A French writer,
sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that "anarchism has a
broad back, like paper it endures anything''---including, he noted
those whose acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could not
have done better.''[1] There have been many styles of thought and
action that have been referred to as "anarchist.'' It would be
hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in
some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract
from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition,
as Daniel Guerin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to
formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of
society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who
presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist
thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison
to Guerins work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is
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 to 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 intellectual culture of the
society in which it has grown.[2]
One might ask what value there is in
studying a "definite trend in the historic development of mankind''
that does not articulate a specific and detailed social theory.
Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless,
primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex
society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every
stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of
authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have
been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or
economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than
alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no
doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even,
necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards
which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the
nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary
that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism,
just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature'' or
"the demands of efficiency'' or "the complexity of modern life''
requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.
Nevertheless, at a particular time there
is every reason to develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a
specific realization of this definite trend in the historic
development of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For
Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man
from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social
enslavement''; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of
state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather "to
reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and
build it up in the spirit of Socialism.''
But only the producers themselves are
fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element
in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs must be the
task of freeing labor from all the fetters which economic
exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the
institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening the
way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on
co-operative labor and a planned administration of things in the
interest of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in the city
and country for this great goal and to bind them together as a
militant force is the objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and
in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]
As a socialist, Rocker would take for
granted "that the serious, final, complete liberation of the workers
is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropriation of
capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labor,
including land, by the whole body of the workers.''[3] As an
anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers'
organizations create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the
future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in
themselves the structure of the future society---and he looks forward
to a social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well
as expropriate the expropriators. "What we put in place of the
government is industrial organization.''
Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that
a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and
statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of
the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of
production; that is, through the taking over of the management of
all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the
separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent
members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on
production and the distribution of the products in the interest of
the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]
Rocker was writing at a moment when such
ideas had been put into practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish
Revolution. Just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the
anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written:
...in facing the problem of social
transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a
medium, but must depend on the organization of producers.
We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of
a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new
order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what
function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization,
where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism
and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State
cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to
finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to
the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for
due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the
Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which
case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.
Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an
economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its
orientation from below and operates in accordance with the
resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison
corps and nothing else.[4]
Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed
his disagreement with this conception as follows:
The anarchists put the thing upside
down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin
by doing away with the political organization of the state....But to
destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by
means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its
newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and
carry out that economic revolution of society without which the
whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the
workers similar to those after the Paris commune.[5]
In contrast, the anarchists---most
eloquently Bakunin---warned of the dangers of the "red bureaucracy,''
which would prove to be "the most vile and terrible lie that our
century has created.''[6] The anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier
asked: "Must even the transitory state to which we have to submit
necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a
free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and
consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?''[7]
I do not pretend to know the answers to
this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form,
a positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that
will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin
Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote: "One cannot in the
nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club
to put forth leaves.''[8] The question of conquest or destruction of
state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him
from Marx.[9] In one form or another, the problem has arisen
repeatedly in the century since, dividing "libertarian'' from
"authoritarian'' socialists.
Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red
bureaucracy, and their fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it
would obviously be a gross error in interpreting the debates of a
century ago to rely on the claims of contemporary social movements as
to their historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard
Bolshevism as "Marxism in practice.'' Rather, the left-wing critique
of Bolshevism, taking account of the historical circumstances
surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to the point.[10]
The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor
movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in
exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They
became prisoners of their environment and used the international
radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon
became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The
"bourgeois'' aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered
in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international
social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical
issues.[11]
If one were to seek a single leading idea
within the anarchist tradition, it should, I believe, be that
expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the Paris Commune, he
identified himself as follows:
I am a fanatic lover of liberty,
considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence,
dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely
formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an
eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the
privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the
individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled
by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois
liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men,
represented by the State which limits the rights of each---an idea
that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to
zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the
name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the
material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each
person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those
determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot
properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not
imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are
immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material,
intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but are the real
and immediate conditions of our freedom.[12]
These ideas grew out of the
Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on
Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's
insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is
the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to
be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of
industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it
is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical
humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals
that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social
order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical
liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life,
capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for
example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State
Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic
of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly,
though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated
beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial
capitalism.
