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#title Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive: Illuminating Methods Used by Girls in the Sex Trade and Street Economy to Fight Back and Heal
#subtitle A Participatory Action Research Study of Resilience and Resistance
#author Young Women’s Empowerment Project
#LISTtitle Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive
#date June 2011
#source Retrieved from [[https://ywepchicago.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/girls-do-what-they-have-to-do-to-survive-a-study-of-resilience-and-resistance.pdf][ywepchicago.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/girls-do-what-they-have-to-do-to-survive-a-study-of-resilience-and-resistance.pdf]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-03-31T16:51:24
#topics research, sex trade, street economy, sex work, youth, ageism, youth liberation, sexual violence, abuse, self harm, drugs, harm reduction, self care, trans, transfem, feminism, Black feminism, transfeminism, transformative justice, queer, transphobia, transmisogyny, autonomy, people of color, child sexual abuse, police violence
** Research Team
Jazeera Iman: Research Development Coordinator
<br>
Naima Paz: Research Intern and cover design
<br>
Dominique McKinney: Social Justice Coordinator
<br>
Daphnie W: Administrative Support and Graphs
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Outreach Workers (2007-2009): Stephany, Precious, Skitlz, Danielle, Amber, Isa, Veronica Bianca, Daphne, Naima, Dominique, Jazeera and Jacque
<br>
Girls in Charge—our weekly leadership group of nearly 60 different girls participated in this project between 2007-2009.
The research report was written by Jazeera Iman, Catlin Fullwood, Naima Paz, Daphne W and Shira Hassan
<br>
Art work by Young Women’s Empowerment Project Membership
** Acknowledgements
Young Women’s Empowerment Project would like to thank Cricket Island Foundation for teaching us how to do Participatory Evaluation Research and for introducing us to Catlin Fullwood. Simply put, without Catlin we would not be who we are as researchers.
YWEP would also like to thank the Crossroads Fund for helping us fund this project.
There are many allies who helped push us in our learning process and supported us along the way: Andrea Ritchie, Cara Page, Adrienne Marie Brown, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Isa Villaflor, Claudine O’Leary, Amber Kutka, Laura Janine Mintz, Ilana Weaver, Xandra Ibarra, Kim Sabo, Johonna R. McCants and Teresa Dulce.
Young Women’s Empowerment Project is especially grateful to our funders: Third Wave Foundation, Cricket Island Foundation, Chicago Foundation for Women, Chicago Community Trust, Polk Brothers Foundation, AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Crossroads Fund, Comer Foundation, The Funding Exchange, Astrea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Peace Development Fund and Michael Reese Health Trust.
<strong>2009 YWEP Leadership</strong>
Dominique McKinney, Social Justice Coordinator
<br>
Jazeera Iman, Research Development Coordinator
<br>
Cindy Ibarra, Communications Coordinator
<br>
Shira Hassan, Co Director
<br>
Naima Paz, Research Intern
<br>
Stephany C, Outreach Intern
<br>
Precious M, Girls in Charge Intern
<br>
Daphne W, Communications Intern
<strong>YWEP Board</strong>
Laura Janine Mintz, Natalie D. Smith, Tanuja Jagernauth, Lara S. Brooks, Teresa Dulce, Xandra Ibarra and Adrienne Marie Brown
** Dedication
This research is dedicated to all girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women who do what they have to do to survive every day. The world may call us victims—but we know differently—we know we are our own heroines. This work is personal to us—it is about our lives.
<quote>
“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, then let us walk together.”
—Lila Watson
</quote>
** Youth Activist Summary
This research is for US. It’s for YOU and for all girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women involved in the sex trade and street economy.
This research study was created by girls, collected by girls, and analyzed by girls.
We did this because this is OUR LIVES. Who knows us better than us?
We did this to prove that we care—that we are capable of resisting violence in a multitude of ways. We take care of ourselves and heal in whatever way feels best for us—whether society approves of it or not.
This research study honors all of the ways we fight back (resistance) and our healing (resilience) methods.
We proved that we do face violence but we are not purely victims. We are survivors. We can take care of ourselves and we know what we need.
This research is a response to all of those researchers, doctors, government officials, social workers, therapists, journalists, foster care workers and every other adult who said we were too messed up or that we needed to be saved from ourselves.
The next time someone tells you that you don’t know what’s best for you, look towards our tool kit for inspiration. We wrote the tool kit with the intent of giving you ideas about how girls have survived this life—not to tell you what to do.
We did this. We did the research. And now we are sharing it with you so that you know that girls do what they have to do to survive.
*** About Young Women’s Empowerment Project
The Young Women’s Empowerment Project was founded by a collective of radical feminists and harm reductionists. In 1998, as a group of young women and girls with lived experience in the sex trade and street economy and our allies, we began doing activism and talking through what we believed about the root causes of the sex trade. We wanted to create an activist organization (not a social service) that would give girls a chance to learn the leadership skills necessary to change the conversation and play an active role in the dialogue about our lives.
Our goal is to build a movement amongst girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women who trade sex for money, are trafficked or pimped and who are actively or formerly involved in the street economy. We are activists, artists, mothers, teachers, and visionaries—our vision for social justice is a world where we can be all of these things, all the time.
Over the last three years, Young Women’s Empowerment Project has reached over 2,000 girls involved in the sex trade through our peer to peer outreach and an additional 105 through our syringe exchange. We have also done presentations, workshops, and offered assistance to nearly 3,000 adults working with youth involved in the sex trade. We have been focusing on building our internal leadership so that young people who begin as members can move up our leadership ladder and become a part of our executive team as Co Directors.
[[y-g-ywep-girls-do-what-they-have-to-do-to-survive-1.png][YWEP (Young Women’s Empowerment Project)
<br><br>
Calling All Street Youth
<br><br>
Reproductive Justice Speak Out for All Street Youth in Chicago!
<br><br>
Come speak your mind about sexual violence, dealing with doctors & sex, hormones, birth control & more!
<br><br>
When: Friday April 18<sup>th</sup> 2008
<br><br>
Time: 6pm to 8pm
<br><br>
Who: For & By All Street Youth
<br><br>
*This means if you identify as being youth under 25, are homeless, drug-user, queer, couch surfing, disabled, LGBTQAA(TSI), feminist, activist, artist, punk rocker, raver, clubber, rioter, exotic dancer, militant fighter, trader, writer, slam poet, dreamer, racer, tagger, juggalo, juggalette, vagabond, guitarist, lyricist, rapper, YOC—Youth of Color, GOC—Girls of Color, GWC—Girls with Children, freestyler, button-maker, anarchists, or just plain surviving thru the day-2-day hustle n flow of our struggle… This Can B Ur day 2 SpeakOut!!!
<br><br>
Where: UIC Latino Cultural Center
<br>
Lecture Center B2
<br>
Enter Through 750 S. Halsted
<br><br>
***we will have signs posted up with arrows pointing you in the right direction cause once you enter 750 S. Halsted, the Student Center East building, you have to go through this building to get to the Latino Cultural Center (LCC) which is basically one lecture center down to your right
<br><br>
It is our duty to fight for our people
<br>
It is our duty to win.
<br>
We must love each other & protect each other
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We have nothing to lose but our chains.
<br>
—Assata Shakur
<br><br>
Co sponsored by: The Broadway Youth Center, Street Level Youth Media, Young Women’s Action Team, Chicago Abortion Fund, Chicago Women’s Health Center, [?] & UnSilenced Woman Press, Radio [?], Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Latinas Organizing for Reproductive Equality, Empowered Fe Fes, MrSA[?], Feminists United, UIC Gender and Women’s Studies, Chicago Girls Coalition, Women and Girls Collective Action Network & Third Wave Foundation.]]
*** What are the Sex Trade and Street Economies?
To us, the sex trade is an umbrella term that describes any way that we can exchange our sex or sexuality for money, gifts, drugs, or survival needs.
Sometimes, this can be by choice but we can also be forced into the sex trade by someone else. There are many ways that girls can be involved in the sex trade and we believe that our experiences, though all uniquely different, are united by the way we experience the intersections of misogyny, racism, classism, transphobia and homophobia.
YWEP defines the sex trade as any form of being sexual (or the idea of being sexual) in exchange for money, gifts, safety, drugs, hormones or survival needs like housing, food, clothes, or immigration and documentation—whether we get to keep the money/goods/service or someone else profits from these acts. The girls that we know have a wide range of experiences in the sex trade. Some of us have been forced to participate, some of us have chosen to participate in the sex trade, some of us have had both kinds of experiences. Others feel that the question of choice is irrelevant or more complicated than choice/no choice.
Regardless of what people think about choice, what we know is that real girls are really trading sex for money. Right now. At YWEP we seek to build community among girls who have been forced and/or trafficked, who trade sex for survival, who choose to participate in the sex trade on their own terms, and every reality in between. We never use the word “prostitute” because we are concerned with the entire range of the sex trade (not just the illegal part) and because this word is a label that dehumanizes us and make us into “those other girls.” Likewise, we don’t use the term “sex worker” because it doesn’t include the experience of girls who have been forced into the sex trade and who don’t relate to the term “work” to describe their experiences.
The street economy is any way that girls make cash money without paying taxes or having to show identification. Sometimes this means the sex trade. But other times it means braiding hair, babysitting, selling CDs/DVDs, drugs or other skills like sewing and laundry.
We say street economies because there is more than one kind of economy playing out on our street at any given time. These economies are complicated and a part of the lives of the membership and outreach contacts of Young Women’s Empowerment Project.
Social justice for girls and young women in the sex trade means having the power to make all of the decisions about our own bodies and lives without policing, punishment, or violence. Our community is often represented as a “problem” that needs to be solved or we are portrayed as victims that need to be saved by someone else. We recognize that girls have knowledge and expertise in matters relating to our own lives that no one else will have. <strong>We are not the problem—we are the solution.</strong>
Young Women’s Empowerment Project is like a political organization in that we try really hard to create unity and power among girls and help them to navigate hostile systems and life crises. We provide training to providers about what girls need and how girls should be treated when trying to access systems and services. When leaving isn’t an option or what a girl might want, YWEP is here to encourage and facilitate safety planning, harm reduction ideas, and offer support and resources. Unlike programs that focus on exiting the sex trade—which usually exclude girls who aren’t ready, able, or wanting to exit—YWEP meets girls where they are and helps them make the next steps they choose. Empowerment means that girls are in charge of their decisions and have power over what they want to do—even if that means something different than what adults think is safe or appropriate. YWEP believes that the more often girls are in charge of the choices in their lives—whether that choice is about food, sleep, relationships, housing or the sex trade—the more power they take in their lives as a whole. We celebrate every decision girls make and honor all of our choices.
*** Who are we?
Young Women’s Empowerment Project is made up of girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women ages 12-23 who have current or past experience with any part of the sex trade and street economies. We are 99% girls and women of color. Most of us are African American, Latina and Mixed Race. About 70% of our constituency also identifies as Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual. Transgender girls represent approximately 20% of our constituency. We are led by our membership through weekly leadership meetings where girls make important decisions about our programming. We have nearly 60 members across Chicago. Of these 60 members, about 15-20 of us regularly participate in weekly meetings at YWEP. Our leadership is made up of our membership and is responsible for the daily running of our organization.
Many of us are undocumented, have been incarcerated/detained, and/or are current or former drug users. At any given point, roughly 85% of our membership and leadership are homeless or precariously housed. We estimate that nearly 25% of us have completed high school or gotten our GEDs. Another 5% of us have taken college classes or gone to trade schools. During 2009, the number of our girls accessing our syringe exchange tripled. We now have 85 girls per month receiving clean works (including hormone needles) from our outreach workers.
*** Our Guiding Principles
<strong>Self Care:</strong> Self care means taking care of your body, mind and spirit whenever and however you can. It means checking in with yourself in a regular way to see how you are doing with your job, your relationships, your health and your overall well being. We know what is best for our bodies and how to take care of ourselves. We practice self care at YWEP by providing food, as well as clothes at the clothing exchange, practicing aromatherapy, and encouraging ourselves as well as others to take “self care time” (time away from YWEP work to take care of our needs).
<strong>Empowerment Model:</strong> We believe that girls are experts in their own lives. We value youth leadership and work to create it as much as possible in our space. We don’t tell girls what to do, we don’t give advice, and adults don’t take control of youth-led projects. We create as many opportunities as possible for girls to be in leadership positions and adults DO NOT do all of the important work and DO NOT make all of the important decisions. Being empowered means that girls are active in the decisions they make about their lives. We believe that a girl is capable of being a leader as soon as she comes into our project. A girl can come to YWEP and immediately take leadership, no matter where she is at in her life. One of the immediate ways a girl can take leadership is in GIC (Girls in Charge), our weekly leadership group where girls learn political education, work on projects to benefit YWEP, and make decisions that directly impact how YWEP is run.
<strong>Harm Reduction:</strong> Harm reduction means any positive change. We do not force anyone to stop participating in any risky behavior. Instead, we work with them to come up with options that work for them to stay safer when engaging in that risky behavior. We apply this to the sex trade, but also to any other high risk behavior as well. Harm reduction means practical options, no judgment, and we respect choices that girls make.
<strong>Popular Education:</strong> is a way of talking about ideas that helps to get people thinking critically about things so that they can act together as a community to address inequalities and injustices. At YWEP we strive to expand our knowledge about each other and about the stories of social justice movements. For example, our stories about our experiences in foster care might sound like someone else’s story too. When we share our stories, we can find common ground to begin to work together to resist and fight back.
<strong>Social Justice:</strong> At YWEP we bring social justice into our work by acknowledging and supporting resistance. We encourage girls to look closely at the way things like racism, classism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia play out and affect girls involved in the sex trade and street economy. We understand that the sex trade is not about one person, but about a system of things that all work together to oppress women, people of color, lesbian and transgender people, and others too.
*** Our Work
Young Women’s Empowerment Project is a member based social justice project for girls and young women ages 12-23 who have current or past experience in the sex trade and street economy. Our mission is to offer safe, respectful, free-of-judgment spaces for girls impacted by the sex trade and street economy to recognize their hopes, dreams, and desires.
The goal of our work is to build a movement of girls with life history in the sex trade and street economy. To do this, we consciously engage in political education and leadership development as holistic themes for our work.
Young women at YWEP run our programs. In addition to running and supporting our office three days per week, YWEP also conducts three weekly meetings for outreach, Girls in Charge, and social justice teams. YWEP staff and members also provide popular education workshops all over the country.
<strong>Girls in Charge:</strong> Girls in Charge is the leadership group that makes all of the major decisions at YWEP. Girls receive stipends to make leadership decisions about our project, learn political education, and create materials valuable to the project and other young women impacted by the sex trade (such as guides, fliers, trainings, etc.). GIC created zines about drug harm reduction and sex trade harm reduction, as well as a training that teaches social workers about how to positively interact with youth in the sex trade. GIC also completed a political education training course, where girls learned about systems of power and oppression and the ways that this affects young women of color in the sex trade.
<strong>Outreach work:</strong> Girls at our project go through a 48-hour training over 8 weeks to learn how to reach out to and support other girls in the sex trade. Girls learn about sex trade safety and harm reduction, female reproductive health, reproductive justice, drugs and drug harm reduction, legal rights. We also learn more outreach skills, such as active listening, supportiveness, and practicing good boundaries. Upon completion of this training, girls reach out to girls and young women in the sex trade. Outreach workers attend a weekly outreach worker group. Outreach Group is a place for girls to discuss any issues that came up during the outreach session, as well as trade information and support each other. Our outreach workers reach 500 girls per year and an additional 85 or more through our syringe exchange each month.
<strong>Popular education trainings:</strong> Popular education is more than making sure that everyone participates in workshops. Activists for decades have been using 12 popular education practice to work together as educators and learners to open up problems and ask critical questions like: Who benefits, why is it this way and what can be done to change the systems that affect us? Our workshops on the sex trade with girls offer practical information on myths and realities of the sex trade. We are engaged in a process with young people across the city to question why the sex trade exists, why girls are involved, and what can be done about it.
Our skill building workshops offer training to girls inside our project to improve their knowledge and ability to take on leadership. We also offer workshops to organizations and collaboratives that want to improve their ability to work with girls and young women impacted by the sex trade.
<strong>Social Justice and Transformative Justice:</strong> At YWEP we value the rebellion of girls impacted by the system. We offer education and support to girls so that they can begin to unpack what social justice means to women and girls involved in the sex trade. To some girls, this might mean working for rights, to other girls this might mean working to abolish the sex trade, and to other girls it might mean both.
One way that we incorporate social justice into our daily work is by working to build community. We do this by helping girls find connections with each other, by looking closely at how we might play out sexism (like by calling girls “ho’s”) and by creating a respectful, free of judgment space where girls can get information about how to change the world.
We believe that social justice and empowerment go hand and hand. Empowered girls who are active in their own lives are making social change just by being in charge of their choices and destiny.
Transformative justice is a model that acknowledges that state systems and social services can and often do create harm in the lives of girls. Transformative Justice supports community-based efforts for social justice beyond the government or other state-sponsored institutions. This means that we do not work on making new laws or policies because we don’t believe that the law can bring fast and positive change to ALL girls in our community. Instead of following models for social change that talk about us without including us, we seek to create a movement for social justice that recognizes and honors our talents as leaders and innovators with us at the forefront.
At YWEP we work together to come up with our own alternatives to shelters, housing, violence and support that do not continue to mire us in the system but instead make change that we can sustain and sustains us.
** Our Research
YWEP began our first experience with Participatory Evaluation Research in 2006. With a grant through the Cricket Island Foundation’s Capacity Building Initiative, we met Catlin Fullwood, an activist, researcher, and trainer. Catlin taught us a research method in which all members of the community could be involved in the development, data collection, and analysis of the research.
Our 2006 research project had three learning questions. We wanted to find out (1) what effect harm reduction was having on our outreach contacts. We also wanted to find out (2) who our allies were and weren’t as a harm reduction-based, youth-led social justice project. Lastly, (3) we wanted to learn more about how girls respond to other girls in positions of leadership. For this research project, we did a literature review, several focus groups with YWEP leadership and membership, and we collected over 300 surveys from our outreach contacts across Chicago and Illinois.
*** 2006 Research Findings
<strong>Finding 1:</strong> As a result of our study, we realized that sometimes girls don’t believe that people like us can be leaders. This is when we began to look closer at how internalized racism, sexism and colonialism play a role in our organization and in our lives. This led us to work more on developing our solidarity with each other. Through retreats, team building exercises, sister healing circles and developing an internal analysis, we worked—and continue to work—to achieve our goal of building solidarity and leadership as a whole with our youth membership.
<strong>Finding 2:</strong> One key component we learned through our research was the effect of harm reduction in the lives of our girls. We learned that girls who have been with us for a year or more, whether that be through outreach, or through more direct involvement in the project or YWEP activities, incorporated harm reduction in all aspects of their lives. Not only did these young women apply the principles of harm reduction to the sex trade and staying safe, they applied it to many other aspects of their lives, from safer drug use to eating habits.
<strong>Finding 3:</strong> We figured out that our allies were people who recognized our abilities to be leaders no matter what our present or past involvement in the sex trade may be. We also realized that our allies were people or organizations who believed in our ability to achieve empowerment and who were willing to work outside of mainstream systems to support us in our goals. We discovered that, for YWEP, being an ally means recognizing that girls work hard every day to live the life they have.
During the 2006 research study, YWEP saw girls and young women in the sex trade and street economy making positive changes in their lives, fighting back against multiple harms, and finding innovative ways to bounce back and/or heal. While we saw violence happening, we also saw that girls were surviving every day and getting stronger and smarter all the time. The 2006 findings prompted us to take a closer look at how girls were resisting and bouncing back from violence. We became determined to find studies done on/about girls involved in the sex trade that purely focused on our survival. We discovered a gap in the research. Every study we found showed us as powerless.
*** Why we started this research
We do not deny the fact that girls in the sex trade face violence. We decided that we would do this research to show that we are not just objects that violence happens to—but that we are active participants in fighting back and bouncing back. We wanted to move away from the one-dimensional view of girls in the sex trade as only victims to look at all aspects of the situation: violence, our response to the violence, how we fight back and heal on a daily basis. We want to build our community by figuring out how we can and do fight back collectively and the role of resilience in keeping girls strong enough to resist.
We want to show that girls in the sex trade face harm <strong><em>from both individuals and institutions</em></strong>. Nearly all the research we could find about girls in the sex trade only looks at individual violence. Many people seem to think that more institutions or social service systems is the solution. YWEP agrees that institutions can be helpful at times, but we also wanted to show the reality that we face: every day girls are denied access to systems due to participation in the sex trade, being drug users, being lesbian, gay or transgender or being undocumented. We know institutions and social services can and do cause harm in our lives. We present this research to show that the systems that claim to help girls are also causing harm. We want to show that girls in the sex trade are <strong><em>fighting back and healing on their own—within their communities</em></strong> and without relying upon systems.
We also wanted to show how girls in the sex trade fight back against the institutional violence they experience so we could share what working. With the data we collected, we discovered that girls face as much institutional violence (like from police or DCFS) as they do individual violence (like from parents, pimps, or boyfriends).
We wanted to show how girls bounce back and heal from individual and institutional violence. We wanted this information so that we can collectively build a social justice campaign to respond to broad systemic harm.
From this, YWEP’s first youth developed, led, and analyzed research project was born.
*** The Learning Questions
A learning question is a question that helps us learn and explore more about a specific topic. A learning question can’t be answered purely by data collectionists also about the process and analysis of the entire research project. Learning questions are never just quantitative. They always must be qualitative as well.
YWEP met for three months in weekly research meetings to discuss what topics we wanted to include in our research. We thought about what impacted us and our constituency. We thought about what the goals of this research would be and how we wanted it to impact us. We knew that research was a powerful tool and we wanted to use it bring us together and build community. This is why we decided to use the research to shape our social justice campaign.
We looked at all the existing research we could find about girls in the sex trade and didn’t feel our truth represented. We spoke to YWEP outreach workers and Girls in Charge Members and noticed themes about how we were fighting back and healing. We brainstormed all of these topics and themes and we color coded all the patterns until we had a visual representation.
To develop the learning questions further we brainstormed all possible questions we could ask. Some questions we asked were “How do girls work the system,” “how do girls heal from daily violence” and “how can girls support each other.” We narrowed the questions down slowly.
From this collective process the following learning questions were decided:
1. What kinds of institutional and individual violence are girls in the sex trade experiencing?
2. How are they resistant to this violence?
3. How are they resilient to this violence?
4. How can we unite and fight back?
We agreed on these questions because we wanted to bring out how girls in the sex trade take care of themselves without relying on systems—without someone else deciding what is best for us.
We also chose these questions as a way of uniting our community. This research is kind of a “toolkit” that shows how girls rely on each other as opposed to systems. This is about more than just studies or findings. This is about girls uniting. Our data shows girls ideas about how to be resistant and resilient—how to continue taking care of themselves and community and how to add new methods to their self care.
*** This story is important to tell
Resilience and resistance-focused research shows girls that we can and do fight back. It shows girls in the sex trade from an empowering perspective. We want to show that we are capable of helping ourselves without relying on the systems that sometimes harm and oppress us.
We want to honor all of the traditional and non-traditional ways girls are taking care of themselves and healing from violence. We are survivors. We find our own unique and individual ways to fight back, whether violent or non-violent. We resist. We also heal. We find ways to take care of ourselves in order to continue our struggle, whether those ways are traditional or non-traditional.
This research is unique because it does not just focus on individual violence in our community. It is also unique because it is the only study that we know of that was developed and conducted by girls ages 12-23 in the sex trade and street economy. We are able to tell our story from the inside.
*** Preparing for the Research
Getting ourselves ready to do this project was a big deal. We started meeting to talk about the research ideas about 6 months before we started collecting the data. We tried at least three versions of all the tools we used (the tools are attached at the back of the report) because we would try them out on each other first. If someone was uncomfortable or didn’t like any part of the tool we would start again until we were all on the same page.
Early in the data collection process we realized that the research was going to be super deep and sometimes a bit sad and overwhelming. The girls who were in charge of collecting and coding the data had to read lots of different stories that were both painful and uplifting. We decided to always check in with each other as we were reviewing the data, to do sister circles and healing circles, to take breaks while we were working with it, to use sage and aromatherapy to help us stay clear and honor every story we read. We observed that we were using resilience methods even while we were doing the research.
*** Why qualitative research?
Qualitative data describes quality, the properties of something, or how something is. If we are talking about fruit, some qualitative information would be: the apple is green. It has a small rotten spot near the stem.
Quantitative data often describes how many or how much. Quantitative information about fruit would be: there are two apples and one orange on the table.
Our data is more qualitative because for us the “how and the why” is more important than the “how many.” We are looking to show something that can not be measured in numbers. Our research is complex, and could not be reduced to counting how many times a girl was resistant. We need to know how the girl was resistant. How else could we share ideas and empowerment? It is impossible to talk about how we heal with numbers. It is impossible to share how we avoid violence with quantitative data. Our research is more than just numbers or data. It is our personal stories about ourselves, our lives.
*** Data collection methods
We had four data collection methods:
1. Because our outreach workers reach 500 girls per year, we added four questions to the outreach worker booklet because we wanted to reach girls that did not come to YWEP’s offices. Since this was an ethnographic observation tool, meaning that the outreach worker was writing about what her contact was experiencing, we felt that this was a good space for questions about violence. In our experience, we found that girls had difficulty talking or writing about violence they experienced. This was an opportunity to explore the kinds of violence girls were experiencing without having them actually have to write about it themselves.
1. Our popular education workshops involve hundreds of girls every year. Girls talk about violence young women in the sex trade experience in our popular education workshops. This was another way to reach a different set of girls. We looked back at the 2007 workshop notes from participants who wrote down anything having to do with violence, resilience, or resistance. We also added a question to the 2008 workshops about violence. We did not ask anyone to talk about their own individual experiences with violence, we asked about violence girls in the sex trade experience collectively. We also asked how girls in the sex trade collectively fight back against violence. Girls wrote the answers to these questions down anonymously on large poster paper. Later, we collected their answers and coded them.
1. We created “Girls Fight Back” journals, a purely resilience and resistance focused fill-in-the-blank style zine for girls to write about ways that they fought back and healed. We wanted this data collection tool to focus on resistance and resilience because the girls would be filling it out themselves and talking about individual violence experiences can be triggering. We also wanted to make sure that we were getting information about resilience and resistance not pertaining to violence. The “Girls Fight Back” journal could be used as a healing and empowering tool. We heard many times from girls who filled it out that they never thought about what they did before they used the zine. Many girls filled the zines out multiple times because they found the process of writing in them healing. Outreach workers, Girls In Charge members and outreach contacts all filed out this journal.
1. The last data collection method we used was focus groups. We did two focus groups in Outreach Group and two in Girls in Charge. The focus groups allowed us to explore more deeply what was talked about in the Girls Fight Back Journal and Outreach Booklets. It also allowed girls to talk about ideas that were not put on paper. The latter of the two focus groups looked at how we could collectively unite when practicing resilience or resistance. It also looked at themes that came up in the data we had already collected. This served to give us ideas for possible social justice campaigns. Focus groups were not open to the public, but were especially for our outreach workers and members only.
*** Impact of the research on the peer researchers and participants
Working so closely with other people’s truths and experiences has really proven how important the community that YWEP is creating helps with the survival and healing of our constituency. Working so closely together during the research development, data collection, and analysis gave peer researchers an opportunity to shape the research into something they really cared about. It shows that we can and will have a voice when the subject matter is our lives. It was empowering to do research on a topic close to us, as well as to have the results be accurate to our truths.
Participants got to take part in a research study in an empowering and positive way. They got to talk about how they fought back. This research was our collective work. Many issues that girls were facing were being talked about in YWEP, but breaking down common issues through research was extremely important so we could get a clearer view of the issues. We could see that some issues affected all of us, and some issues affected just some of us. The process of doing the research ourselves was also important because we knew that we were going to get the story right. In the past, researchers have come in to YWEP and asked us for information about our lives. We would share the same stories over and over and we would still be shocked when we read their reports. No matter what we said to the researchers, their reports always said the same thing: we were victims who needed police and social workers to save us.
Doing research ourselves helped us to say “No” to outside researchers. From this process we came to consensus that we will not work with any other researchers unless they share our values as allies.
Doing this research was empowering because it shows that girls in the sex trade do care about our lives. It promotes a sense of community. We care about fighting back. We care about helping each other and we have each other’s back.
** The Research Design and Implementation
YWEP decided to have one main person be the contact person for all questions and thoughts about the research. Jazeera Iman made sure that Research Groups were meeting regularly and stayed in contact with our professional research consultant, Catlin Fullwood. She was also responsible for making sure that all of our data methods were being carried out as we stated in our plan and that the data was kept confidential. Jazeera also co-led us through our development, implementation and analysis of the research. Our research intern, Naima Paz, assisted with focus group co-facilitation, did our typing, culling and coding and also attended and supported all our research meetings. Daphnie, our communications intern, helped with typing and created graphs. She also helped coordinate the research releases.
We began implementing the data collection tools in January 2008 and stopped in February 2009.
Before we even began collecting new data we looked at the data we already had from our 2007 popular education workshops. Each year, YWEP does workshops with girls in group homes, drop-ins, shelters and foster care settings. We also do workshops at conferences and meetings. YWEP has careful records of the questions asked and discussed during our workshops because the participants always write their answers down on big flipchart paper. We were able to go through our notes and identify what girls were saying about violence and resilience and resistance without being prompted. This was very helpful because we were able to see the thoughts girls were having about these subjects. We used this information as the starting off point for our focus groups.
We asked questions about the violence girls are facing. We also asked ways that girls in the sex trade are resistant or resilient. The flipchart paper asking about violence always had many answers. However, the question asking about resistance always had very few answers. We realized this was because girls were doing things to take care of themselves that they didn’t identify as resilience or resistance. This is why we started using the words “fight back” and “heal” because those words made more sense to our constituency. We had many conversations outside of focus groups about the different things girls do to take care of themselves. The researchers kept an open mind so that we could track all the ways girls were fighting back and healing.
We started off with focus groups to get people thinking about things. Then we added the questions to the outreach booklet. Next we started collecting the “Girls Fight Back” Journal. We ended our data collection with a final round of focus groups to make sure that everyone had a final chance to add something.
Because the research process was so long, girls came in and out of the process. A core group of researchers came every Thursday at 3pm for the research meeting. We regularly had 3-4 participants in the meeting and sometimes we had as many as 10 girls coming to our research meetings.
*** Phase 1—Focus Groups
The first focus group was conducted by Jazeera Iman. We developed the focus group questions during our research meeting together. We then offered stipends to our weekly membership group to participate in the discussion. All of the focus group members were between the ages of 14-21. Of the ten girls, six were African American while the remaining four were Latina. This focus group was 45 minutes long. We talked about ways girls were experiencing institutional and individual violence in our communities.
The second focus group was during Outreach Group. This focus group was also facilitated by Jazeera Iman. A total of eight outreach workers attended this group. Of the eight outreach workers five were African American and two were Latina.
This group asked the outreach workers to observe the violence their outreach contacts were experiencing and also asked questions about how girls were bouncing back and fighting back against that violence.
*** Outreach Questions Added
Once we completed the two focus groups, we added four questions to our outreach booklet (our outreach booklet is attached at the back of this book). We created the questions during our weekly research meeting and with the outreach workers too. The four questions we asked were:
1. Is your contact experiencing one-on-one violence “Individual Violence” like being beat up, raped, girl on girl violence or fighting, gang violence, or hate crimes? For example your contact got beat up by a white person and she is a girl of color, or a girl got beat up by guys (or girls) for being in the sex trade. These are just a few examples, but there are many more. Please describe in detail:
2. Is your contact experiencing violence from an authority or establishment? This doesn’t necessarily mean physical violence. It can be emotional (mental) sexual, verbal, financial, or anything else. This can mean racial or gender discrimination by a school or clinic, or social service facility, lack of resources or care from DCFS, clinics, rehab or any other establishment. These are a few examples; we need you to find more.
3. How has your contact been resilient to violence? (Bounced back or healed from the violence like through meditation, therapy, journaling, talking to other girls, medicinal drug use, self harm, or any other way imaginable a girl can help herself feel better.)
4. How has she been resistant to violence? (Fighting back—this doesn’t necessarily mean physically fighting back. It can mean any way of resisting violence, like always making sure to walk in a group when coming home late at night, leaving her pimp, trading sex for money with people you know are safe, or meeting with other girls to learn legal rights when dealing with the police.) Please be as detailed as possible, and make sure to specify if it is resistance or resilience.
Each week, our outreach workers answered these questions about their outreach contacts and gave the answers to our researchers. We collected this information between March 2008 and February 2009. All of the information was kept in a folder and every week during our research meeting we would look at the new typed data and talk about how we could code the answers we were getting.
*** Girls Fight Back Journal
After we had been collecting data from our outreach workers for six months, we began distributing and collecting the Girls Fight Back Journal. This journal is a fill in the blank style zine that we made together during our research meeting. Before we implemented the Journal, we tested it in one of our weekly membership meetings. We had to make several versions of the Girls Fight Back Journal before we felt satisfied that the tool was respectful, empowering and asked the right questions.
We handed out the Girls Fight Back Journal to all of our membership, outreach workers and any young woman who came to our space. Our outreach workers filled them out themselves and also had their outreach contacts fill them out. We also had a few Journals come back to us by way of service providers in the Chicago Area who had received copies of the Journal from outreach workers. We collected 107 Girls Fight Back Journals between August 2008 and February 2009. We typed the responses up and reviewed the data each week to see if we could find themes in what we were seeing. We talked about our observations each week in our research meeting too.
*** Phase II—Focus Groups
The goals of both of these focus groups were to ask questions about what we were seeing in the written data from the Girls Fight Back Journal and the outreach booklet. We also wanted to ask bigger picture questions about how we could unite girls to fight back together against the violence we are experiencing.
Our first focus group had 14 girls and took place during our weekly membership meeting. Of the fourteen girls who attended, nine were African American, two were Latina and three were Mixed Race.
The group was an hour and a half. First we talked about the resilience and resistance methods girls were using to respond to individual violence. Next we talked about the resilience and resistance methods girls were using to confront institutional violence.
In the final phase of the focus group, girls discussed how the current resilience and resistance methods they were using could be applied to our social justice campaign. We also looked closely at the topics girls were identifying as potential targets of our campaign based on the information we were getting about institutional violence.
** Who Participated
We had three groups of respondents
1. Girls who were a part of YWEP who come to our offices regularly
1. Girls who are outreach contacts who may or may not come to the space
1. Girls who got a “Girls Fight Back” Journal from a YWEP member or a service provider who was giving them out. We chose to reach these three groups because we wanted to hear from as many girls as possible.
These graphs show exactly who responded to our questions from our outreach booklet and from our Girls Fight Back Journal. YWEP chose to allow girls to respond multiple times in both our outreach and Girls Fight Back Journal. Therefore we don’t know the exact number of girls we spoke with (although we know we spoke with over 120 girls).
This demographic information is based on the number of total responses and is a combined number for both our Outreach and the Girls Fight Back Journal.
[[y-g-ywep-girls-do-what-they-have-to-do-to-survive-2.png]]
Other demographic data we collected showed that 18 responses were from transgender girls, while 44 responses were from pregnant girls with another 52 responses coming from girls who said they were mothers. Finally, 54 responses were from homeless girls.
All girls we spoke to were involved in the sex trade and street economy. The chart below shows how girls who responded were involved.
[[y-g-ywep-girls-do-what-they-have-to-do-to-survive-3.png]]
** Analysis
We were overwhelmed and amazed by the amount of data we collected.
Once we had all the data together and typed up (which took two months or more!) we asked Catlin Fullwood to meet with us regularly to help us make sense of all the information. Every Thursday we would meet and look at the findings. We made categories so that we could code the data. After the coding, we wrote a narrative for each code. For example, if the code was “harm reduction” we would find all the examples of harm reduction in the data. Next we would write a few paragraphs using the respondent’s words.
After we had written narrative paragraphs for every code we had four meetings that focused entirely on understanding the data. We had nearly 10 people in each meeting. We all read the narratives very carefully. Next we identified themes and categories that we saw coming out of the data. We called these categories a “set of findings.” Once we had a set of findings, we reflected on the information and asked ourselves these questions:
1. What is the most important thing(s) that I learn about girls and resistance and resilience from this set of findings?
1. Did I have an “AhHa” moment while I was reviewing it? If so, what was it?
1. What surprised you about this set of findings?
1. Are there contradictions in this set of findings? If so, what are they and why do you think they exist?
1. What do you want to make sure that young women and others reading about this research will understand about the real lives of young women in the sex trade?
*** Who participated in the analysis?
Our analysis group consisted of our youth staff, as well as youth membership, interns, outreach workers and girls in charge members. Our adult staff attended some meetings too.
In groups of two, we reviewed our set of findings and answered each question and wrote our answers down. When we came back together to share what we wrote we typed everything up and sat with the data for a few weeks.
After we had all read and re read the answers and reflections we had a debate. We used the data to prove our points and have a discussion about the findings.
Once we completely discussed our findings, debated our thoughts and wrote everything down, we agreed on the findings identified below.
*** Findings Section: Overview
As a part of the research conducted by YWEP to better understand the ways in which girls in the sex trade “fight back” or resist violence, it was necessary to define all the ways that they experience violence—at the individual and institutional levels. As the researchers recounted the forms of violence experienced by girls—from the data collected in the “fighting back” journals, from the outreach workers’ booklets, and from the focus groups, as well as from the experiences of the researchers themselves—the question of how girls who suffer so much trauma can be resilient enough to resist kept coming up. The phrase “resilience as a stepping stone for resistance” resonated for all.
We realized also that there is a universality to the experience of girls in the sex trade that mirror the experiences of all poor women. As young women of color involved in the sex trade, we are being oppressed on multiple levels. We are female, of color, involved in the sex trade, poor—the limitation of choices and access, mistreatment and neglect by “helping systems,” police surveillance and abuse of power, partner abuse, sexual abuse and exploitation, family violence and economic disenfranchisement. They are also young girls, many of color, so racism and ageism are ever present factors in how they are treated—in addition to being in the sex trade. Girls also identify their sexual orientation and gender identification along a broad spectrum including lesbian and transgender as well as bisexual or heterosexual. Homophobia is an additional factor that defines how the world sees and treats them—in addition to being in the sex trade.
In examining the data sets, we found the threads of violence and trauma throughout. But these girls don’t see themselves or want to be seen as victims. They are survivors of violence and they resist the systems of oppression that define their lives, and use their own methods of resiliency. The more they resist by standing up for themselves with police or service providers—getting to know their rights—the more resilient they become in all aspects of their lives. And the more they engage in self care and harm reduction and building support networks—the more they are able to resist the violence that permeates their lives.
*** Findings: Individual Violence
The predominant stories of individual violence told by the girls involved boyfriends, johns, pimps, family members, foster care families.
1. There were recurrent themes of sexual abuse in the forms of gang rapes by johns, being raped and trafficked at a young age, being raped and exploited by pimps, and being stalked and raped by johns. These girls identify trauma that has resulted from these experiences of sexual violence.
1. The theme of control and manipulation was related to pimps and boyfriends who would withhold financial resources necessary for the girls and for their children. Threats of having their children taken away were used to control them and keep them in line.
1. Physical violence is a reality in girls’ lives—perpetrated by boyfriends, pimps and johns. Most often it goes unreported for fear of further violence and based on a belief that the police will not believe them and will, in fact, blame them for the violence they experience. The beatings they experience are also a threat to their children, further cutting off access to help.
1. Girls also report violence by other girls—not so much in terms of direct physical violence, but being involved in girl on girl hating that at times leads to isolated fights between girls.
*** Findings: Institutional Violence
The individual violence that girls experience is enhanced by the institutional violence that they experience from systems and services. The violence included emotional and verbal abuse as well as exclusion from, or mistreatment by, services. Traditional places of safety and protection are not available to them.
1. Girls are denied help from systems such as DCFS, police and the legal system, hospitals, shelters, and drug treatment programs because of their involvement in the sex trade, because they are trans girls or because they are queer, because they are young, because they are homeless, and because they use drugs. “Girls in the sex trade face exclusion and neglect when accessing shelter and other services.”
1. There are particularly a lot of examples of police violence, coercion, and refusal to help. Police often accuse girls in the sex trade of lying or don’t believe them when they turn to the police for help. Many girls said that police sexual misconduct happens frequently while they are being arrested or questioned. One journal respondent wrote “Girls recognize that they need advocates when dealing with these systems, whether it is from their peers, or a trusted adult.” Stories about police abuse outnumbered the stories of abuse by other systems by far. In the words of a youth researcher, “Girls need advocacy when dealing with institutions and public services.”
1. Abuse in foster care is both systemic and personal—as girls reported being physically and emotionally abused by foster parents and being threatened that DCFS will take their children away.
1. Pimps also present an institutional threat because they are organized, and have weapons and bodyguards who watch girls. This sense of omnipotence is part of the psychological abuse that pimps use to keep girls afraid. Whether they are an institutional force or not, they are certainly perceived to be by the girls under their control.
1. We were surprised by the number of girls who are being denied help from various institutions who claimed to be for, and to help, girls in the sex trade. Some examples of institutions denying girls help are police, hospitals, and especially social service agencies.
*** Findings: Resistance
Resistance for the purposes of this research has been defined as the means and the methods used by girls to “fight back.” It has many meanings and applications by girls who experience individual and institutional violence. It can mean avoiding violence by taking another way home or educating herself and another girl about her rights in dealing with the police. There are creative ways of engaging in self-protection that are not judged here—from finding good places to hide your stash when being harassed by the police to “getting over” on a system that refuses to help you. All of these acts of resistance are critical and meaningful for these girls. It gives them a feeling of power in a culture that wants to keep them powerless.
**** Harm Reduction
Harm reduction is one of the primary tenets of YWEP program work. It is not just about harm reduction in terms of drug use or safer sexual practices. It applies to all aspects of girls’ lives and how they negotiate an unsafe world and keep themselves physically, emotionally and spiritually intact. Girls use harm reduction to safety plan and stay safe. Girls talked about practicing it in all areas of their lives, from creating safety plans, to avoiding violence, to safer drug use. A YWEP member looking at the data concluded, “Girls apply harm reduction to their lives broadly to reduce harm in multiple areas.”
Girls also talked about self care as a form of harm reduction. Soothing self care helps girls recharge, and find the strength and energy to continue practicing resilience and resistance in their lives. One girl stated, “They think we don’t take care of us, but girls use baths, showers, aromatherapy, and journal writing as ways to soothe.” When systems completely fail them, girls use harm reduction strategies to get what they need. “Hospitals are discriminating against girls for being in the sex trade and not giving full care.” On the other hand, some girls talk about using harm reduction to make systems work for them. “Girls talk about carefully choosing what information to share and what not to.” We were surprised to find that girls use harm reduction as a transformative justice approach—relying upon each other for the help that the institutions claimed to provide but did not.
Girls talk about safety planning as a way of relying upon each other to keep safe when working in the sex trade. Girls also report that they are learning alternative medicine, and how to take care of their bodies without the aid of medical practitioners. Girls talk about turning to each other for shelter/safe housing instead of relying on institutions.
Girls also use harm reduction with themselves to work on not judging themselves and letting go of self hate. An example of this would be a girl in the sex trade showing herself love by taking a bath at a friend’s and treating herself to a good meal.
**** Speaking Out/Standing Up
Whether it’s “knowing your rights,” speaking up with authority figures, using the legal system to fight back, or participating in a dyke march, girls in the sex trade take direct action on their own behalf or on behalf of others. Girls resist institutions by insisting on making their case despite the threat of repercussions. As one girl wrote in her Girls Fight Back Journal, “I resisted by fighting the court case and appealing the school’s decision (to expel her), by proving them wrong and not letting them underestimate me.” Girls teach each other their “street law rights,” One girl cautioned that “you can still be arrested for using drugs or having sex with a cop even if the cop consented.” Another girl reported that “he told me he would let me go if I gave him some, but then he still took me down to the station.” Some girls use the system for their benefit, such as putting a restraining order against an abuser, or using the legal/judicial system to press charges against someone. One girl talked about reporting her pimp to the sex trade in order to be free of him. “I called the police and told them I was being forced into the sex trade.”
A lot of girls talk about having to fight against the systems, like DCFS or the legal system. “Laws or not there’s ways around it.” Girls talk about having to fight the cops to prove themselves right. When girls do try to use systems like the police to stop the violence they are experiencing, they are often made to feel like liars or provocateurs. When they are the victims of sexual violence they find themselves having to prove that they were raped. One respondent wrote “I took the police with me to the hospital after they called me a liar, and had doctors look at me so I could prove them wrong.”
Girls also talk about fighting for their rights. One girl’s journal stated, “DCFS tried to keep my daughter from me, and I wouldn’t let them.” And another girl wrote in her journal, “I fought the police system, because I wouldn’t let them send me to jail for murder, when it was in self defense.” Sometimes just the act of speaking up is an act of resistance as one girl told us, “don’t be afraid to use your voice, it’s your strongest weapon.”
**** Building Critical Awareness
A very important thing that is happening is girls are gaining Critical Awareness. This critical awareness means that girls are realizing that they are not to blame for institutional violence and are looking at the bigger picture, and realizing the need for advocacy when dealing with systems and the role that institutional oppression plays in what they are going through. Girls are practicing critical awareness by examining patterns in their lives, as one YWEP researcher concluded: “Girls are learning that it’s a whole system of oppression, not just their fault that bad happens.”
Developing critical awareness also helps girls find their greatest resources—one another. YWEP researchers defined Breaking Isolation involved “talking to someone you trust.” YWEP researchers concluded that “Thinking about change is an important change in itself.” When they do not allow themselves to be turned against one another, they can build collective power as a group. Girls talked about the importance of having “someone to watch your back” as a protective factor in their lives. As they become increasingly aware of their shared struggles, it becomes less important to be separate because of race or sexual orientation or what aspect of the sex trade you’re involved in. We may be from different backgrounds, but we share a lot of similarities. What is critical is that girls share the violence and challenges that define their lives and that creating solidarity and collective wisdom with other girls is the greatest act of resistance.
*** Findings: Resilience
Resilience, for the purpose of this study, refers to ways to bounce back or heal whether they be conventional or unconventional. Some forms of resilience are personally soothing like aromatherapy, medicinal drug use, bubble baths, or food. Other forms are about connection—hanging out with girlfriends, reading books about the movement, or educating younger girls about how to protect themselves.
**** Empowering Self Care
Girls are empowering themselves with self care by educating themselves on other radical women and activists and survivors. Sometimes girls work to become educated on any subject they feel good and empowered about. Girls are doing things to physically stay empowered in their bodies such as yoga, running, dancing for fun and other exercises. Some girls are writing in journals and diaries as a way to take care of themselves. Some girls are using projects such as making their own clothes or singing to feel empowered. Many girls also found it empowering to take care of their children every day. Girls are also working hard to embrace their bodies as they are and reject racist and misogynist media messages.
**** Soothing Self Care
Many girls are making an attempt to find things that they find soothing to comfort themselves with when dealing with fatigue, anxiety or stress. Girls are using different methods to physically comfort their bodies; some of the ones that are common are baths, meditation, aromatherapy, and using other drugs to help relax and soothe their bodies like weed, drinking and other medicinal drugs.
Some girls are finding it soothing to be around friends or family that feels safe to them, which seems to bring comfort because of a break in isolation and seems to bring normalcy to their lives. Some are also using religion and talking with God. Some are simply giving themselves the chance to zone out and do mindless activities like watching TV and playing video games or listening to music. Girls are also using reading a book as a soothing way to take care of themselves.
Aromatherapy is used very commonly and also in very different forms. Some girls are burning incense, sage and candles and some girls are using the smell of baby wash they like, weed or foods that smell soothing.
Some girls also find cutting or injuring themselves as a soothing form of self care. This led us at YWEP to re name what some people call “self injury or self mutilation.” We now call it “Self Harm Resilience.” We call it this because so many girls who filled out the Girls Fight Back Journal said that using controlled self injury was a practice that they said was an important form of coping. Girls said that they weren’t doing this to hurt, they wrote they were doing it to feel better. Many girls wrote stories of body modification, like giving themselves and their friends tattoos and piercings. Respondents talked about reclaiming their body through body modification. “Body modification can mean body autonomy to girls” according to one journal writer. Other girls wrote about more complicated forms of self harm resilience like breaking bones or making cuts or burns on their skin. Rather than judge this as “bad” or “dangerous,” we decided to use harm reduction as a way to understand this. We respect that girls wrote these stories of self harm resilience in the section of our journal that asked “how do you heal or take care of yourself.”
It’s important to remember that everyone uses Self Harm Resilience for different reasons. For example, Self Harm Resilience was identified as a way for girls to be in control of their own bodies. One girl talked about self harm resilience as being empowering because she was hurting herself as opposed to someone else hurting her. Self Harm Resilience can be a way to prevent or come out of disassociation. Some girls said that it can be a way to deal with being triggered because it draws you back into your body and into the present moment.
Girls talk about soothing self care as something that they have control of, and feel good about making the attempt to soothe themselves in big or even small ways. Girls also talked about self care as a form of harm reduction. Soothing self care helps girls recharge, and find the strength and energy to continue practicing resilience and resistance in their lives. After reviewing the data from this section one YWEP researcher noted “They think we don’t take care of ourselves, but girls use baths, showers, aromatherapy, writing as a way to soothe.”
**** Breaking Isolation/Creating Community
Girls are also reaching out to other girls in the sex trade to break isolation. Girls in the sex trade get peer to peer support, especially around the issues or sexual assault or survivorship.
It is a misconception that all girls in the sex trade dislike each other and do not reach out to each other for support. In this data set, we found many examples of girls in the sex trade reaching out to each other for support, friendship, and safety. Girls identify turning to their peers as a form of self care. Girls talk about turning to each other as a support system, as well as networking with each other for education and self care. One YWEP researcher observed, “She breaks isolation by talking to a girl she trusts.”
However, girls also talk about experiencing girl on girl violence, such as stealing, talking badly about each other, physically fighting, and setting each other up. Although these things seem contradictory, they are both true in a culture fraught with contradictions about protecting children, yet sexually exploiting them. There is more conversation about girls as violent predators, but little about their incredible loyalty and ethic in their efforts to be there for one another.
*** Surprises in the Data
When we were reviewing the data a few points struck us over and over again. First, we were surprised how many stories we heard from girls, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women about their violent experiences at non profits and with service providers. This was upsetting because adults and social workers often tell us that seeking services will improve our lives. Yet when we do the systems set up to help us actually can make things worse. This was clear when looking at the foster care system. We heard many stories about how foster care settings would deny girls privileges like bus fare or clothing. This left girls to find their own ways to replace those items. This is a cycle of violence that begins with the institution—not with the girls.
We were also surprised by how often police refused us help, didn’t believe us, or forced us to trade sex to avoid arrest and then arrested us anyway. Health care providers were also identified by girls as being unethical. We heard many stories from girls going to the emergency room or to a doctor and being placed in psychiatric units just because they were in the sex trade, transgender or were thought to be self injuring.
There were times when we were all blown away and stunned into silence while reading the extreme and impressive measures girls took to protect themselves, their children and their community. It is absolutely a myth that girls in the sex trade do not take care of themselves or other girls in their neighborhood. It is also a myth that the violence we experience prevents us from being leaders or making positive changes in our lives. We saw over and over again that girls are excited and inspired about making changes and practicing self care. We have now have proof that unconventional resilience methods are a stepping stone to resistance.
Behaviors that have often been condemned by greater society, such as self harm or drug use, are ways that girls in the sex trade take care of themselves, and therefore, build their resilience and resistant to violence.
*** Trans Girls
One area of our research that needs improvement for next time is that our methods did not track whether or not the violence transgender girls were experiencing was different or the same as non transgender girls.
We did notice three trends that were specific to trans girls’ experience of violence:
A. Girls had trouble in school often because teachers were transphobic and allowed classmates to harass them and teachers/administration participated in harassment.
A. Non profits that were specifically for the gay and lesbian community were discriminatory against transgender girls who were there to get help or participate in programming.
A. Health care providers and shelters are not doing a good job of working with trans girls. We face stigma, confusion on the part of service providers and violence when trying to find help taking care of our bodies.
As YWEP continues our research, we will be more clear in our questions so that we can be sure to identify the specific experiences of violence transgender girls are experiencing.
*** Thoughts and Recommendations:
After doing all of this research, we came up with a few recommendations for others to think about.
1. Resilience is a stepping stone to resistance. Meaning, when we take care of ourselves we generate the power to fight back. Our recommendation is that we give girls as many opportunities as possible to take care, that we believe that all girls do want to take care, and that we don’t judge the way girls take care of themselves, their children and their community.
2. Understand that the sex trade is much easier to get into than it is to get out of and that we all have unique and valuable ways of soothing and fighting back.
3. Encourage and respect girls’ right to think for themselves—even if it’s different than what adults think is OK. Empowerment means taking control of our choices—every girl has the power, even if it’s in the smallest ways—to make a decision that can positively affect our lives.
4. If you run a non-profit organization, think about having <strong>NO police or security guards on site</strong>. Girls involved in the sex trade are targets for unethical law enforcement and will be less likely to confide in your staff if they think you are working with the law. Furthermore, we heard a number of stories of security guards who worked at social services soliciting sex, sexually harassing girls, or being homophobic and transphobic towards girls. These cases do not seem to be specific to certain officers or guards or social services. We believe this problem is happening to girls all over Chicago.
5. Be aware that young women who identify as lesbian or queer may be involved in the sex trade and have sexual contact with men. LGBT programs need comprehensive pregnancy prevention programs, too.
6. Any program that is open to girls needs to be open to transgender girls.
7. Trans girls need information about taking care of their bodies when they can’t get to a doctor or clinic. YWEP is working to develop a tool that we can share with girls in our outreach and also with other service providers so that we can all do self exams on our own terms.
8. Think critically about the law before advocating for a policy. Will the law really help girls trading sex for money right now? Or will it just lead to an increase in police presence? Will removing a law decrease girls’ risk for violence or abuse?
9. Allow girls to seek medical care without an ID, without payment and without risk of being turned over to the police or foster care.
10. Harm Reduction is a philosophy that girls need access to. Learn Harm Reduction. Teach Harm Reduction. Practice Harm Reduction.
** YWEP’s Next Steps:
Young Women’s Empowerment Project will be taking steps as a result of this research. Our goal is to launch a social justice campaign that will solidify the movement we have been striving to build in Chicago among girls involved in the sex trade and street economy.
We have five objectives:
1) We will distribute the tool kit we made, describing methods other girls in the sex trade have used to be resilient or resistant that comes directly from these research findings.
2) We want to hold a formal press release for adults and youth, detailing our findings and conclusions. This release will also give people a chance to use the data to figure out how girls in their communities are resilient and resistant to violence and how they can unite.
3) We will launch a social justice campaign based on the research findings. This campaign will be led by the Youth Activist Krew at YWEP and will have the support of our allies across Chicago and the country.
4) We will make more health options available to girls who are a part of YWEP. We want to do this in three ways:
a. We will train our outreach workers to have more knowledge about women’s health and transgender health through developing a relationship with a women’s health clinic that is queer and trans-friendly.
b. We want to invite allies who practice alternative medicine and acupuncture to provide regular information and care so that our constituency can access holistic health care without ID, money or fear of judgment related to the sex trade or drug use.
c. With the help of a health-based resource, we will develop a guide for self exams for cis girls and trans girls. This guide will help girls know their bodies, know how to take care of their bodies and identify when they should go to the doctor if needed.
5) We will address violence and police misconduct, as well as other bad encounters from social service agencies in our community by using the YWEP BAD ENCOUNTER LINE to track violent men, including police. We also hope that this tool will track how girls are fighting back so that we can continue to share resilience and resistance methods with our girls.
*** Our social justice campaign
We will use this information to pinpoint the violent issues that girls in the sex trade face the most. We will also look at ways that the youth fought back. Our focus groups, as well as in the Girls Fight Back journals, explored possible campaign ideas. Our latest focus group examined which of our campaign ideas was the most possible and the steps we need to take to turn the idea into action. Creating our Social Justice Campaign has had a lot of steps:
1. Our social justice coordinator launched a political education curriculum to train our membership.
2. We formed a new activist group called YAK (youth activist krew) that is meeting every week to work on our building our campaign.
3. We invited folks from Rukus and Detroit Summer to come for a weekend to school us about building a campaign from our research findings.
4. We are hosting a Youth Activist Camp for the YAK members to go more in depth about becoming activists and creating our campaign in January 2010.
We have already completed the first three goals on this list. We have also begun our first action using this research. Our action is to create a Bad Encounters Line. This is a tracking tool that any girl, including transgender girls, and young women, including trans women involved in the sex trade and street economies can use to report a discriminatory experience with any system or individual. For example, girls can report an experience with a dangerous man soliciting sex or report a hospital who is refusing them care. By September 24th, 2009 we will have collected 75 responses from our constituency. These responses will help us become clear about a target for our campaign because we will learn what specific service providers, precincts, wards and neighborhoods are most affected by institutional violence.
A social justice campaign that is based in transformative justice means that we will not be targeting a policy or law. Instead we will be working within our communities to increase our resilience and resistance to violence. For example, The Bad Encounters Line also tracks how girls are fighting back and healing from experiences of individual and institutional violence. YWEP will distribute the information that we collect from our constituency about what girls are doing to fight back and heal. This way, girls who may never have met will be able to support each other about dealing with systems or danger.
Our tool kit is another example of transformative justice. We took the stories and explanations of how girls were fighting back and healing very seriously. Our tool kit was a way for us to share our resistance methods with other girls. Youth from our project contributed their survival tools. The YWEP toolkit is a way for us to spread our message to girls that don’t come to our space.
The first page is about building sisterhood. This directly relates back to the breaking isolation theme. We also included information about drug harm reduction, reproductive justice, information on knowing your legal rights, ways to spot a pimp, as well as how to spot an abuser. We have two versions, one that is adult friendly which has less graphic information and one that is just for young people surviving. We included a few pages from our tool kit so that you can see how the research is impacting us. The full toolkit is over 55 pages long.
** Tool Kit
*** Tips for building sisterhood in the hood
Empowerment—When a sista takes control of her own life and takes responsibility for their own decisions.
Sisterhood solidarity—Sistas should have each other’s back showing each other support and being each other’s allies by empowering each other to be strong and independent. “U.N.I.T.Y. Queen Latifah”
Stop the he say she say.
Listen to your sistas, don’t label yo sistas.
Talk openly and non-judgmental, remember keep yo sista’s secrets.
Step up and take leadership don’t let the boys lead you.
Rebel against messages that we get about girls in the hood.
Think before you speak, what you say can hurt someone.
Question the hater, don’t spread the hate.
“The drama for yo mama” Everyone deals with drama, let’s chop the drama in half by showing solidarity by not calling our sistas Bitches and Hoes. Respect each other and keep our sista’s secrets. Stand against the judgments made about our sista. STOP, LISTEN, TALK, and let’s take steps to save our sisterhood and solidarity by staying true to our sistas.
*** 10 tips to spotting a pimp
By grrlz who know
Everybody’s experience is unique. This sheet is only a beginning to help girls identify potentially harmful, deceptive people and pimps. We want to learn ways to stay safe and provide support to our street skilled selves.
First off, this is how we define the word “pimp” we think a pimp can be anyone <male or female> who takes advantage of you when you are weak or down or in need of help. They might make themselves seem like a friend who you can trust and confide in. They might make themselves out to be a “boyfriend or girlfriend” or even a “mother or father” figure to you.
Sometimes things can go really fast—or sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes the relationship can start as one thing—like a boy/girlfriend or just a cool place to crash and then all of a sudden you might feel trapped or like you owe them more than you can give.
There are a lot of stereotypes about what a pimp looks like or how his/her place/apartment might look—but in our experience—these stereotypes are false—don’t look for the person in the Cadillac with the fur suit—pimps can work in offices, houses, apartments, studios, flower shops, ware houses, car repair shops or wherever!
Just any one of these tips can be a “warning.” If you notice more than one tip that’s a big flash warning.
Watch for these signals:
If you notice someone <fe/male> following you, scope you out, starring and propose themselves as: …
<em>See our tool kit for the rest of these tips</em>
*** YWEP
Young Women’s Empowerment Project is a project by and for girls, including transgender girls, in the sex trade and street economies. We believe in taking care of ourselves and empowering each other to take control of our own lives. We believe in building bridges between cisgender girls and transgender girls, between those of us that are survivors of forced involvement and those of us that do what we have to do to survive and make the best choices we can.
Young Women’s Empowerment Project believes that we are especially affected by the sex trade because racism, sexism, male dominance, ageism, and the prison industrial complex and the drug war target us and our communities. The sex trade and street economies exist and thrive because of the lack of resources, choices, support, education and respect.
Everyone should be able to make their own decisions about their sexuality and their health.
You have the right to do, what you have to do, as safely as possible. Harm reduction says that you have the right to have more than one sexual partner. Reproductive justice to us, means you have the right to be in the sex trade and take care of yourself how ever you need to and to be in the street economy and make money how ever you can.
We fight back by making sure our voice is heard at the national level in Third Wave’s Reproductive Health and Justice Initiative Network and with the Catalyst Fund at Chicago Foundation for Women.
*** Rough Guide
This is a rough guide to how long drugs can be detected in the urine. Remember metabolisms vary and other factors like stress, illness, weight and diet affect the speed at which your body processes the drugs. To be safe, you may want to multiply each day count by 3.
Amphetamine | 2-4 Days
Ecstasy | 2-4 Days
Dizeparn | 1-2 Days
Temazepam | 1-2 Days
Cannabis (Pot)<br>- Casual Use<br>- Heavy Use | <br>2-7 Days<br>Up to 30 Days
Alcohol | 12-24 Hours
Heroin | 1-2 Days
Buprnorphine | 2-3 Days
Methadone | 2 Days
LSD | 2-3 Days
Cocaine | 12 hours-3 Days
*** Self Care Tips
Did you know it’s possible to do your own examination of your vagina and cervix? You can also go to this website for detailed steps for doing your own self exam: http://www.fwhc.org/health/selfcare.htm
You can check out your vagina with a mirror and flashlight to see what’s going on even if you don’t have a speculum. Sit down on the floor and spread your legs in front of a mirror. Spread your labia with your fingers and use the flashlight to help you see inside.
If you have a grey, green or yellow discharge you might have an infection. A white discharge is normal.
Get familiar with the way you smell and the color of your vagina so that you can catch signs of infection quicker. An acidic smell is normal. If your smell is stronger than usual, you might have an infection.
*** Things to do with an opiate/heroin overdose using Naloxone
Naloxone is a medication prescribed for the reversal of opiate intoxication. The person possessing naloxone has been trained in its safe usage and has demonstrated competency in managing opiate/heroin overdose situations.
This program is designed to reduce the nearly 500 opiate-related overdose deaths in Chicagoland each year. Your cooperation is appreciated.
Naloxone…
- is a pure antidote to opiates, including heroin—it reverses the effects of heroin for about an hour
- is <strong>not</strong> a Scheduled Drug—it has no potential for abuse
- more than one shot may be needed to stop overdose
- Naloxone is also called Narcan®
- has no effects of its ownusing it without having opiates in you is like injecting water.
- overdose may return when naloxone wears off (about one hour)
- can cause withdrawal in a person with a habit
- withdrawal can harm someone
<strong>S</strong>timulation<br>
can they be awakened?
<strong>C</strong>all for help<br>
if the person is not responsive
<strong>A</strong>irway<br>
make sure nothing is inside the person’s mouth stopping the breathing.
<strong>R</strong>escue breathing<br>
breathe for them—two quick breaths every five seconds
<strong>E</strong>valuate<br>
are they any better? can you get <strong>naloxone</strong> and prepare it quick enough that they won’t go for too long without your breathing assistance?
<strong>M</strong>uscular injection<br>
inject 1cc of naloxone into a muscle
<strong>E</strong>valuate+support<br>
Is the person breathing on their own? Is another dose of naloxone needed? Naloxone wears off in 30-90 minutes. Seek help and comfort him/her so he/she will not use any more drug until the naloxone wears off.
** What you need to know about the real lives of girls in the sex trade and street economy:
- We are survivors and we heal by building community with other girls in the sex trade and street economy.
- We develop unique ways that work for us to heal and or bounce back, even if they may or may not be viewed as positive to others.
- Harm reduction is a major way we take care of ourselves and an important philosophy. We apply it to our whole lives, from sex trade safety, safety planning, safer drug use, safer self injury, better eating, dating and relationship violence and much more.
- We want it to be known that even if we are not currently focused on exiting the sex trade, we can still find ways to create positive change in our lives and to keep ourselves safe.
- You can go to the police, hospitals and shelters, but keep in mind that if they fail you, you might have to take matters into your own hands.
- Don’t blame girls in the sex trade for being in the sex trade or say we can’t help ourselves, because when we go to systems or services we are denied help or judged.
- Girls are taking care of themselves through healing and being resilient and taking steps to create positive change in their lives.
- Girls are fighting to make decisions about their own bodies, controlling their own choices when they can.
- We are more than our trauma—we are fighters with real strength that needs to be honored and respected.
** Vocabulary
- <strong>Violence:</strong> YWEP uses the term violence to mean any kind of harm that can happen to a girl in the sex trade. It can include, but is not limited to physical violence. It can also be emotional violence, abuse, or threats. For example, being kicked out of a shelter because you are using drugs is a form of violence because you are being denied your right to safely sleep indoors.
- <strong>Institutional Violence:</strong> We use the term institutional violence to mean any violence from an institution or agency, such as DCFS or the police. An example of institutional violence is DCFS refusing to give you the benefits you are entitled to.
- <strong>Individual Violence:</strong> We use the term individual violence to mean any violence that happens from one person to another, such as a parent, boyfriend, or pimp. An example of individual violence is a girl’s sister punching her.
- <strong>Resistance:</strong> We use the term resistance to mean any way of fighting back. It can mean avoiding violence by taking another way home to educating yourself and the youth in your neighborhood about your legal rights.
- <strong>Resilience:</strong> We use the term resilience to mean any way to bounce back or heal, either conventional or unconventional. Some examples are therapy, aromatherapy, medicinal drug use, bubble baths, or food choices.
- <strong>Data:</strong> Data means the information we collect
- <strong>Data Collection Method:</strong> This is what we did to gather data or information. Some examples of data collection methods are focus groups, used outreach worker booklets and used a journal.
- <strong>Focus Group:</strong> This is a special meeting where the researchers ask questions to the girls. The girls have a discussion about the questions and then the researchers write down what the girls say. We did 4 focus groups: two in our weekly leadership group Girls in Charge, and two in our Outreach Group. We used these focus groups to learn more about information written in outreach booklets, Girls Fight Back Journals, as well as draw upon experiences not recorded in other data collection methods. We also used these focus groups as an opportunity to discuss how we can unite and fight back.
- <strong>The Girls Fight Back Journal:</strong> This is a fill in the blank style zine we made that had questions in it about girls fighting back and healing (it is attached at the end of the report). We spent a long time making this journal. We tested it before we used it and no one liked it so we had to re do it. We collected 107 Journals from girls all over Chicago. Some girls filled journals out more than one time.
- <strong>Outreach Booklet:</strong> The outreach workers at YWEP fill out outreach booklets every week where they write down their outreach experience. We added a bunch of questions to the outreach booklet to track how our outreach contacts are fighting back and healing. We added two questions about violence; one about individual violence, the other about institutional violence. We also added a question about resistance, and another about resilience.
- <strong>Data Analysis:</strong> This is when we look at all the information we collected and think about what it tells us. It took us three months to analyze this data. First we typed it all up, then we made codes so we could find themes in the story of the data, and then we had meetings where 8 different girls looked at all the information. From this we came what we thought the story from the data is telling us.
- <strong>Data Set:</strong> A data set is the group of information that comes from a data method. For example, we would call the information we wrote down during a focus group a data set. Or we call the information we collected from our outreach booklets a data set.
- <strong>Narrative:</strong> A narrative is a story. We would write narratives for each data set so that we could see what the story was. Then we compiled all of our narratives to see the big story all together.
- <strong>Ethnographic observation:</strong> This means what you see about your people or your hood. For example, when you are at a bus stop in your hood and you look around—how many grocery stores are there with fresh vegetables? How many police officers do you see? How many cameras are posted on poles? Asking and answering these questions is a data collection method that we used during our outreach.
<strong>Harm reduction</strong> offers the largest range of possibilities of preventing HIV and other STDs. Simply put, harm reduction means figuring out how to reduce the danger in your life one piece at a time, without necessarily changing your whole life at once. Harm reduction teaches that all girls deserve real life options without judgment. Harm reduction means that all girls involved in the sex trade need to be in charge of their own decisions. Sometimes, YWEP is the only place that girls are able to make choices and decisions for themselves. We are often asked why we don’t force or demand that girls exit the sex trade. The sex trade is a system, and if we created demands on young women that didn’t acknowledge that the sex trade is much easier to enter than it is to exit, we would stop being a place that respected young women’s realities. We protect and honor girls’ right to make up their own mind and choose the best option or strategy for improving the quality of their lives—including supporting exit from the sex trade. We don’t need to be rescued—we need the resources and support to change our lives and change the world.
<strong>Empowerment</strong> means having the tools and resources you need to live the life you want. To reduce the sex trade to one girl’s experience, or to make blanket statements about the sex trade based on some girls’ experiences, good or bad, is to dis-empower and erase the realities of girls whose experiences are different. Girls in the sex trade are members of many communities, including the ones we create with each other for support and survival. Empowerment means the ability to make community, to make change, and to make decisions.
Young Women’s Empowerment Project
<br>
Chicago, Illinois
<br>
http://www.youarepriceless.org
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#title Benjaminian Resistance, Circumnavigating Border walls, Negating Schmittian Katechon
#author Z. Zolty
#LISTtitle Benjaminian resistance, circumnavigating border walls, Negating Schmittian Katechon
#date 1, 1, 2024
#source https://philpapers.org/rec/ZOLBDV
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-02-03T09:22:47.709Z
#authors Z. Zolty
#topics Carl Schmitt, Christian anarchism, decentralization, Giorgio Agamben, no borders, Tiqqun, Walter Benjamin
#notoc 1
<strong>Abstract</strong> The current situation in the United States of America is that Latin immigrants and migrants are mistreated and subjected to gross human rights violations, with entire extensions of the Nation-State being given virtually unlimited power over a powerless populace. The current gap in the literature revolves around Agamben and political theology as it relates and overlaps with the political reality of Latin American immigrants and migrants being mistreated and subjected to human rights violations with impunity. This research is very important to allow a path to resist nation-states when they collapse into authoritarianism or oppress humans without citizenship of the territory of the nation-state, in question. This will provide a way to assist Latin immigrants and migrants without fear of a revolution that will dissolve into tyranny, as happens so often. How can the political theory of Agamben’s use of Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence establish a new way of assuring Latin migrants and immigrants’ safety and dignity as human beings who should be allowed to live anywhere they please as long as they are not harming anyone? My research objective is to show how Benjamin’s notion of divine violence combined with that of Agamben’s notion of destituent power can provide a way to break out of the dialectic of tyrannies that collapse in revolution to birth yet a new regime of tyrannies.
The topic of critical theory draws upon social and literary studies to grant practitioners of this field of research a way to analyze power and unjust dynamics, formulating a way forward and out of the power dynamics. The literature as it exists today which in part utilizes analysis of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida's responses to Walter Benjamin’s text The Critique of Violence. Also of note is Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s text the Critique of Violence wherein he develops Benjamin’s project into a political tactic as opposed to rejecting it as Derrida does or trying to deform it as Butler does respectively in their reading of Benjamin’s critique. Giorgio Agamben is an interdisciplinary academic trained as a Jurist; however, he branched out into Critical Theory and Theology.
To broaden a gap in the literature applicable to Latin American immigrants in the United States, I am applying Agamben notions of destituent power, as a current application of praxis for assisting, providing, and restoring the dignity of Latin American immigrants and migrants also of note is Benjamin’s notion of Divine violence as a method that occurs when people are oppressed to negate the myth of law which harms Latin migrants and immigrants while providing room for real justice even if it is outside the realm of nation-state powers. By drawing upon Agamben and Benjamin's political writings a new way out can be paved to restore dignity and provide safety within the machine of the nation-state by rendering it inoperable by negating its unjust laws. This research will be useful for those wishing to partake in activism as well as developing further a line of thought that has been mostly untouched in Agamben’s writing as applied to the issue of injustice of Latin-American immigrants and migrants on American soil.
The terms utilized in this paper revolve around politics and political theology, discussions of power politics and religion bleed together and influence each other for better or worse. Destituent power: a mature theory of political action developed by Agamben drawing from Benjamin’s Critique of Violence an array of tactics that circumnavigated and resisted governments and regimes without partaking in revolution or becoming a new government to collapse into tyranny itself. Divine violence is a term used by Benjamin to denote the power, protest, resistance, or revolutionary violence that attacks constitutive power which is the ability to lay down laws and pass legislation that becomes laws of the nation-state, that are to be followed by the pain of punishment by the nation-state if broken.
How can Benjamin’s Divine Violence be developed into a political tactic to negate the Schmittian State of Exception, which is the norm, also when mixed with Agamben's mature theory of destituent power, these two tactics synthesized together provide a very real method of approaching praxis in respect to populations being abused by nation-states? I draw upon Agamben’s reading of political theory and theology. I will also be drawing upon the fields of Political Theory and Political Theology, analysis by the following theorists, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Jacob Taubes, and Carl Schmitt. Drawing upon the theories of critical theorists Butler, Derrida, and Agamben’s grappling with Benjamin’s text, The Critique of Violence. Agamben’s analysis and sections of Schmitt’s work, set up part half of the conversation upon which the Critique of Violence is built in Agamben’s reading and theoretical concerns. Many contemporary academics have different approaches or perspectives centered around violence and legality, as discussed in the work of Walter Benjamin, the Critique of Violence. Utilizing the writings of political theorists, theologians, and theorists as well as philosophers to establish a map of concepts and ideas as they overlap with the epoch of today given the human rights violations of the United States in respect of Latin migrants and immigrants.
Drawing upon the text Critique of Violence, as well as an overview of Agamben’s reading of the Schmittian state of exception which is the action of granting unlimited powers to a leader of a nation-state at the peril of everyone else. The two theorists, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt influenced one another and were dynamically opposed to one another about authoritarianism, anarchism, and resistance to authoritarianism. The work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt has been influential in the debate of Benjamin’s text in the hands of contemporary theorists Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. Each takes a differing approach to Benjamin’s notion of divine law negating violence and the setup of the State of Exception, which is the norm in today’s epoch according to Agamben’s reading of Benjamin.
It is common for others to de-fang Benjamin’s argument concerning violence, as does Butler, who twists Benjamin’s argument into supporting non-violence, such as Butler relying on Benjamin’s earlier works on language to serve as an antidote to Benjamin’s destructive anarchism (Butler, 2020, 93). The middle ground of support, which is most in the spirit of Benjamin’s response to violence would be that of Agamben. Despite these disagreements on adequately responding to Benjamin’s argument’s political, critical, and theoretical implications, something is being left outside the uses of Benjamin’s work The Critique of Violence. What is left unsaid is the application of Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence.
Agamben belongs to a list of the most esteemed contemporary Critical Theorists alive, alongside Butler and the late Derrida. These three have been influenced and even known to correspond or appear together in joint lectures at universities. When filtered through Agamben’s analysis into what he called destituent power. Destituent power is the capacity to ignore and negate oppressive laws while doing so evades punishment and resists it without fear of revolution which will collapse into the same tyranny it was meant to escape. This will have authentic political application for minority groups such as immigrants when they are being oppressed by the state except by Nation-States or regimes. This application has the potential for fruitful application and development of research to resist authoritarianism and produce spaces within the empire that allow the oppressed Latin immigrants and migrants. Derrida and Butler’s critiquing of ideology does little to help provide food shelter or protection against backsliding regimes which is why Derrida’s fear of violence is misplaced. Divine violence is a balm when intermixed with tactics such as destituent power as a way to prevent budding authoritarians from joining the movement to oppress.
Agamben and Benjamin have critics and objections to the spirit of Benjamin’s text. To avoid or circumvent what can be conceived as violent passages, Butler reads Benjamin in the light of Jewish ethics with a dose of Jewish philosophy to deny the violent rupture of Benjamin’s works. (Butler, 2020, 87–100) Beyond Agamben’s approach to adapting, purifying, and processing Benjamin’s divine violence of producing destituent power as a theory, other theorists, philosophers, and activists oppose Agamben’s reading, which questions power and law and negates as such. Butler reduced Benjamin’s divine violence to that of political protest, and Derrida’s fear caused Derrida to reject Benjamin’s work altogether, the violent language aspect of Benjamin’s analysis in his treatise The Critique of Violence. (Derrida, 2018, 62). Derrida focuses on Walter Benjamin’s text, the Critique of Violence, Derrida’s reading is hyper-fixated on the cause and effect or vicious cycle of violence. Derrida fears that Benjamin’s work, the Critique of Violence, will create a cycle that would end in gas chambers for one political opponent. This is different from the mixed tactics of Agamben’s reading of destituent power; in fact, Agamben’s destituent power escapes this cycle by avoiding installing governments or regimes that would be needed for mass systematic murder, as feared by Derrida. This makes Agamben’s notion most useful as well as respectful to Benjamin’s corpus.
Derrida’s analysis of Benjamin’s text, the Critique of Violence, provides a sort of quietism. Derrida makes the point that Benjamin’s notion of law-annihilating violence can lead to violence, which is a different angle from that of Agamben and others who make use of destituent power who make use of resistance to hollow out a space of negation of the machinery of the state of exception (Derrida, 2018, 62). Derrida’s focus and critique of Benjamin’s essay, The Critique of Violence, is lackluster, whereas destituent power is a way of providing a zone of safety for immigrants when they are reduced to a form of bare life. Bare life is a life reduced to its bare biological facts ignoring the individuality and uniqueness of the human as an individual (Agamben, 2014). Thus, people must not be detained by the border patrol agencies which render immigrant people to bear life, subjecting them to starvation, sexual abuse, or exposure to violence (Human Rights Watch, 2023). This reduction to “bare life” reduces Latin immigrants to being cannibalized by the savagery of the Nation-State.
Destituent power, alongside Benjamin’s law-annihilating violence, should be viewed as a negation to deactivate state oppression, divine violence when perfected as destituent power in Agamben’s writing, as both have used when utilized together as two forms of tactics. This serves as a tool; it can negate while it can also heal if a zone is built to provide shelter and aid to those pursued by the regime that is discriminating against migrants or immigrants. Derrida argues that divine violence makes a jump into the potentiality for mass violence; while this is true, quieting while people are suffering under the state of exception is not the answer (Derrida,2018).
Butler and Agamben have differing perspectives on Benjamin’s Critique of Violence; whereas Agamben utilized it as a way to create destituent power as a form of theorizing and praxis to be lived by. Butler synthesized famed Jewish philosophy and ethics with Benjamin to create a nonviolent, “divine violence” as Benjamin coined it by turning Benjamin on his head, negating any action potential (Butler, 2020, 93). Butler read Benjamin as a thinker mainly influenced by Jewish ethics, whereas Benjamin’s reading list consists much more heavily of Christian theological sources. Butler focuses on Benjamin’s violence as a work of non-violent protest and ignores the sources as well as previous works Benjamin wrote on, such as the fragment World and Time, which measures that the divine only appears in the world as a revolutionary force. (Benjamin, 1913–1926, 226–227). Butler, like Derrida, is afraid of the potentiality of Benjamin’s law, annihilating divine violence, and disagrees with its anarchist conclusions (Butler, 2020, 93).
The abuse of the border patrol, which subjugates women and immigrants to sexual abuse and detainment, all expanded under the Patriot Act, giving powers and overreach that no agency man or false idol should have access to (Human Rights Watch, 2023). There are many ways one can evade the overreach of government with the injustice of borders. One can provide housing or utilize churches or places of worship to take in families when oppression and persecution are prevalent. Providing job opportunities under the table can provide a safety net to allow immigrant workers a job to earn income. Creating funds for displaced families provides a net as a form of praxis to better support these groups of people. Handing out bags of food or forming a food bank at a local church is one way of better providing for the needs of the poor and destitute. Aid may also take on the form of teaching immigrants language and literacy skills in English in connection with groups at local Catholic or Protestant churches to provide a form of empowerment. Doing this would allow Latin immigrants and migrants a toolkit to better understand and navigate the labyrinth of a society that demands fluency in English. All of these activities coincide with Agamben’s notion of destituent power. Circumnavigating or disregarding the law that oppressed is vital in allowing and creating a sort of community under the radar to provide a community without the oversight of the oppression of the regime in power.
Agamben takes seriously the claim of Benjamin that the “state of exception” in the Schmittian sense is the norm in which we live, which extends to the camp. Agamben draws parallels to the monitoring technology of the Nazis and the modern United States government with its biometrics to track and convict people of crimes they may not have even had a part of. This monitoring is biometric data and DNA stored in databases for further usage or future prosecution should the nation-state deem it fit. (Agamben, 2010 1–2). Agamben wrote of the genealogy between the laws of taking fingerprints in United States governments as a comparison to the concentration camps’ biopolitical procedure of monitoring via tattoos. There is some overlap here as fingerprints are used to monitor and enter into a database given that we accept that all humans are potential “Homo Sacer”. Given the state of exception anyone can be denied freedoms or murdered with impunity (Agamben, 2008). Agamben’s Homo Sacer is the pinnacle of Agamben’s political theory, which explains the post-World War II epoch as it exists from the past to today. This notion of Homo Sacer draws upon an ancient Roman law where someone is marked as being free to be killed with the murderer not being judged for killing the Homo Sacer. Agamben elaborates on this concept by stating.
The sacred man is the one who the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first Tribonian law; in fact, it is noted that “ if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebcore it will not be considered homicide “ this is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred. (Agamben, 1995, 71)
Agamben’s analysis plays well into the argument of destituent power to create lives without biopolitical monitoring of subjectivity. Agamben’s notion or worries about biometric tattooing is correct. Examples of this can be seen in biometric data gathered from DNA databases being sold and used to gather other kinds of forensic data and charging people with crimes, such as protestors or other forms of activism that the regimes render illegal. The link between the encoding of the biometric database is a link of what allowed the Holocaust to occur. The fact that people were reduced to nothing more than numbers allowed the development of technology that allowed people to be reduced to bare life. Once human beings are reduced to data their humanity is taken from them, and they can be killed with impunity. (Agamben, 2010, 1–2).
The Critique of Violence is a work that posits a way for revolutionary violence to be justified when false idols of the state or regime set up laws that are legally just but hollow and lacking actual justice. The work was written earlier in Benjamin’s early period when he was focused on the theological lens intermixed with radical politics. In Benjamin’s work The Critique of Violence, there is a split between constitutive powers, such as the capacity to lay down laws in the realm of force by political entities, i.e., the nation-state. This is known as myth-making violence, as myth is used to sway and tell lies to the masses about the authority or right to bear power as judge, jury, and executor of innocents or whomever they deem as guilty and therefore able to be rendered as bare life and killed with impunity. Benjamin makes a note of the Ten Commandments of the Torah, where the individuals who try to rise against Moses and establish their mythology are swallowed by the Earth in an act of divine violence, subsequently destroying the myth and claim to those who wish to supplant themselves in God’s place. Benjamin draws upon this section of the Torah as well as Greek myths, to create an example of revolutionary violence that negates the myth of authority of the nation-state and causes destruction in an act of “bloodless bloodletting” (Benjamin, 2021).
The Critique of Violence is drawn upon and used to formulate Agamben’s mature theory of destituent power to create negations through destitution in an oppressive nation-state, through acts of resistance. This is combined with divine law-annihilating violence which is not limited to outright violence but other forms of resistance as well. The point is to negate without being fearful of creating a new regime on top of the other, which has the likelihood of collapsing in a cycle of authoritarian backsliding, as can be seen in the cyclic patterns of history. Of note is Benjamin’s understanding of police power “The ‘law’ of the police marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain. (Benjamin, 2021, 221, 243).
Benjamin makes note of Schmitt’s notion of the state of exception but flips it on its head by noting that the state of exception where government leaders can murder and perform acts of genocide with impunity is already the norm in society, as well as in fascism which had engulfed the planet by the time Benjamin was writing in his later period. As such the point is to create a true exception, a rupture to attack and negate the norm as it stands regarding fascism (Benjamin, 1940).
