Chapter 1. Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes

Anarchism versus economic monopoly and state power; Forerunners of modern Anarchism; William Godwin and his work on Political Justice; P.J. Proudhon and his ideas of political and economic decentralisation; Max Stirner’s work, The Ego and Its Own; M. Bakunin the Collectivist and founder of the Anarchist movement; P. Kropotkin the exponent of Anarchist Communism and the philosophy of Mutual Aid; Anarchism and revolution; Anarchism a synthesis of Socialism and Liberalism; Anarchism versus economic materialism and Dictatorship; Anarchism and the state; Anarchism a tendency of history; Freedom and culture.

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union.

In place of the present state organisation with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interest and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.

Anyone who studies at all profoundly the economic and social development of the present social system will easily recognise that these objectives do not spring from the Utopian ideas of a few imaginative innovators, but that they are the logical outcome of a thorough examination of the present-day social maladjustments, which with every new phase of the existing social conditions manifest themselves more plainly and more unwholesomely. Modern monopoly, capitalism and the totalitarian state are merely the last terms in a development which could culminate in no other results.

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction. and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interest of human society to the private interest of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.

The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the present struggles for economic and political power, are only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead us to a universal catastrophe if social development does not take a new course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged today to spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly.

The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of all against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems of religious theology, God is everything and man nothing, so for this modern political theology, the state is everything and the man nothing. And just as behind the “will of God” there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the “will of the state” only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people.

Anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history, although there still remains a good deal of work for historical work in this field. We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-Tse (The Course and The Right Way) and in the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists and Cynics and other advocates of so-called “natural right,” and in particular in Zeno who, at the opposite pole from Plato, founded the Stoic school. They found expression in the teaching of the Gnostic, Karpocrates, in Alexandria, and had an unmistakable influence on certain Christian sects of the Middle Ages in France, Germany and Holland, almost all of which fell victims to the most savage persecutions. In the history of the Bohemian reformation they found a powerful champion in Peter Chelcicky, who in his work, “The Net of Faith,” passed the same judgement on the church and the state as Tolstoy did later. Among the great humanists there was Rabelais, who in his description of the happy Abbey of Thélème (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all authoritarian restraints. Of other pioneers of libertarian thinking we will mention here only La Boétie, Sylvan Maréchal, and, above all, Diderot, in whose voluminous writings one finds thickly strewn the utterances of a truly great mind which had rid itself of every authoritarian prejudice.

Meanwhile, it was reserved for more recent history to give clear form to the anarchist perception of life and to connect it with the immediate processes of social evolution. This was done for the first time in William Godwin’s splendidly conceived work, Concerning Political Justice and its Influence upon General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793. Godwin’s work was, we might say, the ripened fruit of that long evolution of the concepts of political and social radicalism in England which proceeds in a continuous line from George Buchanan through Richard Hooker, Gerard Winstanley, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Robert Wallace and John Bellers to Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price and Thomas Paine.

Godwin recognised very clearly that the cause of social evils is to be sought, not in the form of the state, but in its very existence. Just as the state presents only a caricature of a genuine society, so also it makes of human beings who are held under its eternal guardianship merely caricatures of their real selves by constantly compelling them to repress their natural inclinations and holding them to things that are repugnant to their inner impulses. Only in this way is it possible to mould human beings to the established form of good subjects. A normal human being who was not interfered with in his natural development would of himself shape the environment that suits his inborn demand for peace and freedom.

But Godwin also recognised that human beings can only live together naturally and freely when the proper economic conditions for this are given, and when the individual is no longer subject to exploitation by another, a consideration which the representatives of mere political radicalism almost completely overlooked. Hence they were later compelled to make consistently greater concessions to that power of the state which they had wished to restrict to a minimum. Godwin’s idea of a stateless society assumed the social ownership of all natural and social wealth, and the carrying on of economic life by the free co-operation of the producers; in this sense he was really the founder of the later communist Anarchism.

Godwin’s work had a very strong influence on advanced circles of the English workers and the more enlightened sections of the liberal intelligentsia. Most important of all, he contributed to give to the young socialist movement in England, which found its maturest exponents in Robert Owen, John Gray and William Thompson, that unmistakable libertarian character which it had for a long time, and which it never assumed in Germany and many other countries.

But a far greater influence on the development of Anarchist theory was that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most many-sided writer of whom modern socialism can boast. Proudhon was completely rooted in the intellectual and social life of his period, and these inspired his attitude upon every question he dealt with. Therefore, he is not to be judged, as he has been by even by many of his later followers, by his special practical proposals, which were born of the needs of the hour. Amongst the numerous socialist thinkers of his time he was the one who understood most profoundly the cause of social maladjustment, and possessed, besides, the greatest breadth of vision. He was the outspoken opponent of all systems, and saw in social evolution the eternal urge to new and higher forms of intellectual and social life, and it was his conviction that this evolution could not be bound by any abstract general formulas.

Proudhon opposed the influence of the Jacobin tradition, which dominated the thinking of the French democrats and of most of the Socialists of that period with the same determination as the interference of the central state and economic policy in the natural processes of social advance. To rid society of these two cancerous growths was for him the great task of the nineteenth-century revolution. Proudhon was no communist. He condemned property as merely the privilege of exploitation, but he recognised the ownership of the instruments of production by all, made effective by industrial groups bound to one another by free contract, so long as this right was not made to serve the exploitation of others and as long as the full product of his individual labour was assured to every human being. This organisation based on reciprocity (mutualité) guarantees the enjoyment of equal rights by each in exchange for equal services. The average working time required for the completion of any product becomes the measure of its value and is the basis of mutual exchange. In this way capital is deprived of its usurial power and is completely bound up with the performance of work. By being made available to all it ceases to be an instrument for exploitation.

Such a form of economy makes an political coercive apparatus superfluous. Society becomes a league of free communities which arrange their affairs according to need, by themselves or in association with others, and in which man’s freedom finds in the freedom of others not its limitation, but its security and confirmation. “The freer, the more independent and enterprising the individual is in a society, the better for the society.” This organisation of Federalism in which Proudhon saw the immediate future sets no definite limitations on further possibilities of development, and offers the widest scope to every individual and social activity. Starting out from this point of view of the federation, Proudhon combated likewise the aspirations for political activity of the awakening nationalism of the time, and in particular that nationalism which found in Mazzini, Garibaldi, Lelewel, and others, such strong advocates. In this respect also he saw more clearly than most of his contemporaries. Proudhon exerted a strong influence on the development of socialism, which made itself felt especially in the Latin countries. But the so-called individual Anarchism, which found able exponents in America in such men as Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, Francis D. Tandy, and most notably in Benjamin R. Tucker ran in similar lines, though none of its representatives could approach Proudhon’s breadth of view.

Anarchism found a unique expression in Max Stirner’s (Johann Kaspar Schmidt’s) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own), which, it is true, quickly passed into oblivion and had no influence at all on the Anarchist movement as such — though it was to experience an unexpected resurrection fifty years later. Stirner’s book is pre-eminently a philosophical work which traces man’s dependence on so-called higher powers through all its devious ways, and is not timid about drawing inferences from the knowledge gained by the survey. It is the book of a conscious and deliberate insurgent, which reveals no reverence for any authority, however exalted, and therefore impels powerfully to independent thinking.

Anarchism found a virile champion of vigorous revolutionary energy in Michael Bakunin, who took his stand upon the teachings of Proudhon, but extended them on the economic side when he, along with the collectivist wing of the First International, came out for the collective ownership of the land and of all other means of production, and wished to restrict the right of private ownership to the full product of individual labour. Bakunin also was an opponent of Communism, which in his time had a thoroughly authoritarian character, like that which it has again assumed today in Bolshevism. In one of his four speeches at the Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom in Bern (1868), he said: “I am not a Communist because Communism unites all forces of society in the state and becomes absorbed in it; because it inevitably leads to the concentration of all property in the hands of the state, while I seek the abolition of the state — the complete elimination of the principle of authority and governmental guardianship, which under the pretence of making men moral and civilising them, has up to now always enslaved, oppressed, exploited and ruined them.”

