Modern Science and Anarchism/Chapter 10
X.
ANARCHISM.
It is seen from the foregoing that a variety of considerations, historical, ethnological, and economical, have brought the Anarchists to conceive a society, very different from what is considered as its ideal by the authoritarian political parties. The Anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society, and by a sum of social customs and habits—not petrified by law, routine, or superstition, but continually developing and continually readjusted, in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals.
No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallisation and immobility, but a continual evolution—such as we see in Nature. Free play for the individual, for the full development of his individual gifts—for his individualisation. In other words, no actions are imposed upon the individual by a fear of punishment; none is required from him by society, but those which receive his free acceptance. In a society of equals this would be quite sufficient for preventing those unsociable actions that might be harmful to other individuals and to society itself, and for favouring the steady moral growth of that society.
This is the conception developed and advocated by the Anarchists.
Of course, up till now no society has existed which would have realised these principles in full, although the striving towards a partial realisation of such principles has always been at work in mankind. We may say, therefore, that Anarchism is a certain ideal of society, and that this ideal is different from the ideal of society which has hitherto been advocated by most philosophers, scientists, and leaders of political parties, who pretended to rule mankind and to govern men.
But it would not be fair to describe such a conception as a Utopia, because the word "Utopia" in our current language conveys the idea of something that cannot be realised.
Taken in its usual current sense, therefore, the word "Utopia" ought to be limited to those conceptions only which are based on merely theoretical reasonings as to what is desirable from the writer's point of view, but not on what is already developing in human agglomerations. Such were, for instance, the Utopias of the Catholic Empire of the Popes, the Napoleonic Empire, the Messianism of Mickiewicz, and so on. But it cannot be applied to a conception of society which is based, as Anarchism is, on an analysis of tendencies of an evolution that is already going on in society, and on inductions therefrom as to the future—those tendencies which have been, as we saw, for thousands of years the mainspring for the growth of sociable habits and customs, known in science under the name of Customary Law, and which affirm themselves more and more definitely in modern society.
With regard to what is very often said as to the necessary slowness of every new step that is made by evolution, let us remember that not further than at the end of the eighteenth century—at the very time when the United States had started in life—a society of a somewhat larger size without a monarch was considered a foolish Utopia. But the North and the South American Republics, the Swiss Republic and France have proved since, as we know, that the "Utopians" were not the Republicans but the admirers of monarchy. It was the latter, who, guided by their desires only, did not take into account the tendencies of societies developing far from the yoke of monarchist traditions; the latter, and not the Republicans, who attributed too much importance and stability to the monarchist institutions—without noticing that they were not an outcome of human nature, but an outcome of temporary historical conditions.
When we look into the origin of the Anarchist conception of society, we see that it has had a double origin: the criticism, on the one side, of the hierarchical organisations and the authoritarian conceptions of society; and on the other side, the analysis of the tendencies that are seen in the progressive movements of mankind, both in the past, and still more so at the present time.
From the remotest, Stone-age antiquity, men must have realised the evils that resulted from letting some of them acquire personal authority—even if they were the most intelligent, the bravest, or the wisest. Consequently, they developed, in the primitive clan, the village community, the mediaeval guild (neighbours' guilds, arts and crafts' guilds, traders', hunters', and so on}, and finally in the free mediaeval city, such institutions as enabled them to resist the encroachments upon their life and fortunes both of those strangers who conquered them, and those clansmen of their own who endeavoured to establish their personal authority. The same popular tendency was self-evident in the religious movements of the masses in Europe during the earlier portions of the Reform movement and its Hussite and Anabaptist forerunners. At a much later period, namely, in 1793, the same current of thought and of action found its expression in the strikingly independent, freely federated activity of the "Sections" of Paris and all great cities and many small "Communes" during the French Revolution.[1] And later still, the Labour combinations which developed in England and France, notwithstanding Draconic laws, as soon as the factory system began to grow up, were an outcome of the same popular resistance to the growing power of the few—the capitalists in this case.