Humboldt's vision of a society in which
social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labor is freely
undertaken suggests the early Marx., with his discussion of the
"alienation of labor when work is external to the worker...not part of
his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but
denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally debased,''
alienated labor that "casts some of the workers back into a barbarous
kind of work and turns others into machines,'' thus depriving man of
his "species character'' of "free conscious activity'' and "productive
life.'' Similarly, Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who
needs his fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the
real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human
relations.''[13] It is true that classical libertarian thought is
opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of
deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and
free association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of
production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of "possessive
individualism''---all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of
the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism
as "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.'' The classical
liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist
economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in that it
"opposes the exploitation of man by man.'' But anarchism also opposes
"the dominion of man over man.'' It insists that "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.''[14] From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as
the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel
Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and
other works.[15] Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every
anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an
anarchist.'' Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto'' of 1865,
the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity,
laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a
socialist.
A consistent anarchist must oppose
private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery
which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the
principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control
of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society
in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the
highest want in life,''[16] an impossibility when the worker is driven
by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of
wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do
away with the misery of wage-labor itself.''[17] A consistent
anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying
specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing
production
mutilate the worker into a fragment of
a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the
machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is
destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the
labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is
incorporated into it as an independent power...[18]
Marx saw this not as an inevitable
concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of
capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be
concerned to "replace the detail-worker of today...reduced to a mere
fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a
variety of labours...to whom the different social functions...are but
so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers.''[19]
The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social
categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor
state'' or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since
capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a
specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather
than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but
not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those
who make man an instrument to serve their ends, overlooking his
individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase.
Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under
capitalism, to create "free associations of free producers'' that
would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the
organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations
would serve as "a practical school of anarchism.''[20] If private
ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often quoted
phrase, merely a form of "theft''---"the exploitation of the weak by
the strong''[21]---control of production by a state bureaucracy, no
matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the
conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the
highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.
In his attack on the right of private or
bureaucratic control over the means of production,, the anarchist
takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about "the third and
last emancipatory phase of history,'' the first having made serfs out
of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the
third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation
that places control over the economy in the hands of free and
voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).[22] The imminent
danger to "civilization'' was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:
As long as the right of property was
the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily
defended---or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of
society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not
bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt
to assail it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as
the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it
alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society,
it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts
of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It
is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political
passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions,
far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that,
little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them
which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry
or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of
society itself?[23]
The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the
silence, and proceeded
to abolish property, the basis of all
civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that
class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the
few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted
to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of
production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and
exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.[24]
The Commune, of course, was drowned in
blood. The nature of the "civilization'' that the workers of Paris
sought to overcome in their attack on "the very foundations of society
itself'' was revealed, once again, when the troops of the Versailles
government reconquered Paris from its population. As Marx wrote,
bitterly but accurately:
The civilization and justice of
bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and
drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this
civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and
lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the
innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary
vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks
complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is
convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar. [Ibid.,
pp. 74, 77]
Despite the violent destruction of the
Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris opens a new era, "that of the
definitive and complete emancipation of the popular masses and their
future true solidarity, across and despite state boundaries...the next
revolution of man, international in solidarity, will be the
resurrection of Paris''---a revolution that the world still awaits.
The consistent anarchist, then, should be
a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only
oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the
appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will
also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some
elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He will, in short,
oppose
the organization of production by the
Government. It means State-socialism, the command of the State
officials over production and the command of managers, scientists,
shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is
liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be
reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself
for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves
being master over production.
These remarks are taken from "Five Theses
on the Class Struggle'' by the left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one
of the outstanding left theorists of the council communist movement.
And in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist currents.
As a further illustration, consider the
following characterization of "revolutionary Socialism'':
The revolutionary Socialist denies that
State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic
despotism. We have seen why the State cannot democratically control
industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled
by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial
administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an
industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial
character. Thus those carrying on the social activities and
industries of society will be directly represented in the local and
central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of
such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and
conversant with the needs of the community. When the central
administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every
phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or
geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative
committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to
the other will be the social revolution. The political State
throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling
classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government of
industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The
former meant the economic and political subjection of the many; the
latter will mean the economic freedom of all---it will be,
therefore, a true democracy.