Bakunin was a determined revolutionary and did no believe in an amicable adjustment of the existing class conflict. He recognised that the ruling classes blindly and stubbornly opposed even the slightest social reform, and accordingly saw the only salvation in an international social revolution, which should abolish all the ecclestical, political, military, bureaucratic and judicial institutions of the existing social system and introduce in their stead a federation of free workers’ associations to provide for the requirements of daily life. Since he, like so many of his contemporaries, believed in the close proximity of the revolution, he directed all his vast energy to combine all the genuinely revolutionary and libertarian elements within and without the International to safeguard the coming revolution against any dictatorship or retrogression to the old conditions. Thus he became in a very special sense the creator of the modern Anarchist movement.

Anarchism found a valuable advocate in Peter Kropotkin, who set himself the task of making the achievements of modern natural science available for the development of the sociological concepts of Anarchism. In his ingenious book Mutual Aid — a Factor of Evolution, he entered the lists against so-called Social Darwinism, whose exponents tried to prove the inevitability of the existing social conditions from the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence by raising the struggle of the strong against the weak to the status of an iron law for all natural processes, to which even man is subject. In reality this conception was strongly influenced by the Malthusian doctrine that life’s table is not spread for all, and that the unneeded will just have to reconcile themselves to this fact.

Kropotkin showed that this conception of nature as a field of unrestricted warfare is only a caricature of real life, and that along with the brutal struggle for existence, which is fought out with tooth and claw, there exists in nature another principle which is expressed in the social combination of the weaker species and the maintenance of races by the evolution of social instincts and mutual aid.

In this sense man is not the creator of society, but society is the creator of man, for he inherited from the that preceded him the social instinct which alone enabled him to maintain himself in his first environment against the physical superiority of other species, and to make sure of an undreamed-of height of development. This second tendency in the struggle for existence is far superior to the first, as is shown by the steady retrogression of those species which have no social life and are dependent merely upon their physical strength. This view, which today is meeting with consistently wider acceptance in the natural sciences and in social research, opened wholly new vistas to speculation concerning human evolution.

The fact is that even under the worst despotism most of man’s personal relations with his fellows are arranged by free agreement and solidaric co-operations, without which social life would not be possible at all. If this were not the case even the strongest coercive arrangements of the state would not be able to maintain the social order for a single day. However, these natural forms of behaviour, which arise from man’s inmost nature, are today constantly interfered with and crippled by the effects of economic exploitation and governmental guardianship, which represents in human society the brutal form of the struggle for existence, which has to be overcome by the other form of mutual aid and free co-operation. The consciousness of personal responsibility and that other precious good that has come down to man by inheritance from remote antiquity: that capacity for sympathy with others in which all social ethics, all ideas of social justice, have their origin, develop best in freedom.

Like Bakunin, Kropotkin too was a revolutionary. But he, like Élisée Reclus and others, saw in revolution only a special phase of the evolutionary process, which appears when new social aspirations are so restricted in their natural development by authority that they have to shatter the old shell by violence before they can function as new factors in human life. In contrast to Proudhon and Bakunin, Kropotkin advocated community ownership, not only of the means of production, but of the products of labour as well, as it was his opinion that in the present status of technique no exact measure of the value of individual labour is possible, but that, on the other hand, by a rational direction of our modern methods of labour it will be possible to assure comparative abundance to every human being. Communist Anarchism, which before him had already been urged by Joseph Dejacque, Élisée Reclus, Errico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, and others, and which is advocated by the great majority of Anarchists today, found in him one of its most brilliant exponents.

Mention must also be made here of Leo Tolstoy, who took from primitive Christianity and, on the basis of the ethical principles laid down in the gospels, arrived at the idea of a society without rulership.

Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of development of a free humanity. In this sense Mutualism, Collectivism and Communism are not to be regarded as closed systems permitting no further development, but merely as economic assumptions as to the means of safeguarding a free community. There will even probably be in society of the future different forms of economic co-operation operating side by side, since any social progress must be associated with that free experiment and practical testing out for which in a society of free communities there will be afforded every opportunity.

The same holds true for the various methods of Anarchism. Most Anarchists of our time are convinced that a social transformation of society cannot be brought about without violent revolutionary convulsions. The violence of these convulsions, of course, depends upon the strength of the resistance which the ruling classes will be able to oppose to the realisation of the new ideas. The wider the circles which are inspired with the idea of a reorganisation of society in the spirit of freedom and Socialism, the easier will be the birth pains of the coming social revolution.

In modern anarchism we have the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French Revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism. Modern Socialism developed when profound observers in social life came to see more and more clearly that political constitutions and changes in the form of government could never get to the bottom of that great problem that we call “the social question.” Its supporters recognised that a social equalising of human beings , despite the loveliest of theoretical assumptions, is not possible so long as people are separated into classes on the basis of their owning or not owning property, classes whose mere existence excludes in advance any thought of a genuine community. And so there developed the recognition that only by elimination of economic monopolies and common ownership of the means of production, in a word, by a complete transformation of all economic conditions and social institutions associated with them, does a condition of social justice become thinkable, a status in which society shall become a genuine community, and human labour shall no longer serve the ends of exploitation, but shall serve to assure abundance to everyone. But as soon as Socialism began to assemble its forces and became a movement, there at once came to light certain differences of opinion due to the influence of the social environment in different countries. It is a fact that every political concept from theocracy to Cæsarism and dictatorship have affected certain factions in the Socialist movement. Meanwhile, there have been two great currents in political thought which have been of decisive significance for the development of Socialistic ideals: Liberalism, which powerfully stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries and Spain, in particular, and Democracy in the later sense to which Rousseau gave expression in his Social Contract, and which found its most influential representatives in French Jacobinism. While liberation in its social theorising started off from the individual and wished to limit the state’s activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract collective concept, Rousseau’s “general will,” which it sought to fix in the national state.

Liberalism and Democracy were preeminently political concepts, and since the great majority of the original adherents of both maintained the right of ownership in the old sense, these had to renounce them both when economic development took a course which could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy, with its motto of “all citizens equal before the law,” and Liberalism with its “right of man over his own person,” both shipwrecked on the realities of the capitalist economic form. So long as millions of human beings in every country had to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so-called “equality before the law” remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one’s own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

Anarchism has in common with Liberalism the idea that the happiness and prosperity of the individual must be the standard of all social matters. And, in common with the great representatives of Liberal thought, it has also the idea of limiting the functions of government to a minimum. Its supporters have followed this thought to its ultimate logical consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power from the life of society. When Jefferson clothes the basic concept of Liberalism in the words: “that government is best which governs least,” then Anarchists say with Thoreau: “That government is best which governs not at all.”

In common with the founders of socialism, Anarchists demand the abolition of all economic monopolies and the common ownership of the soil and all other means of production, the use of which must be available for all without distinction; for personal and social freedom is conceivable only on the basis of equal economic advantages for everybody. Within the socialist movement itself the Anarchists represent the viewpoint that the war against capitalism must be at the same time a war against all institutions of political power, for in history economic exploitation has always gone hand in hand with political and social oppression. The exploitation of man by man and the dominion of man over man are inseparable, and each is the condition of the other.

As long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges. When this condition of social injustice vanishes to give place to a higher order of things, which shall recognise no special rights and shall have as its basic assumption the community of social interests, government over men must yield the field to the to the administration of economic and social affairs, or to speak with Saint-Simon: “The time will come when the art of governing man will disappear. A new art will take its place, the art of administering things.”

And his disposes of the theory maintained by Marx and his followers that the state, in the form of a proletarian dictatorship, is a necessary transitional stage to a classless society, in which the state after the elimination of all class conflicts and then of classes themselves, will dissolve itself and vanish from the canvas. This concept, which completely mistakes the real nature of the state and the significance in history of the factor of political power, is only the logical outcome of so-called economic materialism, which sees in all the phenomena of history merely the inevitable effects of the methods of production of the time. Under the influence of this theory people came to regard the different forms of the state and all other social institutions as a “juridical and political superstructure” on the “economic edifice” of society, and thought that they had found in that theory the key to every historical process. In reality every section of history affords us thousands of examples of the way in which the economic development of a country has been set back for centuries and forced into prescribed forms by particular struggles for political power.

