still lacks technicians: hence the need to bring into workers’ self-management programs “industrial and commercial persons of distinction” who would teach the workers business methods and receive fixed salaries in return: there is “room for all in the sunshine of the revolution.”

This libertarian concept of self-management is at the opposite pole from the paternalistic, statist form of self-management set out by Louis Blanc in a draft law of September 15, 1849. The author of The Organization of Labor wanted to create workers’ associations sponsored and financed by the State. He proposed an arbitrary division of the profits as follows: 25 percent to a capital amortization fund; 25 percent to a social security fund; 25 percent to a reserve fund; 25 percent to be divided among the workers.

Proudhon would have none of self-management of this kind. In his view the associated workers must not “submit to the State,” but “be the State itself.” “Association... can do everything and reform everything without interference from authority, can encroach upon authority and subjugate it.” Proudhon wanted “to go toward government through association, not to association through government.” He issued a warning against the illusion, cherished in the dreams of authoritarian socialists, that the State could tolerate free self-management. How could it endure “the formation of enemy enclaves alongside a centralized authority”? Proudhon prophetically warned: “While centralization continues to endow the State with colossal force, nothing can be achieved by spontaneous initiative or by the independent actions of groups and individuals.”

It should be stressed that in the congresses of the First International the libertarian idea of self-management prevailed over the statist concept. At the Lausanne Congress in 1867 the committee reporter, a Belgian called Cesar de Paepe, proposed that the State should become the owner of undertakings that were to be nationalized. At that time Charles Longuet was a libertarian, and he replied: “All right, on condition that it is understood that we define the State as ‘the collective of the citizens’..., also that these services will be administered not by state functionaries... but by groupings of workers.” The debate continued the following year (1868) at the Brussels Congress and this time the same committee reporter took care to be precise on this point: “Collective property would belong to society as a whole, but would be conceded to associations of workers. The State would be no more than a federation of various groups of workers.” Thus clarified, the resolution was passed.

However, the optimism which Proudhon had expressed in 1848 with regard to self-management was to prove unjustified. Not many years later, in 1857, he severely criticized the existing workers’ associations; inspired by naive, utopian illusions, they had paid the price of their lack of experience. They had become narrow and exclusive, had functioned as collective employers, and had been carried away by hierarchical and managerial concepts. All the abuses of capitalist companies “were exaggerated further in these so-called brotherhoods.” They had been tom by discord, rivalry’ defections, and betrayals. Once their managers had learned the business concerned, they retired to “set up as bourgeois employers on their own account.” In other instances, the members had insisted on dividing up the resources. In 1848 several hundred workers’ associations had been set up; nine years later only twenty remained.

As opposed to this narrow and particularist attitude, Proudhon advocated a “universal” and “synthetic” concept of self-management. The task of the future was far more than just “getting a few hundred workers into associations”; it was “the economic transformation of a nation of thirty-six million souls.” The workers’ associations of the future should work for all and not “operate for the benefit of a few.” Self-management, therefore, required the members to have some education: “A man is not born a member of an association, he becomes one.” The hardest task before the association is to “educate the members.” It is more important to create a “fund of men” than to form a “mass of capital.”

With regard to the legal aspect, it had been Proudhon’s first idea to vest the ownership of their undertaking in the workers’ associations but now he rejected this narrow solution. In order to do this he distinguished between possession and ownership. Ownership is absolute, aristocratic, feudal; possession is democratic, republican, egalitarian: it consists of the enjoyment of an usufruct which can neither be alienated, nor given away, nor sold. The workers should hold their means of production in alleu like the ancient Germains, but would not be the outright owners. Property would be replaced by federal, cooperative ownership vested not in the State but in the producers as a whole, united in a vast agricultural and industrial federation.