Upon writing the text titled The State of Exception, Agamben established the philosophical genealogy of the Schmittian State of Exception in his reading of it and the judicial history of Germany, France, and America about juristic citations that elaborate upon his premise. This groundwork elaborates on who Carl Schmitt is and his importance to the history of the state of exception, with its drastic consequences. An overview of the Schmitt-Benjamin exchange is brought to light alongside the back-and-forth citations and single letters exchanged throughout the years. The text cites the exchanges and cross-citations of the reactionary Jurists Schmitt and Benjamin (Agamben, 2008, 53). Both these writings are essential as they provide a foundation of ideas that eventually gave birth to the destituent power found in these writings (Agamben, 2008, 52- 53). The idea of negating law, and law-annihilating violence is a circumnavigation as well as deactivation of the false idolatry laws of the nation-state when it threatens to consume or harm innocents, this is perfected in Agamben’s notion of destituent power (Agamben, 2014)
Schmitt’s work Political Theology can be read as a response to Benjamin’s anarchic law-annihilating violence (Benjamin, 2021, 54). In Agamben’s eyes, the state of exception is the norm, as seen with the United States Patriot Act, which granted the United States government powers that were never revoked and even expanded slowly as technology grew in power, creeping to grant even more capabilities to the regime in power. Butler’s analysis and nonviolent protest lack the teeth needed to enact change or enforce praxis to support people who are facing oppression, such as Latin immigrants and migrants. Butler’s injection of Jewish ethicists with Benjamin’s divine violence as a way to negate Benjamin’s anarchistic perspective lacks what Agamben’s destituent power can achieve, namely the protection and restoration of dignity to Latin immigrants and migrants. Correspondingly Derrida’s analysis of deconstruction as justice itself is too focused on or ungrounded in its freezing up of praxis, for any form of actual change to occur.
Both these writings are essential as they provide a foundation of ideas that eventually gave birth to the destituent power found in these writings (Agamben, 2008, 52- 53). Schmitt’s state of exception, as well as political theology that all politics is secularized theological concepts, more specifically Benjamin’s paper Critique of Violence. Schmitt’s work Political Theology can be read as a distorted mirror to Benjamin’s anti-authoritarian notion of divine law-annihilating violence (Agamben, 2008, 54). Schmitt’s implementation of the state of exception gave unlimited powers to Germany’s autocrat Hitler, which led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic into the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. The Nazi regime was essentially a state of exception that lasted for a length of time until the regime collapsed, and denazification was in progress post-WWII.
The book The State of Exception by Agamben is essential as it links to Benjamin, once again opposes Schmitt in his last work, the Thesis of the Philosophy of History, where Benjamin writes a Messianic-filled hope for redemption of creation as well as a hope to install a challenge to the norm of the state of exception by bringing out about an actual state of emergency in the fight against fascism (Benjamin, 1940). Benjamin’s concept of negating authoritarianism with the rule of laws is to collapse the idea by flipping God as ruler on its head with God as liberator, with the idea of divine violence, Benjamin’s quote from his text The Critique of Violence is as below,
<quote>
God is opposed to myth in all spheres, so divine violence runs counter to mythic violence. If mythic violence is law-positing, divine violence is law-annihilating; if the former establishes boundaries, the latter boundlessly annihilates them, if mythic violence inculpates and explicates at the same time, divine violence de-expiates if the former is bloody, the latter is in a bloodless manner. (Benjamin, 2021, 57).
</quote>
The state of exception is in Agamben’s eyes essential as it lays the groundwork for a genealogy of the development of the dominant nomos of the earth, which is the camp according to Agamben’s reading of Schmitt’s state of exception. Power is focused on regimes that have spread, as can be seen in America’s authoritarian Patriot Act that gave unlimited wide-reaching powers that were never dissipated. Some of these abuses of powers provided the capacity to conduct drone strikes without trial and imprison individuals without trial in Guantanamo Bay or other “black sites” utilized by the American regime which are hidden across the globe for clandestine activities.
Destituent power has arisen from Agamben’s reading of German-Jewish theorist Benjamin’s work in the Critique of Violence. The development of Benjamin’s work, Critique of Violence into destituent power provides a practical middle ground for many attempts at developing a form of tactics separated from establishing a new regime that will fall back into tyranny as history has shown time and time again.
It is interesting to note that spiritual students of Walter Benjamin’s work have found an imperative to seek out and provide counter-arguments to give examples to the author of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt. This can be seen in Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben as scholars of Benjamin and spiritual students of his. Agamben reads Benjamin through the lens of an anti-authoritarian perspective from Benjamin’s earlier period, all sharing a concern with the resistance of authoritarian states that consume and feed upon the lives of others to enforce the myth of the omnipotence of their false idols. Jacob Taubes was a spiritual student of Walter Benjamin who wrote on the topic of political theology, while also engaging in debate person to person with the Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt. Taubes eventually struck up a correspondence and meeting with Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt after 30 years of refusing to meet with him. This mirrored the exchange of influences that Schmitt and Benjamin had on one another in the early years before Schmitt became a part of the history that initiated the collapse of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany. Taubes engaged in a meeting with Schmitt, where Taubes rebutted Schmitt’s anti-Semitic genocidal authoritarianism with a sort of theocratic anarchism that challenged all claims to authority in political theology and as such, challenged Schmitt’s authoritarianism about his political theological conceptions of which his theories rest (Taubes, 2013 49–58).
Benjamin as well as Agamben and Taubes, each takes seriously Carl Schmitts’ notion that all politics are secularized political concepts, as cited in Schmitt’s book Political Theology, however, they oppose the ends of authoritarianism and Schmitt’s political proclivities (Schmitt, 2008, 1). Benjamin wrote a letter to Schmitt thanking him for his work on political theology influencing his work, as well as his book on dictatorship which influenced Benjamin’s philosophy of art and state which overlapped with Schmitt on some level according to Benjamin himself. (Taubes, 2013, 98).
Agamben was born in 1942; the theorist has made it his life project to resist the premise. The nomos of the world as it exists today is a concentration camp in Agamben’s eyes. Agamben’s work made note of the Schmittian state of exception, which was utilized and repeated by the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration in granting themselves emergency powers that never went away. Much like Hitler’s regime kept the powers to itself, so too has the Presidency of the United States been granted creeping growing powers that branch from the emergency powers of the Patriot Act after September 11th. (Agamben, 2008).
In drawing upon Benjamin’s work Critique of Violence, which itself was posited as the opposition of the Jurist Carl Schmitt. To note, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism in its purest state, likewise the similarities yet inverted of each other is theocratic anarchism, anarchism guided by a belief in Judeo-Christianity as opposed to fascism which worships false idols and anti-Christs in the political, theological as well as spiritual realms.
Agamben’s work on destituent power has influenced many academics and contemporary anarchists, utilizing destituent power as a way out of the paradigms between the totalities of the nation-states and authoritarianism which arises from it and a way to resist neoliberalism, neo-fascism, and other forms of nation-state authoritarianism, that are birthed by the Nation-State.
A form of destituent power is hiding immigrants or housing the persecuted in homes, churches, synagogues, or temples. This pierces a clink in the armor of the Nation-State, deactivating the authoritarianism not by fighting but by deactivating the rule of law by negativing it freely by risking one’s life with imprisonment to preserve the life of the other. This is a microcosm of destituent power, but it can link and formulate a community of individuals who deny and create a chasm in the sovereign escaping notice and being able to joyfully take part in acts of destituent power, by preserving the lives of the others with whom the state of exception looms over. It is essential to make note of the link of the state of exception alongside the notion of democratic backsliding; Just as the Weimar Republic collapsed, authoritarian regimes rose in periods of strife. Walter Benjamin aspired to be a theoretic guerilla fighter in cultural commentary and literary theory concerning resisting authoritarianism in Germany. His engagement with Schmitt in the dueling of citations is critical to note as it may provide an antidote for when democracies are in the process of democratic backsliding. The trick is to arrive and stop the rise before the collapsed democracy becomes transmuted into an authoritative regime.
The seeds of the state of exception can be seen in the United States government post 9/11 with the passage of the Emergency Powers of the Patriot Act, which expanded the rule of powers of the Presidency and the expansion of the rules of Presidency gave rise to the collapse of the rights of the civilians as well as migrants alike. The new loophole of labeling an individual as an enemy combatant allows one to be held outside the norm of the Geneva Convention and held in a black site outside the legal justice system, detained for however long the regime wishes to subject the individual to torture and sexual abuse (Haight, 2024).
The text, To Carl Schmitt, provides further background on Schmitt’s post and during World War II when he was active as a Nazi Jurist as well as an exile post-World War II. This is important as it contains letters exchanged between him and interlocutors. This connects with the topic question as it elaborates upon just who he was and the crisis he created, which affects our epoch to this very day today (Taubes 2013). The State of Exception or State of emergency is a term popularized and made infamous with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazi Germany, and with its unlimited powers given to Hitler, Germany existed as an uninterrupted state of exception for the entirety of its standing until its collapse near the end of World War II (Agamben, 2008).
It is a destituent power of this sort that Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the critique of violence when he tries to define pure violence which could “break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence», an example of which is Sorel’s proletarian general strike. On the breaking of this cycle, he writes at the end of the essay «maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the abolition of State power, a new historical epoch is founded. While a constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power, insofar as it deposes once and for all the law, can open a new historical epoch. (Agamben, 2014).
Agamben’s political project draws from Benjamin's works in doing so Agamben hopes for a resistance of state power as a new opening of epoch following his political tactics of resistance.
Political Theology as a field analyzes the link between modern political concepts as they outgrew theological concepts and the church. The theologian David Bentley Hart is an important figure in Eastern Orthodoxy he published his translation of the Gospels and Letters of the New Testament from Greek to English while avoiding ideological glosses that distort the text as added throughout the ages during the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Hart is a follower of Christ and is known as sympathetic to radical politics influenced by Christ. Hart’s translation of the New Testament Book of Revelation captures the Book of Revelations and political messages in its theological language. One academic perspective is that the Book of Revelation consisted of coded messages using Greek and Hebrew numerology where each letter represents a number that was combined and reverse translated from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which were spelled out when decoded along the lines of Nero, the emperor who was persecuting Jewish Christians, Gentile Christians, and Jewish people during his reign;
Given the way theology bleeds into politics, such as the power of utilizing theological motifs in politics gives power to tyrants, this will continue in waves and cycles. Nero, the archetypal anti-Christ ruler whose rule caused chaos and sadism inspired the writing of the Book of Revelation by the oppressed utilizing nationalism and nation-states. One can view history as a repetition that has been ongoing throughout history since the 1st AD century onwards (Grout, 2024).
Moreover, the dragon gave it his power, throne, and authority. And it was as if one of its heads had been slaughtered, entirely dead, and its deathblow was healed. And all the earth followed after the beast in wonder, And they made obeisance to the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast, and they made obeisance to the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can wage war on him? (Hart, 2023 105).
If the number of the beast refers to Nero; Nero was a historical Emperor who was known for his cruel rule and oppression of Jewish and Gentile Christians. Since the Book of Revelation was written, leaders and rulers have aspired to be a repeat of Nero’s conquest and grow again and again from the stump of the defeated beast. This repetition is not unlike a Greek hydra, cut off one head and another one will sprout from the neck of the freshly decapitated stump. This repetition in the idolatry of man wishing to become or inspired by anti-Christ figures for the draw of power that idolatry brings on the political world stage (Grout, 2024).
This repetition can be seen in Schmitt and Hitler, who also tried to install a genocidal regimen and succeeded. Schmitt may have told himself he was resisting the chaos of what was decadence in his view of the Weimar Republic, the government in place before collapsed with Hitler’s election and with his rise, granted unlimited power by Jurist Schmitt. And as such, gave power to Hitler who aspired to become an anti-Christ figure. Schmitt was not unlike the beast figure in Revelations who gave Hitler, his emergency powers which were never revoked by the entirety of the regime. This cycle of autocrats rising and consuming others to enforce their illusion of legitimacy of power is very important as it continues in cycles. As Benjamin wrote in his text Thesis on the Philosophy of History, if we view history from the eyes of an angel, we would see history as “one single catastrophe” consisting of “wreckage piled upon his feet”, this repeats again and again and again (Benjamin, 1940). The way to prevent a revolution or uprising from collapsing into neo-fascistic or other paradigms of the oppressive nation-states is to practice destitute power intermixed with divine violence when necessity dictates to resist and render the operation of Nation-State’s oppression and genocide inoperable.
Taubes elaborates on Schmitt's perspective as a jurist as well as an arch-authoritarian to keep order to prevent chaos from rising to the top in his eyes, Schmitt uses theological language from St. Paul’s letters from the Bible, specifically Katechon, a term used to describe a retainer of the anti-Christ which is necessary for the coming of the Messiah. The meaning of the “Katechon” meaning “the retainer or “withholder” of the anti-Christ is in Schmitt’s eyes the solution was giving powers to Hitler initiating genocide and waging war across the entire planet by attaching himself to the Katechon he hoped to be of epoch changing importance. (Ullrich, 2021). Unironically, the withholding done by the Katechon withholds the anti-Christ, would hold power over it as it withholds the Messiah, so in a genuine sense, Schmitt was occupying a politically theological paradigm of an anti-Christ adjacent figure, which can further be seen in his giving his power of the unlimited powers to Hitler an anti-Christ figure. To understand the role theology plays is of the utmost importance. The cycle continues in the state of exception, constitutive power, and a washing away of the myth-making false idols in divine violence and formulating communities outside the system with destituent power.
This state of exception sired by Schmitt in the hay-day of the Weimer republic has opened a Pandora’s box, opening a genocide unlike the world has seen in its potential for destruction and reduction of innocent humans into bare life. These subjectivities are then.
Disposed to feed the cannibalistic ideological processes of what is fascism a grotesque object of worship. Understanding how politics and theology are linked and can be found in political theorists, critical theorists, and theologians who all interact or theorize about politics is vital to understanding Schmitt’s work, his cause-and-effect Schmitt giving power to Hitler in emergency powers that were never revoked opening a terrifying technology that can be seen today. For this reason, hope exists for Latin immigrants and migrants, to be a theorist is to dismember the mechanism that enslaves and harms the innocents. Be it in a mixture of divine violence and law negation of destituent power, disrupting the myth of the false idolatry of state. Through this, with destituent power or more head-on resistance with divine violence, both are needed and necessary.
The gap in the literature is applying Agamben’s reading of the Critique of Violence alongside the setup given the premise of Agamben’s reading of the Schmittian State of Exception. Combining these two formats provides a skeleton key to the political epoch of today and the near ongoing future: The discrimination of Latin American immigrants and migrants can best be done by applying destituent power. This can be done by assisting others in teaching language and providing shelter in churches or homes. This can provide a source of development for a gap in the research which would be very fruitful for future academic research, as well as practical applications for resisting authoritarianism. With work and pushing against the cycle of constitutive powers, zones of safety can be created to protect those hunted by regimes, with a particular focus on Latin immigrants and migrants in America’s scope of reach. It is of utmost importance to provide aid to and resistance against the violence of border walls and oversight of abuses of power in the hands of the United States regime. This is akin to other empires be it a form of Neo-Fascist, or neoliberalism itself as it engulfs the planet.
Destituent power is utilized to become ungovernable by reducing the government mechanism to render it inoperable, which is the tactic of destituent power, mixed tactics, protest, evasion, as well as hiding and housing immigrants. Utilizing these tactics to reduce the suffering and indignity of Latin migrants and immigrants, to prevent a populace a reduction of bare life, and to protect the sacredness of life. This new epoch would provide a space to live in resistance to the metaphorical beasts of Nation-States, such as America which feed on immigrants and migrants to feed their illusion of authority and bolster the oppression of borders and lines of division drawn on a map.
The capacity for politics and theology to bleed together, utilizing Benjamin’s divine violence as a resistance tactic combined with Agamben’s notion of destituent power these two toolkits of tactics provide a way to circumnavigate the nation-state with its state of exception which feeds on the weak and discriminates against people by reducing them to bare life, in this case, Latin immigrants at the border as well as Latin migrants. It is by realizing how history repeats with leaders leading nation-states and discriminating against people they deem lesser is an important notion for praxis for Latin immigrant and migrant communities.
*** Citations
<biblio>
Agamben, Giorgio. “No to Bio-Political Tattooing.” 2010 The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/giorgio-agamben-no-to-bio-political-tattooing. Accessed 5 May 2024.
Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. “Part 2 Homo Sacer: Chapter 1 Page 71.” Essay. 1995 In Https://Abahlali.Org/Files/Homo+Sacer.Pdf. Accessed May 2024. abahlali.org. 1995
Agamben, Giorgio. “For a Theory of Destituent Power.” Critical Legal Thinking, April 9, 2014. criticallegalthinking.com.
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Benjamin, Walter, Peter D. Fenves, and Julia Ng. Toward the critique of violence: A critical edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021.
Benjamin, Walter. “On The Concept of History” 1940 www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html. Accessed May 2024. www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.
Benjamin, Walter. Www.Sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.Html. Ened. Accessed May 2024. www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence. Iberian-Connections.Yale.Edu/Wp-Content/Uploads/2020/09/The-Force-of-Nonviolence-An-Ethico-Political-Bind-by-Judith-Butler.Pdf., n.d. iberian-connections.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Force-of-Nonviolence-An-Ethico-Political-Bind-by-Judith-Butler.pdf.
Derrida, Jacques. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Grey Carlson. Https://Fswg.Wordpress.Com/Wp-Content/Uploads/2018/02/Derrida-Force-of-Law.Pdf. Accessed May 2024. fswg.wordpress.com.
Benjamin, Walter. Essay. In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1. 1913–1926 1, 4th ed., 1:226–226, n.d.
Grout, James. Nero as the Antichrist, penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html. Accessed 5 May 2024.
Haight, Elizabeth. “22 Years of Justice Denied.” Amnesty International, March 22, 2024. www.amnesty.org.
Hart, David Bentley. The new testament: A translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
Schmitt, Carl. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008.
Taubes, Jacob. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and reflections. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Ullrich, Calvin Dieter. “Carl Schmitt: Katechon.” Critical Legal Thinking, July 8, 2021. criticallegalthinking.com.
“US Records Show Physical, Sexual Abuse at Border.” Human Rights Watch, August 2, 2023. www.hrw.org.
</biblio>
|
#pubdate 2017-12-02 15:28:05 -0800
#title 1917-1921: The Ukrainian Makhnovist Movement
#author Zabalaza
#SORTtopics anarchism, makhnovism, 1917, russian revolution, Ukraine, 1921 black army, anarcho-communism
#source Retrieved on September 8th, 2006 from https://libcom.org/history/articles/ukrainian-uprising-1917-21
#lang en
#notes <em>From Zabalaza</em>
*** Introduction
<em>The revolution in the Ukraine was a libertarian revolution, and the workers and peasants fought both Tsarist reaction and Bolshevik domination.</em>
Official historians have failed to record the military genius of Nestor Makhno and the heroic deeds of his comrades in the Revolutionary Insurrection Army of the Ukraine. If the Makhnovists, as they became known, are mentioned at all they are referred to as "bandits" or (rather bizarrely) as part of the local right-wing "Kulak" movement. But if truth is the first casualty of war, then the history of war must be a pack of lies.
*** Long live the revolution
In February 1917, there was a Popular uprising in the Russian empire. The Tsar abdicated the principal political parties - most of them Socialist, and began to set up a crude parliamentary democracy, led by the Mensheviks. But Russia was a big, bleak, backward old empire that sprawled across five time zones, communication was bad; the uprisings continued. Radicals were released from prison, dissidents returned from exile, and ordinary people became increasingly aware of the possibilities of communal power. Peasants chased out the landowners, workers took over the factories and many organized themselves democratically through local mass meetings - Soviets.
Freedom was in the air. Much of the population had tasted it or at least had a whiff of it, it seemed to be out there for the taking. There seemed nothing to fear but the fear of freedom. Lenin (of the minority Bolsheviks) was one of the first politicians to sense the mood of the people. He realized that by adopting the popular slogans of the masses - "land to the peasants," "'worker control," and "all power to the soviets," the Bolsheviks, under his leadership could seize power and move to the next phase of the "Marxist" revolution - "The dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In the months that followed, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks that his scam was a runner and they concentrated their efforts on gaining influence in the Soviets and in the army. The October revolution of 1917 was a spontaneous affair, The Bolsheviks simply pushed through the crowd shouting "Stand aside! There's nothing to be afraid of- trust me, I'm a doctor". Freedom was quarantined and strictly rationed. Soon, with the Bolshevik Secret Police, the Cheka quietly overseeing the running of the Soviets and the trade unions, freedom had disappeared.
*** Anarchy in the Ukraine
During the uprisings and reaction that followed the October Revolution, the fertile earth of the Southern Ukraine was trampled under the boots of at least four advancing and retreating armies. Variously at war with each other [and] faced with a strong spirit of independence amongst the local insurgent peasants, none of these forces conquered the region or stayed long enough to set up any form of government.
Official historians have failed to record the military genius of Nestor Makhno and the heroic deeds of his comrades in the Revolutionary Insurrection Army of the Ukraine. If the Makhnovists, as they became known, are mentioned at all they are referred to as "bandits" or (rather bizarrely) as part of the local right-wing "Kulak" movement. But if truth is the first casualty of war, then the history of war must be a pack of lies.
Makhno was of poor peasant stock, an anarchist who had spent many years in prison for "terrorist activities" against the Tsar. He had been released in the February amnesty, and by October was in the thick of it - redistributing the land and resources. The Bolshevik party found it difficult to recruit or organise in the Ukraine, so Lenin decided to use the republic as a bargaining chip with Germany in Russia's withdrawal from the First World War.
Threatened by powerful enemies on all sides, Makhno and thousands of his fellow peasants launched a campaign of armed resistance so wild and imaginative that it became the stuff of instant legend. Theatrical hit-and-run attacks disguised as enemy officers, daring assassinations, robbing the rich, giving to the poor, it all reads like the further adventures of Robin Hood. And Makhno, though only 28, was honoured with the title of Batko ("little father") as he was 5'4".
The Revolutionary Insurrection Army soon became a fully operational volunteer army numbering 50 000, and for three years, the million or so peasants of the Ukraine learned to live in a lawless society under fire. A society based on co-operation with no state power, no politicians, and subsequently no concept of property - in effect, a state of Anarchy.
The Revolutionary Insurrection Army liberated several northern cities from the Ukrainian Nationalists. They threw open the prisons, blew up police stations, wasted the bosses and returned power directly to the workers. They ignored the local Bolsheviks and other socialist authoritarians.
1918 saw Germany's defeat in WW1 and the Bolsheviks turned their attention once more to the Ukraine. They established a political foothold in the northern cities and then moved south with the Red Army, ostensibly to defend the revolution against the Tsarist "Whites" and nationalists.
Fighting under the black flag of Anarchy, the Revolutionary Insurrection Army were renowned for their bravery, moreover they were respected for their honour and revolutionary ethics - they elected their own commanders, were self disciplined and owed their allegiance solely to the insurgent peasants. Their military alliance with the Bolsheviks started interfering with the politics of the local free communes.
Respect for the Revolutionary Insurrection Army's idealism led thousands of Red army soldiers to defect to them. Trotsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for war, soon replaced troops with Chinese and Lettish soldiers who spoke different languages to the Ukraine to prevent fraternising and to counter the defections. Elsewhere in Russia, idealists began to offer their services to Makhno and the movement grew, developing an education and cultural wing publishing newspapers and propaganda.
By 1920, Trotsky's tactics had become ugly. He ordered the assassination of thousands of villagers loyal to the Revolutionary Insurrection Army and he withdrew Red Army troops from the front and allowed the Tsarist Cossacks to overrun the southern Ukraine. The Makhnovists retreated, a growing caravan of their supporters and refugees trailing behind them, until eventually this vast nomadic village was boxed on all sides by a variety of enemy armies. The Red Army waited.
In a brilliant stroke, the Revolutionary Insurrection Army attacked their enemies where they were the strongest, turned their weapons against them, and went on to liberate the southern Ukraine once more. Trotsky once again offered a military deal. Makhno agreed, subject to the release of all Anarchist prisoners through Russia and was once again betrayed. On the 26th November 1920, the Makhnovist commanders were invited to a joint conference - they were met by a firing line squad.
Makhno, ever the romantic hero, eluded capture and continued to fight on, but the Bolsheviks had weakened his grass roots support and the war weary Ukranian peasants were slow to pick up the pieces. Their brief flirtation with freedom was over.
<em>"We have all flirted with freedom and, deep inside all of us have the urge to make it a serious relationship. The Anarchist values of individual freedom, grass roots democracy, and the decentralisation of ALL forms of power are, if anything, more pertinent today then over. See you on the barricades."</em>
-Tony Allen, September, 1990
The remainder of the Revolutionary Insurrection Army managed to fight their way to Romania where many went their own ways into exile In other lands. A few remained to reorganise and fight Ukraine. In response to the bloody and wholesale massacre of fellow Anarchists by Lenin and his bloodthirsty butchers, the Communist Party HQ in Moscow was blown up in September 1921.
|
#title An Anarchist Organising Manual
#author Zabalaza
#LISTtitle Anarchist Organising Manual
#SORTauthors Zabalaza
#SORTtopics community organizing, organizing, organization, how to, manual
#date 2001
#source Zabalaza Books
#lang en
*** Preface
This pamphlet is a collection of essays taken from various sources. The first is taken from the <em>War Resisters League</em> and is available on the <em>Struggle</em> ([[https://struggle.ws/][struggle.ws]]) website. The following three are taken from the organising section of the <em>Workers Solidarity Movement</em>s website. And lastly, the fifth is taken from a book called <em>Rules for Radicals</em> by <em>Saul Alinsky</em>, pp. 126-140. The person who posted the essay to the web had the following to say about it
<quote>
“I'm somewhat ambivalent [unsure] about Alinsky, and if you read his books, you'll see why I say that; but I can't deny that he was a successful organiser, and thus think that anarchists can benefit from some of his ideas.”
</quote>
<right>
<strong>Zabalaza Books<br> 5 May 2001</strong>
</right>
*** Organising Basics
**** **Organising a Local Group**
When organising, local group members should ask themselves: "Are we reaching out to various groups in the community — minority groups, the elderly, trade unions, churches, the campus? Are we seen by other parts of the community as a resource and support group at moments of community crisis?"
<strong>Here are some guidelines to consider in preparing to work for a just and peaceful world:</strong>
- Educate yourself while keeping your mind on possible actions.
- Gather a core group incorporating as many key skills as possible.
- Take local action with a specific focus, within the context of your broader concerns. A "scattershot" approach to organising will likely end in frustration.
- Identify all avenues of access you might have into the political processes of your community.
- Identify and approach all possible allies.
- Target your information to the public. They are more likely to be persuaded than the establishment.
- Take yourself, your group, and your issues seriously. If you lack confidence in your cause it will soon show.
- Present viable alternatives.
- Continuity, persistence, and focus are prime ingredients for success.
**** **How to Start A Local Group**
There are a couple of strategies for forming a local group. The first is to start a group around <em>broad</em> political or social concerns; and then develop specific campaigns and actions that reflect the concerns of your group. A second strategy is to form a group around a <em>specific</em> campaign, target, or injustice... thereby attracting people who are concerned with that issue. They may not have broad political agreement with one another, but many who get involved for the first time may wish to continue working in the same vein with a broader group....
<em><strong>[Note: for anarchists, the first option is the way to go, as single-issue politics scuttles the broader movement]</strong></em>
**** **Recruitment**
The most effective method to convince people to attend a meeting is one-to- one contact. If people are asked directly to come to a meeting, then they are more likely to attend than if they simply hear or read about it without being put on the spot for a commitment. The next best method is to mail a letter or postcard about a meeting, followed by a phone call reminder.
The common "mass methods" of outreach are through leafleting or setting up literature tables at speaking engagements, concerts, meetings, film showings, shopping centres, demonstrations, and so forth. Registration week on college campuses is often the best time for reaching people. Having a petition or sign-up sheet is valuable for follow-up calls and mailings. Placing an ad or announcement for a meeting in a newspaper, on the radio or community billboard, or simply postering key locations can be useful to draw people, but don't rely on these methods to act as more than a reminder.
The key is to be creative and continue to reach out. No group, no matter how stable at one time, will remain that way for long without continually trying to gain new members. This is especially true in communities that are in constant flux, e.g., high schools and colleges.
It is crucial that new people are made to feel welcome. When a stranger comes to a meeting, introduce her or him around and involve the person in regular meeting discussions and post-meeting activities. Also, give the new person a real task to perform, such as making posters, handing out some leaflets, reading a book for a study group, helping to organise a demonstration, or putting to use any skills (s)he may have. You have to gauge what a person
can take, however, so that a new person does not feel overburdened or get frightened off.
The key is to attract five to ten reliable workers, who are likely to stay past the first few meetings. This is your core group, which will be expected to know what is going on with the group at all levels.
**** **The First Meeting**
The first meeting of a group can be crucial to the initial success of that group, so plan carefully. Set a time and place before contacting people. The place should be convenient, the time should be far enough ahead so there are no conflicts and soon enough so people won't forget (that means about a week or two ahead).
Before the meeting, make an agenda — what you want to do, why you want to do it, how you'll go about it, and who will join in. Select a room a bit too small and arrive at least a half-hour in advance. Try to have a beverage and some sort of snack available. Also, display any appropriate literature you might have. Make sure someone will take notes that can be sent to all those who expressed interest but couldn't attend, as well as those who did attend.
Start the meeting with introductions to each other, giving a little more than one's name. Go over the agenda to see if there are any changes or additions, then set a reasonable time limit for the meeting to end (e.g., 2 hours) and stick to it. After there's been group acceptance of the what, why and how, get firm commitments to do something like giving money on a regular basis, giving time, attending a study group session, leafleting, or just about anything. Without a commitment to do something, people have no reason to relate to the local group. Before the meeting breaks up be sure to set a time and place for another meeting. Ask people to bring others who are interested to the next meeting. You may want to set up task forces to meet between meetings.
Meetings are a drag if you don't get anything done. Every time you have a meeting, decide beforehand what you want to accomplish...
<em><strong>First Meeting.</strong></em> Get friends and people politically close to you. Discuss the need for a local group to act on specific issues. Work for common agreement in identifying the issues, and get commitments to work on them through the group.
<em><strong>Second Meeting.</strong></em> Get new people. Summarise previous decisions and determine how the organisation will function.
<em><strong>Third Meeting.</strong></em> Plan an action (picket line, leafleting, etc.) and/or set up a study series. <em><strong>Fourth Meeting.</strong></em> Discuss the action and plan further activities. Plan the involvement of more people.
If your meetings regularly exceed 20 to 30 people, you may want to split into two or more groups. It has been found that the ideal sized group for decision- making is on the order of a dozen or so.
**** **Keeping the Local Alive**
The easy part is getting started. The hard part is keeping things going. <strong>The single most important way to sustain a local group is to be active</strong>. If you don't develop regular projects and actions that people can involve themselves in, they will sense a purposelessness to the group and drop out.
There are any number of actions that can be organised on a regular basis. Leafleting... once a week [is one] example. This ongoing program involves people in a leafleting schedule, and doing the leafleting itself. Study programs are regular activities that will involve people if you have a goal. Create study programs around issues, around politics, around prospective actions.
A newsletter that comes out regularly fills several needs. It's an ongoing activity that involves people. It disseminates information on local activities and is an outlet for political education. It serves as a forum for opinion. It helps tie the membership together.
Second to having a program and doing something, what keeps a group together and helps it grow is a communitarian spirit. A sense of togetherness is really important in this alienating society. If your group is a place where people can feel wanted and part of something, they'll stay and work.
Make your meetings enjoyable rather than dreary. For instance you can have them at the same time as a potluck dinner and at a regular time and place, so that going to them becomes a habit for members. Do some things that are done just for fun. Have parties and picnics or retreats. Make decisions co- operatively. That means really talk things out at your regular potluck dinner meeting. People need to feel involved, and be involved, at all levels of the group. There's a tendency to let one person write the leaflets, one person to do the thinking, and another to do the shit work. While it's true that some people are better at a given task than others, an attempt should be made to rotate the tasks.
**** **Troubleshooting Common Local Group Problems**
<em><strong>Endless meetings with little action.</strong></em> Do anything together, no matter how small (e.g., taking some time during a regular meeting to write a government official or setting up a leafleting event) can give an important feeling of accomplishment while beginning the groundwork for a more substantial project.
<em><strong>Failure to attract, integrate, and hold new members.</strong></em> Brainstorm ideas for outreach and implement these ideas. Make every new person feel welcome and immediately involved.
<em><strong>Leader or key organiser leaves.</strong></em> Though it is often more efficient (in the short run) to have the "best" person do a particular task... it is much better to encourage others to take initiative, responsibility, and leadership in certain areas.
<em><strong>Responsibilities not adequately shared.</strong></em> A process of rotating responsibility or leadership can be regularised to promote a decentralisation of
skills, thus strengthening the movement. Set a time limit (e.g., every 3 months) to rotate convening and facilitating meetings, etc. Schedule special workshops for certain skills (e.g., writing and designing leaflets, speaking, fund raising).
<em><strong>Lack of funding.</strong></em> Establish a pledge system for regular members (R2 a week or R10 a month) just to meet basic operating expenses. Plan a raffle, garage sale, film showing. Brainstorm other ways to get funding.
<em><strong>Group too large.</strong></em> Split the group up, either by geography, interests, or meeting time. This will keep meetings from getting too cumbersome.
<em><strong>Division of interest/lack of unity.</strong></em> If your group is doing too much at once, you may wish to split the group along the lines of the areas of interest, instead of doing many things poorly.
<em><strong>Group changes from founding basis.</strong></em> Often, as new people join a group, it begins to change from its original purpose or its politics may be altered or diluted. Sometimes this is a good process, but sometimes this happens by design (e.g., infiltration and take-over).
To avoid the latter, the group should be founded on an explicit basis. Coalitions are more susceptible to manipulation than groups with clearly identified politics.
<em><strong>Government infiltrators.</strong></em> The best way to deal with informers is to keep everything you do "aboveboard" and honest; that way no exposure would disrupt your activities. Often groups are more disrupted by suspicion of "who's the agent," than by what an agent could do.
*** Setting up an anarchist group
<strong>There are four simple requirements for an effective organisation:</strong>
- people
- politics
- money
- commitment.
**** **People**
People is pretty self-explanatory. To have a group you need more than one person and really at least five before it becomes sustainable. In most places anarchists are not very hard to come across, in most countries at least 1 in a 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 people might consider themselves an anarchist. So even in fairly small towns there are likely to be at least a dozen or so 'anarchists'.
Unfortunately the next step most groups take is to try and set up a group that includes just about everyone that adopts the label. This may seem like the logical thing but problems arise when we look at the next two requirements.
**** **Politics**
For a group to be effective it has to have a clear idea of what it is fighting for, not simply what it is fighting against. And it must agree what the best tactics are to use and that everyone in the group will use follow the agreed tactics. This will be discussed at length later
**** **Money**
In order to function an organisation needs a paper, leaflets, rooms to meet in, money for mailouts and a dozen other items that require lots of the green stuff. Ways of tackling this requirement include
<em><strong>Ignoring it.</strong></em> Which means things only take place if someone is willing to fund them out of their own pocket. This is pretty common but if course results in things not getting done. It also gives the funder undue influence.
<em><strong>Use 'criminal' means to raise money.</strong></em> This sometimes happens but is generally not a good move as sooner or later people get caught and end up in prison or worse. What's more if you come under any sort of police investigation it will rapidly become apparent that your getting funds from some dodgy source that will in itself attract further investigation. It also gives the state a good excuse for a 'non-political' clamp down.
<em><strong>Organise fundraisers.</strong></em> Although I think this can work well for special purchases, like say a printing press if its used for regular bills (printing, rent etc.) it soon turns into a massive drag and waste of resources. You can spend half of the time was discussing jumble sales and disco's which is off-putting.
<em><strong>Membership levy/subs.</strong></em> This is what the WSM uses; members contribute 5% of their gross income on a weekly or monthly basis. A percentage system is fairer then a flat rate as an unemployed member (on 100 dollars a week, the state welfare) pays 5 dollars where as someone working and earning 500 <strong>Con</strong> dollars a week pays at least 25 dollars. This gives us an income to pay for our paper, magazine, leaflets, and rooms and even to subsidise travel to demos for unemployed members. Of course it also has a negative effect on the first requirement, people, as some people may be unwilling to loose the equivalent of a couple of beers a week. Which brings me to the fourth requirement, commitment.
**** <strong>Commitment</strong>
The amount of work you do and the amount of money you’re willing to put in depends on you feeling good about the organisation. It is adversely affected if you feel you are being used, or that other people are not willing to contribute their share. That much is obvious. However its also true that your commitment
will be dependant on how much you agree with what the group is doing/saying and whether the groups seems to be going somewhere or just treading water. It's easy to keep people around when lots of stuff is happening; the difficult thing is the periods in between bursts of activity.
I favour a high commitment oriented group over a 'as many people as possible' one. With time I think the high commitment one can come to involve a lot of people where as I don't think the reverse can be true. Enough background, here's some concrete ideas.
Find another four or five people that are willing to do something serious. You may know this many already if not get an address you can put on leaflets and start leafleting demo's etc. with anarchist stuff. Get a flag or a banner together. Maybe call a public meeting on anarchism and see who turns up.
Once you get your four or five people be prepared to spend a couple of years getting your act together before you start to expand. Agree on a membership levy and conditions of membership. Write down agreed perspectives and strategy for promoting anarchism and getting involved in activity. Start publishing a regular paper arguing these ideas. Sell it through bookshops, campaign meetings and demos. Get involved around struggles and develop respect for your group as good activists and people with good ideas. Don't concentrate on talking to anarchists, concentrate on talking to activists. Find out about the national groups and travel to nearby demos/ conferences. Make a banner you can bring on marches. I know all of this is possible with as few as five people because I spent the period from 1989-91 doing just that here.
Above all you need to be patient. A big problem is the 'revolution next year' syndrome where you hype yourself up to expecting a lot and then get disappointed when it does not materialise. Work out where you are going but be prepared to go there slowly, as I said above its likely to be two years before you get any serious return on your work.
*** Contributing to an anarchist group
Now that you’re a member of an anarchist group it's time to start thinking about what sort of contribution you can make to the group. Don't allow yourself to sit back and blindly follow what others suggest, respect the experience of other activists but recognise that you have a contribution to make in all aspects of the group and also a unique perspective on its functioning.
Is there a theoretical area the group is weak on? If this is the case then perhaps you could research this and explain it to the others through internal educational talks or articles. It's generally impossible for everyone to know
everything so its a good idea for people to specialise a little providing they also explain what they discover to everyone.
Is there a practical skill (e.g. Desk Top Publishing) the group is lacking that you could learn or already know? Can you teach this to others?
Is there a struggle you can get involved in that no one else is currently involved in? Perhaps help is needed in particular struggles the group is already involved in. Perhaps you should get involved in a particular area of struggle to confront you own prejudices or just to find out how things function.
You should start slowly, volunteer for simple stuff first and as you understand how things work (and how much you can sustain) take more things on.
These are practical contributions you can make to build the group and really you should be looking for ways to do one of each. A lot of them are things you can do right from the start.
*** Internal meetings in an anarchist group
One thing central to any functional anarchist group is regular internal meetings. In a healthy organisation almost all decisions will be made at these meetings and there will be a sufficient level of discussion to ensure all those attending have a good idea of the activity and arguments in the different struggles the organisation is involved in. Internal meetings should also have some time given over to education.
**** <strong>Frequency and location</strong>
A new group or one engaged in a lot of activity should meet at least once a week, at the same time and day. As soon as possible you should try and find a regular venue for meeting that is not someone's home. You'll want a space that's private enough for you to have strong disagreements in and where only the members of the group will be while you are using it. In Ireland this means most groups use private rooms in quiet pubs that are glad for the additional customers on quiet nights!
**** <strong>Decision making</strong>
Arguments about how best to reach decisions are fundamental to anarchism. What I have found works best is to allow plenty of time for discussion in the hope of being able to reach a consensus. Only when it becomes obvious that this is not possible should you move to a vote. If time
permits it may make sense to postpone making a contentious decision to the next meeting to give people a chance to think things over (and calm down!).
**** <strong>Conduct of discussion</strong>
Even with a small group it’s normally a very good idea to have someone to chair the meeting. Being able to chair a meeting well is quite difficult, in particular you need to be very careful not to abuse your position in a strong argument. But it’s also important that the same person does not chair every meeting. Perhaps the best way is to have a list of everyone willing to chair and each week take the next person on the list.
<strong>Basically a chair should</strong>
- try and arrange the room so that everyone sits in a circle and make sure you are seated where you can see everyone
- if there are new people there start off by going around the circle and getting everyone to say their name
- at the start of the meeting ask people for items for an agenda and then stick to that agenda. If people start speaking on topics rather then the one under discussion interrupt them politely and tell them you are adding that item to the agenda
- ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to speak
i. generally it's a good idea to ask people to put up their hand when they want to speak and then to take a list of people waiting. In most situations its a very good idea to put people who have not yet spoken to the top of this que.
i. if the discussion is just taking place between a few people and in particular if it is just between two it is often a good idea to suggest going around the circle and giving everyone a chance to speak
i. pay attention - people who are less confident about speaking will often indicate that they want to speak in minor way (eg briefly half put up their hand). A good chair will spot this and encourage them to speak
i. control yourself - while the chair can speak in debates you should try and speak the least and <strong>always</strong> put yourself at the end of the queue. There is nothing worse then a chair who feels they are entitled to comment after every single speaker. Be very strict with yourself
i. don't allow people speaking to insult other people in the room. If
they do interrupt and make it clear that this is not acceptable
- if the discussion is going around in circles with the same people making the same points again and again you should point this out and ask if people want to continue the discussion or
1. Move to a vote
2. Postpone the discussion to later in the meeting or the next meeting if there is any disagreement on what to do you should call an immediate hand vote on whether or not to continue the discussion and then on what to do with the discussion.
- if it appears a decision has been reached (i.e. everyone is agreeing) then write down what you think the decision is then read this back to the meeting.
- if it appears a vote is necessary then make sure the exact question to be voted on is written down and then read this question back to the meeting before taking the vote. This is very important in case there is later disagreement over what exactly was decided.
**** <strong>Agenda</strong>
If its know who is chairing the meeting in advance it may be a good idea for that person to start the meeting with a suggested agenda. In any case the agenda should almost always include
- minutes of last meeting
- correspondence to be dealt with
- decisions that have to be made
- other issues people want discussed
- AOB at the end for minor things people want to mention or things they have 'just remembered'
If there is any disagreement over the order of the agenda then this should be quickly discussed and voted on at the start of the meeting. If the chair thinks there is a lot to get through it may make sense to set a maximum amount of time that can be spent discussing particular topics right at the start of the meeting.
**** <strong>Minutes</strong>
Someone should be responsible every week for keeping minutes of the meeting and preparing these to be read at or distributed before the next meeting. Minutes need not be very detailed (you don't need to write down what everyone says). They should include
- a list of who attended the meeting
- a list of topics discussed
- a list of decisions reached for each topic, this should be a copy of what the chair reads out
- a list of who has volunteered to do what
- a list of items to be discussed at the next meeting
**** <strong>Further comments</strong>
It is important that meetings start on time and end before or at the time they are advertised to end at. Certainly they should end once they have reached the advertised time and somebody needs to leave.
*** Mass Organising Tactics
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have. Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.
For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organised a vast, mass-based people's organisation, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organisation is small in numbers, then... conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamour that will make the listener believe that your organisation numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organisation is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.
<strong>Always remember the first rule of power tactics:</strong>
<em>Power is not only what you have but also what the enemy thinks you have.</em>
The second rule is: <em>Never go outside the experience of your people.</em> When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: <em>Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the</em> <em>enemy</em>. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: <em>Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.</em> You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: <em>Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.</em> It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: <em>A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.</em> If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule is: <em>A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.</em> man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment...
The eighth rule: <em>Keep the pressure on,</em> with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: <em>The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.</em>
The tenth rule: <em>The major premise for tactics is the development of</em> <em>operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.</em>
The eleventh rule is: <em>If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter side;</em> this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative...
The twelfth rule: <em>The price of a successful attack is a constructive</em> <em>alternative.</em> You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right--we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."
The thirteenth rule: <em>Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it.</em>
<br>
In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organiser should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck....
It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target....
One of the criteria in picking your target is the target's vulnerability - where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, the target can always say, "Why do you centre on me when there are others to blame as well?" When you "freeze the target," you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.
Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.
The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community's segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.
<strong>[He says your target should be a</strong> <em><strong>person</strong></em> <strong>in the organisation you are</strong> <strong>opposing; a face within the opposition for you to focus on; it must be</strong> <strong>someone with power within the organisation, like the CEO, school</strong> <strong>superintendent, governor, or something like that.]</strong>
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#title Constitution of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF)
#subtitle As adopted at Johannesburg, 1 December 2007
#author Zabalaza
#SORTtopics Zabalaza, constitution, anarcho-communism, platform
#date 1 December 2007
#source Retrieved on 5<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[http://anarkismo.net/article/7000][anarkismo.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-05T14:06:47
<strong>The ZACF defines Anarchism as:</strong>
<quote>
“…society organised without authority, meaning by authority the power to impose one’s own will ... authority not only is not necessary for social organisation but, far from benefiting it, lives on it parasitically, hampers its development, and uses its advantages for the special benefit of a particular class which exploits and oppresses the others”.
Errico Malatesta
<br>
<em>L’Agitazione</em> June 4, 1897
</quote>
<strong>And Communism as:</strong>
<quote>
“Common possession of the necessaries for production imply[ing] the common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organisation of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned, and when everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of [their] capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of [their] needs.”
Piotr Kropotkin
<br>
<em>Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles</em>, 1887
*** PREAMBLE
We, the working class, produce the world’s wealth. We ought to enjoy the benefits.
We want to abolish the system of capitalism that places wealth and power in the hands of a few, and replace it with workers self-management and socialism. We do not mean the lie called ‘socialism’ practised in Russia, China, and other police states — the system in those countries was/is no more than another form of capitalism — state capitalism.
We stand for a new society where there will be no bosses or bureaucrats. A society that will be run in a truly democratic way by working people, through federations of community and workplace committees. We want to abolish authoritarian relationships and replace them with control from the bottom up — not the top down.
All the industries, all the means of production and distribution will be commonly owned, and placed under the management of those working in them. Production will be co-ordinated, organised and planned by the federation of elected and recallable workplace and community committees, not for profit but to meet our needs. The guiding principle will be “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.
We are opposed to all coercive authority; we believe that the only limit on the freedom of the individual is that their freedom does not interfere with the freedom of others.
We do not ask to be made rulers nor do we intend to seize power “on behalf of the working class”. Instead, we hold that socialism can only be created by the mass of ordinary people. Anything less is bound to lead to no more than replacing one set of bosses with another.
We are opposed to the state because it is not neutral, it cannot be made to serve our interests. The structures of the state are only necessary when a minority seeks to rule over the majority. We can create our own structures, which will be open and democratic, to ensure the efficient running of everyday life.
We are proud to be part of the tradition of libertarian socialism, of anarchism. The anarchist movement has taken root in the working class of many countries because it serves our interests — not the interests of the power seekers and professional politicians.
In short we fight for the immediate needs and interests of our class under the existing set up, while seeking to encourage the necessary understanding and activity to overthrow capitalism and its state, and lead to the birth of a free and equal (anarchist) society.
*** 1) NAME:
The name of the organisation is the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), “zabalaza” being a proud indigenous word meaning “struggle” in Zulu and Xhosa. The short name of the ZACF is Zabalaza. The ZACF works towards the fulfilment of its aims and principles throughout the Southern African region.
*** 2) SYMBOL:
The symbol of the ZACF is a silhouette of Africa divided diagonally into the anarchist black and red, with a black star in the red half over southern Africa and a raised fist straining against its chains, encircled by the name ZABALAZA ANARCHIST COMMUNIST FRONT.
*** 3) PRINCIPLES:
The ZACF is united on revolutionary anarchist principles. This means:
a. internally: the ZACF functions according to the principles of direct democracy, recallable, mandated and rotatable delegates, real, functional equality among members, and horizontal federalism among all its members;
b. externally: the ZACF has a commitment to workers’ self-management, direct action, and to libertarian revolutionary anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-sexism, anti-racism, internationalism and anti-statism. The ZACF supports the struggles of the progressive and radical social movements that articulate the interests and demands of the workers, the poor and the peasantry, (“the popular classes”), including the trade unions. Our involvement with these movements is non-sectarian and we recognise that they frequently do not share the same principles as ourselves, but we fight within them to win them over to our principles. In terms of the Latin American anarchist movement, this is the ZACF’s role as a “specific anarchist organisation” and is what anarchist-communists call organisational dualism and social insertion;
c. globally: the ZACF is inspired by the proud fighting tradition of over a century of mass anarchist militancy, within Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australasia, North America and Europe. The ZACF is inspired by the libertarian federal tradition of the First International, by the autonomous councils of the Parisian and Macedonian Communes and of the original Russian Soviets, by the mass-based anarcho-syndicalist tradition of the International Workers’ Association, and by the anarchist revolutionary tradition of the Mexican, Russian, Ukrainian, Manchurian, Spanish and Cuban Revolutions. These traditions continue today in the International Libertarian Solidarity network and in the anarchist-influenced global mass anti-capitalist struggles of the new millennium;
d. regionally: the ZACF is inspired by the anarchist tradition of the Socialist Club, founded in South Africa by Henry Glasse in 1900, and of the Revolutionary League founded in Mozambique by Jose Estevam in the early 1900s, of the International Socialist League, founded in South Africa in 1915, of the Industrial Socialist League, founded in 1918, and of the anti-parliamentary Communist Party of South Africa, founded in 1920 (not to be confused with the reformist CPSA — Communist International, founded the following year by socialists and Marxists and forerunner of today’s SACP). The ZACF also recalls the revolutionary syndicalist tradition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s South African section, founded in 1910, of the anarcho-syndicalist union currents in Mozambique in the 1920s which were allied to the General Confederation of Labour in Portugal, of the Industrial Workers of Africa and associated unions founded in South Africa between 1917 and 1919 by militants of all “races” such as Thomas William “Bill” Thibedi, Bernard Sigamoney, Henry Kraai, S.P. Bunting and Andrew Dunbar. The ZACF stands proudly in the fighting tradition of the rank-and-file workers’ groups, people’s civics, street committees, and community defence groups of the popular struggle in the 1970s and 1980s against apartheid.<br>We locate ourselves firmly within the left-wing revolutionary socialist tradition and are implacably opposed to the parties and organisations of capital and the state, whether left-wing, liberal, centrist, conservative or right-wing. Instead of the authoritarian, multi-class, elite vanguardist “National Democratic Revolution” of the African National Congress / South African Communist Party, the South West African People’s Organisation, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front, and Mozambique Liberation Front, the ZACF stands for a Social Revolution against the parasitic class, by a front of oppressed classes across all borders.
e. operationally: the ZACF is based on:
- Theoretical Unity: strict homogeneity in the overall positions held by the ZACF, changed in the light of ongoing analysis of the struggle, thereby eliminating the danger of fixed positions and increasing the effectiveness of action.
- Tactical unity or the collective method of action: the ZACF seeks tactical unity through militant implementation of the overall policy in campaigns and projects decided at Congress.
- Collective responsibility: in respect of external expression, each member is answerable for the ZACF’s line. The ZACF is also answerable for and claims responsibility for the positions and actions adopted by each of its members, provided that these have been mandated by the ZACF.
- Federalism: the ZACF is only the expression of its collective membership – its militants being the driving force behind the whole organisation. The ZACF unites the militants around the principles of common principles, mutual aid and unity-in-struggle. However, the militants may not adopt positions that go against the ZACF’s line.
- These being the core principles of the “Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists” drawn up in 1927 by Nestor Makhno, Piotr Arshinov, Ida Mett and other anarchist guerrilla veterans of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine. We are inspired by the “Platform” yet do not accept it uncritically.<br>As well as:
- Comradely ethic: within the ZACF, the members practice the ethical conception of libertarian communism. Comradely relations – based on trust, esteem and respect – link its militants as a body. As well as “ongoing fraternal monitoring of each by all” (Mikhail Bakunin) to guard against possible authoritarian tendencies developing.
*** 4) STRUCTURE:
The ZACF is a horizontal unitary organisation of anarchist-communist militants, federated together in common revolutionary anarchist cause and joining together in common campaigns. The ZACF is more than simply a collection of militants, however: it is a united front of all its militants, fighting a common struggle and united by common ideals.
Their revolutionary activities are determined by the militants themselves, but in consultation with the rest of the ZACF to ensure they complement the ZACF’s principles and objectives. Each individual militant retains their autonomy of action, so long as it is not deemed by a 2/3 majority of the ZACF to be in contradiction of the ZACF’s aims or anarchist principles. That the ZACF decide at its annual Congresses on joint projects and that it maintain constant contact with all members to ensure efficient co-ordination of all aims.
**** a) Congress:
The ZACF will hold a Congress at least once a year, which will set the entire ZACF strategy for the forthcoming year. Congress is the supreme decision-making structure of the ZACF. The decision-making process of Congress is as follows:
1. The quorum for Congress is 50% of the entire membership of the ZACF, including at least two mandated secretaries;
2. A member may delegate another member to cast a proxy vote on their behalf in relation to a specific issue on the agenda. Such proxies must be submitted in writing to the Regional Secretary before Congress.
3. Congress may authorise non-members who are sympathetic to the ZACF to attend all or some of its sessions, and may grant them speaking rights but not voting rights;
4. All Working Groups and secretaries are to submit either written or verbal reports on all aspects of their projects and activities to Congress;
5. Decision-making must as far as possible be by consensus, failing which, by majority vote, a majority being 51% of all members present.
6. Amendments to the Constitution, or a decision by the ZACF that a member’s work is not in accord with the principles of the ZACF, shall require the support of 2/3 of the members present. All proposals for constitutional amendments must be circulated in the Internal Bulletin at least one month prior to the Congress that is to decide on them. Proxy votes on constitutional amendments must be verified by the absent member in writing to the Regional Secretary before Congress.
7. A 51% majority of the ZACF can call an Emergency Congress within a month if deemed necessary. The quorum for an Emergency Congress is 51% of the membership of the ZACF; but no Emergency Congress shall make any amendment to the Constitution.
8. The full minutes of the proceedings of each Congress will be published and disseminated internally within a month of Congress.
9. Congress elects as office-bearers a Regional Secretary and an International Secretary. It may create and fill other positions as it sees fit. Both secretaries, plus any other secretaries elected by Congress are subject to recall at any time by a poll of the entire membership of the ZACF called by any member. In the event of the office-bearers recalling a secretary, it shall appoint a replacement, subject to approval by the membership of the ZACF within one month. In the event of the membership recalling a secretary, the members shall elect a replacement within one month.
10. Congress can create Working Groups to work on specific tasks relating to the ZACF. Working Groups may develop draft policies to present to Congress but may not alter or delete any existing policy without the agreement of Congress. Any interested member may join any Working Group. Each Working Group shall deliver a report to Congress and shall circulate reports of its activities internally between Congresses.
11. Congress shall determine membership dues, having due regard to the financial circumstances of members.
**** b) The office-bearers (OB):
The office-bearers of the ZACF constitute a committee that meets at least once a month between Congresses. Its task is the day-to-day running of the ZACF and the co-ordination of all its militants, campaigns and projects. It has no executive authority to alter or exceed the mandates conferred on it by Congress. OB meetings are open to all members. Any decision of the OB can be overturned by Congress or an immediate poll of members which adheres to the same quorum and voting rules as Congress. An agenda will be circulated prior to all OB meetings.
The OB comprises the following:
1. The Regional Secretary whose duties are: to be the first spokesperson for the organisation domestically; to establish and maintain contact with similar individuals and organisations regionally in southern Africa, and to send them publications and news of our activities; to keep a record of all regional correspondence; to co-ordinate the production of any internal bulletins; and to report to Congress.
2. The International Secretary whose duties are: to be the first spokesperson for the organisation abroad; to establish and maintain contact with similar individuals and organisations in the rest of Africa and further abroad, and to send them our publications and news of our activities; to keep a record of all international correspondence; to organise the writing of articles when requested by contacts abroad; and to report to Congress.
3. Any other secretary or secretaries elected by Congress.
*** 5) ZACF MEMBERSHIP:
a. Membership of the ZACF is restricted to reliable, convinced anarchist-communist militants who agree to abide by its principles and constitution, work and argue for its policies in their public activity, and pay such dues as shall be determined by the Congress.
b. Members are responsible to their fellow militants, and to Congress for their activities.
c. Working Groups may suspend the membership of any militant, all members to be immediately informed of such suspension. If the Working Group does not subsequently lift the suspension, the member concerned may appeal directly to the OB to call an immediate poll of all members or to the next Congress, which will decide whether that person is to retain membership.<br>Some specific grounds for suspension are:
1. spying for the oppressors and the exploiters;
2. failure to be active to the extent agreed by the member without a very good explanation;
3. opposing the ZACF, its aims and principles, or the working class struggle;
4. acting in any way contrary to the ZACF’s aims and principles, including standing for election to any state or government office;
5. accepting a position within a corporation where the member has the power to hire or fire; or
6. non-payment of dues without a very good explanation.
d. Membership is by invitation only, and by consensus of all members. Membership is on an individual basis only.
e. All ZACF members are required to be active both in ZACF’s work and actions in the progressive and radical social movements to the extent personally possible, as well as active within their trade union where this is viable. Every member of the ZACF undertakes to be active to the extent of their abilities, with due regard to their other commitments, including work and domestic commitments.
f. Members of the ZACF shall establish Red and Black Forums (RBFs) for purposes of theoretical training, revolutionary propaganda and action in struggle. These Forums shall invite non-members of the ZACF who have some degree of sympathy with the aims and principles of the ZACF. Any individual participant in an RBF who shows full theoretical and practical commitment to the ZACF’s aims and principles may be considered for membership of the ZACF. Such membership shall be offered to an individual militant after they have proven themselves ideologically and by their actions to the satisfaction of the ZACF membership.
g. Members may also establish Working Groups based on their personal areas of interest – in addition to any Working Groups created by Congress – provided such Working Groups’ creation are agreed to by the ZACF’s membership.
h. Membership is not open to employers at any level or to management functionaries of any tier of government.
*** 6) PUBLICATIONS:
The official publications of the ZACF, to which all members are encouraged to contribute to (in the case of the journal) and distribute, are:
a. “Zabalaza: a Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism”, currently issued twice a year. “Zabalaza” (meaning Struggle) is the theoretical journal of the ZACF and shall contain ideological and analytical articles of benefit to the anarchist-communist movement’s understanding of the struggle. Its articles will be distributed abroad, both on the Internet and by mail. It promotes the official line of the ZACF, in other words, the majority’s line as determined by Congress;
b. The “Zabalaza” website at www.zabalaza.net/ . The website is not merely the mouthpiece of the ZACF, but acts as a general Internet portal to anarchist news, analysis and views relating to the African continent specifically and to the global South more broadly. It also hosts Zabalaza Books’ collection of pamphlets and other materials, and provides links to other online anarchist-communist resources; and
c. Any other publications as may be authorised by Congress, or as may be approved by the OB.
The ZACF will work towards translating this Constitution and its publications into the commonly spoken languages of all its members.
*** 7) MINORITY FACTION RIGHTS:
a. The ZACF’s official strategy, policy and line-of-march, is that agreed at Congress.
b. Minority factions have the right to have their views debated and published internally, but are expected to follow the majority ZACF strategies and tactics in their public activities.
*** 8) EXTERNAL RELATIONS:
The ZACF will maintain a regular exchange of information, analysis, news and views with the global anarchist community. It will form bilateral and multilateral relations with anarchist-communist, Platformist, especifista and other anarchist and libertarian socialist organisations with a view to strengthening global autonomous networking by the oppressed popular classes. Congress is empowered to determine the international and regional affiliations of the ZACF.
|
#title Freedom for All
#subtitle An Introduction to Anarchism
#author Zabalaza
#SORTauthors Lucien van der Walt
#SORTtopics Freedom, introduction, introductory
#date 2008
#source [[https://zabalazabooks.net/2019/03/08/freedom-for-all-an-introduction-to-anarchism/][zabalazabooks.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-18T16:19:08
#notes Over the last few years, the resurgence of revolutionary anarchism has caught the attention of the world. The role of the anarchists in the anti–globalisation movement, at Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa, La Paz, and Porto Allegre – where we have been in the forefront of militant resistance – has been widely reported in the media. The New York Times recently proclaimed “Anarchism: the idea that refuses to die,” whilst SAPA, not to be outdone, blamed the anarchist “black bloc” for the disruption of the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. But what is the anarchist movement? What does it want? Where is it going? And how can you get involved?
<quote>
Freedom for all, and a natural respect for that freedom. Such are the essential conditions of international solidarity.
<strong>– Bakunin</strong>
</quote>
*** Foreword
Over the last few years, the resurgence of revolutionary anarchism has caught the attention of the world.
The role of the anarchists in the anti–globalisation movement, at Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa, La Paz, and Porto Allegre – where we have been in the forefront of militant resistance – has been widely reported in the media.
The New York Times recently proclaimed “Anarchism: the idea that refuses to die,” whilst SAPA, not to be outdone, blamed the anarchist “black bloc” for the disruption of the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.
But what is the anarchist movement? What does it want? Where is it going? And how can you get involved?
This South African pamphlet, based on the excellent work of Black Panther–turned–Anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, answers these questions.
Anarchism is not about violence or chaos.
Anarchists are libertarian socialists: we want the abolition of the capitalist system that systematically impoverishes billions, that crushes individual freedom, that twists and destroys human lives in the interests of profit for the few, that threatens the future of life itself through an ever–increasing ecological crisis.
But this is not enough. The problem of capitalism is not simply a problem of poverty. It is a problem of social freedom.
Capitalism does not just impoverish economically. It also destroys communities, solidarity, freedom, equality and human dignity.
It produces and reproduces horrific forms of social and economic oppression, such as racism and discrimination against women.
Capitalism and the state control us through undemocratic workplaces, schools, and local governments, through structures that serve to systematically disempower ordinary people, enslaving us to a profit system that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a ruling class of big capitalists and politicians. They cannot benefit the majority because all governments and all corporations serve the ruling class first and foremost, and act as organs of repression against ordinary people.
For this reason, we believe in the need to replace capitalist governments with confederations of workplace and community councils based on direct democracy, participation, immediate recallability and strict mandates. These structures will allow self–management throughout our lives as opposed to the fraud of parliamentary democracy that does nothing but provide jobs for ambitious politicians and sell–outs.
It is only the working class and peasantry – organised within and across countries, across race, national and gender lines on an anti–capitalist, anti–statist, anti–racist, anti–imperialist and anti–sexist programme – that can crush capitalism and their governments.
Through the use of direct action – not elections or lobbying, not praying to leaders – rooted in mass organisations based on internal democracy – we can begin to challenge the capitalist “order” and build organs of mass counter power that can supplant capitalism, burying it so that we and our children can begin to live a decent life, as human beings. We must organise on an anti–authoritarian basis, as opposed to the capitalist model of organisation: sitting passively and taking orders from leaders, bosses and central committees.
Only the working class can free the working class. By ‘working class’ we do not just mean blue-collar workers: all people who work for others for wages and lack power are workers, no matter their jobs, and includes workers’ families, the unemployed and, more generally, the poor. Dictatorship and authoritarianism are never progressive, and have, time and again, destroyed working class movements. Authoritarian politics –including mainstream Marxism– has consistently throttled the self–initiative and self–organisation of the masses in favour of a small vanguard of incompetent leaders. And these leaders have, at best, only succeeded in establishing new dictatorships and new forms of capitalism, as happened in the Soviet Union and as continues to happen today in Cuba and China.
We need an alternative to capitalism. Sweatshops, casual labour, racism, imperialist war, poverty, massive unemployment, privatisation, child prostitution on the streets, growing police brutality, neo–liberalism. These are the face of capitalism in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.
This pamphlet, and the ideas it expresses so clearly, point to this alternative.
<em>Read it, study it, and get involved!</em>
<strong>Lucien van der Walt</strong>
<em><strong>Note:</strong> A dictionary has been provided on the last pages. See numbers for direct reference.</em>
*** Introduction
<quote>
“Anarchy is society organised without authority, meaning by authority the power to impose one’s own will… authority not only is not necessary for social organisation but, far from benefiting it, lives on it parasitically, hampers its development, and uses its advantages for the special benefit of a particular class which exploits and oppresses the others”.
<strong>Errico Malatesta</strong>
<br>
<em>l’Agitazione</em>, June 4, 1897
</quote>
Anarchists and Anarchism have historically been misrepresented to the world. The popular idea of an Anarchist as an uncontrollably emotional, violent person who is only interested in destruction for its own sake, and who is opposed to all forms of organisation, still exists to this day. Further, the mistaken belief that Anarchy is chaos and confusion, a reign of rape, murder and mindlessness – total disorder and insanity – is widely believed by the general public.
This impression is still widely believed because people from all political groups have consciously been promoting this lie for years. All who strive to oppress and exploit the working class, and gain power for themselves, whether they come from the Right or the Left, will always be threatened by Anarchism. This is because Anarchists hold that all authority and coercion [1] must be struggled against. In fact, we want to get rid of the greatest cause of violence throughout history – governments. To Anarchists, a Capitalist democratic government is no better than a fascist or Communist regime, because the ruling class only differs in the amount of violence they authorise their police and army to use and the degree of rights they will allow, if any. Through war, police repression, social neglect, and political repression, millions of people have been killed by governments, whether trying to defend or overthrow a government. Anarchists want to end this slaughter, and build a society based on peace and freedom.
*** What is Anarchism?
Anarchism is free or Libertarian Socialism. Anarchists are opposed to government (the people who make the laws), the State (the people who impose the laws) and Capitalists (the people who the laws are made for). Therefore, simply speaking, Anarchism is a no–government form of Socialism.
<quote>
“In common with all Socialists, the Anarchists hold that the private ownership of land, capital and machinery has had its time; that it is condemned to disappear, and that all requisites for production must and will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by the producers of wealth.”
<strong>Peter Kropotkin</strong>
</quote>
Anarchism is based upon the class struggle, but it does not take the same view of the class struggle as the Marxists do. For instance, it does not take the view that only the industrial workers can achieve Socialism, and that the victory of these workers, led by a communist working class party, represents the final victory over Capitalism. Nor do we accept the idea of a Workers’ State. We believe that only the Working Class can liberate society and that we should manage industrial and economic production and distribution through, freely elected, worker and community committee’s, and farm co–operatives, rather than with the interference of a party or government.
Anarchists are social revolutionaries, and feel that the Social Revolution is the process through which a free society will be achieved. Self–management will be established in all areas of social life. By their own initiative, individuals will put into action their own management of social life through voluntary associations. They will refuse to surrender their self–direction to the State, political parties, or vanguard [2] sects [3] since each of these only establish or re–establish domination. Anarchists believe the State and capitalist authority will be ended by the means of direct action; wildcat strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, sabotage, and armed insurrection.[4] We recognise our goals cannot be separated from the means we use to achieve them. Therefore our practice and the associations we create must and will reflect the society we seek.
IT IS CRUCIAL THAT MORE ATTENTION IS PAID TO THE AREA OF ECONOMIC [5] ORGANISATION; SINCE IT IS HERE THAT THE INTERESTS OF EVERYONE MEET. Under Capitalism, we all have to sell our labour to survive and to feed ourselves and our families. But after an Anarchist social revolution, the wage system and the institution of private and state property will be abolished [6] and replaced with the production and distribution of goods according to the principle of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. Voluntary associations of producers and consumers will take common possession of the means of production and distribution and allow the free use of all resources to any voluntary group, as long as this does not deprive others or does not mean using wage labour. These associations could be food and housing co–operatives, co–operative factories, community run schools, hospitals, recreation facilities, and other important social services. These associations will federate with each other to achieve their common goals on both a regional and functional basis.
This federalism as a concept is a form of social organisation in which self–determining groups freely agree to co–ordinate their activities. The only social system that can possibly meet all the different needs of society, while still promoting solidarity on the widest scale, is one that allows people to freely associate on the basis of common needs and interests. Federalism, which emphasises autonomy and de–centralisation, builds solidarity and encourages groups’ efforts to be as self–sufficient as possible. Groups can then be expected to co–operate as long as they gain mutual benefit. Contrary to the Capitalist legal system and its contracts, if such benefits are not felt to be mutual in an anarchist society, any group will have the freedom to dis–associate. In this manner a flexible and self–regulating social organism [7] will be created, always ready to meet new needs by new organisations and adjustments. Federalism is not a type of Anarchism, but it is an essential part of Anarchism. It is the joining of groups and people for political and economic survival and livelihood.
We have an enormous job ahead of us, and we must be able to work together for the benefit of the idea. The Italian Anarchist, Errico Malatesta, said it best when he wrote:
<quote>
“Our task is that of pushing the ‘people’ to demand and to seize all the freedom they can to make themselves responsible for their own needs without waiting for their orders from any kind of authority. Our task is that of demonstrating the uselessness and harmfulness of the government, or provoking and encouraging by propaganda and action all kinds of individual and collective initiatives…. After the revolution, Anarchists will have the special mission of being the vigilant custodians of freedom, against the aspirants to power and possible tyranny of the majority.”
</quote>
So, this is the job of the federation, but it does not end with the success of the revolution. There is much construction work to be done, and the revolution must be defended. To fulfil our tasks, we must have our own organisations. We must organise the post–revolutionary society, and this is why we federate ourselves. In a modern independent society, the principle of Federalism must be extended to all humanity. The network of voluntary associations, the Commune, will know no borders. It will be the size of the city, region or inter–region or a society much larger than the nation–state under Capitalism. It could be a mass–commune, which will include the entire world’s peoples in a number of continental Anarchist federations, say Africa, North America, or the Caribbean. Truly this would be a new world – not a United Nations or One World government, but a united Humanity.
Our opposition if formidable.[8] Each of us has been taught to believe in the need for government, in the absolute necessity of experts, in taking orders, in authority. For some of us it is all we know. But when we do learn to believe in ourselves and when we decide that we can create a society based on free, caring individuals, then that tendency [9] which is buried within us will become the conscious choice of freedom–loving people. As Anarchists, we see our job as strengthening that tendency, and show that there is no democracy or freedom under government – whether in South Africa, the United States, China or Russia. Anarchists believe in direct democracy by the people as the only kind of freedom and self–rule.
Anarchism is an evolving ideal in which many individuals and social movements have influence. Women’s Liberation, Racial Equality, Gay rights, the ecology movement, and others are all additions to the awareness of Anarchism, and this influence has helped in the advancement of Anarchism as a social force in modern society. These influences ensure that the social revolution we all want will be as all–inclusive and democratic as possible, and that all will be fully liberated – not just rich, straight, white males.
*** Anarchist vs. Marxist Thought on Organisation of Society
Historically, there have been three major forms of socialism: Free or Libertarian Socialism (Anarchism), Authoritarian Socialism (Marxist Communism), and Democratic Socialism (electoral social democracy). The non–Anarchist Left has echoed the Capitalist’s portrayal of Anarchism as an ideology [10] of chaos and lunacy. But Anarchism has nothing in common with this image. It is false and made up by its ideological opponents in the various schools of Marxism.
It is very difficult for the Marxists to make an objective criticism of Anarchism as such, because by its nature it undermines all the ideas that the Marxists believe. If Marxism and Leninism, its variant which emerged during the Russian revolution, is held out to be the working class philosophy and the workers cannot owe their liberation to anyone but the Communist Party, it is very hard to go back on it and say that the working class is not yet ready to get rid of authority over it. Lenin came up with the idea of a transitional State, which would “wither away” over time, to go along with Marx’s “dictatorship or the proletariat.” We expose this line as counter–revolutionary and sheer power–grabbing, and over 75 years of Marxist practice has proven us right. These so–called Socialist States produced by Marxist doctrine have only produced new police states, where workers have no rights, and a new ruling class of technocrats [11] and party politicians have emerged, and the class differences between those the State favoured over those it didn’t created widespread poverty among the masses and another class struggle. But instead of meeting such criticisms head on, they have concentrated their attacks not on the doctrine of Anarchism, but on particular Anarchist historical figures, especially Bakunin, an ideological opponent of Marx in the First International of Socialist movements in the last century.
Anarchists are social revolutionaries who seek a stateless, classless, voluntary, co–operative federation of decentralised communes based upon social ownership, individual liberty and autonomous self–management of social and economic life.
Anarchists differ with the Marxists in many areas, but especially in organisation building and structure.
We differ from the authoritarian socialists in three basic ways: we reject the Marxist notions of the vanguard party, democratic centralism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we have alternatives for each of them. The problem is that almost the entire Left, including some Anarchists, is completely unaware of Anarchism’s easily understood, and formed, structural alternatives of the catalyst group, Anarchist consensus, and the mass commune.
The Anarchist alternative to the vanguard party is the catalyst group. The catalyst group is merely an Anarchist federation of affinity (friendship) groups (cells) in action. This catalyst or revolutionary anarchist federation could meet on a regular basis or only when necessary, depending on the wishes of the membership and the urgency of social conditions. It would be made up of immediately recallable delegates from each affinity group, with full voting rights, privileges, and responsibilities. It would set both policies and future actions to be performed. It would produce both anarchist theory and social practice. It believes in the class struggle and the necessity to overthrow Capitalist rule. It organises in the communities and workplaces. It is democratic and has no authority figures like a party boss or central committee.
In order to make a revolution, large–scale co–ordinated movements are necessary, and their formation is in no way counter to Anarchism. What Anarchists are opposed to is hierarchical, power–tripping leadership that suppresses the creative urge of the bulk of those involved, and forces an agenda down their throat. Members of such groups are only servants and worshippers of the party leadership. But although Anarchists reject this type of domineering leadership, we do recognise that some people are more experienced, articulate, or skilled than others, and these people will play leadership action roles. These people are not authority figures, and can be removed at the will of the body. There is also a conscious attempt to routinely rotate this responsibility and to pass on these skills to each other, especially to women, who would ordinarily not get the chance. The experience of these people, who are usually experienced activists or better qualified than most at the moment, can help form and drive forward movements, and even help people develop the potential for revolutionary change in the popular movement. What they cannot do is take over the initiative of the movement itself. The members of these groups reject hierarchical [12] positions (anybody having more official authority than others), and unlike the Marxist vanguard parties, the Anarchist groups won’t be allowed to continue their leadership through a dictatorship after the revolution. Instead the catalyst group itself will be dissolved and its members, when they are ready, will be absorbed into the new society’s collective decision–making process. Therefore, Anarchists are not leaders, but only advisors and organisers for a mass movement.
What we don’t want or need is a group of authoritarians leading the working class, then establishing themselves as a centralised decision–making command. Instead of “withering away”, Marxist states have continuously built authoritarian institutions (the secret police, labour bosses, and the Communist Party) to maintain their power. The apparent effectiveness of such organisations masks the way that revolutionaries who pattern themselves after Capitalist, hierarchical institutions become absorbed by ruling class values, and completely isolated from the real needs and desires of ordinary people.
The reluctance of Marxists to accept revolutionary social change is, however, above all seen in Marx’s idea of the party. It is a prescription to nakedly seize power and put it in the hands of the Communist Party. The party that Marxists create today, they believe, should become the [only] Party of the Working Class in which that class can organise and seize power. In practice, however, this means personal and party dictatorship, which they have, historically, felt gives them the right and duty to wipe out all other parties and political ideologies. Both Lenin and Stalin (both basing their Party on Marx’s ideas) killed millions of workers and peasants, their Left–wing opponents, and even members of the Bolshevik (Communist Party in Russia) Party. This bloody, treacherous history is why there is so much rivalry and hostility between Leninist and Trotskyist (Trotsky was kicked out of the Bolshevik Party) parties today, and it is why the workers’ states, whether in Cuba, China, Vietnam, or Korea are such oppressive bureaucracies over their people. It is also why most of the Eastern European “Communist” countries had their governments overthrown by the small capitalists and ordinary citizens in the 1980’s. Maybe we are witnessing the eclipse [13] of State Socialism (Marxism) entirely; since they have nothing new to say and will never get those governments back again.
While Anarchist groups reach decisions through anarchist consensus,[14] the Marxists organise through so–called democratic centralism. Democratic centralism poses as a form of inner party democracy, but is really just a hierarchy by which each member of a party – ultimately of a society – is subordinate [15] to a higher member until one reaches the all–powerful party Central Committee and its Chairman. This is a totally undemocratic procedure, which puts the leadership above criticism. It is a bankrupt; corrupt method of internal operations for a political organisation. You have no voice in such a party, and must be afraid to say any unflattering comments to, or about, the leaders.
In Anarchist groups, proposals are talked out by members (none of whom has authority over another), dissenting minorities are respected, and each individual’s participation is voluntary. Everyone has the right to agree or disagree over policy and actions, and everyone’s ideas are given equal weight and consideration. No decision may be made until each individual member or affiliated group that will be affected by that decision has had a chance to express their opinion on the issue. Individual members and affiliated groups have the right to refuse support to specific federation activities, but may not actively obstruct such activities. In true democratic fashion, decisions for the federation as a whole must be made by a majority of its members.
In most cases, there is no real need for a formal meeting for the making of decisions, what is needed is co–ordination of the actions of the group. Of course, there are times when a decision has to be made, and sometimes very quickly. This will be rare, but sometimes it is unavoidable. The consensus, in that case, would then have to be among a much smaller circle than the general membership of hundreds or thousands. But ordinarily all that is needed is an exchange of information and trust among parties, and a decision re–affirming the original will be reached, if an emergency decision had to be made. Of course, during the discussion, there will be an attempt to clarify any major differences and explore alternative courses of action. And there will be an attempt to arrive at a mutually agreed upon consensus between conflicting views. As always, if a decision can’t be reached or there is dissatisfaction with the consensus, a vote would be taken, and with a two–thirds majority, the matter would be accepted or rejected.
This is completely different to the Marxist parties, where the Central Committee sets policy for the entire organisation, without consultation, and authority reigns. Anarchists reject centralisation of authority and the concept of a Central Committee. All groups are free associations formed out of common need, not revolutionaries disciplined by fear of authority. When the size of the work–groups (which could be formed around labour, fund–raising, anti–racism, women’s rights, food and housing, propaganda, etc.) becomes awkward, the organisations can be de–centralised into two or more autonomous organisations, still united in one big federation. This enables the group to expand limitlessly while maintaining its anarchic form of de–centralised self–management. It is similar to the scientific theory of a biological cell, dividing and re–dividing, but in a political sense.
However, Anarchist groups aren’t even necessarily organised loosely; Anarchism is flexible and structure can be practically non–existent or very tight, depending upon the type of organisation demanded by the social conditions being faced. For instance, organisation would tighten during military operations or heightened political repression.
Anarchists reject the Marxist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a so–called workers’ state, in favour of a mass commune. Unlike leading members of Marxist parties, whose daily lives are generally similar to present–day middle class lifestyles, Anarchist organisational structures and lifestyles, through communal living arrangements, affinity groups, squatting, etc., attempt to reflect the liberated society of the future. Anarchists built all kinds of communes and collectives during the Spanish Revolution of the 1930’s, but they were crushed by the Fascists and the Communists. Since the Marxists don’t build co–operative structures (the nucleus of the new society) they can only see the world in authoritarian political terms. They want to seize State power and institute their own dictatorship over the people and the workers, instead of crushing State power and replacing it with a free, co–operative society. They insist that the party represents and is the working class, and that there is no need for them to organise themselves outside of the party. Yet, even in the former Soviet Union, the Communist Party membership only represented five percent of the population. This is elitism [16] of the worst sort, and even makes the Capitalist parties look democratic by comparison.
What the Communist Party was intended to represent in terms of workers’ power is never made clear, but in true 1984 doublethink fashion, the results are 80 years of political repression and State slavery, instead of an era of glorious Communist rule. They must be held accountable politically for these crimes against the people, and we must reject their revolutionary political theory and practice. They have slandered [17] the names of Socialism and Communism.
We reject the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is unbridled oppression, and the various Marxist parties must be made to answer for it. Millions were murdered by Stalin in the name of fighting an internal class war, and millions more were murdered in China, Poland, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bulgaria, and other countries by communist movements which followed Stalin’s prescription for revolutionary terror. We reject State communism as the worst hypocrisy [18] and tyranny.[19] We can do better with the mass commune.
The Anarchist mass commune is an inter–regional, continental, or inter–continental federation of economic and political co–operatives and regional communal formations. We look forward to a world and a society in which real decision–making involves everyone who lives in it – a mass commune – not a few discipline freaks pulling the strings on a so–called proletarian or workers’ dictatorship. Any and all dictatorship is bad, it has no good social features, yet that is what the Marxists tell us will protect us from counter–revolution. While Marxists claim that this dictatorship is necessary in order to crush any bourgeois counter–revolutions led by the Capitalist class or Right–wing reactionaries, Anarchists feel that this is itself part of the Marxist school of falsification.[20] A centralised apparatus, such as a state, is a much easier target for opponents of the revolution than is a federation of de–centralised communes. And these communes would remain armed and prepared to defend the revolution against anyone who militarily moves against it. The key is to mobilise the people into self–defence units and militias.
This position by the Marxists of the necessity for a dictatorship to protect the revolution was not proven in the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution; in fact, without support of the Anarchists and other Left–wing forces, along with the Russian people, the Bolshevik government would have been defeated. And then true to any dictatorship, it turned around and wiped out the Russian and Ukrainian Anarchist movements, along with their Left–wing opponents like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, and even ideological opponents in the Bolshevik party were imprisoned and put to death. Millions of people in Russia were killed by Lenin and Trotsky right after the Civil War, when they were building State power, which led to Stalin’s bloody rule. The lesson is that we should not be tricked into surrendering the grassroots people’s power to dictators who pose as our friends or leaders.
We don’t need the various Marxist solutions, they are dangerous and deceptive. There is another way, but to much of the Left and to many ordinary people, the choice has appeared to be Anarchic chaos or the Marxist–Communist parties, however dogmatic and dictatorial. This is the result of misunderstanding and lies. Anarchism as an ideology provides practical organisational structures, as well as valid alternative revolutionary theory, which, if used, could be the basis for organisation just as solid as the Marxists (or even more so) only these organisations will be egalitarian [21] and really for the benefit of people, rather than for the Communist leaders.
Therefore, we build organisations in order to build a new world, to end all domination over the masses of people. We must build an organised, co–ordinated, international movement aimed at transforming the globe into a mass commune. This would really be a great development in human evolution and a gigantic revolutionary stride. It would change the world as we know it and end the problems long plaguing Humankind. It would be a new era of freedom and fulfilment.
*** General Principles of Anarchism
Anarchism is based on a vision of society that harmoniously unites individual self–interest and social well–being. Although Anarchists agree with Marx that Capitalism must be abolished because of its crisis–ridden nature and its exploitation of the Working Class, we do not believe that Capitalism is a necessary, progressive pre–condition for the change to a socially, economically and politically equal society. Nor do we believe that the centralised economic planning of State Socialism can provide for the wide variety of needs and desires. We reject the very idea of a need for a State or that it will just whither away by itself, or a party to boss over the workers or stage–manage the revolution. In short, while accepting parts of his economic critique of Capitalism, we do not worship Karl Marx as the perfect leader (whose ideas can never be criticised or revised) as the Marxists do, and Anarchism is not based on Marxist theory.
Anarchists believe that “the personal is political, and the political is personal”, meaning that we cannot separate our political life from our personal life. We do not play bureaucratic political roles, and then have a separate life as another social being entirely. We recognise that people know their own needs and can make the necessary arrangements to satisfy those needs, provided that they have free access to social resources. We believe that these resources should be freely provided to all, so we therefore believe in the credo of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. This guarantees that everyone will be fed, clothed, and housed as normal social practice, not as degrading welfare or that certain classes will be better provided for than others.
When not deformed by corrupt (authoritarian) social institutions and practices, the inter–dependence and solidarity of human beings results in individuals who are responsible both for themselves and to the society which makes their well–being and cultural development possible. Therefore, we seek to replace the State, Capitalism and Authority with a network of voluntary alliances embracing all of social life – production, consumption, health, culture, recreation, and other areas. In this way, all groups and associations reap the benefits of unity while expanding the range of their freedom. We believe in free association and federating groups of affinity groups, workplace committee’s, food and housing co–operatives, with others of all types.