Before the rise of the ecclesiastical monarchy Spain was industrially the most advanced country in Europe and held the first place in economic production in almost every field. But a century after the triumph of the Christian monarchy most of its industries had disappeared. What was left of then survived only in the most wretched conditions. In most industries they had reverted to the most primitive methods of production. Agriculture collapsed, canals and waterways fell into ruin, and vast stretches of country were transformed into deserts. Down to this day Spain has never recovered from that setback. The aspirations of a particular caste for political power had laid economic development fallow for centuries.

Princely absolutism in Europe, with its silly “economic ordinances” and “industrial legislation,” which punished severely any deviation from the prescribed methods of production and permitted no new inventions, blocked industrial progress in European countries for centuries, and prevented its natural development. And were there not considerations of political power which after the World War constantly balked any escape from the universal economic crisis and delivered the future of whole countries to politics-playing generals and political adventurers? Who will assert that modern Fascism was an inevitable result of economic development?

In Russia, however, where the so-called “proletarian dictatorship” has ripened into reality, the aspirations of a particular party for political power have prevented any truly socialistic reconstruction of economy and have forced the country into the slavery of a grinding state-capitalism. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in which naive souls wish to see merely a passing, but inevitable, transition stage to real Socialism, has today grown into a frightful despotism, which lags behind the tyranny of the Fascist states in nothing.

The assertion that the state must continue to exist until class conflicts, and classes with them, disappear, sounds, in the light of all historical experience, almost like a bad joke. Every type of political power presupposes some particular form of human slavery, for the maintenance of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly, that is, in relation to other states, the state has to create certain artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks, and classes is an essential condition of its continuance. The state is capable only of protecting old privileges and creating new ones; in that its whole significance is exhausted.

A new state which has been brought into existence by a social revolution can put an end to the privileges of the old ruling classes, but it can do this only by immediately setting up a new privileged class, which it will require for the maintenance of its rulership. The development of the Bolshevist bureaucracy in Russia under the alleged dictatorship of the proletariat — which has never been anything but the dictatorship of a small clique over the proletariat and the entire Russian people — is merely a new instance of an old historical experience which has repeated itself uncountable times. This new ruling class, which today is rapidly growing into a new aristocracy, is set apart from the great masses of Russian peasants and workers just as clearly as are the privileged castes and classes in other countries from the mass of their peoples.

It could perhaps be objected that the new Russian commisar-ocracy cannot be put up on the same footing as the powerful financial and industrial oligarchies of capitalist states. But the objection will not hold. It is not the size or the extent of the privilege that matters, but its immediate effect on the daily life of the average human being. An American working man who, under moderately decent working conditions, earns enough to feed, clothe and house himself humanely and has enough left over to provide himself with some cultured enjoyments, feels the possession of millions by the Mellons and Morgans less than a man who earns hardly enough to satisfy his most urgent necessities [and who] feels the privileges of a little caste of bureaucrats, even if these are not millionaires. People who can scarcely get enough dry bread to satisfy their hunger, who live in squalid rooms which they are often obliged to share with strangers, and who, on top of this, are compelled to work under an intensified speed-up system which raises their productive capacity to the utmost, can but feel the privileges of an upper class which lacks nothing, much more keenly than their class comrades in capitalist countries. And this situation becomes still more unbearable when a despotic state denies to the lower classes the right to complain of existing conditions, so that any protest is made at the risk of their lives.

But even a far greater degree of economic equality than exists in Russia would still be no guarantee against political and social oppression. It is just this which Marxism and all the other schools of authoritarian Socialism have never understood. Even in prison, in the cloister or in the barracks one finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all the inmates are provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same uniform and the same tasks. The ancient Inca state in Peru and the Jesuit state in Paraguay had brought equal economic provision for every inhabitant to a fixed system, but in spite of this the vilest despotism prevailed there, and the human being was merely the automaton of a higher will, on whose decisions he had not the slightest influence. It was not without reason that Proudhon saw in a “Socialism” without freedom the worst from of slavery. The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man’s sense of personal freedom and is based on that. In other words Socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of Anarchism.

Institutions serve the same purpose in the life of society as bodily organs do in plants or animals: they are the organs of the social body. Organs do not rise arbitrarily, but because of the definite necessities of the physical and social environment. The eye of a deep-sea fish is formed very differently from that of an animal that lives on land, because it has to satisfy quite different demands. Changed conditions of life produce changed organs, but the organ always performs the function it was evolved to perform, or a related one. And it gradually disappears or becomes rudimentary as soon as its function is no longer necessary to the organism. But an organ never takes on a function that does not accord with its proper purpose.

The same is true of social institutions. They, too, do not rise arbitrarily, but are called into being by special social needs to serve definite purposes. In this way this modern state was evolved after monopoly economy, and the class divisions associated with them had begun to make themselves more and more conspicuous in the framework of the old social order. The newly arise possessing classes had need of a political instrument of power to maintain their economic and social privileges over the masses of their own people, and to impose them from without on other groups of human beings. Thus arose the appropriate social conditions for the evolution of the modern state, as the organ of political power of privileged castes and classes for the forcible subjugation and oppression of the non-possessing classes. This task is the political lifework of the state, the essential reason for it existing at all. And to this task it has always remained faithful, must remain faithful, for it cannot escape from its skin.

Its external forms have altered in the course of its historical development, but its functions have always remained the same. They have even been constantly broadened in just the measure in which its supporters have succeeded in making further fields of social activity subservient to their needs. Whether the state be monarchy or republic, whether historically it is anchored to autocracy or in a national constitution, its function remains always the same. And just as the functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals cannot be arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will hear with his eyes and see with his ears, so also one cannot at pleasure transform an organ of social oppression into an instrument for the liberation of the oppressed. The state can only be what it is: the defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies. Who fails to recognise this function of the state does not understand the real nature of the present social order at all, and is incapable of pointing out to humanity new outlooks for its social evolution.

Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch.

The so-called totalitarian state, which now rests like a mountain-weight upon whole peoples and tries to mould every expression of their intellectual and social life to the lifeless pattern set by a political providence, suppresses with ruthless and brutal force every effort at alteration of the existing conditions. The totalitarian state is a dire omen for our time, and shows with frightful clarity whither such a return to the barbarity of past centuries must lead. It is the triumph of the political machine over mind, the rationalising of human thought, feeling and behaviour according to the established rules of the officials. It is consequently the end of all intellectual culture.

Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is therefore not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the society in which it has grown.

This is the reason why all great culture periods in history have been periods of political weakness. And that is quite natural, for political systems are always set upon the mechanising and not upon the organic development of social forces. State and culture are in the depth of their being irreconcilable opposites. Nietzsche recognised this very clearly when he wrote:

“No one can finally spend more than he has. That holds good for individuals; it holds good for peoples. If one spends oneself for power, for high politics, for husbandry, for commerce, parliamentarism, military interests — if one gives away that amount of reason, earnestness, will, self-mastery, which constitutes one’s real self for one thing, he will not have it for the other. Culture and the state — let no one be deceived about this — are antagonists: the ‘Culture State’ is merely a modern idea. The one lives on the other, the one prospers at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture are periods of political decline. Whatever is great in a cultured sense is non political, is even anti-political.”

A powerful state mechanism is the greatest hindrance to any higher cultural development. Where the state has been attacked by internal decay, where the influence of political power on the creative forces of society is reduced to a minimum, there culture thrives best, for political rulership always strives for uniformity and tends to subject every aspect of social life to its guardianship. And in this it finds itself in inescapable contradiction to the creative aspirations of cultural development, which is always on the quest after new forms and fields of social activity, and for which freedom of expression, the manysidedness and the kaleidoscopic changes of things, are just as vitally necessary as rigid forms, dead rules and the forcible suppression of every manifestation of social life which are in contradiction to it.