These were the main popular Anarchist currents which we know of in history, and it is self-evident that these movements could not but find their expression in literature. So they did, beginning with Lao-tse in China, and some of the earliest Greek philosophers (Aristippus and the Cynics; Zeno and some of the Stoics). However, being born in the masses, and not in any centres of learning, these popular movements, both when they were revolutionary and when they were deeply constructive, found little sympathy among the learned men—far less than the authoritarian hierarchical tendencies.
The Greek Stoic, Zeno, already advocated a free community, without any government, which he opposed to the State Utopia of Plato. He already brought into evidence the instinct of sociability, which Nature had developed in opposition to the egotism of the self-preservation instinct. He foresaw a time when men would unite across the frontiers and constitute the Cosmos, and would have no need of laws, law-courts, or temples—and no need either of money for their exchanges of mutual services. His very wording seems to have been strikingly similar to that now in use amongst Anarchists.[2]
The Bishop of Alba, Marco Girolamo Vida, developed, in 1553, similar ideas against the State, its laws, and its "supreme injustice"; as also did the early precursors of Rationalism Armenia (in the ninth century), the Hussites (especially Chojecki, in the fifteenth century), and the early Anabaptists.
Rabelais in the first half of the sixteenth century, Fénélon at the end of it, and especially the Encyclopaedist Diderot at the end of the eighteenth century, developed the same ideas, which found, as has just been mentioned, some practical expression during the French Revolution.
But it was Godwin, in his "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice," who stated in 1793 in a quite definite form the political and economic principles of Anarchism. He did not use the word "Anarchy" itself, but he very forcibly laid down its principles, boldly attacking the laws, proving the uselessness of the State, and maintaining that only with the abolition of Courts true Justice—the only real foundation of all society—would become possible. As regards property, he openly advocated Communism.[3]
Proudhon was the first to use the word "An-archy" (No-Government) and to submit to a powerful criticism the fruitless efforts of men to give themselves such a Government as would prevent the rich ones from dominating the poor, and at the same time always remain under the control of the governed ones. The repeated attempts of France, since 1793, at giving herself such a Constitution, and the failure of the Revolution of 1848, gave him rich material for his criticism.
Being an enemy of all forms of State Socialism, of which the Communists of those years (the "forties" and "fifties" of the nineteenth century) represented a mere sub-division. Proudhon fiercely attacked all such attempts; and taking Robert Owen's system of labour cheques representing, hours of labour, he developed a conception of Mutualism, in which any sort or political Government would be useless.
The values of all the commodities being measured by the amount of labour necessary to produce them, all the exchanges between the producers could be carried on by means of a national bank, which would accept payment in labour cheques—a Clearing House establishing the daily balance of exchanges between the thousands of branches of this bank.
The services exchanged by different men would thus be equivalent; and as the bank would be able to lend the labour cheques' money without interest, and every association would be able to borrow it on payment of only 1 per cent, or less to cover the administration costs, capital would lose its pernicious power; it could be used no more as an instrument of exploitation.
Proudhon gave to the system of Mutualism a very full development in connection with his anti-Government and anti-State ideas; but it must be said that the Mutualist portion of his programme had been developed in England already by William Thompson (he was a Mutualist prior to his becoming a Communist) and the English followers of Thompson—John Gray (1825, 1831) and J. F. Bray (1839).
In the United States, the same direction was represented by Josiah Warren, who, after having taken part in Robert Owen's colony, "New Harmony," turned against Communism, and in 1827 founded, in Cincinnatti, a "store" in which goods were exchanged on the principle of time-value and labour cheques. Such institutions remained in existence up till 1865 under the names of "Equity Stores," "Equity Village," and "House of Equity."
The same ideas of labour-value and exchange at labour-cost were advocated in Germany, in 1843 and 1845, by Moses Hess and Karl Grün; and in Switzerland by Wilhelm Marr, who opposed the authoritarian Communist teachings of Weitling.
On the other side, in opposition to the strongly authoritarian Communism of Weitling, which had found a great number of adherents among working men in Germany, there appeared in 1845 the work of a German Hegelian, Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt was his real name), "The Ego and His Own," which was lately rediscovered, so to say, by J. H. Mackay, and very much spoken of in Anarchist circles as a sort of manifesto of the Individualist Anarchists.[4]
Stirner's work is a revolt against both the State and the new tyranny which would have been imposed upon man if authoritarian Communism were introduced. Reasoning on Hegelian metaphysical lines, Stirner preaches therefore the rehabilitation of the "I" and the supremacy of the individual; and he comes in this way to advocate complete "a-moralism" (no morality) and an "association of egoists."