Proudhon waxed enthusiastic about the future of such a revised and corrected form of self-management: “It is not false rhetoric that states this, it is an economic and social necessity: the time is near when we shall be unable to progress on any but these new conditions.... Social classes... must merge into one single producers’ association.” Would self-management succeed? “On the reply to this... depends the whole future of the workers. If it is affirmative an entire new world will open up for humanity; if it is negative the proletarian can take it as settled.... There is no hope for him in this wicked world.”

The Bases of Exchange

How were dealings between the different workers’ associations to be organized? At first Proudhon maintained that the exchange value of all goods could be measured by the amount of labor necessary to produce them. The workers were to be paid in “work vouchers”; trading agencies or social shops were to be set up where they would buy goods at retail prices calculated in hours of work. Large-scale trade would be carried on through a compensatory clearinghouse or People’s Bank which would accept payment in work vouchers. This bank would also serve as a credit establishment lending to workers’ associations the sums needed for effective operation. The loans would be interest free.

This so-called mutuelliste scheme was rather utopian and certainly difficult to operate in a capitalist system. Early in 1849 Proudhon set up the People’s Bank and in six weeks some 20,000 people joined, but it was short-lived. It was certainly farfetched to believe that mutuellisme would spread like a patch of oil and to exclaim, as Proudhon did then: “It really is the new world, the promised society which is being grafted on to the old and gradually transforming it!”

The idea of wages based on the number of hours worked is debatable on many grounds. The libertarian communists of the Kropotkin school — Malatesta, Elise Reclus, Carlo Cafiero — did not fail to criticize it. In the first place, they thought it unjust. Cafiero argued that “three hours of Peter’s work may be worth five of Paul’s.” Other factors than duration must be considered in determining the value of labor: intensity, professional and intellectual training, etc. The family commitments of the workers must also be taken into account. Moreover, in a collectivist regime the worker remains a wage slave of the community that buys and supervises his labor. Payment by hours of work performed cannot be an ideal solution; at best it would be a temporary expedient. We must put an end to the morality of account books, to the philosophy of “credit and debit.” This method of remuneration, derived from modified individualism, is in contradiction to collective ownership of the means of production, and cannot bring about a profound revolutionary change in man. It is incompatible with anarchism; a new form of ownership requires a new form of remuneration. Service to the community cannot be measured in units of money. Needs will have to be given precedence over services, and all the products of the labor of all must belong to all, each to take his share of them freely. To each according to his need should be the motto of libertarian communism.

Kropotkin, Malatesta, and their followers seem to have overlooked the fact that Proudhon had anticipated their objections and revised his earlier ideas. In his Theorie de la Propriete, published after his death, he explained that he had only supported the idea of equal pay for equal work in his “First Memorandum on Property” of 1840: “I had forgotten to say two things: first, that labor is measured by combining its duration with its intensity; second, that one must not include in the worker’s wages the amortization of the cost of his education and the work he did on his own account as an unpaid apprentice, nor the premiums to insure him against the risks he runs, all of which vary in different occupations.” Proudhon claimed to have “repaired” this “omission” in his later writings in which he proposed that mutual insurance cooperative associations should compensate for unequal costs and risks. Furthermore, Proudhon did not regard the remuneration of the members of a workers’ association as “wages” but as a share of profits freely determined by associated and equally responsible workers. In an as yet unpublished thesis, Pierre Haubtman, one of Proudhon’s most recent exponents, comments that workers’ self-management would have no meaning if it were not interpreted in this way.

The libertarian communists saw fit to criticize Proudhon’s mutuellisme and the more logical collectivism of Bakunin for not having determined the way in which labor would be remunerated in a socialist system. These critics seemed to have overlooked the fact that the two founders of anarchism were anxious not to lay down a rigid pattern of society prematurely. They wanted to leave the self-management associations the widest choice in this matter. The libertarian communists themselves were to provide the justification for this flexibility and refusal to jump to conclusions, so different from their own impatient forecasts: they stressed that in the ideal system of their choice “labor would produce more than enough for all” and that “bourgeois” norms of remuneration could only be replaced by specifically “communist” norms when the era of abundance had set in, and not before. In 1884 Malatesta, drafting the program for a projected anarchist international, admitted that communism could be brought about immediately only in a very limited number of areas and, “for the rest,” collectivism would have to be accepted “for a transitional period.”