As a practical matter, we believe that we should start to build the new society now, as well as fight to crush the old Capitalist one. We wish to create non–authoritarian mutual aid organisations for food, clothing, housing, funding for community projects and others, neighbourhood assemblies, and co–operatives, not belonging to either government or business corporations, and not run for profit but for social need. Such organisations, if built now, will provide their members with a practical experience in self–management and self–sufficiency, and will decrease the dependency of people on welfare agencies and employers. In short, we can begin now to build the infrastructure for the communal society, so that people can see what they are fighting for, not just the ideas in someone’s head. That is the way to real freedom.
*** Capitalism, the State and Private Property
The existence of the State and Capitalism are excused by their supporters as being a necessary evil due to the so–called inability of the greater part of the population to run their own affairs and those of society, as well as being their protection against crime and violence. Anarchists realise that the opposite is true, the main barriers to a free society are the State and the institution of private property. It is the State that causes war, police repression, and other forms of violence, and it is private property – the lack of equal distribution of major social wealth – that creates crime and deprivation.
But what is the State? The State is a hierarchical institution by which a privileged elite tries to dominate the vast majority of people. The State’s mechanisms include a group of institutions containing legislative [22] assemblies,[23] the civil service bureaucracy, the military and police forces, the judiciary and prisons, and the sub–central State apparatus. The government is the administrative vehicle to run the State. The purpose of this specific set of institutions, which are the expressions of authority in Capitalist societies (and so–called Socialist states), is to keep and extend domination over the common people by a privileged class, the rich in Capitalist societies, the so–called Communist Party in State Socialist or Communist societies like the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
However, the State itself is always an elitist structure positioned between the rulers and the ruled, order–givers and order–takers, economic haves and have–nots. The State’s elite is not just the rich and the super–rich, but those people who have State positions of authority – politicians and juridical officials. Thus, the State bureaucracy itself, in terms of its relation to ideological property, can become an elite class in its own right. This administrative elite class of the State is developed not just through being given privileges by the economic elite, but also by the separation of private and public life – the family unit and civil society respectively – and by the opposition between an individual family and the larger society. It is sheer opportunism,[24] brought on by Capitalist competition and alienation. It is a breeding ground for agents of the State.
The existence of the State and a ruling class based on the exploitation and oppression of the Working Class are inseparable. Domination and exploitation go hand–in–hand and, in fact, this oppression is not possible without force and violent authority. This is why Anarchists argue that any attempt to use State power as a means of establishing a free, equal society can only be self–defeating because the habits of commanding and exploiting become ends in themselves. This was proven with the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution (1917 – 1921). The fact is that officials of the Communist State accumulate political power much as the Capitalist class accumulates economic wealth. Those who govern form a distinct group whose only interest is keeping political control by any means they can. But the institution of Capitalist property also allows a minority of the population to control and to regulate access to, and the use of, all socially produced wealth and natural resources. You have to pay for the land, water, and the fresh air – to some giant utility company or real estate firm.
This controlling group may be a separate economic class or the State itself, but in either case the institution of property leads to a set of social and economic relations, Capitalism, in which a small sector of society reaps enormous benefits and privileges at the expense of the labouring majority. The Capitalist economy is based, not upon fulfilling the needs of everyone, but on amassing profit for a few. Both Capitalism and the State must be attacked and overthrown, not one or the other, or one then the other, because the fall of either will not ensure the fall of both.
*** Down with Capitalism and the State!
No doubt, some workers will mistake what we are saying as a threat to their personally accumulated property. No, we recognise the distinction between personal possessions and major capitalistic property. Capitalistic property is that which has as its basic characteristic and purpose the command of other people’s labour power because of its exchange value. The institution of property conditions the development of a set of social and economic relations that has established Capitalism, and this situation allows a small minority within society to reap enormous benefits and privileges at the expense of the labouring majority. This is the classic scenario of Capital exploiting labour.
Where there is a high social division of labour and complex industrial organisation, money is needed to buy and/or sell. It is not simply that this money is legal, and that it is used in place of direct barter of goods, that is not what we are limited to here: Capital is money, but money as a process which reproduces and increases its value. Capital arises only when the owner of the means of production finds workers on the market as sellers of their own labour power. Capitalism developed as the form of private property that shifted from the rural, agricultural style to the urban, factory style of labour. Capitalism centralises the instruments of production and brings individuals closely alongside others in a disciplined work force.
Capitalism is industrialised commodity [25] production, which makes goods for profit, not for social needs. This is a special distinction of Capital, and Capital alone.
We may understand Capitalists, from what we have seen, as Capital given will and consciousness. That is, as those people who acquire Capital, and function as an elite class with enough financial and political power to rule society. Also, that accumulated Capital is money, and with money they control the means of production that is defined as the mills, mines, factories, land, water, energy, and other natural resources. The rich know that this is their property. They don’t need ideological pretensions, and are under no illusions about public property.
An economy, like the one we have briefly sketched, is not based on fulfilling the needs of everyone in society, but instead is based on the accumulation of profits for the few, who live in extreme luxury as a leisure class, while we, the workers and poor, live in either poverty or one or two pay–cheques away. You see, therefore, that doing away with government also means the abolition of monopoly [26] and personal ownership of the means of production and distribution.
*** Anarchism, Violence and Authority
One of the biggest lies about Anarchists is that we are mindless bomb–throwers, cutthroats, and assassins.
People spread these lies for their own reasons: governments, because they are afraid of being overthrown by social revolution; Marxists, because it is a competing ideology with a totally different method of social organisation and revolutionary struggle; and the Church, because Anarchism does not believe in deities and its rationalism might sway workers away from superstition. It is true that these lies and propaganda are able to sway many people, mostly because they never hear the other side. Anarchism receives bad press and suffers as the scapegoat of every politician – Right or Left wing. Because a Social revolution is an Anarchist revolution, which not only abolishes one exploiting class for another, but all exploiters and the instrument of exploitation, “the State”; because it is a revolution for people’s power, instead of political power, because it abolishes both money and wage slavery; because we are for total direct democracy and freedom, instead of politicians to represent the masses in Parliament, or the Communist Party; because we are for workers’ self–management of industry, instead of government regulation; because Anarchists are for full sexual, racial, cultural and intellectual freedom, instead of sexual and cultural repression, censorship, and racial oppression – because of this, lies have had to be told that we are killers, rapists, robbers, mad bombers, the worst of the worst.
But let’s look at the real world and see who is causing all this violence and repression. The wholesale murder by standing armies in World Wars 1 and 2, the pillage and rape of the colonies, military invasions and dictatorships – all of these have been done by governments. It is government and State/Class rule, which is the source of all violence. This includes all governments. The so–called Communist world is not communist and the Free world is not free. East and West, Capitalism – private and State – remains an inhuman type of society where the vast majority are bossed at work, at home, and in the community. Propaganda (news and education), policemen and soldiers, prisons and schools, traditional values and morality [27] all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to convince or force the many into passive [28] acceptance of a brutal, degrading, and irrational [29] system. This is what we mean by authority being oppression, and it is just such authoritarian rule that is at work in South Africa, Nigeria, the USA, as well as the Communist governments of China and Cuba.
<quote>
“What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organised violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don’t obey, it will compel you by force – all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.”
<strong>Alexander Berkman</strong>,
<br>
<em>ABC of Anarchism</em>
</quote>
Most Anarchists advocate armed overthrow of the Capitalist State. We do not advocate or practice mass murder, like the governments of the modern world with their stockpiles of nuclear bombs, poison gas and chemical weapons, huge air forces, navies, and armies. It was not the Anarchists who provoked [30] two World Wars where over 100 million people were slaughtered; nor was it the Anarchists who invaded and butchered the people of Korea, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Indonesia, and other countries who have suffered imperialist military attack. It was not the Anarchists who sent armies of spies all over the world to murder, disrupt, subvert, overthrow, and meddle into the internal affairs of other countries like the NIA, CIA, KGB, MI6, or other national spy agencies, nor use them as secret police to uphold the home governments in various countries, no matter how repressive and unpopular the regime. Further, if your government makes you a policeman of soldier, you kill and repress people in the name of freedom or law and order, even if you don’t want to.
<quote>
“You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things that the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is ‘lawful’, you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but people using violence unlawfully.”
<strong>Alexander Berkman</strong>,
<br>
<em>ABC of Anarchism</em>
</quote>
If we speak honestly, we must admit that everyone in this society believes in violence and practices it, however much they may condemn it in others. Either they do it themselves to their children or to others, or they have the police and army to do it on their behalf as agents of the State. In fact, all of the governmental institutions we presently support and the entire life of present society are based on violence.
Anarchists have no monopoly on violence and when it was used in so–called “propaganda by the deed” attacks in the nineteenth century, it was against tyrants and dictators, rather than against the common people. These individual attacks – bombings, assassinations, sabotage were efforts at making those in power personally responsible for their unjust acts and repressive authority. In fact, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists and other revolutionaries, as well as patriots and nationalists, and even reactionaries and racists like the AWB or Nazis have all used violence for a variety of reasons. Who would not have rejoiced if a dictator like Hitler had been slain by assassins, and thus spared the world racial genocide and World War II? Further, all revolutions are violent because the oppressing class will not give up its power and privileges without a bloody fight. So, we have no choice anyway.
Basically, we would all choose to be pacifists. And like Martin Luther King counselled, we would rather resolve our differences with understanding, love, and moral reasoning. We will attempt these solutions first, whenever possible. In the insanity that reigns, however, our movement acknowledges the usefulness of preparedness. It is too dangerous a world to be ignorant of the ways to defend ourselves so that we can continue our revolutionary work. Knowing a weapon and its uses does not mean that you must immediately go out and use that weapon, but that if you need to use it, you can use it well.
Understand that the more we succeed at our work, the more dangerous will our situation become, because we will then be recognised as a threat to the State. And make no mistake, an insurrection is coming, that will destabilise the State. So we are talking about a spontaneous,[31] prolonged,[32] rising of the vast majority of the people, and the necessity to defend ourselves against the State’s reaction. Although we recognise the importance of defensive paramilitary violence, and even urban guerilla attacks, we do not depend on war to achieve our liberation, for our struggle cannot be won by the force of arms alone. No, the people must be armed beforehand with understanding and agreement of our objectives, as well as trust and love of each other, and our military weapons are only an expression of our organic spirit and solidarity. Perfect love for all but preparedness against those who don’t want it. As the Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, said, “When one falls, another must take their place, and the rage of each death renews the reason for the fight.”
The governments of the world commit much of their violence in repressing any attempt to overthrow the State. Crimes of repression against the people have usually benefited those in power, especially if the government is powerful. Look what happened in South Africa during the apartheid years! Many protesting injustices were jailed, murdered, injured, or blacklisted – all of which was set–up by the State’s police agencies. So we cannot just depend on mass mobilisations alone, we must also learn how to defend ourselves, if we want to defeat the State and its repression. For the future, our work will include development of collective techniques of self–defence, as well as underground propaganda work, while we work towards Social revolution.
*** Anarchists and Revolutionary Organisation
Another lie about Anarchists is that we don’t believe in any organisational structure. We are not opposed to organisation. In fact, Anarchism is primarily concerned about analysing the way in which society is presently organised – i.e., government.
Anarchism is all about organisation, but it is about alternative forms of organisation to what now exists. Anarchism’s opposition to authority leads to the view that organisation should be non–hierarchical and that membership should be voluntary. Anarchist revolution is a process of organisation building and re–building. This does not mean the same thing as the Marxist concept of party building, which is just about strengthening the rule of party leaders and driving out those members who have an independent position. These purges [33] are methods of domination that the Marxists use to beat all democracy out of their movements, yet they have the cheek to call this democratic centralism.
What organisation means within Anarchism is to organise the needs of the people into non–authoritarian social organisations so that they can take care of their own business on an equal basis. It also means the coming together of like–minded people for the purpose of co–ordinating the work that both groups and individuals feel necessary for survival, well–being, and livelihood. Because Anarchism involves people who would come together on the basis of mutual needs and interests, co–operation is a key element. A primary aim is that the individuals should speak for themselves, and that all in the group be equally responsible for the group’s decisions; no bosses welcome!
Many Anarchists envisage large scale organisational needs in terms of small local groups organised in the workplaces, and neighbourhoods, who would send delegates to larger committees who would make decisions on matters of wider concern. The job of delegate would not be full–time and would be rotated. These delegates would be unpaid, recallable and would only voice the groups’ decisions. We support free, independent organisations of the people as the only way forward.
The nucleus [34] of Anarchist organisation is the affinity (friendship) group. The affinity group is a revolutionary circle or cell of friends and comrades who are in tune with each other both in ideology and as individuals. The affinity group exists to co–ordinate the needs of the group, as expressed by the individuals and by the cell as a body. The group becomes an extended family, the well–being of all becomes the responsibility of all.
<quote>
“Autonomous, communal, and directly democratic, the group combines revolutionary theory with revolutionary lifestyle in its everyday behaviour. It creates a free space in which revolutionaries can remake themselves individually, and also as social beings.”
<strong>Murray Bookchin</strong>,
<br>
<em>Post Scarcity Anarchism</em>
</quote>
We could also refer to these affinity formations as “groups for living revolution” because they live the revolution now, even though only in seed form. Because the groups are small – from three to fifteen – they can start from a stronger basis of solidarity than political strategy alone. The groups would be the best means of political activity of each member. There are four areas of involvement where affinity groups work.
1. <strong>Mutual Aid.</strong> This means giving support and solidarity between members, as well as collective work and responsibility.
1. <strong>Education.</strong> In addition to educating the society at–large to Anarchist ideals, this includes study by members to advance the ideology of the group, as well as to increase their political, economic, scientific, and technical knowledge.
1. <strong>Direct Action.</strong> This means the actual organising and political work outside of the group, where all members are expected to contribute.
1. <strong>Unity.</strong> The group is a form of family, a gathering of friends and comrades, people who care for the well–being of one another, who love and support each other, who strive to live in the spirit of co–operation and freedom, without distrust, jealousy, hate, competition, and other forms of negative social ideas and behaviour. In short, affinity groups allow their members to live a revolutionary lifestyle.
One big advantage of affinity groups is that they are highly resistant to police infiltration because the group members are so intimate. Even if a group is penetrated there is no central office that would give an agent information about the movement as a whole. Each cell has its own agenda and objectives. Therefore, an agent would have to infiltrate hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar groups and since the members all know each other, an agent could not lead disruptions without the risk of immediate exposure. Further, because there are no leaders in the movement, there is no one to target and destroy the group.
Because affinity groups can grow as biological cells grow, by dividing, they can spread rapidly. There could be hundreds in one large city or region. They come prepared for a mass movement, they can organise large numbers of people to co–ordinate activities as their needs become clear and according to any social conditions. Affinity groups function as a catalyst within the mass movement, pushing it to higher and higher levels of resistance to the authorities. But they are ready–made for underground work in case of open political repression or mass insurrection.
This leads us to the next level of Anarchist organisation, the regional federation. Federations are the network of affinity groups who come together out of common needs, which includes mutual aid, education, direct action, co–ordination, and any other work needed for the change from today’s society, from the authoritarian State to Anarchism. The following is an example of how Anarchist federations could be structured. First, there is the regional federation that could cover a large city or region. All like–minded affinity groups in the region would associate themselves in a Regional Federation. Agreements on mutual aid and action to be done would be discussed at meetings in which all can come and have an equal voice.
When the Regional Federation reaches a size where it is too big, the Regional Federation can divide into District or Local Federations. Each affinity group in each area will send one delegate to sit on their Local Federation Committee. The purpose of the committee is to co–ordinate the needs and actions defined by all the groups in the district or local area. As a mandated delegate, after referring back to their group, they could vote and join in co–ordination and decision making on the things that affect the local area. Thereafter, one delegate from each Local Federation Committee will sit on the Regional Federation Committee, which will operate on exactly the same principles as the Local Federation Committee except that it will only deal with things that affect the region as a whole.
Our next federation would be an Eco–Regional Federation, for example the entire coastal plain. This federation would take care of the whole eco–region, with the same principles of consensus, mandating and delegation. Next would come the Inter–Regional Federation to cover Southern Africa and then the Continental Federation, covering the continent of Africa. Last would be the Global Federation, which would be the networking of all federations world–wide. As for the last, because we do not recognise national borders and wish to replace the nation–state, we thus federate with all other like–minded people wherever they live on Earth.
For Anarchism to really work, the needs of the people must be fulfilled. Our first priority is the well–being of all; thus we must organise the means to freely and equally fulfil the needs of the people. First, the means of production, transportation, and distribution must be organised into revolutionary organisations that the workers and the community run and control themselves. Our second priority is to deal with community needs organisations, in addition to industrial organising. Whatever the community needs are, they must be dealt with. This means organisation. It includes co–operative groups to fulfil such needs as health, energy, jobs, childcare, housing, alternative schools, food, entertainment, and other social areas. These community groups would form a co–operative community, which would be a network of community needs organisations and serve as an Anarchistic socio–political infrastructure. These groups should network with those in other areas for mutual aid, education, and action, and become a federation on a regional scale.
Third, we would have to deal with social illness. Not only should we organise for the physical needs of the people, but we must also work and propagandise to cure the ills sprouted by the State that has warped the human personality under Capitalism. For instance, the oppression of women. No one can be free if 51 percent of society is oppressed, dominated, and abused. Not only must our organisation deal with the harmful effects of sexism, but also work to ensure patriarchy is dead by educating society about its harmful effects. Women need to empower themselves for self–determination to lead free lives. We need to form groups to expose and combat sexual prejudice and Capitalist exploitation, and extend full support and solidarity to the Working Class Women’s liberation movement.
Finally, Anarchism would deal with a number of areas too numerous to mention here – science, technology, ecology, disarmament, and so on. We must harness the social sciences and make them serve the people, while we co–exist with nature. Authoritarians foolishly believe that it is possible to conquer nature, but that is not the issue. We are just one of a number of species which inhabit this planet, even if we are the most intelligent. But then other species have not created nuclear weapons, started wars where millions have been killed, or engaged in discrimination against the ‘races’ of their sub–species, all of which humankind has done. So who is to say which is the most “intelligent”?
Right then…
<strong>Lets get on with it, <em>we’ve got a world to win!</em></strong>
[1] <strong>coercion:</strong> to force or to hold by force
[2] <strong>vanguard:</strong> the leading position in a movement or the people in that position
[3] <strong>sects:</strong> a group of people with a common interest or philosophy
[4] <strong>insurrection:</strong> the act of rebelling against an established authority
[5] <strong>economic:</strong> the way goods are distributed and exchanged (money in modern capitalist society).
[6] <strong>abolished:</strong> to do away with (laws, regulations, or customs)
[7] <strong>organism:</strong> something that is living
[8] <strong>formidable:</strong> extremely difficult to defeat or overcome
[9] <strong>tendency:</strong> the general course or direction
[10] <strong>ideology:</strong> the doctrines, opinions, or way of thinking of a person or group
[11] <strong>technocrats:</strong> a government of scientists and other experts (intellectuals)
[12] <strong>hierarchical:</strong> 1. a system of people or things arranged one above the other 2. the hierarchy: the people in power in any authoritarian organisation
[13] <strong>eclipse:</strong> loss of importance, power or fame
[14] <strong>consensus:</strong> general or wide–spread agreement
[15] <strong>subordinate:</strong> 1. of lesser rank or importance 2. to think of something or someone as less important than something or someone else
[16] <strong>elite:</strong> the most powerful or rich of a group, community or society elitism: the belief that society should be governed by a small group of people who think they are superior to everyone else
[17] <strong>slander:</strong> saying something that is false and damaging about a person or thing
[18] <strong>hypocrisy:</strong> claiming to believe in something and then acting differently
[19] <strong>tyranny:</strong> oppressive and unjust government (i.e. all government)
[20] <strong>falsify:</strong> to make (a report of evidence) false by changing it in order to mislead
[21] <strong>egalitarian:</strong> to uphold equality between humans
[22] <strong>legislative:</strong> having the power to make or process laws
[23] <strong>assemblies:</strong> a number of people gathered together
[24] <strong>opportunist:</strong> a person who changes their actions to take advantage of opportunities and circumstances without thinking about principles …ism: the name given to the act
[25] <strong>commodity:</strong> something that can be bought or sold
[26] <strong>monopoly:</strong> exclusive control of something (e.g. supply of a product or service)
[27] <strong>morality:</strong> to do with the belief of what is right or wrong
[28] <strong>passive:</strong> not active
[29] <strong>irrational:</strong> senseless or unreasonable / absurd / no facts behind it
[30] <strong>provoke:</strong> to anger someone / to make something happen
[31] <strong>spontaneous:</strong> starting from a natural feeling, voluntary, an action that has not been thought out first
[32] <strong>prolonged:</strong> lengthened or extended
[33] <strong>to purge:</strong> to get rid of or kick out of an organisation
[34] <strong>nucleus:</strong> a central thing around which others are grouped
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#title The Violence Question
#author Zabalaza
#LISTtitle Violence Question
#SORTtopics violence, armed struggle, terrorism, pacifism, self-defense
#date October 28, 2010
#source Retrieved on 15<sup>th</sup> October 2021 from [[https://zabalaza.net/2010/10/28/the-violence-question-zacf/][zabalaza.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-10-15T10:17:47
<quote>
<em>Anarchism is opposed to any interference with your liberty, be it by force and violence or by any other means … But if someone attacks you, then it is he who is invading you, he who is employing violence against you. You have a right [and a duty] to defend yourself…</em>
<em>To achieve its purpose, the revolution must be imbued with and directed by the anarchist spirit and ideas. The end shapes the means, just as the tool you use must be fit to do the work you want to accomplish … Revolutionary defence excludes all acts of coercion, of persecution and revenge. It is concerned only with repelling attack and depriving the enemy of the opportunity to invade you…</em>
<em>[The strength of the revolution] consists in the support of the people, in the devotion of the agricultural and rural masses … Let them believe in the revolution and they will defend it to the death … The armed workers and peasants are the only effective defence of the revolution. By means of their unions and syndicates they must always be on guard against counter-revolutionary attack … the active interest of the masses; their autonomy and self-determination are the best guarantee of success…</em>
<em>Let them [counter-revolutionaries] talk as they like… To suppress speech and press is … a theoretic blow offence against liberty [and] a direct blow at the very foundations of the revolution … [While forcible attack will be actively resisted] the revolution must be big enough to welcome even the severest criticism, and profit by it if it is justified…</em>
<strong>Alexander Berkman,</strong>
<br>
“Defence of the Revolution”,
<br>
in his <em>ABC of Anarchism</em>, various editions
</quote>
*** <strong>INTRODUCTION</strong>
There are three basic positions which can be adopted on the “violence question”-pacifism, terrorism or defensive violence.[1]
*** <strong>PACIFISM</strong>
With regret we have to dismiss pacifism as being hopelessly unrealistic.
Restricting a struggle to pacifism or non-violent direct action in a campaign or strike can in some circumstances seriously undermine that struggle. We are against the adoption of such tactics as an absolute principle, although obviously it may be tactically wise to rely on peaceful methods of protest in certain situations.
Violence will also be an inevitable part of a revolution as the ruling class will not give up its power or wealth without a bloody struggle. To refuse to prepare to meet this contingency with counter-violence, or to rely on pricking the conscience of the oppressor to prevent bloodshed in such a situation, is a recipe for the massacre of the working-class and poor.
*** <strong>ARMED STRUGGLE AND “TERRORISM”</strong>
We reject the tactics of armed struggle and “terrorism”.
This approach relies on the military actions of an armed vanguard to free the working class and poor (or other oppressed groups, e.g. national minorities). It is thus substitutionist to the core in that it substitutes the activity of a small group for the actions of the toiling masses as a whole. It is clearly therefore elitist and sows the seeds for a new elite to take power over the heads of the workers and the poor in the event of the armed struggle succeeding. In fact, this tactic readily degenerates into authoritarianism even prior to the actual seizure of power as the armed vanguard is not accountable to the working people and is instead controlled by a typically unelected central circle of leaders. In this model the masses are reduced to a passive role , acting at most as the providers of logistical support to the guerrillas. Even if sizeable popular support can be won for the armed struggle, this fact remains. Such a tactic is clearly at odds with Anarchism which involves the masses in self-managed action to establish an anti-authoritarian socialist society.
Generally speaking, the tactic of armed struggle is a relatively ineffective one. This is particularly true where the armed struggle is urban based (and thus almost never unable to consolidate “liberated” territories) , but it also holds in the case of rural ly-focussed struggles. The murder of individuals in no way weakens the system. Bosses, police and so on are all easily replaceable. So are powerlines and other facilities. The military power which clandestine guerrilla forces can mobilise is typically minimal compared to the full power of the State. As Anarchists we realise that under capitalism and the State the strength of the masses lies primarily in their economic power – their ability to struggle at the point of production- yet the tactic of armed struggle relegates the workplace struggle to a secondary role (if any at all). Even in conditions of harsh political repression, underground activity should prioritise workplace organising over the formation of a guerrilla army.
Although the intention of those engaging in armed struggle is often to secure freedom for the oppressed, the actual effect may be quite different. Typically, armed struggle puts the lives of working people at risk which provides the State with an excuse (and, often, the popular support) needed to introduce more repressive measures. We also do not support the tactic of small groups provoking a violent response from the State in order to “radicalise” the majority. In fact, this is often used by the State to victimise activists and intimidate those involved.
This is not to say that we deny the sincerity of those who take up the gun in an attempt to change society, merely that their method is a wrong one. However, while we do not advocate armed struggle, we defend those who participate in it from repression, reactionary attacks and criticism. we never side with the State against such groups. The real problem is not the gunmen, the primary responsibility lies with the system which leads people to resist in such a manner.
*** <strong>OUR POSITION: SELF-DEFENSIVE VIOLENCE</strong>
Our position is to accept the need for self-defensive violence.
Short of revolution, there are many occasions on which the State uses violence to break the collective power of the working class and poor. For example, attacking picket lines and demonstrations, victimising, arresting and even murdering activists. We always support those who are victimised and defend them against State repression.
On occasions, demonstrations or strikes can turn to violence. We recognise that this is an inevitable feature of large-scale resistance to the bosses and rulers. In such cases where violence is inevitable, we argue for the creation of self-managed defence squads under democratic mass control.
Violence sometimes also takes place in smaller situations due to the necessity of intimidating scabs or due to frustration. In such cases, we defend those involved from State repression. Where such manifestations can only damage the struggle, we argue against the use of violent tactics. In cases where their use is correct we argue for the greatest possible democratic control of their use and implementation.
We do not glorify or encourage random attacks in members of the ruling class. Attacks on individuals and their property may well demonstrate an ineffective expression of legitimate anger but the function of Anarchists is to argue for collective action by the working class. These tactics may make individuals in the ruling class uncomfortable but they do not undermine the ability of this class to rule. Obviously we defend those who show their anger in this way, but we also argue that such energy is better directed at mobilising and politicising the working class.
Revolution should be as bloodless as possible. As we mentioned above, violence becomes inevitable as the ruling class will not give up its power and wealth without a bloody struggle. Our violence will be in defence of the gains of the revolution. We will work to minimise the violence by winning the State armed forces to the side of the workers and the peasants. The defence of the revolution will be organised through an internally democratic workers militia under the control of the trade unions and other working class and working peasant structures of self-management. The need for such violence will be almost universally understood.
[1] Some of these issues are dealt with in greater depth in the pamphlet <em>You Can’t Blow Up a Social relationship: the Anarchist Case Against Terrorism</em>. Anonymous Australian comrades. See Zabalaza Books [[http://zabalazabooks.net/2014/07/06/you-cant-blow-up-a-social-relationship-the-anarchist-case-against-terrorism/][zabalazabooks.net]]
|
#title Finding Joy in Queer Activism
#subtitle An Autoethnography
#author Zac Larkham
#LISTtitle Finding Joy in Queer Activism: An Autoethnography
#date 01/05/2024
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-01-30T03:26:36.767Z
#topics care, hierarchy, anti-hierarchy, Joyful Militancy, student activism, university, academia, United Kingdom
; #notes so this is my undergrad dissertation. a lot of people have been asking me to read it and i do think i can be genuinely useful, it won an award so it must be half decent. I’ve put it here in full but please don’t feel you have to read in full to understand or appreciate it — the literature review is particularly boring. if you want to skip ahead to the sections on care and (anti)hierarchy, please do! there are also meant to be some parts in italics that weren’t kept when I copied it over, you’ll just have to do without them cos i’m not trawling through 11,000 words to find the ones that need to be italicised
*** Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Sheffield Hallam UCU branch, particularly Bob Jeffrey, who was there for me when the rest of the university was not and without him, I may not have finished this degree. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Carissa Honeywell, for her advice and enthusiasm for this research, every activist I’ve met and worked with over the last three and a half years for everything they’ve taught me and my parents for endless support.
Finally, a special thank you to the recent Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University Professor Sir Chris Husbands for being such a loathsome human being and standing for everything I hate about universities. Paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary of Richard Nixon Sheffield Action Group wrote in a zine (also available on the Anarchist Library, search for Troublemakers 1 (February 2024)) recently: “Some of my best friends have hated Husbands, even the ones at other universities. My lecturers and their colleagues around the country who’ve been subjected to TEF hate Husbands, former SU officers hate Husbands, fellow students (that are aware of him) hate Husbands, I hate Husbands, and this hatred has brought us together.” Without him, I would certainly have a lot less to protest and write about.
*** Abstract
This Autoethnography explores the contemporary UK student movement and how the high proportion of queer activists in the movement can change how groups organise. I look at The Group, a student activist group at an unnamed university, and analyse my experiences and observations from organising with them in two chapters focused on cultures of care and practices of hierarchy. I look at this through critiques of neoliberalism and its resulting consciousness deflation and the framework provided by Joyful Militancy (bergman & Montgomery, 2017) which points a route out of neoliberalism, arguing strong relationships and bonds between activists can help create new strategies and methods of organising. By reflecting on The Group’s internal culture, I found a culture of care imbedded which allows the fluid forms of organising, attentive to the needs of the group at that present conjuncture, bergman and Montgomery outline.
*** Introduction
In Ghosts of My Life (2014), Mark Fisher argues that in the UK, the post-war welfare state created conditions for, “most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s” (p.13). Cheap or squatted property, student maintenance grants and the fruits of a welfare state widely accessible for the first time helped create an “efflorescence of cultural invention” (p.13). The same conditions that nurtured this blossoming of culture also nurtured experiments in politics. Historically, bohemia and revolutionary movements are often drawn from the same demographics and coexisted side by side (Graeber, 2009, p. 253). It should be no surprise then, that this same period saw a spate of decolonial, black power, feminist, queer, New Left and countercultural movements emerge. Since then, however, progress in both revolutionary politics and culture has stagnated. The reformulation of power following the sixties – neoliberalism – is best understood as an “exorcising of ‘the spectre of a world which could be free… a project aimed at destroying — to the point of making them unthinkable — the experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism.” (Fisher, 2018a, p. 674). Berardi (2011) argued neoliberalisation in the seventies and eighties created the “slow cancellation of the future” (p. 13), explaining the intensity and precarity of work in late capitalism leaves us in a simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated state that prevents us from creating anything new.
Neoliberalism has since expanded to encompass most of the globe and this neoliberal hegemony works to limit our political imaginations. Hegemonic ideologies create a new “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 423) in which ideology fades into the background, becoming what Žižek (1989) calls a subconscious fantasy that structures social reality. This hegemonic naturalisation of ideology is part of what Fisher (2009) called capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it,” (p.2). The political status quo appears not as a construction, but instead as an innate reality of modern life. The effect of this is what Milburn (2019) calls consciousness deflation: If consciousness inflation is the process of raising people’s consciousness and revealing what is perceived as inevitable as contingent and therefore changeable, then neoliberalism makes the inevitable appear as just that (p.44).
As students were a source of much of the experiments with culture and politics in the sixties, universities in the US and UK were among the first places to be touched by neoliberalism. Two texts produced by student activists in the seventies foreshadow the neoliberal university which transformed universities’ function and the relationship with and between students and staff. Warwick University Ltd. (Thompson, 2014), first published by activists at the University of Warwick in 1970 details through the eyes of student activists a prefiguration of the neoliberal university and ways universities today are “subordinated” to the interests of capital (p. iv). The then-new University of Warwick, conceived to serve the people of Warwickshire, was hijacked by business interests and, “student, academic, democratic and community interests [were] relegated to the level of second-class citizenship,” (p.28). It was branded the “Business University” (Thompson, 1970); its “managerial style” was modelled on a for-profit business (p.78), with prominent bankers and men of industry at its helm. The administration was characterised by its authoritarian nature, its, “insensitivity to or fear of open democratic decision-making and extreme insensitivity to genuine communication,” (p.84) and students who attempted to affect decision making found their attempts were futile (p.69). In their protests the students found themselves confronted with the stymying bureaucracy of neoliberalism Fisher (2009, p.39–53) and Graeber (2015) railed against. The students recognised this could not be changed by new appointments or tinkering but must be overhauled from the bottom up.
Across the Atlantic, activists from Brooklyn College and the University of Massachusetts inspired by the Wages for Housework campaign began Wages for Students, publishing a pamphlet in 1975. At the time, New York City was heavily indebted and undergoing neoliberal restructuring. This included gentrification, defunding public services, crushing unions and forcing America’s only free public university, CUNY, to charge tuition fees (Graeber, 2009). Instead of campaigning against fees, the pamphlet went further and argued that like housework, work done by students was also unpaid, reproductive labour and should be remunerated. In an introduction to a republished version the authors reflect that the pamphlet, “satirized and described,” the shift to the new neoliberal university beginning to take shape, “where education becomes a commodity a student buys, an investment she makes in her future, and the institution itself is modelled on a corporation” (Caffentzis, Neil, & Willshire-Carrera, 2016, p. 8). The pamphlet introduces the notion that students self-discipline to carry out unpaid labour, training themselves to assume their role as workers through various mechanisms such as understanding education (and fees) as an ‘investment’ in ourselves or grading which equates our value as students to performance.
These first manifestations paved the way for a decades long process towards the contemporary, British, neoliberal university. Universities, relying on income from fees and having to compete in a quasi-market, now think and act like businesses. “Blunt quantitative measures take precedence over any qualitative experiences,” to create varying degrees of ‘quality’ for students to assess their value for money (Cole & Maisura, 2017, p. 605). As Fisher (2009) puts it, “all that is solid melts into PR” (p.39). How education appears when measured by these blunt metrics takes precedence over the actual function of education itself. Staff are over worked and underpaid (UCU, 2022). State support for students has been withdrawn, first revoking students’ rights to claim benefits, then in 2012 trebling fees and creating inadequate maintenance loans. Rents and living costs have skyrocketed (Unipol, 2021) and as wages and loans have stagnated, students recently faced their largest ever drop in living standards (van der Merwe, 2022). UK graduates have the highest student debt in the OECD on average (OECD, 2023). The relationship between university and student is now a transactional one. Students are passive consumers of their education, weighed down by debt and social pressure to get good grades so those fees aren’t wasted. In the job market, students compete by proving their worth with the grades they receive which have a moral value attached to them; the better the grade, the more employable you are and therefore the better a person you are. This underlying discourse of neo-liberalism ties a person’s morality and self-worth to their performance. Students who get low grades have the pressure of both being a ‘bad’ person and wanting to get ‘value’ for the money they have invested into their education weighing on them, which has contributed to a mental health crisis (Pan, 2020). And if students protest, they are hit with repression which grows bolder each year (Glover, 2022; Larkham, 2023; Joseph-Salisbury, 2023).
Education was one of the places Fisher saw capitalist realism reified most strongly and this has had a depressive effect on student organising. This context is not one which is conducive to new ideas, experimentation and rebellion. Instead of the deep political organising and relationship building that effective political movements necessitate, “desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes” (Fisher, 2014, p. 13) or make ineffective complaints (Ahmed, 2021). Neoliberalism leaves us stuck at the end of history, unable to create or invent anything truly new to break out of capitalist hegemony. Political action now increasingly appears as a pastiche of previous action. In 2022 The National Union of Students (NUS) called a London demo for its 100<sup>th</sup> anniversary, bussing in students from around the country. It felt like a weak attempt to capture the energy of the 2010 student movement with their tactics, only this time less effectively with an event that, in comparison, some found embarrassing. There were no new modes of politics, no new understandings of how to fight in the current moment, only a poor copy of our last best efforts. Fisher (2009) wonders how long a culture can persist without the new (p.X) and this begs the question, how long can our political movements resist without the new?
Students have sunk into the apathy described in Capitalist Realism, comparable to what Spinoza describes as ‘sadness’ – a reduction in our ability to affect the world around us (bergman & Montgomery, 2017, pp.40–41). Joyful Militancy (2017) offers a glimpse at a remedy. It explains how the monopolising concept of Empire – a catch-all term to describe the web of complex, interlocking processes that work to create divisions and oppressions (p.48) analogous to Fisher’s capitalist realism – “works in part by making us impotent, corroding our abilities to shape worlds together” (p.33), controlling our desires, identities and relationships (p.25). Resistance usually appears as ‘rigid radicalism’, a tangled web of beliefs that posits a fixed ideal of so-called-radicalism that limits the possibilities of organising (p.20). The opposite of sadness for Spinoza is ‘joy’, or the ability to create and affect the world. Crucially, joy is not happiness. Happiness, whilst not bad in itself, is often an aesthetic used to justify oppression to redefine harmful social norms as social goods: the happy housewife, the happy slave, domestic bliss (Ahmed, 2010) and becomes a tool of subjection. Joyful militancy is being militant about joy in the Spinozan sense; an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected.
Spinozan Joy is relational and collective, relying on our relationships with others in organising spaces. It’s a process and active theory which participates in struggle and affirms what people already intuit instead of directing it and creating new norms and ideals (p. 27). Joyful Militancy argues activists should attune to what is around them and those they work with by strengthening these relationships. Instead of following someone’s blueprint for revolution, revolution starts by asking those around us what is really needed? What, right here and now, can make a useful intervention? By building relationships, working from them as a starting point and seeing revolution as a process continually made and remade through these relationships rather than an end point, vibrant movements that sustain struggles, spaces and forms of life where we can live and fight in new ways emerge (p.25). Activating joy, the authors say, is the key to undoing Empire and its hold on our lives. It can be how we find the ‘new’ Fisher believed was robbed from us and the process that allows these new ways of being, relating and resisting to be born. Fisher wrote, “real wealth is the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy.” (Fisher, 2018b, p. 510) and in his search for a post-capitalist desire, he spoke of the importance of “belonging to a movement: “a movement that abolishes the present state of things, a movement that offers unconditional care without community (it doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are, we will care for you anyway)” (p.511). In a blog post for Plan C remembering Fisher, Milburn argues this search opened whole new areas of enquiry and encourages us to ask, “Where can we find post-capitalist desire expressing itself today? How can we help that desire to be realised?” (Milburn, 2017, para.4). Using the framework of joyful militancy, this is what I explore in this research through looking at the intertwining practices of care and hierarchy within The Group.
*** Methodology
Little has been written about the UK student movement in recent years that wasn’t about the 2010 movement. The movement now looks very different to the one over a decade ago; parts of the movement that could be relied on historically like Students’ Unions and the NUS are largely dead as organising spaces. Other groups may technically be part of The Movement™ but do little organising and campaigning such as Young Labour or various Marxist sects that usually function as reading groups and newsagents. Instead, what we largely have now are broad left activist groups existing sometimes as societies to get funding from Students’ Unions but oftentimes not, without a much of a codified uniting ideology besides a hatred of capitalism, imperialism and university senior leadership. Perhaps the biggest shift is the huge influx of queer activists and their disproportionate presence in these spaces (although the Palestine encampments, which happened just as I finished writing this, bringing an influx of people of colour has been a notable change too). Sometimes a majority in groups are queer (Larkham, 2022, para.9). Many of the current active groups grew out of the School Strikes for Climate and Extinction Rebellion (XR). Those organisers grew up and many went to university. Many of them came out as queer too, anecdotally at least. During the 2020 student rent strikes, the UK’s largest for forty years (Wall, 2020), it became apparent many of the organisers and people who started rent strikes were veteran organisers of the school strikes (Wenham, 2021).
After the rent strikes, students kept organising and energy was directed towards setting up local groups. Many of these groups operate on broadly anarchist terms – even if not explicitly espousing anarchist politics – valuing consensus decision making, coalition and network building, direct action and autonomy over passing motions, winning votes and building a revolutionary party or more Liberal modes of politics. Groups are not necessarily part of broader national campaigns and, whilst linked up behind the scenes nationally through personal relationships, are largely focused on local campaigns ranging from housing and climate struggles to anti-arms trade campaigning and worker solidarity. There is no effective national campaign, union or federation uniting these groups. They operate as affinity groups, uniting students from different political tendencies to work together. It must be said that the majority of these groups are centred around Russell Group universities and other older universities with more prestige more likely to be populated by children of the middle-classes – even in towns and cities with multiple universities. Post-92 universities are still stubbornly difficult to organise and thus very poorly represented in the active student movement.
This study is about how these groups organise and the cultures within, particularly trying to understand the influence queerness has on group culture. I have done this through an autoethnography by reflecting on and observing my experiences with The Group, a student activist group at an unnamed university typical of the ones around the country that make up the most active parts of the student movement. The Group is majority queer, broad left group containing both Anarchists and (a few) Trotskyists but works along anarchist lines as described above: consensus decision making, engaging in direct action as its primary tactic but also working alongside other groups in coalitions and national networks.
When deciding how to conduct this research, an autoethnography presented itself for a variety of reasons. Firstly, my involvement for over three years in the student movement and activist spaces means I do have a bias. Ethnographies have scope for deeper personal reflection on relationships with research subjects other methods do not quite allow for in the same way. Given my proximity to student activism and involvement, it would be difficult to do research with other methods requiring a pretence of objectivity. Secondly, as an ‘insider’ ultimately my goals here are to further and benefit the movement. Ethnography should not have an exploitative relationship with subjects and instead can give back in meaningful ways other research methods cannot. Holman Jones (2021) calls for a queering of autoethnography that becomes something more than a recording of past events. Outlining the fragments of what he calls an anarchist anthropology – the practice of ethnography and utopianism in constant dialogue (Graeber, 2004, p. 12) – Graeber says, “the practice of ethnography provides at least something of a model, if a very rough, incipient model of how non-vanguardist revolutionary [academic] practice might work” (p. 11). Ethnographies involve observing practices and teasing out underlying logics to make sense of them in ways practitioners may not be aware of themselves. Graeber argues this is a role of radical intellectuals: “to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts” (p. 12). Graeber would go on to say that this vision should work as some form of autoethnography – examining the movements which one has made some sort of commitment to and feels a part of (Graeber, 2005). Finally, ethnographies are particularly well suited to studying activism and social movements, particularly if research is on the culture of movements and how they organise internally. O’Reilly (2005) notes that, “topics which involve examining processes of change, examining negotiated lived experiences, topics which see culture as constructed and reconstructed through actors’ participation’ are especially suited to participant observation and ethnography” (p.29). Other methods can also overlook the nuance and complexity of social movements but as someone involved, I am acutely aware of these nuances and in an excellent position to conduct an autoethnography of the student movement.
The research contains two chapters exploring the following questions:
1. How does care function and what practices of care are implemented in these groups?
2. How does hierarchy operate in the student movement?
It has been necessary to situate contemporary activism, and ideas around care and hierarchy, within the current context. This meant tracing ideas around care and hierarchy in activist spaces over the last sixty years back to debates and ideas they are rooted in. This autoethnography explores my experiences and observations of organising but cannot explore that in a vacuum. Activist spaces are a product of lessons learnt from those that have gone before so it was necessary to look at how those ideas evolved over time. Besides this, my research employed a mix of observations of meetings and other events collected in a journal and observations from casual conversations. The line between activist and social lives are often blurred when fellow activists are also your friends and discussions with these friends are often on the topic of activism. I also draw on experiences from my last few years of organising in the student movement and a small number of interviews. Interviews were conducted when necessary to explore topics in more depth or get thoughts from key people in The Group. This will also draw on some experiences and conversations with those in the wider student movement – defined narrowly as activist groups that primarily draw their membership from students or campaign at/against universities. It is worth remembering all struggles are linked and the student movement is intertwined with animal liberation, anti-war, climate change, internationalist and many other movements. I do not mean to present The Group as a perfect example of the themes explored in this study, neither am I suggesting these students hold the key to revolution. Students I spoke to would be the first to list the many, many problems we are yet to solve and often practicing what is discussed later has been far from perfect. My hope is that this presents analyses and practices of care and hierarchy that can be replicated elsewhere and be built on by others.
The research has not been without its ethical complexities and dilemmas, largely about protecting identities and obtaining consent. In the last three and a half years of organising at universities I have been fined, assaulted and spied on by my university for activism (Joseph-Salisbury, 2023, p. 4&33). At SOAS, students experienced a violent, illegal eviction from an occupation (Larkham, 2023). Students at the University of Manchester reported similar experiences to me, as have students at the University of Sheffield. At the University of Sheffield students have had possessions stolen by security on several occasions (Larkham, 2023, para.6) and I have worked on an investigation with openDemocracy (forthcoming) into the university hiring private investigators to spy on activists. Repression of student activism at universities has gotten notably bolder since the pandemic and the examples listed above only scratch the surface. A key concern for this research therefore was on keeping activists safe. Not doing this would be a betrayal of trust. Care is one of the key focuses of this research so it was important that was also embodied in producing this study. This was done through practicing active consent. Consent is important and frequently spoken about in activist spaces, partly because of the many polycules, relationship anarchy and sexual/romantic relationships between activists but also because consent extends far beyond sexual (or research) relationships. Youth liberationists assert that consent is often violated throughout childhood and this continues in our daily lives as adults under capitalism and patriarchy (Stinney Distro, 2017). The XR Consent Advocacy Circle argue, “Consent opens pathways to intimacy and pleasure. It also supports a healthy and connected life, and allows us to practice living in a way that brings joy and authenticity” (Extinction Rebellion, 2024). Well planned actions make all the information available to activists so they can enthusiastically consent to taking part, free of coercion and able to withdraw at any time. Consent as an active tool is empowering and should not be approached as a static obligation.
Consent became an embodiment of the findings of this study, requiring me to pay attention to people’s needs and engage in an active dialogue around them. Students were not interested in filling out consent forms, and if they did would have used fake names, rendering the forms redundant. I was advised by university staff verbal consent would be enough. So, after presenting the participant information sheet to The Group explain the focus and intention of this research, the parameters of what I could/could not write about, how to obtain consent and how to protect activists were drawn up collaboratively with The Group. We decided on three conditions:
1. I must make people aware I’m taking notes and obtain consent every time. This was done verbally and by using a pink notebook participants could recognise as my ethnography journal.
2. The Group are allowed to proofread a draft to ensure everyone was anonymised properly. This meant leaving enough time between finishing writing and the due date for it to be read.
3. My supervisor’s email is made available to The Group.
Additionally, being part of The Group and student movement outside of this research means there are alternative procedures for accountability should the situation arise.
*** A note on ‘queer’
Here, it is worth defining what I mean by ‘queer’. In common usage, queer often refers to people under the LGBT+ umbrella (Whittington, 2012). Whilst this is not inaccurate, for those under that umbrella (particularly activists), queer implies a more consciously political meaning. Queer theory has introduced the concept of ‘queering’, where queer becomes a verb rather than an identity. Wilkinson (2009) writes that, “to ‘queer’ something is to attempt to destabilize dominant understandings, seeing nothing is innate or unchangeable… Queer is not just a term for those who stand against normative sexuality, but questions all norms, positioning itself in opposition to all power hierarchies and oppressions” (p.37). Similarly, activists from Reclaim Brighton Pride write that queer, “is that of an oppositional force, forged in the fire of a war being waged on anything that challenges normalcy. Normalcy is white supremacist, is capitalist, is allocisheteronormative, is patriarchal, is monogamous, is able-bodied. Queer, is everything else.” (Reclaim Pride Brighton, 2021, p. 3). The ‘everything else’ is never clearly defined, leaving queerness an ambiguous, fluid concept, or as Sedgewick (1993) puts it: “a continuing moment, movement, motive-recurrent, eddying, troublant” (p.xii). A queer politics then, invites us to question every area of our lives, constantly challenging dominant modes and imagining alternatives (Wilkinson, 2009, p.42). It must ‘queery’ everything (Homocult, 1992), including our own intimate lives and relationships (p. 41). Positioning itself in opposition to hierarchies, challenging everyday norms, interactions and relationships, advocating direct action and DIY culture gives queerness a certain affinity with anarchism (Shepard, 2010).
*** Literature Review
Previously, university student movements have been identified as a vanguard of social, economic, and political change (Altbach, 1975; Levine, 1980). Students merit political analysis once we drop the image of students frequently playing decisive roles in determining national policies and instead focus more on matters such as strong influence over higher education policy itself, political recruitment, the generation of ideas, and legitimacy and disorder. (Levy, 1981). Activism in these past movements was not the volunteerism or what Alvarez et al. (1998) consider the co-option and ‘NGOisation’ of social movements. Instead, it was directed at “the established power structures in an effort to bring into existence a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system than the existing one” (Wallerstein, 2014, p. 160), a tradition that has been held by the student movement to the present day.
There is a wide depth and breadth of research on the UK student movement in the 21<sup>st</sup> century but it is nearly all on the tuition fee protests which Myers (2017) says lasted from 2010 to 2012 in his oral history of the movement, although organising for what became the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts started as early as 2009. The literature on the 2010 movement ranges from wide ranging commentary and analysis of the movement. Kumar (2011) produced commentary on the achievements and limitations of the movement finding there is a divide between the National Union of Students and the student movement, lack of vision and alternative solutions students have presented. Ibrahim (2011) drew on a two-and-a-half-year ethnographic study of the student movement to argue that the protests were a mobilisation in defence of an embedded tradition — affordable Higher Education — and that they were politically motivated by what they consider to be a violation of this entitlement. Although 2011 may have been too soon for this research.
Studies discuss student resistance but they do so usually through macro theoretical perspectives and look at the student movement’s relation to wider society and social change. They rarely explore the movement itself and the ways students organise, who is organising and how they engage in research, produce knowledge, and enact social practices of resistance. Despite this, Hensby (2016) has looked at how students were united by a common grievance of rising tuition fees, responding quickly with a multi-repertoire mass campaign, which quickly fell away when the fees were finally introduced. Hensby has written extensively on the protests and has also explored the barriers to participation in social movement and the importance of networks in making protest a viable option (Hensby, 2014). He has also written on their use of the media as a tool in student activism and discussed the strengths and limitations of mediated protest ‘events’ (Hensby, 2019).
The students of 2010 did not win and tuition fees were trebled, opening up the UK Higher Education sector to marketisation and financialisation. As a result, the context in which students are now organising is completely different and universities are very different institutions compared to a decade ago. This has very real implications for how students are organising, the tactics they are using and the nature of the movement. Anyone wanting to understand the student movement today would have to rely on literature written about events that are over a decade old.
Much like how the spectre of the 2010 movement haunts the current student movement, its significance has meant researchers have neglected current events and phenomena in favour of understanding a movement that ended a decade ago. Researchers seem unable to get past their fascination of the 2010 movement and begin trying to understand their current students and shifts in the movement. As such research on the UK student movement post 2010–2012 has been very limited. One paper reported on one of the first rent strikes at UCL at Campbell House in 2015, compiling a history and noting the importance of social media and in particular, the Facebook page, in organising activists (Hedges, 2017). Apart from that, researchers from two British universities interviewed rent strike organisers form the 2020/21 UK university rent strikes and noted how students’ comments reflect Freire’s (1972) praxis and made interesting links between their learning from the rent strikes and their formal learning (Wenham, 2021). Whilst it is not on the UK student movement, there is also research on rent strikes in 2020 during the pandemic in the USA and how students organised online when they could not meet each other in real life (Massarenti, 2020).
There are several books theorising how social movements (should) organise including Nunes (2021) who tried to look past the vertical/horizontal dichotomy of left organising in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century, Sophie K. Rosa (2023) who argues for a revaluing of intimacy as a political project to accompany traditional political organising and Emergent Strategy (brown, 2017) which encourages activists to start at smaller scale, doing deep slow movement building work necessary for creating big change. Graeber (2009) wrote an in-depth ethnography of the alter-globalisation movement provided detailed insights into the cultures and inner workings of activist groups.
With LGBT+ and Queer activists, research often focuses on their campaigning around LBGT and Queer issues. Mobley et al. (2021) have explored the presence of Queer and Trans students at historically black universities in the USA and how ‘queer student labour’ (p.28) done in organising and protesting around Queer and Trans issues is emotionally and physically draining for those students which affects them academically. The research done on queer students in the UK student movement outside of the queer liberation struggle is very limited, perhaps non-existent because I could not find anything.
The only writing on gender queer people in the contemporary British student movement has been by me. Interviews for a non-academic article I wrote (Larkham, Queer-led movements are driving change at university, 2022) revealed students have been trying to employ what they call radical care to support each other because they are marginalised. This supports what Longhurst & Johnston (2014) noted, that many forms of gender politics have a strong prefigurative element via the ‘embodiment’ of their demands, and vision of a better future within their organisations and groups. This goes some way to illustrate one of the practices students have been employing in the current student movement. My article also supported my assertion that queer students are over-represented in the movement and are often the ones getting involved in activism.
Finally, the literature demonstrates that ethnographies of higher education are scarce while secondary school ethnographic research is extensive (Jones et al., 2014; Pabian, 2013; Wisniewski, 2000). The use of ethnographies in higher education, despite earlier appeals for its use (Masemann, 1982), is uncommon. Apart from scholarship that falls under science and technology studies, few ethnographies have been written on the university and the everyday practices of its actors. That said, there is an autoethnographic account of the 1991 City University of New York (CUNY) strike movement written by some of the key organisers of the strike (McCaffery, Kovic, & Menzies, 2020). There is also an ethnography of the Honduran student movement (Funez, 2020) but not any of the UK student movement in recent years.
*** Care
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive about the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” – (Vaneigem, 2012, p. 11)
“I think care has got to be the thing which all other things stem from within movements.” This was the first thing Bucket, a trans woman and comrade I’ve organised with for the last three years, said when I asked her about care within social movements. It makes sense then, for this to be the first topic explored. During the pandemic it became excruciatingly clear that, “our world is one in which carelessness reigns” (The Care Collective, 2020, p. 1), yet in student organising, care – finding ways to meet mental, physical and emotional needs so we can be present in our work – is prioritised. As explained in the introduction, students are now more alienated than ever before. Thatcher stated that ‘economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’. In universities, the heart and soul of has certainly been changed. Graduating with the highest levels of student debt in the OECD, most students have had no option but to internalise the logics of marketisation; increasing their ‘employability’ and gaming the system to get the highest grade with the least work instead of engaging with the course as designed to maximise learning. We have been alienated in our housing and now our university work and to afford all this, take on a part-time job or sometimes several. The neoliberal student is a sick student, overworked and stressed out with little agency over their work, housing and learning with this stress privatised, reduced to individual failings. As such, a survey by the mental health charity Student Minds (Lewis & Bolton, 2023) found 57% of respondents reporting a mental health issue. Sophie K. Rosa (2023) notes that, “since human ‘hearts and souls’ cannot be subsumed into the logic of capital without alienation and varying types of immiseration, the changes Thatcher refers to could in part be understood as mental illness” (p.17). 1970’s revolutionary therapy collective Red Therapy described mental illness as “our bodies’ rebellion against capitalism” (p.17).
At the same time as this mental health crisis, activist burnout is endemic in our movements, particularly in environmental groups. The climate crisis is no longer a distant future, we are living through it and there is a sense that we need to do everything now – critically referred to as an ‘urgency culture’. This is present in the student movement too, where constant turnover of undergraduates makes long-term organising hard. In an urgency culture, typical macho demonstrations of power – big, loud, shouty, flashy actions – that groups like Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action lean towards are prioritised because, as the saying goes, ‘direct action gets the goods.’ Climate anxiety leads people to look for quick solutions that soothe those worries, often embodied in direct action or civil disobedience that grants immediate relief because you feel like you’ve done something. In this paradigm, care is devalued and pushed aside because The Action is more important – ‘We don’t have time to create networks that can care and support one another, the world is on fire! Now do something useful and lock yourself to that gate.’ Patriarchy therefore massively informs perceptions of what is considered ‘good’ or ‘effective’ activism, placing less importance on feminised reproductive labour and care work. Men, Levine (1984) suggests, “tend to organise the way they fuck — one big rush and then that “wham, slam, thank you ma’am”” (p.18). This way of working without care has burned through scores of enthusiastic activists and friends of mine, including many now in the student movement. Not to say direct action doesn’t have its place, but it should not be the only expression of our politics. The importance of prefiguration here shines through in student movement groups’ emphasis on care, insisting that our organising should embody our politics, not contradict it. “Care is really important and that without it we risk becoming really alienated from each other and ultimately alienated from the kind of politics we’re trying to make.” Trout, another transwoman in The Group, told me. “If we’re trying to push towards a radical new kind of politics then we need to embody that in every part of the practice before because otherwise we’re just perpetuating the same problems,” she added.
Most activists in the student movement recognise this so ‘care’ is something often spoken about but frequently lacks a deep understanding, leaving it littered with contradictions and lacking a clear definition or set of practices. Despite this, care is also everywhere we look. Graeber (2014) argues most working-class labour (including students’ hospitality and retail employment) is care work: “What we think of as archetypally women’s work – looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects – accounts for a far greater proportion of what working-class people do when they’re working than hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things” (para.7). Being powerful is not having to worry what others are thinking and feeling – “The powerful employ others to do that for them” (para.5). If not caring is the privilege of the powerful, for marginalised activists care is something difficult to avoid. Against a backdrop of dominant machismo in activism, care is also a queering of praxis – disrupting prevailing patriarchal modes of organising.
Care in activist spaces usually manifests in collective and self-care. Self-care has its roots in the intersection of feminism and black liberation. The Black Panther Party established survival programs – programs set up to care for black communities – in the sixties and seventies. They provided over sixty programs covering everything from healthcare, free breakfasts and martial arts training to pest control (Nelson, 2011). These programs were survival through self-care. By providing the basic needs of individuals they also met the community’s needs. Collective and self-care were intrinsically linked and difficult to separate, in this framework self-care was care of a collective self. The Combahee River Collective (1977), a Black, feminist, lesbian, socialist organization in 1970s Boston wrote, “the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics emerge from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work” (p.4). This self-love was a political self-love, and care was an expression of that. Whilst battling with cancer, Audre Lorde (1988) wrote that, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p.130). Self-care here meant recognising the important work we need to do of looking after ourselves to sustain struggles or simply stay alive. It was a call for women who spend all their lives looking after others, to look after themselves too. Importantly, focus on the individual here is still not separated from collective care. Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed describes it this way: “In directing our care towards ourselves we are redirecting care away from its proper objects, we are not caring for those we are supposed to care for; we are not caring for the bodies deemed worth caring about. And that is why in queer, feminist and anti-racist work self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities, assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other” (Ahmed, 2014, para.39).
In recent years as self-care has entered mainstream discourse it became unmoored from these radical roots, disentangled from the collective, depoliticised and co-opted. A 2016 article in Glamour suggested yoga, baths, puppy pictures or a stroll could help Americans get through the Presidential election (Wakeman, 2016). The week after Donald Trump won, Google searches in the US for “self-care” peaked as despondent Liberals turned to self-care to soothe themselves (Meltzer, 2016). Self-care now refers to acts individuals do for themselves, often by themselves. A withdrawal from the world to protect yourself. Companies have been all too eager to capitalise on this, offering products to help you #SelfCare and be a more productive worker (Davies, 2015). Self-care becomes a way to perform health and wellness, instead of uncomfortable honesty (Crimethinc, 2013). Often products from wellness shops like Goop are bought because we are unhappy with ourselves – thinking we’re too fat, too ugly – instead of because we love ourselves. This is neoliberal self-care: a privatisation of responsibility and an obfuscation and depoliticization of the roots of these problems (Michaeli, 2017). “Self-care cannot be an “act of political warfare” if the only battle you’re waging is against your frown lines with $110 moisturizer” (Newman-Bremang, 2021, para. 6).
One activist I spoke to from Cambridge pointed out how in activist spaces neoliberal self-care can often be used as an excuse to avoid the “yucky bits” of organising – the difficult, complicated, sometimes painful or just less exciting parts of organising: doing the washing up after a communal meal, providing emotional support, harm reduction, filling out Excel spreadsheets. Here, self-care becomes a replacement and alternative to political action, prioritising comfort over the meaningful organising that must compliment care. When self-care is ripped from its original meaning it can have a tendency towards comfort and indulgence masked in the language of radicalism. An away day for this dissertation included a talk with tips and tricks to look after ourselves like breathing techniques, exercise and a maintaining good diet. The first thought for many of us was, ‘what about lessening our workload, longer extensions, financial support?’ Depoliticised self-care encourages individualistic (sometimes expensive) responses to structural problems and is often the privilege of the wealthy who have time, space and resources for it.
Activists meanwhile have been trying to reconnect self-care back to the collective. Without collective care, the political potential of self-care is rendered useless, encouraging us to turn from uncomfortable realities and sink into the comfort of a warm, overpriced bubble bath. Rose (2020) argues self-care must be a collective struggle to fight burnout. Meanwhile, Dutton (2014) has called for a queering of self-care that acknowledges the fluidity of self-care, resisting hierarchies of correct and incorrect forms of self-care: “Self-care might look calm, relaxed, and happy; or it might look like deep depression, sadness, or failing to function at all.” (p.7). Coeden, a member of The Group, argues XR changed the culture of how UK activists organise after looking at the lack of care and burnout in environmental groups in the UK. A core part of their culture, particularly XR Youth’s culture, was regenerative organising. Coeden describes this as the idea that, “we need to act in ways which don’t burn people out, in which people are able to sustain the movement… generally it was about having a conscious attitude towards meetings and towards group culture and towards making that group culture about supporting the people in it and not just about the actions.”
Like the youth strikes, many of the current crop of university activists also learned how to organise in XR Youth and this emphasis on regenerative organising has followed them into other spaces, including The Group, as activists have shared experiences. The Group have tried to create what they call a “culture of care” where caring practices are imbedded in the way they organise. Trout describes this as “not specific acts or individual things. It’s a way of being and conducting yourself… care being a consistent practice throughout everything. That it becomes culturally embodied where you don’t need to have specific welfare people but welfare is ingrained within that space.”
This requires a level of intimacy with each other. Sophie K. Rosa (2023) has written on the need to revalue intimacy – “a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love” (p. 2). She insists the personal is still political and that to, “remake the world we must pay attention to connection, care and community as sites of struggle” (p.4). Revaluing intimacy becomes a strategy to resist capitalism by strengthening revolutionary movements building “the kinds of relationships that could support our struggles for a future of abundance” (p.7). Additionally, care becomes a feedback loop for group culture. Caring for others means listening to them and their needs. Doing that strengthens bonds, trust and relationships allowing caring to become easier but also responsive and adaptable when needs change. Cultures are constantly made and remade by those that engage with them and if done correctly, a culture of care will be responsive to changing needs.
The culture of care has manifested itself in a variety of ways. The Group have prioritised joy in its traditional sense by committing to organising social events which Trout sees as having a regenerative function. By ingraining care into everything, “any mundane space or conversation to be one that could be a space of care” says Trout. In meetings, accessibility has been a big focus to make them caring spaces. Queerness often overlaps with neurodivergence (Warrier, 2020) so a meeting your average businessman attends will likely be extremely boring for a group of queers. Speaking from experience as a neurodivergent activist, this boredom quickly devolves in chaos if needs are ignored and shoehorned into meeting formats not designed for us. Facilitating a group of under/overstimulated neurodivergent activists can be akin to chasing headless chickens. To get around that, a facilitator chairs each meeting for The Group. A facilitator, says Coeden who claims (believably, as one of those people with seemingly limitless energy) to have gone to thousands of meetings, “is basically responsible for making sure that the meeting runs smoothly”. ‘Running smoothly’ means reaching decisions accessibly and democratically. It means reading the room, having control of it so it can’t be dominated and everyone can engage fully with it and helping resolve conflicts. In other words, it means caring for the meeting, being attuned and sensitive to the conversation, dynamics and individuals in the room. At the start of every meeting The Group holds there is a check-in where names and pronouns are shared in turn and space created to share how everyone is doing in their wider life and at that moment – in one meeting someone was in a particularly hyperactive mood that day with frequent stimming and wanted to communicate they weren’t trying to be disruptive. Regular breaks happen during a meeting (usually every hour). A communal meal and snacks are at each meeting so everyone is fed, and at the end a check-out repeats the format of the check-in, providing space to say how people feel that meeting went. When taken together, this builds a picture of meetings where care runs through from start to finish and helps build cultures where care is prioritised.
Much like the catharsis of collective action as self-care described by Ortega-Williams (2021), actions such as occupations can be seen in this light too. Occupations have been detrimental to the group and helped burn people out or push others away from direct action but there have been positive uses too. Bucket and I both agree that occupations can be a useful tool for internal organising and bringing people closer together through creating shared experiences and being held and supported by the collective through those experiences. For queer people who experience repression so often, occupations create temporary autonomous zones – temporary enclaves where alternatives to power can be realised (Bey, 2003). Normality and rules are suspended in a carnivalesque space where hierarchy can be inverted (Graeber, 2007). In 2022 I visited an occupation at the University of Nottingham. Here they created space for queer students to live with and care for each other side by side. They appointed welfare officers and held regular group check-ins to talk about how each of them was doing. Each night had socials ranging from poetry readings and dancing on tables to using management’s top-of-the-range projector to screen Brokeback Mountain. One occupier told me, “I’ve never had such a safe space… It became a community because we all really looked after each other.” (Larkham, 2022, para.18).
In line with Dutton’s queering of self-care, there is often space for a whole range of emotions in this culture of care – although it is worth noting meetings often tend towards ‘acceptable’ emotions as outlined by (Wilkinson, 2009, pp. 39–40). Being a group that often engages in direct action, confrontation with security guards and repression by the university have plagued our organising and here care has played an essential role. In a zine The Group wrote, they noted building a culture of community and care has been essential to fighting against repression. Trout describes her experience of a university investigation as, “fundamentally uncaring… they wanted me to feel fragile and depressed, they wanted me to feel pushed to my limits.” The idea, Coeden says, of having care imbedded in organising means “when people go through investigations there’s people around that person. They’re not isolated.”
Care can be a powerful tool to keep a group together and continue campaigns in the face of something designed to tear them apart. In one sense Trout argues, it is necessary because to not care here “is not conducive to trust, its not conducive to strengthening friendships.” Ultimately, Trout argues where care really becomes embodied is in criticisms, as the next chapter will show.
*** Anti-Hierarchy
“To be radical is to be radical in relation to a concrete situation, by identifying the most transformative action compatible with it… Outside of that, “radicality” is a purely aesthetic gesture… devoid of commitment to actually producing effects in the world” (Nunes, 2021, p. 271)
As mentioned previously, current active groups in the student movement function on broadly anarchist, or horizontalist, lines. Bucket sees the current tendency in one section of the left towards flattening hierarchies and consensus decision making (horizontalism) a continuation of a tradition that can be traced back through XR, Occupy (Leach, 2013), and alter-globalisation (Graeber, 2002) movements to even earlier iterations. But this way of organising has not been without its limitations. Milburn (2019) notes that when old organisational, action and interpretative models are artificially placed on a new situation and movement, it collapses and fails to address the present conjuncture (p.68). If traditions are to be repeated, they must not be done uncritically and be rooted in present circumstances. This authentic creation requires new forms that, “criticise themselves constantly, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start over anew” (Marx, 2005, p. 5). The other organising model, often associated with Marxists, is a strictly hierarchical (vertical) revolutionary party, of which anarchists have many critiques and is often viewed as a relic from 20<sup>th</sup> Century revolutions. Attempting to reconcile the two dominant approaches to political organisation, Nunes (2021) argues for an ecological approach to movement building that is “neither vertical, nor horizontal”. Instead of aiming for a fixed approach, predetermined as the ‘most radical’, this approach calls for sensitivity to context and flexible power relations according to a situation’s specific needs.
In this spirit, I will focus on how hierarchy operates within The Group through ‘anti-hierarchy’. The concept of anti-hierarchy is, as far as I can make out, an original one. Drawing on her own and comrade’s experiences of organising over the last 6 years, Bucket developed a critique of hierarchy, how it operates in groups and how we often fail to deal with the problems it throws up. She argues anti-hierarchy is part of a culture of care and difficult to separate from that, but nevertheless it’s a concept worth analysing in isolation. It is a response to so-called ‘non-hierarchical’ groups that reject formalised hierarchies, but often end up obscuring hidden hierarchies such as cliques that can have oversized influence over a group because, as Bucket puts it sarcastically, “we’re all equal here, comrade!” An influence on Bucket in this regard is ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ (Freeman, 1984). Freeman argues cogently against “leaderless, structureless groups” (p.5) that made up the 1970s feminist movement. “There is no such thing as structurelessness” she says (p.6), wherever groups of people meet there is structure of some sort, formal or informal, to strive for structurelessness is to mask where power really lies and as achievable as an “‘objective’ news story” (p.6). It creates cliques that can come to informally dominate groups and lacking an explicit structure to name and criticise, the power of these cliques is hard to dismantle. Lacking formal spokespeople or a decision process on how to engage with the press, individuals were allowed to rise to the top and become “stars” (p.10). A movement that doesn’t choose who exercises power and how, “does not thereby abolish power” (p.13). Freeman concludes with proposing “democratic structuring”, a system that attempts to maintain the egality feminists were aiming for whilst specifying the location of power based on seven principles: delegation and distribution of authority, rotation and rational allocation of tasks, responsibility, diffusion of information and equal access to resources (pp.14–15). The second influence is a rebuttal, The Tyranny of Tyranny (Levine, 1984). Levine argues there is value in women’s attempts to reject the patriarchal modes of organising. The alternatives women developed are a solution to the “over-structured, hierarchical organisation of society” (p.21) and do not need, “more structures and rules, providing us with easy answers, pre-fab alternatives and no room in which to create our own way of life.” (p.19). Instead, Levine argues for a revolution based on friendship and anarchist-like principles the feminist movement had already developed.
Anti-hierarchy is a pragmatic synthesis of the two critiques, recognising hierarchies are often undesirable but not wanting to compromise organising principles that work. Bucket adds, some hierarchies can’t be dismantled: “they’re just facts of life because we live in an imperfect capitalist society. Even in some utopian society I don’t think we can ever truly claim to abolish hierarchies because the act of saying you have removed hierarchies is how they begin to seep in.” Some hierarchies like skills and knowledge, where some know more than others or have a specific skill set, are not easily dismantled. Dismantling them may not necessarily be desirable. For similar reasons why activists describe themselves as anti-racist, rather than simply non-racist, the solution anti-hierarchy offers is thinking critically about hierarchies in spaces and being constantly vigilant for their emergence, rather than pretending they aren’t there, or instituting strict hierarchies that are difficult to criticise and break down.
Anti-clout is a closely related aspect of Anti-hierarchy and it’s a testament to Bucket’s thinking on these concepts that she struggled to accept the concept could be seen as ‘her’ idea, “the more clout you have, the more anti-clout you should be,” she told me. On an individual level, personal attributes like class, age, gender, ethnicity and disability (CAGED) or experience can intersect to determine the amount of power someone has in a room, or how likely it is they are listened to – in other words, how much clout they have. Bucket defines clout as, “when you get credit disproportionately large to your actual actions.” Clout in this sense differs from Bourdieu’s (1986) conception of social capital in that this is an analysis more specific to activist groups and political movements. Bucket suggested a few ways people can get clout within movements: getting (or claiming) credit for work that behind the scenes was a collective effort, but because often the work of women and queer people is invisibilised they won’t get credit; being well networked and holding relationships with lots of other groups or doing lots of public facing or media work so your name and face become associated with a group or campaign in way that creates a micro-celebrity or poster child for a cause.
Anti-clout was largely formed from observing experiences of student activists who were involved in the University of Manchester 2020/21 rent strike. At the time, the rent strike drew huge national media attention. One person, Ben McGowan, was the group’s go-to figure for many of these interviews. Despite being an organisation without any formal hierarchy, he effectively became the figurehead of the campaign because of these media appearances, despite, some organisers say, not even being on rent strike himself. Using this clout, he revealed his true colours as being far less radical than he appeared and wormed his way into the Labour Party establishment. McGowan’s journey from ‘radical’ rent strike leader to Liberal stooge took only a few years – could that have been possible if he was not given the platform to build his public image?
In practical terms, the first step in anti-hierarchy is recognising hierarchies exist, and often are impossible to erase entirely. Hierarchies must then be named, brought out into the open to be critiqued. At the start of 2024 it was decided in a termly review The Group had much more work to do on developing group culture. We held a ‘group culture day’, which I helped plan, involving discussions and workshops about our group’s culture. The first workshop was designed to visualise power in The Group. A short exercise involved asking a series of questions including:
- How much of your time do you currently spend doing activism?
- How long have you been organising?
- how many actions have you done?
- How many activist groups are you a part of?
- How many material items do you have for activism (clothes, burner phone etc.)?
- How many talks, workshops, meetings and sessions have you led or facilitated?
- How much public facing work have you done?
For each question people were asked to physically arrange themselves in the room on a spectrum from most to least. It is worth noting this day was not attended by as many as we would have liked which did not give an ideally diverse set of experiences. Predictably, a few individuals who have been organising for longer and been more deeply involved spent a lot of time at the ‘most’ end (Bucket, Coeden and I). It threw up some interesting results too. The starkest divide came when the room was asked if they needed to work to get through university, at which point the room was almost completely split, with the only black woman in the group being the only one of us who needed to work regularly whilst at university. Two of us were in the middle – Coeden who worked full time before coming to university but hasn’t worked during and me, a part-time freelance journalist (not regular work, but still a job). Most people did not need to work whilst at university which really brought intersectional class divides in the space to the fore. The final question was ‘how much clout do you have in this space?’ which people were given the opportunity to suggest others move if they feel they over/underestimated their status.
After acknowledging the hierarchies and disparities, the next step is to think critically about those hierarchies: are they good? Do we want to or can we mitigate them? If not, what are we going to do to acknowledge them? Following the exercise Bucket, Coeden, a transmasc called Marvin and I went off into a group as those with more clout to discuss what we had seen and the others had their own chat. What followed was honest and frank discussions about discrepancies and inequalities in the room and why we think they exist – a critique and analysis of the hierarchies presented to us. Marvin, who some expected not to be in our group, pointed out that whilst on paper he has just as much experience as me Bucket and Coeden, the work he does is more behind the scenes such as dealing with finances and social media, whereas us other three do a lot of work networking or outward facing work that is more visible. Moreover, because this work is more visible, people in other groups reinforce this perception of who the ‘big names’ are. They will likely only know a few individuals and will perceive those people as more important, despite the fact we are all supposed to be equal. In the case of networking, it can be very difficult to have relationship with other organisations not held by a small number of people. Everyone in The Group cannot know everyone in XR, but a few of us can know a few key people in XR. This is a case of one hierarchy that cannot be entirely broken down but in naming it we were able to see aspects that can be mitigated by bringing newer people along to opportunities to network and raising up the hidden labour that goes on.
The final step, according to Bucket, is then working out how to structure your group in a way which deals with the fact hierarchies always exist and can nonetheless still be democratic and accessible for people to see where power lies and how to challenge it. Throughout the day we also had discussions on CAGED and how they can impact ability to get involved in activism. We had a discussion where each person took it in turns to describe their class background and experiences of that, how much money they and their family have, with the room being skewed towards a more middle-class demographic with a couple outliers below and two individuals who are far wealthier than any of us knew. Following this we committed to doing more work on CAGED to develop a deeper understanding of it and drew up early plans for a system to share money more equitably. After other conversations we have previously incorporated ‘skill shares’, opportunities like workshops or trainings to share skills or knowledge between group members. Often, they are done in collaboration with other groups or run internally and I have run several. Skill shares mean skills and knowledge (like writing a press release) are more evenly distributed and aren’t concentrated among an individual which can lead to them burning out, but it also creates a culture of educational praxis (see: Freire, 1972). The Group have also tried a ‘buddy system’ for tasks where those with less experience are paired with those who know what they’re doing to create opporunities for learning and build confidence.
Anti-hierarchy has to be an active persistent process of critique that needs to be nurtured, requiring honest self-reflection to accurately assess and critique interpersonal dynamics. This level of critique and self-reflection can only be made possible by having a culture of care and intimacy described in the previous chapter. Trout told me, “ultimately, where care becomes embodied is in criticisms about hierarchy or clout. It’s still coming from a position of care for that individual but also a position of care for the entire group and what the group’s trying to achieve.” It necessitates a high level of trust that allows activists to speak openly and honestly and make critiques that may sting but are given in good faith. Without care, criticism “could otherwise be seen as maliciousness, or just trying to sabotage another person of sabotage the group.” The trust and care for constant critique allows for fluid forms of organising. The Group are not structuring themselves on the ‘best’ way, they are trusting themselves to work that out and adapt as they go along, creating new ideas and forms of organising as they go.
*** Discussion and Conclusion
What I have presented here is not particularly groundbreaking, paradigm shifting research. It will likely not reshape political organising but what it does show is there is a world outside rigid radicalism. I have also deconstructed joyful militancy, showing that by attuning to the needs of those around us we create healthy, vibrant, sustainable resistance. Prioritising care creates intimacy and trust between activists, building strong relationships which call us to listen closely to each other. This level of trust and intimacy creates space for comradely critique and self-reflection that is crucial for fluid modes of organising that don’t work from a fixed ideal. Fluidity and strong relationships allow for the active theory of joyful militancy to take hold, allowing new ideas like anti-hierarchy to develop. In the methodology section I noted Graeber’s (2004) vision for anarchist academia that can “look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts” (p.11) I feel this research succeeds in that and will give them useful insights. I have also provided an account of the present student movement, what it is doing, its character, the queerness of its current form and how activists are queering organising, something missing from the literature.
There are limitations to this research, largely arising from time and word count constraints. In painting a picture of how care and anti-hierarchy should (and do) work, I feel I have not quite been able to capture the complexity of how they often do not work, or how they can fail to be implemented and had I more time and words I would have liked to explore that in more depth. Neurodiversity, as many of The Group are both queer and neurodiverse, is an aspect that runs through this research but could not be explored in this few words. As one of the older, more experienced members of The Group, there are certainly oversights I will have made by not incorporating voices of people with less experience and clout than me as fully as I would have liked. Interviewing them was more difficult as they are unavailable more often and show up to meetings less so future research could try to incorporate the perspective of marginalised activists more fully, instead of largely being from my perspective as part of the dominant culture. Tracing the concepts of self-care and anti-hierarchy back to their roots as I have done could provide a good starting point for further research on these areas and their relation to activism. An area I started out wanting to explore is suffering and pleasure, and how they are experienced in activist spaces, often swinging from one extreme to the other. I think this would be particularly interesting in the light of Dutton’s (2014) queering of self-care.
*** References
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|
#title Potential, Power and Enduring Problems
#subtitle Reassembling the Anarchist Critique of Technology
#author Zachary M. Loeb
#date 2015-12-13
#source
*Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies* No. 1 & 2 (2015): Anarchist Modernities, pp. 87-114 [[https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/17182][journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/17182]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-02-03T23:27:35
#authors Zachary M. Loeb
#topics technology, anti-technology
*** Abstract
Within anarchist thought there is a current that treats a critique of technology as a central component of a broader critique of society and modernity. This tendency – which can be traced through the works of Peter Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker, and Murray Bookchin – treats technologies as being thoroughly nested within sets of powerful social relations. Thus, it is not that technology cannot provide ‘plenty for all’ but that technology is bound up in a system where priorities other than providing plenty win out. This paper will work to reassemble the framework of this current in order to demonstrate the continuing strength of this critique.
*** I.
Faith in technological progress has provided a powerful well of optimism from which ideologies as disparate as Marxism and neoliberal capitalism have continually drawn. Indeed, the variety of machines and techniques that are grouped together under the heading “technology” often come to symbolize the tools, bothliterally and figuratively, which a society uses to construct a modern, better, world. That technologically enhanced modern societies remain rife with inequity and oppression, while leaving a trail of toxic e-waste in their wake, is treated as an acceptable tradeoff for progress – while assurances are given that technological solutions will soon appear to solve the aforementioned troubles. Beyond the capitalist embrace of technology, the reactionary lust for technological power, or the techno-utopian longings of some forms of socialism, there is a current in anarchist thought that has consistently advanced a contrary approach to technology. It is not a view that eagerly embraces or hastily rejects technology, as such, but instead it is a view which recognizes that certain types of technology carry within them the kernels of particular forms of social relations – certain forms of modernity – regardless of whether a machine is run by a capitalist, a nationalist state, or a workers state.
While it would be quite difficult, or potentially impossible, to identify a single anarchist philosophy of technology, a line can be traced across the works of Peter Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker and Murray Bookchin that provides a sturdy framework for an anarchist analysis of technology. These thinkers connect their broader critiques of power, control and hierarchy to the way that particular technologies may reify these imbalances, while still remaining aware of technology’s liberating potential. This critical engagement with technology is a vital, if overlooked, aspect of these particular anarchists’ thought and represents an element in anarchist theory that is further developed by the likes of Colin Ward, Paul Goodman and Herbert Read. Furthermore, the anarchist approach to technology characterized by Kropotkin, Rocker and Bookchin simultaneously echoes and is echoed by prominent thinkers associated with the broader critique of technology – notably Lewis Mumford who, arguably, appears within a broader constellation of anarchist or left-libertarian thought.
Though, it is certainly the case, that Peter Kropotkin never used a
smart phone, the approach to technology developed by these anarchist thinkers remains vital today. For, even if these thinkers would be astounded by certain contemporary technologies they would be all too unsurprised by the way today’s technologies still drive profits to the wealthy, exacerbate governmental surveillance, and mutilate the planet. The historian Judy Wajcman has written that “our common sense notion of ‘modern’ denotes a historical process of steady advance and improvement in human material well- being, occasioned by technological innovation.”[1] The critique that is visible in the particular anarchist current being reassembled in this paper recognizes that the potential for “advance and improvement” is not inherent in technology itself. Indeed, modern ‘technological innovation’ can regress and harm human well-being just as easily as it can help improve it. Therefore, reassembling this anarchist critique of technology is not undertaken because “we hardly dare to think” and thus “we consult musty books a hundred years old, to know what ancient masters thought on the subject,”[2] but because this anarchist analysis is still effective for questioning ideas of modernity, scientific progress, and technology’s role in society.
Alas, too often it seems that what ‘we hardly dare to think’ about is the way that new technology often reinforces old power and advances a vision of modernity where machinery is used primarily to enrich the few instead of provide for the many.
*** II.
There is a certain hopeful orientation towards the future, and towards technology, that informs much of Peter Kropotkin’s work. This is not the result of a wishy-washy belief in the inherent goodness of humanity or of a Marxist confidence in the inevitability of a coming proletarian revolution, but of his scientific observations related to the role of mutual aid as both a factor in the evolution of species and of the evolution of human societies. Despite the rise of capitalism, its consolidation of power, and the attempts by its primary beneficiaries to suppress the impulse towards mutual aid, in favor of an emphasis on the State and the Church, Kropotkin concluded that such efforts were not enough to “weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.”[3] For Kropotkin the tenacious survival of mutual aid could still be seen in a host of organized groups ranging from lifeboat associations to libraries to the Red Cross, all of which selflessly demonstrated how “the ethical progress of our race […] appears as a gradual extension of the mutual-aid principles […] so as to finally embrace one day the whole of mankind, without respect to its divers [sic] creeds, languages, and races.”[4]
In Kropotkin’s estimation the progress of human civilization bore the evidence of the oft unseen workings of mutual aid. Breakthroughs and advancements were not the result of a few ‘great’ individuals but were instead a testament to an uncountable number of forgotten people who had made essential contributions that allowed for the eventual breakthrough, and such advancements also included technological ones.[5] The inequity and exploitation with which the world was riven did not appear to Kropotkin as a reflection of a natural law but as a result of the power of “authoritarian” tendencies that had become increasingly dominant.[6] Thus, the fact that some were destitute while others lived lives of decadence was not because of the impossibility of providing ‘plenty for all’ but because the society was arranged in such a way as to keep the plenitude from being equitably distributed.