It is easy to see, however—as has been indicated more than once by Anarchist writers, and lately by the French professor, V. Basch, in an interesting work, "Anarchist Individualism: Max Stirner" (1904, in French)—that this sort of Individualism, aiming as it does at the "full development," not of all members of society, but of those only who would be considered as the most gifted ones, without caring for the right of full development for all—is merely a disguised return towards the now-existing education-monopoly of the few. It simply means a "right to their full development" for the privileged minorities. But, as such monopolies cannot be maintained otherwise than under the protection of a monopolist legislation and an organised coercion by the State, the claims of these Individualists necessarily end in a return to the State idea and to that same coercion which they so fiercely attack themselves. Their position is thus the same as that of Spencer, and of all the so-called "Manchester school" of economists, who also begin by a severe criticism of the State and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the property monopolies, of which the State is the necessary stronghold.
Such was the growth of Anarchist ideas, from the French Revolution and Godwin to Proudhon. The next step was made within the great "International Working Men's Association," which so much inspired the working classes with hope, and the middle classes with terror, in the years 1868–1870—just before the Franco-German War.
That this Association was not founded by Marx, or any other personality, as the hero-worshippers would like us to believe, is self-evident. It was the outcome of the meeting, at London, in 1862, of a delegation of French working men, who had come to visit the Second International Exhibition, with representatives of British Trade Unions and Radicals, who received that delegation.
Already in 1830 Robert Owen had made an attempt at organising, beside his "Great National Trades' Union," an "International Union of All Trades"; but the idea had soon to be abandoned, in consequence of the wild prosecutions that the British Government directed against the National Trades' Union. However, the idea was not lost. It smouldered in England; it found followers in France; and after the defeat of the Revolution of 1848, it was taken by some French refugees across the Atlantic, and propagated in the United States, in a paper, L'Internationale.
Now, the French working men who came to London in 1862 being mostly Proudhonian "Mutualists," and the British Trade Unionists being mainly followers of Robert Owen, British "Owenism" thus joined hands with French "Mutualism," with the result of giving birth to a powerful international Labour organisation. In Marx and several others this union of the two leading Socialist currents of the time found the intellectual support of the secret political organisation of the "Materialist Communists" (Communistes Matérialistes), an organisation which represented what was still living of the secret societies, once so powerful in the "thirties" and "forties" under Blanqui and Barbès, these societies themselves having originated in the conspiracy of the authoritarian Communists, organised by Babeuf in 1794–1795.
We saw in a previous chapter that the years 1856–1862 were years of a wonderful revival in science and philosophy. They were also years of a general political revival of Radicalism in Europe and America. And this was stirring everywhere the working men, who began to see that they themselves must prepare the proletarian revolution. The International Exhibition of 1862 was described as a great Fete of the World's Industry, which would mark a new departure in the struggle of Labour for its emancipation; and now the creation of an International Working Men's Association, which boldly announced its rupture with the old political parties, and the firm resolution of the working men to take the work of their liberation into their own hands, made a very deep impression.
The Association began to spread rapidly in the Latin countries. Its fighting power soon became menacing, while at the same time its Federations and its yearly Congresses offered to the working men the opportunity of discussing and bringing into shape the ideas of a Social Revolution.
The near approach of such a Revolution was generally expected at that time, but no definite ideas as to its possible form and its immediate steps were forthcoming. On the contrary, several conflicting currents of Socialist thought met together in the International.
The main idea of the Association was a direct struggle of Labour against Capital in the economic field—i,e., the emancipation of Labour, not by middle-class legislation, but by the working men themselves.
But how the liberation of Labour from the capitalist yoke would be accomplished, what form the new organisation of production and exchange would take—in this respect the opinions of the Socialists were divided quite as much in 1864–1868 as they were twenty years before, when the representatives of the different Socialist schools met together in the Republican Constituent Assembly sitting at Paris in 1848.