Every culture, if its natural development is not too much affected by political restrictions, experiences a perpetual renewal of the formative urge, and out of that comes an ever growing diversity of creative activity. Every successful piece of work stirs the desire for greater perfection and deeper inspiration; each new form becomes the herald of new possibilities of development. But the state creates no culture, as is so often thoughtlessly asserted; it only tries to keep things as they are, safely anchored to stereotypes. That has been the reason for all revolutions in history.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.

It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

Chapter 2. The Proletariat and the Beginning of the Modern Labour Movement

The era of machine production and modern Capitalism; The rise of the Proletariat; The first labour unions and their struggle for existence; Luddism; Trade Unionism pure and simple; Political radicalism and labour; The Chartist movement; Socialism and the labour movement.

Modern Socialism was at first only a profounder understanding of the interconnections in social life, an attempt to solve the contradictions implicit in the present social order and to give a new content to man’s relations with his social environment. Its influence was, therefore, for a time confined to a little circle of intellectuals, who for the most part came from the privileged classes. Inspired with a profound and noble sympathy for the intellectual and material needs of great masses they sought a way out of the labyrinth of social antagonisms in order to open to mankind new outlooks for its future development. For them Socialism was a cultural question; therefore, they made their appeal directly and chiefly to the reason and ethical sense of their contemporaries, hoping to find them receptive to the new insights.

But ideas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life and are never the result of purely abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalised by a great idea, which gives them life and intellectual content. It is only when viewed thus that the relation of the labour movement to Socialism can be correctly understood and intelligently valued. Socialism is not the creator of the modern labour movement; rather, it grew out of it. the movement developed as the logical result of a social reconstruction out of which the present capitalist world was born. Its immediate purpose was the struggle for daily bread, the conscious resistance to a trend of things was constantly becoming more ruinous for the workers.

The modern labour movement owes its existence to the great industrial revolution which was going on in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and which has since then overflowed into all five continents. After the system of so-called “manufactures” had at an earlier period opened the door for a certain degree of division of labour — a division which was, however, concerned more with the methods of applying human labour than with actual technical processes — the great inventions of the subsequent period brought about a complete transformation of all the apparatus of work; the machine conquered the individual tool and created totally new forms for productive processes in general. the invention of the mechanical loom revolutionised the whole textile industry, the most important industry in England, and led to a complete new set of methods in the processing and dyeing of wool and cotton.

Through the utilisation of steam power, made available by the epoch-making invention of James Watt, machine production was freed from its dependence on the old motive forces of wind, water and horse power, and the way first properly opened for modern mass production. The use of steam made possible the operation of machines of different function in the same rooms. Thus arose the modern factory, which in a few decades had shoved the small shop to the brink of the abyss. This happened first in the textile industry; the other branches of production followed at short intervals. the utilisation of the power of steam and the invention of cast steel led in a short time to a complete revolutionising of the iron and coal industries and rapidly extended their influence to other lines of work. The development of modern big plants had as a result the fabulous growth of the industrial cities. Birmingham, which in 1801 boasted only 73,000 inhabitants, had in 1844 a population of 200,000. Sheffield in the same period grew from 46,000 to 110,000. Other centres of the new big industries grew in the same ratio.

The factories needed human fodder, and the increasingly impoverished rural population met the demand by streaming into the cities. The legislature helped, when, by the notorious Enclosure Acts, it robbed the small farmers of the common lands and brought them to beggary. The systematic theft of the commons had already begun under Queen Anne (1702–1714), and by 1844 had taken in more than one third of the tillable land of England and Wales. While in 1786 there had still existed 250,000 independent landowners, in the course of only thirty years their number had been reduced to 32,000.

The new machine production increased the so-called national wealth on an undreamed-of scale. But this wealth was in the hands of a small privileged minority and owed its origin to the unrestrained exploitation of the working population, which by the rapid alteration of the economic conditions of living was plunged into the most revolting misery. If one reads the dismal descriptions of the situation of the workers of that period as it is set down in the reports of the English factory inspectors, of which Marx made such effective use in his Capital; or if one picks up a book like Eugene Buret’s De la misère des classes labeurieuses en Angleterre et France, to which Frederick Engels was so deeply indebted in his initial work, The Conditions of the Working Classes in England; or any one of numerous works by contemporary English authors, one gets a picture of that time which staggers the mind.

If Arthur Young, in his well-known account of his travels in France just before the outbreak of the Great Revolution, could declare that a large part of the French rural population stood almost on the level of beasts, having lost every trace of humanity as a result of their horrible poverty, the comparison could apply in large measure also to the intellectual and material status of the great masses of the rising industrial proletariat in the initial period of modern capitalism.

The enormous majority of the workers dwelt in miserable dirty holes without even a glass window, and they had to spend from fourteen to fifteen hours a day in the sweatshops of industry, innocent of either hygienic equipment or provision for the protection of the lives and health of the inmates. And this for a wage that was never enough to satisfy even the most indispensable of needs. If at the end of the week the worker had enough left to enable him to forget the hell he lived in for a few hours by getting drunk on bad liquor, it was the most he could achieve. The inevitable consequence of such a state of affairs was an enormous increase in prostitution, drunkenness and crime. The utter wretchedness of mankind dawns on one when he reads of the spiritual degradation and moral depravity of those masses whom no one pitied.

The pitiful situation of the factory slaves was made still more oppressive by the so-called truck system, under which the worker was compelled to purchase his provisions and other articles of daily use in the stores of the factory-owners, where often overpriced and unusable goods were handed out to him. This went so far that the worker had scarcely anything left of their hard-earned wages, and had to pay for unexpected expenses, such as doctors, medicines, and the like with the goods they had received from the factory owners, which they had, of course, to turn in in such cases at a lower price than they had been charged for them. And contemporary writers tell how mothers, in order to provide burial for a dead child, would have to pay the undertaker and the gravedigger in this way.

And this limitless exploitation of human labour-power was not confined to men and women. The new methods of work had enabled the machine to be served with just a few manual movements, which could be learned with no great difficulty. This led to the destruction of the children of the proletariat, who were put to work at the age of three or four years and had to drag out their youth in the industrial prisons of the entrepreneurs. The story of child labour, on which no restrictions of any kind were imposed at first, is one of the darkest chapters in the history of capitalism. It shows to what lengths of heartlessness a Christian management would go, untroubled by ethical considerations, and unthinkingly accustomed to unrestricted exploitation of the masses. Prolonged labour under the unwholesome conditions of the factories at last raised child mortality to the point where Richard Carlile could, with perfect justice, speak of a “gruesome repetition of the slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem.” Not until then did parliament enact laws which were for a long time evaded by the factory owners, or simply broken.

The state lent its best assistance to the freeing of management from restrictions burdensome on its lust for exploitation. It provided it with cheap labour. For this purpose, for example, there was devised the notorious Poor Law of 1834, which rouse such a storm of indignation, not only from the English working class, but from everyone who still carried a heart in his bosom. The old Poor Law, which had originated in 1601 under Queen Elizabeth, was an outcome of the suppression of the monasteries in England. The monasteries had made a practise of expending a third of their income on the maintenance of the poor. But the noble proprietors to whom the greater part of the monastic holdings had fallen had no thought of continuing to devote the required third to alms, so the law imposed on the parishes the duty of caring for the poor and finding some human means of subsistence for those whose existence had been uprooted. the law saw in poverty a personal misfortune for which the human being was not responsible, and conceded to him the right to call upon society for aid when through no fault of his own he had fallen into need and was no longer able to provide for himself. This natural consideration gave the law a social character.

The new law, however, branded poverty as crime, and laid the responsibility for personal misfortune upon alleged indolence. The new law had been brought into existence under the fateful influence of the Malthusian doctrine, whose misanthropic teachings had been hailed by the possessing classes as a new revelation. Malthus, whose well-known work on the population problem had been conceived as an answer to Godwin’s Political Justice, had announced in blunt words that the poor man forced his way into society as an uninvited guest, and could therefore lay no claim to special rights or to the pity of his fellow men. Such a view was, of course, grist to the mill of the industrious barons and gave the required moral support to their unlimited lust for exploitation.