Beyond the process of invention, it is in Kropotkin’s vision of how all can have their deserved share in the present (and the future) that his thinking on technology becomes clearest – in particular what is evident is the high degree of potential that he sees in technology. When Kropotkin observes how “machinery, too, has become the exclusive property of the few,”[7] he is suggesting the way these
machines can be operated by and for the people instead of by the people for the machine’s owners. The Conquest of Bread is littered with appeals to the way in which technologies can improve lives and provide “plenty for all” (which includes plenty of leisure and plenty of fulfilling work), and where needs still exist these will be addressed through “the best machinery that man has invented or can invent.”[8] Thus, Kropotkin approached technology from the capitalist present in which he was writing, while looking forward to the anarchist- communist future he envisioned – the future technologies he anticipated would be those that would best suit the needs of the community. Kropotkin noted that “whenever a saving of human labour can be obtained by means of a machine, the machine is welcome and will be resorted to”9 – though this would only function equitably in a society where the machine is used to improve the life of the worker instead of turning the worker into a cog within the machine. What emerges in Kropotkin’s thinking from his commentary on mutual aid to his observations on the promise of agricultural technologies is a belief that if society can switch its orientation from “authoritarian” to “libertarian” than people “by the aid of machinery already invented and to be invented, should themselves create all imaginable riches. Technics and science will not be lagging behind if production takes such a direction.”[10] This points to a sense that machines, under capitalism, are not able to function truly efficiently or rationally. That which is produced is excessive or unneeded.
The optimism of Kropotkin’s writings, including those that take technology into account, speak to many of the very reasons why technology remains a font of hope. For technology truly does hold out the offer of “plenty for all” even if such “plenty” is yet to be distributed in such a way as to provide for all. Alas, the positive potentials that Kropokin saw in technology would be filled with holes by machine gun fire and ground beneath the treads of tanks only a few years after works like The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops appeared. The economic, social, and political atmosphere of the period between the two world wars brought with it certain shifts in attitudes towards technology. Capitalism and socialism still paid fealty to the modernity ushered in by the machine, but technology also became a symbol of power for incipient fascist ideologies. While Kropotkin had emphasized the need to attach a “libertarian” ethos to technology, other thinkers attached a distinctly “authoritarian” vision to the potentials of technologicy. Thus the decorated World War One veteran Ernst Jünger marveled at how “technology’s inherent claim to power has grown stronger,” resolutely declaring: “technology is our uniform.”[11] Similarly Oswald Spengler surveyed the new forms of technological power and feared that “the lord of the world is becoming the slave of the Machine” and thus he called for “Faustian man” (Western man) to reassert control lest the new technology be used against “Faustian civilization” (Western civilization).[12] The thought of these purveyors of “reactionary modernism”[13] presents a stark retort to Kropotkin, demonstrating the way in which technological power that could liberate people could also usher in an era of grotesque repression and barbarity. It is in this smoke filled atmosphere that Rudolf Rocker’s technological critique adjusts Kropotkin’s ideas to confront a world experiencing the way that technology can turn a continent into rubble.
While Kropotkin had emphasized the role that mutual-aid played in the development of human civilization, Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture aimed to elucidate the role that “the will to power” played in shaping human history, an analysis which was darkly warranted against the backdrop of the “triumph of the will.”[14] To Rocker, “the desire to bring everything under one rule, to unite mechanically and to subject to its will every social activity, is fundamental in every power,”[15] be it religious or state power, whether this state be fascist or Bolshevist, whether it be capitalist or pre-capitalist. Anarchism, for Rocker, thus appears as the counter to this “will to power” insofar as it seeks not the hording of power in a few hands or the transfer of power from one elite to another elite (or worker’s
vanguard) but the means of disseminating this power. Such freedom “from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppressions […] is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.”[16] Machinery and technology appear in Rocker’s work as examples not so much of liberating potential but as ways in which “the will to power” is consolidated and exercised; and though such machinery may generate a great deal of human wealth (“plenty for all”) this wealth winds up concentrated in only a few hands as workers, including women and children, fall victim to further exploitation.[17]
In a similar vein to Kropotkin, Rocker sees the subterranean workings of mutual-aid at work all across human civilization including in the arts and technical fields,[18] that “great men” are singled out for praise is less a result of their individual greatness than of the ideological workings of “the will to power.” Writing in the midst of the fascist consolidation of power, Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture bears witness to what the potential of technology can sow when it is commanded by authoritarian forces. Spengler had feared that “the exploited world” empowered by new technology “is beginning to take revenge on its lords.”[19] But what Rocker observed was the fascist ‘lords’ tightening their grip on “the exploited world” and taking their revenge on any who had questioned their dominance. With words that eerily evoke Jünger’s comment that “technology is our uniform,” Rocker observed that “there is a real danger that we shall rush on to the era of the mechanical man with giant strides.”[20] Rejecting the technological uniform and the Spenglarian call for “Faustian man” Rocker remained hopeful that humanity could emerge from the smoky darkness being made continually dimmer by technology. Seeing what technology could do in authoritarian hands, it became ever more imperative to reorient it toward libertarian goals.
The vision of technology in the aftermath of WWI and in the midst of the early stages of WWII did not permit Rocker the same
optimism that appears in Kropotkin’s thought. Rocker’s contribution to an anarchist critique of technology was in still seeing the role that mutual-aid plays in the development of technologies and the ways in which technology can benefit distributed power, while clearly elucidating a dire warning that “we have increased and developed our technical ability to a degree which appears almost fantastic, and yet man has not become richer thereby; on the contrary he has become poorer.”[21] A further contribution that Rocker made to the anarchist critique of technology was in recognizing the ways in which technological power can repress the striving for autonomy and freedom as it reduces people to little more than cogs within the socio-technical apparatus.[22] The adherents of the “will to power” had discovered a staggering way of reifying and enhancing their power in modern technology and the modernity they constructed with it was one wherein the machines that could provide “plenty for all” instead produced bullets, uniforms, and bombs. Rocker wrote “that the men of science and technology have opened limitless possibilities to production is not disputed by anyone and needs no special proof. But under our present system every achievement of technology becomes a weapon of capitalism against the people and results in the very opposite of that which it was intended to accomplish.”[23] After warning against the horrific ways in which the potential of technology can be harnessed in the name of power, Rocker moved to reground technology in the principles of mutual aid emphasizing that the task remains “to see to it that the achievements of technical ability and the fruits of labor are made equally available to all members of society.”[24] For Rocker it was not sufficient to see capitalism as the sole problem, as the “will to power” that finds a powerful tool in technology predates capitalism and can easily exist in a post- capitalist world.
Whereas Kropotkin’s work shows a certain emphasis on the potentialities of technology and Rocker focuses upon the way that technology reinforces societal power, Murray Bookchin synthesized the two views while rooting his own critique in an ecological perspective. Though Bookchin was apt to use terms such as “social ecology,” and later in his life “communalism,” instead of “anarchism,” the philosophy developed by Bookchin helped bring the anarchist critique of technology into the twenty-first century.[25] Bookchin wrote about technology against the backdrop of the continued dominance of capitalism, the disappearance of the “left that was,” and rising ecological destruction. Moving beyond the nascent concern with the threat of nuclear weapons which one finds in Rocker,[26] Bookchin recognized that capitalism not only represses countless people but also poses a grave threat to the future of life on Earth. Therefore, for Bookchin, it was not only necessary to move toward a “libertarian” society over an “authoritarian” one, but toward “an ecological society” as well.[27] Bookchin observed coldly that “unless science and technics can contain the pollution and simplification of the planet, there will decidedly be a crisis in the future that strips the biosphere of its very capacity to support complex life-forms.”[28] This comment demonstrates deftly Bookchin’s awareness of the potential of technology and the risks of its power.
The technological riddle that Bookchin found himself attempting to solve was the contrast between “a great sense of promise about technical innovation, on the one hand, and by a thorough disenchantment with its results, on the other.”[29] Bookchin is wholly confident, as was Kropotkin before him, that technology can be used to ensure “plenty for all.” Similarly, Bookchin saw the tendency towards power and hierarchy in history, but much like Rocker he did not see this as a reason to vilify technology, as such, but instead to point out the ambiguities of technology and the ways in which it can reinforce dominant forces, or demonstrate a liberating potential. While showing a concern for the way that “man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine,”[30] Bookchin did not see this standardizing effect as inherent in technology itself. Rather Bookchin saw, akin to Kropotkin, that technology could be harnessed by the “revolution” to provide enough for all once the machinery is redirected.[31] Bookchin remained quite cognizant of the deleterious impact that technologies steered by capitalism have had upon humanity and the world, but he argued for an reorientation that would “bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the world of life, back into technology, into the means of human survival,” and he noted that doing so “would be a revolutionary renewal of man’s ties to nature.”[32]
In thinking about the potential to move “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” Bookchin engaged with the various ways in which moves in this direction might too easily go astray. For Bookchin “liberatory technology” is only possible within a “liberatory society,”[33] and he repeatedly cautions his readers not to confuse technology as such with technology as used by those in power. Thus, in what can only be interpreted as a retort to the likes of E.F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich, Bookchin warned against the false hope that can be conjured up by ideas such as “appropriate technologies” or “convivial tools,” as such alternative forms of technology remain enmeshed in the larger sphere of governmental and capitalist power.[34]
A similar aggravated note appears in Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, where he attacked the thinking of “anti- technology anarchists” by warning of the way such thinkers displace “capitalism with the machine, thereby shifting the reader’s attention from the all-important social relations that determine the use of technology to technology itself.”[35] Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that Bookchin advocated an unthinking embrace of all technology, to advocate for “liberatory technology” is to suggest that there are also “repressive technologies,” it is to see an opposition between “libertarian technics” and “authoritarian technics.”36 Instead of falling for the temptation to treat technology as a separate sphere of consideration, Bookchin insisted that technologies be seen as thoroughly embedded in a larger societal critique. As Bookchin noted “our technics can be either catalysts for our integration with the natural world or the chasms separating us from it.”[37]
Through the work of Kropotkin, Rocker, and Bookchin, the framework for an anarchist critique of technology emerges. Like much anarchist theorizing, it is more of an invitation for further thought than it is a tidy definitive answer. Yet an orientation nevertheless appears which recognizes the potential that technology has for providing “plenty for all” (Kropotkin), warns of the way that new technologies can dangerously enhance the “will to power” (Rocker), and argues for the development of new “liberatory technologies” that will allow the potential to triumph over the lure of power (Bookchin). Thus, it becomes evident, that these thinkers were not strictly critiquing technology. Indeed, Bookchin and Rocker warned against the tendency to focus too exclusively on technology. These are critiques aimed against the world in which those technologies are couched. Their critique of technology was by extension a critique of modern capitalist society. Yet, before further reassembling the framework of this critique it is worthwhile to take a slight detour through the thought of a figure on the outskirts of this anarchist critique, Lewis Mumford, whose work nevertheless provides many important bridges and tributaries.
*** III.
The “Critique of Technology” does not so much point to a definitive school of thought, as to a certain tendency in the history and philosophy of technology. It brings together a vague assortment of writers, activists and thinkers from a variety of political and philosophical perspectives whose main similarity is a shared critical stance towards technology. Though what is entailed in this critical stance varies from one thinker to the next. Despite the degree of ambiguity under the heading “critique of technology,” there are traces of anarchist thought, which appear amongst several of the
‘core’ thinkers associated with the critique. Indeed, though the anarchism or anarchist leanings of some of these thinkers are often overlooked, the radical analysis of technological power that one encounters amongst certain ‘critique of technology’ figures features echoes of such political commitment.
At the core of Lewis Mumford’s thinking, whether he was writing about technology, art, or cities, was his wrestling with the “fundamental difference between the good life and the ‘goods life.’”[38] That this topic should be such a recurring feature in his work was not a reflection of Mumford’s inability to define “the good life,” but of his frustration at the way that “the goods life” had come to stand in for “the good life.” In Mumford’s classic work Technics and Civilization he provided not only a social and cultural history of technology’s role in the development of civilization, but he also offered a bold vision of how humanity can harness its technological capabilities to provide “the good life” for all. Ensuring that all people are capable of enjoying the benefits of technologically wrought plenty was what Mumford called “basic communism” and he emphasized that “the claim to a livelihood rests upon the fact that, like the child in a family, one is a member of a community: the energy, the technical knowledge, the social heritage of a community belongs equally to every member of it, since in the large the individual contributions and differences are completely insignificant.”[39] For Mumford, the onset of WWII appeared as a demand not to abandon such a vision but to press for it with even greater fervor: “The only right anyone has as an American is to an equal share in the good life. Not a life of material abundance; but a life of comradeship, art, and love.”[40] And in the aftermath of WWII, in the shadow of the dropping of the nuclear bombs, Mumford emphasized that such a “right […] to an equal share in the good life” extended to all people’s of the world.41 Though it was clear to Mumford that humanity had the capacity to provide one and all “an equal share” he was fully cognizant that such megatechnic powers could also be consolidated and directed to
construct nuclear weaponry. Thus the second volume of Mumford’s final, theoretical, work (the two volume The Myth of the Machine) features Mumford declaring in his starkest terms the need for a reorientation “to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture,” and such prevention would require the development of “an organic world picture.”[42]
Mumford wrote extensively about technology (though he used the term “technics”); however, such writings, generally, avoided looking at pieces of machinery in isolation. Mumford’s focus was not upon machines, as such, but on what machines meant for humanity, on the ways in which various technical regimes helped or hindered the fulfillment of “the good life.” That humanity is unable to simply “invent its way out” of its human wrought problems was another leitmotif of Mumford’s work, laid out clearly as early as his first book wherein he wrote: “it would be so easy, this business of making over the world if it were only a matter of creating machinery”[43] Despite Mumford engaging with technics as a way of advancing a critique of the totality of civilization there are several highly influential contributions that Mumford has made to the broader analysis of technology. He remains a prominent thinker for the fields of the history and philosophy of technology. Drawing upon the thought of one of his greatest influences, Patrick Geddes, Mumford wrote about technology as being divided into historic phases: “the eotechnic” (roughly from the year 1000 to 1750), “the paleotechnic” (the period of industrial development from 1750 to 1850), and “the neotechnic” (from the close of the paleotechnic era to the present day, as of Mumford’s writing, in 1934).[44] Yet Mumford emphasized that one should not fall for the temptation of treating these phases as too neat or separate because there could be extensive overlap, and because human morals from “the paleotechnic” era did not suddenly disappear with the onset of “the neotechnic” era. Thus ‘modern’ was always a murky category. The machines that defined a new “technic” era did not mean that the society’s ethics had reached a similar level.
The concept of “megatehnics” and the “megamachine,” around which Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine focused, is another central idea from his work, and it emphasized not “big machines” per se but the agglomeration of social, economic, and political systems of control, though this power was often reified in technological instruments.[45] A third contribution to the analysis of technics, by Mumford, that is of particular import for the present discussion, was his argument that “two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic”[46] – the former representing large scale control, routinization and power, whilst the latter tools tended to be small scale, skill intensive, and autonomous.[47] The problem, as Mumford observed in his first book, was the way in which “scientific knowledge has not merely heightened the possibilities of life in the modern world: it has lowered the depths.”[48] The position towards technics that appeared across Mumford’s oeuvre was one that sees the immense potential of technology for providing all with “the good life,” the cataclysmic dangers of such potential being used to further shore up those in power who benefited from displacing the vision of “the good life” with the “goods life,” and a future oriented technical vision that saw the promise of technology being used for “the good” but which recognized that this change would come from people not from technology. That there were many similarities between Mumford’s thought and that seen in the works of Kropotkin, Rocker and Bookchin was not coincidental.
Lewis Mumford was not an anarchist. At least, he did not identify as such. Yet Mumford’s work often evinced the influence of certain anarchist thinkers and demonstrated such a rigorous emphasis on ethics, decentralization, autonomy, and the value of life that his critique of technology parallels the distinctly anarchist critique of technology that appears in the work of Kropotkin, Rocker and Bookchin. While Patrick Geddes had a particularly strong influence on Mumford, so too did the thought of Geddes’ “friend and colleague” Peter Kropotkin.[49] Indeed, Mumford’s “first public lecture in 1917” was at the “anarchist Ferrer Society” where he spoke about “Kropotkin and Regionalism.”[50] Interest in Kropotkin’s work was not abandoned by Mumford as his own thinking developed. Indeed Mumford repeatedly credited Kropotkin for his foresight and argued for the continuing validity of his ideas, as Kropotkin had foreseen “the opportunity for a more responsible and responsive local life, with greater scope for the human agents who were neglected and frustrated by mass organizations.”[51] One can only imagine what Mumford might have written had Freedom Press published the edition of Mutual Aid to which he had agreed to contribute an introduction.[52] After all, as Colin Ward wrote in the introduction to Freedom Press’s publication of an edited version of Technics and Civilization: “Mumford’s debt to Kropotkin was profound and handsomely acknowledged.”[53]
Kropotkin was a clear influence upon the work and thinking of Mumford. It is only fair to emphasize the important influence that Mumford had upon the thinking of Murray Bookchin as well. For, as Janet Biehl has noted, “Bookchin absorbed Kropotkin’s ideas through Mumford. Not until the late 1960s or early 1970s would [Bookchin] read Kropotkin’s books.”[54] While Mumford’s writings about decentralized city planning – likewise influenced by Kropotkin – had particular influence upon Bookchin, Mumford’s writing about technology also had an important impact. The emphasis that Bookchin put upon the opposition between “authoritarian” and “libertarian” technics was not an accidental echo of Mumford’s “authoritarian” and “democratic” technics, rather it was Bookchin purposely pushing Mumford’s analysis a step further and willingly stepping away from Mumford’s use of “the more socially respectable and amorphous term, democratic.”[55]
Granted, the pushback that Bookchin was giving against Mumford’s choice of the term “democratic” seems largely linked to the fact that the term “democratic” (especially when set-up in opposition to “authoritarian”) has a non-radical veneer. However, to engage with Mumford’s work in any detail (as Bookchin surely had done) is to recognize that what Mumford means by “democratic” and “democracy” is decidedly decentralist. Mumford’s democratic vision was not based upon party politics but included his call for “basic communism” entailed “the equalization of advantages between economic classes and within the community now spread far too widely apart in their incomes and their social opportunities.”[56] Indeed, by “democratic technics” Mumford clearly had in mind simple tools that remain under the control of their user. These would be the “liberatory tools” of a ‘liberatory’ society. And though Bookchin clearly had disagreements with some of Mumford’s phrasing, Bookchin also made a point of defending Mumford from charges of being “anti-technology” and from the misuse of his thought by “anti-technology” thinkers.[57] As Bookchin noted, Mumford “favored […] the sophistication of technology along democratic and humanly scaled lines.”[58] Here, Bookchin appears to be using the term “democratic” as a compliment.
While Mumford’s work and thinking have clearly been a great influence upon many anarchists, it is important to restate that he did not describe himself as an anarchist, though he does appear in Peter Marshall’s history of anarchism amongst the “Modern Libertarians.”[59] Yet, the influence of Kropotkin on Mumford is clear, as is Mumford’s influence upon Bookchin. As contemporaries, roughly speaking, Mumford and Rocker may not have so clearly interacted with one another but it is evident that Mumford was familiar with Rocker’s work. Mumford claimed that Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture provided “keen criticism from the standpoint of philosophical anarchism.”[60] It is not merely that Mumford was able to further popularize and advocate for Kropotkin’s ideas, but that in doing so Mumford participated in the ongoing conversation around Kropotkin’s ideas by keeping these concepts circulating and by providing a place for them within not just the critique of technology but within the history and philosophy of technology. The book for which Mumford won the National Book Award – The City in History – lauds Kropotkin’s foresight and vision.[61] Mumford may not be a canonical figure in the history of anarchist thought, but the influence he has had cannot be ignored. Mumford’s work helped to build and maintain the bridge between Kropotkin’s ideas and contemporary critiques of technology. The question that consumed so much of Mumford’s thinking – the opposition between “the good life” and the “goods life” – is a key question in the confrontation of megatechnic modernity, and this is the same matter that one sees struggled with in the arc of critique set out by Kropotkin, Rocker, and Bookchin.
While a technological advance may have the potential to provide “plenty for all” – this potential in and of itself is no guarantee that a just distribution will occur. The version of world civilization that is advanced and solidified by complex technologies is often simply an extension of power by those already in power. Technology may usher in a newer modern era, but such modernity can easily be a high-tech veneer atop distinctly antiquated power regimes. And these regimes may well predate or outlive capitalism. That technologies are not neutral artifacts but that they embody political values[62] is an important aspect of Kropotkin, Rocker and Bookchin’s thinking about technology and its place in society. Yet, there is a somewhat tragic element to reading the predictions and prescriptions of these thinkers, as well as Mumford, in the twenty- first century. The technological abundance of the present age stands as a galling reminder that technology can help bring about “the good life” but that what it generally brings about is instead “the goods life.”
Amidst the dominance of technology – the consolidation of power by the megamachine – “[t]oday […] ideas of decentralization usually play a much different role, an expression of the faint hope one may still create institutions here and there that allow ordinary folks some measure of autonomy.”[63] Yet, the anarchist critique of technological modernity that is evident from Kropotkin to Bookchin retains its heft precisely because it does not see this hope as ‘faint’ though it recognizes that the task of reconstruction is not for the faint of heart. What is recognized by this critique is that “we have merely used our new machines and energies to further processes which were begun under the auspices of capitalist and military enterprise: we have not yet utilized them to conquer these forms of enterprise and subdue them to more vital and humane purposes.”[64] Though humanity may have advanced into an age of “neotechnics,” the social, economic, and political structures that govern the society have not advanced nearly as much as the technology. Yet the analysis put forth by this set of thinkers does not wallow in despair but prefers righteous indignation. Technological advances have made it so that the prospect of “plenty for all is not a dream.”[65] As these thinkers insisted: “we are faced not with an absolute shortage of materials but with an irrational society.”[66]
Nevertheless, in attempting to think through the problems of “irrational society,” these thinkers display certain theoretical weaknesses that, though they may be a reflection of the time in which they were writing, still display flaws in their technological critique. Though a current of an anarchist critique of technology appears in the work of Kropotkin, Rocker, Bookchin (and Mumford), it is still a critique being advanced by a group of Western men. The historiography undertaken in works like Mutual Aid, Nationalism and Culture, and The Ecology of Freedom all work to engage a broader view of world history and civilizations than one that exclusively privileges Western societies, and men – but if the critique started in such works is to have utility it must be acknowledged that there are some shortcomings in the selfsame works. Whereas Emma Goldman seems to be echoing sentiments similar to those advanced by Kropotkin when she wrote that “freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities,”[67] the question remains whether or not women wind up being easily overlooked in this situation.
Though Kropotkin, as well as Rocker and Bookchin, clearly include women (and the whole of the world’s peoples) in their goals of “well being for all,” in The Conquest of Bread there are moments where on still sees women as fulfilling gendered tasks (such as cooking[68] and child-rearing[69]). Kropotkin recognized that ‘woman’s work’ was not usually given the attention it deserved and thus he projected a future wherein “machinery undertakes three-quarters of household cares,”[70] yet such a claim, once more, about the ‘liberating’ potential of technology only serves as a reminder that ‘liberating technology’ in a rigidly hierarchical society may do little to truly advance those liberatory aims. Voltairine de Cleyre wrote of the repressive effects of women laboring in the domestic sphere, “she has done one thing in a secluded sphere, and while she may have learned to do that thing well […] it is not a thing which has equipped her with the confidence necessary to go about making an independent life […] the world of production has swept past her; she knows nothing of it.”[71] Thus, the danger of simply emphasizing that ‘machinery’ will take over ‘household cares’ is the way in which such a stance sees the labor of women as only ‘household cares’ instead of treating this work as the labor that it truly is. Thus the focus on new machines risks perpetuating a gendered vision of labor against which Silvia Federici wrote, “only when men see our work as work – our love as work – and most important our determination to refuse both, will they change their attitude towards us.”[72]
Thus the ‘three-quarters of household cares’ is important to reflect upon as it risks diminishing labor to merely ‘cares’ – a reflection that “the overalls did not give us more power than the apron; if possible even less, because now we had to wear both and had less time and energy to struggle against them.”[73] Indeed the sphere of ‘machinery’ meant to alleviate women’s labor in the home provides a particularly stark example of the way that supposedly liberating technologies can simply enhance an authoritarian (and patriarchal) social order. As the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan has noted, in lines that echo Federici’s comments regarding aprons and overalls, that women in “the second postwar generation, discovered that they were working even longer hours than their mothers had worked because of the double burden of housework and outside employment.”[74] Machinery that ‘undertakes’ household cares may be quite helpful, but such machinery is not in and of itself a challenge to patriarchy.
Therefore, the question that lingers is the extent to which technologies can help promote an ‘emancipation’ for the entirety of the human species. As a somewhat defensive answer, it can be simple to highlight Bookchin’s emphasis upon “libertarian technics” along with his focus on the way that such a technics can only truly exist in a libertarian society. Yet, it may be more accurate to focus upon Rocker’s emphasis on power because the domination of women by men appears as an early, and lasting, manifestation of the “will to power.” As Goldman wrote, in an article on the importance of birth control, “if every male were emancipated from the superstitions of the past nothing would yet be changed in the social structure so long as woman had not taken her place with him in the great social struggle.”[75] Or, to approach it from a slightly different angle, perhaps Goldman’s comment that “time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated” can be read just the same with the terms “aspiring politicians” switched out with “technologies.” To suggest that “libertarian technics” can provide “plenty for all” is only sufficient if this “all” genuinely encompasses all.
It is easy to imagine a further retort that today we are in an era of technological abundance; however, it may be that technology is abundant, not that abundance is being made more readily available. The promise still held out by high-technology is also that “plenty for all is not a dream” though this version of plenty offers mountains of “the goods” as opposed to “the good.” While people may be vaguely aware of the abhorrent conditions under which the elements in their devices were mined, the exploitative conditions under which they were assembled, and the ecological hellscape their e-waste will contribute to once the device falls victim to planned obsolescence, what becomes clear for industrial society is that “the machine has not only run away without the driver, but the driver has become a mere part of the machine.”[76] Here, Mumford’s concept of the “megatechnic bribe” appears with harrowingly discomforting effect as an explanation for the way in which people are convinced to pick “the goods life” over “the good life.” According to Mumford the bribe “appear[s] to be a generous bargain […] if people are willing to surrender their life completely at source, this authoritarian system promises to generously give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, scientifically sorted, technically conditioned, manipulated, directed, and socially distributed under supervision of a centralized bureaucracy. What held at first only for increasing the quantity of goods, now applies to every aspect of life.”[77] Thus the high-tech accoutrements of modern society hold out the offer of increased freedom and autonomy but in accepting this people find themselves more thoroughly caught up in the authoritarian workings of the machine. After all, one can run only open-source software and encrypt everything done while online, but such purchases of individual freedom still rest atop a technologically blighted ecosystem. Technology may not be “our uniform” but it may have instead become our fashionable accouterment. As Bookchin noted “we who have created this machine must be awakened from our own slumber […] we too occupy the very world we have sought to mechanize.”[78]
Beyond the emphasis on potential and the threat of power, it may be that the most important element of this anarchist critique of technology is the way in which Kropotkin, Rocker, and Bookchin (as well as Mumford) showed no qualms in discussing the ‘ethical’ alongside the technical. Indeed, they emphasize that it is imperative to ground the technical in the ethical, and to suggest that much of the damage wrought by technology is a result of the two becoming divorced: “While man was subduing the forces of nature, he forgot to give to his actions an ethical content and to make his mental acquisitions serviceable to the community. He himself became the slave of the tool he had created.”[79] This emphasis upon ensuring that the technical advances were rooted in the needs of the community was what inspired much of Kropotkin’s hope for the potential of technology, for advances in manufacturing technology and related advances in agricultural science[80] showed that technology could truly provide “plenty for all.” In considering the meeting of such needs Kropotkin emphasized the primary problems of securing the essential goods for subsistence (“bread”),[81] but his sights were set beyond full stomachs: “after bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.”[82] This stance, too, was interwoven with Kropotkin’s rich sense of the needs for ethical foundations, which he saw clearest in the practice of mutual aid. Kropotkin’s observation – that “equality in mutual relations with the solidarity arising form it, this is the most powerful weapon of the animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality is equity”[83] – powerfully gestures towards the need to direct technology towards the satisfaction of the needs of all. And though these thinkers at times skated over questions relating to gender, their ethical focus provides space for such concerns to be asserted and given the emphasis they warrant. While rejecting the morality of capitalism as false, these thinkers do not embrace egoism but search for historic and ecological ethical foundations.
Where Kropotkin linked the ethical with representing a demand upon the potential of technology, and Rocker evoked the ethical as a way to reevaluate the power reified in technology, Bookchin’s treatment of the ethical expanded upon such views and gave them an ecological dimension. By emphasizing that “technics does not exist in a vacuum, nor does it have an autonomous life of its own,”[84] Bookchin reaffirmed the need to see technological shifts in the context of the society that made use of them. Thus, Bookchin showed that the way to interrogate new technological shifts, and to consider older ones, was to look at these machines in the real context of their use – a machine was not good merely because it functioned, it could only be good by helping move humanity closer to “the good.”[85] While categorically rejecting the notion that when it comes to technology small was synonymous with good and big always equivalent to evil,[86] Bookchin echoed Kropotkin’s call for an emphasis on the satisfaction of real needs – though he tied this closely to an ecological awareness: “a technology for life must be based on the community; it must be tailored to the community and the regional level.”[87] What the emphasis on ethics further demonstrates is that Bookchin’s choice of the term “libertarian technics,” as opposed to Mumford’s less confrontational “democratic technics,” was not simply a semantic quibble but a way of foregrounding that the difference between the two traditions of technology was not strictly instrumental or political but ethical. The task of constructing and using “libertarian technics” or “liberatory technics” could not be simply a ‘less bad’ option functioning quietly in the shadow of smoke stacks, it was instead a revolutionary tactic for transforming the world. For Bookchin, the problem of the transition from “authoritarian technics” to “libertarian technics” was not a technical problem but a result of the fact that “what we have not recognized clearly are the social, cultural, and ethical conditions that render our biotic substitutes for industrial technologies ecologically and philosophically meaningful.”[88] “Libertarian technics” were not an investment opportunity for oil companies ‘going green’ they were a chance for humanity to reinvest itself in the natural world.
*** V.
That Kropotkin, Rocker, and Bookchin note the potential of technology, warn against its potential misuse, and attempt to envision a way in which the potential and power can be productively combined is not unique to these three thinkers. While Mumford may have become something of a woebegone footnote in contemporary discourse around technology – mentioned in passing whilst his larger criticisms often go ignored – he showed a similar broad analysis to the one developed by Kropotkin, Rocker, and Bookchin and helped to bring such anarchist critiques (particularly Kropotkin’s critique) to wider audiences. Yet what these thinkers share that keeps their work vital both in terms of liveliness and usefulness is the way in which they tied their prescriptions not strictly to a critique of technology, as such, but that in critiquing technology they were simultaneously critiquing all of modern capitalist society. Thus, to still turn to these thinkers is not a reflection that, as Kropotkin warned, “we hardly dare to think” but instead a recognition that “[i]f we do not take the time to review the past we shall not have sufficient insight to understand the present or command the future: for the past never leaves us, and the future is already here.”[89]
The current of anarchist critique regarding technology developed by the thinkers discussed in this paper has lost none of its ethical weight even as the technologies of modern societies have become ever more wondrous. By focusing on the core issues of ensuring “plenty for all” and resisting the allure of technological power, this anarchist approach to technology remains just as rigorous when applied to a smart phone as for critiquing a large factory. Indeed, the present surplus of technological “goods” while the human “good” remains distant stands as an unfortunate affirmation of the way in which new technologies can work to simply promote old power relations. Nevertheless, it is precisely by not rejecting technology as such that this critique is able to avoid the equally dangerous position of unthinkingly embracing all technology. And yet the most important contribution of the critique made by these thinkers may be in showing that to critique society, and to critique modernity, one must also be willing to critique technology.
; Endnotes
[1] Judy Wajcman. (2015) Pressed for Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 44.
[2] Peter Kropotkin. [1892] (2007) The Conquest of Bread. Oakland: AK Press. p. 238.
[3] Peter Kroptokin. (2006) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 241.
[4] Ibid., 184–5.
[5] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 57.
[6] Peter Kropotkin. (1993) “The State: Its Historic Role,” Fugitive Writings. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
[7] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 58.
[8] Ibid., 218.
[9] Peter Kropotkin. (1998) Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow. London: Freedom Press. pp. 151–2.
[10] Ibid., 198.
[11] Ernst Jünger. (2008) On Pain. Candor: Telos Press. p. 31, 34. Italics in original text.
[12] Oswald Spengler. (2002) Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. p. 90, 103.
[13] Jeffrey Herf. (1984) Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimer and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[14] Rudolf Rocker. (1978) Nationalism and Culture. Stillwater: The Croixside Press.
[15] Ibid., 16.
[16] Rudolf Rocker. (2004) <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em>. Oakland: AK Press. p. 18.
[17] Ibid., 20–2.
[18] Op.Cit., fn. 14., pp. 452–3.
[19] Op.Cit., fn. 12., p. 102.
[20] Op.Cit., fn. 14., p.. 247.
[21] Ibid., 254.
[22] Ibid., 254–6.
[23] Ibid., 524.
[24] Ibid., 524–5.
[25] Murray Bookchin. (2005) <em>The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy</em>. Oakland: AK Press. pp. 10–4.
[26] Cf., Op.Cit., fn. 14., p. 547.
[27] Op.Cit., fn. 25., pp. 411–47.
[28] Ibid., 14.
[29] Ibid., 302.
[30] Murray Bookchin. (2005) “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” <em>Post- Scarcity Anarchism</em>. Oakland: AK Press. p. 79.
[31] Ibid., 80–1.
[32] Ibid., 76.
[33] Op.cit., fn. 25., p. 328.
[34] Ibid., 329.
[35] Murray Bookchin. (1995) Social Anarchism of Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Oakland: AK Press. p. 29.
[36] Op.Cit., fn. 25., p. 326.
[37] Ibid., 445.
[38] Lewis Mumford. (1970) The Myth of the Machine – Volume 2, The Pentagon of Power. New York: A Harvest / HBJ Book. P. 458. Mumford is here providing a bibliographical explanation for his book The Story of Utopias – within The Story of Utopias (Bibliobazaar, 2008) Mumford first makes use of this turn of phrase: “Thus the good life, as I have said elsewhere, was the Goods Life: it could be purchased” p. 146.
[39] Lewis Mumford. (2010) Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 403.
[40] Lewis Mumford. (1940) Faith for Living. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. p. 312.
[41] Lewis Mumford. (1946) “Program for Survival,” in Values for Survival. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. p. 129.
[42] Lewis Mumford. (1970) The Myth of the Machine: Pentagon of Power (Vol. 2). San Diego: A Harvest/HBJ Book. p. 395.
[43] Lewis Mumford. (2008) The Story of Utopias. Charleston: Bibliobazaar. p. 175
[44] Op.Cit., fn. 39., p. 109.
[45] Lewis Mumford. (1967) The Myth of the Machine – Volume 1. Technics and Human Development. New York: A Harvest / HBJ Book. p. 3–13.
[46] Lewis Mumford. (1964) “Authoritarian and Democratic Techincs.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter). pp. 1–8, 2.
[47] Ibid., 2–3.
[48] Op.Cit., fn. 43., p. 192.
[49] Lewis Mumford. (1982) Sketches from Life. New York: The Dial Press. pp. 147–8.
[50] Ibid., 214. Granted, it is worth mentioning that the audience found “the Regionalism…suspect” and the next day one of the members of the society accosted Mumford and “accused me of being a capitalist hireling.” p. 147.
[51] Lewis Mumford. (1989) The City in History. New York: A Harvest Book. p. 515.
[52] Lewis Mumford. (1986) The Future of Technics and Civilization. London: Freedom Press. p. 3.
[53] Colin Ward. (1986) “Introduction.” The Future of Technics and Civilization. London: Freedom Press. p. 13.
[54] Janet Biehl. (2011) Mumford, Gutkind, Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco- Decentralism. Porsgrunn: New Compass Press. p. 45
[55] Op.Cit., fn. 25., p. 326.
[56] Lewis Mumford. (1946) “The Reasons for Fighting.” Values for Survival. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. pp. 56–7.
[57] Op.Cit., fn. 35., pp. 31–3.
[58] Ibid., 33.
[59] Peter Marshall. (2010) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Oakland: PM Press. pp. 575–8. Interestingly, Ellul gets almost no mention in Marshall’s book. He appears only in passing, despite Ellul’s much clearer claim to a place in “a history of anarchism.”
[60] Lewis Mumford. (1973) The Condition of Man. New York: A Harvest / HBJ Book. p. 442. Mumford also provided a quote for the cover of Nationalism and Culture declaring that it “is a book worthy to be placed on the same shelf that holds Candide, the Rights of Man and Mutual Aid.”
[61] Op.Cit., fn. 51., pp. 514–5.
[62] Langdon Winner. (1986) The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 19–39.
[63] Ibid., 96.
[64] Op.Cit., fn. 39., p. 265.
[65] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 66.
[66] Op.Cit., fn. 25., p. 349
[67] Emma Goldman. (1911) “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For.” Anarchy and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing. As Retrieved on May 7<sup>th</sup>, 2015 from <[[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/aando/anarchism.h][http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/aando/anarchism.h]] tml>
[68] Op.Cit., fn. 2., pp. 150–7
[69] Ibid., 154.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Voltairine de Cleyre. (2001) “Those Who Marry Do Ill.” Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Peter Glassgold., Ed.). Washington D.C.: Counterpoint. p. 110.
[72] Silvia Federici. (1975) Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. p. 7.
[73] Ibid., p. 8.
[74] Ruth Schwartz Cowan. (1983) More Work for Mother. Basic Books Inc. p. 193.
[75] Emma Goldman. (2001) “The Social Aspects of Birth Control” Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Peter Glassgold, ed.). Washington D.C.: Counterpoint. p. 137
[76] Op.Cit., fn. 25., p. 361.
[77] Op.Cit., fn. 42., p. 332.
[78] Ibid., 324.
[79] Op.Cit., fn. 14., p. 253.
[80] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 228–31.
[81] Ibid., 97.
[82] Ibid., 138.
[83] Peter Kropotkin. (1993) “Anarchist Morality.” Fugitive Writings. Montreal: Black Rose Books. p. 142.
[84] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 306.
[85] Op.Cit., fn. 30., p. 49.
[86] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 348.
[87] Op.Cit., fn. 30., p 81. Italics in original text.
[88] Op.Cit., fn. 2., p. 409.
[89] Op.Cit., fn. 39., p. 13.
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#title Rojava: Fantasies and Realities
#author Zafer Onat
#SORTtopics Rojava, critique
#date November 8<sup>th</sup>, 2014
#source Retrieved on 16<sup>th</sup> August 2020 from https://www.anarkismo.net/article/27575
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-08-16T08:37:12
The Kobane resistance that has passed its 45<sup>th</sup> day as of now has caused the attention of revolutionaries all over the world to turn to Rojava. As a result of the work carried out by Revolutionary Anarchist Action, anarchist comrades from many parts of the world have sent messages of solidarity to the Kobane resistance.[1] This internationalist stance without a doubt carries great importance for the people resisting in Kobane. However if we do not analyze what is happening in all its truth and if we romanticize instead, our dreams will turn to disappointment in short order.
Furthermore, in order to create the worldwide revolutionary alternative that is urgently needed, we must be cool-headed and realistic, and we have to make correct assessments. On this point let us mention in passing that these solidarity messages that have been sent on the occasion of the Kobane resistance demonstrate the urgency of the task of creating an international association where revolutionary anarchists and libertarian communists can discuss local and global issues and be in solidarity during struggles. We have felt the lack of such an international during the last four years when many social upheavals took place in many parts of the world — we at least felt this need during the uprising that took place in June 2013 in Turkey.
Today however we must discuss Rojava without illusions and base our analyses on the right axis. It is not very easy for a person to evaluate the developments that happen within the time frame they live in according only to what they see in that moment. Evidently, assessments made with minds clouded with feelings of being cornered and despair make it even harder for us to produce healthy answers.
Nowhere on the world today exists an effective revolutionary movement in our sense of the term or a strong class movement that can be a precursor of such a movement. The struggles that do emerge fade either through being violently repressed or by being drawn in to the system. It seems that because of this, just as in the case of an important part of Marxists and anarchists in Turkey, revolutionary organizations and individuals in various parts of the world are imbuing a meaning to the structure that has emerged in Rojava that is beyond its reality. Before all else, it is unfair for us to load the burden of our failure to create a revolutionary alternative in places we live and the fact that social opposition is largely co-opted in to the system on to the shoulders of the persons struggling in Rojava. That Rojava, where the economy is to a large extent agricultural, and is surrounded by imperialist blocs led on the one hand by Russia and on the other hand by the USA, repressive, reactionary and collaborator regimes in the area and brutal jihadist organizations like ISIS which have thrived in this environment. In that sense, it is equally problematic to attribute a mission to Rojava that is beyond what it is or what it can be or to blame those people engaged in a life and death struggle for expecting support from Coalition forces or not carrying out “a revolution to our liking”.
First of all we must identify that the Rojava process has progressive features such as an important leap in the direction of women’s liberation, that a secular, pro-social justice, pluralist democratic structure is attempted to be constructed and that other ethnic and religious groups are given a part in the administration. However, the fact that the newly emerging structure does not aim at the elimination of private property, that is the abolition of classes, that the tribal system remains and that tribal leaders partake in the administration shows that the aim is not the removal of feudal or capitalist relations of production but is instead in their own words “the construction of a democratic nation”.
We must also remember that the PYD is a part of the political structure led by Abdullah Ocalan for 35 years which aims at national liberation and the political limitations that all nationally oriented movements have apply to the PYD as well. Furthermore, the influence of elements that belong to the ruling class inside of the Kurdish movement is constantly increasing with the “solution process”, especially in Turkey. On this point, it is helpful to examine the KCK Contract that defines the democratic confederalism that forms the basis of the political system in Rojava.[2] A few points in the introduction written by Ocalan deserve our attention:
<quote>
“<em>This system is one that takes into account ethnic, religious and class differences on a social basis.</em>” (..) “<em>Three systems of law will apply in Kurdistan: EU law, unitary state law, democratic confederal law.</em>”
</quote>
In summary, it is stated that class society will remain and there will be a federal political system compatible with the global system and the nation state. In concert with this, article 8 of the Contract, titled “Personal, Political Rights and Freedoms” defends private property and section C of article 10 titled “Basic Responsibilities” defines the constitutional basis of mandatory military service as it states “In the case of a war of legitimate defense, as a requirement of patriotism, there is the responsibility to actively join the defense of the homeland and basic rights and freedoms.” While the Contract states that the aim is not political power, we also understand that the destruction of the state apparatus is also not aimed, meaning the goal is autonomy within existing nation states. When the Contract is viewed in its entirety, the goal that is presented is seen not to be beyond a bourgeois democratic system that is called democratic confederalism. To summarize, while the photos of two women bearing rifles that are frequently spred on social media, one taken in the Spanish Civil War, the other taken in Rojava do correspond to a similarity in the sense of women fighting for their freedoms, it is clear that the persons fighting ISIS in Rojava do not at this point have the same goals and ideals as the workers and poor peasants that fought within the CNT-FAI in order to remove the state and private property altogether. Furthermore, there are serious differences between the two processes in terms of conditions of emergence, the class positions of their subjects, the political lines of those running the process and the strength of the revolutionary movement worldwide.
In this situation, we must neither be surprised by, nor blame the PYD if they are forced to abandon even their current position, in order to found an alliance with regional and global powers to break the ISIS siege. We cannot expect persons struggling in Kobane to abolish the world scale hegemony of capitalism or to resist this hegemony for long. This task can only be realized by a strong worldwide class movement and revolutionary alternative.
Capitalism is in a crisis at the global level and imperialists who are trying to transcend this crisis by exporting war to every corner of the world, together with policies of repressive regimes in the region have turned Syria and Iraq into a living hell. Under conditions where a revolutionary alternative is not in existence, the social uprising that emerged in Ukraine against the pro-Russian and corrupt government resulted in fascist-backed pro-EU forces coming to power and the war between two imperialist camps continues. Racism and fascism is rising fast in European countries. In Turkey, political crises come one after the other and the ethnic and sectarian division in society is deepening. While under these circumstances, Rojava may appear as a lifeline to hold on to, we must consider that beyond the military siege of ISIS, Rojava is also under the political siege of forces like Turkey, Barzani and the Free Syrian Army. As long as Rojava is not backed by a worldwide revolutionary alternative for it to rest upon, it seems that it will not be easy for Rojava to maintain even its current position in the long run.
The path not only to defend Rojava physically and politically and to carry it further lies in creating a class based grounds for organizing and struggle, and a related strong and globally organized revolutionary alternative. The same applies for preventing the atmosphere of ethnic, religious and sectarian conflict that draws the peoples of the region further in by each passing day, and preventing laborers from sliding into right-wing radicalism in the face of capitalism’s world level crisis. Solidarity with Kobane, while important is insufficient. Beyond this, we need to see that discussing what needs to be done to create a revolutionary process, and organizing for this at the international level everywhere we are is imperative not only for those resisting in Kobane but millions of laborers all over the world.
[1] http://meydangazetesi.org/gundem/2014/10/dunya-anarsistlerinden-kobane-dayanismasi/
[2] http://tr.wikisource.org/wiki/KCK_S%C3%B6zle%C5%9Fmesi
|
#title Afrin and the Policies of the Democratic Union Party
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava
#date March 2018
#source https://libcom.org/library/afrin-policies-democratic-union-party
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T01:53:02
Afrin is one of the districts in northern Syria forming the region commonly known as Rojava. Until 17/03/2018, Afrin was one of Rojava’s cantons that the seven year Syrian civil war did not reach. It was the safest place in the whole of Syria until January 20th when the Turkish State invaded. Around 200,000 people from different places in Syria, especially from Aleppo, moved there where they found peace, safety, equality, dignity and humanity.
There were many reasons for the invasion of Afrin by the Turkish State. The most important are the near-complete military defeat of Isis who fought against Syrian troops and Kurdish forces on behalf of the Turkish state, the proximity of Afrin and ethnic mix of its citizens which Erdogan wants to change by settling Arab refugees who are currently in Turkey and also its proximity to Idlib and Aleppo allowing control over the roads and supply of weapons and other support from Turkey to terrorist groups. In addition, there are unconfirmed reports that there was a deal between Erdogan and Assad whereby Erdogan would not support the rebels in East Ghouta whilst having a free hand to attack the Kurds in Afrin.
However, whatever the reasons were for Erdogan to invade Afrin, I believe the Turkish State cannot stay there for very long as there will be bargaining between Assad and Erdogan.
At dawn on 19th of March, Turkish troops, with the mercenaries of the Syrian Free Army (SFA), managed to enter Afrin after paying a heavy price. During the course of the invasion 1500 fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were killed and many injured as well. Around 400 civilians were killed, over 2000 people were injured and also over 150,000 people left and headed toward Aleppo.
For the last 3 years the Turkish President, Rajab Erdogan, managed to play a very successful game, using almost everyone involved in the war. This included Isis, whilst keeping good diplomatic relationships with many regional governments including Iraq and Iran. He kept a successful balance between Russia and the United States and also satisfied Europe by blocking the entry of refugees through Turkey. One of his cleverest policies was imposing conflict on the PKK, forcing them to enter this war. Erdogan knows very well that any peace process helps the PKK and the Kurdish more than helping his political party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and his government. Throughout this war, Erdogan weakened the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and destroyed many cities, towns and villages in the Turkish Kurdistan region of Bakur.
There is no doubt that the US does not like some of Erdogan’s policies. It does not want a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to ally itself with Russia, enjoy a very good relationship with Iran and threaten Iraq whose Shia government is a US ally in fighting Isis. None of these are acceptable, but there is little the US can do about it. There is no alternative to the AKP in Turkey at all, and there has been no alternative political movement for the US to support and promote in order to replace the AKP. In this case the only other option is a military coup d’état. However, this option is also unavailable, at least in the present situation.
The vast majority of people, from writers, academics, and politicians to even ordinary supporters of the Kurdish people, are blaming the US, UN, UK and other European countries for being silent in the face of the brutal attack on Afrin and its citizens by the Turkish State. They believe that the above have betrayed the Kurdish in Rojava who defeated Isis, reducing the threat of terrorist attacks on the streets and public places. They think that, instead of being silent, these powerful states should have rewarded the Kurdish people by stopping Turkish troops slaughtering civilians, destroying their homes and land and displacing them.
I was neither shocked nor surprised about the position of the above states. We should all know better especially for those of us who know too well the history of the UK and US. They have no history of protecting human rights or of liberating nations from their allies. They have never supported any leftist, communist or socialist movements, let alone an anarchist one. Their history shows they have only been concerned with their own interests. They have always lined up with the most brutal dictators and states in the world. It is they who are planning war in advance and causing terrible, miserable lives for the majority of people in many, many countries.
We should also know there has been a major power struggle in the Middle East and the entry of the US into the war in support of the Kurdish in Kobane was the last effort and hope for the US to save its skin in the region rather than being kicked out of the region completely.
Personally, I always believed it was not that Rojava wanted the support of the US and Russia but, in that circumstance it was they who actually wanted Kurdish support especially when the Kurdish proved themselves in battle. When the US entered the war in Kobane it was mainly symbolic, morally boosting the spirit of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) at the time. US forces never seriously fought Isis in Kobane and never truly threatened them because it never wanted to destroy them. By entering the war, the US destroyed whatever was left intact in Kobane after the attack by Isis. Before US involvement, only 30% of Kobane was destroyed but by the end of the war this increased to 70%. I never had a doubt that this was a deliberate effort to weaken Kobane and Rojava politically and economically so that the Kurds would ask big US and European corporations to help in the rebuilding.
A few months after defeating Isis in Kobane, it became obvious that Syria and Rojava became the battlefields or war zone for Russia and the US as they played out a political, economic and strategical power struggle. At this stage, both were looking for a proxy war and trying to find groups to fight on their behalf. The Democratic Union Party (PYD) was among them but it tried to keep a balance between. Alas, in the end the PYD could not maintain this balance and had to align itself with the US, putting the future of Rojava in its hands.
This has disturbed Russia, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group, and also Turkey as a member of NATO.
In such circumstances, the only winner was Erdogan who, up to the present time has played this game very well with the loser clearly being the Kurdish people of Rojava.
Has the PYD committed to the right policies to protect what has been achieved in Rojava?
Before coming to this point I would like to say I have written quite a lot about Rojava and Bakur in which I criticised the policies of the PKK and PYD. If anybody is interested in reading them, please see the links at the end of this article.
In my opinion PYD had three options to choose from, whilst each of the US and Russia had only one. The PYD could ally itself with Russia or US or simply stay out of the war and be neutral. In adopting the third option, it could work with the Movement for a Democratic Society (Tev-Dem) and the Democratic Self-administration (DSA) in bringing more international support and solidarity in rebuilding Rojava. At the same time, it could develop the YPG and YPJ to make them more powerful defence forces and stay independent of the PYD itself. In other words, it should serve the interests of the whole of Rojava and not just its own. The PYD should have stuck with Ocalan’s principle, “if we have the world’s forces, we will not attack anywhere. If all the world attacks us we will defend ourselves and not surrender “.
In my opinion, there were no excuses or justifications for the PYD to try to expand its territory and fight Isis in non-Kurdish lands. The more land they liberated from Isis, the more fighters were killed, whilst bringing more threats and insecurity from Turkey, Iran and Russia to Rojava, more relying on US financially and militarily in other words less independent and also less focused on rebuilding Rojava economically and socially.
So what was going wrong with the PYD?
Unfortunately, the PYD was the main architect in designing policies and making plans for Rojava without consulting the people in Rojava. In fact, all the decisions, as with any other political party, have been made by a small circle of people, its leaders, in a dark room. Since Kobane’s battle, the PYD made and committed to so many wrong policies. In my opinion, these have damaged the mass movement in Rojava instead of taking it forward. Here are some of them:
Aligning with the US: I already mentioned above the reasons for the US entering the war in Rojava and also mentioned that the PYD had three cards in its hand. The PYD did not need to deeply analyse or do much research in order to understand the position of the US in supporting any movement or government in the world. It has been clear for at least a century that many of us have known the US as a dark force. In fact any movement attracted to the US usually becomes very unpopular and suspect and has no future outside the US or to its big corporate interests. This should have been very clear and considered by the very progressive and unique movement in Rojava.
The Kurdistan Regional Government, KRG, following attack by the Iraqi Government on 16/10/2017 with a green light from the US, proved wrong to rely on or ally with the US. Surely, the US never drops Turkey, Iraq, Iran or the future Syrian government for Kurdish interests. These two examples proved again that those who thought the PYD had no choice but to ally itself with the US were wrong.
YPG and YPJ: These two forces initially were small volunteer forces but were very effective in defending Rojava. The PYD gradually made them much larger. Their strategy changed from defence to attack forces and have absolute loyalty to the PYD rather than to the people from whom they emerged. The YPG and YPJ were jointly commanded by the PYD and US attacking Isis who coordinated and cooperated in the air and ground fighting against Isis.
Constant war with Isis: The PYD insisted on defeating Isis in cooperation with US forces when, after Kobane, Isis was not a direct threat to Rojava at least while they were engaged in fighting with other forces. Continuation of the war with Isis meant digging graves for themselves. Consequently, the YPG and YPJ were weakened losing so many fighters, needed more help in every way from the US and deepened enmity with Erdogan. Putting fighting with Isis as the main strategy before rebuilding Rojava, resulted in less impetus to form more cooperatives to improve the life of people in Rojava economically and not focussing on the continuation of the revolution in culture and education. These, along with many more, were the consequence of continuing the war with Isis.
Syrian Kurdish National Council for Kurdish Opposition Parties (ENKS): The Syrian opposition political parties in Rojava have never had deep roots among people in Rojava. They have never been popular having no clean and clear records or background. That said, that does not mean they cannot have an influence over people or that they cannot stand against Rojava’s people and their movement. ENKS could not launch a movement let alone make a revolution, but certainly they could and can damage and hurt the movement, especially when they have been supported in every way by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Barzani’s Party. They also have a strong connection with Turkey and probably other regional governments.
In my opinion there was always room for the PYD to compromise with ENKS. They could accept some of their political conditions apart from letting them have their own independent military force out of control of the SDF. If the PYD had a good relation with them then it could affect the attitude of the KDP towards the PYD as well and probably ENKS could have an influences on Turkey too or, at least, could stay neutral.
Final US plan and project: When the US recently recommended that the PYD should form a 30,000 strong force among the SDF to protect the borders, the PYD should have turned this request down. They should have known better. The US never wanted the SDF to be too big, although any forces made larger by an outsider can easily vanish or, at least, be smaller. The PYD should have known that this plan would annoy and irritate the State of Turkey and bring forward its plan to invade Afrin.
When the invasion started on 20/01/18, the PYD instead of begging for help from the US, UK, the rest of Europe and the UN should have given an immediate warning to the US; either stop their ally, Turkey, from attacking Afrin, or they would withdraw from fighting Isis and join the SDF in fighting Turkey in Afrin. However, this was not done until almost the last weeks of the operation and that was far too late.
The question is why the PYD made mistake after mistake or rather all the time made wrong decisions?
The answer is very simple as they never consulted the people in Rojava. They ignored Ocalan’s principle about the people making all the decisions. The PYD has a history of doing this. In 2015 when they negotiated with ENKS, they reached an agreement to offer 40 seats on the Democratic Self Administration, DSA, without consulting the people in Rojava. However, later ENKS pulled out of the agreement so they did not share power in Rojava.
I am sure that if the PYD had consulted with people when making these decisions, then many lives could have been saved as well as saving Rojava from any invasion or, at least, they would not be as responsible for what happened in Afrin or what may happen in future.
What can we learn from all this?
Well, the only lesson we can learn is that we should not trust any political parties and their leaders as they usually represent a tiny minority in society. They make decisions among a very small circle in a dark room. The strength of political parties is always at the expense of the mass movement, and eventually the mass movement is getting weaker and weaker.
We also should know that building Confederalism or Democratic Confederalism is the work of millions of people in all sections of society rather than the job of political parties. The last lesson we should learn is that we should recognise the use of weapons as a conditional and solid duty in defending ourselves but not attacking others.
|
#title Confederalism, Democratic Confederalism and Rojava
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics democratic confederalism, Rojava
#date February 20, 2018
#source https://libcom.org/library/confederalism-democratic-confederalism-rojava
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T01:49:28
Many religions and ideologies from left to the right have tried to tackle class issues and other societal problems, but none of them has been able to resolve these problems, rather most of them have made the situation even worse.
Whilst these problems have remained unresolved, groups, political parties and individuals have continued to come up with different theories and different ideas for how to tackle them. Confederalism or Democratic Confederalism is one of them.
The idea of federation and confederation dates back several centuries. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) wrote a lot about federation and confederation with regards to Canada, Switzerland and Europe. However, when he observed the debates about European Confederation he noticed that his own understanding and analysis of confederation was completely different from what was actually going on at the time. His comment on this was as follows: "By this they seem to understand nothing but an alliance of all the states which presently exist in Europe, great and small, presided over by a permanent congress. It is taken for granted that each state will retain the form of government that suits it best. Now, since each state will have votes in the congress in proportion to its population and territory, the small states in this so-called confederation will soon be incorporated into the large ones ...” Proudhon’s analysis of the situation was right at the time and still right: “The right of free union and equally free secession comes first and foremost among all political rights; without it, confederation would be nothing but centralisation in disguise”[1]. In fact the EU, which is a union of States, has developed the most bureaucratic apparatuses and has become a very undemocratic confederation.
In addition to Proudhon, others like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, have written about confederalism, but none of them has written as much as Murray Bookchin (1921-2006). In fact, Bookchin not only wrote about it, but he also connected confederalism to the issues of social ecology and decentralisation, and considered the building of Libertarian Municipalism as the foundation for confederalism. Bookchin was not just a theorist, he was passionate about his ideas and as a very active, dedicated organiser tried to put his theory into practice during the 1980s, as described here “In Burlington, Vermont, Bookchin attempted to put these ideas [Libertarian Municipalism] into practice by working with the Northern Vermont Greens, the Vermont Council for Democracy, and the Burlington Greens, retiring from politics in 1990. His ideas are summarized succinctly in Remaking Society (1989) and The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997). [2]
For Bookchin, building libertarian municipalism is the foundation of confederalism, an alternative to the nation-state, and the way to reach a classless and liberated society. While Bookchin placed libertarian municipalism within the framework of anarchism for much of his life “…..in the late 1990s he broke with anarchism and in his final essay, The Communalist Project (2003), identified libertarian municipalism as the main component of communalism. Communalists believe that libertarian municipalism is both the means to achieve a rational society and the structure of that society”. [2]
Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s long-term partner, in her book Ecology or Catastrophe, describes the importance of municipalities and confederalism to Bookchin “ In Bookchin’s eyes , the democratized municipality, and the municipal confederation as an alternative to the nation-state, was the last, best redoubt for socialism. He presented these ideas and arguments, which he called libertarian municipalism, in their fullest form in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, published in 1986”.[3]
In the rest of this article I try to define Confederalism from Bookchin’s viewpoint, and the understanding of Democratic Confederalism by Abdullah Ocalan. This is followed by a brief review of what has been achieved in Rojava.
Although Bookchin had an idea and plan for putting his theory into practice, he knew very well that it would be impossible, or just a dream, to build Libertarian Muncipalism and confederalism among huge existing cities, given the current mentality, education and culture of their peoples and the centralist nature of society. He realised that building Libertarian Municipalism requires a different type of education and organisation, and thought of centralization as one of the main barriers. His thinking has been described as follows: “Bookchin became an advocate of face-to-face or assembly democracy in the 1950s, inspired by writings on the ancient Athenian polis by H. D. F. Kitto and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern. For the concept of confederation, he was influenced by the nineteenth century anarchist thinkers. Bookchin tied libertarian municipalism to a utopian vision for decentralizing cities into small, human-scaled eco-communities, and to a concept of urban revolution”.2
However, Janet Biehl believes differently. She thinks there were other factors that influenced Bookchin. “What really inspired Murray to think about confederation was not Proudhon/Bakunin, etc., but the story of the CNT (Confederation Nacional del Trabajo) in Spain. His book, ‘The Spanish Anarchists’ focuses on the CNT’s structure as a confederation. He was trying to demonstrate that, contrary to the accusation of Marxists, anarchists really could organise themselves, and confederation was the bottom-up structure they chose” (personal communication, 9th December 2017).
Although Bookchin believed in decentralisation and an ecofriendly society, he could not believe that this could be achieved without confederalism - a network through which municipalities could unite and cooperate to share resources between themselves on the basis of their citizens and communities’ needs. However, at the same time he believed each municipality must have autonomy over policy making. His definition of confederalism is “It is above all a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves”.[4]
The road towards confederalism requires the building of Libertarian Municipalism for which working on the primary pillars like decentralization, social ecology, interdependence and feminism are very important tasks. Each of these pillars is connected to the other, such that none of them is workable without the others. Bookchin clarified this very well when he said “To argue that the remaking of society and our relationship with the natural world can be achieved only by decentralization or localism or self-sustainability leaves us with an incomplete collection of solutions”.[4] Bookchin also insists that decentralisation and self-sufficiency are not necessarily democratic so will be unable to resolve society’s problems and be successful, he therefore continues to say “It is a troubling fact that neither decentralization nor self-sufficiency in itself is necessarily democratic. Plato’s ideal city in the Republic was indeed designed to be self-sufficient, but its self-sufficiency was meant to maintain a warrior as well as a philosophical elite. Indeed, its capacity to preserve its self-sufficiency depended upon its ability, like Sparta, to resist the seemingly “corruptive” influence of outside cultures (a characteristic, I may say, that still appears in many closed societies in the East). Similarly, decentralization in itself provides no assurance that we will have an ecological society. A decentralized society can easily co-exist with extremely rigid hierarchies. A striking example is European and Oriental feudalism, a social order in which princely, ducal, and baronial hierarchies were based on highly decentralized communities. With all due respect to Fritz Schumacher, small is not necessarily beautiful……..If we extol such communities because of the extent to which they were decentralized, self-sufficient, or small, or employed “appropriate technologies,” we would be obliged to ignore the extent to which they were also culturally stagnant and easily dominated by exogenous elites”.[4]
Bookchin was not just talking about confederalism in a political way as an alternative to the nation-state. He thought that while the state has its own institutions and politics, and maintains a capitalist economy through its institutions, forces and spies with other administration (Churches, Banks, other Financial Institutions, Media and Courts), its economy can be imposed on and dominate the society. He thought confederalism, through its libertarian municipalities, should create its own institutions, design its own policies and education, build up its own economy, and empower its own individual citizens. So Bookchin stressed that “Confederalism as a principle of social organization reaches its fullest development when the economy itself is confederalized by placing local farms, factories, and other needed enterprises in local municipal hands that is, when a community, however large or small, begins to manage its own economic resources in an interlinked network with other communities”.[4]
Janet Biehl has tried to clarify and explain Boockchin’s ideas about the above concept in plain and simple language in her book, ‘The politics of Social Economy, Libertarian Municipalism’. In Chapter 11 she explains the meaning of the Bookchin quote above “A confederation is a network in which several political entities combine to form a larger whole. Although a larger entity is formed in the process of confederating, the smaller entities do not dissolve themselves into it and disappear. Rather they retain their freedom and identity and their sovereignty even as they confederate”.[5]
It is essential that people are economically equal according to their needs otherwise, they will remain in conflict politically. Obviously economic equality cannot happen unless people themselves control their economy. This means the economy should not in any way be in private hands, or in the hands of the State, either in what is called the public sector, or in public-private partnerships. In her book on Libertarian Municipalism mentioned above, Janet Biehl explains in Chapter 12, ‘A Municipalized Economy that the type of economy the community needs is very different from any other type of economy that class-based societies have seen before. She says “Libertarian municipalism advances a form of public ownership that is truly public. The political economy it proposes is one that is neither privately owned, nor broken up into small collectives, nor nationalized. Rather, it is one that is municipalized - placed under community "ownership" and control.”
“This municipalization of the economy means the “ownership" and management of the economy by the citizens of the community. Property - including both land and factories - would no longer be privately owned but would be put under the overall control of citizens in their assemblies. The citizens would become the collective "owners" of their community's economic resources and would formulate and approve economic policy for the community …………In a rational anarchist society, economic inequality would be eliminated by turning wealth, private property, and the means of production over to the municipality. Through the municipalization of the economy, the riches of the possessing classes would be expropriated by ordinary people and placed in the hands of the community, to be used for the benefit of all".[5]
The concept of Democratic Confederalism `
Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) both before and during his current imprisonment has thought about and analysed the PKK movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Blocks. He has also linked the experience and ideology of all the Communist parties in the world with one another, especially in the Middle Eastern Region, and observed that their achievements in real life are not what they claim. However, the trigger point for Ocalan was familiarising himself with Bookchin’s ideas while in prison. Through his lawyer, Ocalan wrote to Bookchin a few times with a view to adapt his ideas to the context of the PKK, but Bookchin was near the end of his life.
At the beginning of this century, Ocalan realised that Bookchin’s proposed citizens’ assemblies and confederalism were the right solution for all the nations and ethnic minorities who are living in the countries of the region. He therefore rejected the idea of the nation-state. In fact he now believes the nation-state is the root of the problem rather than the solution and that it brought and still brings disaster to the people. He wrote “If the nation-state is the backbone of the capitalist modernity it certainly is the cage of the natural society …….. The nation-state domesticates the society in the name of capitalism and alienates the community from its natural foundations”.[6]
He thinks that not only do nations have no future under the nation-state, but even individuals - the citizens - have no future, except for fitting themselves into a kind of modern society “The citizenship of modernity defines nothing but the transition made from private slavery to state slavery “.[6]
Ocalan knew the root of the problem in many societies, like the Kurdish society, especially in the region he came from. For him it is not enough just to reject the nation-state, he believes people also need to concentrate on another major problem that has existed in society for a long time, women’s issues. He read a lot about ancient society, from the time of the first civilisation over 10,000 years ago and the role of women through this period. He realised that all issues from the nation-state, through exploitation and slavery to women issues and gender equality are strongly connected and so cannot be resolved separately. Indeed, he thought exploitation started with the slavery and repression of women “Without woman’s slavery none of the other types of slavery can exist let alone develop..….without the repression of the women the repression of the entire society is not conceivable”. [6]
Ocalan is deeply concerned about women’s issues and he thought even women is nation but a colonised nation. Testament to his genuine belief in what he wrote, is his insistence that the involvement of women is the first and essential step in the struggle to resolve their own issues as well as the entire problems of society. He was working on these ideas when he was in the mountains and he managed to involve many women in guerrilla fighting, even some non-Kurdish women. However, over time he became more aware of the role of women, not just in fighting the state with weapons, but in fighting the state in different ways and in building a new society based on Democratic Confederalism “The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a State system," he wrote "It is the democratic system of a people without a State."[6]
Why was Ocalan so insistent on Democratic Confederalism? What is Ocalan’s definition of this concept?
Ocalan shortened the definition of Democratic Confederalism to just few words “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society……or democracy without State”.[7] He thought that capitalism has been built on three pillars: capitalist modernity, the nation-state, and industrialism, and he believed that people can replace these with “democratic modernity, democratic nation, communal economy and ecological industry”[7] respectively.
The idea of democratic confederalism for Ocalan is people organising to manage themselves. He sees it as a grassroots task, enacted by collective decisions made by the people themselves about their own issues through direct democracy, which rejects control by the state or any dominant administration. He wrote “Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people. Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation. Democratic confederalism is based on grass-roots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities.”.[6] He goes on to say “[Democratic Confederalism]…can be called a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state. Democratic decision-making processes must not be confused with the processes known from public administration. States only administrate [sic] while democracies govern. States are founded on power; democracies are based on collective consensus”. [6]
Examining the definition and views of Bookchin about confederalism and of Ocalan about democratic confederalism, can we see similarities and differences between the two concepts and views? I personally see that both the concepts as well as Bookchin’s and Ocalan’s views on these concepts share many similarities. They may have chosen different conceptual labels, but the meaning of them and the aims are the same.
Minor differences are that Ocalan replaced the concept of confederalism with democratic confederalism and instead of using the concept of Libertarian Municipalism uses a different form of administration that has been put into practice in Rojava. As far as I know, Ocalan saw his theory as a solution to the conflicts and problems between the nations and ethnic minorities especially in the region he came from. However, Bookchin went further in that he believed that confederalism is the solution for all human beings and the way to end capitalist domination in every way. So for Bookchin confederalism is the solution to the problems that people are facing world-wide and not just in one region or some countries.
There is another difference. Ocalan in his analysis of the history of human civilization, exploitation and slavery believes that slavery started from the enslavement of women and hierarchy started from the domination of men over women, although elsewhere he agreed with Bookchin “I have repeatedly pointed out that the patriarchal society mostly consisted of the shaman, the elderly experienced sheikh, and the military commander. It may be wise to look for prototype of a new society within such development with “a new society” we mean a situation where hierarchy emerges inside the clan. The immanent division is finalised when hierarchy gives rise to permanent class-formation and a state-like organisation”.[8] The issue of hierarchy is the soul of Ocalan’s theory, as libertarian municipalism was for Bookchin, although both of them see hierarchy as the foundation of the class society. It is quite clear that Bookchin has looked at hierarchy and hierarchical society in greater depth than Ocalan, and at how domination existed before class society through the heads of tribes, heads of families, elders, and the domination of men over women. Janet Biehl wrote in the Bookchin Reader: “According to Marx “primitive egalitarianism“was destroyed by the rise of social classes, in which those who own wealth and property exploit the labor of those who do not. But from his observations of contemporary history, Bookchin realised that class analysis in itself does not explain the entirety of social oppression. The elimination of class society could leave intact relation of subordination and domination……….Bookchin emphasised that it would be necessary to eliminate not only social class but social hierarchies as well........ Hierarchy and domination, in Bookchin’s view, historically provided the substrate of oppression out of which class relations were formed”.[9]
However, Janet Biehl believes that Ocalan’s theory is almost the same as Bookchin’s and that Ocalan put Bookchin’s theory into practice. As she said on one occasion: “The way I think of it, Bookchin gave birth to the baby, and Abdullah Ocalan raised it to a child.” [10] She continued, noting that “Ocalan altered some of Bookchin’s original model. Bookchin was an anarchist, and as such he was opposed to all hierarchies, of race, of sex, of gender, of domination by state, of interpersonal relations. Mr Ocalan emphasised gender hierarchy and the importance of the liberation of women. [That is] one of the biggest theoretical changes I can see.” 10
In addition to these similarities and differences, in my opinion there is another main difference between Bookchin and Ocalan. Bookchin sees building libertarian municipalities as the foundation of confederalism. This building relies purely and completely on the education, organisation and participation of the people. Ocalan believes that participation is the people’s own job and should be done through mass meetings/assemblies to discuss and debate existing and related issues, and that decisions should be made collectively. The main tool that can be used for this purpose is direct democracy and direct action.
For Ocalan, although the aim is the same, as I have shown above, the way of to get to the destination, to a certain extent, or at least as far as we can see in Rojava and Bakur, is different. Until this moment Ocalan is the leader of PKK and he is the spiritual leader of the Kurds in Bakur and Rojava, as well as of many people in Basur and Rojhalat [Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan respectively]. It is true that Ocalan contacted his party and his people when he had the chance from his prison cell. He tried hard to convince them to transform the PKK into a social movement. As a result, there was a lot of discussion in 2012 and after about the idea of rejecting the nation-state, committing to a ceasefire and discussing anarchism. However the PKK did not transform into what many of us, probably Ocalan included, suggested and wanted.
Once all the contact between Ocalan and the outside was cut off in April 2015 and a new situation emerged when Erdogan announced a very brutal war against all Kurdish people, not just the PKK, the PKK became more militarised. So for the PKK it became more important to concentrate on fighting than to continue the discussion that commenced in 2012. In Rojava more or less the same thing happened. However, there, instead of having to fight the Assad Regime, it was forced to fight against Isis in defence of Kobane and other places*. There is no doubt that during a war in any country the mass movement will be weaker and the military will be stronger. So too in Kurdistan, Bakur and Rojava, the PKK and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) became more powerful at the expense of the mass movement.
From this I can conclude that in Bakur and Rojava a couple of high-disciplinary and authoritarian political parties, PKK and PYD, are behind building democratic confederalism in both Kurdistan, Bakur and Rojava. It is these parties that are the ones making major decisions, planning and designing the policies, and also setting up diplomatic relationships with other countries and other political parties. It is they who negotiate with their enemies or the states, and make war or peace. Of course, these are very big issues and extremely important as they shape the future destination of the society. However, unfortunately it is the political parties which are making these decisions and not the people in their own assemblies and mass meetings, or through direct action.
For Bookchin building Libertarian Muncipalities and confederalism is the task of people, or “Citizens” as he called them, but for Ocalan and PKK, at least at the moment, it is the task of political parties.
Finally we can ask ourselves a question: is what exists in Rojava democratic confederalism?
This is a difficult question especially for me to answer while I am confined to reading about Rojava, following the news on Rojava TV , Radio, websites and social media, especially Facebook. I believe that to answer this question properly and to understand all sides of this issue in relation to the future of Rojava, I may need to go there to do some essential research. This needs to include visiting cities, towns and villages, speaking to and interviewing people at every level and section of society. Visiting the Communes and participating in their meetings, following their decisions, seeing the Cooperatives, analysing the balance of power between the Movement for a Democratic Society (Tev-Dem) and the PYD as well as between them and the Democratic Self-Administration (DSA) and many more work for me to do.
We have all noticed that there has been a lot written about democratic confederalism in Rojava. The vast majority of these writings are positive and supportive and agree that democratic confedralism has been built or at least is on its way to being built there.
I believe the main problem with those articles or essays were isolated the major things, events and the role, from the influence and the power of PYD. The comrades who wrote these articles did not think or did not want to mention that building confederalism and democratic confederalism should be the task of anarchists. It is the anarchists, not political parties, who should participate and involve themselves through the mass movement in this process of building confederalism and democratic confederalism, because some issues that come up can be resolved completely through the libertarian muncipalism that is the foundation of the libertarian society. Bookchin wrote “before the class society there was “However we should not see democratic confederalism (or communalism) as separate from anarchism because they very much follow the tradition of classical anarchism.” [4]
In the case of Rojava many questions remain to be asked and many outstanding issues queried, such as: Is everybody free to be involved in politics and take part in the meetings to make the decisions? Are the issues I raised in the previous page discussed and the decisions about them taken collectively through the mass meetings and by direct action? Are the existing Cooperatives really owned by the communes, the Democratic Self Administration (DSA), or a kind of mixture of private-public ownership; also can everybody be a member regardless of who they are, and finally how are the products distributed? Are the Communes and the Houses of the People really non-hierarchical groups or organisations? Why are the chair and co-chairs in position for such a long time? Is the head of the DSA, and those at the highest levels of the Tev-Dem and the Communes elected through direct democracy or just nomination? How hard is democratic confederalism working towards an ecological society and what has been achieved so far? There are actually many other aspects of democratic confederalism that also need to be questioned.
Those of us so far who have written about democratic confederalism, in my opinion, have not answered many questions or have not been following this project properly. I know some of the comrades and friends who have written about it have not stayed in Rojava long enough to know about all sides of the society and investigate these issues. Additionally, those who have stayed long enough were comrades who were or are with the YPG/J.
Having saying all that, we should agree that when we write and analyse Rojava we should not isolate Rojava from the situation that surrounds it, we should see Rojava’s enemies inside and outside Syria and also the continuing war with Isis, the Assad Regime, Turkey, and the probability that Iraq, Iran and Turkey will come together to fight PKK and Rojava in the future. In addition we should acknowledge that there has been no effective or strong international solidarity from leftists, communists, socialists, trade unionists and anarchists, and the same movement has not emerged in neighbouring countries. Had the situation been different and some of the above conditions met, perhaps Rojava could answer my questions in more positive way and set a better example to follow.
[1] Anarchist and Radical Texts/The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism
[2] Libertarian municipalism – Wikipedia [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism]]
[3] Biehl J. Ecology or Catastrophe, The life of Murray Bookchin, Oxford University Press 2015, P 227
[4] The Meaning of Confederalism | The Anarchist Library [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-meaning-of-confederalism.pdf][https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-meaning-of-confederalism.pdf]]
[5] The politics of Social Economy, Libertarian Municipalism. Biehl, J. P 110 and 118 [[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6YOyGNakE86b3RLY2RZN0dySUE/view?usp=sharing][https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6YOyGNakE86b3RLY2RZN0dySUE/view?usp=sharing]]
[6] [[http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Ocalan--Confederalism.pdf][http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Ocalan--Confederalism.pdf]]
[7] Democratic Confederalism - ROAR Magazine
[8] Capitalism and unmasked gods and naked kings: Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume ll (page 110). Published New Compass Press, Porsgrun, Norway and International Initiatives edition, Cologne, Germany 2017
[9] The Murray Bookchin Reader. Edited by Janet Biehl (page 75) [[https://archive.org/details/themurraybookchinreader][https://archive.org/details/themurraybookchinreader]]
[10] Golphy O. Rojava's democratic confederalism: the experiment of an American theory. 2016.
[[https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/4fxpd5/rojavas_democratic_confederalism_the_experiment/][https://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/4fxpd5/rojavas_democratic_confederalism_the_experiment/]]
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#title Interview with Beyond Europe about Turkey Election
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics interview, Turkey, Elections
#date July 3, 2018
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[http://zaherbaher.com/2018/07/03/interview-with-beyond-europe-about-turkey-election/][zaherbaher.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-19T12:33:23
*** 1) Is there still a chance that Erdogan will not win the game? If so, who are his counterparts? What strategy do they pursue and what goals do they have? What is going to happen if the HDP exceeds 10 % and moves into parliament?
A: I believe Erdogan will win again but may be narrowly. Erdogan controlled everything in Turkey almost all the Media, the State’s administrations, the courts & jurisdiction system, the military section, the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), the Parliament. In addition he has made Turkey as an open prison for its citizens, so all these in some way helps Erdogan to dominate the election campaign process, in other words people can hear mainly AKP campaign voice not the rest of the political parties and groups.
Probably HDP exceeds 10% threshold but no mulch chance for HDP to make big changes because of its experiences we saw it previously in the Parliament so what do you think under the presidential system?!
I also must say the role that whole the political parties including HDP play is to make the mass movement weaken by deceiving people and giving impression that the real problems the society in Turkey currently is facing can be resolve through the election and Parliamentary System. We all know wherever the political parties are strong, the mass movement becomes weak and vice versa.
*** 2) Can you describe the current situation of the Kurdish people in North-Kurdistan? What will happen here if Erdogan wins?
A: Well, the situation in Bakur, North-Kurdistan, is much worse than the years of 1990s in every way. I have mentioned this in my articles that published in Lib-Com and Anarchismo.
What was left over from 1990s intact, after imposing the war on Kurdish there in July 2015 by Erdogan almost completely destroyed. In addition Erdogan managed to weekend the mass movement there too.
If Erdogan wins or not, his AKP’s MPs work on paralysing and destroying the mass movement in Turkey in whole. It is in Erdogan and his party interest to replace the mass battle by party political battle. He is very clever politician and knows very well what makes the Turkish establishment weak is not the party political game and the parliamentary system, it is in fact the people’s movement, the working class movement. All his efforts now concentrating on deceiving people and diverting them from the right way of struggle there against the State of Turkey to Parliamentary system game.
*** 3) What impact will an AKP election victory have on the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and the situation in the Middle East? Can the idea of Rojava survive a Turkish autocratic state?
A: I do not thinks the policies of AKP, if Erdogan wins, will be changed to better. We all know Erdogan’s ambitious are very big as he tries to bring back the role of old Ottoman Empire to play a major role in Middle East and whole Europe as well.
He is very arrogant guy. Every time when he has succeeded in his Political career that made him more ambitious and more persistent on implementing his polices. He is now more dictator and more brutal than ever.
Erdogan since has been in power he has done everything to fail Rojava. I do not think when he wins again, he can be better. He probably will be worse because he thinks he has a mandate from people elected him again.
He is an evil man like the rest of the politicians so that he compromises with evil to defeat Rojava , his political history for the last two and a half years proved that.
As for Middle East, Erdogan tries to be a main leader, he tries to give an impression he is the voice of the voiceless, the voice of all Sunna Muslim, the voice of the Philistines and the voice of peace and security in the region.
In relation to Rojava, it is very hard to expect the idea of Rojava as claiming of Democratic Confedralism can be survived in a long term because of so many reasons. The special circumstances Rojava has, surrounding by the different enemies, lack of international solidarity, controlling the political, social and economic arena by PYD and the serious mistakes have PYD made, all these are few factors among many that have aborted the Tev-Dem movement’s initial aims . I have stressed on this point in my article Afrin and the policies of the Democratic Union Party.
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#title Our attitude towards Rojava must be critical solidarity
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, criticism, solidarity
#date January 30, 2016
#source https://libcom.org/library/our-attitude-towards-rojava-must-be-critical-solidarity
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T01:18:19
Many articles from different people about Rojava have expressed different views. The vast majority of them have covered the positive and bright sides of this experiment. I too have written many articles, in both Kurdish and English. In addition, I have given many interviews to Kurdish and non-Kurdish media. I have attended and addressed several meetings, both in the UK and abroad. I travelled once to Rojava and twice to Bakur (the Kurdistan part of Turkey).
This article is about both Rojava and Bakur, as I am more optimistic about Bakur than about Rojava. As a result, I am prepared to receive considerable backlash from those who read this article, especially from Kurdish people. They either do not accept any criticism or they blindly support both movements without seeing the negative sides of either. I am open to criticism and accept their different opinions and even accusations. However, I am very supportive concerning Rojava and Bakur, and a committed person for social revolution wherever it exists.
Before delving into the main issues, I would like to add that I believe that having an entirely supportive attitude toward something makes one a blind follower, and having an entirely critical attitude makes one narrow-minded. In both cases, one sees what one wants to see, not what is there. So I try to support my opinions with evidence and a clear conscience. I must also say that last year the Kurdistan Anarchist Forum (KAF) (of which I am a member), on two occasions, wrote to the senior figures in the PKK, the PYD, the Tev-Dem and other groups and organisations, attempting to call their attention to some of the problems. The KAF has not yet received any response.
<strong>Why are there problems in Rojava?</strong>
<br>
Anyone who demands a ‘pure movement’ is either unrealistic or simply wants the movement to produce whatever is in his/her mind and to conform to his/her wishes. We should understand that life is neither a one-way street nor a straightforward road. The movement is a people’s movement, and people consist of individuals, and these individuals are tied to, and tied down by, all the bad things that the system has produced and continues to produce. Even if we want to reject the superfluous things in society, the system limits our agency and our wishes. However strongly one wishes to be ‘a pure person’ or ‘a 100% anarchist’ in rejecting undesirable things, the system one lives in throws up big barriers and obstacles.
This applies both to Rojava and to the movement in Bakur as well. In order to avoid ‘purity’ and unrealistic judgment, we need to look at both in connection with the whole situation surrounding these movements inside their countries, regionally and internationally. Especially in Rojava, we see continuous war, threats of civil war, attacks by Assad, threats from the state of Turkey, and economic, political and social embargo. In addition, there exist two powerful and hierarchical political parties. All these barriers restrict the movement’s progress towards actual social revolution.
To isolate Rojava’s movement from its context, and also from the outcome of the Arab Spring and from the persistently inadequate international support and solidarity, would mean we can never analyse Rojava properly. Yet criticising it without supporting it would undermine the movement and its people, who have sacrificed themselves for this cause.
In Rojava’s movement we must consider a couple of very important points in making our judgment. First: Has it achieved more than it has lost? Do the positive points outweigh the negative? Second: What is the direction of the movement? In my opinion, Rojava’s movement is still on the right track and has not missed its right direction, at least until now. Its future cannot be predicted and, as a whole, depends on many factors, including some of the above. At present the important thing for us, as unionists, leftists, communists, socialists and anarchists, is to support that movement in order to help it progress.
<strong>What are the problems with both movements?</strong>
<br>
After I visited Rojava in May 2014, I wrote a report on it in two parts.
The first described the situation as it was, while the second described my ‘fears and expectations’ about Rojava’s revolution. It was very important for me because the future of Rojava depended on ‘expectations’ of whether the experiment would succeed or fail. Some of those expectations became real and have since become very big and complicated issues. Others are still on a ‘waiting list’ and could still become major threats to the movement. I did not mention Isis in my 2014 report because at the time it had not yet become a major force, posing a threat to half the world. It became a very powerful, brutal force as soon as it occupied Mosul, just a few days after my return to Iraqi Kurdistan.