This programmatic statement appears in
William Paul's The State, its Origins and Functions, written in
early 1917---shortly before Lenin's State and Revolution,
perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was a member of
the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one of the
founders of the British Communist Party.[25] His critique of state
socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its
principle that since state ownership and management will lead to
bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the
industrial organization of society with direct workers' control. Many
similar statements can be cited.
What is far more important is that these
ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action, for
example in Germany and Italy after World War I and in Spain (not only
in the agricultural countryside, but also in industrial Barcelona) in
1936. One might argue that some form of council communism is the
natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It
reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is severely
limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of
autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a
"vanguard'' party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of
authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals developed
further by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be
realized; man will not be free to develop his own potentialities to
their fullest, and the producer will remain "a fragment of a human
being,'' degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from
above.
The phrase "spontaneous revolutionary
action'' can be misleading. The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took
very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' organizations must
create "not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself''
in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of the popular
revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the patient work of
many years of organization and education, one component of a long
tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions of the Madrid
Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936
foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the
somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his
fairly specific account of the social and economic organization to be
instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes "The Spanish revolution
was relatively mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the
popular consciousness.'' And workers' organizations existed with the
structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake the task
of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the turmoil of
early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his introduction to a
collection of documents on collectivization in Spain, the anarchist
Augustin Souchy writes:
For many years, the anarchists and the
syndicalists of Spain considered their supreme task to be the social
transformation of the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and
groups, in their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of
the social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic
fashion.[26]
All of this lies behind the spontaneous
achievements, the constructive work of the Spanish Revolution.
The ideas of libertarian socialism, in
the sense described, have been submerged in the industrial societies
of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of
state socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized
character in the United States, for reasons that are not obscure).[27]
But there has been a rekindling of interest in the past few years. The
theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet
of a radical French workers' group (Informations Correspondance
Ouvrière). The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary socialism
are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the National
Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969.
The workers' control movement has become a significant force in
England in the past few years. It has organized several conferences
and has produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among
its active adherents representatives of some of the most important
trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union,
for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program of
nationalization of basic industries under "workers' control at all
levels.''[28] On the Continent, there are similar developments. May
1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism
and related ideas in France and Germany, as it did in England.
Given the highly conservative cast of our
highly ideological society, it is not too surprising that the United
States has been relatively untouched by these developments. But that
too may change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it
possible to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the
present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can
overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been
accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize
industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control
in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant
intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of
contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for libertarian
socialism develops, speculation should proceed to action.
In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin
predicted that one element in the social revolution will be "that
intelligent and truly noble part of youth which, though belonging by
birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and
ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people.'' Perhaps in the
rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a
fulfillment of this prophecy.
Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has
described as a "process of rehabilitation'' of anarchism. He argues,
convincingly I believe, that "the constructive ideas of anarchism
retain their vitality, that they may, when re-examined and sifted,
assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a new
departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism.''[29] >From the
"broad back'' of anarchism he has selected for more intensive scrutiny
those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian
socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the
major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been
animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not
only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of
popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as
intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the
constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the
theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand
the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the
history of anarchism.
Guérin describes the anarchism of the
nineteenth century as essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth
century, for the anarchists, has been a time of "revolutionary
practice.''[30] Anarchism reflects that judgment. His
interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the future.
Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions
characteristically seek to replace "a feudal or centralized authority
ruling by force'' with some form of communal system which "implies the
destruction and disappearance of the old form of State.'' Such a
system will be either socialist or an "extreme form of
democracy...[which is] the preliminary condition for Socialism
inasmuch as Socialism can only be realized in a world enjoying the
highest possible measure of individual freedom.'' This ideal, he
notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.[31] This natural
struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing tendency
towards centralization in economic and political life.
A century ago Marx wrote that the workers
of Paris "felt there was but one alternative---the Commune, or the
empire---under whatever name it might reappear.''