Like their French predecessors, whose aspirations were so admirably summed up in 1848 by Considérant, in his "Socialism Before the Old World," the Socialists of the International Working Men's Association did not rally under the banner of one single doctrine. They oscillated between several different solutions.
There was, first, the direct legacy of the Great French Revolution—the Babeuf conspiracy of 1795—that is, the secret societies of the French "Materialist Communists" and the German Communists, followers of Weitling. Both lived upon the traditions of the stern Jacobinism of 1793. In 1848 they still dreamed of some day seizing the political power in the State—perhaps with the preliminary aid of a dictator—and of instituting, on the model of the terrorism of the Jacobinist societies of 1793 (but this time in favour of the workers), a "dictatorship of the proletariat." This dictatorship would introduce Communism by means of stern legislation.
Property-owning would be rendered so unbearable by means of a thousand laws, restrictions, taxation, and so on, that the property-owners would be happy to surrender their properties to the State. Then, "armies of labourers" would be sent out to cultivate the fields, and industrial production for the State would be organised in the same semi-military fashion.[5] This school continued to cherish the same ideals at the time of the foundation of the International Association, and had later on a great following in France among the Blanquists.
Diametrically opposed to this Jacobinist Communism was the Co-operative idea of Robert Owen, which refused to resort to the coercive action of the State, and relied chiefly, both for realising the Revolution and maintaining the new Socialistic life, on the power of the organised and federated Labour Unions. The British Owenites repudiated Communism; but, in common with the French followers of Fourier, they attached a great importance to the freely constituted and federated communities or groups, which would own in common their land, their factories, and their stores; while remuneration for work, both within each industrial village, and in the exchange between the different groups, would be made by means of labour-cheques, representing the hours of labour that were spent by each person in the communal fields, workshops, or factories.
The same idea of remuneration by labour-cheques was advocated, as we have already seen, by Proudhon and his Mutualist followers. They also repudiated the coercive intervention of the State, both during the transitory period and the subsequent Socialist life. They considered that what now constitutes the functions of the State in economic matters could be accomplished by the branches of the Bank of the People and the Clearing Houses; while education, sanitary arrangements, and so on ought to be in the hands of entirely independent Communes.
Again, the same idea of labour-cheques taking the place of money in all exchanges, but with a State ownership of all the land, the mines, the railways, and the factories, was advocated by two remarkable writers, Pecqueur and Vidal, who described their system as Collectivism. Pecqueur, who was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848, wrote a whole treatise on this matter, in which he developed his system in full—even in the shape of laws which the Assembly had only to vote to accomplish the Social Revolution. The names of Vidal and Pecqueur were quite forgotten by that time, but their ideas were widely spread, and they were soon revived among the Germans under the names of "Marxism," "scientific Socialism," or "Collectivism."
By the side of these different schools, the ideas of the Saint-Simonist school had a considerable hold upon many minds in the International Working Men's Association, as they also had had among the revolutionists of 1848.
A great number of brilliant writers, politicians, and industrialists, among whom suffice it to name the philosopher Auguste Comte, the historian Augustin Thierry, and the economist Sismondi, had developed under the inspiration of the teachings of Saint-Simon. And their work had deeply influenced most social reformers.
Human progress—they said—had hitherto consisted in transforming Slavery into Serfdom, and Serfdom into the Wage System. But the time had now come to abolish the Wage System in its turn. And with it, individual property had also to go. Private ownership and Authority were not immutable institutions. Property had already undergone several modifications in the course of history, and new changes, having become necessary, would have to be made.
The abolition of private property—they wrote—could be done gradually, by a series of measures (of which the Great Revolution had already begun to take the initiative), enabling the State to appropriate, in the shape of inheritance duties, a steadily growing proportion of the estates transmitted by inheritance. Individual inheritance being thus more and more reduced, so as to be eventually abolished, and the rich people themselves seeing their own advantage in abandoning privileges which belong to a dying stage of civilisation, "the State would finally become the sole owner of all the lands and industrial concerns, as also the supreme regulator of all labour, the head and the absolute regulator of the three main functions of social life—Art, Science, and Industry."[6]
Every one, being a worker in one of these branches, would thus be a functionary of the State. As to the Government, it would be composed of a hierarchy of the "best men"—the best men of science, the best artists, the best industrialists.