For communism to be possible, a high stage of moral development is required of the members of society, a sense of solidarity both elevated and profound, which the upsurge of the revolution may not suffice to induce. This doubt is the more justified in that material conditions favorable to this development will not exist at the beginning.

Anarchism was about to face the test of experience, on the eve of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, when Diego Abad de Santillan demonstrated the immediate impracticability of libertarian communism in very similar terms. He held that the capitalist system had not prepared human beings for communism: far from developing their social instincts and sense of solidarity it tends in every way to suppress and penalize such feelings.

Santillan recalled the experience of the Russian and other revolutions to persuade the anarchists to be more realistic. He charged them with receiving the most recent lessons of experience with suspicion or superiority. He maintained that it is doubtful whether a revolution would lead directly to the realization of our ideal of communist anarchism. The collectivist watchword, “to each the product of his labor,” would be more appropriate than communism to the requirements of the real situation in the first phase of a revolution’ when the economy would be disorganized, production at a low ebb, and food supplies a priority. The economic models to be tried would, at best, evolve slowly toward communism. To put human beings brutally behind bars by imprisoning them in rigid forms of social life would be an authoritarian approach which would hinder the revolution. Mutuellisme, communism, collectivism are only different means to the same end. Santillan turned back to the wise empiricism of Proudhon and Bakunin, claiming for the coming Spanish Revolution the right to experiment freely: “The degree of mutuellisme, collectivism, or communism which can be achieved will be determined freely in each locality and each social sphere.” In fact, as will be seen later, the experience of the Spanish “collectives” of 1936 illustrated the difficulties arising from the premature implementation of integral communism .

Competition

Competition is one of the norms inherited from the bourgeois economy which raises thorny problems when preserved in a collectivist or self-management economy. Proudhon saw it as an “expression of social spontaneity” and the guarantee of the “freedom” of the association. Moreover, it would for a long time to come provide an “irreplaceable stimulus” without which an “immense slackening off” would follow the high tension of industry. He went into detail:

“The working brotherhood is pledged to supply society with the goods and services asked from it at prices as near as possible to the cost of production.... Thus the workers’ association denies itself any amalgamation [of a monopolistic type], subjects itself to the law of competition, and keeps its books and records open to society, which reserves the power to dissolve the association as the ultimate sanction of society’s right of supervision.” “Competition and association are interdependent.... The most deplorable error of socialism is to have considered it [competition] as the disorder of society. There can... be... no question of destroying competition.... It is a matter of finding an equilibrium, one could say a policing agent.”

Proudhon’s attachment to the principle of competition drew the sarcasm of Louis Blanc: “We cannot understand those who have advocated the strange linking of two contrary principles. To graft brotherhood onto competition is a wretched idea: it is like replacing eunuchs by hermaphrodites.” The pre-Marxian Louis Blanc wanted to “reach a uniform price” determined by the State, and prevent all competition between establishments within an industry. Proudhon retorted that prices “can only be fixed by competition, that is, by the power of the consumer... to dispense with the services of those who overcharge....” “Remove competition... and you deprive society of its motive force, so that it runs down like a clock with a broken spring.”

Proudhon, however, did not hide from himself the evils of competition, which he described very fully in his treatise on political economy. He knew it to be a source of inequality and admitted that “in competition, victory goes to the big battalions.” It is so “anarchic” (in the pejorative sense of the term) that it operates always to the benefit of private interests, necessarily engenders civil strife and, in the long run, creates oligarchies. “Competition kills competition.”