Some of the problems both movements are now facing are small and can be resolved. But others, in my opinion, could affect the future of Rojava. These problems are neither trivial nor fleeting, such that they can be ignored. In fact, some of them are so serious already that they have affected and influenced the movement.
Here I shall attempt to discuss them point by point.
<strong>1.The media’s language</strong>
<br>
If one reads Rojnews, listens to Sterk TV and follows social media, especially Facebook most of the time, one repeatedly comes across racist language, in words such as ’Turkish police’, ‘Turkish force, Turkish forces’, ‘Turkish Gendarme’, ‘Turkish government’, ‘Turkish state’. These words are repeated daily.
I am aware that those who use this sort of language are not racist. Rather, they are not educated enough to match their language with the current direction of the movement in Bakur, or else they are not professional enough in the way they perform their jobs. Whatever the reason, these terms are still racist and are against Ojalan’s messages and statements, and do not serve aims of the movement. How do we know that the member of police who was killed, or the killer, is Turkish, not Kurdish? Let’s suppose it is Turkish, but why not say ‘a member of police of the government of Turkey’ or of ‘the force/s of the state of Turkey’?
The government and the state in Turkey are not a Turkish state or Turkish government only. They also have a Kurdish element, despite the fact those Kurds do not speak Kurdish or admit they are Kurdish. There are 20 million Kurdish people in Turkey, several million of whom probably support the government. Many Kurdish tribes and clans also still support the government of Turkey, as do some Kurdish political parties there.
It is important to use the right and appropriate language. The media avoid sexist words and words humiliating women, so I cannot understand why they use racist words and sentences daily!
They also use other inappropriate words, like the word ‘bandits’ to refer to Isis. I do not know where they got this word for Isis, but it is very common among the vast majority of Kurdish writers and journalists. But using this word for Isis is unfair to bandits. When did ’bandits’ commonly rape, kill and sell women? When and where were ’bandits’ a brutal enemy of humanity, animals and nature? When and where did ‘bandits’ launch war on a few billion people, even on people who are Sunni but who do not practice their religion in the same way as they? Those who use the word ’bandits’ for Isis either do not know the meaning of the word in Kurdish, or do not have an accurate assessment of the brutality of Isis.
We do not hear this racist language in Rojava’s media very often. When we hear it occasionally, we know the speaker is originally from Iraq or Iranian Kurdistan.
Another inappropriate word is one that is used for people who have sacrificed their lives for the sake of the movement: ‘martyr’. How do you use the word ‘martyr’ for an atheist person or for someone who belongs to a secular organisation? The word ‘martyr’ is a religious word and is inappropriate to use for YPG and YPJ fighters.
Some of the leaders or people in high positions within the PKK, the HDP and the PYD do, from time to time, use racist and inappropriate language, too.
Murat Karayilan, the head of PKK Guerrilla, on December 30, 2015, told Rojnews, “In defying the brutality of the Turkish state our own self-rule is announced. The citizens, women and children are killed daily by Turkish police and soldiers” [emphasis mine]. In the same interview he said of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), “We are hoping in this situation all the political parties of the Kurdish people acknowledge all these behaviors of the fascist and Turkish occupier in order to act rightly and offer support” [emphasis mine].
For me, it is a disaster to hear these words coming from the main commander of the PKK Guerrilla and one of the PKK leaders. They are the exact opposite of what Ojalan says and wants to be said. At that level, he should either not speak, or when he speaks, his speech should reflect the politics of his party and of the movement.
Even Selahattin Demirtas occasionally speaks like a Kurdish nationalist. I will come back to this in another point.
On January 5, 2016, Rojnews reported that Salih Muslim was talking about the progress of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in taking back territory from Isis. He criticised the reaction and hostility of Turkey, and said, “The lands have been taken back and they [have] nothing to do with Turkey, so why is Turkey setting up a red line?...Turkey and Syria are the same Turkish Military [emphasis mine] on the border who started killing civilians in Rojava, but their brutality cannot stop our victory.”
In my opinion, purging racist and inappropriate words from our language would not be difficult. The media could censor and filter all the news when monitoring their writings and statements, before publishing them. If anybody is not improving his/her language, then there are so many approaches that can be taken in educating and training them.
<strong>2. The bad interviews, bad announcements, and withdrawing from democratic confederalism</strong>
<br>
Those of us who follow the events, interviews and the media of Rojava and Bakur closely can see that a big departure from the original principles of Ojalan is under way in both movements.
On April 5, 2015, Ojalan’s lawyers and all delegations were all banned from seeing him. Since then the HDP, PKK, and PYD have been deprived from his deep thought and valuable advice, instructions and recommendations. I personally think some of the powerful people in the parties and the movements have used it as an opportunity to give interviews and instructions against Ojalan’s wishes. In fact, they managed to change the policies of their parties in ways that are not in the interest of the movements.
Some talks, statements and interviews have been nonsensical. In September 2015, Murat Karayilan said, “Our revolution for the victory of the Kurdish nation passes through an important stage of history...This stage we are at now, it is a stage of Freedom of Kurdistan; because of this we need national unity more than at any other time.” He continues, “You nominated me [referring to his nomination as an Executive Council member of the KNC, or Kurdistan National Congress], as you thought I deserve to be a member of KNC, I promise you in struggling for freedom of Kurdistan I must be one of the Apo [Ojalan] Guerrilla. I should apply the principles of democratic unity of a nation for a free and democratic Kurdistan. With all my effort and power, I struggle against the occupation policy of the Turkish state [emphasis mine]....In an important situation like this, we need unity more than at any other time. I believe that for the victory of our nation, we need national unity; the KNC is playing a big role [in this].”
In my opinion, these remarks do not serve the Kurdish question at all. He challenges Ojalan, as he is very much opposed to his plan, principles and his solution for the Kurdish problem in each part of Kurdistan.
The phrases ‘unity of the Kurdish people’ and ‘unity of nation’ are nothing more than myths– they refer to other leaders’ national political parties in Kurdistan. Anyone who is aware of the history of the Kurdish people can easily see that this nation never had and never will achieve unity. All nations consist of classes, each of which represents its own interests. Because of the disputes between them, they cannot achieve unity. In addition, forming different political parties with different leaders and their greed for power not only hampers attempts at unification, it breaks the nation down further.
Karayilan’s remarks are against Ojalan’s ideas and those of his master Bookchin regarding democratic confederalism, decentralism, non-hierarchy and unity with others regardless of their differences. Karayilan’s ideas about the nation-state and national freedom contradict Ojalan’s ideas, which are anti-state and more democratic.
On December 30, 2015, in his interview with Rojnews, Karayilan reassured us about what he had said in September. He said, “The struggle in Bakur is a national struggle and all the forces in Kurdistan must support it because this struggle is for all Kurds. We are hoping the politicians in Bashur (Iraqi Kurdistan) will support Bakur better.”
Karayilan either talks politics or is simply not aware of the reality of the situation or the attitude of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) towards the PKK, the PYD, Bakur and Rojava. Who conspired with Turkey and Qatar to bring Isis to Iraq and Kurdistan? Who embargoes Rojava? Who does not allow YPG and YPJ fighters, wounded in their fight with Isis, to be treated in their hospitals under KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) control? Who does not allow the bodies of YPG, YPG, and Guerrilla fighters to be sent back to Rojava and Bakur through their borders? Who does not let people from Bashur and Rojhalat (the Iranian part of Kurdistan) cross the border into Rojava? Who is continuously in conspiracy with Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the US against the PKK and PYD? Is not the answer to all these questions, “the KRG”? Does Karayilan not see that just a few months ago Turkey, with the support of the KRG, brought a huge number of soldiers and powerful military forces to Sinjar, close to Mosul? Who gave permission to Turkey to set up a few military bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, to protect and defend Barzani against the PKK? Who is supporting Isis and Turkey by selling them very cheap oil? Who settled over 4,000 companies from Turkey in Iraqi Kurdistan for their own interests and not for the Kurdish people in Iraq? And finally, who are those people who have meetings – one day in the US, next day in the Gulf Countries and another day in some other western country – on how to eliminate the PKK and the fighters in Rojava? Again, is it not the KRG?
In addition to the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), other powerful organisations share power in the KRG. They are Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Movement for Change (Goran), plus a couple of Islamic organisations. How can Karayilan demand unity from them? True, Goran has not been in power since October 12, 2015, but it never supported Bakur or Rojava practically. And the PUK is less guilty than the KDP, but it has not really supported either Rojava or Bakur either.
Doubtless the political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, including the KDP, are very clever. They have their reasons for not supporting either movement. Forget about the bloody history between the PKK and them (the PUK and KDP) at the end of the twentieth century. They do not want to support the sort of movement that aims to bring a brand-new model of popular power into the region, because this would mean digging a grave for themselves.
Selahattin Demirtas, during his trip to the US at the beginning of December 2015, told a large meeting in Washington, “We are not perfect, but I can say we have progressed toward achieving national unity. From Mahabad to Qamishli, Erbil and Sina [Kurdish towns in three parts of Kurdistan], we are all going in one direction. In my opinion, in this century we have arrived at a great position, in order to have our own seat among prestigious UN family and to live as a state.”
Obviously Demirtas here did not talk as a co-president of the HDP or as a citizen of Turkey, as he claimed to be during both elections in 2015; in fact he was talking like Barzani. He forgot that his aim in Bakur is to establish not a Kurdish nation-state but people’s self-rule, or democratic confederalism. His goal should not be to wave the Kurdish flag and wish the Kurdish state to be among the ‘happy family of the UN’. He should know better and remember that the UN never, ever condemns Turkey for its treatment to Demirtas’s own Kurdish nation.
And what ‘unity’ was he talking about?! The fact that a few thousand Kurdish people have been taking part in both movements, who come from the other parts of Kurdistan, does not mean that the national unity of the Kurdish people has been achieved. A few hundred foreign fighters, if not thousands, are already among the YPG and the PKK Guerrilla; what does Demirtas say about them? And also, what does he say about the many hundreds of Arabs, Assyrians, Christians, even Turkish and the others among the YPG and the YPJ?
<strong>3. The PKK’s and PYD’s diplomatic relationship with the KRG, especially the KDP</strong>
<br>
The bloody conflict between the PKK and the Kurdish forces in Iraqi Kurdistan dates, at least, back to the beginning of the 1990s. In the past, few if any forces or political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan liked the PKK. True, at present, the relationship of the PKK and the PYD with the Islamic political parties and Goran is not as bloody as that between the KDP and the PUK. However, that does not mean they are less dangerous than the KDP and PUK to them.
The KDP considers the PKK its arch-enemy, more than any other force or government in this world. It brings forces of the state of Turkey to Kurdistan, opens military bases for them and co-operates with Isis in order to defeat the PKK, the YPG and the YPJ. The KDP does not even allow any serious demos or protests against the government of Turkey. Recently at the demo in Erbil, when one of the organisers tried to read a statement that condemned Turkey’s brutality against the Kurdish people in Bakur’s towns and cities, the KDP’s police banned the reading. What better support and friendship could the KRG have offered Turkey? In my Rojava report of June 2014, I mentioned the major dispute and the bloody history between the PKK and the PDK; I do not want to repeat myself here.
Surely both the PKK and the PYD know more than we do about the KDP’s agreements with Turkey, the US and some of the Western states against them. In fact, they might have official documents as well. But the problem with the PKK and the PYD is that the relationship with the KDP has been fruitless, has achieved nothing; in fact, it causes them problems. For instance, Salih Muslim visited the grave of the senior Barzani, Mustafa Barzani, for no reason. And also the PYD invited Barzani to attend its conference last year in Qamishli. He turned down the invitation and sent somebody else on behalf of himself, someone who has no personality, no dignity and no power. This means doing ‘black politics’ rather than general politics, and the majority of us, as Kurdish people, interpreted this as humiliating the PYD and the rest.
The KDP does not deserve to have any relationship with the PKK or the PYD. Obviously I am not in favour of launching a war against the KDP. I just wish to say that the PKK and the PYD, instead of having a relationship with the KDP, should have a policy of “no war, no peace “, much like the PYD policy toward Assad’s regime. The PKK and the PYD should have left people in Iraqi Kurdistan to work on isolating the KDP and weakening its power.
In Rojava, the disputes and the problems between the PKK and the PYD on one side, and with the PDK on the other, have penetrated to the other Kurdish political parties (ENKS), the Syrian Kurdish National Council for Kurdish Opposition parties, the Tev-Dem (the Movement for a Democratic Society), and the Democratic Self-Administration (DSA). Obviously, this is to be expected because of major differences between the PKK and the KDP. They have two very different strategies and want two different futures. We all can see that the PYD is a close relative, so to speak, of the PKK; meanwhile most of the Kurdish political parties in the ENKS have been formed and are supported in every way by the KDP, and their plans and strategies for Rojava are not separate from the KDP’s.
Last year, the talks and negotiations between the ENKS and the PYD and PKK finally reached a sort of compromise and agreement about the political seats in Rojava. I noticed a couple of things. First: Aldar Khalil, who is one of the main people from Tev-Dem and the PYD, represented the movement in Rojava. In making the agreement, he did not go back to local groups and the House of People that formed the Tev-Dem; nor did he announce a referendum. Instead, he offered 40% of the seats to the ENKS. Of course, that happened after consultation with other leaders in both political parties, the PKK and the PYD. Neither direct democracy nor indirect democracy was used during the process of drafting the agreement. If it had been implemented, it would certainly have affected the future of Rojava. For me, this was a major setback from the principles of Rojava’s revolution. The Tev-Dem is the only hope, in my opinion, for Rojava, but it is completely marginalised. Second, this compromise and the courtesy they showed to the KDP would have worked better and been more effective if they had extended it directly to the ENKS. That also means considering the ENKS as a partner of peace and war in Rojava, whilst it was undermining the KDP. I believe that direct negotiations with the ENKS would be better and would save time and money, and avoid confusion. The PKK and the PYD should look at the ENKS in a more realistic way, give it more weight and consideration—whether it is small or big, it can still create many problems for the PYD and the PKK. The ENKS has so many choices due to the existence of many enemies of the PYD and the PKK. It could easily become a part of one of those enemies the KDP, Assad, Turkey, Iran or any other regional country, and work with them against Rojava.
<strong>4. The mistakes of the PKK and falling in the trap of the state of Turkey</strong>
<br>
In 2013, when the so-called peace process began, we did not know that Turkey—under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader, Erdogan—does not want peace with the Kurdish people but just wanted to pass the time. However, by the beginning of 2015, we should have realised this. Then as now, it is very clear that the peace process will succeed only in the way that Ojalan and a few more people in the PKK envisaged it. They knew that shifting the war from the mountains to the cities would not get the Kurdish movement anywhere. They knew that a ceasefire, even if it is just for killing time, is still better than war.
Ojalan spent so much time, made a great effort and took so many steps to defuse all the tactics from the state of Turkey. He managed to take the Kurdish question from an internal issue to a big issue on the table of some powerful countries. He managed to take the PKK movement forward from a closed nationalist political movement to an exemplary social movement, to a movement that is anti-state and anti-authoritarian. By doing this, he managed to bring millions of people around the world to support, and offer solidarity with, Bakur’s movement, and he has managed to do even more.
Alas, if the situation continues as it is now, all these efforts and the work that Ojalan has done will be wasted, and the movement will go back to its level in the 1980s and early 1990s. If this happens, it will also be the beginning of the defeat of Rojava.
The ceasefire and the transfer the struggle to the towns and cities of Turkey, and the transformation of the movement into a social revolution would cut off the aggressive arms of Erdogan and his AKP. It has put the AKP under much pressure both inside and outside Turkey and has put the state of Turkey’s polices under scrutiny.
However, the state of Turkey and its head, Erdogan, have never seriously wanted to resolve the issue. In the meantime, it was very difficult for them to go back to war with the PKK easily. They always looked for an excuse to launch an attack on the PKK and the rest of the Kurdish people in Bakur. They also knew that the route that the PKK has taken – announcing a ceasefire and being ready to reach a peaceful solution – was the way to win the struggle. Therefore Erdogan, with the help of the Turkish Intelligence Agency (MIT), tried to find a way to involve the PKK in starting a war. He also knew that this is the only way to defeat Rojava, or at least to make it so weak that it would accept any compromise.
Regrettably, the PKK has done what exactly the state of Turkey wanted. In the summer of 2015 it killed a few members of the police, although the PKK has denied that. However, this provided the state with a justification to kill and arrest of many innocent people. At the same time, the state’s fighter jets crossed the Iraqi border and, over the period of a week, bombarded the Guerrillas in the mountains and destroyed a few villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, killing many civilians (including women and children) and also killing many fighters from the PKK Guerrilla. Later on, the state of Turkey announced that the peace process was over.
After killing more than 130 people in the terrorist attack in Ankara and the state’s brutality against people there, the PKK, instead of working to expand its social revolution to other parts of Turkey, announced “resistant but in the form of announcing self-rule administration”. How can you set up a “self-rule administration” in a climate of war and terror? If “self-rule” is the people’s self-rule, the people themselves must decide and do it by using direct democracy, not by a decision made by the Guerrillas or by a tiny minority of people!!! Obviously, announcing self-rule in this situation was not a choice of the people, and has also given an excuse to the state to kill more people and use more terror. In addition, Erdogan could tell people in Turkey that the “Kurdish people want divide Turkey, they want separation”, especially because, at the time, a general election process was under way.
Worse still, on December 24 and 25, in the town of Nosubin, Butane, a few people announced the formation of the “Civil Party” in Cizre. Soon after the announcement, the establishment of the“Town Protection Unit” was announced, too – by showing pictures of a few young people in social media flashing their guns and grenades as happy and very good news. In my opinion, this was a very big mistake, and I have no doubt that the state of Turkey would have been happy to buy it for millions of pounds.
On the other side, someone else was going to make a decision, alone, for a whole town, without thinking of the consequences of her decision and without going back to her people who elected her. On December 30 Rojnews reported that Gültan Kisanek declared, “If the state arrests our co-mayor of our municipalities, then I will announce self-rule.”
At present, there is talk about the continuation of this sort of resistance, and in the very near future, the Guerrillas will enter the cities to start fighting in the heart of Turkey’s towns. The above has been confirmed by one of the commanders, Dalal Amud, and is said to prevent attacks by the forces of Turkey’s government. Rojnews reported on January 2 that Dalal Amud, in her interview with Firat News, said, “If, in 2016, the attacks increased [referring to attacks by Turkey], we shall put intervention in cities on our agenda.”
These sorts of tactics are, in my opinion, very dangerous and suicidal. The only person to defuse them and to put the PKK back in the right direction is Ojalan, and he is not allowed to see anybody or to send any messages out. I believe that the tactic of banning him from seeing other people is deliberate. They know Ojalan could instruct his followers not to fight in the streets, not to destroy the social revolution that may end up destroying what has been achieved.
<strong>5. Getting close to the US and Western Countries</strong>
<br>
The US and the Western countries are dark forces; in at least the past century they have hardly helped any movement or state unless doing so would benefit them. In analysing any movement to see whether it actually reflects the interest of vast majority of its people, we need only identify the attitudes of the US and other Western countries toward it, and then we can tell. If they support the movement, it should be questionable. If they are against it, then we need to look into it closely before saying anything.
Obviously, this formula does not apply to the terrorist groups, since we simply do not know what is going on behind the scenes and what opinions, exactly, these countries hold. It is very normal for them to call the groups terrorists today and “freedom fighters” tomorrow; to fight them forcefully and even brutally today and negotiate with them tomorrow. The language of politics knows only vested interests and nothing else.
Compared to the help the US and other Western countries give to reactionary and terrorist states, their help and support for Rojava is nothing. But still, why do they give it? The reason is that to defeat Rojava by military force would not be easy at all. Any country that fought Rojava’s movement would face a huge protest, not just by its own people but also by people from other countries. So the best way to defeat it is to support it, and thereby to contain it and tame it, without sacrificing any of their soldiers. Once this has been done, they can occupy it economically.
What I see from the interviews of the PKK and PYD leaders and their attitudes is that they are very anxious and are rushing to get closer to the US and other Western countries.
The US support for the PYD is now much greater than it was during the battle for Kobane, and the support is direct rather than through the KRG. A few months ago the US sent 50 advisers and experts to the YPG and YPJ. The US support for Rojava was planned very well, but was slow: first, because of Turkey; second, because of the Gulf countries and the reaction of the Sunni people; and third, currently, the future direction of Rojava is not clear to them. (It is not clear to us, either.)
Salih Muslim in his interview with the Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI) on September 2, 2015, was asked: What is the purpose of the buffer zone that the Turkish government wants? What is the US administration’s position on it? He said,“ The US has repeatedly stressed its rejection of the buffer zone, and we trust the statements by the US”. This answer is very naive. If this is his true opinion, he knows neither the US nor the importance of Turkey, the Gulf countries and the Sunni people in general, to the US. If he thinks this is a good diplomatic answer, not many Kurdish people believe it. The US administration does not believe it either, because the US knows about the closeness of the PKK to the PYD, and the PKK is, for them, still a terrorist organization.
In the same interview, Muslim was asked: How do you explain your relationship with the US? , He said, “This is a positive step. We seek to expand our relations with the US politically and diplomatically, and we hope that we will succeed in doing so.” He was then asked: What is your message to the American people and their government? His response was, “America is a superpower that fosters democracy globally, and tries to develop and disseminate it throughout the world, and the American people have their own standards and fundamental principles for democracy”. That this is the opinion of the best PYD leader about the US is a disaster. In the past hundred years or more, the US has not supported democracy. In fact, it has fought brutally against people who stand for democracy by killing thousands of them in different countries around world. The US is the most friendly administration to reactionary and dictatorship states in the world. Muslim’s answer contains no truth at all; it is covering up and defending the brutality of the US state in the world, and especially what the US has done, and still does, directly and indirectly, against his own nation, the Kurdish people.
On December 7, 2015, Cemil Bayik, the main leader of PKK after Ojalan, was interviewed by Mahmut Hamsic. Kurdish Leader Bayik: We are neither on America nor ...
In response of one of the questions, he said, “We are neither on America’s nor on Russia's side. We are a third force there, we represent a third line. When I say 'we' I mean the Kurds in Rojava”. What did they say? “They said, we will recognize whoever recognizes our status, and we will form an alliance with them. Until now no-one has officially recognized Rojava. Therefore, the Kurds there cannot be on the side of America or Russia. There is a relationship. Whoever wants to fight ISIS (Daesh), we will fight with them”. While he is the person who best understands Ojalan’s ideas, democratic confederalism, and to a certain extent Bookchin’s ideas too, I believe he could have done much better in this interview and a couple of previous ones. He could have explained, very well and clearly, his and the PKK’s opinions, by carefully choosing his words on the events, and avoid embarrassing himself when responding to a sensitive question in the way that he did.
<strong>6 . The different opinions and the paradox about the future economy in Rojava</strong>
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The basis of Rojava’s social revolution, for me, is its economic revolution and its cultural revolution. From there, the revolution can be extended to other sectors, such as education and politics, both of which are strongly connected with the economy and culture.
A social revolution supports changing the negative sides of the existing cultures to match the natural/organic society in which people live communally and work collectively. So it is important, from the beginning, to have a clear plan and idea of what sort of economy we want in the end. Creating communes, and working and living together on the land, in neighborhoods and in workplaces– this is the basis for socialising the economy and for people living together as communities.
It is true that Rojava has no advanced economy; instead it has war and an embargo. These issues co-exist with other social problems, and international support and solidarity are insufficient. No doubt all of these played, and still play, a big role in forming the economy in Rojava.
However, people should not take the issue of economy lightly, and they should make a proper plan. They also should avoid contradictions in talking about it.
There are more than 109 communes in Jazeera Canton. They can be made more effective by trying to move them forward. For instance, they could establish large collective kitchens in the neighborhoods, in the factories, on the land where people work, and in every other place of work and study, as well as in public services.
By now, a plan for people to work on the land collectively and to distribute the products according to people’s needs should be in place. However, consider what Dr Ahmet Yusuf, the economics minister in Afrin Canton, said in his interview with the Huffington Post on December 18, 2015: "We will develop an economy based on agriculture, that is to say production. We will base this mode of production on a foundation by which all the peoples of the region will be included and benefit from it." Dr. Yusuf also told the PKK-linked Kurdish outlet ANF News last December, "We will encourage everyone to work their own lands based on the needs of the community." He continued, “Wealthy investors are welcome to contribute, by putting capital into various citizens' efforts to live off the land”, adding, ”since private enterprise is still part of the economy.” But he wants them to know that "we will not allow them the opportunity to exploit the community and people or monopolise. We will succeed in this,” he said, “because there is no other model left to try on Earth. Because this model is the model by which the history of humanity will be brought back to life."
On January 8, 2015, during the unfolding revolution in Rojava, the historian Dylan Murphy asked Özgür Amed, a journalist and researcher: The Unfolding Revolution in Rojava “The capitalist world is still recovering from the 2008 economic crisis and wealth inequality is increasing in many places around the globe. What economic alternatives are being proposed in Rojava?” Amed replied, “The economic pillar has been an essential part of the Rojava revolution! It defends an autonomous economic model and is working to put it into practice. Capitalism has surrounded everyone and everything, and in a century in which it is difficult to breathe, and where we are seemingly bereft of alternatives, an exit is now being discovered through an alternative economic model and a communal economy.”
Then Amed referred to Dr. Ahmet Yusuf’s remarks about the ‘Democratic Autonomous Economy’: “We take as a principle the protection and defense of natural resources. What we mean by defense is not defense in a military sense, but the self-defense against the exploitation and oppression which society now faces. There are many obstacles to restructuring the communal economy in Rojava. Systems that take capitalist systems as their reference have attempted to obstruct our progress in the economic as well as the social spheres. We ourselves take the communal economy as a founding principle. We are working to create a system which combines anti-liberalism, ecological sustainability, and moral common property with communal and cultural production.”
Özgür Amed continued, “This revolution is developing cooperatives based on a social economy as its economic alternative. For example, any companies that will come to Rojava will take a place in the service of these cooperatives.”
Obviously, Dr Yusuf’s opinions and ideas about Rojava’s economy in the first interview are much better and clearer than in the latest one. However, the question arises here: How can you convince a company to abandon seeking profit? As long as a company’s purpose is business, and business means making money, no company will participate in the co-operatives if it does not make money.
<strong>7. Breaching and abusing the principles of human rights</strong>
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There has been so much propaganda against the PYD and its breaches and abuses of human rights by the media, including the KRG, and also by human rights organisations. The PYD has been accused of restricting freedom, arresting people from oppositions, treating prisoners badly, and using violence against them. Recently, the YPG was even accused of using violence against Arab villagers who were under the control of Isis before. Worse, we were told that they moved entire villages, due to their co-operation with Isis.
No doubt that the people who are at war with others, struggling for power with guns, create a climate that breaches and abuses human rights, and these can become a normal practices. These practices are also usually used against anybody in opposition organizations who struggles for power, or against somebody who simply has differences. Under such circumstances, most of the above accusations can be moved from doubt to certainty. History has proved that.
Since September of last year, when the PYD introduced a new primary school curriculum, some people from different religions, different backgrounds, different organisations, and some Arabs as well, have shown concern about the new scheme. They think that “New Kurdish-language primary school curricula introduced by the PYD-led Kurdish authorities in northern Syria last month are generating controversy for being too ideological and “prioritizing a single view over all others.” They believe there is not much difference between the education under Assad’s regime and that under the democratic self-administration. “Just like the Syrian government’s textbooks, ” Kadar Ahmad, a Kobani-based Kurdish activist, told Syria Direct, the texts used in the new curricula “prioritize a single view over all others, the difference being that these curricula adopt Ocalan’s thought rather than Baathist ideas.” http://syriadirect.org/news/new-pyd-curriculum-in-northern-syria-reveals-ideological-linguistic-fault-lines/
Obviously we do not know how much of this is true, but it is certainly very difficult for the above groups to approve the current system in Rojava and to apply the new education system. The Syrian government at the time permitted private schools for Christians and Assyrians for different reasons; therefore these people now think they are deprived of the privileges they had had under Assad’s regime. I recognize the wish of the PYD and the DSA to bring back the private schools, and some parents do not want their children’s study covered by the current education system. However, the PYD and the DSA should have had more patience. They could have spent more time in dialogue and in meetings with parents in order to convince them not to withdraw their children from the normal schools.
In Qamishli, the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) thinks there have been violations of human rights, extending to forced eviction and destruction of homes and properties of non-Kurdish people. The Assyrian International News Agency, on November 2, 2015, reported on the confiscation of property, military conscription and church school curricula. “Sixteen Assyrian and Armenian organizations have issued a statement protesting Kurdish expropriation of private property in the Hasaka province of Syria. The statement accuses the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian wing of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), of human rights violations, expropriation of private property, illegal military conscription and interference in church school curricula.”
<br>
http://www.aina.org/news/20151102170051.htm
No matter what the situation in Rojava is, people there must have their say, must be allowed to show their differences, and must have full rights to criticise, to protest and to organise their own demonstrations, whether as individuals or as part of a political organisation. And also, there is no justification for moving Arabs from their villages. They should avoid repeating the same policy that Assad and the former Iraqi government used against the Kurdish people in both Syria and Iraq.
The PYD and the YPG should regard HRW as a protector and not as an enemy. They should see that it is there to protect their reputation by stopping them or at least by bringing to their attention any breaches or violations of human rights. They should encourage HRW to register the abuses and the abusers so that they can tackle this horrible issue.
The PYD, instead of making compromises with the KRG and other forces in the region, should make a compromise with the opposition in Rojava. The PYD should let them enjoy their rights rather than persecute them, ban them and push them to get closer to the KRG or Turkey or any other regional government. Ignoring and marginalizing the opposition will cause a lot of problems for the PYD, the PKK and the YPG.
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#title Rojava between genocide and compromise
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, Syrian civil war
#date October 16, 2019
#source https://libcom.org/library/rojava-between-genocide-compromise
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T11:01:05
Rojava is going through a very difficult time; its future is not clear at the moment. However what is clear is that there will either be genocide or compromise.
What is currently going on in Rojava has been caused by the very complicated background to its struggle going back to the defence of Kobane by the heroic fighters of the YPG/J, and then the intervention of the United States (US).
I always believed that the US became involved in Rojava because they knew that Kobane could not be defeated and there was no other way to defeat Rojava’s experiment other than by getting involved and controlling the situation in order to achieve its goal and strategy.
The absence of strong international support and solidarity from leftists, unionists, communists, socialists and anarchists, as well as the absence of uprisings in neighbouring countries in the region, has led to the present situation in Rojava.
In my opinion the US planned deliberately and meticulously to get involved in Rojava to meet its aims. This was done with the help of Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and probably the Kurdistan Regional Government, the KRG. For the US and its allies, it should not have been a successful experiment in such a place in a troubled region, very rich with oil and gas reserves. The experiment in Rojava tried to build democratic confederalism, based on democratic self- administration, gender equality, social ecology, and harmonious living, making religion a personal rather than a political issue, as it should be. This was impossible for the US and its allies to accept.
The conspiracy against Rojava started from there. The plan was not easy, but the US knew the steps that were necessary to carry this out. The first step was for the US to get closer to the Democratic Union Party, the PYD, not because it was very powerful, but because they were a very disciplined and well trained force, like the YPG/J. Later on, these forces formed a bigger body under the name of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF. The US knew how to get these voluntary forces, built to defend their community, to change to an offensive force to serve US purposes. This could only happen with the cooperation of the PYD, so this was the second step for the US. Later we saw how the US and PYD managed to use the SDF wherever they wanted, changing them from a defensive force to an offensive one. The YPG/J developed with the SDF and grew from 7,000 fighters, to over 70,000. Maintaining a sizeable force like the SDF required food, clothing and other essentials plus whatever was required to fight ISIS. Now the third step was completed. In the end, the SDF became completely dependent on the US when fighting ISIS. In addition to this, the intention of the PYD and their main strategy focused on fighting ISIS, rather than rebuilding Rojava economically, culturally, educationally and socially. The US alliance with the Kurdish in Rojava infuriated President Erdogan and his administration. The close relationship of the PYD with the US isolated Kurds and its forces from Russia. At the same time, Rojava received less international support and solidarity. So now the plan was completed and the US had almost achieved what it wanted.
All of this shifted the process of Rojava’s movement towards the interests of the US rather than in the interests of Rojava itself. In the meantime, the PYD was unaware, or simply ignored the reality, that their survival was closely connected to the survival of ISIS. Once ISIS had been completely dealt with, then Rojava would not be able to survive, especially when there was not enough international solidarity or uprisings happening in neighbouring countries.
While the PYD became increasingly powerful, the self-ruling administration, the Democratic Movement of Society (the Tev-Dem) became weak and lost their balance and power. As a result, the PYD, a powerful, hierarchical organisation, failed to consult the people of Rojava when making important decisions. Although the PYD was powerful, its unconditional alliance with the US collapsed last week and Rojava came under brutal attack by the Turkish state.
The above reasons were crucial in placing Rojava in its current situation. However, the main reason was an internal one; the incorrect policies of the PYD. When I look at people’s experiences in the region in general and the Kurdish people in particular, I see that a nation will fail if it is commanded by a political party.
Rojava is now facing either genocide by the Turkish state or compromise with the Assad regime. While none of the countries involved helped Rojava and with the war still ongoing, Rojava must look for a solution. If the US and other countries cannot stop Turkey right now, it will be too late and will lead to a disaster. In that scenario, Rojava is faced with two choices; genocide or compromise. In my opinion, choosing compromise with Assad's regime to save lives and the prevention of more destruction in Rojava is a logical choice. The PYD’s compromise with the Syrian regime through Russia will change the direction of the war. We should also expect that while the PYD is negotiating with Assad from a weakened position, it cannot get what it wants and any talk of building democratic confederalism and an ecological society built on cooperatives and communes remains a dream.
Having said that, the current tactic is still better as it may prevent war between Turkey and Syria, because the US, Russia and others do not want the war to continue. If it does, there may be strikes, demonstrations and protests in Turkey and this could lead to the end of Erdogan’s power.
Alas, in 1974[1], the Kurdish Democratic Party, the KDP, did not use the same tactic of compromise with the Iraqi regime in order to prevent the renewal of war between the KDP and Iraqi regime, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. It would also have been wonderful if the Kurdistan Patriotic Union, the PUK, had not restarted the military struggle against the regime in 1976. That struggle caused so many deaths following the Anfal operation[2] against the Kurdish in Iraq and the launching of chemical weapons on the town of Helabija by the regime. So, saving the nation is far more important and entirely logical rather than saving the party, its dignity and its interests.
[1] The Kurdish movement started on 11/09/1961. There was a peaceful period between 1970 and 1974 after negotiations between the KDP and the regime at the time. But, in March 1974, after the dispute between KDP and the regime over the city of Kirkuk, the KDP went back to the mountains to fight the regime. This movement was supported by the former Iranian Regime. Once the Iranian regime made a pact with the Iraqi regime on 06/03/1975, it cut off all support for the KDP so that the Kurdish movement collapsed within 24 hours.
[2] Operation Anfal, or simply Anfal, was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq, led by the Ba’athist Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid, in the final stage of the Iran-Iraq war. The campaign happened in 1988 and lead to the disappearance of 180 thousand people.
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#title The battle of Idlib Province in Syria is decisive and crucial for the future of Rojava
#LISTtitle battle of Idlib Province in Syria is decisive and crucial for the future of Rojava
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, Syrian civil war
#date September 5, 2018
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[https://libcom.org/library/battle-idlib-province-syria-decisive-crucial-future-rojava][libcom.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T01:58:08
“We are at the final stage of solving the crisis in Syria and liberating whole territory from terrorism”, stated Walid al-Moualem, Syria’s foreign minister when he met Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in Moscow.
The Assad Regime and its allies are preparing themselves for the upcoming battle for Idlib. The military launch might start this month, September, or the beginning of October. The war will likely bring victory to Assad and catastrophe to the 2 million citizens of Idlib where 1.6 million are already in need of humanitarian aid.
Idlib, near Aleppo, Hama and Homs, is a stronghold of over 60,000 anti-regime rebels and over 10,000 jihadists. To justify attacking Idlib, Assad often claims the province is full of terrorists.
Although the battle of Idlib looks rather small with any parties like the US, Russia, Turkey and Assad and their other allies’ involvement directly or indirectly, it will, no doubt, be a big battle. Each of these parties has their own stake in Idlib and the region. Assad is trying to control the whole country by defeating opposition rebels and terrorist groups. He also wants an open hand over the Kurdish in Rojava either to suppress or negotiate with them on his own terms and conditions. Turkey, which has supported anti-Assad forces and terrorist groups throughout the war for many reasons, has its own interests too. The US and Russia have been the major powers in the region and are arch enemies. Their intervention and involvement in Syria only serves their own interests economically, politically and financially and protects the power of their friends in the region.
As for Rojava’s situation, its future within the Idlib battle scenario is quite complicated. In my opinion, Rojava’s position has been weak since Jul 2015 when Erdogan launched a brutal attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) forcing them to become involved in war. On the other hand, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been aligned with the US in the war against Islamic State (IS), and has committed many deadly mistakes mentioned in my previous article. Please see the link below:
[[http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30915?search_text=Zaher+Baher][http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30915?search_text=Zaher+Baher]]
The battle of Idlib will happen sooner or later. It will be decisive and crucial for the major powers and their allies in the region and also for Rojava. At the moment, US opposes the attack because it would lead to a “humanitarian catastrophe “. The White House warned on Tuesday 04/09 that the US and its allies would respond “swiftly and appropriately” if Assad used chemical weapons. The question here is why the US and its allies were not concerned about a “humanitarian catastrophe” when Turkey invaded Afrin and massacred hundreds of innocent people? In Idlib,the US is probably concerned with defeating the terrorist groups rather than innocent people because they want the game to last longer to achieve completely what they planned in the first place.
Rojava and its self-rule administration and the SDF cannot be ignored during the attack on Idlib and after the battle as well. It cannot be left as it is. The Rojava question and its future must be resolved either way. Rojava is facing many possible scenarios. If Assad prevails in this battle, as commonly predicted, the position of the Kurdish in Rojava will be weaker. Assad will be in a very strong position, securing his hold on power for a while. In this situation, he can impose his terms and conditions on the PYD and SDF while they are in a weak position. There is also the possibility of the SDF joining Assad’s forces for the battle of Idlib while the PYD is negotiating with the regime. As we can see, the PYD and SDF are in a very complicated situation. The SDF may join Assad’s forces against the rebels; an action which is opposed to US interests. In this circumstances the PYD and SDF might be abandoned by the US which, in the near future, may encourage a Turkish attack on Rojava or, at least, Turkey may try to occupy the towns on its border currently under control of the SDF.
If Assad fails to defeat the rebels in Idlib, it won’t be in the interest of Rojava either, because Assad’s defeat will also be a Turkish victory who will then be in a better position to attack Rojava as happened to Afrin.
However, whatever the outcome of Idlib’s battle, it will be critical for Rojava as its future is tied to the battles between the forces mentioned above. The situation may become so complicated in Rojava that it will become difficult for the Kurdish to maintain their principal aim of Democratic Confederalism.
What keeps Rojava alive is the continuing war with Isis and other terrorist groups and, also, the economic embargo imposed by regional powers. Saying this does not mean that Rojava’s movement will collapse. In my opinion, the Kurdish have proved themselves and resolved many questions positively so they cannot be ignored or marginalized by any sides of the major powers and Assad’s regime I believe that, in the end, there might be some compromise between the US and Russia over Syria and its regime. The power struggle between them and their allies to reach their own aims forces Assad, or a future government in Syria, to offer cultural autonomy and some cultural rights. These rights would be far short of building Democratic Confederalism.
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#title The experiment of West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has proved that people can make changes
#LISTtitle experiment of West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has proved that people can make changes
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics kurdistan, Rojava, democratic confederalism
#date Aug 26, 2014
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[https://libcom.org/news/experiment-west-kurdistan-syrian-kurdistan-has-proved-people-can-make-changes-zaher-baher-2][libcom.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T00:58:20
#notes An interesting report by Zaher Baher of Haringey Solidarity Group and Kurdistan Anarchists Forum who spent two weeks in Syrian Kurdistan, looking at the experiences of self-government in the region against the background of the Syrian civil war and rise of Islamic State.
What you read below is the experience of my visit, for a couple of weeks in May this year, 2014, to North East of Syria or Syrian Kurdistan (West of Kurdistan) with a close friend of mine.
Throughout the visit we had the total freedom and opportunity to see and speak to whoever we wanted to. This includes women, men, youth, and the political parties. There are over 20 parties from Kurdish to Christian, of which some are in the Democratic Self Administration (DSA) or Democratic Self Management (DSM) of the region of Al Jazera. Al Jazera is one of three regions, (cantons) of West Kurdistan. We also met the Kurdish and Christian political parties who are not in the DSA or DSM. In addition, we met the top people from the Democratic Self Administration (DSM), members of the different committees, local groups and communes as well as businesspeople, shopkeepers, workers, people in the market and people who were just walking in the street.
*** The background
Kurdistan is a land of around 40 million people that was divided between Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey after the First World War. Historically, the Kurds have suffered massacres and genocide at the hands of successive regimes, especially in Iraq and Turkey. Since then they have continuously suffered and been oppressed at the hands of the central governments of the countries Kurdistan was annexed to. In Iraqi Kurdistan, under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Kurdish people suffered chemical weapon attacks under Operation Anfal [1]. In Turkey, until recently, Kurds did not even have the basic rights of talking in their own language. Historically, they have been recognized as the Turkish who live in the mountains (a reference to the Kurdistan region as there are so many mountains there). In Syria, the Kurds’ situation was little better than Turkey. In Iran they have some basic rights and are recognized as forming a different nation from Persians but have no autonomy.
After the first gulf war in 1991, the Kurdish people in Iraq managed to set up their own regional government, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). After the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish people took advantage of this to strengthen their local power. They managed to gain the right to having their own self administration, budget, parliaments and army. These have now all been recognized by the central Iraqi Government and, to a certain extent, are supported by the central government. This has encouraged and had a positive impact on the other parts of Kurdistan, especially in Turkey and Syria.
In the same year as the invasion of Iraq (2003), the Kurdish people in Syria set up their own party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD); although there were already a number of other Kurdish parties and organizations that existed in the region. Some of them are so old that they date back to the 1960s, but they were ineffective compared to the PYD which has developed and spread rapidly among the Kurdish people there.
*** The Arab Spring
The Arab Spring reached Syria at the beginning of 2011 and, after a short time, spread to the Syrian Kurdistan regions /cantons of: Al Jazera, Kobany and Afrin. The protest among the Kurdish people in those three cantons was very strong and effective. This, to a certain extent, caused the withdrawal of the Syrian army in the Kurdish cantons apart from some areas of Al Jazera which I will explain further on.
In the meantime, the people there, with the support of the PYD & PKK, formed the Tev-Dam, (the Movement of the Democracy Society). This movement quickly became very strong and popular among the region’s population. Once the Syrian army and administration had withdrawn, the situation became very chaotic, (I will explain why). This forced the Tev-Dam to implement its plans and programs without further delay before the situation became worse.
The Tev-Dam’s programme was very inclusive and covered every single issue in society. Many people from the rank and file and from different backgrounds, including Kurdish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Assyrian and Yazidis, have been involved. The first task was to establish a variety of groups, committees and communes on the streets in neighborhoods, villages, counties and small and big towns everywhere. The role of these groups was to become involved in all the issues facing society. Groups were set up to look at a number of issues including: women’s, economic, environmental, education and health and care issues, support and solidarity, centers for the family martyrs, trade and business, diplomatic relations with foreign countries and many more. There are even groups established to reconcile disputes among different people or factions to try to avoid these disputes going to court unless these groups are incapable of resolving them.
These groups usually have their own meeting every week to talk about the problems people face where they live. They have their own representative in the main group in the villages or towns called the “House of the People”.
The Tev-Dam, in my opinion, is the most successful organ in that society and could achieve all the tasks they have been set. I believe the reasons for its success are:
1. The will, determination and power of the people who believe that they can change things.
<br>
2. The majority of people believe in working voluntarily at all levels of service to make the event/experiment successful.
<br>
3. They have set up an army of defence consisting of three different parts: the People’s Defence Units (PDU), the Women’s Defence Units (WDU) and the Asaish (a mixed force of men and women that exists in the towns and all the checkpoints outside the towns to protect civilians from any external threat). In addition to these forces, there is a special unit for women only, to deal with issues of rape and domestic violence.
From what I have seen, Syrian Kurdistan has taken a different route (and, in my opinion, the right one) from the “Arab Spring” and the two cannot be compared. There are a couple of major differences between them.
1. What happened in the countries that were part of the “Arab Spring“were great events and many kicked out tyranny in those countries. The “Arab Spring” in the case of Egypt, produced an Islamic State then a military dictatorship. Other countries fared little better. This shows that people are powerful and can be the heroes of history at a particular time but they were not in a position to achieve what they wanted in the long term. This is one of the major differences between the “Arab Spring” and the “Kurdish Spring” in Syrian Kurdistan where the latter could achieve what they wanted long term — or, at least, so far.
2. In Syrian Kurdistan the people were prepared and knew what they wanted. They believed that the revolution must start from the bottom of society and not from the top. It must be a social, cultural and educational as well as political revolution. It must be against the state, power and authority. It must be people in the communities who have the final decision-making responsibilities. These are the four principles of the Movement of the Democracy Society (Tev-Dam). Credit needs to be given to whoever is behind these great ideas and the efforts being made to put them into practice, whether it’s Abdulla Ocallan and his comrades or anybody else. In addition, people in Syrian Kurdistan set up many local groups under different names to make their revolution work. In the other “Arab Spring” countries, people were not prepared and knew only that they wanted to get rid of the current government but not the system. Also, the vast majority of the people thought that the only revolution is the revolution from the top. Setting up local groups was not undertaken except by a tiny minority of anarchists and libertarians.
*** The Democratic Self Administration (DSA)
After a lot of hard work, discussions and thought, the Tev-Dam has reached the conclusion that they need a DSA in all three Cantons of Kurdistan (Al Jazera, Kobany and Afrin). In the middle of January, 2014, the People’s Assembly elected their own DSA, with autonomy, to implement and execute the decisions from the “House of the People” (the main Tev-Dam committee) and to take over some of the administration work in the local authorities, municipalities, education and health departments, trade and business organizations, defence and judiciary systems etc. The DSA is made up of 22 men and women with each of them having two deputies (one a man and the other a woman). Almost half the representatives are women. It is organized so that people from different backgrounds, nationalities, religions and genders can all participate. This has created a very good atmosphere of peace, brother/sisterhood, satisfaction and freedom.
In a short space of time, this administration has done quite a lot of work and issued a Social Contract, Transport Law, Parties Law and a programme or plan for the Tev-Dam. In the Social Contract, the first page states, “the areas of self-management democracy do not accept the concepts of state nationalism, military or religion or of centralized management and central rule but are open to forms compatible with the traditions of democracy and pluralism, to be open to all social groups and cultural identities and Athenian democracy and national expression through their organization ...” There are many decrees in the Social Contract. A few are extremely important for society, including:
A. Separation of state from religion
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B. Banning marriages under the age of 18 years
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C. Women’s and children’s rights must be recognized, protected and implemented
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D. Banning female circumcision
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E. Banning polygamy.
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F. The revolution must take place from the bottom of society and be sustainable
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G. Freedom, equality, equal opportunity and non- discrimination.
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H. Equality between men and women
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I. All languages people speak must be recognized and Arabic, Kurdish and Syrian are the official languages in Al Jazera
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J. To provide a decent life for prisoners and to make prison a place for rehabilitation and reform.
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K. Every human being has the right to seek asylum and refugees may not be returned without his/her consent.
*** The economic situation in Al Jazera Canton
The population of Jazera is over one million people. This population consists of Kurds as well as Arabs, Christians, Chechens, Yazidis, Turkmens, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Armenians. 80% percent of the population is Kurdish. There are many Arab and Yazidis villages plus up to 43 Christian villages.
The size of Al Jazera is bigger than Israel and Palestine combined. In the 1960s, the Syrian regime implemented a policy in the Kurdish area called the “Greenbelt” which the Ba’ath party continued when they came to power. This stated that conditions for Kurds would be worse compared to those for Syrian people with regards to political, economic and social life and also education. The main point of the Greenbelt was to bring Arabs from different areas to settle in Kurdish areas and to confiscate Kurdish lands which were then distributed amongst the recently-arrived Arab people. In short, Kurdish citizens under Assad came third, after Arabs and Christians.
Another policy was that Al Jazera should only produce wheat and oils. This meant that the government made sure that there would be no factories, companies or industry in the area. Al Jazera produces 70% of Syrian wheat and is very rich in oils, gas and phosphates. So the majority of people were involved in agriculture in the small towns and villages, and as traders and shopkeepers in the bigger towns. In addition, many people were employed by the government in education, health and local authorities, in military service as soldiers and as small contractors in municipalities.
From 2008, the situation deteriorated as Assad’s regime issued a special decree to ban construction of any big buildings justified by the situation arising from the war (referring to continuous war in the region) and also because the area is remote and on the border. Currently, the situation is bad. There are sanctions imposed by both Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraqi Kurdistan (I will explain this in other sections). Life in Al Jazera is very simple and living standards are very low but they do not have poverty. The people, in general, are happy giving priority to what they have achieved in order to be successful.
Some of the necessities any society needs to survive exist in West Kurdistan which is important, at least for the time being, to avoid starvation, stand on their own two feet and resist the boycotts sanctions by Turkey and KRG . These necessities include having lots of wheat to make bread and pastries. As a result, the price of bread is almost free. The second thing is that oil is also cheap and, as people say,” its price is like the price of water”. People use oil for everything; in the home, driving vehicles and making a little equipment needed for a range of industries. To facilitate this dependence on oil, the Tev-Dam reopened some of the oil wells and refining depots. At the moment, they are producing more oil than they need in the region so they are able to export some and also store any excess.
Electricity is a problem because most is produced in the neighboring region under the control of Isis (currently is IS The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant or Islamic State). Therefore, people only have electricity for about 6 hours a day. But it’s free as people are not charged for it. This has partly been resolved by the Tev-Dam by selling diesel, at a very low price, to anybody with a private generator on the condition they supply power to local residents at a very cheap rate as well.
In terms of phone communication, all mobile phones are either using the KRG line or Turkey’s line; depending on where you are. Land lines are under the control of the Tev-Dam & DSA and seem to be working well... Again, this is free.
The shops and markets in the towns are normally open from early morning until 11pm at night. Many of the goods from neighboring countries are smuggled into the region. Other goods do come from other parts of Syria but they are expensive due to heavy taxes payable to Syrian forces or terrorist groups who allow goods into the Al Jazera region.
*** The Political Situation in Al Jazera
As mentioned, most of Assad’s army withdrew from the region but some still remain in a couple of towns in Al Jazera. The regime still has control over half of the main town (Hassaka) while the other half is in the hands of the PDU (The People’s Defence Units).
Government forces remain in the second town in the region (Qamchlo) where they control a small area in the centre of town. However, in the occupied area, the vast majority of people do not use the offices and services centers. The number of the regime’s force in this town is between 6 and 7,000 and they only have control over the airport and the post office.
Both sides seem to recognize the position, power and authority of one another and refrain from clashes or confrontation. I call this situation, the policy of “no peace, no war”. This does not mean there have not been clashes between them in either Hassaka or Qamchlo. Clashes do happen causing the deaths of many people from both sides but, so far, the head of the Arab tribes makes the two sides coexist.
Both sides have taken advantage of the withdrawal of the Syrian army and not fighting with the Kurdish protesters and its military forces saves a lot of cost and expense. Further, the government does not have to protect the area from other opposition forces , as the Kurdish forces do this instead. Also, by withdrawing from Kurdish lands, Assad has freed up forces which can be used elsewhere against other opponents. Secondly, with Assad’s forces leaving Kurdistan, it is protected and defended by the Kurdish people. Indeed, the units defending the people and women protect their own people from any attack or any force, including Turkey, much better than the Syrian army.
The Kurdish people have also benefited in the following ways:
1. They have stopped fighting the government and this has protected their land and property, saving many lives and leaving people in peace and freedom. This has created an opportunity for everybody to live in peace and without fear when running their own business.
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2. The government still pays the wages of its old employees although almost all of them, at present, are working under the control of the DSA. This obviously helps the economic situation there.
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3. This situation has allowed people to manage their own lives and make their own decisions. It also means that people are allowed to live under the authority of the Tev-Dam and DSA. The longer this happens then the more chance they have to firmly settle and make themselves stronger.
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4. This gives the People’s Defence Units and Women’s Defence Units opportunities to fight terrorist groups, especially Isis/IS, as and when necessary.
In Al Jazera, there are more than twenty political parties among the Kurdish and Christian people. The majority of them are in opposition to the PYD, the Tev-Dam and the DSA for their own reasons (a point I will come back to later on) as they do not want to join either Tev-Dam or the DSA. However, they have total freedom to carry out their activities without any restriction. The only thing they cannot have is fighters or militias under their own control.
*** Women and the Role of Women
There is no doubt that women and their roles have been greatly accepted and they have filled both high and low positions in the Tev-Dam, PYD and DSA. They have a system called Joint Leaders and Joint Organizers. This means that the head of any office; administration or military section must include women. In addition to this, the women have their own armed forces. There is total equality between women and men. Women are a major force and are heavily involved in every section of the House of the People, committees, groups and communes. Women in West Kurdistan do not form just half of society, but are the most effective and important half of that society to the extent that if women stop working or withdraw from the above groups, Kurdish society may well collapse. There are many professional women in politics and the military who were with the PKK in the mountains for a long time. They are very tough, very determined, very active, very responsible and extremely brave.
The importance of the equal participation of women in rebuilding society and in all issues/questions has been taken seriously by Abdulla Ocallan and the rest of the PKK / PYD leaders to the extent that women in West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) are considered sacred. It is part of Ocallan’s idea, dream and belief that if you want to see the best of human nature then society must return to the state of the Maternal Society but, obviously, in an advanced stage.
Although this is the position of women and although they have freedom, love, sex and relationships among the women involved in the struggle are extremely rare. The women and men we spoke to believed that the above (love, sex, relationships) are not appropriate at this stage as they are involved in revolution and have to give everything to the revolution in order to succeed. When I asked, if two people in military service or sensitive positions are in love with each other, what would happen, I was told that, obviously, nobody can prevent this but they must be moved to more suitable positions or sections.
This may be difficult for Europeans to understand. How can people live without love, sex and relationships? But, for me, it’s perfectly understandable. I believe it is their choice and, if people are free to choose, then it must be respected. However, there is one interesting observation which I made and which was outside military service, the Tev-Dam and other parties. I have not seen a single woman working in a shop, petrol station, market, café or restaurant. But, women and women’s issues in Syrian Kurdistan are miles ahead of those in Iraqi Kurdistan where they have had 22 years of their own Self Rule and so much more opportunity. Saying that, I still cannot say there is a special or independent movement of the women in Syrian Kurdistan.
*** The Communes
The Communes were the most active cells in the House of the People, and have been set up everywhere. They have their own regular weekly meeting to discuss the problems they face. Each Commune has their own representative in the House of the People and in the neighborhood, village or town where they are based.
Below is the definition of the Commune from the Tev-Dam manifesto and translated from Arabic:
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“Communes are the smallest cells and the most activist in society. They are formed practically in society and there is freedom of women and ecology and the adoption of direct democracy.
“The Communes form on the principle of direct participation of people in the villages, on the street and the neighborhoods and the towns. These are the places that people willingly organize themselves with their opinion, create their free will and initiate their activities in whole residential areas and open the door for discussion about all the issues and their solution.
”Communes work on developing and promoting the committees. They talk and search for solutions of social matters, political, education, securities and self- defending & self-protection from its own power, not from the state. Communes create their own power through building organization in the form of agricultural communes in the villages and also communes, cooperatives and associations in the neighborhoods.
“Forming the Communes on the street, villages and towns with participation of all the residents. Communes have a meeting every week. In the meeting Communes make all its decisions openly by people who are in the Commune and are older than 16 years-old.”
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We went to a meeting of one the communes based in the neighborhood of Cornish in the town of Qamchlo. There were 16 to 17 people in the meeting. The majority of them were young women. We engaged in a deep conversation about their activities and their tasks. They told us that in their neighborhood they have 10 Communes and the membership of each Commune is 16 people. They told us “We act in the same way as community workers including meeting people, attending the weekly meetings, checking any problems in the places we are based, protecting people in the community and sorting out their problems, collecting the rubbish in the area, protecting the environment and attending the biggest meeting to report back about what happened in the last week”.
In response to one of my questions, they confirmed that nobody, including any of the political parties, intervenes in their decision making and that they make all the decisions collectively. They mentioned a few things that they had recently made a decision about. They said “One of them concerned a big piece of land in a residential area we wanted to use for a little park. We went to the Mayor of the town to tell him about our decision and asked for financial help. The Mayor told us that would be fine but they only had $100 to offer us. We took the money and collected another $100 from the local people to build a nice little park”. They showed us the park and told us “many of us collectively worked on it to finish it without needing more money”. In another example they told us, “The Mayor wanted to initiate a project in the neighborhood. We told him we cannot accept it until we get opinions from everybody. We had a meeting where we discussed it. The meeting unanimously rejected it. There were people that could not make the meeting so we went to see them in their houses to get their opinion. Everybody in the commune said no to the project”
They asked us about local groups and communes in London. I told them that we have many groups but we are unfortunately not like them- united, progressive and committed. I told them that they are miles ahead of us. From their faces I could see their surprise, disappointment and frustration to my answer. I could understand their feelings because they think how, in a very backward world like theirs; can they be ahead of us, while we live in the country that had the industrial revolution centuries ago!!!!!
*** The Kurdish and Christians opposition parties
I said before that there are more than 20 Kurdish political parties. A few have joined the DSA but sixteen didn’t. Some have withdrawn from politics while others have joined together to set up a bigger party. There are now twelve parties set up under an umbrella name, The Patriotic Assembly of Kurdistan in Syria. This organization, more or less, shares the same goals and strategies. The majority of the parties under this umbrella support Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government, (KRG), who is also the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraqi Kurdistan.
There is a bloody history between the KDP and PKK that dates back to the 1990s. There was heavy fighting between the two groups in Iraqi Kurdistan which left thousands dead on both sides and this is a wound which has yet to heal. I must mention that Turkey’s government had a hand in the fighting as they were close to the KDP and helped attack PKK force on the Iraq/Turkey border for their own reasons.
There is another dispute between Barzani and his family with the former head of the PKK, Abdulla Ocallan, which is about the Kurdish leader’s position as the Kurdish national leader. While the Kurdish people in West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) have managed to collectively organize their society, protecting it from war and setting up their own DSA, they are still not on very good terms with the KDP.
The PKK and Democratic Union Party (PYD) have been very supportive of the changes happening in Syrian Kurdistan. But, this is certainly not beneficial to either Turkey or the KRG. Meanwhile Turkey and the KRG remain extremely close.
The above is an explanation as to why the KDP in Iraqi Kurdistan are unhappy about what happened in West Kurdistan and are opposed to both the DSA and Tev-Dam. The KDP looks at what happened there a big business and, either this business should not run at all or, if it does run, then the KDP must have the biggest share of this business. The KDP still helps some Kurdish people in West Kurdistan financially and with weapons training in an attempt to set up militias for some of the political parties in order to destabilize the area and its plans. The Patriotic Assembly of Kurdistan in Syria, set up by the twelve political parties mentioned before, is very close to the KDP.
Our meeting with the opposition parties lasted for over two hours and the majority of them were present. We started by asking them how they got on with the PYD, DSA and Tev-Dam. Do they have freedom? Have any of their members or supporters been followed or arrested by the PDU and WDU? Do they have freedom to organize people, demonstrate and organize other activities? Many more questions were asked. The answer to every single question was positive. No arrests were made, no restrictions on freedom or organizing demonstrations. But all of them shared the point that they do not want to take part in the DSA.
They have three disputes with the PYD and DSA. They believe that the PYD and Tev-Dam have betrayed the Kurdish people. Their reasons for this included the fact that half of Hassaka is under the control of the government and that the government’s forces are still in the town of Qamchlo although they admitted these forces are ineffective and only control a small amount of land. Their view is that this is a big problem and the PYD and Tev-Dam compromised with the Syrian regime badly.
We told them that they should think that the PYD and Tev-Dam’s policy is the policy of “No peace, No war” to balance the situation. It has been successful and benefited everybody in the region including all the opposition parties and because of the other reasons already mentioned above. We also said they should know better than us that kicking out Assad’s army from both towns is easy for the PYD with the sacrifice of a few of their fighters but what will happen after that?!! We told them we know that Assad does not want to give up Hassaka and, therefore, the war will start again with killing, persecution, bombardments and the destruction of towns and villages. Also, this opens a door for Isis/IS and al-Nusra to launch an attack on all of them. There would be the possibility of Assad’s army, the Syrian Free Army and the rest of the terrorist organizations all fighting each other in the region with the consequence of losing everything achieved so far. They had no response to this.
The opposition does not want to join the DSA and the next election of this body will take place in a few months time if the situation remains the same. Their reasons for this are, firstly, that they accuse the PYD of co-operating with the regime, while they did not have any evidence to prove this accusation. Secondly, the next election won’t be a free election as the PYD is not a democratic party, but a bureaucratic party. But we know that the PYD has almost the same numbers and positions as any other party in the DSA so statement is incorrect. We told them that if they believe in the election process they should participate if they want to see an administration with more democracy and less bureaucracy. They said that the PYD had withdrawn from the Kurdish National Conference of the KRG, which took place last year in the town of Irbil, to discuss the Kurdish issue. But when we checked this later on with people in the PYD and Tev-Dam, they told us they have evidence of a written document which shows that they committed to the pact but that the opposition did not commit.
The opposition wants to establish their own army, but they are not allowed to by the PYD. When we took this issue back to the PYD and Tev-Dam we were told the opposition could have their own fighters but they must be under the control of the units of the Defence of the People and Defence of Women.. They told us the situation is very sensitive and very tense. It may cause fighting between one another and that this is our great fear and we cannot afford to let it happen. The PYD simply said they do not want the same failure repeated in West Kurdistan. By failure experiment, they were referring to the experiment of Iraqi Kurdistan in the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century which lasted to the end of the century where there were so many fights between different Kurdish organizations at the time. In the end, the PYD and Tev-Dam asked us to go back to the opposition parties with the authority to offer them, on behalf of the PYD and Tev-Dam, anything except letting them have military forces under their own control.
A few days after that we had another meeting for almost three hours in Qamchlo town with the head of the three Kurdish parties: The Kurdistan Democratic Party in Syria ( Al Party),the Kurdistan Party for Democracy and Equality in Syria and The Kurdish Patriotic Democracy Party in Syria. In the meeting, they more or less repeated the reasons for their colleagues, in the previous meeting, not joining the DSA and Tev-Dam to build and develop Kurdish society. We had a long discussion with them, trying to convince them that, if they wanted the Kurdish issue to be resolved, a powerful force in the country and to avoid war and distraction, then they should be independent from the KRG and KDP and work in the interest of nobody but the people of West Kurdistan. Most of the time they were silent and had no response to our suggestions.
A few days later we also met representatives from a couple of Christian political parties and the Christian Youth Organization in Qamchlo. None of these parties have joined the DSA or Tev-Dam for their own reasons but admitted that they get on well with the DSA and Tev-Dam and are fine with their policies. They also appreciated that their safety, and protection from the Syrian army and terrorist groups was due to the forces of the Defence of the People and Defence of Women who have sacrificed their lives to achieve all of the above for everybody in the region. However, the people from the Christian Youth Organisation in Qamchlo were not happy with the DSA and Tev-Dam. Their complaint was about not having enough electrical power and not much for the youth to do or be involved in within the town. Because of this they said they will seek an alternative to the DSA and Tev-Dam, so that, if the situation remains the same, then they will have no choice but to emigrate to Europe. The head of one of the political parties who was present in the meeting responded to them by saying
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what are you talking about Son? we are in the middle of a war, can you see what happened in the rest of the main towns in Syria?, Can you see how many women, men, elderly and children are killed daily?!!! There is an important issue which is very important in life. Power in this particular situation is not very important; we can use other means instead. What is important right now is: sitting at home with no fear of being killed, leaving our children on the streets, playing with no fear of being kidnapped or killed. We can run our business as usual, nobody restricts us, nobody assaults or insults us.... there is peace, there is freedom, and there is social justice.....
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The members of the other political parties agreed and acknowledged all these facts.
Before we left the region we decided to speak to shopkeepers, businessmen, stall holders and people on the market to hear their views which were very important to us. Everyone seemed to have a very positive view and opinion of the DSA and Tev-Dam. They were happy about the existence of peace, security and freedom and running their own business without any interference from any parties or sides.
*** The Shameful Trench
Last year the KRG and Iraqi government agreed, allegedly for security reasons, to dig a 35-kilometre long trench, over two meters deep and about two meters wide, on the Iraqi/Syrian border of Kurdistan. The Trench separates Al Jazera in West Kurdistan from Iraqi Kurdistan in the south. The Tigris river covers five kilometers of this border so there was no need for a trench there. The next twelve kilometers were constructed by the KRG, with the final eighteen kilometers built by the Iraqi government.
Both the KRG and Iraqi government say that the Trench was a necessary measure because of fears over peace and security within Iraqi lands including the Kurdistan region. But there are big questions people always ask about these fears. What fear? From whom? From Isis/Is? It is impossible for groups like Isis/Is to get into Iraq or KRG through that part of Syria as it has been protected by PDU and WDU forces and also Al Jazera has been cleared of Isis/Is completely. However, the majority of Kurdish people know that there are a couple of reasons for digging the trench. Firstly, it is to stop Syrians fleeing the war from reaching Iraqi Kurdistan. Also, the head of the KRG, Massoud Barzani, as explained above, is worried about the PKK and PYD and therefore he and the KRG want to stop them or anybody else from the DSA entering this part of Kurdistan. Secondly, the trench will increase the effectiveness of the sanctions used against West Kurdistan in an attempt to strangle and pressurize them to the point of surrender so as to give into KRG conditions. However, given the choice between surrender and starvation for the Kurds in Syrian Kurdistan, I feel they may choose starvation. This is the reason why the majority of Kurds, wherever they live, call the Trench the “shameful trench”...
There is no doubt that the sanctions have crippled Kurdish life in Al Jazera as the people need everything including medicine, money, doctors, nurses, teachers, technicians and expertise in industrial areas, especially in the oilfield and refining industry to make them work. In Al Jazera, they have thousands of tons of wheat which they are happy to sell for $200 to $250 a ton to Iraqi’s government but it pays $600 to $700 for each ton of wheat elsewhere.
There are people in West Kurdistan who do not understand why the KRG, as a Kurdish self rule government, and its President, Massoud Barzani, (who calls himself a great Kurdish leader) want to starve their own people in another part of Kurdistan.
In Qamchlo, the Tev-Dam called a large, peaceful demonstration on Saturday, 9<sup>th</sup> of May, 2014. A few thousand people took part against those who dug the shameful trench. There were many powerful speeches from different people and organizations, including the House of the People and many other groups and committees. None of their speeches created more tension between them. People mainly concentrated on brotherhood, good relationships and co-operation between both sides of the border, reconciliation between all the disputed parties and peace and freedom in their speeches. In the end it became a street party with people dancing happily and singing, particularly anthems.
*** Expectation and fears
It is very difficult to know what direction the mass movement of people in West Kurdistan will take, but that does not mean restricting us from expectation and analyzing what may affect the direction of this movement and its future. The complete victory or defeat of this big event/experiment that the region, at least for a long time, has not seen depends on so many factors that can be divided into internal ( internal issues and problems inside the movement itself and with the KRG ) and external factors.
However, whatever happens in the end we have to face it, but what’s important is: the resistance, defying and challenging, not surrendering, confidence and believing in making changes. Rejecting the current system and grabbing the opportunities are more important, in my opinion, than temporary victory, because all these are the key points needed to reach the final goal.
**** The external factors
The direction of the war and the balance of the forces inside Syria:
It was quite clear in the beginning of the people’s uprising in Syria, that, if it was to benefit the Syrian people, then the expected ending of Assad’s regime would not take that long when people united with great support both inside and outside the country. However, after a while, the terrorist groups got involved and changed the direction of the people’s uprising as we all have seen and still see this through the media. This happened because Assad was very clever in implementing a couple of policies which directly affected the direction of the people’s uprising and making his regime strong.
Firstly, he withdrew all his forces in the three Kurdish regions/cantons of Afrin, Kobany and Al Jazera except for a few thousand in the Al Jazeera region as I explained previously. Obviously, a part of the reason for withdrawal was due to pressure from the Kurdish protesters.
Secondly, he opened the Syrian border to terrorist organizations to do what they wanted. We all know by now what happened then. By doing this, Assad managed to weaken and isolate the protestors against his regime and also sent a message to the so-called “international community” to tell them that there was no alternative to him and his regime except the terrorist groups. Do the US, UK, Western countries and the rest really want that? Of course, to a certain extent, the answer is No. It all depends on their interests. These policies have worked very well and changed the direction of the battle completely.
So, there was a possibility of Assad remaining in power, at least for a short time after negotiating with the US, UN, UK and their agents until the next election. In that case, he might have learnt a lesson to change his policy towards the Kurdish people but on his own terms and conditions and not in the way the Kurdish people want.
If Assad was defeated in the war by the terrorist groups with the support of the US, UK, EU and the “International Community”, and they came to power, certainly there wouldn’t be any future for either the DSA or Tev-Dam. If the modern forces, like the parties or organizations making up the Free Syria Army (FSA) are still not in power, then there is very little chance for the Kurdish people as they do not have a positive opinion of or a good solution for the Kurdish question, let alone when it comes to power. Of course, there are other possibilities of ending Assad’s power including assassination or through a military coup...
*** The role and the influences of neighbouring countries in the region
It was very clear that ordinary people in Syria started the uprising due to existing suppression, oppression, lack of freedom and social justice, corruption, discrimination, lack of human rights, and no rights for ethnic minorities like Kurdish, Turkmen and others. Life for the majority of people was terrible; low incomes, the cost of living continuously rising, homelessness, and unemployment all served as inspiration for the “Arab Spring”.
However, the protests, demonstrations and uprising on the ground have been diverted by neighbouring rulers into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey with the support of the US and Western countries on one side and Assad’s regime, Iran and Hezbollah on the other. The Iraqi government has not announced their support for Assad’s regime but they wanted, and still want, Assad to stay in power because of the close relationship between Shias and Alawites and also because Iran is Iraq’s closest ally, while Iran is also extremely close to Syria. What was left from the neighbouring countries was the KRG’s attitude towards what happens in Syria, due to KRG closeness, and, particularly, its President, Massoud Barzani, to Turkey in every respect. They announced, from the beginning, their support for the Syrian opposition to Assad’s regime. We must note here the double standards and hypocrisy of the KRG as, on the one hand, they are against Assad whilst supporting the opposition but, on the other hand, against the Kurdish in Syria and their popular mass movement while they are one of the main and constructive forces against Assad.
Obviously each country has a big impact as some of them are supporting Assad’s regime and others support the Syrian opposition. What is important here is to know that none of these countries are friends or close to the Kurdish nation in any part of Kurdistan, whether in Syrian Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran or Turkish Kurdistan. They never had a positive view on the Kurdish question and never,, genuinely,, wanted to resolve this question, but they had a positive view on the Kurdish nationalist political parties when these parties were working and fighting in their interests.
*** The Role of China and Russia
Although Russia has become much smaller and less powerful than before, it still has weight and power, in competition with the US and Western countries, over its interests. It is no surprise that we now see that Russia cannot reach agreement with the West over Assad’s regime. There is also the fact that Syria, even when Assad’s father was in power, was always in the Soviet camp. This is in addition to Russia being close to Iran which is the main ally of Syria.
With regards to China, China too has its own interests in the region, especially with Iran. Therefore, China tries to protect that interest as it is not to their benefit to see Assad go because it knows that next it will be Iran. So Russia and China’s interests and support for Syria make the war longer than expected. From the above, we can see how two powerful countries would deal with the Kurdish question in Syria, especially with the DSA and Tev-Dam. In my opinion, business and profits decide, in the end, whether or not they will support the Kurdish people in the future.
At present, there is no support for the DSA and Tev-Dam from China, Russia or from the US and Western countries while the Kurds in Syria are the main opposition and fighters against terrorist forces like Isis/IS, through the forces of the PDU and WDU. These units are constantly fighting these terrorist groups in the Kurdish regions of Al Jazera and Kobney.
We can see here the double standards and hypocrisy of the US, Western countries and the rest. They launched a war on terror while the Kurdish people in Syria are the only ones fighting the terrorist organizations seriously, but the above countries do not support the Kurds there. The major reasons for this, in my opinion, are:
1. They are not serious in fighting the terrorists and terrorism because they themselves or their alliance created and supported them
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2. They fight the people who believe in Islam rather than fighting the religion itself and its holy book, Quran.
<br>
3. They may need this organization again in the future.
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4. They do not want to alter their foreign policy or review it.
<br>
5. The US and UK support, financially and morally, all reactionary faiths under the name of equal opportunity, freedom and recognizing different cultures. We can already see more than one hundred Sharia Courts in the U.K.
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6. The main point is that the mass democracy movement in Syrian Kurdistan, including the DSA, did not create religions or nationalist or liberal power. They know that people in this part of the world have given birth to people power, that they have proved that they can rule themselves through direct democracy without government and support from the US, Western countries and global financial institutions, like the IMF, WB and CBE (Central Bank of Europe).
*** The Internal Factors
By internal factors I mean whatever could happen inside West Kurdistan itself. This includes the following:
The civil war among the Kurdish people. Here I do not mean just a war among the political parties inside West Kurdistan but the war between the KRG in Iraqi Kurdistan and the forces of the PDU, WDU and PKK.
There is a very close relationship between the PKK and PYD who are behind this experiment in West Kurdistan and have been very supportive. I mentioned previously that there has been a history of bloodshed between the PKK and KDP and also a sharp dispute between them over the Kurdish leadership.
However, for some time, Abdulla Ocallan, in recent books and text /messages, has denounced and rejected the state and authority. But until now I have not heard that he has rejected his own authority and denounce those people calling him a great leader and who work hard to give him a sacred position. Ocallan’s attitude cannot be correct unless he also rejects his own authority and leadership.
At the moment, the situation is getting worse and the KRG’s relationship with the PYD and PKK is deteriorating, so there is a possibility of fighting between them especially as the KRG is, day by day, getting closer to Turkey. Once this war starts there is no doubt that Isis/IS and others will take part in fighting on the side of the KRG and Turkey. The only way to stop this happening is through mass protests, demonstrations and mass occupations in Iraqi Kurdistan and by friends of Syrian Kurdish elsewhere.
*** Tev-Dam becomes weak
As explained above, it was Tev-Dam that created this situation, with its groups, committees, communes and the House of the People which is the soul and mind of the mass movement. Tev-Dam was the major force in setting up the DSA. In general, it is the existence of Tev-Dam that makes the difference to forcing the outcome of what might happen there and to be the inspiration to the rest of the region.
It is hard for me to see the balance between the power of Tev-Dam and the DSA in the future. I got the impression that as long as the power of the DSA increases the power of Tev-Dam decreases and the opposite could be right too.
I have raised this point with the comrades of Tev-Dam. They disagreed with me as they believe the more powerful the DSA becomes, the more powerful Tev-Dam will be. Their reason for this was that they look at the DSA as the executive body, executing and implementing whole decisions made by Tev-Dam and Tev-Dam organs. However, I cannot agree or disagree with them because the future will show the direction the whole movement and society will take.
*** The PYD and its party structures
The PYD , United Democratic Party and PKK are behind the mass democracy movement there and are political parties having all the conditions that a political party needs in that part of the world : hierarchical organization, leaders and lead people, and all orders and commands from the leaders coming down to the bottom of the party. There has not been much consultation with members when it comes to making a decision on big issues. They are very well-disciplined, have rules and orders to go by, secrets and secret relationships with different parties, either in power or not, in different part of the world.
On the other hand, I can see Tev-Dam as being exactly the opposite. Many people inside this movement have not been members of the PKK or PYD. They believe the revolution must start from the bottom of society and not from the top, they do not believe in state powers and authority and they come together in meetings to make their own decisions about whatever they want and whatever is in the best interests of the people where they are based. After that, they ask the DSA to execute their decisions. There are many more differences between the PYD and PKK and the Movement of Democracy Society, Tev-Dam.
The question here is: While that is the task and the nature of Tev-Dam and that is the structure of the PYD and PKK, how can a compromise happen? Does Tev-Dam follow the PYD and PKK or do they follow the Tev-Dam, or who controls who?
This is the question that I cannot answer and have to wait and see. However, I believe the answer is probably in the near future.
*** The fear of Ideology and Ideologists that can became sacred
Ideology is a view. Looking at or seeing anything from the ideological perspective can be a disaster as it gives you a ready solution or answer, but does not connect with the reality of the situation. Most of the time, ideologists are looking at the words of old books that were written a long time ago to find the solution while those books are not relevant to the current problem or situation.
Ideologists can be dangerous when they want to impose their ideas taken from what has been written in the old books, on the present situation or on the rest of us. They are very narrow-minded, very persistent, stick with their ideas and are out of touch. They do not have respect for other people who do not share the same opinion as themselves. ideologists have many common points between them from religious people to Marxists and Communists. In short, the ideologists believe that Ideology, or thought, creates uprising or revolutions but for non-ideologists, people like me, the opposite is true.
It is very unfortunate that I found many ideologists among the PYD and Tev-Dam members, especially when it came to discussions about Abdulla Ocallan’s ideas. These people are very stuck with Ocallan’s principles, making them refer to his speeches and books in our discussions. They have total faith in him and, to a certain extent, he is sacred. If this is the faith that people have and put in their leader and are scared of him, it is very frightening and the consequences will not be good. For me, nothing should be sacred and everything can be criticized and rejected if they need to be. Worse than this, there is the House of Children and Youth Centers. In the House of Children and Youth Centers, children are taught about new ideas, the revolution and many positive things that children need to be raised with in order to be useful members of society. However, besides, these children are taught the ideology and the ideas and principles of Ocallan and how great he is as the leader of the Kurdish people. In my opinion, children should not be brought up believing in ideology. They should not have teaching on religion, nationality, race or colour. They should be free of them and leave them alone until they become adult when they can decide for themselves.
*** The Role of the Communes
In the previous pages I explained the communes and their roles. The communes’ duties have to be changed as they cannot just be involved in the problems where they have been set up and make decisions about the things going on there. The communes must increase their roles, duties and powers. It is true that there are no factories, companies nor industrial sections. But Al Jazera is an agricultural canton involving many people in villages and small towns and wheat is the major product in Al Jazera. This canton is also very rich in oil, gas and phosphates, although many of the oilfields are not in use due to the war and lack of maintenance even before the uprising.
So these are further areas for the communes to involve themselves in by controlling them, using them and distributing produce to the people according to their need for free. Whatever is left, after distribution, the members of the communes can decide and agree to deal with it; sell it, exchange it for necessary materials for the people or just simply store it for later when needed. If the communes do not step up to these tasks and maintain what they do now, obviously, their tasks will be uncompleted.
*** The Conclusion and my final words
There are so many different views and opinions from the right wing, left, separatists, Trotskyists, Marxists, communists, socialists, anarchists and libertarians about the future of the experiment in West Kurdistan, and, indeed, more deserves writing about it. For me, as an anarchist, I do not see the events as black or white, I do not have a ready solution for them and I also never go back to the old books to look for the solutions either to the events which, are now taking place or for the outcome of these current events I believe that the realities, the events themselves and the situation create the ideas and thoughts, not the opposite. I look at them with an open mind and connect them to so many, factors and reasons for their happening.
However, I must say a couple of things about every uprising and revolution, as they are very important for me. Firstly, the revolution is not expressing anger, is not created by order or command, is not something that can happen within twenty-four hours and is not a military coup, Bolshevik coup or the conspiracy of politicians. Also, it is not only the dismantling of society’s economic infrastructure and the abolition of social class. The above are all the views and opinions of lefties, Marxists and communists and their parties. These are their definitions of revolution. They look at the revolution in this way because they are dogmatic and see the relationships of existing classes in a mechanistic way. For them, when the revolution happens and abolishes class society, that is, the end of the story and Socialism can be established. In my opinion, even if the revolution succeeds, there are still possibilities that there will be a desire for authority, with it remaining within families, inside factories and companies, in schools, universities and many other places and institutions. This is in addition to the remaining differences between men and women and the authority of men over women within socialism. Moreover, a selfish and greedy culture will still remain, using violence with many other nasty habits which already exist in capitalist society. They cannot disappear or vanish in a short time. In fact, they are going to stay with us for a long, long time and could threaten the revolution.
So, changing the economic infrastructure of society and achieving victory over class society can neither give any guarantee that the revolution happened nor of maintaining it for a long time. I, therefore, believe that there must be a revolution in social life, in our culture, education, the mentality of individuals and individual behavior and thought. The revolutions in the above areas are not just necessary, but indeed, must happen before or alongside the changing of the economic infrastructure of society. I do not believe we are done, following the revolution in the economic infrastructure of society. It must reflect in all aspects of the life of society and its members. For me, people resent the current system and believe in changing it. They desire the tendency for rebellion, the consciousness of being used and exploited and, in addition, the mentality of resistance are extremely important to maintain the revolution.
**** How do I connect the above point to the experiment of the people in West Kurdistan?
In reply, I say this experiment has existed for over two years and there are generations who are witness to this. They are rebels or already have the tendency to rebellion, they live in harmony and a free atmosphere and are accustomed to new cultures: a culture of living together in peace and freedom, a culture of tolerance and give not just take, a culture of being very confident and defiant, a culture of belief in working voluntarily and for the benefit of the community, a culture of solidarity and living for each other and a culture of, you are first and I am second. In the meantime, it is true that life there is very difficult, where there is a lack of many basic and necessary resources and the standard of living is low, but people there are pleasant, happy and, at all times, smiling and vigilant, very simple and humble and the gap between rich and poor is small . All these have, firstly, helped people overcome the difficulties in their lives and the hardships. Secondly, the events, their personal history and the present environment in which they currently live has taught people that, in the future, they will not put up with a dictatorship, they will resist suppression and oppression, they will try to maintain what they had before; they have a spirit of defiance and challenge and they will not accept other people making decisions for them any longer. For all of these reasons, people will resist surrender, stand again on their own feet, fight for their rights and resist the return of the culture they used to live with before.
The second point is that some people tell us that while this movement has Abdulla Ocallan, the PKK and PYD behind it, then, if the people try to divert this experiment, the experiment will end or a dictator will take power. Well this is possible and can happen. But even in this situation, I do not think people in Syria or in West Kurdistan can, any longer, tolerate a dictatorship or a Bolshevik-type government. I believe the days have passed when the government in Syria can, as before, massacre 30,000 people in the town of Aleppo in a matter of a few days. Also the world has changed and is not as it was.
All that is left to say here is that what happened in West Kurdistan was not Ocallan’s Idea, as many people want to tell us. In fact this idea is very old and Ocallan developed these thoughts in prison, familiarizing himself with them through reading hundreds and hundreds of books, non-stop thinking and analyzing the experiences of nationalist movements, communist movements and their governments in the region and the world and why all of them failed and could not deliver what they claimed. The basis of all this is that he is convinced that the state, whatever its name and form, is a state and cannot disappear when replaced by another state. For this, Abdulla Ocallan deserves credit.
[1] Operation Anfal, or simply Anfal, was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq, led by the Ba’athist Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid, in the final stage of the Iran-Iraq war.
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#title The State and the Power of Business
#author Zaher Baher
#LISTtitle State and the Power of Business
#SORTtopics the State, Capitalism
#date March 9, 2021
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[http://zaherbaher.com/2021/03/09/the-state-and-the-power-of-business/][zaherbaher.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-19T12:30:11
Recently I was involved in a long discussion with a close friend of mine who is not an anarchist<strong>.</strong> He believes that the destination of human beings is a kind of socialism but not necessarily the one that anarchists want.
My friend thinks the needs of the state gradually decrease, to the point where it will no longer be necessary to run society by any separate authority, as its members will be fully aware, conscientious and responsible so that all care for each other and society too. Finally, he concluded by saying, “Since society would be run by its members, law makers will become unnecessary”.
Of course, anarchists talk about socialism but in a wider form as it will be a classless and non-hierarchical society. Anarchists do not design the map for future society and how it should be managed. We think and work to create a society that would be controlled by all, where there would be no one in charge to dominate and exploit us; no bosses, no landlords and no government from above. We do not elaborate on how it will be in the future. That would be the task of those who live in that society, how they would organise it and how they would manage themselves.