The new law took the provision for the maintenance of the poor out of the hands of the parish authorities and put it under a central body appointed by the state. Material support by money or provisions was for the most part abolished and replaced by the workhouse, that notorious and hated institution which in the popular speech was called the “poor law Bastille.” He who, smitten by fate, was compelled to seek refuge in the workhouse, surrendered his status as a human being, for those houses were outright prisons, in which the individual was punished and humiliated for his personal misfortune. In the workhouses an iron discipline prevailed, which countered any opposition with strict punishment. Everyone had a definite task to perform; anyone who was not able to do it was deprived of food in punishment. The food was worse and more inadequate than in actual prisons, and the treatment so harsh and barbarous that children were often driven to suicide. Families were separated and their members permitted to see one another only at stated times and under the supervision of the officials. Every effort was directed to making residence in this place of terror so unendurable that only the utmost necessity would drive human beings to seek in it a last refuge. For that was the real purpose of the new poor law. Machine production had driven thousands out of their old means of living — in the textile industries alone more than 80,000 hand weavers had been made beggars by the modern big plants — and the new law saw to it that cheap labour was at the command of management, and with it the possibility of constantly forcing wages lower.

Under these horrible conditions a new social class was born, which had no forerunners in history: the modern industrial proletariat. The small craftsman of former times, who served principally the local demand, enjoyed comparatively satisfactory living conditions, which were only rarely disturbed by any considerable shock from without. He served his apprenticeship, became a journeyman, and often, later, a master himself, as the acquisition of the necessary tools of his trade was not dependent on the possession of any great amount of capital, as it became in the era of the machine. His work was worthy of a human being and still offered that natural variety which incites to creative activity and guarantees inner satisfaction to man.

Even the small home industrialist, who at the beginning of the capitalist era was already disposing of the greater part of his product to the rich lords of trade in the cities, was far from being a proletarian in the present sense. Industry, the textile industry in particular, had its centres in the rural districts, so that the small craftsmen in most instances had at his disposal a tiny bit of land, which made maintenance easier for him. And as the oncoming capitalism was before the domination of the machine, still tied to the handicraft stage of industry, its possibilities of expansion were for the time limited, since the demand for the products of industry was as a rule greater than supply, so that the worker was safeguarded against serious economic crises.

However, all that was changed within a very few years after modern machine production had began to play its part, as it was dependent in advance on mass demand, and hence on the conquest of foreign markets. Each new invention raised the capacity for production in ever increasing measure and made industrial capital the undisputed master of capitalist industry, dominating trade and finance. And since free competition, which was held by theorists to be an iron economic law, put any planned control of industrial production out of the question, at longer or shorter periods there must occur periods when, owing to various causes, the supply of industrial products outstripped the demand. This brought on abrupt cessations of production, so-called crises, which were ruinous to the proletarian population of the cities because they condemned the workers to enforced inactivity and so deprived them of the means of living. It is just this phenomenon of so-called “over production” which is so indicative of the real nature of modern capitalism — this condition in which, while factories and warehouses are crammed with wares, the actual producers are languishing in bitterest misery. It is this which reveals most plainly the horror of a system for which man is nothing and dead possessions everything.

But the developing proletariat was completely exposed to the economic fluctuations of this system, since its members had nothing to dispose of except the labour of their hands. The natural human ties which existed between the master-workman and his journeymen had no meaning for the modern proletarian. He was merely the object of exploitation by a class with which he no longer had any social relationship. For the factory owner he existed merely as a “hand,” not any more as a human being. He was, one might say, the chaff which the great industrial revolution of that time had swept up in heaps in the cities, after he had lost all social standing. Socially uprooted, he had become just a component of a great mass of shipwrecked beings, who had all been smitten by the same fate. The modern proletarian, he was the man of the machine, a machine of flesh and blood who set the machine of steel in motion, to create wealth for others, while the actual producer of this wealth must perish in misery.

And dwelling close-packed with his comrades-in-misfortune in the great centres of industry not only gave a particular character to his material existence, it also gradually created for his thinking and feeling new concepts which he had not originally known. Transplanted into a new world of pounding machines and reeking chimneys, he at first merely felt himself as a wheel or a cog in a mighty mechanism against which he as an individual was helpless. He dared not even hope sooner or later to escape from this condition, since to him, as the typical dispossessed with no means of keeping alive except by the sale of his hands, every way out was barred. And not he alone, his posterity was doomed as well to the same fate. Bereft of every social tie, he was personally a mere nothing in comparison with that enormous power which was using him as the insensate tool of its selfish interests. In order to become something once more and to effect some betterment of his lot, he would have to act along with others of his kind and call a halt to the fate that had smitten him. Such considerations had sooner or later to control him if he did not wish simply to sink into the abyss; they led to the first proletarian alliances, to the modern labour movement as a whole.

It was not the “agitator” who conjured this movement of the dispossessed masses into life, as narrow-minded reactionaries and a rapacious management dared to assert then, and still assert even to-day; it was the conditions themselves which roused to life the movement and with it its spokesmen. The combination of the workers was the only means at their command for saving their lives and forcing more human conditions under which to live. The first proposals of those bands of organised wage-workers, which can be traced back to the first half of the eighteenth century, went no further than the abolition of the most crying evils of the capitalist system and some improvement of the existing conditions of living.

Since 1350 there had existed in England a statute in accordance with which apprenticeship, wages and hours were regulated by the state. The alliances of the ancient craft corporations concerned themselves only with questions relating to the production of commodities and the right of disposal of them. But when, with incipient capitalism, and the spread of “manufactures,” wages began to be pushed down further and further, the first trade union organisations developed among the new class of wage-workers to combat the tendency. But these efforts of the organised workers at once encountered the unanimous resistance of the managers, who besieged the government with petitions to uphold the ancient law and suppress the “unlawful” organisations of the workers. And parliament promptly responded to this demand by passing the so-called Combination Acts of 1799–1800, which prohibited all combinations for the purpose of raising wages or improving the existing conditions of work and imposed severe penalties for violation.

Thus labour was given over unconditionally to exploitation by industrial capital, and was faced with the alternatives of, either submitting to the law and accepting without resistance all the consequences this entailed, or breaking the law which had condemned them to outright slavery. Confronted with such a choice the decision could not have been too difficult for the more courageous section of the workers, as they had scarcely more to lose anyway. They defied the law which mocked at human dignity, and tried by every means to get around its provisions. Since the trade union organisations, which were at first purely local in character and confined to particular industries, had been deprived of the legal right to exist, there sprang up all over the country so-called mutual benefit associations or similar innocuous bodies, having as their sole purpose the diverting of attention from the actual fighting organisations of the proletarians.

For the inner core of these open associations was composed of the secret conspiratory brotherhoods of the militant element among the workers, smaller or larger groups of determined men, bound by an oath to profoundest secrecy and mutual assistance. In the northern industrial sections of England and in Scotland in particular there were a large number of these secret organisations, which carried on the fight against the employers and spurred the workers to resistance. It lay in the nature of the affair that most of these struggles assumed an extremely violent character, as is easy to understand when we consider the miserable situation of the workers resulting from the disastrous development of economic conditions and the pitiless prosecutions following even the most modest attempt at improvement of the proletarian standard of living. Any violation of the letter of the law was visited with horrible punishment. Even after trade union organisations were legally recognised in 1824, the prosecutions did not cease for a long time. Conscienceless judges, openly and cynically protecting the class interests of the employers, inflicted hundreds of years imprisonment on insubordinate workers, and a considerable time elapsed before somewhat endurable conditions prevailed.