In Proudhon’s view, however, the absence of competition would be no less pernicious. Taking the tobacco administration, he found that its products were too dear and its supplies inadequate simply because it had long been a monopoly free from competition. If all industries were subject to such a system, the nation would never be able to balance its income and expenditures. The competition Proudhon dreamed of was not to be the laissez-faire competition of the capitalist economic system, but competition endowed with a higher principle to “socialize” it, competition which would function on the basis of fair exchange, in a spirit of solidarity, competition which would both protect individual initiative and bring back to society the wealth which is at present diverted from it by capitalist appropriation.

It is obvious that there was something utopian in this idea. Competition and the so-called market economy inevitably produce inequality and exploitation, and would do so even if one started from complete equality. They could not be combined with workers’ self-management unless it were on a temporary basis, as a necessary evil, until (1) a psychology of “honest exchange” had developed among the workers; (2) most important, society as a whole had passed from conditions of shortage to the stage of abundance, when competition would lose its purpose.

Even in such a transitional period, however, it seems desirable that competition should be limited, as in Yugoslavia today, to the consumer-goods sector where it has at least the one advantage of protecting the interests of the consumer.

The libertarian communist would condemn Proudhon’s version of a collective economy as being based on a principle of conflict; competitors would be in a position of equality at the start, only to be hurled into a struggle which would inevitably produce victors and vanquished, and where goods would end up by being exchanged according to the principles of supply and demand; “which would be to fall right back into competition and the bourgeois world.” Some critics of the Yugoslav experiment from other communist countries use much the same terms to attack it. They feel that self-management in any form merits the same hostility they harbor toward a competitive market economy, as if the two ideas were basically and permanently inseparable.

Centralization and Planning

At all events, Proudhon was aware that management by workers’ associations would have to cover large units. He stressed the “need for centralization and large units” and asked: “Do not workers’ associations for the operation of heavy industry mean large units?” “We put economic centralization in the place of political centralization.” However, his fear of authoritarian planning made him instinctively prefer competition inspired by solidarity. Since then, anarchist thinkers have become advocates of a libertarian and democratic form of planning, worked out from the bottom up by the federation of self-managing enterprises.

Bakunin foresaw that self-management would open perspectives for planning on a world-wide scale:

“Workers’ cooperative associations are a new historical phenomenon; today as we witness their birth we cannot foresee their future, but only guess at the immense development which surely awaits them and the new political and social conditions they will generate. It is not only possible but probable that they will, in time, outgrow the limits of today’s counties, provinces, and even states to transform the whole structure of human society, which will no longer be divided into nations but into industrial units.”

These would then “form a vast economic federation” with a supreme assembly at its head. With the help of “world-wide statistics, giving data as comprehensive as they are detailed and precise,” it would balance supply and demand, direct, distribute, and share out world industrial production among the different countries so that crises in trade and employment, enforced stagnation, economic disaster, and loss of capital would almost certainly entirely disappear.

Complete Socialization?

There was an ambiguity in Proudhon’s idea of management by the workers’ associations. It was not always clear whether the self-management groups would continue to compete with capitalist undertakings — in other words, whether a socialist sector would coexist with a private sector, as is said to be the present situation in Algeria and other newly independent countries — or whether, on the other hand, production as a whole would be socialized and made subject to self-management.

Bakunin was a consistent collectivist and clearly saw the dangers of the coexistence of the two sectors. Even in association the workers cannot accumulate the necessary capital to stand up to large-scale bourgeois capital. There would also be a danger that the capitalist environment would contaminate the workers’ associations so that “a new class of exploiters of the labor of the proletariat” would arise within them. Self-management contains the seeds of the full economic emancipation of the working masses, but these seeds can only germinate and grow when “capital itself, industrial establishments, raw materials, and capital equipment... become the collective property of workers’ associations for both agricultural and industrial production, and these are freely organized and federated among themselves.” “Radical, conclusive social change will only be brought about by means affecting the whole society,” that is, by a social revolution which transforms private property into collective property. In such a social organization the workers would be their own collective capitalists, their own employers. Only “those things which are truly for personal use” would remain private property.

Bakunin admitted that producers’ cooperative