There are fundamental questions arising here. Will the role of the state diminish when capitalism gets stronger? Will the state disappear gradually or dismantle itself? Has neoliberal theory failed to reduce some or all functions of the state? If so, why do we see the state stronger than ever? There are many more questions to be asked on this subject.
To begin with, I must, very briefly, look at the recent history of the state, liberalism, and neoliberal theories. Many of us know that the state is very old, dating back some 10,000 years, maybe longer it developed through various stages and functioned differently in accordance with the society that the state had emerged from.
However, it took a long time for the modern state to emerge and reach its mature stage.
Whatever stage the state went through, historically or as it is now, there was always a vital struggle between the business sector and the state. Although neither could live without the other, each wanted to subdue the other for its own benefit.
At present the state looks to have completed its functions, its essence once embraced the liberal economy and then the neoliberal theories. While the state was not completely compatible with the business sector in general and with the big corporations in particular, the corporations always tried to find ways to reform the state for their benefit in meeting their aims.
One of the major attempts to reform the economic system, in the last century was neoliberalism. A group of liberals who helped to shape the social market economy put forward a program at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. They believed in the opportunity of individualism. They found government a major barrier as it prevented individualism. The neoliberal embraces individualism and is opposed to <strong>“<em>the collective society</em>,”</strong> as Margaret Thatcher put it. In 1944 Hayek, in <em>The</em> <em>Road to Serfdom</em> argued that, <strong><em>“Government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control”</em></strong>
In 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism and it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.
Neoliberalism’s doctrine is very exclusive in aiming to liberate the major sections of the state and privatising them. In short, Hayek’s view is that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies. The ideology of neoliberalism brought financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the slow collapse of public health and education. Clearly it was waging a war on every front against society; it not only created economic crises, but also caused political crises.
On the other hand, there is Keynesian economic policy, which was developed by the British <strong>economist</strong> <strong>John Maynard Keynes</strong> during the 1930s. His theories were a response to the Great Depression and he was highly critical of previous economic theories, which he referred to as “classical economics”. He stated that intervention is necessary to moderate the booms and busts in economic activity.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Keynes’s influence was at its peak, as the developed and emerging capitalist economies enjoyed an exceptionally high rate of growth and low unemployment. Later this was echoed by the then U.S. President Richard Nixon, “We are all Keynesians now”
Keynesian policies did not last long. By the end of the 1960s there was a big change and، the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, <strong><em>“1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators”</em></strong><em>.</em> Keynesian economic policies were officially abandoned by the British Government in 1979. So, gradually, Keynesian policies began to crumble, and economic crises deepened. At that time Milton Friedman remarked<strong>, <em>“When the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”</em></strong><em>.</em>
Once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all supported or promoted by multilateral bodies and treaties, like the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent. Remarkably these policies were adopted among parties that once belonged to the left, including the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats. This was expected. As John Major, when he was elected Prime Minister in 1992, famously said <strong><em>“1992 killed socialism in Britain.</em></strong><strong><em>…</em></strong> <strong><em>Our win meant that between 1992 and 1997 Labour had to change.”</em></strong>
The Chicago School, also known as Chicago boys designed packages for several countries including Egypt and others in South America, particularly Chile. On a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied, Hayek told a Chilean newspaper that it was possible for a <em>“…<strong>dictator to govern in a liberal way…”</strong></em> and that he preferred a <strong><em>“…liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.</em></strong> <strong><em>My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”.</em></strong>
We should not be shocked when Friedman and Hayek happily embraced neoliberal policies as documented by Naomi Klein in ‘<em><em>The Shock Doctrine</em></em><em>‘.</em> <strong>“Neoliberal<em>theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system”</em></strong>
After almost forty years, the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession derailed neoliberalism which lost its force and fell apart. Some governments and economists wanted to go back to Keynesian solutions to tackle the crises of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. They could not or did not want to understand or simply ignored the reality that last century’s solutions cannot resolve a crisis of the present century. The reason for this is quite clear; it is fundamental to the nature of capitalism itself that, whatever name or shape it takes, it will not work anymore.
Neoliberalism has gone too far and, wherever it was implemented, it brought total disaster. One of these countries was the US where data shows that, <strong><em>“</em></strong><strong><em>During the neoliberal era, the racial wealth gap did not fare much better. In 1979, the average hourly wage for a black man in the U.S. was 22 percent lower than for a white man. By 2015, the wage gap had grown to 31 percent. For black women, the wage gap in 1979 was only 6 percent; by 2015, it had jumped to 19 percent. Homeownership is one of the central ways that families build wealth over time, yet homeownership rates among African Americans in 2017 were as low as they were before the civil rights revolution, when racial discrimination was legal</em></strong>“. The situation was so bad that leading political scientists declared that, <strong><em>“…the U.S. is no longer best characterized as a democracy or a republic but as an oligarchy—a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich”.</em></strong>
Some economists, including Paul Krugman, also argued that economic conditions are like those that existed during the earlier part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.
In light of the above, we can see that government and business institutions in any country, in many ways, are interrelated and interdependent. Their unity is much stronger than their division, their conflicts are nothing more than efforts to unite against society. They are inseparable. Corporate executives, political leaders and government officials are all of the same social class.
The state is the main pillar of the system and its economy. It works to facilitate the function of business and increased profits. It is government which shapes business activities, providing a suitable and workable environment for business. The aim of business is to make profit, while government’s goal is to ensure economic stability and growth. Business has a big influence on government when investing heavily in large-scale projects.
Government, directly and indirectly, implements rules and regulations which dictate what business organisations can and cannot do and tries to influence those organisations’ policies with taxation measures.
The main goal of business is to make a profit and the government provides everything for them. Government is even helping to establish companies’ production facilities by offering them tax incentives in less developed regions in the country.
As government and politicians want to return to power in coming elections, they need support from business. They want to satisfy corporations and corporations want to play a role in government and have a great influence.
Corporations and the rest of business know very well that the establishment that can protect and maintain them is the government, the state. They know that the police, the laws, the courts, the army, the spy networks, and the education system are all under the control of the state. They know that once they face bankruptcy, the state can bail them out or when they face threats by their own workforces, the state will protect them by whatever means.
They need one another desperately. In today’s global economy, businessmen and entrepreneurs are the driving forces of the economy states have long been the most powerful force in the economy.
Therefore, anarchists insist that the struggle against the system, the ownership of the economy, and the elites, to bring about a classless and non-hierarchical society cannot happen without a struggle against power, authority and the state.
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#title We should not let Kobane and the rest of Rojava to be defeated by the big corporations and the international financial institutions
#author Zaher Baher
#LISTtitle We should not let Kobane and the rest of Rojava to be defeated by the big corporations and the international financial institutions
#SORTauthors Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, revolution, libertarian socialism
#date June 3, 2015
#source Haringey Solidarity Group, Kurdistan Anarchists Forum, [[http://libcom.org/forums/middle-east/we-should-not-let-kobane-rest-rojava-be-defeated-big-corporations-internation][libcom.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-08-06T03:25:26
First of all, I should mention a couple of issues in Kurdistan of Turkey (Bakur) that are strongly connected to the subject. Between 08/05 and 22/05/15 I visited a number of big towns in Bakur, including: Amed (Diyarbakir), Van, Colemerge (Hakari) and Gavar. Later I returned to Suruc and was hoping to cross the border to Kobane.
My main purpose for visiting there were three important points: first: understanding the similarity and differences between the Democratic Self Administration (DSA) in Bakur and Rojava. Second: Reconstruction of Kobane, and third the type of economy that Rojava can have in the future. Although the friends in Peoples ‘ Democratic Party (HDP) , other organisation and the Working Committees of Rojava in Amed and Suruc tried hard to arrange my trip to Kobane but it did not happen.
There are two important issues to talk about. These are:
*** First: The 07<sup>th</sup> June general election in Turkey:
Turkey is facing an important election. It is historical, not just for the Kurds but the rest of Turkey. If president Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) win, they will be able implement their hidden Islamic Democratic agenda. The human rights will suffer, the police oppression will increase, the prisons will be full of activists, the rights of individuals, women, ethnic minorities, and other religious almost will be disappeared and also will be a big setback for the peace process.. On the other hand If Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) passes the 10 % election threshold then AKP could be stopped from implementing its inhuman agenda. The HDP manifesto is very radical; even if only 50% of it is implemented Turkey’s Constitution could be reformed unless the military Generals take over.
I met many people in Amed, Van, Colemerg and Gaver. Everybody was busy with election campaign for HDP. Everybody from candidates, the campaigners and the ordinary people who I asked believe that the election of this time is a major event and anxiously look forward to seeing the result of 07/06. Their reasons for that are the following which is very difficult not to agree with them:
- This is the first time that the Kurdish people enter the election having a political party, HDP. Previously individual Kurdish allowed taking a part in election as independent it is also the first time many non-Kurds are united with Kurds inside HDP and share its radical manifesto that reflecting and protecting the same interest of whole parties.
- It is quite clear that the AKP is not interested in a serious peace process with the Kurdish people. Erdogan has not taken a big practical step towards this goal. In fact AKP has been forced to agree to the peace process. Erdogan and his party are calculating that HDP does not get through the 10% threshold and does not become a major force in the Parliament to push the peace process seriously. So that wining this election will be a major achievement almost for everybody in Turkey.
- The HDP manifesto is strongly connected to the life of Kurdish and non-Kurdish people. It is a political, economical, educational, cultural as well as social manifesto. It aims at the equality between men and women, at reducing poverty, unemployment, homelessness and the power of the corporations. It deals with recognising Rojava’s Cantons, the Cyprus issue, tackling discrimination, recognising the right of the individuals, different cultures and different religions.
- To rebuild Kobane, humanitarian aid and materials have to enter through Syria or Turkey. So that reconstruction of Kobane whether thorough the big corporations or through the international solidarity, has to be through Turkey. At present Turkey only allows humanitarian aid and winning the election is extremely important for rebuilding Kobane.
Because of the above reasons there is no doubt that the Turkey election of 07<sup>th</sup> of June has got its own speciality that very much different from any other election in many countries.
*** Second: the DSA in Bakur and their differences with Rojava:
There are many similarities of the DSA in Bakur and that of Rojava. What both experiments share are self-reliance and belief that things can be changed and done differently. Creating different radical local groups, committees, people assemblies and the House of People in the villages, on streets, neighborhoods and towns. In both experiments there are working voluntaries; making decisions collectively through the people assembly or the House of People. This resulted in bringing back decision making into the hands of communities. This also leads to decentralization and weakening the authority of the state.
In both experiments, the environment is a major issue and become an important part of people’s agenda.
Making revolution from the bottom of the society is a core belief in both experiments. There is no promotion for religions or for nation state.
Naturally, there are many differences between the two experiments. This is due to a different socio-political climate; which gave the both experiments their separate characters. These differences might find themselves in:
- The DSAs in Rojava emerged through the current situation in Syria, withdrawing Assad’s forces and the will and the determination of people in Rojava to do what they wanted to do. The one in Bakur have been the outcome of the long historical struggles of people under the PKK’s influences.
- The DSAs in Rojava have been settled and are the main administration that people trust and use. These are independent establishments and have no opponents except in Aljazeera; where there is still some regime administration exist. So the DSAs in Rojava are free and have open hands. On the other hand the DSAs in Bakur and in many towns and villages have not settled completely yet. In the main towns, like, Amed, Van and Colemerg; people are in confrontation with the regime establishments. For example, in the town of Amed; there are no contacts between Municipalities and the governor, the head of police and the military forces. The same situation or even worse can be found in the town of Van. While I was there, I was told by people I had a meeting with that they turned into problems with the official authorities; when they wanted to change the names of their streets to Kurdish names.
- The DSAs in Rojava have been recognized to great extend in the world. They have received a good attention, solidarity and support from leftist, communists, trade unionists, socialists, anarchists and libertarians. In contrast the DSAs in Bakur have been recognized as a work of PKK and PKK, which for the US, Turkey and the Western countries is a terrorist organisation. Their poisoning propaganda has even affected the value and importance of the DSAs there.
- The continuation of ISIS war in Rojave is costing many lives, the stability of the region. This war also affects very badly the financial position of this area. The situation is paralyzing most of the economics, politics and social future planning. Furthermore, there is a continues threats from other terror forces, like Syrian free army and the Assad’s forces as well. Whereas, in Bakur and until now, there has not been any war.
- Rojava is an agricultural region and it is very rich in oil, gas and phosphates. Equally, Bakur is a very fertile land and ample source of water. The river Tigris is going through this region along with some other rivers. In addition the Van Lake is in the heart of Kurdistan. The area with it’s high and snow covered mountains can be a tourist attraction too. With all these resources the area can be self-sufficient, without a need from the central government.
- Capitalism has not been developed in Rojava yet. There are no big corporations, companies or factories. Therefore, the ugly face of capitalism cannot be seen here. In contrast in Bakur there is some form of undeveloped capitalism. This is as a result of a deliberate racist policy from the regime, to exclude Kurdistan from major developments.
- The trade unions in Bakur are very strong and play a big role in Municipalities, the radical groups, people assembly, House of People and also in the work places as well. They have good relations with the three main Turkey trade unions. Obviously emerging the unions there relate to the industrialization of Bakur although not as advance as in the rest of Turkey. On the other hand the number of the trade unionists and unions in Rojava are very small; therefore, they have a very little role to play.
In one of my meeting with people in Van they talked in details about the situation there. They talked about the heavy present of police and military forces in their area. These forces put a lot of pressure on people; harassing, humiliating and the threat of arrest. Despite of all these, the activists there continue to further their course to progress there DSA. They work in variety of groups; such as political, language, health services, women, environment and agriculture. It is estimated that DSAs can manage to 80% of Van. In 1056 villages there are people assemblies and in 40% of the area there has been some form of self managements. What is worth mentioning here is women’s 50% participations in these self management organizations.
In addition of the agricultural nature of Van; the region has a great potential to become a great tourist attraction. The House of people in Van has future plans to make it more attractive for tourists and have Eco-tourist projects to protect people and the environment.
One of the other problems facing people is the poor production up to 50% less than expected. This is due to the distraction activities of the regime’s forces. There is also the culture of lack of confidence among people and unwillingness of sharing, lack of freedom and political problems.
However, I was told by people there; that they face a mammoth task. It is not easy to overturn 500 years influence of the Turkish authority. Throughout of these years people have been marginalised, isolated and treated with utter disrespect. To change all these require a lot of work on the ground and on the individual level as well. But what is promising is the zeal and determination of the activists in the area.
In my meeting with co-president of HDP, another party chief and co-leader of Colemerg Municipalities, it became apparent that DSAs in the region are facing major problems. The situation gets worse more you get closer to the boarder. In fact there are areas are restricted by the military and people are not allowed to enter.
Despite all this; the Municipalities in Colemerg are determined to implement their main Ecology plan. They have agreed that Colemerg to be the Ecology Pilot. It has also been decided to work on this project as soon as the election is over.
*** Kobane and its Reconstruction:
After defeating Isis and Turkey’s regime in the war, Kobane could manage to pass the first test successfully. The USA and its allies took part in the war because they realised that either Kobane cannot be defeated or if it goes down it will take everything else with it. The first possibility would deprive the big corporations from rebuilding Kobane. The second would add another black spot to the history of so-called “international community”.
The war and the sanction indeed made life in Kobane and the rest of Rojave miserable for a long time but in my opinion both factors played a major role in surviving the whole of Rojava.
The war there introduced Rojava to the world and particularly the leftists, communists, socialists, trade unionist, anarchists and libertarians.. It brought love, support and solidarity to Rojava and its people. Hundreds of people from different countries travelled there to be in the front line against Isis and a few of them lost their lives. Hundreds more went there as journalist and aid and community workers to show their support and solidarity.
Using sanction against Rojava by Turkey, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the regional countries all also played a role in surviving Rojava. It prevented corruption, entering money, capital and hindered exploitation by businessmen and landowners. The simple life of the region managed to go on. People had to rely on themselves, work voluntarily and collectively. The true natural relation between the people continued.
Now Kobane and the whole of Rojava enter the economic test which is difficult indeed. Many countries can resist militarily occupation but cannot survive an economic one. Launching an economic war by the big corporations and the international financial institutions can be devastating.
This may start with the reconstruction of Kobane. Rebuilding it could bring death or the survival of Rojava as a whole by initiating its social revolution.
In my opinion rebuilding Kobane may take one of the following roots:
- Either through the work of big corporations and financial institution, like IMF, WB and ECB. This will no doubt benefit the big corporation in particular and the capitalist system in general as happened, by imposing so many dramatic conditions, in Africa and South America.
- Or through international support and solidarity of the leftists, communists, trade unionists, socialists, anarchists and libertarians. This of course is a slow process but it is the only way that Kabana can be rebuild solidly and avoiding the influence of the big corporations.
- It could also be done by contracting out some of the projects to some companies to supply materials and expertise but the actual work to be done collectively by the people. This is provided a close watch and scrutiny of the DSAs and the Tev-Dem. Could be imposed.
There is currently a big discussion among the politicians, academics and economists about the rebuilding Kobane and the future economy of Rojava. In fact a big conference was held in Amed in early May regarding rebuilding Kobane but so far no decision has been taken. While I was in Bakur I spoke to many people in important position. They all rejected the big corporations and explained that this is their own official and firm view.
Making no decision in rebuilding kobane through the big corporations and the international financial institutions is excellent decision against the interests of US and the Western countries and keeps their powers out. In the meantime it is our duty all to help and support whatever we can to participate in reconstruction of Kobane in order to protect this shiny experiment. We should not let the blood of thousands of people who scarified themselves to liberate Kobane and protecting the social revolution in Rojava to go in vain.
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#title We, supporters of Rojava, should be worried about its partnership with the United States.
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, United States, US foreign interventions
#date 17th May 2017
#source https://libcom.org/library/we-supporters-rojava-should-be-worried-about-its-partnership-united-states
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T01:36:36
The political and military balance in Syria is constantly changing. Relations between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), co-founded by People’s Protection Units (YPG), and in turn Russia and US constantly ebb and flow. The dynamic behind these changes has very little to do with ISIS. In fact, it all depends on the respective interests of the great powers and their struggle against one another to establish predominant power there.
The past year has seen a steady erosion of the US position in Syria vis-à-vis Russia, who has since overtaken it. Russia’s heavy involvement in Syria and becoming a major ally with Turkey has changed many things. The relative inactivity of the USA has given the opportunity to Russia, Turkey and Iran to play a significant role in making decisions there.
Under Trump’s new administration this has changed somewhat. He probably has a different approach to Syria. While US still is one of the major powers in the world, it cannot sit and do nothing in the region especially in Syria.
After a long pause, Trump has decided to ally with SDF against ISIS to defeat them in Raqqa regardless of Turkey’s position and reaction. Trump has now approved a deal to supply arms including heavy weapons to SDF directly, seeing them as the most effective and reliable force especially after the SDF capture of Tabqa City from ISIS. The US administration is at present more than any other time determined in recapturing Raqqa, the ISIS de facto capital. It is now quite clear that the US administration and SDF and the People’s Democratic Party (PYD) are getting very close to one another to the point that SDF strife to achieve what the US wants to achieve, even though this can be at the expenses of what have been achieved so far in Rojava.
We supporters of Rojava should be very worried about the current development in relation to Democratic Self-administration and the Movement of Society (Tev-Dem). We should be concerned because of the following consequences:
First: It is a matter of influence for the US while seeing that Russia almost controlled the situation and managed to take Turkey onto its own side. US wants to be very active before losing its power there. It wants to play the major role and achieve its own goal, this can be only done through SDF and PYD. There is no doubt that the US is more concerned about its own interests rather than Kurdish interests in Rojava.
Second: To contain SDF and PYD, to make them a tool by using them for their own interest. This is the best way to make PYD and SDF lose their credibility in Syria, the region, Europe and elsewhere.
Third: The current attitude of the US towards Rojava and arming SDF directly might be an effort to cut them off from PKK and decrease PKK influence over developments in Rojava.
Fourth: There is no doubt that whatever happens will now make Turkey more furious against both YPG and PKK. This could create a greater backlash from Turkey. It may repeat last month’s military operations against YPG or even extend these military operations into Rojava and against YPG & PKK in Shangal, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Fifth: With Russia’s displeasure against the SDF and PYD, Assad could be influenced to change Syria’s attitude towards them in the future if not now. If Rojava had chosen the Russian side instead of USA, it could have been much better because Russia is more reliable as an ally than the US. It looks like Assad will stay in power after the defeat of ISIS. Assad normally listens to Russia very diligently. In this case, there was a greater chance under pressure of Russia that Assad would have let Rojava pursue a better future than what US and Western countries may decide for them.
Sixth: Intensifying and prolonging the current war causing Rojava a great deal of dislocation. Continuation of the war costs SDF so many lives and makes them weaker and weaker. The stronger and the bigger the size of SDF in Rojava is, the more it must necessarily be dependent on one of the major power, in the meantime Rojava will be weaker. The more SDF achieves militarily, the more socially and economically can actually be lost in Rojava. The more powerful SDF and PYD become, the less power the local self-administration and Tev-Dem will have. The number of SDF fighters alone is estimated to be 50,000. Just imagine even 10.000 instead of working militarily, working in the fields and cooperatives or building school, hospitals, parks and houses, by now Rojava would have been somewhere else.
Seventh: Often I have mentioned in my articles that a successful Rojava – successful in the way we were hopping – depended on a couple of factors or as a minimum one to preserve the experiment. One was expanding Rojava’s movement at least to a couple of more countries in the region. The other factor was international solidarity. However, neither happened. If one thing can now preserve Rojava, it is ISIS and the opposition forces in Syria holding out against the odds. In short only a prolonged anti-ISIS military campaign can preserve Rojava.
In my opinion after defeating ISIS in Kobane’s region, YPG should have suspended it military operations except in self-defence of its establish perimeter. After defeating ISIS in Kobane region and the greater intervention of US and Russia, UPG and PYD should have withdrawn from the war. PYD should have dealt with the situation better and withdrawn from power for Tev-Dem and let the rest of the population to make their own decisions about peace and war. Clearly the current nature, direction and the potential course of the present war in Rojava has completely changed. It is a war of the major powers, European governments and the regional governments over securing interests and sharing domination.
The situation at the moment looks very grim. It appears that once ISIS has been defeated in Mosul and Raqqa then more than likely war will start involving Rojava and PKK in Qandil and Shangal. These calculation are being made by Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Turkey and perhaps also Iran and Iraq with the blessing of the US, Russia and Germany. Such a war may start by the end of August or September after the military defeat of ISIS in Mosul and Reqqa.
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#title Why Anarchists and Libertarians have been divided over Rojava?
#author Zaher Baher
#SORTtopics Rojava, anarchist movement
#date October 20, 2015
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[http://zaherbaher.com/2015/10/20/why-anarchists-and-libertarians-have-been-divided-over-rojava/][zaherbaher.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-19T12:20:44
Like leftists and communists, anarchists and libertarians have been divided over Rojava. Some of them are very supportive and optimistic about the future of this experiment and the others are skeptical and suspicious.
In my opinion there are many factors contributing in this. Some of these factors not just apply to the anarchists, libertarian and ordinary people but the Kurdish people too. So this article may be the answer as well to those Kurdish frequently asking why they do not receive support from the political groups and ordinary people, not just about Rojava, in fact about any event in any parts of Kurdistan. The main factors are:
<strong>First:</strong> the attitude of the individuals in the Kurdish communities who live in Europe and other countries. Although many of us for a long time being living or even born in the countries, but has not played a big role in introducing Kurdish issues including Rojava to the ordinary people in the countries they reside let alone the anarchists and libertarians.
Of course, I am not talking about those Kurdish are already members or supportive of the Kurdish political parties who do not like PKK and PYD, but to the supporters for Rojava. A large number of us (Kurdish) have been spread over all Europe, US, Scandinavians and other countries. If we want support for Rojava or any other part of Kurdistan, we need to get closer to the people in these countries and consider ourselves are a part of this society.
It is a bitter fact or reality to say no many of us( Kurdish) think the country we live in, in some way is our country, its society is our society. We do not think any changes in its politics, economic, education, housing, welfare rights, law & order and many more, directly affecting us. These in addition to the immigration law, we are like many more black people and people from different ethnic minorities facing racism and discrimination from police and the employers. Regardless of what happens, majority of us are still silent and do nothing to get together with the rest of people to fight back.
While we sharing all the above issues, problems with the vast majority of the people in any country we live, although some of these problem hit us harder but still we remain ignorant and deaf about them. We therefore do not participate in independent local groups, not going to demos, protests, not supporting the workers while they are on strike and picket line. We do not take a part in the other campaigns to improve the life of the communities whether the campaigns local or national. So how can we expect the people outside of us know us and support our causes including Rojava?!!
<strong>Second:</strong> The way we do our demos and protests, we do not know how to introduce our cause to by passers or local people. The actual cause that we organize the demos or protests for, usually is getting lost among lifting so many irrelevant placards, banners, Kurdish flag and the picture of one of the leaders or a few of them. We chant some useless and expired nationalist anathemas. Because of these our demos, protests fail to delivery our purpose and just remain attractive to ourselves. While this is our way and our manner to introduce our causes to people, how can we expect them to know the exact situation, let’s say in Rojava?!!
<strong>Third:</strong> The historical bitter experiences that the anarchists/libertarians movements have since the first International/International Workingmen’s Association in 19<sup>th</sup> century. They involved heavily and supported it but later on been kicked out and accused. Then in 20<sup>th</sup> century bloody experiences with Bolshevik, following by the Spain civil war in 1936/37. This history throughout last century from time to time repeated itself in different countries. Their support and solidarity for those groups, movements made the enemy strong but damaged the anarchist’s movement and caused so many lives. Because of these terrible and bloody experiences many individual anarchists and anarchist groups/organizations remain very cautious in approaching Rojava.
In Rojava and Bakur (Northern Kurdistan-Turkey Kurdistan) we see a couple of powerful political parties: PKK and PYD who have been heavily involved and they are behind both movements. This made a part of anarchists difficult or unable to understand, or seeing the big steps that both movements in both parts towards social revolution. They still look into PKK and its movement through the glasses of 80<sup>th</sup>, 90<sup>th</sup> of the last century and beginning of this century. There was no doubt PKK done terrible things at that time even Ocalan himself acknowledged that there was involvement in terrorist act toward its own people and people outside of the party.
However, many of the anarchists do not see there is an internal struggle inside PKK over idea and principals of anarchist between anarchist’s tendency of minority and the majority of the party that they struggle to keep its structure as it was. I am sure the outcome of this struggle will be positive. It is not realistic to think or expect that PKK and PYD as a party giving up hierarchical organization. They cannot be transferred to anarchist organization as whole. However, in quick look of PKK’s history we can see it has been changed and made so many positive steps. For example, they do not believe in a nation state and the notion of United Kurdistan, to certain extent they are or a part of them are anti power, anti authority. They transferred their weight to the towns to keep the struggles among the workers and poor people; they are in the process of abandoning the guerrilla war and involving in peace process. They also believe in freedom, living the people together in peace and harmony regardless of their differences in ethnicity, religion, and gender. They are very serious the environment and ecology issues and also believing in social revolution. They supported forming so many radical local groups, believing in direct democracy and direct action. Ignoring and not acknowledging the above changes come either from arrogance or simply have no clue about what was going on in this movement and unable to read the situation properly.
In my opinion the best attitude towards Rojava is “supportive and being critical” in the same time. Criticizing it alone and keeping distance from it, does not benefit our current anarchist movement. This attitude again shows incapability of recognizing the movement in its realistic way and that bring blame of history over us. Meantime supporting it without criticizing the negative sides of it, again shows that we do not see this movement realistically and make ourselves very optimistic and seeing it as a perfect one. Having this attitude, once the movement fails to meet our demands, we will be very disappointed and keep ourselves a far distance from any movement in the future and always look into them in a suspicious way.
<strong>Four:</strong> Ideological attitude and looking for purity and perfectness in the movement. I believe this approach in best is an irresponsible and in worse is naivety. How we expect purity in the movement of Rojave and Bakur while even the minority of those people participating in the movement are not totally pure? So it is important to recognize this movement as a mass movement. We cannot get pure movement unless you have pure people. If you have pure, responsible and conscious people about what was going on in the society we did not need revolution. We need to look into Rojava with its all positive and negative steps. We should support the positive part and we also should be hard on its negative side too, not just to draw the attention of people about what is going wrong, but also to support fixing it.
We have not seen a movement like Rojava since the Zapatista’s movement of 1994. What happened in Rojava with all its faults so far is the best we have especially when we see the outcome o Arab Spring, and seeing Rojava exactly took opposite direction. Up to this moment, this movement steps towards right direction although facing so many attacks and threats, like, war with Isis and other terrorist organizations, possibility of Assad’s forces to return and invade the region, possibility of invading a part of it by Turkey government, possibility of war with Syrian Free Army, reconciliation of neighboring countries on their expenses and rebuilding Kobane and the rest of Rojava by US, Western Countries and their companies and financial institution. Rohjave faces all these threat with many more, so what is the attitude of anarchists and libertarians here? Solidarity and support to take the right direction or keeping distance and ignoring it until losing whatever so far been achieved? Which one is the right approach?
<strong>Five:</strong> Many of the anarchists and Libertarians came from Marxist or Marxist-Leninist background. Although these comrades adopted some of the anarchist principals but still some of their views, approaches and analyzing are Marxists. Therefore, they find it extremely difficult to believe and expect the social revolution can be happened in developing countries, especially somewhere like Rojava. This approach is ideological and religion approach not anarchist one as they believe if anything is not written in the old books are difficult to happen. Many of us know the Marxist’s books have confused people and distorted historical struggles about achieving socialism/anarchism. These comrades still they use the same Marxist, Marxist-Leninists definition for the working class and the history of developing of human being in reaching socialism/anarchism. For this, they divided this history to five stages before achieving our aim. The five stages are the Primitive society, Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism then Socialism and after all Communism (they even separated socialism form communism). While in somewhere like Rojava finding companies and factories are seldom, therefore, in the view of the Marxist, there is no working class or proletarians there. In short while Rojava has not reached capitalism how could the revolution start from there? How can dictatorship of proletarian be set up while there is no proletarian? So any thought or any talk about starting revolution in Rojava for these comrades is unacceptable.
It is very pity our comrades cannot see or cannot consider the exploitation of people throughout history it has been a main issue. There was a class society, hierarchy society, high class and low class, very rich and very poor, there were a tiny minority of elites and the vast majority of people. So regardless of this division mentioned above and having many stages, but all the time was one question exist, one struggle raised and remains the same until we achieve the classless society, socialism/anarchism
While this was the society’s situation there was always alternative, there has always been grounds of replacing of that society by forming/building socialist/anarchist society. There was no doubt that the societies developed and progressed throughout history but happening the social revolution has nothing to do with this division or to do with the condition of societies should reach the capitalism stage before the socialism. The basis of revolution is existing of exploitation, the class division , having people on the top of the society with all the privileges and the rest in the bottom of the society having nothing or very little and also people must be conscious and aware about all the above and ready to rise up. In other words, the social revolution can happen in any society, anywhere regardless of the stage they are in, but maintaining it and total victory of this revolution are depends on many factors that play a very big role in that whether this revolution happens in Rojava or in any advance country like UK or US.
History shows that the human being so far has only seen a couple of stages/ societies which is Primitive and the class society that continues until present. There is no doubt that History proved that division of human being history to reach socialist/anarchist society damaged the social revolution badly. This is a separate subject as how the leftists and communists throughout last century and before until now damaged the class struggles and principle of socialism as much as the right wing politicians and their parties done. I will write about this soon.
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#title Statutes of the Workers Solidarity Initiative (WSI)
#author Zeeshan Aman
#SORTtopics Pakistan, anarcho-syndicalism
#date 4 August 2020
#source Retrieved on 17<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://wsipakistan.pk/en/statutes/][wsipakistan.pk]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-17T16:35:50
#notes Workers Solidarity Initiative was founded on 22 May 2020 with the aim of establishing a section of the International Workers Association in Pakistan. WSI is an initiative of the Asia-Pacific Sub-Secretariat of the IWA۔
The Workers Solidarity Initiative is a libertarian workers movement organised according to anarcho-syndicalist principles. We aim to create a society based on liberty, mutual aid, federalism and self-management.
WSI believes the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, abolish the wage system and replace the government of people with the administration of things.
In the present, we take an active part in the struggle for worker solidarity, shorter hours, immediate wage increases and improved working conditions. And we actively oppose all attacks on workers such as conscription of labour, strike breaking, drives for increased production and longer working hours, wage cuts, unemployment or any other actions harmful to the health and well-being of working people and their communities.
WSI wants worker/community self-education for complete self-management of production, distribution, social organisation and preservation of a healthy ecological environment. This will come about by worker/community expropriation of wealth and the creation of alternative economic systems.
WSI is opposed to all economic and social monopoly. We do not seek the conquest of political power, but rather the total abolition of all state functions in the life of society. Hence we reject all parliamentary activity and other collaboration with legislative bodies. We believe in fighting organisations in the workplace and community, independent of, and opposed to all political parties and Trade Union bureaucracies.
Our means of struggle include education and direct action. To ensure the full participation of all in both current struggle and the future self-management of society, we oppose centralism in our organisations. We organise on the basis of Libertarian Federalism that is from the bottom up without any hierarchy and with full freedom of initiative by both local and regional groups. All co-ordinating bodies of the Federation consist of recallable delegates with specific tasks determined by local assemblies.
WSI sees the world as our country, humanity as our family. We reject all political and national frontiers and aim to unmask the arbitrary violence of all governments.
WSI oppose all attitudes and assumptions that are harmful and injurious to working class solidarity. We oppose all ideologies and institutions that stand in the way of equality and the right of people everywhere to control their own lives and their environment.
*** <strong>1. NAME</strong>
This organisation shall be known as the Workers Solidarity Initiative.
*** <strong>2. MEMBERSHIP</strong>
2.1 Membership of the WSF affiliates shall be open to all workers, employed or not.
2.2 No member of an WSF affiliate shall be:
2.2.a A paid official of a trade union or a craft union, or an office-bearer of a political party or religious organisation.
2.2.b Someone who has powers of hiring and firing in their occupation.
2.3 All new members in agreement with the Aims and Principles and who agree to abide by the Statutes of the WSI, join by paying dues to the Treasurer.
2.4 All members shall have an equal voice and an equal part in decision-making.
2.5 All decisions are made after full debate by all members meeting in the duly constituted assembly of their affiliate.
2.6 No office to have any executive powers. All delegated and other offices to be elected and recallable at any time. The maximum term of tenure for all office shall be one year. Maximum of two terms to be served consecutively.
*** <strong>3. OFFICES</strong>
**** A. SECRETARY
3.A.1 A member will elected by the assembly to fulfil the function of Secretary.
3.A.2 The responsibilities of the Office of Secretary shall include;
3.A.2.a All correspondance of the WSI
3.A.2.b The recording of the minutes of the meetong of the assembly.
3.A.2.c The preparation of reports as required.
**** B. TREASURER
3.B.1 A member will elected by the assembly to fulfil the function of Treasurer.
3.B.2 The responsibilities of the Treasurer shall include;
3.B.2.a The collection of dues
3.B.2.b The maintenance of financial accounts.
3.B.2.c The preparation of the annual financial report or any other reports as required.
**** C. THE COMBINATION OF OFFICES
3.C.1 The offices of Secretary and Treasuer may be combined where necessary.
3.C.2 The combination of offices shall end when it is possible to do so.
*** <strong>4. FINANCES</strong>
5.1 All members shall pay monthly or annual dues. Dues for unwaged or low income members shall be set at a lower rate. The Dues rate to be set by WSI meeting in assembly.
5.2 The WSI meeting in assembly may exempt persons in special need from paying their dues wholly or in part.
5.3 Members are considered financila if they have paid their dues by the agreed date.
5.4 Members in arrears will be considered non-financial. Non-financial members will not be eligible for any offices or mandated functions.
5.5 Members shall be considered lapsed if they are in arrears for a period longer than 12 months.
*** <strong>6. PUBLICATIONS</strong>
6.1 The WSI shall maintain a website. The WSI Secretary shall be responsible for its maintenance.
6.2 The WSI Secretary shall be responsible for any social media platforms. The WSI Secretary may delegate responsibility for one or more social media paltforms to other members by decision of meeting in assembly.
6.3 All WSI publications shall clearly state they are published by the WSI.
*** <strong>7. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS</strong>
7.1 The WSI shall apply to the IWA to affiliate to the IWA as a Friends Group
7.2 Upon the founding of another organisation with which the WSI can federate, the WSI will convert to the WSF and apply to the affiliate to the IWA as the Pakistan section of the IWA.
7.3 The WSI will not enter into relations with organisations deemed by the IWA to be hostile to it.
7.4 The WSI will do all it can to promote anarcho-syndicalism and the IWA within our immediate region of Asia and the Pacific.
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#title Zhuangzi
#author Zhuang Zhou
#SORTtopics Taoism, China
#date Originally writen between 350 BC & 250 BC. Translation published in 1891.
#source *The Writings of Chuang Tzu* <[[https://ctext.org/zhuangzi][ctext.org/zhuangzi]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-08-11T12:04:56
#notes Translated by James Legge
** Inner Chapters
*** Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease
In the Northern Ocean there is a fish, the name of which is Kun - I do not know how many li in size. It changes into a bird with the name of Peng, the back of which is (also) - I do not know how many li in extent. When this bird rouses itself and flies, its wings are like clouds all round the sky. When the sea is moved (so as to bear it along), it prepares to remove to the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean is the Pool of Heaven.
There is the (book called) Qi Xie, a record of marvels. We have in it these words: 'When the peng is removing to the Southern Ocean it flaps (its wings) on the water for 3000 li. Then it ascends on a whirlwind 90,000 li, and it rests only at the end of six months.' (But similar to this is the movement of the breezes which we call) the horses of the fields, of the dust (which quivers in the sunbeams), and of living things as they are blown against one another by the air. Is its azure the proper colour of the sky? Or is it occasioned by its distance and illimitable extent? If one were looking down (from above), the very same appearance would just meet his view.
And moreover, (to speak of) the accumulation of water; if it be not great, it will not have strength to support a large boat. Upset a cup of water in a cavity, and a straw will float on it as if it were a boat. Place a cup in it, and it will stick fast; the water is shallow and the boat is large. (So it is with) the accumulation of wind; if it be not great, it will not have strength to support great wings. Therefore (the peng ascended to) the height of 90,000 li, and there was such a mass of wind beneath it; thenceforth the accumulation of wind was sufficient. As it seemed to bear the blue sky on its back, and there was nothing to obstruct or arrest its course, it could pursue its way to the South.
A cicada and a little dove laughed at it, saying, 'We make an effort and fly towards an elm or sapanwood tree; and sometimes before we reach it, we can do no more but drop to the ground. Of what use is it for this (creature) to rise 90,000 li, and make for the South?' He who goes to the grassy suburbs, returning to the third meal (of the day), will have his belly as full as when he set out; he who goes to a distance of 100 li will have to pound his grain where he stops for the night; he who goes a thousand li, will have to carry with him provisions for three months. What should these two small creatures know about the matter? The knowledge of that which is small does not reach to that which is great; (the experience of) a few years does not reach to that of many. How do we know that it is so? The mushroom of a morning does not know (what takes place between) the beginning and end of a month; the short-lived cicada does not know (what takes place between) the spring and autumn. These are instances of a short term of life. In the south of Chu there is the (tree) called Ming-ling, whose spring is 500 years, and its autumn the same; in high antiquity there was that called Da-chun, whose spring was 8000 years, and its autumn the same. And Peng Zu is the one man renowned to the present day for his length of life: if all men were (to wish) to match him, would they not be miserable?
In the questions put by Tang to Ji we have similar statements: 'In the bare and barren north there is the dark and vast ocean - the Pool of Heaven. In it there is a fish, several thousand li in breadth, while no one knows its length. Its name is the kun. There is (also) a bird named the peng; its back is like the Tai mountain, while its wings are like clouds all round the sky. On a whirlwind it mounts upwards as on the whorls of a goat's horn for 90,000 li, till, far removed from the cloudy vapours, it bears on its back the blue sky, and then it shapes its course for the South, and proceeds to the ocean there.' A quail by the side of a marsh laughed at it, and said, 'Where is it going to? I spring up with a bound, and come down again when I have reached but a few fathoms, and then fly about among the brushwood and bushes; and this is the perfection of flying. Where is that creature going to?' This shows the difference between the small and the great.
Thus it is that men, whose wisdom is sufficient for the duties of some one office, or whose conduct will secure harmony in some one district, or whose virtue is befitting a ruler so that they could efficiently govern some one state, are sure to look on themselves in this manner (like the quail), and yet Rongzi of Song would have smiled and laughed at them. (This Rongzi), though the whole world should have praised him, would not for that have stimulated himself to greater endeavour, and though the whole world should have condemned him, would not have exercised any more repression of his course; so fixed was he in the difference between the internal (judgment of himself) and the external (judgment of others), so distinctly had he marked out the bounding limit of glory and disgrace. Here, however, he stopped. His place in the world indeed had become indifferent to him, but still he had not planted himself firmly (in the right position). There was Liezi, who rode on the wind and pursued his way, with an admirable indifference (to all external things), returning, however, after fifteen days, (to his place). In regard to the things that (are supposed to) contribute to happiness, he was free from all endeavours to obtain them; but though he had not to walk, there was still something for which he had to wait. But suppose one who mounts on (the ether of) heaven and earth in its normal operation, and drives along the six elemental energies of the changing (seasons), thus enjoying himself in the illimitable - what has he to wait for? Therefore it is said, 'The Perfect man has no (thought of) self; the Spirit-like man, none of merit; the Sagely-minded man, none of fame.'
Yao, proposing to resign the throne to Xu You, said, 'When the sun and moon have come forth, if the torches have not been put out, would it not be difficult for them to give light? When the seasonal rains are coming down, if we still keep watering the ground, will not our toil be labour lost for all the good it will do? Do you, Master, stand forth (as sovereign), and the kingdom will (at once) be well governed. If I still (continue to) preside over it, I must look on myself as vainly occupying the place - I beg to resign the throne to you.' Xu You said, 'You, Sir, govern the kingdom, and the kingdom is well governed. If I in these circumstances take your place, shall I not be doing so for the sake of the name? But the name is but the guest of the reality; shall I be playing the part of the guest? The tailor-bird makes its nest in the deep forest, but only uses a single branch; the mole drinks from the He, but only takes what fills its belly. Return and rest in being ruler - I will have nothing to do with the throne. Though the cook were not attending to his kitchen, the representative of the dead and the officer of prayer would not leave their cups and stands to take his place.'
Jian Wu asked Lian Shu, saying, 'I heard Jie Yu talking words which were great, but had nothing corresponding to them (in reality); once gone, they could not be brought back. I was frightened by them; they were like the Milky Way which cannot be traced to its beginning or end. They had no connexion with one another, and were not akin to the experiences of men.' 'What were his words?' asked Lian Shu, and the other replied, (He said) that 'Far away on the hill of Gu Ye there dwelt a Spirit-like man whose flesh and skin were (smooth) as ice and (white) as snow; that his manner was elegant and delicate as that of a virgin; that he did not eat any of the five grains, but inhaled the wind and drank the dew; that he mounted on the clouds, drove along the flying dragons, rambling and enjoying himself beyond the four seas; that by the concentration of his spirit-like powers he could save men from disease and pestilence, and secure every year a plentiful harvest.' These words appeared to me wild and incoherent and I did not believe them. 'So it is,' said Lian Shu. 'The blind have no perception of the beauty of elegant figures, nor the deaf of the sound of bells and drums. But is it only the bodily senses of which deafness and blindness can be predicated? There is also a similar defect in the intelligence; and of this your words supply an illustration in yourself. That man, with those attributes, though all things were one mass of confusion, and he heard in that condition the whole world crying out to him to be rectified, would not have to address himself laboriously to the task, as if it were his business to rectify the world. Nothing could hurt that man; the greatest floods, reaching to the sky, could not drown him, nor would he feel the fervour of the greatest heats melting metals and stones till they flowed, and scorching all the ground and hills. From the dust and chaff of himself, he could still mould and fashion Yaos and Shuns - how should he be willing to occupy himself with things?' A man of Song, who dealt in the ceremonial caps (of Yin), went with them to Yue, the people of which cut off their hair and tattooed their bodies, so that they had no use for them. Yao ruled the people of the kingdom, and maintained a perfect government within the four seas. Having gone to see the four (Perfect) Ones on the distant hill of Gu Ye, when (he returned to his capital) on the south of the Fen water, his throne appeared no more to his deep-sunk oblivious eyes.
Huizi told Zhuangzi, saying, 'The king of Wei sent me some seeds of a large calabash, which I sowed. The fruit, when fully grown, could contain five piculs (of anything). I used it to contain water, but it was so heavy that I could not lift it by myself. I cut it in two to make the parts into drinking vessels; but the dried shells were too wide and unstable and would not hold (the liquor); nothing but large useless things! Because of their uselessness I knocked them to pieces.' Zhuangzi replied, 'You were indeed stupid, my master, in the use of what was large. There was a man of Song who was skilful at making a salve which kept the hands from getting chapped; and (his family) for generations had made the bleaching of cocoon-silk their business. A stranger heard of it, and proposed to buy the art of the preparation for a hundred ounces of silver. The kindred all came together, and considered the proposal. "We have," said they, "been bleaching cocoon-silk for generations, and have only gained a little money. Now in one morning we can sell to this man our art for a hundred ounces - let him have it." The stranger accordingly got it and went away with it to give counsel to the king of Wu, who was then engaged in hostilities with Yue. The king gave him the command of his fleet, and in the winter he had an engagement with that of Yue, on which he inflicted a great defeat, and was invested with a portion of territory taken from Yue. The keeping the hands from getting chapped was the same in both cases; but in the one case it led to the investiture (of the possessor of the salve), and in the other it had only enabled its owners to continue their bleaching. The difference of result was owing to the different use made of the art. Now you, Sir, had calabashes large enough to hold five piculs; why did you not think of making large bottle-gourds of them, by means of which you could have floated over rivers and lakes, instead of giving yourself the sorrow of finding that they were useless for holding anything. Your mind, my master, would seem to have been closed against all intelligence!'
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, 'I have a large tree, which men call the Ailantus. Its trunk swells out to a large size, but is not fit for a carpenter to apply his line to it; its smaller branches are knotted and crooked, so that the disk and square cannot be used on them. Though planted on the wayside, a builder would not turn his head to look at it. Now your words, Sir, are great, but of no use - all unite in putting them away from them.' Zhuangzi replied, 'Have you never seen a wildcat or a weasel? There it lies, crouching and low, till the wanderer approaches; east and west it leaps about, avoiding neither what is high nor what is low, till it is caught in a trap, or dies in a net. Again there is the Yak, so large that it is like a cloud hanging in the sky. It is large indeed, but it cannot catch mice. You, Sir, have a large tree and are troubled because it is of no use - why do you not plant it in a tract where there is nothing else, or in a wide and barren wild? There you might saunter idly by its side, or in the enjoyment of untroubled ease sleep beneath it. Neither bill nor axe would shorten its existence; there would be nothing to injure it. What is there in its uselessness to cause you distress?'
*** The Adjustment of Controversies
Nan-Guo Zi-Qi was seated, leaning forward on his stool. He was looking up to heaven and breathed gently, seeming to be in a trance, and to have lost all consciousness of any companion. (His disciple), Yan Cheng Zi-You, who was in attendance and standing before him, said, 'What is this? Can the body be made to become thus like a withered tree, and the mind to become like slaked lime? His appearance as he leans forward on the stool to-day is such as I never saw him have before in the same position.' Zi-Qi said, 'Yan, you do well to ask such a question, I had just now lost myself; but how should you understand it? You may have heard the notes of Man, but have not heard those of Earth; you may have heard the notes of Earth, but have not heard those of Heaven.'
Zi-You said, 'I venture to ask from you a description of all these.' The reply was, 'When the breath of the Great Mass (of nature) comes strongly, it is called Wind. Sometimes it does not come so; but when it does, then from a myriad apertures there issues its excited noise; have you not heard it in a prolonged gale? Take the projecting bluff of a mountain forest - in the great trees, a hundred spans round, the apertures and cavities are like the nostrils, or the mouth, or the ears; now square, now round like a cup or a mortar; here like a wet footprint, and there like a large puddle. (The sounds issuing from them are like) those of fretted water, of the arrowy whizz, of the stern command, of the inhaling of the breath, of the shout, of the gruff note, of the deep wail, of the sad and piping note. The first notes are slight, and those that follow deeper, but in harmony with them. Gentle winds produce a small response; violent winds a great one. When the fierce gusts have passed away, all the apertures are empty (and still) - have you not seen this in the bending and quivering of the branches and leaves?'
Zi-You said, 'The notes of Earth then are simply those which come from its myriad apertures; and the notes of Man may just be compared to those which (are brought from the tubes of) bamboo- allow me to ask about the notes of Heaven.' Zi-Qi replied, 'Blowing the myriad differences, making them stop [proceed] of themselves, sealing their self-selecting - who is it that stirs it all up?'
Great knowledge is wide and comprehensive; small knowledge is partial and restricted. Great speech is exact and complete; small speech is (merely) so much talk. When we sleep, the soul communicates with (what is external to us); when we awake, the body is set free. Our intercourse with others then leads to various activity, and daily there is the striving of mind with mind. There are hesitancies; deep difficulties; reservations; small apprehensions causing restless distress, and great apprehensions producing endless fears. Where their utterances are like arrows from a bow, we have those who feel it their charge to pronounce what is right and what is wrong; where they are given out like the conditions of a covenant, we have those who maintain their views, determined to overcome. (The weakness of their arguments), like the decay (of things) in autumn and winter, shows the failing (of the minds of some) from day to day; or it is like their water which, once voided, cannot be gathered up again. Then their ideas seem as if fast bound with cords, showing that the mind is become like an old and dry moat, and that it is nigh to death, and cannot be restored to vigour and brightness. Joy and anger, sadness and pleasure, anticipation and regret, fickleness and fixedness, vehemence and indolence, eagerness and tardiness;-- (all these moods), like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture, day and night succeed to one another and come before us, and we do not know whence they sprout. Let us stop! Let us stop! Can we expect to find out suddenly how they are produced?
If there were not (the views of) another, I should not have mine; if there were not I (with my views), his would be uncalled for:-- this is nearly a true statement of the case, but we do not know what it is that makes it be so. It might seem as if there would be a true Governor concerned in it, but we do not find any trace (of his presence and acting). That such an One could act so I believe; but we do not see His form. He has affections, but He has no form. Given the body, with its hundred parts, its nine openings, and its six viscera, all complete in their places, which do I love the most? Do you love them all equally? or do you love some more than others? Is it not the case that they all perform the part of your servants and waiting women? All of them being such, are they not incompetent to rule one another? or do they take it in turns to be now ruler and now servants? There must be a true Ruler (among them) whether by searching you can find out His character or not, there is neither advantage nor hurt, so far as the truth of His operation is concerned. When once we have received the bodily form complete, its parts do not fail to perform their functions till the end comes. In conflict with things or in harmony with them, they pursue their course to the end, with the speed of a galloping horse which cannot be stopped - is it not sad? To be constantly toiling all one's lifetime, without seeing the fruit of one's labour, and to be weary and worn out with his labour, without knowing where he is going to - is it not a deplorable case? Men may say, 'But it is not death;' yet of what advantage is this? When the body is decomposed, the mind will be the same along with it - must not the case be pronounced very deplorable? Is the life of man indeed enveloped in such darkness? Is it I alone to whom it appears so? And does it not appear to be so to other men?
If we were to follow the judgments of the predetermined mind, who would be left alone and without a teacher? Not only would it be so with those who know the sequences (of knowledge and feeling) and make their own selection among them, but it would be so as well with the stupid and unthinking. For one who has not this determined mind, to have his affirmations and negations is like the case described in the saying, 'He went to Yue to-day, and arrived at it yesterday.' It would be making what was not a fact to be a fact. But even the spirit-like Yu could not have known how to do this, and how should one like me be able to do it? But speech is not like the blowing (of the wind); the speaker has (a meaning in) his words. If, however, what he says, be indeterminate (as from a mind not made up), does he then really speak or not? He thinks that his words are different from the chirpings of fledgelings; but is there any distinction between them or not? But how can the Dao be so obscured, that there should be 'a True' and 'a False' in it? How can speech be so obscured that there should be 'the Right' and 'the Wrong' about them? Where shall the Dao go to that it will not be found? Where shall speech be found that it will be inappropriate? Dao becomes obscured through the small comprehension (of the mind), and speech comes to be obscure through the vain-gloriousness (of the speaker). So it is that we have the contentions between the Literati and the Mohists, the one side affirming what the other denies, and vice versa. If we would decide on their several affirmations and denials, no plan is like bringing the (proper) light (of the mind) to bear on them.
There is no thing that is not "that", and there is no thing that is not "this". If I look at something from "that", I do not see it; only if I look at it from knowing do I know it. Hence it is said, 'That view comes from this; and this view is a consequence of that:' - which is the theory that that view and this (the opposite views) produce each the other. Although it be so, there is affirmed now life and now death; now death and now life; now the admissibility of a thing and now its inadmissibility; now its inadmissibility and now its admissibility. (The disputants) now affirm and now deny; now deny and now affirm. Therefore the sagely man does not pursue this method, but views things in the light of (his) Heaven (-ly nature), and hence forms his judgment of what is right. This view is the same as that, and that view is the same as this. But that view involves both a right and a wrong; and this view involves also a right and a wrong - are there indeed the two views, that and this? Or are there not the two views, that and this? They have not found their point of correspondency which is called the pivot of the Dao. As soon as one finds this pivot, he stands in the centre of the ring (of thought), where he can respond without end to the changing views; without end to those affirming, and without end to those denying. Therefore I said, 'There is nothing like the proper light (of the mind).'
By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse to illustrate that (what another calls) a horse is not so, is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not a horse, by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a horse. (All things in) heaven and earth may be (dealt with as) a finger; (each of) their myriads may be (dealt with as) a horse.
Does a thing seem so to me? (I say that) it is so. Does it seem not so to me? (I say that) it is not so. A path is formed by (constant) treading on the ground. A thing is called by its name through the (constant) application of the name to it. How is it so? It is so because it is so. How is it not so? It is not so, because it is not so. Everything has its inherent character and its proper capability. There is nothing which has not these. Therefore, this being so, if we take a stalk of grain and a (large) pillar, a loathsome (leper) and (a beauty like) Xi Shi, things large and things insecure, things crafty and things strange; they may in the light of the Dao all be reduced to the same category (of opinion about them).
It was separation that led to completion; from completion ensued dissolution. But all things, without regard to their completion and dissolution, may again be comprehended in their unity - it is only the far reaching in thought who know how to comprehend them in this unity. This being so, let us give up our devotion to our own views, and occupy ourselves with the ordinary views. These ordinary views are grounded on the use of things. (The study of that) use leads to the comprehensive judgment, and that judgment secures the success (of the inquiry). That success gained, we are near (to the object of our search), and there we stop. When we stop, and yet we do not know how it is so, we have what is called the Dao. When we toil our spirits and intelligence, obstinately determined (to establish our own view), and do not know the agreement (which underlies it and the views of others), we have what is called 'In the morning three.' What is meant by that 'In the morning three?' A keeper of monkeys, in giving them out their acorns, (once) said, 'In the morning I will give you three (measures) and in the evening four.' This made them all angry, and he said, 'Very well. In the morning I will give you four and in the evening three.' The monkeys were all pleased. His two proposals were substantially the same, but the result of the one was to make the creatures angry, and of the other to make them pleased - an illustration of the point I am insisting on. Therefore the sagely man brings together a dispute in its affirmations and denials, and rests in the equal fashioning of Heaven. Both sides of the question are admissible.
Among the men of old their knowledge reached the extreme point. What was that extreme point? Some held that at first there was not anything. This is the extreme point, the utmost point to which nothing can be added. A second class held that there was something, but without any responsive recognition of it (on the part of men). A third class held that there was such recognition, but there had not begun to be any expression of different opinions about it. It was through the definite expression of different opinions about it that there ensued injury to (the doctrine of) the Dao. It was this injury to the (doctrine of the) Dao which led to the formation of (partial) preferences. Was it indeed after such preferences were formed that the injury came? or did the injury precede the rise of such preferences? If the injury arose after their formation, Zhao's method of playing on the lute was natural. If the injury arose before their formation, there would have been no such playing on the lute as Zhao's. Zhao Wen's playing on the lute, Shi Kuang's indicating time with his staff, and Huizi's (giving his views), while leaning against a dryandra tree (were all extraordinary). The knowledge of the three men (in their several arts) was nearly perfect, and therefore they practised them to the end of their lives. They loved them because they were different from those of others. They loved them and wished to make them known to others. But as they could not be made clear, though they tried to make them so, they ended with the obscure (discussions) about 'the hard' and 'the white.' And their sons, moreover, with all the threads of their fathers' compositions, yet to the end of their lives accomplished nothing. If they, proceeding in this way, could be said to have succeeded, then am I also successful; if they cannot be pronounced successful, neither I nor any other can succeed. Therefore the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man; but not to use one's own views and to take his position on the ordinary views is what is called using the (proper) light.
But here now are some other sayings - I do not know whether they are of the same character as those which I have already given, or of a different character. Whether they be of the same character or not when looked at along with them, they have a character of their own, which cannot be distinguished from the others. But though this be the case, let me try to explain myself. There was a beginning. There was a beginning before that beginning. There was a beginning previous to that beginning before there was the beginning. There was existence; there had been no existence. There was no existence before the beginning of that no existence. There was no existence previous to the no existence before there was the beginning of the no existence. If suddenly there was nonexistence, we do not know whether it was really anything existing, or really not existing. Now I have said what I have said, but I do not know whether what I have said be really anything to the point or not.
Under heaven there is nothing greater than the tip of an autumn down, and the Tai mountain is small. There is no one more long-lived than a child which dies prematurely, and Peng Zu did not live out his time. Heaven, Earth, and I were produced together, and all things and I are one. Since they are one, can there be speech about them? But since they are spoken of as one, must there not be room for speech? One and Speech are two; two and one are three. Going on from this (in our enumeration), the most skilful reckoner cannot reach (the end of the necessary numbers), and how much less can ordinary people do so! Therefore from non-existence we proceed to existence till we arrive at three; proceeding from existence to existence, to how many should we reach? Let us abjure such procedure, and simply rest here.
The Dao at first met with no responsive recognition. Speech at first had no constant forms of expression. Because of this there came the demarcations (of different views). Let me describe those demarcations: they are the Left and the Right; the Relations and their Obligations; Classifications and their Distinctions; Emulations and Contentions. These are what are called 'the Eight Qualities.' Outside the limits of the world of men, the sage occupies his thoughts, but does not discuss about anything; inside those limits he occupies his thoughts, but does not pass any judgments. In the Chun Qiu, which embraces the history of the former kings, the sage indicates his judgments, but does not argue (in vindication of them). Thus it is that he separates his characters from one another without appearing to do so, and argues without the form of argument. How does he do so? The sage cherishes his views in his own breast, while men generally state theirs argumentatively, to show them to others. Hence we have the saying, 'Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly.'
The Great Dao does not admit of being praised. The Great Argument does not require words. Great Benevolence is not (officiously) benevolent. Great Disinterestedness does not vaunt its humility. Great Courage is not seen in stubborn bravery. The Dao that is displayed is not the Dao. Words that are argumentative do not reach the point. Benevolence that is constantly exercised does not accomplish its object. Disinterestedness that vaunts its purity is not genuine. Courage that is most stubborn is ineffectual. These five seem to be round (and complete), but they tend to become square (and immovable). Therefore the knowledge that stops at what it does not know is the greatest. Who knows the argument that needs no words, and the Way that is not to be trodden? He who is able to know this has what is called 'The Heavenly Treasure-house.' He may pour into it without its being filled; he may pour from it without its being exhausted; and all the while he does not know whence (the supply) comes. This is what is called 'The Store of Light.' Therefore of old Yao asked Shun, saying, 'I wish to smite (the rulers of) Zong, Kuai, and Xu-Ao. Even when standing in my court, I cannot get them out of my mind. How is it so?' Shun replied, 'Those three rulers live (in their little states) as if they were among the mugwort and other brushwood - how is it that you cannot get them out of your mind? Formerly, ten suns came out together, and all things were illuminated by them; how much should (your) virtue exceed (all) suns!'
Nie Que asked Wang Ni, saying, 'Do you know, Sir, what all creatures agree in approving and affirming?' 'How should I know it?' was the reply. 'Do you know what it is that you do not know?' asked the other again, and he got the same reply. He asked a third time, 'Then are all creatures thus without knowledge?' and Wang Ni answered as before, (adding however), 'Notwithstanding, I will try and explain my meaning. How do you know that when I say "I know it," I really (am showing that) I do not know it, and that when I say "I do not know it," I really am showing that I do know it.' And let me ask you some questions: 'If a man sleep in a damp place, he will have a pain in his loins, and half his body will be as if it were dead; but will it be so with an eel? If he be living in a tree, he will be frightened and all in a tremble; but will it be so with a monkey? And does any one of the three know his right place ? Men eat animals that have been fed on grain and grass; deer feed on the thick-set grass; centipedes enjoy small snakes; owls and crows delight in mice; but does any one of the four know the right taste? The dog-headed monkey finds its mate in the female gibbon; the elk and the axis deer cohabit; and the eel enjoys itself with other fishes. Mao Qiang and Li Ji were accounted by men to be most beautiful, but when fishes saw them, they dived deep in the water from them; when birds, they flew from them aloft; and when deer saw them, they separated and fled away. But did any of these four know which in the world is the right female attraction? As I look at the matter, the first principles of benevolence and righteousness and the paths of approval and disapproval are inextricably mixed and confused together - how is it possible that I should know how to discriminate among them?' Nie Que said (further), 'Since you, Sir, do not know what is advantageous and what is hurtful, is the Perfect man also in the same way without the knowledge of them?' Wang Ni replied, 'The Perfect man is spirit-like. Great lakes might be boiling about him, and he would not feel their heat; the He and the Han might be frozen up, and he would not feel the cold; the hurrying thunderbolts might split the mountains, and the wind shake the ocean, without being able to make him afraid. Being such, he mounts on the clouds of the air, rides on the sun and moon, and rambles at ease beyond the four seas. Neither death nor life makes any change in him, and how much less should the considerations of advantage and injury do so!'
Qu Quezi asked Chang Wuzi, saying, 'I heard the Master (speaking of such language as the following): "The sagely man does not occupy himself with worldly affairs. He does not put himself in the way of what is profitable, nor try to avoid what is hurtful; he has no pleasure in seeking (for anything from any one); he does not care to be found in (any established) Way; he speaks without speaking; he does not speak when he speaks; thus finding his enjoyment outside the dust and dirt (of the world)." The Master considered all this to be a shoreless flow of mere words, and I consider it to describe the course of the Mysterious Way - What do you, Sir, think of it?' Chang Wuzi replied, 'The hearing of such words would have perplexed even Huang Di, and how should Qiu be competent to understand them? And you, moreover, are too hasty in forming your estimate (of their meaning). You see the egg, and (immediately) look out for the cock (that is to be hatched from it); you see the bow, and (immediately) look out for the dove (that is to be brought down by it) being roasted. I will try to explain the thing to you in a rough way; do you in the same way listen to me. How could any one stand by the side of the sun and moon, and hold under his arm all space and all time? (Such language only means that the sagely man) keeps his mouth shut, and puts aside questions that are uncertain and dark; making his inferior capacities unite with him in honouring (the One Lord). Men in general bustle about and toil; the sagely man seems stupid and to know nothing. He blends ten thousand years together in the one (conception of time); the myriad things all pursue their spontaneous course, and they are all before him as doing so. How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? and that the dislike of death is not like a young person's losing his way, and not knowing that he is (really) going home? Li Ji was a daughter of the border Warden of Ai. When (the ruler of) the state of Jin first got possession of her, she wept till the tears wetted all the front of her dress. But when she came to the place of the king, shared with him his luxurious couch, and ate his grain-and-grass-fed meat, then she regretted that she had wept. How do I know that the dead do not repent of their former craving for life? Those who dream of (the pleasures of) drinking may in the morning wail and weep; those who dream of wailing and weeping may in the morning be going out to hunt. When they were dreaming they did not know it was a dream; in their dream they may even have tried to interpret it; but when they awoke they knew that it was a dream. And there is the great awaking, after which we shall know that this life was a great dream. All the while, the stupid think they are awake, and with nice discrimination insist on their knowledge; now playing the part of rulers, and now of grooms. Bigoted was that Qiu! He and you are both dreaming. I who say that you are dreaming am dreaming myself. These words seem very strange; but if after ten thousand ages we once meet with a great sage who knows how to explain them, it will be as if we met him (unexpectedly) some morning or evening.
Since you made me enter into this discussion with you, if you have got the better of me and not I of you, are you indeed right, and I indeed wrong? If I have got the better of you and not you of me, am I indeed right and you indeed wrong? Is the one of us right and the other wrong? are we both right or both wrong? Since we cannot come to a mutual and common understanding, men will certainly continue in darkness on the subject. Whom shall I employ to adjudicate in the matter? If I employ one who agrees with you, how can he, agreeing with you, do so correctly? If I employ one who agrees with me, how can he, agreeing with me, do so correctly? If I employ one who disagrees with you and I, how can he, disagreeing with you and I, do so correctly? If I employ one who agrees with you and I, how can he, agreeing with you and I, do so correctly? In this way I and you and those others would all not be able to come to a mutual understanding; and shall we then wait for that (great sage)? (We need not do so.) To wait on others to learn how conflicting opinions are changed is simply like not so waiting at all. The harmonising of them is to be found in the invisible operation of Heaven, and by following this on into the unlimited past. It is by this method that we can complete our years (without our minds being disturbed). What is meant by harmonising (conflicting opinions) in the invisible operation of Heaven? There is the affirmation and the denial of it; and there is the assertion of an opinion and the rejection of it. If the affirmation be according to the reality of the fact, it is certainly different from the denial of it - there can be no dispute about that. If the assertion of an opinion be correct, it is certainly different from its rejection - neither can there be any dispute about that. Let us forget the lapse of time; let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the Infinite, and take up our position there.'
The Penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, 'Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up - how is it that you are so without stability?' The Shadow replied, 'I wait for the movements of something else to do what I do, and that something else on which I wait waits further on another to do as it does. My waiting, is it for the scales of a snake, or the wings of a cicada? How should I know why I do one thing, or do not do another?
Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference. This is a case of what is called the Transformation of Things.'
*** Nourishing the Lord of Life
There is a limit to our life, but to knowledge there is no limit. With what is limited to pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this, we still seek the increase of our knowledge, the peril cannot be averted. There should not be the practice of what is good with any thought of the fame (which it will bring), nor of what is evil with any approximation to the punishment (which it will incur): an accordance with the Central Element (of our nature) is the regular way to preserve the body, to maintain the life, to nourish our parents, and to complete our term of years.
His cook was cutting up an ox for the ruler Wen Hui. Whenever he applied his hand, leaned forward with his shoulder, planted his foot, and employed the pressure of his knee, in the audible ripping off of the skin, and slicing operation of the knife, the sounds were all in regular cadence. Movements and sounds proceeded as in the dance of 'the Mulberry Forest' and the blended notes of the King Shou.' The ruler said, 'Ah! Admirable! That your art should have become so perfect!' (Having finished his operation), the cook laid down his knife, and replied to the remark, 'What your servant loves is the method of the Dao, something in advance of any art. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the (entire) carcase. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills. Observing the natural lines, (my knife) slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the facilities thus presented. My art avoids the membranous ligatures, and much more the great bones. A good cook changes his knife every year; (it may have been injured) in cutting - an ordinary cook changes his every month - (it may have been) broken. Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone. There are the interstices of the joints, and the edge of the knife has no (appreciable) thickness; when that which is so thin enters where the interstice is, how easily it moves along! The blade has more than room enough. Nevertheless, whenever I come to a complicated joint, and see that there will be some difficulty, I proceed anxiously and with caution, not allowing my eyes to wander from the place, and moving my hand slowly. Then by a very slight movement of the knife, the part is quickly separated, and drops like (a clod of) earth to the ground. Then standing up with the knife in my hand, I look all round, and in a leisurely manner, with an air of satisfaction, wipe it clean, and put it in its sheath.' The ruler Wen Hui said, 'Excellent! I have heard the words of my cook, and learned from them the nourishment of (our) life.'
When Gong-wen Xian saw the Master of the Left, he was startled, and said, 'What sort of man is this? How is it he has but one foot? Is it from Heaven? or from Man?' Then he added, 'It must be from Heaven, and not from Man. Heaven's making of this man caused him to have but one foot. In the person of man, each foot has its marrow. By this I know that his peculiarity is from Heaven, and not from Man.
A pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps to pick up a mouthful of food, and thirty steps to get a drink, but it does not seek to be nourished in a coop. Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance, it does not think (such confinement) good.'
When Lao Dan died, Qin Shi went to condole (with his son), but after crying out three times, he came out. The disciples said to him, 'Were you not a friend of the Master?' 'I was,' he replied, and they said, 'Is it proper then to offer your condolences merely as you have done?' He said, 'It is. At first I thought he was the man of men, and now I do not think so. When I entered a little ago and expressed my condolences, there were the old men wailing as if they had lost a son, and the young men wailing as if they had lost their mother. In his attracting and uniting them to himself in such a way there must have been that which made them involuntarily express their words (of condolence), and involuntarily wail, as they were doing. And this was a hiding from himself of his Heaven (-nature), and an excessive indulgence of his (human) feelings; a forgetting of what he had received (in being born); what the ancients called the punishment due to neglecting the Heaven (-nature). When the Master came, it was at the proper time; when he went away, it was the simple sequence (of his coming). Quiet acquiescence in what happens at its proper time, and quietly submitting (to its ceasing) afford no occasion for grief or for joy. The ancients described (death) as the loosening of the cord on which God suspended (the life).
What we can point to are the faggots that have been consumed; but the fire is transmitted (elsewhere), and we know not that it is over and ended.
*** Man in the World, Associated with other Men
Yan Hui went to see Zhongni, and asked leave to take his departure. 'Where are you going to?' asked the Master. 'I will go to Wei' was the reply. 'And with what object?' 'I have heard that the ruler of Wei is in the vigour of his years, and consults none but himself as to his course. He deals with his state as if it were a light matter, and has no perception of his errors. He thinks lightly of his people's dying; the dead are lying all over the country as if no smaller space could contain them; on the plains and about the marshes, they are as thick as heaps of fuel. The people know not where to turn to. I have heard you, Master, say, "Leave the state that is well governed; go to the state where disorder prevails." At the door of a physician there are many who are ill. I wish through what I have heard (from you) to think out some methods (of dealing with Wei), if peradventure the evils of the state may be cured.'
Zhongni said, 'Alas! The risk is that you will go only to suffer in the punishment (of yourself)! The right method (in such a case) will not admit of any admixture. With such admixture, the one method will become many methods. Their multiplication will embarrass you. That embarrassment will make you anxious. However anxious you may be, you will not save (yourself). The perfect men of old first had (what they wanted to do) in themselves, and afterwards they found (the response to it) in others. If what they wanted in themselves was not fixed, what leisure had they to go and interfere with the proceedings of any tyrannous man?
Moreover, do you know how virtue is liable to be dissipated, and how wisdom proceeds to display itself? Virtue is dissipated in (the pursuit of) the name for it, and wisdom seeks to display itself in the striving with others. In the pursuit of the name men overthrow one another; wisdom becomes a weapon of contention. Both these things are instruments of evil, and should not be allowed to have free course in one's conduct. Supposing one's virtue to be great and his sincerity firm, if he do not comprehend the spirit of those (whom he wishes to influence); and supposing he is free from the disposition to strive for reputation, if he do not comprehend their minds;-- when in such a case he forcibly insists on benevolence and righteousness, setting them forth in the strongest and most direct language, before the tyrant, then he, hating (his reprover's) possession of those excellences, will put him down as doing him injury. He who injures others is sure to be injured by them in return. You indeed will hardly escape being injured by the man (to whom you go)!
Further, if perchance he takes pleasure in men of worth and hates those of an opposite character, what is the use of your seeking to make yourself out to be different (from such men about him)? Before you have begun to announce (your views), he, as king and ruler, will take advantage of you, and immediately contend with you for victory. Your eyes will be dazed and full of perplexity; you will try to look pleased with him; you will frame your words with care; your demeanour will be conformed to his; you will confirm him in his views. In this way you will be adding fire to fire, and water to water, increasing, as we may express it, the evils (which you deplore). To these signs of deferring to him at the first there will be no end. You will be in danger, seeing he does not believe you, of making your words more strong, and you are sure to die at the hands of such a tyrant.
And formerly Jie killed Guan Long-feng, and Zhou killed the prince Bi-gan. Both of these cultivated their persons, bending down in sympathy with the lower people to comfort them suffering (as they did) from their oppressors, and on their account opposing their superiors. On this account, because they so ordered their conduct, their rulers compassed their destruction - such regard had they for their own fame. (Again), Yao anciently attacked (the states of) Cong-qi and Xu-ao, and Yu attacked the ruler of Hu. Those states were left empty, and with no one to continue their population, the people being exterminated. They had engaged in war without ceasing; their craving for whatever they could get was insatiable. And this (ruler of Wei) is, like them, one who craves after fame and greater substance - have you not heard it? Those sages were not able to overcome the thirst for fame and substance - how much less will you be able to do so! Nevertheless you must have some ground (for the course which you wish to take); pray try and tell it to me.'
Yan Hui said, 'May I go, doing so in uprightness and humility, using also every endeavour to be uniform (in my plans of operation)?' 'No, indeed!' was the reply. 'How can you do so? This man makes a display of being filled to overflowing (with virtue), and has great self-conceit. His feelings are not to be determined from his countenance. Ordinary men do not (venture to) oppose him, and he proceeds from the way in which he affects them to seek still more the satisfaction of his own mind. He may be described as unaffected by the (small lessons of) virtue brought to bear on him from day to day; and how much less will he be so by your great lessons? He will be obstinate, and refuse to be converted. He may outwardly agree with you, but inwardly there will be no self-condemnation - how can you (go to him in this way and be successful)?'
(Yan Hui) rejoined, 'Well then; while inwardly maintaining my straightforward intention, I will outwardly seem to bend to him. I will deliver (my lessons), and substantiate them by appealing to antiquity. Inwardly maintaining my straightforward intention, I shall be a co-worker with Heaven. When I thus speak of being a co-worker with Heaven, it is because I know that (the sovereign, whom we style) the son of Heaven, and myself, are equally regarded by Heaven as Its sons. And should I then, as if my words were only my own, be seeking to find whether men approved of them, or disapproved of them? In this way men will pronounce me a (sincere and simple) boy. This is what is called being a co-worker with Heaven. Outwardly bending (to the ruler), I shall be a co-worker with other men. To carry (the memorandum tablet to court), to kneel, and to bend the body reverentially - these are the observances of ministers. They all employ them, and should I presume not to do so? Doing what other men do, they would have no occasion to blame me. This is what is called being a fellow-worker with other men. Fully declaring my sentiments and substantiating them by appealing to antiquity, I shall be a co-worker with the ancients. Although the words in which I convey my lessons may really be condemnatory (of the ruler), they will be those of antiquity, and not my own. In this way, though straightforward, I shall be free from blame. This is what is called being a co-worker with antiquity. May I go to Wei in this way, and be successful?' 'No indeed!' said Zhongni. 'How can you do so? You have too many plans of proceeding, and have not spied out (the ruler's character). Though you firmly adhere to your plans, you may be held free from transgression, but this will be all the result. How can you (in this way) produce the transformation (which you desire)? All this only shows (in you) the mind of a teacher!'
Yan Hui said, 'I can go no farther; I venture to ask the method from you.' Zhongni replied, 'It is fasting, (as) I will tell you. (But) when you have the method, will you find it easy to practise it? He who thinks it easy will be disapproved of by the bright Heaven.' Hui said, 'My family is poor. For months together we have no spirituous drink, nor do we taste the proscribed food or any strong-smelling vegetables;-- can this be regarded as fasting?' The reply was, 'It is the fasting appropriate to sacrificing, but it is not the fasting of the mind.' 'I venture to ask what that fasting of the mind is,' said Hui, and Zhongni answered, 'Maintain a perfect unity in every movement of your will, You will not wait for the hearing of your ears about it, but for the hearing of your mind. You will not wait even for the hearing of your mind, but for the hearing of the spirit. Let the hearing (of the ears) rest with the ears. Let the mind rest in the verification (of the rightness of what is in the will). But the spirit is free from all pre-occupation and so waits for (the appearance of) things. Where the (proper) course is, there is freedom from all pre-occupation; such freedom is the fasting of the mind.' Hui said, 'Before it was possible for me to employ (this method), there I was, the Hui that I am; now, that I can employ it, the Hui that I was has passed away. Can I be said to have obtained this freedom from pre-occupation?' The Master replied, 'Entirely. I tell you that you can enter and be at ease in the enclosure (where he is), and not come into collision with the reputation (which belongs to him). If he listen to your counsels, let him hear your notes; if he will not listen, be silent. Open no (other) door; employ no other medicine; dwell with him (as with a friend) in the same apartment, and as if you had no other option, and you will not be far from success in your object. Not to move a step is easy; to walk without treading on the ground is difficult. In acting after the manner of men, it is easy to fall into hypocrisy; in acting after the manner of Heaven, it is difficult to play the hypocrite. I have heard of flying with wings; I have not heard of flying without them. I have heard of the knowledge of the wise; I have not heard of the knowledge of the unwise. Look at that aperture (left in the wall); the empty apartment is filled with light through it. Felicitous influences rest (in the mind thus emblemed), as in their proper resting place. Even when they do not so rest, we have what is called (the body) seated and (the mind) galloping abroad. The information that comes through the ears and eyes is comprehended internally, and the knowledge of the mind becomes something external: (when this is the case), the spiritual intelligences will come, and take up their dwelling with us, and how much more will other men do so! All things thus undergo a transforming influence. This was the hinge on which Yu and Shun moved; it was this which Fu-xi and Ji-qu practised all their lives: how much more should other men follow the same rule!'
Zi Gao, duke of She, being about to proceed on a mission to Qi, asked Zhongni, saying, 'The king is sending me, Zhu Liang, on a mission which is very important. Qi will probably treat me as his commissioner with great respect, but it will not be in a hurry (to attend to the business). Even an ordinary man cannot be readily moved (to action), and how much less the prince of a state! I am very full of apprehension. You, Sir, once said to me that of all things, great or small, there were few which, if not conducted in the proper way, could be brought to a happy conclusion; that, if the thing were not successful, there was sure to be the evil of being dealt with after the manner of men; that, if it were successful, there was sure to be the evil of constant anxiety; and that, whether it succeeded or not, it was only the virtuous man who could secure its not being followed by evil. In my diet I take what is coarse, and do not seek delicacies - a man whose cookery does not require him to be using cooling drinks. This morning I received my charge, and in the evening I am drinking iced water; am I not feeling the internal heat (and discomfort)? Such is my state before I have actually engaged in the affair; I am already suffering from conflicting anxieties. And if the thing do not succeed, (the king) is sure to deal with me after the manner of men. The evil is twofold; as a minister, I am not able to bear the burden (of the mission). Can you, Sir, tell me something (to help me in the case)?'
Zhongni replied, 'In all things under heaven there are two great cautionary considerations: the one is the requirement implanted (in the nature); the other is the conviction of what is right. The love of a son for his parents is the implanted requirement, and can never be separated from his heart; the service of his ruler by a minister is what is right, and from its obligation there is no escaping anywhere between heaven and earth. These are what are called the great cautionary considerations. Therefore a son finds his rest in serving his parents without reference to or choice of place; and this is the height of filial duty. In the same way a subject finds his rest in serving his ruler, without reference to or choice of the business; and this is the fullest discharge of loyalty. When men are simply obeying (the dictates of) their hearts, the considerations of grief and joy are not readily set before them. They know that there is no alternative to their acting as they do, and rest in it as what is appointed; and this is the highest achievement of virtue. He who is in the position of a minister or of a son has indeed to do what he cannot but do. Occupied with the details of the business (in hand), and forgetful of his own person, what leisure has he to think of his pleasure in living or his dislike of death? You, my master, may well proceed on your mission. But let me repeat to you what I have heard: In all intercourse (between states), if they are near to each other, there should be mutual friendliness, verified by deeds; if they are far apart, there must be sincere adherence to truth in their messages. Those messages will be transmitted by internuncios. But to convey messages which express the complacence or the dissatisfaction of the two parties is the most difficult thing in the world. If they be those of mutual complacence, there is sure to be an overflow of expressions of satisfaction; if of mutual dissatisfaction, an overflow of expressions of dislike. But all extravagance leads to reckless language, and such language fails to command belief. When this distrust arises, woe to the internuncio! Hence the Rules for Speech say, "Transmit the message exactly as it stands; do not transmit it with any overflow of language; so is (the internuncio) likely to keep himself whole."
Moreover, skilful wrestlers begin with open trials of strength, but always end with masked attempts (to gain the victory); as their excitement grows excessive, they display much wonderful dexterity. Parties drinking according to the rules at first observe good order, but always end with disorder; as their excitement grows excessive, their fun becomes uproarious. In all things it is so. People are at first sincere, but always end with becoming rude; at the commencement things are treated as trivial, but as the end draws near, they assume great proportions. Words are (like) the waves acted on by the wind; the real point of the matters (discussed by them) is lost. The wind and waves are easily set in motion; the success of the matter of which the real point is lost is easily put in peril. Hence quarrels are occasioned by nothing so much as by artful words and one-sided speeches. The breath comes angrily, as when a beast, driven to death, wildly bellows forth its rage. On this animosities arise on both sides. Hasty examination (of the case) eagerly proceeds, and revengeful thoughts arise in their minds; they do not know how. Since they do not know how such thoughts arise, who knows how they will end? Hence the Rules for Speech say, "Let not an internuncius depart from his instructions. Let him not urge on a settlement. If he go beyond the regular rules, he will complicate matters. Departing from his instructions and urging on a settlement imperils negotiations. A good settlement is proved by its lasting long, and a bad settlement cannot be altered - ought he not to be careful?"
Further still, let your mind find its enjoyment in the circumstances of your position; nourish the central course which you pursue, by a reference to your unavoidable obligations. This is the highest object for you to pursue; what else can you do to fulfil the charge (of your father and ruler). The best thing you can do is to be prepared to sacrifice your life; and this is the most difficult thing to do.'
Yan He, being about to undertake the office of Teacher of the eldest son of duke Ling of Wei, consulted Qu Bo-yi. 'Here,' said he, 'is this (young) man, whose natural disposition is as bad as it could be. If I allow him to proceed in a bad way, it will be at the peril of our state; if I insist on his proceeding in a right way, it will be at the peril of my own person. His wisdom is just sufficient to know the errors of other men, but he does not know how he errs himself. What am I to do in such a case?' Qu Bo-yi replied,'Good indeed is your question! Be on your guard; be careful; see that you keep yourself correct! Your best plan will be, with your person to seek association with him, and with your mind to try to be in harmony with him; and yet there are dangers connected with both of these things. While seeking to keep near to him, do not enter into his pursuits; while cultivating a harmony of mind with him, do not show how superior you are to him. If in your personal association you enter into his pursuits, you will fall with him and be ruined, you will tumble down with a crash. If in maintaining a harmony with his mind, you show how different you are from him, he will think you do so for the reputation and the name, and regard you as a creature of evil omen. If you find him to be a mere boy, be you with him as another boy; if you find him one of those who will not have their ground marked out in the ordinary way, do you humour him in this characteristic; if you find him to be free from lofty airs, show yourself to be the same - (ever) leading him on so as to keep him free from faults. Do you not know (the fate of) the praying mantis? It angrily stretches out its arms, to arrest the progress of the carriage, unconscious of its inability for such a task, but showing how much it thinks of its own powers. Be on your guard; be careful. If you cherish a boastful confidence in your own excellence, and place yourself in collision with him, you are likely to incur the fate (of the mantis). Do you not know how those who keep tigers proceed? They do not dare to supply them with living creatures, because of the rage which their killing of them will excite. They do not (even) dare to give them their food whole, because of the rage which their rending of it will excite. They watch till their hunger is appeased, (dealing with them) from their knowledge of their natural ferocity. Tigers are different from men, but they fawn on those who feed them, and do so in accordance with their nature. When any of these are killed by them, it is because they have gone against that nature. Those again who are fond of horses preserve their dung in baskets, and their urine in jars. If musquitoes and gadflies light on them, and the grooms brush them suddenly away, the horses break their bits, injure (the ornaments on) their heads, and smash those on their breasts. The more care that is taken of them, the more does their fondness (for their attendants) disappear. Ought not caution to be exercised (in the management of them)?'