In 1812, the secret labour organisations brought about a general strike of the weavers in Glasgow. In the following years the whole of Northern England was continually shaken by strikes and unrest among the workers which finally culminated in the great strike of the spinners and weavers in Lancastershire in 1818, in which the workers, in addition to the usual demand for higher wages, called for reform of factory legislation and humane regulation of the labour of women and children. The same year brought the great strike of the Scottish miners, which was staged by their secret organisations. In the same way the greater part of the Scottish textile industry was periodically crippled by cessation of labour. Often the strikes were accompanied by arson, destruction of property and public disorder, so that the government was frequently under the necessity of throwing the militia into the industrial sections.

As later in every other country, so then in England, the resentment of the workers was directed against the introduction of the machines, the social importance of which they did not yet recognise, and which were the immediate cause of their want. As early as 1769, a special law had been enacted for the protection of the machines; but later, when the application of steam power started a rapid advance in machine production, and, in the textile industry in particular, thousands of handworkers were robbed of the means of subsistence and plunged into deepest misery, the destruction of machines became an everyday occurrence. This was the period of so-called Luddism. In 1811, over two hundred machine looms were destroyed in Nottingham. In Arnold, where the introduction of stocking-weaving machinery had thrown hundreds of the old stocking weavers on the payment, the workers stormed the factories and demolished sixty of the new machines, each of which represented an investment of forty pounds. Similar performances were repeated everywhere.

What was the good of laws, so long as the need of the proletarian population was steadily increasing, and management and government had neither understanding nor sympathy for their situation! King Ludd made his royal entry in industrial circles everywhere, and even the harshest laws were unable to put a stop to his work of destruction. “Stop him who dares; stop him who can!” was the watchword of the secret worker’s societies. The destruction of the machines ceased only when a new understanding of the matter arose among themselves, and they came to see that they could not halt technical progress by this means.

In 1812, parliament enacted a law imposing the death penalty for the destruction of machines. It was on this occasion that Lord Byron delivered his celebrated indictment of the government and ironically demanded that, if the bloody law was to be put into force, the house should provide that the jury should always consist of twelve butchers.

The officials put a price of forty thousand pounds in the heads of the leaders of the underground movement. In January of 1813, eighteen workers convicted of Luddism were hanged at York, and the deportation of organised workers to the penal colonies in Australia increased at a frightful rate. But the movement itself only grew the faster, particularly when the great business crisis set in after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and the discharged soldiers and sailors were added to the armies of the unemployed. This situation was made still tenser by several short harvests and the notorious corn laws of 1815, by which the price of bread was raised artificially.

But although this first phase of the modern labour movement was in great part a violent one, it still was not revolutionary in the proper sense. For this it lacked that proper understanding of the actual causes of economic and social processes which only Socialism could give it. Its violent methods were merely the result of the brutal violence which was inflicted on the workers themselves. But the methods of the young movement were not directed against the capitalist system as such at all, but merely at the abolishment of its most pernicious excrescences and at the establishment of a decent human standard of living for the proletariat. “A fair days’ pay for a fair day’s work” was the slogan of these first unions, and when the employers resisted this modest and certainly fully justified demand of the workers with the utmost brutality, the latter were obliged to resort to whatever methods were available to them under the existing conditions.

The great historical significance of the movement lay at first less in its actual social objectives than in its simple existence. It gave a footing once more to the uprooted masses which the pressure of economic conditions had driven into the great industrial centres. It revived their social sense. The class struggle against the exploiters awakened the solidarity of the workers and gave new meaning to their lives. It breathed new hope into the victims of an economy of unrestricted exploitation and showed them a course which offered them the possibility of safeguarding their lives and defending their outraged human dignity. It strengthened the workers’ self-reliance and gave them confidence in the future once more. It trained the workers in self-discipline and organised resistance, and developed in them the consciousness of their strength and their importance as a social factor in the life of their time. This was the great moral service of that movement which was born of the necessities of the situation, and which only he can undervalue who is blind to social problems and without sympathy for the sufferings of his fellow men.

When, then, in 1824, the laws against the combination of workers were repealed, when the government and that section of the middle class possessed of insight had at last become convinced that even the harshest persecution would never break up the movement, the trade union organisation of the workers spread over the entire country at an undreamed-of rate. The earlier local groups combined into larger unions and thus gave to the movement its real importance. Even the reactionary turns in the government were no longer able to control this development. They merely increased the number of victims among its adherents, but they could not turn back the movement itself.

The new upsurge of political radicalism in England after the long French wars naturally had a strong influence on the English working class also. Men like Burdett, Henry Hunt, Major Cartwright, and above all William Cobbett, whose paper the Political Register, after the price had been reduced to twopence, attained a circulation of sixty thousand, were the intellectual heads of the new reform movement. This was directing its attacks chiefly against the corn laws, the Combination Acts of 1799–1800, and most of all, against the corrupt electoral system under which even a large part of the middle class was excluded from the franchise. Huge mass meetings in every section of the country, and particularly in the northern industrial districts, set the populace in motion. But the reactionary government under Castlereagh opposed any reform, and was determined from the first to put an end to the reform process by force. When in August, 1819, sixty thousand people poured into the Petersfield in Manchester to formulate a mass petition to the government, the assembly was dispersed by the militia, and four hundred persons were wounded or killed.

To the stormy outburst in the country against the instigators of the massacre of “Peterloo” the government replied with the notorious six gag laws, by which the right of assembly and freedom of the press were in effect suspended and the reformers made liable to the harshest prosecution. By the so-called “Cato Street Conspiracy,” in which Arthur Thistlewood and his associates planned the assassination of the members of the British Cabinet, the government was given the wished for opportunity to proceed with draconic severity against the reform movement. On May 1, 1820, Thistlewood and four of his comrades paid for their attempt on the gallows: the habeus corpus act was suspended for two years, and England was delivered to a reactionary regime which respected none of the rights of its citizens.

This put a stop to the movement for the time being. Then the July revolution of 1830 in France led to a revival of the English reform movement, which, this time, took on an entirely different character. The fight for parliamentary reform flared up anew. But after the bourgeoisie saw the greater part of their demands satisfied by the Reform Bill of 1832, a victory which they owned only to the energetic support of the workers, they opposed all further attempts at reform, looking towards universal suffrage, and left the workers to depart empty-handed. Not only that: the new parliament enacted a number of reactionary laws by which the workers’ right to organise was again seriously threatened. The shining examples among these new laws were the notorious poor laws of 1834, to which reference has already been made. The workers felt that they had been sold and betrayed, and this feeling led to a complete break with the middle class.

The new reform movement from now on found vigorous expression in the developing Chartism, which, it is true, was supported by a considerable part of the petty-bourgeoisie, but in which the proletarian element everywhere took and energetic part. Chartism, of course, had inscribed on its banner the celebrated six points of the charter, which aimed at radical parliamentary reform, but it had also appropriated all the social demands of the workers and was trying by every form of direct attack to transform these into realities. Thus J.R. Stevens, one of the most influential leaders of the Chartist movement, declared before a great mass meeting in Manchester that Chartism was not a political question which would be settled by the introduction of universal suffrage, but was instead to be regarded as a “bread and butter question,” since the charter would mean good homes, abundant food, human associations and short hours of labour for the workers. It was for this reason that propaganda for the celebrated Ten-Hour Bill played such an important part in the movement.

With the Chartist movement England had entered upon a revolutionary period, and wide circles of both the bourgeoisie and the working class were convinced that a civil war was close at hand. Huge mass meetings in every section of the country testified to the rapid spread of the movement, and numerous strikes and constant unrest in the cities gave it a threatening aspect. The frightened employers organised numerous armed leagues “for the protection of persons and property” in the industrial centres. This led to the workers also beginning to arm. By a resolution of the Chartist convention, which convened in London in March of 1839, and was later moved to Birmingham, fifteen of their best orators were sent out to every section of the country to make the people aquatinted with the aims of the movement and to collect signatures to the Chartist petition. Their meetings were attended by hundreds of thousands, and showed what a response the movement had aroused among the masses of the people.