The distribution of the commodities produced would be made, under this system, in virtue of the principle: To each one according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its works.[7]
The Saint-Simonist school, and still more so the Positivist philosophy to which it gave birth, produced a number of quite remarkable historical works, in which the origins of authority, of property, and of the State divided into classes were discussed in a really scientific way, and which up till now have retained their value. The Saint-Simonists severely criticised at the same time the so-called classical political economy of Adam Smith and Ricardo (which was known later on as the Manchester school of "non-intervention of the State"). But while combatting the principle of commercial and industrial individualism and competition, advocated by these economists, the Saint-Simonists fell into the error which they themselves had combatted at the outset, when they severely criticised the military State and the State based upon a division of society into classes ("the Class-State"). They ended by recognising an all-powerful State. They based the structure of society upon inequality and authority, and they based order upon a hierarchy of administrators, proceeding from above to below.
From the Communists of 1848 the Saint-Simonists thus differed by allotting to the individual a purely individual share in the riches produced by the whole community. Notwithstanding the valuable work which some of them had accomplished in political economy, they did not yet reach the conception of all production being a social fact, and consequently of it being materially impossible to determine with justice the share which must be attributed to each separate individual out of the total mass of commodities produced.
Upon this point the Communists widely differed from the Saint-Simonists. But there was one point upon which both the authoritarian Communists and the followers of Saint-Simon agreed. They both ignored the individual and his claims. All that the Communists did, was to concede to the individual the right of electing his administrators and rulers, which the earlier Saint-Simonists, before 1848, refused to admit. But under Communism, as under Saint-Simonism and under Collectivism, the individual was a mere functionary of the State. With Cabet, Jacobinist Communism, the suppression of individuality, reached its fullest expression.
And finally we must mention the followers of Louis Blanc, very numerous at that time both in France and Germany (where they were represented by a strong body of Lassalleans). They considered that the transfer of industrial property from Capital to Labour could be effected if a Government, born of a revolution and inspired by Socialist ideas, would aid the workers in organising a wide system of productive Labour Associations, support them by loans, and join all of them in one large system of national production. Equal remuneration of all workers in these associations might be accepted as a transitory form—their final aim being to come later on to a division of produce according to the needs of each producer. It was thus, as Considérant remarked, Communistic Saint-Simonism under State management.
Supported by a large system of State credit, granted at a very low rate of interest, freely competing against capitalist production, and upheld by the commands of the Stare, such Labour Associations would soon oust the Capitalist from the industrial field, take his place everywhere, and gradually spread also on to the land, in agriculture. This economic, Socialist aim must be kept in view by the worker—not the merely political ideals of the bourgeois politicans.
With various modifications in the details, and with more or less vagueness or precision, these ideas, which had been spread by the Revolution of 1848, were widely diffused in the International Association. They also, as we see, recognised as their basis a strong, powerful Government, holding in its hands the economic life of the nation; and they recognised in full the present hierarchic and centralised organisation of the State.
Happily enough, there circulated also in the International the ideas of the Fourierists, which counter-balanced to some extent the ideas of these Jacobinist admirers of the State.
- ↑ See "The Great French Revolution" (London: Heinemann, 1909).
- ↑ See article, "Anarchism," in the forthcoming (eleventh) edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica."
- ↑ It is all in the first edition of 1793, made in two quarto volumes. In the second edition, published in two octavo volumes in 1796, after the prosecution of his Republican friends, he withdrew his views on Communism, and mitigated his views on government.
- ↑ A French translation of it was published at Paris in 1900, and an English translation, under the above title, was published by B. R. Tucker at New York in 1907.
- ↑ It is interesting to note that similar ideas about State agriculture, carried on by "armies of labourers," had been expressed by Napoleon III., while he was yet a pretender to the Presidency of the Republic, in a pamphlet, "The Extinction of the Proletariate."
- ↑ V. Considérant, "Le Socialisme devant le Vieux Monde," 1848, p. 36. I use here the very words of Considérant, to show how Saint-Simonism was understood by the Socialists in 1848, and how many of its ideas are still retained in the teachings of the Social Democrats.
- ↑ I translate verbally the Saint-Simonist formula.