A (master) mechanic, called Shi, on his way to Qi, came to Qu-yuan, where he saw an oak-tree, which was used as the altar for the spirits of the land. It was so large that an ox standing behind it could not be seen. It measured a hundred spans round, and rose up eighty cubits on the hill before it threw out any branches, after which there were ten or so, from each of which a boat could be hollowed out. People came to see it in crowds as in a market place, but the mechanic did not look round at it, but held on his way without stopping. One of his workmen, however, looked long and admiringly at it, and then ran on to his master, and said to him, 'Since I followed you with my axe and bill, I have never seen such a beautiful mass of timber as this. Why would you, Sir, not look round at it, but went on without stopping?' 'Have done,' said Mr. Shi, 'and do not speak about it. It is quite useless. A boat made from its wood would sink; a coffin or shell would quickly rot; an article of furniture would soon go to pieces; a door would be covered with the exuding sap; a pillar would be riddled by insects; the material of it is good for nothing, and hence it is that it has attained to so great an age.'
When Mr. Shi was returning, the altar-oak appeared to him in a dream, and said, 'What other tree will you compare with me? Will you compare me to one of your ornamental trees? There are hawthorns, pear-trees, orange-trees, pummelo-trees, gourds and other low fruit-bearing plants. When their fruits are ripe, they are knocked down from them, and thrown among the dirt. The large branches are broken, and the smaller are torn away. So it is that their productive ability makes their lives bitter to them; they do not complete their natural term of existence, but come to a premature end in the middle of their time, bringing on themselves the destructive treatment which they ordinarily receive. It is so with all things. I have sought to discover how it was that I was so useless; I had long done so, till (the effort) nearly caused my death; and now I have learned it - it has been of the greatest use to me. Suppose that I had possessed useful properties, should I have become of the great size that I am? And moreover you and I are both things - how should one thing thus pass its judgment on another? how is it that you a useless man know all this about me a useless tree?' When Mr. Shih awoke, he kept thinking about his dream, but the workman said, 'Being so taken with its uselessness, how is it that it yet acts here as the altar for the spirits of the land?' 'Be still,' was the master's reply, 'and do not say a word. It simply happened to grow here; and thus those who do not know it do not speak ill of it as an evil thing. If it were not used as the altar, would it be in danger of being cut down? Moreover, the reason of its being preserved is different from that of the preservation of things generally; is not your explaining it from the sentiment which you have expressed wide of the mark?'
Nan-bo Zi-Qi in rambling about the Heights of Shang, saw a large and extraordinary tree. The teams of a thousand chariots might be sheltered under it, and its shade would cover them all! Zi-Qi said, 'What a tree is this! It must contain an extraordinary amount of timber! When he looked up, however, at its smaller branches, they were so twisted and crooked that they could not be made into rafters and beams; when he looked down to its root, its stem was divided into so many rounded portions that neither coffin nor shell could be made from them. He licked one of its leaves, and his mouth felt torn and wounded. The smell of it would make a man frantic, as if intoxicated, for more than three whole days together. 'This, indeed,' said he, 'is a tree good for nothing, and it is thus that it has attained to such a size. Ah! and spirit-like men acknowledge this worthlessness (and its result).'
In Song there is the district of Jing-shi, in which catalpae, cypresses, and mulberry trees grow well. Those of them which are a span or two or rather more in circumference are cut down by persons who want to make posts to which to tie their monkeys; those which are three or four spans round are cut down by persons who want beams forr their lofty and famous houses; and those of seven or eight spans are cut down by noblemen and rich merchants who want single planks for the sides of their coffins. The trees in consequence do not complete their natural term of life, and come to a premature end in the middle of their growth under the axe and bill;-- this is the evil that befalls them from their supplying good timber.
In the same way the Jie (book) specifies oxen that have white foreheads, pigs that have turned-up snouts, and men that are suffering from piles, and forbids their being sacrificed to the Ho. The wizards know them by these peculiarities and consider them to be inauspicious, but spirit-like men consider them on this account to be very fortunate.
There was the deformed object Shu. His chin seemed to hide his navel; his shoulders were higher than the crown of his head; the knot of his hair pointed to the sky; his five viscera were all compressed into the upper part of his body, and his two thigh bones were like ribs. By sharpening needles and washing clothes he was able to make a living. By sifting rice and cleaning it, he was able to support ten individuals. When the government was calling out soldiers, this poor Shu would bare his arms among the others; when it had any great service to be undertaken, because of his constant ailments, none of the work was assigned to him; when it was giving out grain to the sick, he received three kung, and ten bundles of firewood. If this poor man, so deformed in body, was still able to support himself, and complete his term of life, how much more may they do so, whose deformity is that of their faculties!
When Confucius went to Chu, Jie-yu, the madman of Chu, as he was wandering about, passed by his door, and said, '0 Phoenix, 0 Phoenix, how is your virtue degenerated! The future is not to be waited for; the past is not to be sought again! When good order prevails in the world, the sage tries to accomplish all his service; when disorder prevails, he may preserve his life; at the present time, it is enough if he simply escape being punished. Happiness is lighter than a feather, but no one knows how to support it; calamity is heavier than the earth, and yet no one knows how to avoid it. Give over! give over approaching men with the lessons of your virtue! You are in peril! you are in peril, hurrying on where you have marked out the ground against your advance! I avoid publicity, I avoid publicity, that my path may not be injured. I pursue my course, now going backwards, now crookedly, that my feet may not be hurt.
The mountain by its trees weakens itself. The grease which ministers to the fire fries itself. The cinnamon tree can be eaten, and therefore it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless.
*** The Seal of Virtue Complete
In Lu there was a Wang Tai who had lost both his feet; while his disciples who followed and went about with him were as numerous as those of Zhongni. Chang Ji asked Zhongni about him, saying, 'Though Wang Tai is a cripple, the disciples who follow him about divide Lu equally with you, Master. When he stands, he does not teach them; when he sits, he does not discourse to them. But they go to him empty, and come back full. Is there indeed such a thing as instruction without words? and while the body is imperfect, may the mind be complete? What sort of man is he?' Zhongni replied, 'This master is a sage. I have only been too late in going to him. I will make him my teacher; and how much more should those do so who are not equal to me! Why should only the state of Lu follow him? I will lead on all under heaven with me to do so.'
Chang Ji rejoined, 'He is a man who has lost his feet, and yet he is known as the venerable Wang - he must be very different from ordinary men. What is the peculiar way in which he employs his mind?' The reply was, 'Death and life are great considerations, but they could work no change in him. Though heaven and earth were to be overturned and fall, they would occasion him no loss. His judgment is fixed regarding that in which there is no element of falsehood; and, while other things change, he changes not. The transformations of things are to him the developments prescribed for them, and he keeps fast hold of the author of them.'
Chang Ji said, 'What do you mean?' 'When we look at things,' said Zhongni, 'as they differ, we see them to be different, (as for instance) the liver and the gall, or Chu and Yue; when we look at them, as they agree, we see them all to be a unity. So it is with this (Wang Tai). He takes no knowledge of the things for which his ears and eyes are the appropriate organs, but his mind delights itself in the harmony of (all excellent) qualities. He looks at the unity which belongs to things, and does not perceive where they have suffered loss. He looks on the loss of his feet as only the loss of so much earth.'
Chang Ji said, 'He is entirely occupied with his (proper) self. By his knowledge he has discovered (the nature of) his mind, and to that he holds as what is unchangeable; but how is it that men make so much of him?' The reply was, 'Men do not look into running water as a mirror, but into still water - it is only the still water that can arrest them all, and keep them (in the contemplation of their real selves). Of things which are what they are by the influence of the earth, it is only the pine and cypress which are the best instances - in winter as in summer brightly green. Of those which were what they were by the influence of Heaven, the most correct examples were Yao and Shun; fortunate in (thus) maintaining their own life correct, and so as to correct the lives of others. As a verification of the (power of) the original endowment, when it has been preserved, take the result of fearlessness - how the heroic spirit of a single brave soldier has been thrown into an army of nine hosts. If a man only seeking for fame and able in this way to secure it can produce such an effect, how much more (may we look for a greater result) from one whose rule is over heaven and earth, and holds all things in his treasury, who simply has his lodging in the six members of his body, whom his ears and eyes serve but as conveying emblematic images of things, who comprehends all his knowledge in a unity, and whose mind never dies! If such a man were to choose a day on which he would ascend far on high, men would (seek to) follow him there. But how should he be willing to occupy himself with other men?'
Shen-tu Jia was (another) man who had lost his feet. Along with Zi-chan of Zheng he studied under the master Bo-hun Wu-ren. Zi-chan said to him (one day), 'If I go out first, do you remain behind; and if you go out first, I will remain behind.' Next day they were again sitting together on the same mat in the hall, when Zi-chan said (again), 'If I go out first, do you remain behind; and if you go out first, I will remain behind. Now I am about to go out; will you stay behind or not? Moreover, when you see one of official rank (like myself), you do not try to get out of his way - do you consider yourself equal to one of official rank?' Shen-tu Jia replied, 'In our Master's school is there indeed such recognition required of official rank? You are one, Sir, whose pleasure is in your official rank, and would therefore take precedence of other men. I have heard that when a mirror is bright, the dust does not rest on it; when dust rests on it the mirror is not bright. When one dwells long with a man of ability and virtue, he comes to be without error. There now is our teacher whom you have chosen to make you greater than you are; and when you still talk in this way, are you not in error?' Zi-chan rejoined, 'A (shattered) object as you are, you would still strive to make yourself out as good as Yao! If I may form an estimate of your virtue, might it not be sufficient to lead you to the examination of yourself?' The other said, 'Most criminals, in describing their offences, would make it out that they ought not to have lost (their feet) for them; few would describe them so as to make it appear that they should not have preserved their feet. They are only the virtuous who know that such a calamity was unavoidable, and therefore rest in it as what was appointed for them. When men stand before (an archer like) Yi with his bent bow, if they are in the middle of his field, that is the place where they should be hit; and if they be not hit, that also was appointed. There are many with their feet entire who laugh at me because I have lost my feet, which makes me feel vexed and angry. But when I go to our teacher, I throw off that feeling, and return (to a better mood) - he has washed, without my knowing it, the other from me by (his instructions in) what is good. I have attended him now for nineteen years, and have not known that I am without my feet. Now, you, Sir, and I have for the object of our study the (virtue) which is internal, and not an adjunct of the body, and yet you are continually directing your attention to my external body - are you not wrong in this?' Zi-chan felt uneasy, altered his manner and looks, and said, 'You need not, Sir, say anything more about it.'
In Lu there was a cripple, called Shu-shan the Toeless, who came on his heels to see Zhongni. Zhongni said to him, 'By your want of circumspection in the past, Sir, you have incurred such a calamity; of what use is your coming to me now?' Toeless said, 'Through my ignorance of my proper business and taking too little care of my body, I came to lose my feet. But now I am come to you, still possessing what is more honourable than my feet, and which therefore I am anxious to preserve entire. There is nothing which Heaven does not cover, and nothing which Earth does not sustain; you, Master, were regarded by me as doing the part of Heaven and Earth - how could I know that you would receive me in such a way?' Confucius rejoined, 'I am but a poor creature. But why, my master, do you not come inside, where I will try to tell you what I have learned?' When Toeless had gone out, Confucius said, 'Be stimulated to effort, my disciples. This toeless cripple is still anxious to learn to make up for the evil of his former conduct;-- how much more should those be so whose conduct has been unchallenged!' Mr. Toeless, however, told Lao Dan (of the interview), saying, 'Kong Qiu, I apprehend, has not yet attained to be a Perfect man. What has he to do with keeping a crowd of disciples around him? He is seeking to have the reputation of being an extraordinary and marvellous man, and does not know that the Perfect man considers this to be as handcuffs and fetters to him.' Lao Dan said, 'Why did you not simply lead him to see the unity of life and death, and that the admissible and inadmissible belong to one category, so freeing him from his fetters? Would this be possible?' Toeless said, 'It is the punishment inflicted on him by Heaven. How can he be freed from it?'
Duke Ai of Lu asked Zhongni, saying, 'There was an ugly man in Wei, called Ai-tai Tuo. His father-in-law, who lived with him, thought so much of him that he could not be away from him. His wife, when she saw him (ugly as he was), represented to her parents, saying, "I had more than ten times rather be his concubine than the wife of any other man." He was never heard to take the lead in discussion, but always seemed to be of the same opinion with others. He had not the position of a ruler, so as to be able to save men from death. He had no revenues, so as to be able to satisfy men's craving for food. He was ugly enough, moreover, to scare the whole world. He agreed with men instead of trying to lead them to adopt his views; his knowledge did not go beyond his immediate neighbourhood. And yet his father-in-law and his wife were of one mind about him in his presence (as I have said) - he must have been different from other men. I called him, and saw him. Certainly he was ugly enough to scare the whole world. He had not lived with me, however, for many months, when I was drawn to the man; and before he had been with me a full year, I had confidence in him. The state being without a chief minister, I (was minded) to commit the government to him. He responded to my proposal sorrowfully, and looked undecided as if he would fain have declined it. I was ashamed of myself (as inferior to him), but finally gave the government into his hands. In a little time, however, he left me and went away. I was sorry and felt that I had sustained a loss, and as if there were no other to share the pleasures of the kingdom with me. What sort of man was he?'
Zhongni said, 'Once when I was sent on a mission to Qi, I saw some pigs sucking at their dead mother. After a little they looked with rapid glances, when they all left her, and ran away. They felt that she did not see them, and that she was no longer like themselves. What they had loved in their mother was not her bodily figure, but what had given animation to her figure. When a man dies in battle, they do not at his interment employ the usual appendages of plumes: as to supplying shoes to one who has lost his feet, there is no reason why he should care for them - in neither case is there the proper reason for their use. The members of the royal harem do not pare their nails nor pierce their ears; when a man is newly married, he remains (for a time) absent from his official duties, and unoccupied with them. That their bodies might be perfect was sufficient to make them thus dealt with; how much greater results should be expected from men whose mental gifts are perfect! This Ai-tai Tuo was believed by men, though he did not speak a word; and was loved by them, though he did no special service for them. He made men appoint him to the government of their states, afraid only that he would not accept the appointment. He must have been a man whose powers were perfect, though his realisation of them was not manifested in his person.
Duke Ai said, 'What is meant by saying that his powers were complete?' Zhongni replied, 'Death and life, preservation and ruin, failure and success, poverty and wealth, superiority and inferiority, blame and praise, hunger and thirst, cold and heat; these are the changes of circumstances, the operation of our appointed lot. Day and night they succeed to one another before us, but there is no wisdom able to discover to what they owe their origination. They are not sufficient therefore to disturb the harmony (of the nature), and are not allowed to enter into the treasury of intelligence. To cause this harmony and satisfaction ever to be diffused, while the feeling of pleasure is not lost from the mind; to allow no break to arise in this state day or night, so that it is always spring-time in his relations with external things; in all his experiences to realise in his mind what is appropriate to each season (of the year): these are the characteristics of him whose powers are perfect.'
'And what do you mean by the realisation of these powers not being manifested in the person?' (pursued further the duke). The reply was, 'There is nothing so level as the surface of a pool of still water. It may serve as an example of what I mean. All within its circuit is preserved (in peace), and there comes to it no agitation from without. The virtuous efficacy is the perfect cultivation of the harmony (of the nature). Though the realisation of this be not manifested in the person, things cannot separate themselves (from its influence).'
Some days afterwards duke Ai told this conversation to Min-zi, saying, 'Formerly it seemed to me the work of the sovereign to stand in court with his face to the south, to rule the kingdom, and to pay good heed to the accounts of the people concerned, lest any should come to a (miserable) death - this I considered to be the sum (of his duty). Now that I have heard that description of the Perfect man, I fear that my idea is not the real one, and that, by employing myself too lightly, I may cause the ruin of my state. I and Kong Qiu are not on the footing of ruler and subject, but on that of a virtuous friendship.'
A person who had no lips, whose legs were bent so that he could only walk on his toes, and who was (otherwise) deformed, addressed his counsels to duke Ling of Wei, who was so pleased with him, that he looked on a perfectly formed man as having a lean and small neck in comparison with him. Another who had a large goitre like an earthenware jar addressed his counsels to duke Huan of Qi, who was so pleased with him that he looked on a perfectly formed man as having a neck lean and small in comparison with him. So it is that when one's virtue is extraordinary, (any deficiency in) his bodily form may be forgotten. When men do not forget what is (easily) forgotten, and forget what is not (easily) forgotten, we have a case of real oblivion. Therefore the sagely man has that in which his mind finds its enjoyment, and (looks on) wisdom as (but) the shoots from an old stump; agreements with others are to him but so much glue ; kindnesses are (but the arts of) intercourse; and great skill is (but as) merchants' wares. The sagely man lays no plans; of what use would wisdom be to him? He has no cutting and hacking to do; of what use would glue be to him? He has lost nothing; of what use would arts of intercourse be to him? He has no goods to dispose of; what need has he to play the merchant? (The want of) these four things are the nourishment of (his) Heavenly (nature); that nourishment is its Heavenly food. Since he receives this food from Heaven, what need has he for anything of man's (devising)? He has the bodily form of man, but not the passions and desires of (other) men. He has the form of man, and therefore he is a man. Being without the passions and desires of men, their approvings and disapprovings are not to be found in him. How insignificant and small is (the body) by which he belongs to humanity! How grand and great is he in the unique perfection of his Heavenly (nature)!
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, 'Can a man indeed be without desires and passions?' The reply was, 'He can.' 'But on what grounds do you call him a man, who is thus without passions and desires?' Zhuangzi said, 'The Dao gives him his personal appearance (and powers); Heaven gives him his bodily form; how should we not call him a man?' Huizi rejoined, 'Since you call him a man, how can he be without passions and desires?' The reply was, 'You are misunderstanding what I mean by passions and desires. What I mean when I say that he is without these is, that this man does not by his likings and dislikings do any inward harm to his body - he always pursues his course without effort, and does not (try to) increase his (store of) life.' Huizi rejoined, 'If there were not that increasing of (the amount) of life, how would he get his body?' Zhuangzi said, 'The Dao gives him his personal appearance (and powers); Heaven gives him his bodily form; and he does not by his likings and dislikings do any internal harm to his body. But now you, Sir, deal with your spirit as if it were something external to you, and subject your vital powers to toil. You sing (your ditties), leaning against a tree; you go to sleep, grasping the stump of a rotten dryandra tree. Heaven selected for you the bodily form (of a man), and you babble about what is strong and what is white.'
*** The Great and Most Honoured Master
He who knows the part which the Heavenly (in him) plays, and knows (also) that which the Human (in him ought to) play, has reached the perfection (of knowledge). He who knows the part which the Heavenly plays (knows) that it is naturally born with him; he who knows the part which the Human ought to play (proceeds) with the knowledge which he possesses to nourish it in the direction of what he does not (yet) know: to complete one's natural term of years and not come to an untimely end in the middle of his course is the fulness of knowledge. Although it be so, there is an evil (attending this condition). Such knowledge still awaits the confirmation of it as correct; it does so because it is not yet determined. How do we know that what we call the Heavenly (in us) is not the Human? and that what we call the Human is not the Heavenly? There must be the True man, and then there is the True knowledge.
What is meant by 'the True Man?' The True men of old did not reject (the views of) the few; they did not seek to accomplish (their ends) like heroes (before others); they did not lay plans to attain those ends. Being such, though they might make mistakes, they had no occasion for repentance; though they might succeed, they had no self-complacency. Being such, they could ascend the loftiest heights without fear; they could pass through water without being made wet by it; they could go into fire without being burnt; so it was that by their knowledge they ascended to and reached the Dao.
The True men of old did not dream when they slept, had no anxiety when they awoke, and did not care that their food should be pleasant. Their breathing came deep and silently. The breathing of the true man comes (even) from his heels, while men generally breathe (only) from their throats. When men are defeated in argument, their words come from their gullets as if they were vomiting. Where lusts and desires are deep, the springs of the Heavenly are shallow.
The True men of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no joy; the exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they went and came. They did not forget what their beginning bad been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be. They accepted (their life) and rejoiced in it; they forgot (all fear of death), and returned (to their state before life). Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Dao, and of all attempts by means of the Human to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who are called the True men. Being such, their minds were free from all thought; their demeanour was still and unmoved; their foreheads beamed simplicity. Whatever coldness came from them was like that of autumn; whatever warmth came from them was like that of spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to what we see in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things what was suitable, and no one could know how far their action would go. Therefore the sagely man might, in his conduct of war, destroy a state without losing the hearts of the people; his benefits and favours might extend to a myriad generations without his being a lover of men. Hence he who tries to share his joys with others is not a sagely man; he who manifests affection is not benevolent; he who observes times and seasons (to regulate his conduct) is not a man of wisdom; he to whom profit and injury are not the same is not a superior man; he who acts for the sake of the name of doing so, and loses his (proper) self is not the (right) scholar; and he who throws away his person in a way which is not the true (way) cannot command the service of others. Such men as Hu Bu-jie, Wu Guang, Bo-yi, Shu-Qi, the count of Ji, Xu-yu, Ji Ta, and Shen-tu Di, all did service for other men, and sought to secure for them what they desired, not seeking their own pleasure.
The True men of old presented the aspect of judging others aright, but without being partisans; of feeling their own insufficiency, but being without flattery or cringing. Their peculiarities were natural to them, but they were not obstinately attached to them; their humility was evident, but there was nothing of unreality or display about it. Their placidity and satisfaction had the appearance of joy; their every movement seemed to be a necessity to them. Their accumulated attractiveness drew men's looks to them; their blandness fixed men's attachment to their virtue. They seemed to accommodate themselves to the (manners of their age), but with a certain severity; their haughty indifference was beyond its control. Unceasing seemed their endeavours to keep (their mouths) shut; when they looked down, they had forgotten what they wished to say. They considered punishments to be the substance (of government, and they never incurred it); ceremonies to be its supporting wings (and they always observed them); wisdom (to indicate) the time (for action, and they always selected it); and virtue to be accordance (with others), and they were all-accordant. Considering punishments to be the substance (of government), yet their generosity appeared in the (manner of their) infliction of death. Considering ceremonies to be its supporting wings, they pursued by means of them their course in the world. Considering wisdom to indicate the time (for action), they felt it necessary to employ it in (the direction of) affairs. Considering virtue to be accordance (with others), they sought to ascend its height along with all who had feet (to climb it). (Such were they), and yet men really thought that they did what they did by earnest effort. In this way they were one and the same in all their likings and dislikings. Where they liked, they were the same; where they did not like, they were the same. In the former case where they liked, they were fellow-workers with the Heavenly (in them); in the latter where they disliked, they were co-workers with the Human in them. The one of these elements (in their nature) did not overcome the other. Such were those who are called the True men.
Death and life are ordained, just as we have the constant succession of night and day - in both cases from Heaven. Men have no power to do anything in reference to them - such is the constitution of things. There are those who specially regard Heaven as their father, and they still love It (distant as It is); how much more should they love That which stands out (Superior and Alone)! Some specially regard their ruler as superior to themselves, and will give their bodies to die for him; how much more should they do so for That which is their true (Ruler)! When the springs are dried up, the fishes collect together on the land. Than that they should moisten one another there by the damp about them, and keep one another wet by their slime, it would be better for them to forget one another in the rivers and lakes. And when men praise Yao and condemn Jie, it would be better to forget them both, and seek the renovation of the Dao.
There is the great Mass (of nature) - I find the support of my body on it; my life is spent in toil on it; my old age seeks ease on it; at death I find rest in it - what makes my life a good makes my death also a good. If you hide away a boat in the ravine of a hill, and hide away the hill in a lake, you will say that (the boat) is secure; but at midnight there shall come a strong man and carry it off on his back, while you in the dark know nothing about it. You may hide away anything, whether small or great, in the most suitable place, and yet it shall disappear from it. But if you could hide the world in the world, so that there was nowhere to which it could be removed, this would be the grand reality of the ever-during Thing. When the body of man comes from its special mould, there is even then occasion for joy; but this body undergoes a myriad transformations, and does not immediately reach its perfection; does it not thus afford occasion for joys incalculable? Therefore the sagely man enjoys himself in that from which there is no possibility of separation, and by which all things are preserved. He considers early death or old age, his beginning and his ending, all to be good, and in this other men imitate him; how much more will they do so in regard to That Itself on which all things depend, and from which every transformation arises!
This is the Dao; there is in It emotion and sincerity, but It does nothing and has no bodily form. It may be handed down (by the teacher), but may not be received (by his scholars). It may be apprehended (by the mind), but It cannot be seen. It has Its root and ground (of existence) in Itself. Before there were heaven and earth, from of old, there It was, securely existing. From It came the mysterious existences of spirits, from It the mysterious existence of God. It produced heaven; It produced earth. It was before the Tai-ji, and yet could not be considered high; It was below all space, and yet could not be considered deep. It was produced before heaven and earth, and yet could not be considered to have existed long; It was older than the highest antiquity, and yet could not be considered old. Shi-wei got It, and by It adjusted heaven and earth. Fu-xi got It, and by It penetrated to the mystery of the maternity of the primary matter. The Wei-dou got It, and from all antiquity has made no eccentric movement. The Sun and Moon got It, and from all antiquity have not intermitted (their bright shining). Kan-pei got It, and by It became lord of Kun-lun. Feng-yi got It, and by It enjoyed himself in the Great River. Jian-wu got It, and by It dwelt on mount Tai. Huang-di got It, and by It ascended the cloudy sky. Zhuan-xu got It, and by It dwelt in the Dark Palace. Yu-jiang got It, and by It was set on the North Pole. Xi Wang-mu got It, and by It had her seat in (the palace of) Shao-guang. No one knows Its beginning; no one knows Its end. Peng Zu got It, and lived on from the time of the lord of Yu to that of the Five Chiefs. Fu Yue got It, and by It became chief minister to Wu-ding, (who thus) in a trice became master of the kingdom. (After his death), Fu Yue mounted to the eastern portion of the Milky Way, where, riding on Sagittarius and Scorpio, he took his place among the stars.
Nan-bo Zi-kui asked Nu Yu, saying, 'You are old, Sir, while your complexion is like that of a child; how is it so?' The reply was, 'I have become acquainted with the Dao.' The other said, 'Can I learn the Dao?' Nu Yu said, 'No. How can you? You, Sir, are not the man to do so. There was Bu-liang Yi who had the abilities of a sagely man, but not the Dao, while I had the Dao, but not the abilities. I wished, however, to teach him, if, peradventure, he might become the sagely man indeed. If he should not do so, it was easy (I thought) for one possessing the Dao of the sagely man to communicate it to another possessing his abilities. Accordingly, I proceeded to do so, but with deliberation. After three days, he was able to banish from his mind all worldly (matters). This accomplished, I continued my intercourse with him in the same way; and in seven days he was able to banish from his mind all thought of men and things. This accomplished, and my instructions continued, after nine days, he was able to count his life as foreign to himself. This accomplished, his mind was afterwards clear as the morning; and after this he was able to see his own individuality. That individuality perceived, he was able to banish all thought of Past or Present. Freed from this, he was able to penetrate to (the truth that there is no difference between) life and death - (how) the destruction of life is not dying, and the communication of other life is not living. (The Dao) is a thing which accompanies all other things and meets them, which is present when they are overthrown and when they obtain their completion. Its name is Tranquillity amid all Disturbances, meaning that such Disturbances lead to Its Perfection.'
'And how did you, being alone (without any teacher), learn all this?' 'I learned it,' was the reply, 'from the son of Fu-mo; he learned it from the grandson of Luo-song; he learned it from Zhan-ming; he learned it from Nie-xu; he, from Xu-yu; he, from Ou; he, from Xuan-ming; he, from Shen-liao; and he learned it from Yi-shi.'
Zi-si, Zi-yu, Zi-li, and Zi-lai, these four men, were talking together, when some one said, 'Who can suppose the head to be made from nothing, the spine from life, and the rump-bone from death? Who knows how death and birth, living on and disappearing, compose the one body? I would be friends with him.' The four men looked at one another and laughed, but no one seized with his mind the drift of the questions. All, however, were friends together. Not long after Zi-yu fell ill, and Zi-si went to inquire for him. 'How great,' said (the sufferer), 'is the Creator! That He should have made me the deformed object that I am!' He was a crooked hunchback; his five viscera were squeezed into the upper part of his body; his chin bent over his navel; his shoulder was higher than his crown; on his crown was an ulcer pointing to the sky; his breath came and went in gasps: yet he was easy in his mind, and made no trouble of his condition. He limped to a well, looked at himself in it, and said, 'Alas that the Creator should have made me the deformed object that I am!' Si said, 'Do you dislike your condition?' He replied, 'No, why should I dislike it? If He were to transform my left arm into a cock, I should be watching with it the time of the night; if He were to transform my right arm into a cross-bow, I should then be looking for a Xiao to (bring down and) roast; if He were to transform my rump-bone into a wheel, and my spirit into a horse, I should then be mounting it, and would not change it for another steed. Moreover, when we have got (what we are to do), there is the time (of life) in which to do it; when we lose that (at death), submission (is what is required). When we rest in what the time requires, and manifest that submission, neither joy nor sorrow can find entrance (to the mind). This would be what the ancients called loosing the cord by which (the life) is suspended. But one hung up cannot loose himself;-- he is held fast by his bonds. And that creatures cannot overcome Heaven (the inevitable) is a long-acknowledged fact - why should I hate my condition?'
Before long Zi-lai fell ill, and lay gasping at the point of death, while his wife and children stood around him wailing. Zi-li went to ask for him, and said to them, 'Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him as he is passing through his change.' Then, leaning against the door, he said (to the dying man), 'Great indeed is the Creator! What will He now make you to become? Where will He take you to? Will He make you the liver of a rat, or the arm of an insect? Zi-lai replied, 'Wherever a parent tells a son to go, east, west, south, or north, he simply follows the command. The Yin and Yang are more to a man than his parents are. If they are hastening my death, and I do not quietly submit to them, I shall be obstinate and rebellious. There is the great Mass (of nature);-- I find the support of my body in it; my life is spent in toil on it; my old age seeks ease on it; at death I find rest on it: what has made my life a good will make my death also a good. Here now is a great founder, casting his metal. If the metal were to leap up (in the pot), and say, "I must be made into a (sword like the) Mo-ye," the great founder would be sure to regard it as uncanny. So, again, when a form is being fashioned in the mould of the womb, if it were to say, "I must become a man; I must become a man," the Creator would be sure to regard it as uncanny. When we once understand that heaven and earth are a great melting-pot, and the Creator a great founder, where can we have to go to that shall not be right for us? We are born as from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awaking.'
Zi-sang Hu, Meng Zi-fan, and Zi-qin Zhang, these three men, were friends together. (One of them said), 'Who can associate together without any (thought of) such association, or act together without any (evidence of) such co-operation? Who can mount up into the sky and enjoy himself amidst the mists, disporting beyond the utmost limits (of things), and forgetting all others as if this were living, and would have no end?' The three men looked at one another and laughed, not perceiving the drift of the questions; and they continued to associate together as friends. Suddenly, after a time, Zi-sang Hu died. Before he was buried, Confucius heard of the event, and sent Zi-gong to go and see if he could render any assistance. One of the survivors had composed a ditty, and the other was playing on his lute. Then they sang together in unison,
'Ah! come, Sang Hu! ah! come, Sang Hu!
Your being true you've got again,
While we, as men, still here remain
Ohone!'
Zi-gong hastened forward to them, and said, 'I venture to ask whether it be according to the rules to be singing thus in the presence of the corpse?' The two men looked at each other, and laughed, saying, 'What does this man know about the idea that underlies (our) rules?' Zi-gong returned to Confucius, and reported to him, saying, 'What sort of men are those? They had made none of the usual preparations, and treated the body as a thing foreign to them. They were singing in the presence of the corpse, and there was no change in their countenances. I cannot describe them; what sort of men are they?' Confucius replied, 'Those men occupy and enjoy themselves in what is outside the (common) ways (of the world), while I occupy and enjoy myself in what lies within those ways. There is no common ground for those of such different ways; and when I sent you to condole with those men, I was acting stupidly. They, moreover, make man to be the fellow of the Creator, and seek their enjoyment in the formless condition of heaven and earth. They consider life to be an appendage attached, an excrescence annexed to them, and death to be a separation of the appendage and a dispersion of the contents of the excrescence. With these views, how should they know wherein death and life are to be found, or what is first and what is last? They borrow different substances, and pretend that the common form of the body is composed of them. They dismiss the thought of (its inward constituents like) the liver and gall, and (its outward constituents), the ears and eyes. Again and again they end and they begin, having no knowledge of first principles. They occupy themselves ignorantly and vaguely with what (they say) lies outside the dust and dirt (of the world), and seek their enjoyment in the business of doing nothing. How should they confusedly address themselves to the ceremonies practised by the common people, and exhibit themselves as doing so to the ears and eyes of the multitude?'
Zi-gong said, 'Yes, but why do you, Master, act according to the (common) ways (of the world)?' The reply was, 'I am in this under the condemning sentence of Heaven. Nevertheless, I will share with you (what I have attained to).' Zi-gong rejoined, 'I venture to ask the method which you pursue;' and Confucius said, 'Fishes breed and grow in the water; man developes in the Dao. Growing in the water, the fishes cleave the pools, and their nourishment is supplied to them. Developing in the Dao, men do nothing, and the enjoyment of their life is secured. Hence it is said, "Fishes forget one another in the rivers and lakes; men forget one another in the arts of the Dao."'
Zi-gong said, 'I venture to ask about the man who stands aloof from others.' The reply was, 'He stands aloof from other men, but he is in accord with Heaven! Hence it is said, "The small man of Heaven is the superior man among men; the superior man among men is the small man of Heaven!"'
Yan Hui asked Zhongni, saying, 'When the mother of Meng-sun Cai died, in all his wailing for her he did not shed a tear; in the core of his heart he felt no distress; during all the mourning rites, he exhibited no sorrow. Without these three things, he (was considered to have) discharged his mourning well; is it that in the state of Lu one who has not the reality may yet get the reputation of having it? I think the matter very strange.' Zhongni said, 'That Meng-sun carried out (his views) to the utmost. He was advanced in knowledge; but (in this case) it was not possible for him to appear to be negligent (in his ceremonial observances)', but he succeeded in being really so to himself. Meng-sun does not know either what purposes life serves, or what death serves; he does not know which should be first sought, and which last. If he is to be transformed into something else, he will simply await the transformation which he does not yet know. This is all he does. And moreover, when one is about to undergo his change, how does he know that it has not taken place? And when he is not about to undergo his change, how does he know that it has taken place? Take the case of me and you: are we in a dream from which we have not begun to awake? Moreover, Meng-sun presented in his body the appearance of being agitated, but in his mind he was conscious of no loss. The death was to him like the issuing from one's dwelling at dawn, and no (more terrible) reality. He was more awake than others were. When they wailed, he also wailed, having in himself the reason why he did so. And we all have our individuality which makes us what we are as compared together; but how do we know that we determine in any case correctly that individuality? Moreover you dream that you are a bird, and seem to be soaring to the sky; or that you are a fish, and seem to be diving in the deep. But you do not know whether we that are now speaking are awake or in a dream. It is not the meeting with what is pleasurable that produces the smile; it is not the smile suddenly produced that produces the arrangement (of the person). When one rests in what has been arranged, and puts away all thought of the transformation, he is in unity with the mysterious Heaven.'
Yi-er Zi having gone to see Xu You, the latter said to him, 'What benefit have you received from Yao?' The reply was, 'Yao says to me, You must yourself labour at benevolence and righteousness, and be able to tell clearly which is right and which wrong (in conflicting statements).' Xu You rejoined, 'Why then have you come to me? Since Yao has put on you the brand of his benevolence and righteousness, and cut off your nose with his right and wrong, how will you be able to wander in the way of aimless enjoyment, of unregulated contemplation, and the ever-changing forms (of dispute)?' Yi-er Zi said, 'That may be; but I should like to skirt along its hedges.' 'But,' said the other, 'it cannot be. Eyes without pupils can see nothing of the beauty of the eyebrows, eyes, and other features; the blind have nothing to do with the green, yellow, and variegated colours of the sacrificial robes.' Yi-er Zi rejoined, 'Yet, when Wu-zhuang lost his beauty, Ju-liang his strength, and Huang-Di his wisdom, they all (recovered them) under the moulding (of your system) - how do you know that the Maker will not obliterate the marks of my branding, and supply my dismemberment, so that, again perfect in my form, I may follow you as my teacher?' Xu You said, 'Ah! that cannot yet be known. I will tell you the rudiments. 0 my Master! 0 my Master! He gives to all things their blended qualities, and does not count it any righteousness; His favours reach to all generations, and He does not count it any benevolence; He is more ancient than the highest antiquity, and does not count Himself old; He overspreads heaven and supports the earth; He carves and fashions all bodily forms, and does not consider it any act of skill;-- this is He in whom I find my enjoyment.'
Yan Hui said, 'I am making progress.' Zhongni replied, 'What do you mean?' 'I have ceased to think of benevolence and righteousness,' was the reply. 'Very well; but that is not enough.' Another day, Hui again saw Zhongni, and said, 'I am making progress.' 'What do you mean?' 'I have lost all thought of ceremonies and music.' 'Very well, but that is not enough.' A third day, Hui again saw (the Master), and said, 'I am making progress.' 'What do you mean?' 'I sit and forget everything.' Zhongni changed countenance, and said, 'What do you mean by saying that you sit and forget (everything)?' Yan Hui replied, 'My connexion with the body and its parts is dissolved; my perceptive organs are discarded. Thus leaving my material form, and bidding farewell to my knowledge, I am become one with the Great Pervader. This I call sitting and forgetting all things.' Zhongni said, 'One (with that Pervader), you are free from all likings; so transformed, you are become impermanent. You have, indeed, become superior to me! I must ask leave to follow in your steps.'
Zi-yu and Zi-sang were friends. (Once), when it had rained continuously for ten days, Zi-yu said, 'I fear that Zi-sang may be in distress.' So he wrapped up some rice, and went to give it to him to eat. When he came to Zi-sang's door, there issued from it sounds between singing and wailing; a lute was struck, and there came the words, '0 Father! 0 Mother! 0 Heaven! 0 Men!' The voice could not sustain itself, and the line was hurriedly pronounced. Zi-yu entered and said, 'Why are you singing, Sir, this line of poetry in such a way?' The other replied, 'I was thinking, and thinking in vain, how it was that I was brought to such extremity. Would my parents have wished me to be so poor? Heaven overspreads all without any partial feeling, and so does Earth sustain all; Would Heaven and Earth make me so poor with any unkindly feeling? I was trying to find out who had done it, and I could not do so. But here I am in this extremity - it is what was appointed for me!'
*** The Normal Course for Rulers and Kings
Nie Que put four questions to Wang Ni, not one of which did he know (how to answer). On this Nie Que leaped up, and in great delight walked away and informed Yu-yi Zi of it, who said to him, 'Do you (only) now know it?' He of the line of Yu was not equal to him of the line of Tai. He of Yu still kept in himself (the idea of) benevolence by which to constrain (the submission of) men; and he did win men, but he had not begun to proceed by what did not belong to him as a man. He of the line of Tai would sleep tranquilly, and awake in contented simplicity. He would consider himself now (merely) as a horse, and now (merely) as an ox. His knowledge was real and untroubled by doubts; and his virtue was very true: he had not begun to proceed by what belonged to him as a man.
Jian Wu went to see the mad (recluse), Jie-yu, who said to him, 'What did Ri-Zhong Shi tell you?' The reply was, 'He told me that when rulers gave forth their regulations according to their own views and enacted righteous measures, no one would venture not to obey them, and all would be transformed.' Jie-yu said, 'That is but the hypocrisy of virtue. For the right ordering of the world it would be like trying to wade through the sea and dig through the He, or employing a mosquito to carry a mountain on its back. And when a sage is governing, does he govern men's outward actions? He is (himself) correct, and so (his government) goes on; this is the simple and certain way by which he secures the success of his affairs. Think of the bird which flies high, to avoid being hurt by the dart on the string of the archer, and the little mouse which makes its hole deep under Shen-qiu to avoid the danger of being smoked or dug out; are (rulers) less knowing than these two little creatures?'
Tian Gen, rambling on the south of (mount) Yin, came to the neighbourhood of the Liao-water. Happening there to meet with the man whose name is not known, he put a question to him, saying, 'I beg to ask what should be done in order to (carry on) the government of the world.' The nameless man said, 'Go away; you are a rude borderer. Why do you put to me a question for which you are unprepared? I would simply play the part of the Maker of (all) things. When wearied, I would mount on the bird of the light and empty air, proceed beyond the six cardinal points, and wander in the region of nonentity, to dwell in the wilderness of desert space. What method have you, moreover, for the government of the world that you (thus) agitate my mind?' (Tian Gen), however, again asked the question, and the nameless man said, 'Let your mind find its enjoyment in pure simplicity; blend yourself with (the primary) ether in idle indifference; allow all things to take their natural course; and admit no personal or selfish consideration - do this and the world will be governed.'
Yang Zi-ju, having an interview with Lao Dan, said to him, 'Here is a man, alert and vigorous in responding to all matters, clearsighted and widely intelligent, and an unwearied student of the Dao - can he be compared to one of the intelligent kings?' The reply was, 'Such a man is to one of the intelligent kings but as the bustling underling of a court who toils his body and distresses his mind with his various contrivances. And moreover, it is the beauty of the skins of the tiger and leopard which makes men hunt them; the agility of the monkey, or (the sagacity of) the dog that catches the yak, which make men lead them in strings; but can one similarly endowed be compared to the intelligent kings?' Yang Zi-ju looked discomposed and said, 'I venture to ask you what the government of the intelligent kings is.' Lao Dan replied, 'In the governing of the intelligent kings, their services overspread all under the sky, but they did not seem to consider it as proceeding from themselves; their transforming influence reached to all things, but the people did not refer it to them with hope. No one could tell the name of their agency, but they made men and things be joyful in themselves. Where they took their stand could not be fathomed, and they found their enjoyment in (the realm of) nonentity.'
In Zheng there was a mysterious wizard called Ji-xian. He knew all about the deaths and births of men, their preservation and ruin, their misery and happiness, and whether their lives would be long or short, foretelling the year, the month, the decade and the day like a spirit. When the people of Kang saw him, they all ran out of his way. Liezi went to see him, and was fascinated by him. Returning, he told Hu-zi of his interview, and said, 'I considered your doctrine, my master, to be perfect, but I have found another which is superior to it.' Hu-zi replied, 'I have communicated to you but the outward letter of my doctrine, and have not communicated its reality and spirit; and do you think that you are in possession of it? However many hens there be, if there be not the cock among them, how should they lay (real) eggs? When you confront the world with your doctrine, you are sure to show in your countenance (all that is in your mind), and so enable (this) man to succeed in interpreting your physiognomy. Try and come to me with him, that I may show myself to him.'
On the morrow, accordingly, Liezi came with the man and saw Hu-zi. When they went out, the wizard said, 'Alas! your master is a dead man. He will not live;-- not for ten days more! I saw something strange about him - I saw the ashes (of his life) all slaked with water!' When Liezi reentered, he wept till the front of his jacket was wet with his tears, and told Hu-zi what the man had said. Hu-zi said, 'I showed myself to him with the forms of (vegetation beneath) the earth. There were the sprouts indeed, but without (any appearance of) growth or regularity:-- he seemed to see me with the springs of my (vital) power closed up. Try and come to me with him again.'
Next day, accordingly, Liezi brought the man again and saw Hu-zi. When they went out, the man said, 'It is a fortunate thing for your master that he met with me. He will get better; he has all the signs of living! I saw the balance (of the springs of life) that had been stopped (inclining in his favour).' Liezi went in, and reported these words to his master, who said, 'I showed myself to him after the pattern of the earth (beneath the) sky. Neither semblance nor reality entered (into my exhibition), but the springs (of life) were issuing from beneath my feet;-- he seemed to see me with the springs of vigorous action in full play. Try and come with him again.'
Next day Liezi came with the man again, and again saw Hu-zi with him. When they went out, the wizard said, 'Your master is never the same. I cannot understand his physiognomy. Let him try to steady himself, and I will again view him.' Liezi went in and reported this to Hu-zi, who said, 'This time I showed myself to him after the pattern of the grand harmony (of the two elemental forces), with the superiority inclining to neither. He seemed to see me with the springs of (vital) power in equal balance. Where the water wheels about from (the movements of) a dugong, there is an abyss; where it does so from the arresting (of its course), there is an abyss; where it does so, and the water keeps flowing on, there is an abyss. There are nine abysses with their several names, and I have only exhibited three of them. Try and come with him again.'
Next day they came, and they again saw Hu-zi. But before he had settled himself in his position, the wizard lost himself and ran away. 'Pursue him,' said Hu-zi, and Liezi did so, but could not come up with him. He returned, and told Hu-zi, saying, 'There is an end of him; he is lost; I could not find him.' Hu-zi rejoined, 'I was showing him myself after the pattern of what was before I began to come from my author. I confronted him with pure vacancy, and an easy indifference. He did not know what I meant to represent. Now he thought it was the idea of exhausted strength, and now that of an onward flow, and therefore he ran away.'
After this, Liezi considered that he had not yet begun to learn (his master's doctrine). He returned to his house, and for three years did not go out. He did the cooking for his wife. He fed the pigs as if he were feeding men. He took no part or interest in occurring affairs. He put away the carving and sculpture about him, and returned to pure simplicity. Like a clod of earth he stood there in his bodily presence. Amid all distractions he was (silent) and shut up in himself. And in this way he continued to the end of his life.
Non-action (makes its exemplifier) the lord of all fame; non-action (serves him as) the treasury of all plans; non-action (fits him for) the burden of all offices; non-action (makes him) the lord of all wisdom. The range of his action is inexhaustible, but there is nowhere any trace of his presence. He fulfils all that he has received from Heaven, but he does not see that he was the recipient of anything. A pure vacancy (of all purpose) is what characterises him. When the perfect man employs his mind, it is a mirror. It conducts nothing and anticipates nothing; it responds to (what is before it), but does not retain it. Thus he is able to deal successfully with all things, and injures none.
The Ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the Ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, 'Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing, while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him.' Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died.
** Outer Chapters
*** Webbed Toes
A ligament uniting the big toe with the other toes and an extra finger may be natural growths, but they are more than is good for use. Excrescences on the person and hanging tumours are growths from the body, but they are unnatural additions to it. There are many arts of benevolence and righteousness, and the exercise of them is distributed among the five viscera; but this is not the correct method according to the characteristics of the Dao. Thus it is that the addition to the foot is but the attachment to it of so much useless flesh, and the addition to the hand is but the planting on it of a useless finger. (So it is that) the connecting (the virtues) with the five viscera renders, by excess or restraint, the action of benevolence and righteousness bad, and leads to many arts as in the employment of (great) powers of hearing or of vision. Therefore an extraordinary power of vision leads to the confusion of the five colours and an excessive use of ornament. (Its possessor), in the resplendence of his green and yellow, white and black, black and green, will not stop till he has become a Li Zhu. An extraordinary power of hearing leads to a confusion of the five notes, and an excessive use of the six musical accords. (Its possessor), in bringing out the tones from the instruments of metal, stone, silk, and bamboo, aided by the Huang-zhong and Da-lu (tubes), will not stop till he has become a Shi Kuang. (So), excessive benevolence eagerly brings out virtues and restrains its (proper) nature, that (its possessor) may acquire a famous reputation, and cause all the organs and drums in the world to celebrate an unattainable condition; and he will not stop till he has become a Zeng (Shen) or a Shi (Qiu). An extraordinary faculty in debating leads to the piling up of arguments like a builder with his bricks, or a netmaker with his string. (Its possessor) cunningly contrives his sentences and enjoys himself in discussing what hardness is and what whiteness is, where views agree and where they differ, and pressing on, though weary, with short steps, with (a multitude of) useless words to make good his opinion; nor will he stop till he has become a Yang (Zhu) or Mo (Di). But in all these cases the parties, with their redundant and divergent methods, do not proceed by that which is the correct path for all under the sky. That which is the perfectly correct path is not to lose the real character of the nature with which we are endowed. Hence the union (of parts) should not be considered redundance, nor their divergence superfluity; what is long should not be considered too long, nor what is short too short. A duck's legs, for instance, are short, but if we try to lengthen them, it occasions pain; and a crane's legs are long, but if we try to cut off a portion of them, it produces grief. Where a part is by nature long, we are not to amputate, or where it is by nature short, we are not to lengthen it. There is no occasion to try to remove any trouble that it may cause. The presumption is that benevolence and righteousness are not constituents of humanity; for to how much anxiety does the exercise of them give rise! Moreover when another toe is united to the great toe, to divide the membrane makes you weep; and when there is an extra finger, to gnaw it off makes you cry out. In the one case there is a member too many, and in the other a member too few; but the anxiety and pain which they cause is the same. The benevolent men of the present age look at the evils of the world, as with eyes full of dust, and are filled with sorrow by them, while those who are not benevolent, having violently altered the character of their proper nature, greedily pursue after riches and honours. The presumption therefore is that benevolence and righteousness are contrary to the nature of man - how full of trouble and contention has the world been ever since the three dynasties began!
And moreover, in employing the hook and line, the compass and square, to give things their correct form you must cut away portions of what naturally belongs to them; in employing strings and fastenings, glue and varnish to make things firm, you must violently interfere with their qualities. The bendings and stoppings in ceremonies and music, and the factitious expression in the countenance of benevolence and righteousness, in order to comfort the minds of men - these all show a failure in observing the regular principles (of the human constitution). All men are furnished with such regular principles; and according to them what is bent is not made so by the hook, nor what is straight by the line, nor what is round by the compass, nor what is square by the carpenter's square. Nor is adhesion effected by the use of glue and varnish, nor are things bound together by means of strings and bands. Thus it is that all in the world are produced what they are by a certain guidance, while they do not know how they are produced so; and they equally attain their several ends while they do not know how it is that they do so. Anciently it was so, and it is so now; and this constitution of things should not be made of none effect. Why then should benevolence and righteousness be employed as connecting (links), or as glue and varnish, strings and bands, and the enjoyment arising from the Dao and its characteristics be attributed to them? It is a deception practised upon the world. Where the deception is small, there will be a change in the direction (of the objects pursued); where it is great, there will be a change of the nature itself. How do I know that it is so? Since he of the line of Yu called in his benevolence and righteousness to distort and vex the world, the world has not ceased to hurry about to execute their commands - has not this been by means of benevolence and righteousness to change (men's views) of their nature?
I will therefore try and discuss this matter. From the commencement of the three dynasties downwards, nowhere has there been a man who has not under (the influence of external) things altered (the course of) his nature. Small men for the sake of gain have sacrificed their persons; scholars for the sake of fame have done so; great officers, for the sake of their families; and sagely men, for the sake of the kingdom. These several classes, with different occupations, and different reputations, have agreed in doing injury to their nature and sacrificing their persons. Take the case of a male and female slave; they have to feed the sheep together, but they both lose their sheep. Ask the one what he was doing, and you will find that he was holding his bamboo tablets and reading. Ask the other, and you will find that she was amusing herself with some game. They were differently occupied, but they equally lose their sheep. (So), Bo-yi died at the foot of Shou-yang to maintain his fame, and the robber Zhi died on the top of Dong-ling in his eagerness for gain. Their deaths were occasioned by different causes, but they equally shortened their lives and did violence to their nature; why must we approve of Bo-yi, and condemn the robber Zhi? In cases of such sacrifice all over the world, when one makes it for the sake of benevolence and righteousness, the common people style him 'a superior man,' but when another does it for the sake of goods and riches, they style him 'a small man.' The action of sacrificing is the same, and yet we have 'the superior man' and 'the small man!' In the matter of destroying his life, and doing injury to his nature, the robber Zhi simply did the same as Bo-yi - why must we make the distinction of 'superior man' and 'small man' between them? Moreover, those who devote their nature to (the pursuit) of benevolence and righteousness, though they should attain to be like Zeng (Shen) and Shi (Qiu), I do not pronounce to be good; those who devote it to (the study of) the five flavours, though they attain to be like Shu-er, I do not pronounce to be good; those who devote it to the (discrimination of the) five notes, though they attain to be like Shi Kuang, I do not pronounce to be quick of hearing; those who devote it to the (appreciation of the) five colours, though they attain to be like Li Zhu, I do not pronounce to be clear of vision. When I pronounce men to be good, I am not speaking of their benevolence and righteousness; the goodness is simply (their possession of) the qualities (of the Dao). When I pronounce them to be good, I am not speaking of what are called benevolence and righteousness; but simply of their allowing the nature with which they are endowed to have its free course. When I pronounce men to be quick of hearing, I do not mean that they hearken to anything else, but that they hearken to themselves; when I pronounce them to be clear of vision, I do not mean that they look to anything else, but that they look to themselves. Now those who do not see themselves but see other things, who do not get possession of themselves but get possession of other things, get possession of what belongs to others, and not of what is their own; and they reach forth to what attracts others, and not to that in themselves which should attract them. But thus reaching forth to what attracts others and not to what should attract them in themselves, be they like the robber Zhi or like Bo-yi, they equally err in the way of excess or of perversity. What I am ashamed of is erring in the characteristics of the Dao, and therefore, in the higher sphere, I do not dare to insist on the practice of benevolence and righteousness, and, in the lower, I do not dare to allow myself either in the exercise of excess or perversity.
*** Horses's Hoofs
Horses can with their hoofs tread on the hoarfrost and snow, and with their hair withstand the wind and cold; they feed on the grass and drink water; they prance with their legs and leap: this is the true nature of horses. Though there were made for them grand towers and large dormitories, they would prefer not to use them. But when Bo-le (arose and) said, 'I know well how to manage horses,' (men proceeded) to singe and mark them, to clip their hair, to pare their hoofs, to halter their heads, to bridle them and hobble them, and to confine them in stables and corrals. (When subjected to this treatment), two or three in every ten of them died. (Men proceeded further) to subject them to hunger and thirst, to gallop them and race them, and to make them go together in regular order. In front were the evils of the bit and ornamented breastbands, and behind were the terrors of the whip and switch. (When so treated), more than half of them died. The (first) potter said, 'I know well how to deal with clay;' and (men proceeded) to mould it into circles as exact as if made by the compass, and into squares as exact as if formed by the measuring square. The (first) carpenter said, 'I know well how to deal with wood;' and (men proceeded) to make it bent as if by the application of the hook, and straight as if by the application of the plumb-line. But is it the nature of clay and wood to require the application of the compass and square, of the hook and line? And yet age after age men have praised Bo-le, saying, 'He knew well how to manage horses,' and also the (first) potter and carpenter, saying, 'They knew well how to deal with clay and wood.' This is just the error committed by the governors of the world.
According to my idea, those who knew well to govern mankind would not act so. The people had their regular and constant nature: they wove and made themselves clothes; they tilled the ground and got food. This was their common faculty. They were all one in this, and did not form themselves into separate classes; so were they constituted and left to their natural tendencies. Therefore in the age of perfect virtue men walked along with slow and grave step, and with their looks steadily directed forwards. At that time, on the hills there were no foot-paths, nor excavated passages; on the lakes there were no boats nor dams; all creatures lived in companies; and the places of their settlement were made close to one another. Birds and beasts multiplied to flocks and herds; the grass and trees grew luxuriant and long. In this condition the birds and beasts might be led about without feeling the constraint; the nest of the magpie might be climbed to, and peeped into. Yes, in the age of perfect virtue, men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family - how could they know among themselves the distinctions of superior men and small men? Equally without knowledge, they did not leave (the path of) their natural virtue; equally free from desires, they were in the state of pure simplicity. In that state of pure simplicity, the nature of the people was what it ought to be. But when the sagely men appeared, limping and wheeling about in (the exercise of) benevolence, pressing along and standing on tiptoe in the doing of righteousness, then men universally began to be perplexed. (Those sages also) went to excess in their performances of music, and in their gesticulations in the practice of ceremonies, and then men began to be separated from one another. If the raw materials had not been cut and hacked, who could have made a sacrificial vase from them? If the natural jade had not been broken and injured, who could have made the handles for the libation-cups from it? If the attributes of the Dao had not been disallowed, how should they have preferred benevolence and righteousness? If the instincts of the nature had not been departed from, how should ceremonies and music have come into use? If the five colours had not been confused, how should the ornamental figures have been formed? If the five notes had not been confused, how should they have supplemented them by the musical accords? The cutting and hacking of the raw materials to form vessels was the crime of the skilful workman; the injury done to the characteristics of the Dao in order to the practice of benevolence and righteousness was the error of the sagely men.
Horses, when living in the open country, eat the grass, and drink water; when pleased, they intertwine their necks and rub one another; when enraged, they turn back to back and kick one another - this is all that they know to do. But if we put the yoke on their necks, with the moonlike frontlet displayed on all their foreheads, then they know to look slily askance, to curve their necks, to rush viciously, trying to get the bit out of their mouths, and to filch the reins (from their driver); this knowledge of the horse and its ability thus to act the part of a thief is the crime of Bo-le. In the time of (the Di) He-xu, the people occupied their dwellings without knowing what they were doing, and walked out without knowing where they were going. They filled their mouths with food and were glad; they slapped their stomachs to express their satisfaction. This was all the ability which they possessed. But when the sagely men appeared, with their bendings and stoppings in ceremonies and music to adjust the persons of all, and hanging up their benevolence and righteousness to excite the endeavours of all to reach them, in order to comfort their minds, then the people began to stump and limp about in their love of knowledge, and strove with one another in their pursuit of gain, so that there was no stopping them: this was the error of those sagely men.
*** Cutting open Satchels
In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief. Let me try and set this matter forth. Do not those who are vulgarly called wise prove to be collectors for the great thieves? And do not those who are called sages prove to be but guardians in the interest of the great thieves? How do I know that the case is so? Formerly, in the state of Qi, the neighbouring towns could see one another; their cocks and dogs never ceased to answer the crowing and barking of other cocks and dogs (between them). The nets were set (in the water and on the land); and the ploughs and hoes were employed over more than a space of two thousand li square. All within its four boundaries, the establishment of the ancestral temples and of the altars of the land and grain, and the ordering of the hamlets and houses, and of every corner in the districts, large, medium, and small, were in all particulars according to the rules of the sages. So it was; but yet one morning, Tian Cheng-zi killed the ruler of Qi, and stole his state. And was it only the state that he stole? Along with it he stole also the regulations of the sages and wise men (observed in it). And so, though he got the name of being a thief and a robber, yet he himself continued to live as securely as Yao and Shun had done. Small states did not dare to find fault with him; great states did not dare to take him off; for twelve generations (his descendants) have possessed the state of Qi. Thus do we not have a case in which not only did (the party) steal the state of Qi, but at the same time the regulations of its sages and wise men, which thereby served to guard the person of him, thief and robber as he was? Let me try to set forth this subject (still further). Have not there been among those vulgarly styled the wisest, such as have collected (their wealth) for the great chief? And among those styled the most sage such as have guarded it for him? How do I know that it has been so? Formerly, Long-feng was beheaded; Bi-gan had his heart torn out; Chang Hong was ripped open; and Zi-xu was reduced to pulp (in the Chang). Worthy as those four men were, they did not escape such dreadful deaths. The followers of the robber Zhi asked him, saying, 'Has the robber also any method or principle (in his proceedings)?' He replied, 'What profession is there which has not its principles? That the robber in his recklessness comes to the conclusion that there are valuable deposits in an apartment shows his sageness; that he is the first to enter it shows his bravery; that he is the last to quit it shows his righteousness; that he knows whether (the robbery) may be attempted or not shows his wisdom; and that he makes an equal division of the plunder shows his benevolence. Without all these five qualities no one in the world has ever attained to become a great robber.' Looking at the subject in this way, we see that good men do not arise without having the principles of the sages, and that Zhi could not have pursued his course without the same principles. But the good men in the world are few, and those who are not good are many - it follows that the sages benefit the world in a few instances and injure it in many.
Hence it is that we have the sayings, 'When the lips are gone the teeth are cold;' 'The poor wine of Lu gave occasion to the siege of Han-dan;' 'When sages are born great robbers arise.' Only when you destroy the sages and pardon all the thieves and robbers can the world begin to be ordered. When the stream is dried, the valley is empty; when the mound is levelled, the deep pool (beside it) is filled up. When the sages have died, the great robbers will not arise; the world would be at peace, and there would be no more troubles. While the sagely men have not died, great robbers will not cease to appear. The more right that is attached to (the views of) the sagely men for the government of the world, the more advantage will accrue to (such men as) the robber Kih. If we make for men pecks and bushels to measure (their wares), even by means of those pecks and bushels should we be teaching them to steal; if we make for them weights and steelyards to weigh (their wares), even by means of those weights and steelyards shall we be teaching them to steal. If we make for them tallies and seals to secure their good faith, even by means of those tallies and seals shall we be teaching them to steal. If we make for them benevolence and righteousness to make their doings correct, even by means of benevolence and righteousness shall we be teaching them to steal. How do I know that it is so? Here is one who steals a hook (for his girdle) - he is put to death for it: here is another who steals a state - he becomes its prince. But it is at the gates of the princes that we find benevolence and righteousness (most strongly) professed - is not this stealing benevolence and righteousness, sageness and wisdom? Thus they hasten to become great robbers, carry off princedoms, and steal benevolence and righteousness, with all the gains springing from the use of pecks and bushels, weights and steelyards, tallies and seals: even the rewards of carriages and coronets have no power to influence (to a different course), and the terrors of the axe have no power to restrain in such cases. The giving of so great gain to robbers (like) Zhi, and making it impossible to restrain them - this is the error committed by the sages.
In accordance with this it is said, 'Fish should not be taken from (the protection of) the deep waters; the agencies for the profit of a state should not be shown to men.' But those sages (and their teachings) are the agencies for the profit of the world, and should not be exhibited to it. Therefore if an end were put to sageness and wisdom put away, the great robbers would cease to arise. If jade were put away and pearls broken to bits, the small thieves would not appear. If tallies were burned and seals broken in pieces, the people would become simple and unsophisticated. If pecks were destroyed and steelyards snapped in two, the people would have no wrangling. If the rules of the sages were entirely set aside in the world, a beginning might be made of reasoning with the people. If the six musical accords were reduced to a state of utter confusion, organs and lutes all burned, and the ears of the (musicians like the) blind Khwang stopped up, all men would begin to possess and employ their (natural) power of hearing. If elegant ornaments were abolished, the five embellishing colours disused and the eyes of (men like) Li Zhu glued up, all men would begin to possess and employ their (natural) power of vision. If the hook and line were destroyed, the compass and square thrown away, and the fingers of men (like) the artful Khui smashed, all men would begin to possess and employ their (natural) skill - as it is said, 'The greatest art is like stupidity.' If conduct such as that of Zeng (Shen) and Shi (Qiu) were discarded, the mouths of Yang (Zhu) and Mo (Di) gagged, and benevolence and righteousness seized and thrown aside, the virtue of all men would begin to display its mysterious excellence. When men possessed and employed their (natural) power of vision, there would be no distortion in the world. When they possessed and employed their (natural) power of hearing, there would be no distractions in the world. When they possessed and employed their (natural) faculty of knowledge, there would be no delusions in the world. When they possessed and employed their (natural) virtue, there would be no depravity in the world. Men like Zeng (Shen), Shi (Qiu), Yang (Zhu), Mo (Di), Shi Kuang (the musician), the artist Khui, and Li Zhu, all display their qualities outwardly, and set the world in a blaze (of admiration) and confound it - a method which is of no use!
Are you, Sir, unacquainted with the age of perfect virtue? Anciently there were Rong-cheng, Da-ting, Bo-huang, Zhong-yang, Li-lu,Li-Chu, Xian-yuan, He-xu, Zun-lu, Zhu-rong, Fu-xi, and Shen-nong. In their times the people made knots on cords in carrying on their affairs. They thought their (simple) food pleasant, and their (plain) clothing beautiful. They were happy in their (simple) manners, and felt at rest in their (poor) dwellings. (The people of) neighbouring states might be able to descry one another; the voices of their cocks and dogs might be heard (all the way) from one to the other; they might not die till they were old; and yet all their life they would have no communication together. In those times perfect good order prevailed.
Now-a-days, however, such is the state of things that you shall see the people stretching out their necks, and standing on tiptoe, while they say, 'In such and such a place there is a wise and able man.' Then they carry with them whatever dry provisions they may have left, and hurry towards it, abandoning their parents in their homes, and neglecting the service of their rulers abroad. Their footsteps may be traced in lines from one state to another, and the ruts of their chariot-wheels also for more than a thousand li. This is owing to the error of their superiors in their (inordinate) fondness for knowledge. When those superiors do really love knowledge, but do not follow the (proper) course, the whole world is thrown into great confusion.
How do I know that the case is so? The knowledge shown in the (making of) bows, cross-bows, band-nets, stringed arrows, and contrivances with springs is great, but the birds are troubled by them above; the knowledge shown in the hooks, baits, various kinds of nets, and bamboo traps is great, but the fishes are disturbed by them in the waters; the knowledge shown in the arrangements for setting nets, and the nets and snares themselves, is great, but the animals are disturbed by them in the marshy grounds. (So), the versatility shown in artful deceptions becoming more and more pernicious, in ingenious discussions as to what is hard and what is white, and in attempts to disperse the dust and reconcile different views, is great, but the common people are perplexed by all the sophistry. Hence there is great disorder continually in the world, and the guilt of it is due to that fondness for knowledge. Thus it is that all men know to seek for the knowledge that they have not attained to; and do not know to seek for that which they already have (in themselves); and that they know to condemn what they do not approve (in others), and do not know to condemn what they have allowed in themselves - it is this which occasions the great confusion and disorder. It is just as if, above, the brightness of the sun and moon were darkened; as if, beneath, the productive vigour of the hills and streams were dried up; and as if, between, the operation of the four seasons were brought to an end: in which case there would not be a single weak and wriggling insect, nor any plant that grows up, which would not lose its proper nature. Great indeed is the disorder produced in the world by the love of knowledge. From the time of the three dynasties downwards it has been so. The plain and honest-minded people are neglected, and the plausible representations of restless spirits received with pleasure; the quiet and unexciting method of non-action is put away, and pleasure taken in ideas garrulously expressed. It is this garrulity of speech which puts the world in disorder.
*** Letting Be, and Exercising Forbearance
I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world. Letting be is from the fear that men, (when interfered with), will carry their nature beyond its normal condition; exercising forbearance is from the fear that men, (when not so dealt with), will alter the characteristics of their nature. When all men do not carry their nature beyond its normal condition, nor alter its characteristics, the good government of the world is secured. Formerly, Yao's government of the world made men look joyful; but when they have this joy in their nature, there is a want of its (proper) placidity. The government of the world by Jie, (on the contrary), made men look distressed; but when their nature shows the symptoms of distress, there is a want of its (proper) contentment. The want of placidity and the want of contentment are contrary to the character (of the nature); and where this obtains, it is impossible that any man or state should anywhere abide long. Are men exceedingly joyful? The Yang or element of expansion in them is too much developed. Are they exceedingly irritated? The Yin or opposite element is too much developed. When those elements thus predominate in men, (it is as if) the four seasons were not to come (at their proper times), and the harmony of cold and heat were not to be maintained - would there not result injury to the bodies of men? Men's joy and dissatisfaction are made to arise where they ought not to do so; their movements are all uncertain; they lose the mastery of their thoughts; they stop short midway, and do not finish what they have begun. In this state of things the world begins to have lofty aims, and jealous dislikes, ambitious courses, and fierce animosities, and then we have actions like those of the robber Zhi, or of Zeng (Shen) and Shi (Qiu). If now the whole world were taken to reward the good it would not suffice, nor would it be possible with it to punish the bad. Thus the world, great as it is, not sufficing for rewards and punishments, from the time of the three dynasties downwards, there has been nothing but bustle and excitement. Always occupied with rewards and punishments, what leisure have men had to rest in the instincts of the nature with which they are endowed? Moreover, delight in the power of vision leads to excess in the pursuit of (ornamental) colours; delight in the power of hearing, to excess in seeking (the pleasures of) sound; delight in benevolence tends to disorder that virtue (as proper to the nature); delight in righteousness sets the man in opposition to what is right in reason; delight in (the practice of) ceremonies is helpful to artful forms; delight in music leads to voluptuous airs; delight in sageness is helpful to ingenious contrivances; delight in knowledge contributes to fault-finding. If all men were to rest in the instincts of their nature, to keep or to extinguish these eight delights might be a matter of indifference; but if they will not rest in those instincts, then those eight delights begin to be imperfectly and unevenly developed or violently suppressed, and the world is thrown into disorder. But when men begin to honour them, and to long for them, how great is the deception practised on the world! And not only, when (a performance of them) is once over, do they not have done with them, but they prepare themselves (as) with fasting to describe them, they seem to kneel reverentially when they bring them forward, and they go through them with the excitements of music and singing; and then what can be done (to remedy the evil of them)? Therefore the superior man, who feels himself constrained to engage in the administration of the world will find it his best way to do nothing. In (that policy of) doing nothing, he can rest in the instincts of the nature with which he is endowed. Hence he who will administer (the government of) the world honouring it as he honours his own person, may have that government committed to him, and he who will administer it loving it as he loves his own person, may have it entrusted to him. Therefore, if the superior man will keep (the faculties lodged in) his five viscera unemployed, and not display his powers of seeing and hearing, while he is motionless as a representative of the dead, his dragon-like presence will be seen; while he is profoundly silent, the thunder (of his words) will resound; while his movements are (unseen) like those of a spirit, all heavenly influences will follow them; while he is (thus) unconcerned and does nothing, his genial influence will attract and gather all things round him: what leisure has he to do anything more for the government of the world?
Cui Ji asked Lao Dan, saying, 'If you do not govern the world, how can you make men's minds good?' The reply was, 'Take care how you meddle with and disturb men's minds. The mind, if pushed about, gets depressed; if helped forward, it gets exalted. Now exalted, now depressed, here it appears as a prisoner, and there as a wrathful fury. (At one time) it becomes pliable and soft, yielding to what is hard and strong; (at another), it is sharp as the sharpest corner, fit to carve or chisel (stone or jade). Now it is hot as a scorching fire, and anon it is cold as ice. It is so swift that while one is bending down and lifting up his head, it shall twice have put forth a soothing hand beyond the four seas. Resting, it is still as a deep abyss; moving, it is like one of the bodies in the sky; in its resolute haughtiness, it refuses to be bound - such is the mind of man!'
Anciently, Huang-Di was the first to meddle with and disturb the mind of man with his benevolence and righteousness. After him, Yao and Shun wore their thighs bare and the hair off the calves of their legs, in their labours to nourish the bodies of the people. They toiled painfully with all the powers in their five viscera at the practice of their benevolence and righteousness; they tasked their blood and breath to make out a code of laws - and after all they were unsuccessful. On this Yao sent away Huan Dou to Chong hill, and (the Chiefs of) the Three Miao to San-wei, and banished the Minister of Works to the Dark Capital; so unequal had they been to cope with the world. Then we are carried on to the kings of the Three (dynasties), when the world was in a state of great distraction. Of the lowest type of character there were Jie and Zhi; of a higher type there were Zeng (Shen) and Shi (Qiu). At the same time there arose the classes of the Literati and the Mohists. Hereupon, complacency in, and hatred of, one another produced mutual suspicions; the stupid and the wise imposed on one another; the good and the bad condemned one another; the boastful and the sincere interchanged their recriminations - and the world fell into decay. Views as to what was greatly virtuous did not agree, and the nature with its endowments became as if shrivelled by fire or carried away by a flood. All were eager for knowledge, and the people were exhausted with their searchings (after what was good). On this the axe and the saw were brought into play; guilt was determined as by the plumb-line and death inflicted; the hammer and gouge did their work. The world fell into great disorder, and presented the appearance of a jagged mountain ridge. The crime to which all was due was the meddling with and disturbing men's minds. The effect was that men of ability and worth lay concealed at the foot of the crags of mount Tai, and princes of ten thousand chariots were anxious and terrified in their ancestral temples. In the present age those who have been put to death in various ways lie thick as if pillowed on each other; those who are wearing the cangue press on each other (on the roads); those who are suffering the bastinado can see each other (all over the land). And now the Literati and the Mohists begin to stand, on tiptoe and with bare arms, among the fettered and manacled crowd! Ah! extreme is their shamelessness, and their failure to see the disgrace! Strange that we should be slow to recognise their sageness and wisdom in the bars of the cangue, and their benevolence and righteousness in the rivets of the fetters and handcuffs! How do we know that Zeng and Shi are not the whizzing arrows of Jie and Zhi? Therefore it is said, 'Abolish sageness and cast away knowledge, and the world will be brought to a state of great order.'
Huang-Di had been on the throne for nineteen years, and his ordinances were in operation all through the kingdom, when he heard that Guang Cheng-zi was living on the summit of Kong-tong, and went to see him. 'I have heard,' he said, 'that you, Sir, are well acquainted with the perfect Dao. I venture to ask you what is the essential thing in it. I wish to take the subtlest influences of heaven and earth, and assist with them the (growth of the) five cereals for the (better) nourishment of the people. I also wish to direct the (operation of the) Yin and Yang, so as to secure the comfort of all living beings. How shall I proceed to accomplish those objects?' Kong Tong-zi replied, 'What you wish to ask about is the original substance of all things; what you wish to have the direction of is that substance as it was shattered and divided. According to your government of the world, the vapours of the clouds, before they were collected, would descend in rain; the herbs and trees would shed their leaves before they became yellow; and the light of the sun and moon would hasten to extinction. Your mind is that of a flatterer with his plausible words - it is not fit that I should tell you the perfect Dao.'
Huang-Di withdrew, gave up (his government of) the kingdom, built himself a solitary apartment, spread in it a mat of the white m?o grass, dwelt in it unoccupied for three months, and then went again to seek an interview with (the recluse). Kong Tong-zi was then lying down with his head to the south. Huang-Di, with an air of deferential submission, went forward on his knees, twice bowed low with his face to the ground, and asked him, saying, 'I have heard that you, Sir, are well acquainted with the perfect Dao - I venture to ask how I should rule my body, in order that it may continue for a long time.' Kong Tong-zi hastily rose, and said, 'A good question! Come and I will tell you the perfect Dao. Its essence is (surrounded with) the deepest obscurity; its highest reach is in darkness and silence. There is nothing to be seen; nothing to be heard. When it holds the spirit in its arms in stillness, then the bodily form of itself will become correct. You must be still; you must be pure; not subjecting your body to toil, not agitating your vital force - then you may live for long. When your eyes see nothing, your ears hear nothing, and your mind knows nothing, your spirit will keep your body, and the body will live long. Watch over what is within you, shut up the avenues that connect you with what is external - much knowledge is pernicious. I (will) proceed with you to the summit of the Grand Brilliance, where we come to the source of the bright and expanding (element); I will enter with you the gate of the Deepest Obscurity, where we come to the source of the dark and repressing (element). There heaven and earth have their controllers; there the Yin and Yang have their Repositories. Watch over and keep your body, and all things will of themselves give it vigour. I maintain the (original) unity (of these elements), and dwell in the harmony of them. In this way I have cultivated myself for one thousand and two hundred years, and my bodily form has undergone no decay.'
Huang-Di twice bowed low with his head to the ground, and said, 'In Kong Tong-zi we have an example of what is called Heaven.' The other said, 'Come, and I will tell you: (The perfect Dao) is something inexhaustible, and yet men all think it has an end; it is something unfathomable, and yet men all think its extreme limit can be reached. He who attains to my Dao, if he be in a high position, will be one of the August ones, and in a low position, will be a king. He who fails in attaining it, in his highest attainment will see the light, but will descend and be of the Earth. At present all things are produced from the Earth and return to the Earth. Therefore I will leave you, and enter the gate of the Unending, to enjoy myself in the fields of the Illimitable. I will blend my light with that of the sun and moon, and will endure while heaven and earth endure. If men agree with my views, I will be unconscious of it; if they keep far apart from them, I will be unconscious of it; they may all die, and I will abide alone!'
Yun Jiang, rambling to the east, having been borne along on a gentle breeze, suddenly encountered Hong Mang, who was rambling about, slapping his buttocks and hopping like a bird. Amazed at the sight, Yun Jiang stood reverentially, and said to the other, 'Venerable Sir, who are you? and why are you doing this ?' Hong Mang went on slapping his buttocks and hopping like a bird, but replied, 'I am enjoying myself.' Yun Jiang said, 'I wish to ask you a question.' Hong Mang lifted up his head, looked at the stranger, and said, 'Pooh!' Yun Jiang, however, continued, 'The breath of heaven is out of harmony; the breath of earth is bound up; the six elemental influences do not act in concord; the four seasons do not observe their proper times. Now I wish to blend together the essential qualities of those six influences in order to nourish all living things - how shall I go about it?' Hong Mang slapped his buttocks, hopped about, and shook his head, saying, 'I do not know; I do not know!'
Yun Jiang could not pursue his question; but three years afterwards, when (again) rambling in the east, as he was passing by the wild of Sung, he happened to meet Hong Mang. Delighted with the rencontre, he hastened to him, and said, 'Have you forgotten me, 0 Heaven? Have you forgotten me, 0 Heaven?' At the same time, he bowed twice with his head to the ground, wishing to receive his instructions. Hong Mang said, 'Wandering listlessly about, I know not what I seek; carried on by a wild impulse, I know not where I am going. I wander about in the strange manner (which you have seen), and see that nothing proceeds without method and order - what more should I know?' Yun Jiang replied, 'I also seem carried on by an aimless influence, and yet the people follow me wherever I go. I cannot help their doing so. But now as they thus imitate me, I wish to hear a word from you (in the case).' The other said, 'What disturbs the regular method of Heaven, comes into collision with the nature of things, prevents the accomplishment of the mysterious (operation of) Heaven, scatters the herds of animals, makes the birds all sing at night, is calamitous to vegetation, and disastrous to all insects - all this is owing, I conceive, to the error of governing men.' 'What then,' said Yun Jiang, 'shall I do?' 'Ah,' said the other, 'you will only injure them! I will leave you in my dancing way, and return to my place.' Yun Jiang rejoined, 'It has been a difficult thing to get this meeting with you, 0 Heaven! I should like to hear from you a word (more).' Hong Mang said, 'Ah! your mind (needs to be) nourished. Do you only take the position of doing nothing, and things will of themselves become transformed. Neglect your body; cast out from you your power of hearing and sight; forget what you have in common with things; cultivate a grand similarity with the chaos of the plastic ether; unloose your mind; set your spirit free; be still as if you had no soul. Of all the multitude of things every one returns to its root. Every one returns to its root, and does not know (that it is doing so). They all are as in the state of chaos, and during all their existence they do not leave it. If they knew (that they were returning to their root), they would be (consciously) leaving it. They do not ask its name; they do not seek to spy out their nature; and thus it is that things come to life of themselves.'
Yun Jiang said, 'Heaven, you have conferred on me (the knowledge of) your operation, and revealed to me the mystery of it. All my life I had been seeking for it, and now I have obtained it.' He then bowed twice, with his head to the ground, arose, took his leave, and walked away.
The ordinary men of the world all rejoice in men's agreeing with themselves, and dislike men's being different from themselves. This rejoicing and this dislike arise from their being bent on making themselves distinguished above all others. But have they who have this object at heart so risen out above all others? They depend on them to rest quietly (in the position which they desire), and their knowledge is not equal to the multitude of the arts of all those others! When they wish again to administer a state for its ruler, they proceed to employ all the methods which the kings of the three dynasties considered profitable without seeing the evils of such a course. This is to make the state depend on the peradventure of their luck. But how seldom it is that that peradventure does not issue in the ruin of the state! Not once in ten thousand instances will such men preserve a state. Not once will they succeed, and in more than ten thousand cases will they ruin it. Alas that the possessors of territory (the rulers of states) should not know the danger (of employing such men)!
Now the possessors of territory possess the greatest of (all) things. Possessing the greatest of all things (possessing, that is, men) they should not try to deal with them as (simply) things. And it is he who is not a thing (himself) that is therefore able to deal with (all) things as they severally require. When (a ruler) clearly understands that he who should so deal with all things is not a thing himself, will he only rule the kingdom? He will go out and in throughout the universe (at his pleasure); he will roam over the nine regions, alone in going, alone in coming. Him we call the sole possessor (of this ability); and the sole possessor (of this ability) is what is called the noblest of all.
The teaching of (this) great man goes forth as the shadow from the substance, as the echo responds to the sound. When questioned, he responds, exhausting (from his own stores) all that is in the (enquirer's) mind, as if front to front with all under heaven. His resting-place gives forth no sound; his sphere of activity has no restriction of place, He conducts every one to his proper goal, proceeding to it and bringing him back to it as by his own movement. His movements have no trace; his going forth and his re-enterings have no deviation; his course is like that of the sun without beginning (or ending). If you would praise or discourse about his personality, he is united with the great community of existences. He belongs to that great community, and has no individual self. Having no individual self, how should he have anything that can be called his? If you look at those who have what they call their own, they are the superior men of former times; if you look at him who has nothing of the kind, he is the friend of heaven and earth.
Mean, and yet demanding to be allowed their free course - such are Things. Low, and yet requiring to be relied on - such are the People. Hidden (as to their issues), and yet requiring to be done - such are Affairs. Coarse, and yet necessary to be set forth - such are Laws. Remote, and yet necessary to have dwelling (in one's self) - such is Righteousness. Near, and yet necessary to be widely extended - such is Benevolence. Restrictive, and yet necessary to be multiplied - such are Ceremonies. Lodged in the centre, and yet requiring to be exalted - such is Virtue. Always One, and yet requiring to be modified - such is the Dao. Spiritlike, and yet requiring to be exercised - such is Heaven.
Therefore the sages contemplated Heaven, but did not assist It. They tried to perfect their virtue, but did not allow it to embarrass them. They proceeded according to the Dao, but did not lay any plans. They associated benevolence (with all their doings), but did not rely on it. They pursued righteousness extensively, but did not try to accumulate it. They responded to ceremonies, but did not conceal (their opinion as to the troublesomeness of them). They engaged in affairs as they occurred, and did not decline them. They strove to render their laws uniform, but (feared that confusion) might arise from them. They relied upon the people, and did not set light by them. They depended on things as their instruments, and did not discard them.
They did not think things equal to what they employed them for, but yet they did not see that they could do without employing them. Those who do not understand Heaven are not pure in their virtue. Those who do not comprehend the Dao have no course which they can pursue successfully. Alas for them who do not clearly understand the Dao!
What is it that we call the Dao? There is the Dao, or Way of Heaven; and there is the Dao, or Way of Man. Doing nothing and yet attracting all honour is the Way of Heaven; Doing and being embarrassed thereby is the Way of Man. It is the Way of Heaven that plays the part of the Lord; it is the Way of Man that plays the part of the Servant. The Way of Heaven and the Way of Man are far apart. They should be clearly distinguished from each other.
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*** Heaven and Earth
Notwithstanding the greatness of heaven and earth, their transforming power proceeds from one lathe; notwithstanding the number of the myriad things, the government of them is one and the same; notwithstanding the multitude of mankind, the lord of them is their (one) ruler. The ruler's (course) should proceed from the qualities (of the Dao) and be perfected by Heaven, when it is so, it is called 'Mysterious and Sublime.' The ancients ruled the world by doing nothing - simply by this attribute of Heaven.
If we look at their words in the light of the Dao, (we see that) the appellation for the ruler of the world was correctly assigned; if we look in the same light at the distinctions which they instituted, (we see that) the separation of ruler and ministers was right; if we look at the abilities which they called forth in the same light, (we see that the duties of) all the offices were well performed; and if we look generally in the same way at all things, (we see that) their response (to this rule) was complete. Therefore that which pervades (the action of) Heaven and Earth is (this one) attribute; that which operates in all things is (this one) course; that by which their superiors govern the people is the business (of the various departments); and that by which aptitude is given to ability is skill. The skill was manifested in all the (departments of) business; those departments were all administered in righteousness; the righteousness was (the outflow of) the natural virtue; the virtue was manifested according to the Dao; and the Dao was according to (the pattern of) Heaven.