Chartism had a large number of intelligent and self-sacrificing spokesmen (such as William Lovell, Feargus O’Connor, Branterre O’Brien, J.R. Stephens, Henry Hetherington, James Watson, Henry Vincent, John Taylor, A.H. Beaumont, Ernest Jones, to mention only a few of the best known.) It commanded, in addition, a fairly widespread press, of which papers like The Poor Man’s Guardian and the Northern Star exerted the greatest influence. Chartism was, as a matter of fact, not a movement with definite aims, but rather a catchbasin for the social discontent of the time, but it did effect a shaking-up, especially of the working class, whom it made receptive to far-reaching social aims. Socialism also forged vigorously ahead during the Chartist period, and the ideas of William Thompson, John Gray, and especially of Robert Owen, began to spread more widely among the English workers.

In France, Belgium and the Rhine country also, where industrial capitalism first established itself on the Continent, it was everywhere accompanied by the same phenomena and led, of necessity, to the initial stages of a labour movement. And this movement manifested itself at first in every country in the same primitive form, which only gradually yielded to a better understanding, until at last its permeation by Socialist ideas endowed it with loftier conceptions and opened for it new social outlooks. The alliance of the labour movement with Socialism was of decisive importance for both. But the political ideas which influenced this, that or the other Socialist school determined the character of the movement in each instance, and its outlook for the future as well.

While certain schools of Socialism remained quite indifferent or unsympathetic to the young labour movement, others of them realised the real importance of this movement as the necessary preliminary to the realisation of Socialism. They understood that it must be their task to take an active part in the everyday struggles of the workers, so as to make clear to the toiling masses the intimate connection between their immediate demands and the Socialist objectives. For these struggles, growing out of the needs of the moment, serve to bring about a correct understanding of the profound importance of the liberation of the proletariat for the complete suppression of wage slavery. Although sprung from the immediate necessities of life, the movement, nevertheless, bore within it the germ of things to come, and these were to set new goals for life. Everything new arises from the realities of vital being. New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract ideas, but in the fight for daily bread in that hard and ceaseless struggle which the needs and worries of the hour demand just to take care of the indispensable requirements of life. In the constant warfare against the already existing, the new shapes itself and comes to fruition. He who does not know how to value the achievements of the hour will never be able to conquer a better future for himself and his fellows.

From the daily battles against the employers and their allies, the workers gradually learn the deeper meaning of this struggle. At first they pursue only the immediate purpose of improving the status of the producers within the existing social order, but gradually they lay bare the root of the evil — monopoly economy and its political and social accompaniments. For the attainment of such an understanding the everyday struggles are better educative material than the finest theoretical discussions. Nothing can so impress the mind and soul of the worker as this enduring battle for daily bread, nothing makes him so receptive to the teachings of Socialism as the incessant struggle for the necessities of life.

Just as in the time of feudal domination the bondmen peasants by their frequent uprisings — which had at first only the purpose of wresting from the feudal lords certain concessions which would mean some betterment of their dreary standard of living — prepared the way for the Great Revolution by which the abolition of feudal privileges was practically brought about; so the innumerable labour was within capitalist society constitute, one might say, the introduction to that great social revolution of the future which shall make Socialism a living reality. Without the incessant revolts of the peasantry — Taine reports that between 1781 and the storming of the Bastille nearly five hundred of these revolts occurred in almost every part of France — the idea of the perniciousness of the whole system of serfdom and feudalism would never have entered the heads of the masses.

That is just how it stands with the economic and social struggles of the modern working class. It would be utterly wrong to estimate these merely on the basis of their material origin or their practical results and to overlook their deeper psychological significance. Only from the everyday conflicts between labour and capital could the doctrines of Socialism, which had arisen in the minds of individual thinkers, take on flesh and blood and aquire that peculiar character which make of them a mass movement, the embodiment of a new cultural ideal for the future.

Chapter 3. The Forerunners of Syndicalism

Robert Owen and the English labour movement; The Grand National Consolidated Trade Union; William Benbow and the idea of the General Strike; The period of reaction; Evolution of the labour organisations in France; The International Workingmen’s Association; The new conception of trade unionism; The idea of the labour councils; Labour councils versus dictatorships; Bakunin on the economic organisation of the workers; The introduction of parliamentary politics by Marx and Engels and the end of the International.

The permeation of the labour movement by Socialist ideas early led to tendencies which had an unmistakable relationship to the revolutionary syndicalism of our day. These tendencies developed first in England, the mother country of capitalist big industry, and for a time strongly influenced the advanced sections of the English working class. After the repeal of the Combination Acts, the effort of the workers was directed chiefly to giving a broader character to their trade union organisations, as practical experience had shown them that purely local organisations could not provide the needed support in their struggles for daily bread. Still these efforts were not at first based on any very profound social concepts. The workers, insofar as they were influenced by the political reform movement of that time, had no goal whatever in view outside the immediate betterment of their economic status. Not until the beginning of the 30’s did the influence of Socialist ideas on the English labour movement become plainly apparent, and its appearance then is to be ascribed chiefly to the stirring propaganda of Robert Owen and his followers.

A few years before the convening of the so-called Reform Parliament the National Union of the Working Classes was founded, its most important component part being the workers in the textile industries. This combination had summed up its demands in the following four points:

To every worker the full value of his labour. Protection of the worker against the employers by every appropriate means, which means will develop automatically out of the current conditions. The reform of parliament and universal suffrage for both men and women. Education of workers in economic problems. One recognises in these demands the strong influence of the political reform movement which just at that time held the entire country under its spell: but at the same time one notices expressions which are borrowed from the doctrines of Robert Owen.

The year 1832 brought the Reform Bill, by which the last political illusions for large circles of the English working class were destroyed. When the bill had become law it was seen that the middle class had, indeed, won a great victory over the aristocratic landowners, but the workers recognised that they had been betrayed again, and that they had merely been used by the bourgeoisie to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. The result was a general disillusionment and the steadily sprawling conviction that the working class could find no help in an alliance with the bourgeoisie. If, before then, the class struggle had been an actuality which rose spontaneously out of the conflicting economic interests of the possessing and non-possessing classes, it had now taken shape as a definite conviction in the minds of the workers and gave a determinate course to their activities. This turn in the thinking of the working class is clearly revealed in numerous utterances in labour press during those years. The workers were beginning to understand that their real strength lay in their character as producers. The more keenly aware they became of the fiasco of their participation in the political reform movement, the more firmly rooted became their newly acquired understanding of their own economic importance in society.

They were strengthened in this conviction in high degree by the propaganda of Robert Owen, who at that time was gaining constantly stronger influence in the ranks of organised labour. Owen recognised that the steady growth of trade union organisations furnished a firm basis for his efforts at a fundamental alteration of the capitalist economic order, and this filled him with high hopes. He showed the workers that the existing conflict between capital and labour could never be settled by ordinary battles over wages, though, in fact, he by no means overlooked the great importance of these to the workers. On the other hand he strove to convince the workers that they could expect nothing whatever from legislative bodies, and must take their affairs into their own hands. These ideas found willing ears among the advanced sectors of the English working class, and first manifested themselves strongly among the building trades. The Builders’ Union, in which were combined a considerable number of local labour unions, was at that time one of the most advanced and most active of labour organisations, and was a thorn in the flesh of the managers. In the year 1831, Owen had presented his plans for the reconstruction of society before a meeting of delegates of this union in Manchester. The plans amounted to a kind of Guild Socialism and called for the establishment of producer’s co-operatives under the control of the trade unions. The proposals were adopted, and shortly after this the Builders’ Union was involved in a long serious of severe conflicts, the unhappy outcome of which seriously threatened the existence of the organisation and put a premature end to all efforts in the direction marked out by Owen.

Owen did not let himself be discouraged by this, but carried on his activities with renewed zeal. In 1833 there convened in London a conference of trade unions and co-operative organisations, at which Owen explained exhaustively his plan for social reconstruction by the workers themselves. From the reports of the delegates one can see plainly what an influence these ideas has already gained and what a creative spirit then animated the advanced circles of the English working class. The Poor Man’s Guardian very justly summed up its report of the conference in these words:

“But far different from the paltry objects of all former combinations is that now aimed at by the congress of delegates. Their reports show that an entire change in society — a change amounting to a complete subversion of the existing order of the world — is contemplated by the working classes. They aspire to be at the top instead of the bottom of society — or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all.”