The empire had ruined them economically
by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial
swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially
accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant
expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them
politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had
insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their
children to the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their
national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a
war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the
disappearance of the empire.[32]
The miserable Second Empire "was the only
form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already
lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of
ruling the nation.''
It is not very difficult to rephrase
these remarks so that they become appropriate to the imperial systems
of 1970. The problem of "freeing man >from the curse of economic
exploitation and political and social enslavement'' remains the
problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the
revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an
inspiration and guide.
**********************************NOTES************************************
This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel
Guérin's Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. In a slightly
different version, it appeared in the New York Review of Books, May
21, 1970.
[1] Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, The Anarchists, pp.
145--6.
[2] Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 31.
[3] Cited by Rocker, ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the
next sentence are from Michael Bakunin, "The Program of the
Alliance,'' in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy, p.
255.
[4] Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, p. 86. In the
last chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun,
he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved
along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in
Spain, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. 1, and
references cited there; the important study by Broué and Témime
has since been translated into English. Several other important
studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz,
L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionaire (Paris: Editions
Bélibaste, 1971); César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnols et
le pouvoir, 1868--1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston
Leval, Espagne libertaire, 1936--1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la
Révolution espagnole (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also
Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, enlarged 1972
edition.
[5] Cited by Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, in
his discussion of Marxism and anarchism.
[6] Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel
Guérin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, p. 119.
[7] Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, Anarchists. The source is
"L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers,'' Les Temps nouveaux,
1895. The full text appears in Daniel Guérin, ed., Ni Dieu, ni
Maître, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.
[8] Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 127.
[9] "No state, however democratic,'' Bakunin wrote, "not even the
reddest republic---can ever give the people what they really want,
i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own
affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence
from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State
concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses
from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals,
who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than
do the people themselves....'' "But the people will feel no better
if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the
people's stick' '' (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff,
Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 338)---"the people's stick'' being the
democratic Republic.
Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.
For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this
dispute, see Daniel Guérin's comments in Ni Dieu, ni Maître;
these also appear, slightly extended, in his Pour un marxisme
libertaire. See also note 24.
[10] On Lenin's "intellectual deviation'' to the left during 1917,
see Robert Vincent Daniels, "The State and Revolution: a Case Study
in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,'' American
Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).
[11] Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 295.
[12] Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de
l'état,'' reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Bakunin's
final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of
freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the
rationalist and romantic traditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics
and Language and Mind.
[13] Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx,
p. 142, referring to comments in The Holy Family. Avineri states
that within the socialist movement only the Israeli kibbutzim
"have perceived that the modes and forms of present social
organization will determine the structure of future society.'' This,
however, was a characteristic position of anarchosyndicalism, as
noted earlier.
[14] Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.
[15] See Guérin's works cited earlier.
[16] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.
[17] Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie,
cited by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this connection, see
also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control,'' in Priscilla Long, ed.,
The New Left; and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.
[18] Karl Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly
emphasizes that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a "frustrated
producer'' than a "dissatisfied consumer'' (The Marxian
Revolutionary Idea). This more radical critique of capitalist
relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the libertarian
thought of the Enlightenment.
[19] Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political Thought
of Marx, p. 83.
[20] Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme.''
[21] "Qu'est-ce que la propriété?'' The phrase "property is
theft'' displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft
presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri,
Social and Political Thought of Marx.
[22] Cited in Buber's Paths in Utopia, p. 19.
[23] Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European
Socialism, p. 60.
[24] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 24. Avineri observes
that this and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer
pointedly to intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his
considered assessment was more critical than in this address.
[25] For some background, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary
Movement in Britain.
[26] Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution
espagnole, p. 8.
[27] For discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael
Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War. See also discussion and
references cited in my At War With Asia, chap. 1, pp. 23--6.
[28] See Hugh Scanlon, The Way Forward for Workers' Control.
Scanlon is the president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade
unions.
The institute was established as a result of the sixth
Conference on Workers' Control, March 1968, and serves as a center
for disseminating information and encouraging research.
[29] Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître, introduction.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88.
[32] Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62--3.
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