The Sustainability of Anarchism

(Concluding summary)

I am reminded that some libertarian communists or socialists, who claim to be revolutionaries in the politico-social sense of the term, have renounced or demand that those of their tendency renounce what they call the anarchist label. That anarchist label, from their perspective, conceals a very questionable sort of anarchism. They are disturbed by it and disturb still more the propagation of a specifically anarchist philosophy.

In the current political climate, the libertarian socialists are — with the Trotskyists and other small varieties of revolutionaries — oppositional elements within a movement more generally related to communism. Now, all communism is by nature a matter of herds and herding, and thus the opposite of anarchism. That is what Proudhon saw very clearly in his encounter with Marx. I have noted somewhere that communism collectivizes persons at the same time as things.

Anarchism is not a label. It is the proper name of an evolving philosophy that defines an ethic and aesthetic of individual life, whatever the society we live in at a given time. Its scientific sources date back to Democritus and Anaxagoras, its moral science to our Epicurus, its method of understanding facts, its attitude toward the facts, to the skepticism of Pyrrho. It is thus more ancient that Christianity, which has not been able to destroy it and which has borrowed a great deal from it by means of stoic interventions. It is by means of interference of this sort that the anarchist philosophy passes from the individual to the social. Rigorous with regard to the mode of individual life, it concerns itself, as a critical method, with the reality of the present. It is a humanism active in living social relations and, with regard to the social to come, it promotes potential ideas and not systems. As a result, it claims to be revolutionary, but deeply so.

The autonomy of thought, for an anarchist, is without restriction. In this sense, the anarchist is entirely individualist. The critical and cultural expression of their thought calls, on the contrary, for a free association with other anarchists. However, in an society organized according to the psycho-social definitions of the times and places, the positive activities of all anarchists can only be related to existing circumstances. They are effective only in the form of interventions within organizations with progressive motives and, in concert with those organizations, against conservative or reactionary associations. It is in this way that the individualist is in fact social while avoiding catechized socialism.

That notion — among others — reconciles the secondary differences, normally abundant in an anarchist milieu, as soon as we envision action as a kind of persistent harassment of the real and not as a means of achieving some preconceived—consequently limiting and, to say the least, unpredictable—system. We have known too many revolutions in our century to be ignorant of their contingency and to be unaware that the anarchist remains unsatisfied by them when he is not permanently muzzled—if not liquidated. The crowd and its ringleaders, whatever name they assume, are not anarchists.

The fact remains that a harassing action makes sense and has effect only if it is reflective, supported by references and attentive investigations. That demands, besides a minimum of intercollaboration, labor, gratuity, honesty in judgment and attacks. What we combat is not necessarily of bad quality any more than we are of excellent quality in all things. Such an attitude is less easy to hold than that of a demagoguery of anti-everything or of the splendor of the multitudes. It demands, along with character, a certain detachment from contingencies. But, when related to the constants of an anarchist philosophy, it has duration on its side and, as a result, an efficacy over time. It confers, in the present, the satisfaction of constructing our own personalities and of feeling that we exist by and for ourselves, with the other who is our brother or sister.