The immediate result of this conference was the founding of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union of Great Britain and Ireland at the beginning of 1834. These were stirring times. The whole country was shaken by innumerable strikes and lock-outs, and the number of workers organised in trade unions rapidly soared to 800,000. The founding of the G.N.C. arose from the effort to gather the scattered organisations into one great federation, which would give greater effective force to the actions of the workers. But what distinguished this alliance from all the efforts in this direction which had been made previously was that it stood, neither for pure trade unionism, not for collaboration of the workers with the political reformers. The G.N.C. was conceived as a fighting organisation to lend all possible aid to the needed betterment of their condition, but it had at the same time set itself the goal of overthrowing capitalist economy as a whole and replacing it with the co-operative labour of all producers, which should no longer have in view profits for all individuals, but the satisfaction of the needs of all. The G.N.C. was, then, to be the framework within which these aspirations would find expression and be transformed into reality.

The organisers wanted to combine in these federations the workers in all industrial and agricultural pursuits and group them according to their special branches of production. Each industry would constitute a special division which would concern itself with the special conditions of their productive activity and the related administrative functions. Wherever this was possible the workers in the various branches were to proceed to the establishment of co-operative plants, which should sell their produce to consumers at actual cost, including the expense of administration. Universal organisation would serve to bind the separate industries together organically, and to regulate their mutual interests. The exchange of products of the co-operative plants was to be effected through so-called labour bazaars and the use of special exchange-money or labour tickets. By the steady spread of these institutions they hoped to drive capitalist competition from the field and thus to achieve a complete reorganisation of society.

At the same time these co-operative agricultural and industrial undertakings were to serve to make the day-to-day struggles of the workers in the capitalist world easier. This is shown particularly in three of the seven points in which the G.N.C. had framed its demands:

“As land is the source of the first necessaries of life, and as, without the possession of it, the producing classes will ever remain in a greater or less degree subservient to the money capitalists, and subsequent upon the fluctuations of trade and commerce, this committee advises that a great effort should be made by the unions to secure such portions of it on lease as their funds will permit, in order that in all turn-outs the men may be employed in rearing the greater part, if not the whole, of their subsistence under the direction of practical agricultural superintendents, which arrangements would not have the effect of lowering the price of labour in any trade, but on the contrary would rather tend to increase it by drawing off the at present superfluous supply in manufactures.

“The committees would, nevertheless, earnestly recommend in all cases of strikes and turn-outs, where it is practicable, that the men be employed in the making or producing of commodities as would be in demand among their brother unionists; and that to effect this, each lodge should be provided with a workroom or shop in which these commodities may be manufactured on account of such lodge, which shall make proper arrangements for the supply of the necessary materials.

“That in all cases where it is practicable, each district or branch should establish one or more depots of provisions and articles in general domestic use: by which means the working man may be supplied with the bast commodities at little above wholesale prices.”

The G.N.C. was, therefore, conceived by its founders as an alliance of trade unions and co-operatives. By his practical participation in co-operative undertakings the worker was to gain the understanding necessary for the administration of the industry and thus be fitted to bring ever wider circles of social production under their control, until at last the whole economic life should be conducted by the producers themselves and an end put to all exploitation. These ideas found surprisingly clear expression in worker’s meetings and, more particularly, in the labour press. If, for example, one reads The Pioneer, the organ of the G.N.C. managed by James Morrison, one frequently encounters arguments that sound thoroughly modern. This is revealed especially in the discussions with the political reformers, who had inscribed on their banner the democratic reconstruction of the House of Commons. They were told in reply that the workers had no interest whatever in efforts of that sort, since an economic transformation of society in the Socialist sense would render the House of Commons superfluous. Its place would be taken by the labour boards and the industrial federations, which would concern themselves with merely with the problems of production and consumption in the interest of the people. These organisations were destined to take over the functions of the present entrepreneurs; with common ownership of all social wealth there would no longer be any need for political institutions. The wealth of the nation would no longer be determined by the quantity of goods produced, but by the personal advantage that every individual derived from them. The House of Commons would in the future be merely a House of Trades.

The G.N.C. met with an extraordinary response from the workers. In a few months it embraced much over half a million members, and even though its actual aims were clearly understood at first only by the most intellectually active elements among the workers, still the great masses recognised, at least, that an organisation of such dimensions could lend much greater weight to their demands than could local groups. The agitation for the ten-hour day had then taken firm hold on all sections of the English working class, and the G.N.C. set itself with all its energy to enforce this demand. Owen himself, and his close friends Doherty, Fielden and Grant took a prominent part in this movement. However, the militants in the G.N.C. placed little hope in legislation, but tried to convince the workers that the ten-hour day could only be won by the united economic action of the whole body of workers. “The adults in factories must by unions among themselves make a Short Time Bill for themselves.” This was their slogan.

The idea of the general strike met with undivided sympathy from the organised English workers. At the beginning of 1832, William Benbow, one of the most active champions of the new movement, had published a pamphlet entitled Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, which had a tremendous circulation, and in which the idea of the general strike and its importance to the working class was for the first time treated in its full compass. Benbow told the workers that if the enforced sale of their labour power was the cause of their slavery, then their organised refusal to work must be the means of their liberation. Such an instrument of warfare dispensed with any use of physical force and could achieve incomparably greater effects that the best army. All that was needed to bring about the downfall of the system of organised injustice was that the workers should grasp the importance of this powerful weapon and learn to use it with intelligence. Benbow advance a lot of proposals, such as preparation for the general strike in the whole country by the establishment of local committees, so that the eruption might burst with elemental force, and his ideas at that time met with the heartiest response from the workers.

The rapid growth of the G.N.C. and, even more, the spirit that emanated from it, filled the employers with secret fear and blind hatred of the new combination. They felt that the movement must be stifled at the very outset before it had time to be spread farther and build up and consolidate its local groups. The entire bourgeois press denounced the “criminal purposes” of the G.N.C., and unanimously proclaimed that it was leading the country toward a catastrophe. The factory owners in every industry besieged parliament with petitions urging measures against “unlawful combinations,” and in particular against the collaboration of workers in different categories in industrial disputes. Many employers laid before their workers the so-called “document,” and offered them the alternative of withdrawing from their unions or being thrown on the street by a lock-out.

Parliament did not, it is true, re-enact the old Combination Acts, but the government encouraged the judges to deal with the “excesses” of the workers as severely as they could within the framework of the existing laws. And they did so in generous measure, being often able to use as a handle the fact that many unions had retained from the days of their underground activity before the repeal of the Combination Acts the formula of the oath and other ceremonial forms, and that this was contrary to the letter of the law. hundreds of workers were sentenced to horrible punishments for the most trivial offences. Among the terrorist sentences of that time that imposed on six field hands in Dorchester aroused the bitterest indignation. Through the initiative of the G.N.C. the field workers in Tolpuddle, a little village near Dorchester, had formed a union and demanded an increase of wages from seven shillings to eight shillings a week. Shortly afterward six field hands were arrested and sentenced to the frightful penalty of transportation for seven years to the penal colonies in Australia. Their sole crime consisted in belonging to a union.

Thus from the very beginning the G.N.C. was involved in a long series of important wage wars and was subjected besides to constant and bitter prosecutions, so that it hardly found time to begin in earnest its great work of educating the masses. Perhaps, in any case, the time for that was not yet ripe. Many of its members turned to the awakening Chartism, which accepted many of its immediate demands, and along with other matters kept up the propaganda for the general strike, culminating in 1842 in that great movement which tied up all the industries of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, the Potteries, Wales and the coal districts of Scotland. But the original significance of the movement had worn off, and Owen had been right when he accused Chartism of laying too much weight of political reform and showing too little understanding of the great economic problems. The unhappy revolutions of 