Hence it is said, 'The ancients who had the nourishment of the world wished for nothing and the world had enough; they did nothing and all things were transformed; their stillness was abysmal, and the people were all composed.' The Record says, 'When the one (Dao) pervades it, all business is completed. When the mind gets to be free from all aim, even the Spirits submit.'
The Master said, 'It is the Dao that overspreads and sustains all things. How great It is in Its overflowing influence! The Superior man ought by all means to remove from his mind (all that is contrary to It). Acting without action is what is called Heaven(-like). Speech coming forth of itself is what is called (a mark of) the (true) Virtue. Loving men and benefiting things is what is called Benevolence. Seeing wherein things that are different yet agree is what is called being Great. Conduct free from the ambition of being distinguished above others is what is called being Generous. The possession in himself of a myriad points of difference is what is called being Rich. Therefore to hold fast the natural attributes is what is called the Guiding Line (of government); the perfecting of those attributes is what is called its Establishment; accordance with the Dao is what is called being Complete; and not allowing anything external to affect the will is what is called being Perfect. When the Superior man understands these ten things, he keeps all matters as it were sheathed in himself, showing the greatness of his mind; and through the outflow of his doings, all things move (and come to him). Being such, he lets the gold lie hid in the hill, and the pearls in the deep; he considers not property or money to be any gain; he keeps aloof from riches and honours; he rejoices not in long life, and grieves not for early death; he does not account prosperity a glory, nor is ashamed of indigence; he would not grasp at the gain of the whole world to be held as his own private portion; he would not desire to rule over the whole world as his own private distinction. His distinction is in understanding that all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be viewed in the same way.
The Master said, 'How still and deep is the place where the Dao resides! How limpid is its purity! Metal and stone without It would give forth no sound. They have indeed the (power of) sound (in them), but if they be not struck, they do not emit it. Who can determine (the qualities that are in) all things?
'The man of kingly qualities holds on his way unoccupied, and is ashamed to busy himself with (the conduct of) affairs. He establishes himself in (what is) the root and source (of his capacity), and his wisdom grows to be spirit-like. In this way his attributes become more and more great, and when his mind goes forth, whatever things come in his way, it lays hold of them (and deals with them). Thus, if there were not the Dao, the bodily form would not have life, and its life, without the attributes (of the Dao), would not be manifested. Is not he who preserves the body and gives the fullest development to the life, who establishes the attributes of the Dao and clearly displays It, possessed of kingly qualities? How majestic is he in his sudden issuings forth, and in his unexpected movements, when all things follow him! This we call the man whose qualities fit him to rule.'
He sees where there is the deepest obscurity; he hears where there is no sound. In the midst of the deepest obscurity, he alone sees and can distinguish (various objects); in the midst of a soundless (abyss), he alone can hear a harmony (of notes). Therefore where one deep is succeeded by a greater, he can people all with things; where one mysterious range is followed by another that is more so, he can lay hold of the subtlest character of each. In this way in his intercourse with all things, while he is farthest from having anything, he can yet give to them what they seek; while he is always hurrying forth, he yet returns to his resting-place; now large, now small; now long, now short; now distant, now near.'
Huang-Di, enjoying himself on the north of the Red-water, ascended to the height of the Kun-lun (mountain), and having looked towards the south, was returning home, when he lost his dark-coloured pearl. He employed Wisdom to search for it, but he could not find it. He employed (the clear-sighted) Li Zhu to search for it, but he could not find it. He employed (the vehement debater) Chi Gou to search for it, but he could not find it. He then employed Purposeless, who found it; on which Huang-Di said, 'How strange that it was Purposeless who was able to find it!'
The teacher of Yao was Xu You; of Xu You, Nie Que; of Nie Que, Wang Ni; of Wang Ni, Bei-yi. Yao asked Xu You, saying, 'Is Nie Que fit to be the correlate of Heaven? (If you think he is), I will avail myself of the services of Wang Ni to constrain him (to take my place).' Xu You replied, 'Such a measure would be hazardous, and full of peril to the kingdom! The character of Nie Que is this - he is acute, perspicacious, shrewd and knowing, ready in reply, sharp in retort, and hasty; his natural (endowments) surpass those of other men, but by his human qualities he seeks to obtain the Heavenly gift; he exercises his discrimination in suppressing his errors, but he does not know what is the source from which his errors arise. Make him the correlate of Heaven! He would employ the human qualities, so that no regard would be paid to the Heavenly gift. Moreover, he would assign different functions to the different parts of the one person. Moreover, honour would be given to knowledge, and he would have his plans take effect with the speed of fire. Moreover, he would be the slave of everything he initiated. Moreover, he would be embarrassed by things. Moreover, he would be looking all round for the response of things (to his measures). Moreover, he would be responding to the opinion of the multitude as to what was right. Moreover, he would be changing as things changed, and would not begin to have any principle of constancy. How can such a man be fit to be the correlate of Heaven? Nevertheless, as there are the smaller branches of a family and the common ancestor of all its branches, he might be the father of a branch, but not the father of the fathers of all the branches. Such government (as he would conduct) would lead to disorder. It would be calamity in one in the position of a minister, and ruin if he were in the position of the sovereign.'
Yao was looking about him at Hua, the border-warden of which said, 'Ha! the sage! Let me ask blessings on the sage! May he live long!' Yao said, 'Hush!' but the other went on, 'May the sage become rich!' Yao (again) said, 'Hush!' but (the warden) continued, 'May the sage have many sons!' When Yao repeated his 'Hush,' the warden said, 'Long life, riches, and many sons are what men wish for - how is it that you alone do not wish for them?' Yao replied, 'Many sons bring many fears; riches bring many troubles; and long life gives rise to many obloquies. These three things do not help to nourish virtue; and therefore I wish to decline them.' The warden rejoined, 'At first I considered you to be a sage; now I see in you only a Superior man. Heaven, in producing the myriads of the people, is sure to have appointed for them their several offices. If you had many sons, and gave them (all their) offices, what would you have to fear? If you had riches, and made other men share them with you, what trouble would you have? The sage finds his dwelling like the quail (without any choice of its own), and is fed like the fledgling; he is like the bird which passes on (through the air), and leaves no trace (of its flight). When good order prevails in the world, he shares in the general prosperity. When there is no such order, he cultivates his virtue, and seeks to be unoccupied. After a thousand years, tired of the world, he leaves it, and ascends among the immortals. He mounts on the white clouds, and arrives at the place of God. The three forms of evil do not reach him, his person is always free from misfortune - what obloquy has he to incur?'
With this the border-warden left him. Yao followed him, saying, 'I beg to ask-- ;' but the other said, 'Begone!'
When Yao was ruling the world, Bo-cheng Zi-Gao was appointed by him prince of one of the states. From Yao (afterwards) the throne passed to Shun, and from Shun (again) to Yu; and (then) Bo-cheng Zi-Gao resigned his principality and began to cultivate the ground. Yu went to see him, and found him ploughing in the open country. Hurrying to him, and bowing low in acknowledgment of his superiority, Yu then stood up, and asked him, saying, 'Formerly, when Yao was ruling the world, you, Sir, were appointed prince of a state. He gave his sovereignty to Shun, and Shun gave his to me, when you, Sir, resigned your dignity, and are (now) ploughing (here) - I venture to ask the reason of your conduct.' Zi-Gao said, 'When Yao ruled the world, the people stimulated one another (to what was right) without his offering them rewards, and stood in awe (of doing wrong) without his threatening them with punishments. Now you employ both rewards and punishments, and the people notwithstanding are not good. Their virtue will from this time decay; punishments will from this time prevail; the disorder of future ages will from this time begin. Why do you, my master, not go away, and not interrupt my work?' With this he resumed his ploughing with his head bent down, and did not (again) look round.
In the Grand Beginning (of all things) there was nothing in all the vacancy of space; there was nothing that could be named. It was in this state that there arose the first existence - the first existence, but still without bodily shape. From this things could then be produced, (receiving) what we call their proper character. That which had no bodily shape was divided; and then without intermission there was what we call the process of conferring. (The two processes) continuing in operation, things were produced. As things were completed, there were produced the distinguishing lines of each, which we call the bodily shape. That shape was the body preserving in it the spirit, and each had its peculiar manifestation, which we call its Nature. When the Nature has been cultivated, it returns to its proper character; and when that has been fully reached, there is the same condition as at the Beginning. That sameness is pure vacancy, and the vacancy is great. It is like the closing of the beak and silencing the singing (of a bird). That closing and silencing is like the union of heaven and earth (at the beginning). The union, effected, as it is, might seem to indicate stupidity or darkness, but it is what we call the 'mysterious quality' (existing at the beginning); it is the same as the Grand Submission (to the Natural Course).
The Master asked Lao Dan, saying, 'Some men regulate the Dao (as by a law), which they have only to follow - (a thing, they say,) is admissible or it is inadmissible; it is so, or it is not so. (They are like) the sophists who say that they can distinguish what is hard and what is white as clearly as if the objects were houses suspended in the sky. Can such men be said to be sages?' The reply was, 'They are like the busy underlings of a court, who toil their bodies and distress their minds with their various artifices - dogs, (employed) to their sorrow to catch the yak, or monkeys that are brought from their forests (for their tricksiness). Qiu, I tell you this - it is what you cannot hear, and what you cannot speak of: Of those who have their heads and feet, and yet have neither minds nor ears, there are multitudes; while of those who have their bodies, and at the same time preserve that which has no bodily form or shape, there are really none. It is not in their movements or stoppages, their dying or living, their falling and rising again, that this is to be found. The regulation of the course lies in (their dealing with) the human element in them. When they have forgotten external things, and have also forgotten the heavenly element in them, they may be named men who have forgotten themselves. The man who has forgotten himself is he of whom it is said that he has become identified with Heaven.'
At an interview with Ji Che, Jiang-li Wan said to him, 'Our ruler of Lu asked to receive my instructions. I declined, on the ground that I had not received any message for him. Afterwards, however, I told him (my thoughts). I do not know whether (what I said) was right or not, and I beg to repeat it to you. I said to him, "You must strive to be courteous and to exercise self-restraint; you must distinguish the public-spirited and loyal, and repress the cringing and selfish - who among the people will in that case dare not to be in harmony with you?"' Ji Che laughed quietly and said, 'Your words, my master, as a description of the right course for a Di or King, were like the threatening movement of its arms by a mantis which would thereby stop the advance of a carriage - inadequate to accomplish your object. And moreover, if he guided himself by your directions, it would be as if he were to increase the dangerous height of his towers and add to the number of his valuables collected in them - the multitudes (of the people) would leave their (old) ways, and bend their steps in the same direction.'
Jiang-li Wan was awe-struck, and said in his fright, 'I am startled by your words, Master, nevertheless, I should like to hear you describe the influence (which a ruler should exert).' The other said, 'If a great sage ruled the kingdom, he would stimulate the minds of the people, and cause them to carry out his instructions fully, and change their manners; he would take their minds which had become evil and violent and extinguish them, carrying them all forward to act in accordance with the (good) will belonging to them as individuals, as if they did it of themselves from their nature, while they knew not what it was that made them do so. Would such an one be willing to lookup to Yao and Shun in their instruction of the people as his elder brothers? He would treat them as his juniors, belonging himself to the period of the original plastic ether. His wish would be that all should agree with the virtue (of that early period), and quietly rest in it.'
Zi-gong had been rambling in the south in Chu, and was returning to Jin. As he passed (a place) on the north of the Han, he saw an old man who was going to work on his vegetable garden. He had dug his channels, gone to the well, and was bringing from it in his arms a jar of water to pour into them. Toiling away, he expended a great deal of strength, but the result which he accomplished was very small. Zi-gong said to him, 'There is a contrivance here, by means of which a hundred plots of ground may be irrigated in one day. With the expenditure of a very little strength, the result accomplished is great. Would you, Master, not like (to try it)?' The gardener looked up at him, and said, 'How does it work?' Zi-gong said, 'It is a lever made of wood, heavy behind, and light in front. It raises the water as quickly as you could do with your hand, or as it bubbles over from a boiler. Its name is a shadoof.' The gardener put on an angry look, laughed, and said, 'I have heard from my teacher that, where there are ingenious contrivances, there are sure to be subtle doings; and that, where there are subtle doings, there is sure to be a scheming mind. But, when there is a scheming mind in the breast, its pure simplicity is impaired. When this pure simplicity is impaired, the spirit becomes unsettled, and the unsettled spirit is not the proper residence of the Dao. It is not that I do not know (the contrivance which you mention), but I should be ashamed to use it.' (At these words) Zi-gong looked blank and ashamed; he hung down his head, and made no reply.
After an interval, the gardener said to him, 'Who are you, Sir?' 'A disciple of Kong Qiu,' was the reply. The other continued, 'Are you not the scholar whose great learning makes you comparable to a sage, who make it your boast that you surpass all others, who sing melancholy ditties all by yourself, thus purchasing a famous reputation throughout the kingdom? If you would (only) forget the energy of your spirit, and neglect the care of your body, you might approximate (to the Dao). But while you cannot regulate yourself, what leisure have you to be regulating the world? Go on your way, Sir, and do not interrupt my work.'
Zi-gong shrunk back abashed, and turned pale. He was perturbed, and lost his self-possession, nor did he recover it, till he had walked a distance of thirty li. His disciples then said, 'Who was that man? Why, Master, when you saw him, did you change your bearing, and become pale, so that you have been all day without returning to yourself?' He replied to them, 'Formerly I thought that there was but one man in the world, and did not know that there was this man. I have heard the Master say that to seek for the means of conducting his undertakings so that his success in carrying them out may be complete, and how by the employment of a little strength great results may be obtained, is the way of the sage. Now (I perceive that) it is not so at all. They who hold fast and cleave to the Dao are complete in the qualities belonging to it. Complete in those qualities, they are complete in their bodies. Complete in their bodies, they are complete in their spirits. To be complete in spirit is the way of the sage. (Such men) live in the world in closest union with the people, going along with them, but they do not know where they are going. Vast and complete is their simplicity! Success, gain, and ingenious contrivances, and artful cleverness, indicate (in their opinion) a forgetfulness of the (proper) mind of man. These men will not go where their mind does not carry them, and will do nothing of which their mind does not approve. Though all the world should praise them, they would (only) get what they think should be loftily disregarded; and though all the world should blame them, they would but lose (what they think) fortuitous and not to be received - the world's blame and praise can do them neither benefit nor injury. Such men may be described as possessing all the attributes (of the Dao), while I can only be called one of those who are like the waves carried about by the wind.' When he returned to Lu, (Zi-gong) reported the interview and conversation to Confucius, who said, 'The man makes a pretence of cultivating the arts of the Embryonic Age. He knows the first thing, but not the sequel to it. He regulates what is internal in himself, but not what is external to himself. If he had intelligence enough to be entirely unsophisticated, and by doing nothing to seek to return to the normal simplicity, embodying (the instincts of) his nature, and keeping his spirit (as it were) in his arms, so enjoying himself in the common ways, you might then indeed be afraid of him! But what should you and I find in the arts of the embryonic time, worth our knowing?'
Zhun Mang, on his way to the ocean, met with Yuan Feng on the shore of the eastern sea, and was asked by him where he was going. 'I am going,' he replied, 'to the ocean;' and the other again asked, 'What for?' Zhun Mang said, 'Such is the nature of the ocean that the waters which flow into it can never fill it, nor those which flow from it exhaust it. I will enjoy myself, rambling by it.' Yuan Feng replied, 'Have you no thoughts about mankind? I should like to hear from you about sagely government.' Zhun Mang said, 'Under the government of sages, all offices are distributed according to the fitness of their nature; all appointments are made according to the ability of the men; whatever is done is after a complete survey of all circumstances; actions and words proceed from the inner impulse, and the whole world is transformed. Wherever their hands are pointed and their looks directed, from all quarters the people are all sure to come (to do what they desire): this is what is called government by sages.'
'I should like to hear about (the government of) the kindly, virtuous men,' (continued Yuan Feng). The reply was, 'Under the government of the virtuous, when quietly occupying (their place), they have no thought, and, when they act, they have no anxiety; they do not keep stored (in their minds) what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. They share their benefits among all within the four seas, and this produces what is called (the state of) satisfaction; they dispense their gifts to all, and this produces what is called (the state of) rest. (The people) grieve (on their death) like babies who have lost their mothers, and are perplexed like travellers who have lost their way. They have a superabundance of wealth and all necessaries, and they know not whence it comes; they have a sufficiency of food and drink, and they know not from whom they get it: such are the appearances (under the government) of the kindly and virtuous.'
'I should like to hear about (the government of) the spirit-like men,' (continued Yuan Feng once more). The reply was, 'Men of the highest spirit-like qualities mount up on the light, and (the limitations of) the body vanish. This we call being bright and ethereal. They carry out to the utmost the powers with which they are endowed, and have not a single attribute unexhausted. Their joy is that of heaven and earth, and all embarrassments of affairs melt away and disappear; all things return to their proper nature: and this is what is called (the state of) chaotic obscurity.'
Men Wu-gui and Chi-zhang Man-ji had been looking at the army of king Wu, when the latter said, 'It is because he was not born in the time of the Lord of Yu, that therefore he is involved in this trouble (of war).' Men Wu-gui replied, 'Was it when the kingdom was in good order, that the Lord of Yu governed it? Or was it after it had become disordered that he governed it?' The other said, 'That the kingdom be in a condition of good order, is what (all) desire, and (in that case) what necessity would there be to say anything about the Lord of Yu? He had medicine for sores; false hair for the bald; and healing for those who were ill: he was like the filial son carrying in the medicine to cure his kind father, with every sign of distress in his countenance. A sage would be ashamed (of such a thing). In the age of perfect virtue they attached no value to wisdom, nor employed men of ability. Superiors were (but) as the higher branches of a tree; and the people were like the deer of the wild. They were upright and correct, without knowing that to be so was Righteousness; they loved one another, without knowing that to do so was Benevolence; they were honest and leal-hearted, without knowing that it was Loyalty; they fulfilled their engagements, without knowing that to do so was Good Faith; in their simple movements they employed the services of one another, without thinking that they were conferring or receiving any gift. Therefore their actions left no trace, and there was no record of their affairs.'
The filial son who does not flatter his father, and the loyal minister who does not fawn on his ruler, are the highest examples of a minister and a son. When a son assents to all that his father says, and approves of all that his father does, common opinion pronounces him an unworthy son; when a minister assents to all that his ruler says, and approves of all that his ruler does, common opinion pronounces him an unworthy minister. Nor does any one reflect that this view is necessarily correct. But when common opinion (itself) affirms anything and men therefore assent to it, or counts anything good and men also approve of it, then it is not said that they are mere consenters and flatterers - is common opinion then more authoritative than a father, or more to be honoured than a ruler? Tell a man that he is merely following (the opinions) of another, and at once he flushes with anger. Tell a man that he is flatterer of others, and immediately he flushes with anger. And yet all his life he is merely following others, and flattering them. His illustrations are made to agree with theirs; his phrases are glossed: to win the approbation of the multitudes. From first to last, from beginning to end, he finds no fault with their views. He will let his robes hang down, display the colours on them, and arrange his movements and bearing, so as to win the favour of his age, and yet not call himself a flatterer. He is but a follower of those others, approving and disapproving as they do, and yet he will not say that he is one of them. This is the height of stupidity. He who knows his stupidity is not very stupid; he who knows that he is under a delusion is not greatly deluded. He who is greatly deluded will never shake the delusion off; he who is very stupid will all his life not become intelligent. If three men be walking together, and (only) one of them be under a delusion (as to their way), they may yet reach their goal, the deluded being the fewer; but if two of them be under the delusion, they will not do so, the deluded being the majority. At the present time, when the whole world is under a delusion, though I pray men to go in the right direction, I cannot make them do so - is it not a sad case?
Grand music does not penetrate the ears of villagers; but if they hear 'The Breaking of the Willow,' or 'The Bright Flowers,' they will roar with laughter. So it is that lofty words do not remain in the minds of the multitude, and that perfect words are not heard, because the vulgar words predominate. By two earthenware instruments the (music of) a bell will be confused, and the pleasure that it would afford cannot be obtained. At the present time the whole world is under a delusion, and though I wish to go in a certain direction, how can I succeed in doing so? Knowing that I cannot do so, if I were to try to force my way, that would be another delusion. Therefore my best course is to let my purpose go, and no more pursue it. If I do not pursue it, whom shall I have to share in my sorrow? If an ugly man have a son born to him at midnight, he hastens with a light to look at it. Very eagerly he does so, only afraid that it may be like himself.
From a tree a hundred years old a portion shall be cut and fashioned into a sacrificial vase, with the bull figured on it, which is ornamented further with green and yellow, while the rest (of that portion) is cut away and thrown into a ditch. If now we compare the sacrificial vase with what was thrown into the ditch, there will be a difference between them as respects their beauty and ugliness; but they both agree in having lost the (proper) nature of the wood. So in respect of their practice of righteousness there is a difference between (the robber) Zhi on the one hand, and Zeng (Shen) or Shi (Qiu) on the other; but they all agree in having lost (the proper qualities of) their nature.
Now there are five things which produce (in men) the loss of their (proper) nature. The first is (their fondness for) the five colours which disorder the eye, and take from it its (proper) clearness of vision; the second is (their fondness for) the five notes (of music), which disorder the ear and take from it its (proper) power of hearing; the third is (their fondness for) the five odours which penetrate the nostrils, and produce a feeling of distress all over the forehead; the fourth is (their fondness for) the five flavours, which deaden the mouth, and pervert its sense of taste; the fifth is their preferences and dislikes, which unsettle the mind, and cause the nature to go flying about. These five things are all injurious to the life; and now Yang and Mo begin to stretch forward from their different standpoints, each thinking that he has hit on (the proper course for men).
But the courses they have hit on are not what I call the proper course. What they have hit on (only) leads to distress - can they have hit on what is the right thing? If they have, we may say that the dove in a cage has found the right thing for it. Moreover, those preferences and dislikes, that (fondness for) music and colours, serve but to pile up fuel (in their breasts); while their caps of leather, the bonnet with kingfishers' plumes, the memorandum tablets which they carry, and their long girdles, serve but as restraints on their persons. Thus inwardly stuffed full as a hole for fuel, and outwardly fast bound with cords, when they look quietly round from out of their bondage, and think they have got all they could desire, they are no better than criminals whose arms are tied together, and their fingers subjected to the screw, or than tigers and leopards in sacks or cages, and yet thinking that they have got (all they could wish).
*** The Way of Heaven
The Way of Heaven operates (unceasingly), and leaves no accumulation (of its influence) in any particular place, so that all things are brought to perfection by it; so does the Way of the Dis operate, and all under the sky turn to them (as their directors); so also does the Way of the Sages operate, and all within the seas submit to them. Those who clearly understand (the Way of) Heaven, who are in sympathy with (that of) the sages, and familiar through the universe and in the four quarters (of the earth) with the work of the Dis and the kings, yet act spontaneously from themselves: with the appearance of being ignorant they are yet entirely still. The stillness of the sages does not belong to them as a consequence of their skilful ability; all things are not able to disturb their minds - it is on this account that they are still. When water is still, its clearness shows the beard and eyebrows (of him who looks into it). It is a perfect Level, and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human Spirit! The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things.
Vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action - this is the Level of heaven and earth, and the perfection of the Dao and its characteristics. Therefore the Dis, Kings, and Sages found in this their resting-place. Resting here, they were vacant; from their vacancy came fullness; from their fullness came the nice distinctions (of things). From their vacancy came stillness; that stillness was followed by movement; their movemerts were successful. From their stillness came their non-action. Doing-nothing, they devolved the cares of office on their employes, Doing-nothing was accompanied by the feeling of satisfaction. Where there is that feeling of satisfaction, anxieties and troubles find no place; and the years of life are many.
Vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and doing-nothing are the root of all things. When this is understood, we find such a ruler on the throne as Yao, and such a minister as Shun. When with this a high position is occupied, we find the attributes of the Dis and kings,-- the sons of Heaven; with this in a low position, we find the mysterious sages, the uncrowned kings, with their ways. With this retiring (from public life), and enjoying themselves at leisure, we find the scholars who dwell by the rivers and seas, among the hills and forests, all submissive to it; with this coming forward to active life and comforting their age, their merit is great, and their fame is distinguished - and all the world becomes united in one. (Such men) by their stillness become sages; and by their movement, kings. Doing-nothing, they are honoured; in their plain simplicity, no one in the world can strive with them (for the palm of) excellence. The clear understanding of the virtue of Heaven and Earth is what is called 'The Great Root,' and 'The Great Origin;' - they who have it are in harmony with Heaven, and so they produce all equable arrangements in the world - they are those who are in harmony with men. Being in harmony with men is called the joy of men; being in harmony with Heaven is called the joy of Heaven.
Zhuangzi said, 'My Master! my Master! He shall hash and blend all things in mass without being cruel; he shall dispense his favours to all ages without being benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity, and yet is not old. He overspreads the heavens and sustains the earth; from him is the carving of all forms without any artful skill! This is what is called the Joy of Heaven. Hence it is said, "Those who know the joy of Heaven during their life, act like Heaven, and at death undergo transformation like (other) things; in their stillness they possess the quality of the Yin, and in their movement they flow abroad as the Yang. Therefore he who knows the Joy of Heaven has no murmuring against Heaven, nor any fault-finding with men; and suffers no embarrassment from things, nor any reproof from ghosts. Hence it is said, 'His movements are those of Heaven; his stillness is that of Earth; his whole mind is fixed, and he rules over the world. The spirits of his dead do not come to scare him; he is not worn out by their souls. His words proceeding from his vacancy and stillness, yet reach to heaven and earth, and show a communication with all things: this is what is called the Joy of Heaven. This Joy of Heaven forms the mind of the sage whereby he nurtures all under the sky.'"'
It was the Way of the Dis and Kings to regard Heaven and Earth as their Author, the Dao and its characteristics as their Lord, and Doing-nothing as their constant rule. Doing-nothing, they could use the whole world in their service and might have done more; acting, they were not sufficient for the service required of them by the world. Hence the men of old held non-inaction in honour. When superiors do nothing and their inferiors also do nothing, inferiors and superiors possess the same virtue; and when inferiors and superiors possess the same virtue, there are none to act as ministers. When inferiors act, and their superiors also act, then superiors and inferiors possess the same Dao; and when superiors and inferiors possess the same Dao, there is none to preside as Lord. But that the superiors do nothing and yet thereby use the world in their service, and that the inferiors, while acting, be employed in the service of the world, is an unchangeable principle. Therefore the ancient kings who presided over the world, though their knowledge embraced (all the operations of) Heaven and Earth, took no thought of their own about them; though their nice discrimination appreciated the fine fashioning of all things, they said not a word about it; though their power comprehended all within the seas, they did nothing themselves. Heaven produces nothing, yet all things experience their transformations; Earth effects no growth, yet all things receive their nurture; the Dis and Kings did nothing, yet all the world testified their effective services. Hence it is said, 'There is nothing more spiritlike than Heaven; there is nothing richer than Earth; there are none greater than the Dis and Kings.' Hence it is said (further), 'The attributes of the Dis and kings corresponded to those of Heaven and Earth.' It was thus that they availed themselves of (the operations of) Heaven and Earth, carried all things on unceasingly (in their courses), and employed the various classes of men in their service.
Originating belongs to those in the higher position; details (of work) to those who are in the lower. The compendious decision belongs to the lord; the minutiae of execution, to his ministers. The direction of the three hosts and their men with the five weapons is but a trifling quality; rewards and penalties with their advantages and sufferings, and the inflictions of the five punishments are but trivial elements of instruction; ceremonies, laws, measures, and numbers, with all the minutiae of jurisprudence, are small matters in government; the notes of bells and drums, and the display of plumes and flags are the slightest things in music, and the various grades of the mourning garments are the most unimportant manifestations of grief. These five unimportant adjuncts required the operation of the excited spirit and the employment of the arts of the mind, to bring them into use. The men of old had them indeed, but they did not give them the first place.
The ruler precedes, and the minister follows; the father precedes, and the son follows; the elder brother precedes, and the younger follows; the senior precedes, and the junior follows; the male precedes, and the female follows; the husband precedes, and the wife follows. This precedence of the more honourable and sequence of the meaner is seen in the (relative) action of heaven and earth, and hence the sages took them as their pattern. The more honourable position of heaven and the lower one of earth are equivalent to a designation of their spirit-like and intelligent qualities. The precedence of spring and summer and the sequence of autumn and winter mark the order of the four seasons. In the transformations and growth of all things, every bud and feature has its proper form; and in this we have their gradual maturing and decay, the constant flow of transformation and change. Thus since Heaven and Earth, which are most spirit-like, are distinguished as more honourable and less, and by precedence and sequence, how much more must we look for this in the ways of men! In the ancestral temple it is to kinship that honour is given; in court, to rank; in the neighbourhoods and districts, to age; in the conduct of affairs, to wisdom; such is the order in those great ways. If we speak of the course (to be pursued in them), and do not observe their order, we violate their course. If we speak of the course, and do not observe it, why do we apply that name to it?
Therefore the ancients who clearly understood the great Dao first sought to apprehend what was meant by Heaven, and the Dao and its characteristics came next. When this was apprehended, then came Benevolence and Righteousness. When these were apprehended, then came the Distinction of duties and the observance of them. This accomplished, there came objects and their names. After objects and their names, came the employment of men according to their qualities: on this there followed the examination of the men and of their work. This led to the approval or disapproval of them, which again was succeeded by the apportioning of rewards and penalties. After this the stupid and the intelligent understood what was required of them, and the honourable and the mean occupied their several positions. The good and the able, and those inferior to them, sincerely did their best. Their ability was distributed; the duties implied in their official names were fulfilled. In this way did they serve their superiors, nourish their inferiors, regulate things, and cultivate their persons. They did not call their knowledge and schemes into requisition; they were required to fall back upon (the method of) Heaven: this was what is called the Perfection of the Rule of Great Peace.
Hence it is said in the Book, 'There are objects and there are their names.' Objects and their names the ancients had; but they did not put them in the foremost place. When the ancients spoke of the Great Dao, it was only after four other steps that they gave a place to 'Objects and their Names,' and after eight steps that they gave a place to 'Rewards and Penalties.' If they had all at once spoken of 'Objects and their Names,' they would have shown an ignorance of what is the Root (of government); if they had all at once spoken of 'Rewards and Penalties,' they would have shown an ignorance of the first steps of it. Those whose words are thus an inversion of the (proper) course, or in opposition to it, are (only fit to be) ruled by others - how can they rule others? To speak all at once of 'Objects and their Names,' and of 'Rewards and Penalties,' only shows that the speaker knows the instruments of government, but does not know the method of it, is fit to be used as an instrument in the world, but not fit to use others as his instruments: he is what we call a mere sophist, a man of one small idea. Ceremonies, laws, numbers, measures, with all the minutiae of jurisprudence, the ancients had; but it is by these that inferiors serve their superiors; it is not by them that those superiors nourish the world.
Anciently, Shun asked Yao, saying, 'In what way does your Majesty by the Grace of Heaven exercise your mind?' The reply was, 'I simply show no arrogance towards the helpless; I do not neglect the poor people; I grieve for those who die; I love their infant children; and I compassionate their widows.' Shun rejoined, 'Admirable, as far as it goes; but it is not what is Great.' 'How then,' asked Yao, 'do you think I should do?' Shun replied, 'When (a sovereign) possesses the virtue of Heaven, then when he shows himself in action, it is in stillness. The sun and moon (simply) shine, and the four seasons pursue their courses. So it is with the regular phenomena of day and night, and with the movement of the clouds by which the rain is distributed.' Yao said, 'Then I have only been persistently troubling myself! What you wish is to be in harmony with Heaven, while I wish to be in harmony with men.' Now (the Way of) Heaven and Earth was much thought of of old, and Huang-Di, Yao, and Shun united in admiring it. Hence the kings of the world of old did nothing, but tried to imitate that Way.
Confucius went to the west to deposit (some) writings in the library of Zhou, when Zi-lu counselled him, saying, 'I have heard that the officer in charge of this Zheng Repository of Zhou was one Lao Dan, who has given up his office, and is living in his own house. As you, Master, wish to deposit these writings here, why not go to him, and obtain his help (to accomplish your object).' Confucius said, 'Good;' and he went and saw Lao Dan, who refused his assistance. On this he proceeded to give an abstract of the Twelve Classics to bring the other over to his views. Lao Dan, however, interrupted him while he was speaking, and said, 'This is too vague; let me hear the substance of them in brief.' Confucius said, 'The substance of them is occupied with Benevolence and Righteousness.' The other said, 'Let me ask whether you consider Benevolence and Righteousness to constitute the nature of man?' 'I do,' was the answer. 'If the superior man be not benevolent, he will not fulfil his character; if he be not righteous, he might as well not have been born. Benevolence and Righteousness are truly the nature of man.' Lao Dan continued, 'Let me ask you what you mean by Benevolence and Righteousness.' Confucius said, 'To be in one's inmost heart in kindly sympathy with all things; to love all men; and to allow no selfish thoughts - this is the nature of Benevolence and Righteousness.' Lao Dan exclaimed, 'Ah! you almost show your inferiority by such words! "To love all men!" is not that vague and extravagant? "To be seeking to allow no selfish thoughts!" - that is selfishness! If you, Master, wish men not to be without their (proper) shepherding, think of Heaven and Earth, which certainly pursue their invariable course; think of the sun and moon, which surely maintain their brightness; think of the stars in the zodiac, which preserve their order and courses; think of birds and beasts, which do not fail to collect together in their flocks and herds; and think of the trees, which do not fail to stand up (in their places). Do you, Master, imitate this way and carry it into practice; hurry on, following this course, and you will reach your end. Why must you further be vehement in putting forward your Benevolence and Righteousness, as if you were beating a drum, and seeking a fugitive son, (only making him run away the more)? Ah! Master, you are introducing disorder into the nature of man!'
Shi-cheng Qi, having an interview with Laozi, asked him, saying, 'I heard, Master, that you were a sage, and I came here, wishing to see you, without grudging the length of the journey. During the stages of the hundred days, the soles of my feet became quite callous, but I did not dare to stop and rest. Now I perceive that you are not a sage. Because there was some rice left about the holes of the rats, you sent away your younger sister, which was unkind; when your food, whether raw or cooked, remains before you not all consumed, you keep on hoarding it up to any extent.' Laozi looked indifferent, and gave him no answer.
Next day Qi again saw Laozi, and said, 'Yesterday I taunted you; but to-day I have gone back to a better mood of mind. What is the cause (of the change)?' Laozi replied, 'I consider that I have freed myself from the trammels of claiming to be artfully knowing, spirit-like, and sage. Yesterday if you had called me an ox, you might have done so; or if you had called me a horse, you might have done so. If there be a reality (corresponding to men's ideas), and men give it a name, which another will not receive, he will in the sequel suffer the more. My manner was what I constantly observe - I did not put it on for the occasion.'
Shi-cheng Qi sidled away out of Lao's shadow; then he retraced his steps, advanced forward, and asked how he should cultivate himself. The reply was, 'Your demeanour is repelling; you stare with your eyes; your forehead is broad and yet tapering; you bark and growl with your mouth; your appearance is severe and pretentious; you are like a horse held by its tether, you would move, but are restrained, and (if let go) would start off like an arrow from a bow; you examine all the minutiae of a thing; your wisdom is artful, and yet you try to look at ease. All these are to be considered proofs of your want of sincerity. If on the borders one were to be found with them, he would be named a Thief.'
The Master said, 'The Dao does not exhaust itself in what is greatest, nor is it ever absent from what is least; and therefore it is to be found complete and diffused in all things. How wide is its universal comprehension! How deep is its unfathomableness! The embodiment of its attributes in benevolence and righteousness is but a small result of its spirit-like (working); but it is only the perfect man who can determine this. The perfect man has (the charge of) the world - is not the charge great? and yet it is not sufficient to embarrass him. He wields the handle of power over the whole world, and yet it is nothing to him. His discrimination detects everything false, and no consideration of gain moves him. He penetrates to the truth of things, and can guard that which is fundamental. So it is that heaven and earth are external to him, and he views all things with indifference, and his spirit is never straitened by them. He has comprehended the Dao, and is in harmony with its characteristics; he pushes back benevolence and righteousness (into their proper place), and deals with ceremonies and music as (simply) guests: yes, the mind of the perfect man determines all things aright.'
What the world thinks the most valuable exhibition of the Dao is to be found in books. But books are only a collection of words. Words have what is valuable in them - what is valuable in words is the ideas they convey. But those ideas are a sequence of something else - and what that something else is cannot be conveyed by words. When the world, because of the value which it attaches to words, commits them to books, that for which it so values them may not deserve to be valued - because that which it values is not what is really valuable. Thus it is that what we look at and can see is (only) the outward form and colour, and what we listen to and can hear is (only) names and sounds. Alas! that men of the world should think that form and colour, name and sound, should be sufficient to give them the real nature of the Dao. The form and colour, the name and sound, are certainly not sufficient to convey its real nature; and so it is that 'the wise do not speak and those who do speak are not wise.' How should the world know that real nature?
Duke Huan, seated above in his hall, was (once) reading a book, and the wheelwright Bian was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, Bian went up the steps, and said, 'I venture to ask your Grace what words you are reading?' The duke said, 'The words of the sages.' 'Are those sages alive?' Bian continued. 'They are dead,' was the reply. 'Then,' said the other, 'what you, my Ruler, are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.' The duke said, 'How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book which I am reading? If you can explain yourself, very well; if you cannot, you shall, die!' The wheelwright said, 'Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither (too) gentle nor (too) violent, the idea in my mind is realised. But I cannot tell (how to do this) by word of mouth; there is a knack in it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, nor can my son learn it from me. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am (still) making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and what it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone: so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!'
*** The Revolution of Heaven
How (ceaselessly) heaven revolves! How (constantly) earth abides at rest! And do the sun and moon contend about their (respective) places? Who presides over and directs these (things)? Who binds and connects them together? Who is it that, without trouble or exertion on his part, causes and maintains them? Is it, perhaps, that there is some secret spring, in consequence of which they cannot be but as they are? Or is it, perhaps, that they move and turn as they do, and cannot stop of themselves? (Then) how the clouds become rain! And how the rain again forms the clouds! Who diffuses them so abundantly? Who is it that, without trouble or exertion on his part, produces this elemental enjoyment, and seems to stimulate it? The winds rise in the north; one blows to the west, and another to the east; while some rise upwards, uncertain in their direction. By whose breathing are they produced? Who is it that, without any trouble and exertion of his own, effects all their undulations? I venture to ask their cause.
Wu-xian Shao said, 'Come, and I will tell you. To heaven there belong the six Extreme Points, and the five Elements. When the Dis and Kings acted in accordance with them, there was good government; when they acted contrary to them, there was evil. Observing the things (described) in the nine divisions (of the writing) of Luo, their government was perfected and their virtue was complete. They inspected and enlightened the kingdom beneath them, and all under the sky acknowledged and sustained them. Such was the condition under the august (sovereigns) and those before them.'
Tang, the chief administrator of Shang, asked Zhuangzi about Benevolence, and the answer was, 'Wolves and tigers are benevolent.' 'What do you mean?' said Tang. Zhuangzi replied, 'Father and son (among them) are affectionate to one another. Why should they be considered as not benevolent?' 'Allow me to ask about perfect benevolence,' pursued the other. Zhuangzi said, 'Perfect benevolence does not admit (the feeling) of affection.' The minister said, 'I have heard that, without (the feeling of) affection there is no love, and without love there is not filial duty - is it permissible to say that the perfectly benevolent are not filial?' Zhuangzi rejoined, 'That is not the way to put the case. Perfect Benevolence is the very highest thing - filial duty is by no means sufficient to describe it. The saying which you quote is not to the effect that (such benevolence) transcends filial duty - it does not refer to such duty at all. One, travelling to the south, comes (at last) to Ying, and there, standing with his face to the north, he does not see mount Ming. Why does he not see it? Because he is so far from it. Hence it is said, "Filial duty as a part of reverence is easy, but filial duty as a part of love is difficult. If it be easy as a part of love, yet it is difficult to forget one's parents. It may be easy for me to forget my parents, but it is difficult to make my parents forget me. If it were easy to make my parents forget me, it is difficult for me to forget all men in the world. If it were easy to forget all men in the world, it is difficult to make them all forget me."
'This virtue might make one think light of Yao and Shun, and not wish to be they. The profit and beneficial influences of it extend to a myriad ages, and no one in the world knows whence they come. How can you simply heave a great sigh, and speak (as you do) of benevolence and filial duty? Filial duty, fraternal respect, benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, sincerity, firmness, and purity - all these may be pressed into the service of this virtue, but they are far from sufficient to come up to it. Therefore it is said, "To him who has what is most noble, all the dignities of a state are as nothing; to him who has what is the greatest riches, all the wealth of a state is as nothing; to him who has all that he could wish, fame and praise are as nothing." It is thus that the Dao admits of no substitute.'
Bei-men Cheng asked Huang-Di, saying, 'You were celebrating, O Di, a performance of the music of the Xian-chi, in the open country near the Dong-ting lake. When I heard the first part of it, I was afraid; the next made me weary; and the last perplexed me. I became agitated and unable to speak, and lost my self-possession.'
The Di said, 'It was likely that it should so affect you! It was performed with (the instruments of) men, and all attuned according to (the influences of) Heaven. It proceeded according to (the principles of) propriety and righteousness, and was pervaded by (the idea of) the Grand Purity. The Perfect Music first had its response in the affairs of men, and was conformed to the principles of Heaven; it indicated the action of the five virtues, and corresponded to the spontaneity (apparent in nature). After this it showed the blended distinctions of the four seasons, and the grand harmony of all things - the succession of those seasons one after another, and the production of things in their proper order. Now it swelled, and now it died away, its peaceful and military strains clearly distinguished and given forth. Now it was clear, and now rough, as if the contracting and expanding of the elemental processes blended harmoniously (in its notes). Those notes then flowed away in waves of light, till, as when the hibernating insects first begin to move, I commanded the terrifying crash of thunder. Its end was marked by no formal conclusion, and it began again without any prelude. It seemed to die away, and then it burst into life; it came to a close, and then it rose again. So it went on regularly and inexhaustibly, and without the intervention of any pause: it was this which made you afraid.
'In the second part (of the performance), I made it describe the harmony of the Yin and Yang, and threw round it the brilliance of the sun and moon. Its notes were now short and now long, now soft and now hard. Their changes, however, were marked by an unbroken unity, though not dominated by a fixed regularity. They filled every valley and ravine; you might shut up every crevice, and guard your spirit (against their entrance), yet there was nothing but gave admission to them. Yea, those notes resounded slowly, and might have been pronounced high and clear. Hence the shades of the dead kept in their obscurity; the sun and moon, and all the stars of the zodiac, pursued their several courses. I made (my instruments) leave off, when (the performance) came to an end, and their (echoes) flowed on without stopping. You thought anxiously about it, and were not able to understand it; you looked for it, and were not able to see it; you pursued it, and were not able to reach it. All-amazed, you stood in the way all open around you, and then you leant against an old rotten dryandra-tree and hummed. The power of your eyes was exhausted by what you wished to see; your strength failed in your desire to pursue it, while I myself could not reach it. Your body was but so much empty vacancy while you endeavoured to retain your self-possession: it was that endeavour which made you weary.
'In the last part (of the performance), I employed notes which did not have that wearying effect. I blended them together as at the command of spontaneity. Hence they came as if following one another in confusion, like a clump of plants springing from one root, or like the music of a forest produced by no visible form. They spread themselves all around without leaving a trace (of their cause); and seemed to issue from deep obscurity where there was no sound. Their movements came from nowhere; their home was in the deep darkness - conditions which some would call death, and some would call life; some would call the fruit, and some would call (merely) the flower. Those notes, moving and flowing on, separating and shifting, and not following any regular sounds, the world might well have doubts about them, and refer them to the judgment of a sage, for the sages understand the nature of this music, and judge in accordance with the prescribed (spontaneity). While the spring of that spontaneity has not been touched, and yet the regulators of the five notes are all prepared - this is what is called the music of Heaven, delighting the mind without the use of words. Hence it is said in the eulogy of the Lord of Yan, "You listen for it, and do not hear its sound; you look for it, and do not perceive its form; it fills heaven and earth; it envelopes all within the universe." You wished to hear it, but could not take it in; and therefore you were perplexed.
'I performed first the music calculated to awe; and you were frightened as if by a ghostly visitation. I followed it with that calculated to weary; and in your weariness you would have withdrawn. I concluded with that calculated to perplex; and in your perplexity you felt your stupidity. But that stupidity is akin to the Dao; you may with it convey the Dao in your person, and have it (ever) with you.'
When Confucius was travelling in the west in Wei, Yan Yuan asked the music-master Jin, saying, 'How is it, do you think, with the course of the Master?' The music-master replied, 'Alas! it is all over with your Master!' 'How so?' asked Yan Yuan; and the other said, 'Before the grass-dogs are set forth (at the sacrifice), they are deposited in a box or basket, and wrapt up with elegantly embroidered cloths, while the representative of the dead and the officer of prayer prepare themselves by fasting to present them. After they have been set forth, however, passers-by trample on their heads and backs, and the grass-cutters take and burn them in cooking. That is all they are good for. If one should again take them, replace them in the box or basket, wrap them up with embroidered cloths, and then in rambling, or abiding at the spot, should go to sleep under them, if he do not get (evil) dreams, he is sure to be often troubled with the nightmare. Now here is your Master in the same way taking the grass-dogs, presented by the ancient kings, and leading his disciples to wander or abide and sleep under them. Owing to this, the tree (beneath which they were practising ceremonies) in Sung was cut down; he was obliged to leave Wei; he was reduced to extremities in Shang and Zhou: were not those experiences like having (evil) dreams? He was kept in a state of siege between Chen and Cai, so that for seven days he had no cooked food to eat, and was in a situation between life and death: were not those experiences like the nightmare?
'If you are travelling by water, your best plan is to use a boat; if by land, a carriage. Take a boat, which will go (easily) along on the water, and try to push it along on the land, and all your lifetime it will not go so much as a fathom or two: are not ancient time and the present time like the water and the dry land? and are not Zhou and Lu like the boat and the carriage? To seek now to practise (the old ways of) Zhou in Lu is like pushing along a boat on the dry land. It is only a toilsome labour, and has no success; he who does so is sure to meet with calamity. He has not learned that in handing down the arts (of one time) he is sure to be reduced to extremity in endeavouring to adapt them to the conditions (of another).
'And have you not seen the working of a shadoof? When (the rope of) it is pulled, it bends down; and when it is let go, it rises up. It is pulled by a man, and does not pull the man; and so, whether it bends down or rises up, it commits no offence against the man. In the same way the rules of propriety, righteousness, laws, and measures of the three Huangs and five Dis derived their excellence, not from their being the same as those of the present day, but from their (aptitude for) government. We may compare them to haws, pears, oranges, and pummeloes, which are different in flavour, but all suitable to be eaten.
'Just so it is that the rules of propriety, righteousness, laws, and measures, change according to the time. If now you take a monkey, and dress it in the robes of the duke of Zhou, it will bite and tear them, and will not be satisfied till it has got rid of them altogether. And if you look at the difference between antiquity and the present time it is as great as that between the monkey and the duke of Zhou. In the same way, when Xi Shi was troubled in mind, she would knit her brows and frown on all in her neighbourhood. An ugly woman of the neighbourhood, seeing and admiring her beauty, went home, and also laying her hands on her heart proceeded to stare and frown on all around her. When the rich people of the village saw her, they shut fast their doors and would not go out; when the poor people saw her, they took their wives and children and ran away from her. The woman knew how to admire the frowning beauty, but she did not know how it was that she, though frowning, was beautiful. Alas! it is indeed all over with your Master!'
When Confucius was in his fifty-first year, he had not heard of the Dao, and went south to Pei to see Lao Dan, who said to him, 'You have come, Sir; have you? I have heard that you are the wisest man of the North; have you also got the Dao?' 'Not yet,' was the reply; and the other went on, 'How have you sought it?' Confucius said, 'I sought it in measures and numbers, and after five years I had not got it.' 'And how then did you seek it?' 'I sought it in the Yin and Yang, and after twelve years I have not found it.'
Laozi said, 'Just so! If the Dao could be presented (to another), men would all present it to their rulers; if it could be served up (to others), men would all serve it up to their parents; if it could be told (to others), men would all tell it to their brothers; if it could be given to others, men would all give it to their sons and grandsons. The reason why it cannot be transmitted is no other but this - that if, within, there be not the presiding principle, it will not remain there, and if, outwardly, there be not the correct obedience, it will not be carried out. When that which is given out from the mind (in possession of it) is not received by the mind without, the sage will not give it out; and when, entering in from without, there is no power in the receiving mind to entertain it, the sage will not permit it to lie hid there. Fame is a possession common to all; we should not seek to have much of it. Benevolence and righteousness were as the lodging-houses of the former kings; we should only rest in them for a night, and not occupy them for long. If men see us doing so, they will have much to say against us. The perfect men of old trod the path of benevolence as a path which they borrowed for the occasion, and dwelt in Righteousness as in a lodging which they used for a night. Thus they rambled in the vacancy of Untroubled Ease, found their food in the fields of Indifference, and stood in the gardens which they had not borrowed. Untroubled Ease requires the doing of nothing; Indifference is easily supplied with nourishment; not borrowing needs no outlay. The ancients called this the Enjoyment that Collects the True.
'Those who think that wealth is the proper thing for them cannot give up their revenues; those who seek distinction cannot give up the thought of fame; those who cleave to power cannot give the handle of it to others. While they hold their grasp of those things, they are afraid (of losing them). When they let them go, they are grieved; and they will not look at a single example, from which they might perceive the (folly) of their restless pursuits: such men are under the doom of Heaven. Hatred and kindness; taking and giving; reproof and instruction; death and life: these eight things are instruments of rectification, but only those are able to use them who do not obstinately refuse to comply with their great changes. Hence it is said, "Correction is Rectification." When the minds of some do not acknowledge this, it is because the gate of Heaven (in them) has not been opened.'
At an interview with Lao Dan, Confucius spoke to him of benevolence and righteousness. Lao Dan said, 'If you winnow chaff, and the dust gets into your eyes, then the places of heaven and earth and of the four cardinal points are all changed to you. If musquitoes or gadflies puncture your skin, it will keep you all the night from sleeping. But this painful iteration of benevolence and righteousness excites my mind and produces in it the greatest confusion. If you, Sir, would cause men not to lose their natural simplicity, and if you would also imitate the wind in its (unconstrained) movements, and stand forth in all the natural attributes belonging to you!-- why must you use so much energy, and carry a great drum to seek for the son whom you have lost? The snow-goose does not bathe every day to make itself white, nor the crow blacken itself every day to make itself black. The natural simplicity of their black and white does not afford any ground for controversy; and the fame and praise which men like to contemplate do not make them greater than they naturally are. When the springs (supplying the pools) are dried up, the fishes huddle together on the dry land. Than that they should moisten one another there by their gasping, and keep one another wet by their milt, it would be better for them to forget one another in the rivers and lakes.'
From this interview with Lao Dan, Confucius returned home, and for three days did not speak. His disciples (then) asked him, saying, 'Master, you have seen Lao Dan; in what way might you admonish and correct him?' Confucius said, 'In him (I may say) that I have now seen the dragon. The dragon coils itself up, and there is its body; it unfolds itself and becomes the dragon complete. It rides on the cloudy air, and is nourished by the Yin and Yang. I kept my mouth open, and was unable to shut it - how could I admonish and correct Lao Dan?' Zi-gong said, 'So then, can (this) man indeed sit still as a representative of the dead, and then appear as the dragon? Can his voice resound as thunder, when he is profoundly still? Can he exhibit himself in his movements like heaven and earth? May I, Ci, also get to see him?' Accordingly with a message from Confucius he went to see Lao Dan.
Lao Dan was then about to answer (his salutation) haughtily in the hall, but he said in a low voice, 'My years have rolled on and are passing away, what do you, Sir, wish to admonish me about?' Zi-gong replied, 'The Three Kings and Five Dis ruled the world not in the same way, but the fame that has accrued to them is the same. How is it that you alone consider that they were not sages?' 'Come forward a little, my son. Why do you say that (their government) was not the same?' 'Yao,' was the reply, 'gave the kingdom to Shun, and Shun gave it to Yu. Yu had recourse to his strength, and Tang to the force of arms. King Wen was obedient to Zhou (-xin), and did not dare to rebel; king Wu rebelled against Zhou, and would not submit to him. And I say that their methods were not the same.'
Lao Dan said, 'Come a little more forward, my son, and I will tell you how the Three Huangs and the Five Dis ruled the world. Huang-Di ruled it, so as to make the minds of the people all conformed to the One (simplicity). If the parents of one of them died, and he did not wail, no one blamed him. Yao ruled it so as to cause the hearts of the people to cherish relative affection. If any, however, made the observances on the death of other members of their kindred less than those for their parents, no one blamed them. Shun ruled it, so as to produce a feeling of rivalry in the minds of the people. Their wives gave birth to their children in the tenth month of their pregnancy, but those children could speak at five months; and before they were three years old, they began to call people by their surnames and names. Then it was that men began to die prematurely. Yu ruled it, so as to cause the minds of the people to become changed. Men's minds became scheming, and they used their weapons as if they might legitimately do so, (saying that they were) killing thieves and not killing other men. The people formed themselves into different combinations - so it was throughout the kingdom. Everywhere there was great consternation, and then arose the Literati and (the followers of) Mo (Di). From them came first the doctrine of the relationships (of society); and what can be said of the now prevailing customs (in the marrying of) wives and daughters? I tell you that the rule of the Three Kings and Five Dis may be called by that name, but nothing can be greater than the disorder which it produced. The wisdom of the Three Kings was opposed to the brightness of the sun and moon above, contrary to the exquisite purity of the hills and streams below, and subversive of the beneficent gifts of the four seasons between. Their wisdom has been more fatal than the sting of a scorpion or the bite of a dangerous beast. Unable to rest in the true attributes of their nature and constitution, they still regarded themselves as sages: was it not a thing to be ashamed of? But they were shameless.' Zi-gong stood quite disconcerted and ill at ease.
Confucius said to Lao Dan, 'I have occupied myself with the Shi, the Shu, the Li, the Yue, the Yi, and the Chun Qiu, those six Books, for what I myself consider a long time, and am thoroughly acquainted with their contents. With seventy-two rulers, all offenders against the right, I have discoursed about the ways of the former kings, and set forth the examples (of the dukes of Zhou and Shao); and not one of them has adopted (my views) and put them in practice: how very difficult it is to prevail on such men, and to make clear the path to be pursued!'
Laozi replied, 'It is fortunate that you have not met with a ruler fitted to rule the age. Those six writings are a description of the vestiges left by the former kings, but do not tell how they made such vestiges; and what you, Sir, speak about are still only the vestiges. But vestiges are the prints left by the shoes - are they the shoes that produced them? A pair of white herons look at each other with pupils that do not move, and impregnation takes place; the male insect emits its buzzing sound in the air above, and the female responds from the air below, and impregnation takes place; the creatures called lei are both male and female, and each individual breeds of itself. The nature cannot be altered; the conferred constitution cannot be changed; the march of the seasons cannot be arrested; the Dao cannot be stopped. If you get the Dao, there is no effect that cannot be produced; if you miss it, there is no effect that can.'
Confucius (after this) did not go out, till at the end of three months he went again to see Lao Dan, and said, 'I have got it. Ravens produce their young by hatching; fishes by the communication of their milt; the small-waisted wasp by transformation; when a younger brother comes, the elder weeps. Long is it that I have not played my part in harmony with these processes of transformation. But as I did not play my part in harmony with such transformation, how could I transform men?' Laozi said, 'You will do. Qiu, you have found the Dao.'
*** Ingrained Ideas
Ingrained ideas and a high estimate of their own conduct; leaving the world, and pursuing uncommon ways; talking loftily and in resentful disparagement of others - all this is simply symptomatic of arrogance. This is what scholars who betake themselves to the hills and valleys, who are always blaming the world, and who stand aloof like withered trees, or throw themselves into deep pools, are fond of. Discoursing of benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and good faith; being humble and frugal, self-forgetful and courteous - all this is simply symptomatic of (self-)cultivation. This is what scholars who wish to tranquillise the world, teachers and instructors, men who pursue their studies at home and abroad, are fond of. Discoursing of their great merit and making a great name for themselves; insisting on the ceremonies between ruler and minister; and rectifying the relations between high and low - all this shows their one object to be the promotion of government. This is what officers of the court, men who honour their lord and would strengthen the state and who would do their utmost to incorporate other states with their own, are fond of. Resorting to marshes and lakes; dwelling in solitary places; occupying themselves with angling and living at ease - all this shows their one object to be to do nothing. This is what gentlemen of the rivers and seas, men who avoid the society of the world and desire to live at leisure, are fond of. Blowing and breathing with open mouth; inhaling and exhaling the breath; expelling the old breath and taking in new; passing their time like the (dormant) bear, and stretching and twisting (the neck) like a bird - all this simply shows the desire for longevity. This is what the scholars who manipulate their breath, and the men who nourish the body and wish to live as long as Peng Zu are fond of.
As to those who have a lofty character without any ingrained ideas; who pursue the path of self-cultivation without benevolence and righteousness; who succeed in government without great services or fame; who enjoy their ease without resorting to the rivers and seas; who attain to longevity without the management (of the breath); who forget all things and yet possess all things; whose placidity is unlimited, while all things to be valued attend them: such men pursue the way of heaven and earth, and display the characteristics of the sages.
Hence it is said, 'Placidity, indifference, silence, quietude, absolute vacancy, and non-action: these are the qualities which maintain the level of heaven and earth and are the substance of the Dao and its characteristics.'
In accordance with this it is said, 'The sage is entirely restful, and so (his mind) is evenly balanced and at ease. This even balance and ease appears in his placidity and indifference. In this state of even balance and ease, of placidity and indifference, anxieties and evils do not find access to him, no depraving influence can take him by surprise; his virtue is complete, and his spirit continues unimpaired.'
Therefore it is (also) said, 'The life of the sage is (like) the action of Heaven; and his death is the transformation common to (all) things. In his stillness his virtue is the same as that of the Yin, and in movement his diffusiveness is like that of the Yang. He does not take the initiative in producing either happiness or calamity. He responds to the influence acting on him, and moves as he feels the pressure. He rises to act only when he is obliged to do so. He discards wisdom and the memories of the past; he follows the lines of his Heaven (-given nature); and therefore he suffers no calamity from Heaven, no involvement from things, no blame from men, and no reproof from the spirits of the dead. His life seems to float along; his death seems to be a resting. He does not indulge any anxious doubts; he does not lay plans beforehand. His light is without display; his good faith is without previous arrangement. His sleep is untroubled by dreams; his waking is followed by no sorrows. His spirit is guileless and pure; his soul is not subject to weariness. Vacant and without self-assertion, placid and indifferent, he agrees with the virtue of Heaven.'
Therefore it is said (further), 'Sadness and pleasure show a depraving element in the virtue (of those who feel them); joy and anger show some error in their course; love and hatred show a failure of their virtue. Hence for the mind to be free from sorrow and pleasure is the perfection of virtue; to be of one mind that does not change is the perfection of quietude; to be conscious of no opposition is the perfection of vacancy; to have no intercourse with (external) things is the perfection of indifference; and to have no rebellious dissatisfactions is the perfection of purity.'
Therefore it is said (still further), 'If the body be toiled, and does not rest, it becomes worn out; if the spirit be used without cessation, it becomes toiled; and when toiled, it becomes exhausted. It is the nature of water, when free from admixture, to be clear, and, when not agitated, to be level; while if obstructed and not allowed to flow, it cannot preserve its clearness - being an image of the virtue of Heaven.'
Hence it is said (once again), 'To be guileless and pure, and free from all admixture; to be still and uniform, without undergoing any change; to be indifferent and do nothing; to move and yet to act like Heaven: this is the way to nourish the spirit.
Now he who possesses a sword made at Gan-Yue preserves it carefully in a box, and does not dare to use it - it is considered the perfection of valuable swords. But the human spirit goes forth in all directions, flowing on without limit, reaching to heaven above, and wreathing round the earth beneath. It transforms and nourishes all things, and cannot be represented by any form. Its name is "the Divinity (in man)." It is only the path of pure simplicity which guards and preserves the Spirit. When this path is preserved and not lost, it becomes one with the Spirit; and in this ethereal amalgamation, it acts in harmony with the orderly operation of Heaven.' There is the vulgar saying, 'The multitude of men consider gain to be the most important thing; pure scholars, fame; those who are wise and able value their ambition; the sage prizes essential purity.' Therefore simplicity is the denomination of that in which there is no admixture; purity of that in which the spirit is not impaired. It is he who can embody simplicity and purity whom we call the True Man.
*** Correcting the Nature
Those who would correct their nature by means of the vulgar learning, seeking to restore it to its original condition, and those who would regulate their desires, by the vulgar ways of thinking, seeking thereby to carry their intelligence to perfection, must be pronounced to be deluded and ignorant people.
The ancients who regulated the Dao nourished their faculty of knowledge by their placidity, and all through life abstained from employing that faculty in action - they must be pronounced to have (thus also) nourished their placidity by their knowledge. When the faculty of knowledge and the placidity (thus) blend together, and they nourish each other, then from the nature there come forth harmony and orderly method. The attributes (of the Dao) constitute the harmony; the Dao (itself) secures the orderly method. When the attributes appear in a universal practice of forbearance, we have Benevolence; when the path is all marked by orderly method, we have Righteousness; when the righteousness is clearly manifested, and (all) things are regarded with affection, we have Leal-heartedness; when the (heart's) core is thus (pure) and real, and carried back to its (proper) qualities, we have Music; when this sincerity appears in all the range of the capacity, and its demonstrations are in accordance with what is elegant, we have Ceremony. If ceremonies and Music are carried out in an imperfect and one-sided manner, the world is thrown into confusion. When men would rectify others, and their own virtue is beclouded, it is not sufficient to extend itself to them. If an attempt be made so to extend it, they also will lose their (proper) nature.
The men of old, while the chaotic condition was yet undeveloped, shared the placid tranquillity which belonged to the whole world. At that time the Yin and Yang were harmonious and still; their resting and movement proceeded without any disturbance; the four seasons had their definite times; not a single thing received any injury, and no living being came to a premature end. Men might be possessed of (the faculty of) knowledge, but they had no occasion for its use. This was what is called the state of Perfect Unity. At this time, there was no action on the part of any one, but a constant manifestation of spontaneity.
This condition (of excellence) deteriorated and decayed, till Sui-ren and Fu-xi arose and commenced their administration of the world; on which came a compliance (with their methods), but the state of unity was lost. The condition going on to deteriorate and decay, Shen Nong and Huang-Di arose, and took the administration of the world, on which (the people) rested (in their methods), but did not themselves comply with them. Still the deterioration and decay continued till the lords of Tang and Yu began to administer the world. These introduced the method of governing by transformation, resorting to the stream (instead of to the spring), thus vitiating the purity and destroying the simplicity (of the nature). They left the Dao, and substituted the Good for it, and pursued the course of Haphazard Virtue. After this they forsook their nature and followed (the promptings of) their minds. One mind and another associated their knowledge, but were unable to give rest to the world. Then they added to this knowledge (external and) elegant forms, and went on to make these more and more numerous. The forms extinguished the (primal) simplicity, till the mind was drowned by their multiplicity. After this the people began to be perplexed and disordered, and had no way by which they might return to their true nature, and bring back their original condition.
Looking at the subject from this point of view, we see how the world lost the (proper) course, and how the course (which it took) only led it further astray. The world and the Way, when they came together, being (thus) lost to each other, how could the men of the Way make themselves conspicuous in the world? and how could the world rise to an appreciation of the Way? Since the Way had no means to make itself conspicuous in the world, and the world had no means of rising to an appreciation of the Way, though sagely men might not keep among the hills and forests, their virtue was hidden - hidden, but not because they themselves sought to hide it. Those whom the ancients called 'Retired Scholars' did not conceal their persons, and not allow themselves to be seen; they did not shut up their words, and refuse to give utterance to them; they did not hide away their knowledge, and refuse to bring it forth. The conditions laid on them by the times were very much awry. If the conditions of the times had allowed them to act in the world on a great scale, they would have brought back the state of unity without any trace being perceived (of how they did so), When those conditions shut them up entirely from such action, they struck their roots deeper (in themselves), were perfectly still and waited. It was thus that they preserved (the Way in) their own persons. The ancients who preserved (the Way in) their own persons did not try by sophistical reasonings to gloss over their knowledge; they did not seek to embrace (everything in) the world in their knowledge, nor to comprehend all the virtues in it. Solitary and trembling they remained where they were, and sought the restoration of their nature. What had they to do with any further action? The Way indeed is not to be pursued, nor (all) its characteristics to be known on a small scale. A little knowledge is injurious to those characteristics; small doings are injurious to the Way - hence it is said, 'They simply rectified themselves.'
Complete enjoyment is what is meant by 'the Attainment of the Aim.' What was anciently called 'the Attainment of the Aim' did not mean the getting of carriages and coronets; it simply meant that nothing more was needed for their enjoyment. Now-a-days what is called 'the Attainment of the Aim' means the getting of carriages and coronets. But carriages and coronets belong to the body; they do not affect the nature as it is constituted. When such things happen to come, it is but for a time; being but for a time, their coming cannot be obstructed and their going cannot be stopped. Therefore we should not because of carriages and coronets indulge our aims, nor because of distress and straitness resort to the vulgar (learning and thinking); the one of these conditions and the other may equally conduce to our enjoyment, which is simply to be free from anxiety. If now the departure of what is transient takes away one's enjoyment, this view shows that what enjoyment it had given was worthless. Hence it is said, 'They who lose themselves in their pursuit of things, and lose their nature in their study of what is vulgar, must be pronounced people who turn things upside down.'
*** The Floods of Autumn
The time of the autumnal floods was come, and the hundred streams were all discharging themselves into the He. Its current was greatly swollen, so that across its channel from bank to bank one could not distinguish an ox from a horse. On this the (Spirit-) earl of the He laughed with delight, thinking that all the beauty of the world was to be found in his charge. Along the course of the river he walked east till he came to the North Sea, over which he looked, with his face to the east, without being able to see where its waters began. Then he began to turn his face round, looked across the expanse, (as if he were) confronting Ruo, and said with a sigh, 'What the vulgar saying expresses about him who has learned a hundred points (of the Dao), and thinks that there is no one equal to himself, was surely spoken of me. And moreover, I have heard parties making little of the knowledge of Zhongni and the righteousness of Bo-yi, and at first I did not believe them. Now I behold the all-but-boundless extent (of your realms). If I had not come to your gate, I should have been in danger (of continuing in my ignorance), and been laughed at for long in the schools of our great System.'
Ruo, (the Spirit-lord) of the Northern Sea, said, 'A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea - he is confined to the limits of his hole. An insect of the summer cannot be talked with about ice - it knows nothing beyond its own season. A scholar of limited views cannot be talked with about the Dao - he is bound by the teaching (which he has received). Now you have come forth from between your banks, and beheld the great sea. You have come to know your own ignorance and inferiority, and are in the way of being fitted to be talked with about great principles. Of all the waters under heaven there are none so great as the sea. A myriad streams flow into it without ceasing, and yet it is not filled; and afterwards it discharges them (also) without ceasing, and yet it is not emptied. In spring and in autumn it undergoes no change; it takes no notice of floods or of drought. Its superiority over such streams even as the Jiang and the He cannot be told by measures or numbers; and that I have never, notwithstanding this, made much of myself, is because I compare my own bodily form with (the greatness of) heaven and earth, and (remember that) I have received my breath from the Yin and Yang. Between heaven and earth I am but as a small stone or a small tree on a great hill. So long as I see myself to be thus small, how should I make much of myself? I estimate all within the four seas, compared with the space between heaven and earth, to be not so large as that occupied by a pile of stones in a large marsh! I estimate our Middle States, compared with the space between the four seas, to be smaller than a single little grain of rice in a great granary! When we would set forth the number of things (in existence), we speak of them as myriads; and man is only one of them. Men occupy all the nine provinces; but of all whose life is maintained by grain-food, wherever boats and carriages reach, men form only one portion. Thus compared with the myriads of things, they are not equal to a single fine hair on the body of a horse. Within this range are comprehended all (the territories) which the five Dis received in succession from one another; all which the royal founders of the three dynasties contended for; all which excited the anxiety of Benevolent men; and all which men in office have toiled for. Bo-yi was accounted famous for declining (to share in its government), and Zhongni was accounted great because of the lessons which he addressed to it. They acted as they did, making much of themselves - therein like you who a little time ago did so of yourself because of your (volume of) water!'
The earl of the He said, 'Well then, may I consider heaven and earth as (the ideal of) what is great, and the point of a hair as that of what is small?' Ruo of the Northern Sea replied, 'No. The (different) capacities of things are illimitable; time never stops, (but is always moving on); man's lot is ever changing; the end and the beginning of things never occur (twice) in the same way. Therefore men of great wisdom, looking at things far off or near at hand, do not think them insignificant for being small, nor much of them for being great: knowing how capacities differ illimitably. They appeal with intelligence to things of ancient and recent occurrence, without being troubled by the remoteness of the former, or standing on tiptoe to lay hold of the latter: knowing that time never stops in its course. They examine with discrimination (cases of) fulness and of want, not overjoyed by success, nor disheartened by failure: knowing the inconstancy of man's lot. They know the plain and quiet path (in which things proceed), therefore they are not overjoyed to live, nor count it a calamity to die: the end and the beginning of things never occurring (twice) in the same way. We must reckon that what men know is not so much as what they do not know, and that the time since they were born is not so long as that which elapsed before they were born. When they take that which is most small and try to fill with it the dimensions of what is most great, this leads to error and confusion, and they cannot attain their end. Looking at the subject in this way, how can you know that the point of a hair is sufficient to determine the minuteness of what is most small, or that heaven and earth are sufficient to complete the dimensions of what is most large?'
The earl of the He said, 'The disputers of the world all say, "That which is most minute has no bodily form; and that which is most great cannot be encompassed" - is this really the truth?' Ruo of the Northern Sea replied, 'When from the standpoint of what is small we look at what is great, we do not take it all in; when from the standpoint of what is great we look at what is small, we do not see it clearly. Now the subtile essence is smallness in its extreme degree; and the vast mass is greatness in its largest form. Different as they are, each has its suitability - according to their several conditions. But the subtile and the gross both presuppose that they have a bodily form. Where there is no bodily form, there is no longer a possibility of numerical division; where it is not possible to encompass a mass, there is no longer a possibility of numerical estimate. What can be discoursed about in words is the grossness of things; what can be reached in idea is the subtilty of things. What cannot be discoursed about in words, and what cannot be reached by nice discrimination of thought, has nothing to do either with subtilty or grossness. Therefore while the actions of the Great Man are not directed to injure men, he does not plume himself on his benevolence and kindness; while his movements are not made with a view to gain, he does not consider the menials of a family as mean; while he does not strive after property and wealth, he does not plume himself on declining them; while he does not borrow the help of others to accomplish his affairs, he does not plume himself on supporting himself by his own strength, nor does he despise those who in their greed do what is mean; while he differs in his conduct from the vulgar, he does not plume himself on being so different from them; while it is his desire to follow the multitude, he does not despise the glib-tongued flatterers. The rank and emoluments of the world furnish no stimulus to him, nor does he reckon its punishments and shame to be a disgrace. He knows that the right and the wrong can (often) not be distinguished, and that what is small and what is great can (often) not be defined. I have heard it said, "The Man of Dao does not become distinguished; the greatest virtue is unsuccessful; the Great Man has no thought of self" - to so great a degree may the lot be restricted.'
The earl of the He said, 'Whether the subject be what is external in things, or what is internal, how do we come to make a distinction between them as noble and mean, and as great or small?' Ruo of the Northern Sea replied, 'When we look at them in the light of the Dao, they are neither noble nor mean. Looking at them in themselves, each thinks itself noble, and despises others. Looking at them in the light of common opinion, their being noble or mean does not depend on themselves. Looking at them in their differences from one another, if we call those great which are greater than others, there is nothing that is not great, and in the same way there is nothing that is not small. We shall (thus) know that heaven and earth is but (as) a grain of the smallest rice, and that the point of a hair is (as) a mound or a mountain - such is the view given of them by their relative size. Looking at them from the services they render, allowing to everything the service which it does, there is not one which is not serviceable; and, extending the consideration to what it does not do, there is not one which is not unserviceable. We know (for instance) that East and West are opposed to each other, and yet that the one cannot be without (suggesting the idea of) the other - (thus) their share of mutual service is determined. Looking at them with respect to their tendencies, if we approve of what they approve, then there is no one who may not be approved of; and, if we condemn what they condemn, there is no one who may not be condemned. There are the cases of Yao and Jie, each of whom approved of his own course, and condemned the other - such is the view arising from the consideration of tendency and aim.
Formerly Yao and Shun resigned (their thrones), and yet each continued to be Di; Zhi-kuai resigned (his marquisate) which led to his ruin. Tang and Wu contended (for the sovereignty), and each became king; the duke a contended (for Qi), which led to his extinction. Looking at the subject from these examples of striving by force and of resigning, and from the conduct of Yao (on the one hand) and of Jie (on the other), we see that there is a time for noble acting, and a time for mean - these characteristics are subject to no regular rule.
A battering ram may be used against the wall of a city, but it cannot be employed to stop up a hole - the uses of implements are different. The (horses) Qi-ji and Hua-liu could in one day gallop 1000 li, but for catching rats they were not equal to a wild dog or a weasel - the gifts of creatures are different. The white horned owl collects its fleas in the night-time, and can discern the point of a hair, but in bright day it stares with its eyes and cannot see a mound or a hill - the natures of creatures are different.
Hence the sayings, "Shall we not follow and honour the right, and have nothing to do with the wrong? shall we not follow and honour those who secure good government, and have nothing to do with those who produce disorder?" show a want of acquaintance with the principles of Heaven and Earth, and with the different qualities of things. It is like following and honouring Heaven and taking no account of Earth; it is like following and honouring the Yin and taking no account of the Yang. It is clear that such a course cannot be pursued. Yet notwithstanding they go on talking so: if they are not stupid, they are visionaries. The Di sovereigns resigned their thrones to others in one way, and the rulers of the three dynasties transmitted their thrones to their successors in another. He who acts differently from the requirements of his time and contrary to its custom is called an usurper; he who complies with the time and follows the common practice is said to be righteous. Hold your peace, 0 earl of the He. How should you know what constitutes being noble and being mean, or who are the small and who the great?'
The earl of the He said, 'Very well. But what am I to do? and what am I not to do? How am I to be guided after all in regard to what I accept or reject, and what I pursue or put away from me?' Ruo of the Northern Sea replied, 'From the standpoint of the Dao, what is noble? and what is mean? These expressions are but the different extremes of the average level. Do not keep pertinaciously to your own ideas, which put you in such opposition to the Dao. What are few? and what are many? These are denominations which we employ in thanking (donors) and dispensing gifts. Do not study to be uniform in doing so - it only shows how different you are from the Dao. Be severe and strict, like the ruler of a state who does not selfishly bestow his favours. Be scrupulous, yet gentle, like the tutelary spirit of the land, when sacrifice is offered to him who does not bestow his blessing selfishly. Be large-minded like space, whose four terminating points are illimitable, and form no particular enclosures. Hold all things in your love, favouring and supporting none specially. This is called being without any local or partial regard; all things are equally regarded; there is no long or short among them.
There is no end or beginning to the Dao. Things indeed die and are born, not reaching a perfect state which can be relied on. Now there is emptiness, and now fulness - they do not continue in one form. The years cannot be reproduced; time cannot be arrested. Decay and growth, fulness and emptiness, when they end, begin again. It is thus that we describe the method of great righteousness, and discourse about the principle pervading all things. The life of things is like the hurrying and galloping along of a horse. With every movement there is a change; with every moment there is an alteration. What should you be doing? what should you not be doing? You have only to be allowing this course of natural transformation to be going on.'
The earl of the He said, 'What then is there so valuable in the Dao?' Ruo of the Northern Sea replied, 'He who knows the Dao is sure to be well acquainted with the principles (that appear in the procedures of things). Acquainted with (those) principles, he is sure to understand how to regulate his conduct in all varying circumstances. Having that understanding, he will not allow things to injure himself. Fire cannot burn him who is (so) perfect in virtue, nor water drown him; neither cold nor heat can affect him injuriously; neither bird nor beast can hurt him. This does not mean that he is indifferent to these things; it means that he discriminates between where he may safely rest and where he will be in peril; that he is tranquil equally in calamity and happiness; that he is careful what he avoids and what he approaches - so that nothing can injure him. Hence it is said, "What is heavenly is internal; what is human is external." The virtue (of man) is in what is Heavenly. If you know the operation of what is Heavenly and what is Human, you will have your root in what is Heavenly and your position in Virtue. You will bend or stretch (only) after the (necessary) hesitation; you will have returned to the essential, and may be pronounced to have reached perfection.'
'What do you mean,' pursued the earl, 'by the Heavenly, and by the Human?' Ruo replied, 'Oxen and horses have four feet - that is what I call their Heavenly (constitution). When horses' heads are haltered, and the noses of oxen are pierced, that is what I call (the doing of) Man. Hence it is said, "Do not by the Human (doing) extinguish the Heavenly (constitution); do not for your (Human) purpose extinguish the appointment (of Heaven); do not bury your (proper) fame in (such) a pursuit of it; carefully guard (the Way) and do not lose it: this is what I call reverting to your True (Nature)."'
The kui desires to be like the millipede; the millipede to be like the serpent; the serpent like the wind; the wind to be like the eye; and the eye to be like the mind.
The kui said to the millipede, 'With my one leg I hop about, and can hardly manage to go along. Now you have a myriad feet which you can employ; how is it that you are so abundantly furnished?' The millipede said, 'It is not so. Have you not seen one ejecting saliva? The largest portion of it is like a pearl, while the smaller portions fall down like a shower of mist in innumerable drops. Now I put in motion the springs set in me by Heaven, without knowing how I do so.'
The millipede said to the serpent, 'I go along by means of my multitude of feet; and yet how is it that I do not go so fast as you who have no feet at all?' The serpent replied, 'How can the method of moving by the springs set in us by Heaven be changed? How could I make use of feet?'
The serpent said to the wind, 'I get along by moving my backbone and ribs, thus appearing to have some (bodily) means of progression. But now you, Sir, rise with a blustering force in the North Sea, and go on in the same way to the South Sea - seemingly without any such means. How does it take place?' The wind said, 'Yes. With such a blustering force I rise in the North Sea and go on to the South Sea. But you can point to me, and therein are superior to me, as you are also in treading on me. Yet notwithstanding, it is only I who can break great trees, and blow down great houses. Therefore he whom all that are small cannot overcome is a great overcomer. But it is only he who is the sagely man that is the Great Conqueror (of all).'
When Confucius was travelling in Kuang, some people of Song (once) surrounded him (with a hostile intention) several ranks deep; but he kept singing to his lute without stopping. Zi-lu came in, and saw him, and said, 'How is it, Master, that you are so pleased?' Confucius said, 'Come here, and I will tell you. I have tried to avoid being reduced to such a strait for a long time; and that I have not escaped shows that it was so appointed for me. I have sought to find a ruler that would employ me for a long time, and that I have not found one, shows the character of the time. Under Yao and Shun there was no one in the kingdom reduced to straits like mine; and it was not by their sagacity that men succeeded as they did. Under Jie and Zhou no (good and able man) in the kingdom found his way to employment; and it was not for (want of) sagacity that they failed to do so. It was simply owing to the times and their character. People that do business on the water do not shrink from meeting iguanodons and dragons - that is the courage of fishermen. Those who do business on land do not shrink from meeting rhinoceroses and tigers - that is the courage of hunters. When men see the sharp weapons crossed before them, and look on death as going home - that is the courage of the determined soldier. When he knows that his strait is determined for him, and that the employment of him by a ruler depends on the character of the time, and then meeting with great distress is yet not afraid - that is the courage of the sagely man. Wait, my good You, and you will see what there is determined for me in my lot.' A little afterwards, the leader of the armed men approached and took his leave, saying, 'We thought you were Yang Hu, and therefore surrounded you. Now we see our mistake.' (With this) he begged to take his leave, and withdrew.
Gong-sun Long asked Mou of Wei, saying, 'When I was young, I learned the teachings of the former kings; and when I was grown up, I became proficient in the practice of benevolence and righteousness. I brought together the views that agreed and disagreed; I considered the questions about hardness and whiteness; I set forth what was to be affirmed and what was not, and what was allowable and what was not; I studied painfully the various schools of thought, and made myself master of the reasonings of all their masters. I thought that I had reached a good understanding of every subject; but now that I have heard the words of Zhuangzi, they throw me into a flutter of surprise. I do not know whether it be that I do not come up to him in the power of discussion, or that my knowledge is not equal to his. But now I do not feel able to open my mouth, and venture to ask you what course I should pursue.'
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Gong-sun Mou leant forward on his stool, drew a long breath, looked up to heaven, smiled, and said, 'Have you not heard of the frog of the dilapidated well, and how it said to the turtle of the Eastern Sea, "How I enjoy myself? I leap upon the parapet of this well. I enter, and having by means of the projections formed by the fragments of the broken tiles of the lining proceeded to the water, I draw my legs together, keep my chin up, (and strike out). When I have got to the mud, I dive till my feet are lost in it. Then turning round, I see that of the shrimps, crabs, and tadpoles there is not one that can do like me. Moreover, when one has entire command of all the water in the gully, and hesitates to go forward, it is the greatest pleasure to enjoy one's self here in this dilapidated well - why do not you, Master, often come and enter, and see it for yourself?" The turtle of the Eastern Sea (was then proceeding to go forward), but before he had put in his left foot, he found his right knee caught and held fast. On this he hesitated, drew back, and told (the frog) all about the sea, saying, "A distance of a thousand li is not sufficient to express its extent, nor would (a line of) eight thousand cubits be equal to sound its depth. In the time of Yu, for nine years out of ten the flooded land (all drained into it), and its water was not sensibly increased; and in the time of Thang for seven years out of eight there was a drought, but the rocks on the shore (saw) no diminution of the water because of it. Thus it is that no change is produced in its waters by any cause operating for a short time or a long, and that they do not advance nor recede for any addition or subtraction, whether great or small; and this is the great pleasure afforded by the Eastern Sea." When the frog of the dilapidated well heard this, he was amazed and terror-struck, and lost himself in surprise.
And moreover, when you, who have not wisdom enough to know where the discussions about what is right and what is wrong should end, still desire to see through the words of Zhuangzi, that is like employing a mosquito to carry a mountain on its back, or a millipede to gallop as fast as the Ho runs - tasks to which both the insects are sure to be unequal. Still further, when you, who have not wisdom enough to know the words employed in discussing very mysterious subjects, yet hasten to show your sharpness of speech on any occasion that may occur, is not this being like the frog of the dilapidated well?
And that (Zhuangzi) now plants his foot on the Yellow Springs (below the earth), and anon rises to the height of the Empyrean. Without any regard to south and north, with freedom he launches out in every direction, and is lost in the unfathomable. Without any regard to east and west, starting from what is abysmally obscure, he comes back to what is grandly intelligible. (All the while), you, Sir, in amazement, search for his views to examine them, and grope among them for matter for discussion - this is just like peeping at the heavens through a tube, or aiming at the earth with an awl; are not both the implements too small for the purpose? Go your ways, Sir.
And have you not heard of the young learners of Shou-ling, and how they did in Han-dan? Before they had acquired what they might have done in that capital, they had forgotten what they had learned to do in their old city, and were marched back to it on their hands and knees. If now you do not go away, you will forget your old acquirements, and fail in your profession.'
Gong-sun Long gaped on the speaker, and could not shut his mouth, and his tongue clave to its roof. He slank away and ran off.
Zhuangzi was (once) fishing in the river Pu, when the king of Chu sent two great officers to him, with the message, 'I wish to trouble you with the charge of all within my territories.' Zhuangzi kept on holding his rod without looking round, and said, 'I have heard that in Chu there is a spirit-like tortoise-shell, the wearer of which died 3000 years ago, and which the king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a cloth. Was it better for the tortoise to die, and leave its shell to be thus honoured? Or would it have been better for it to live, and keep on dragging its tail through the mud?' The two officers said, 'It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after it over the mud.' 'Go your ways. I will keep on drawing my tail after me through the mud.'
Huizi being a minister of state in Liang, Zhuangzi went to see him. Some one had told Huizi that Zhuangzi was come with a wish to supersede him in his office, on which he was afraid, and instituted a search for the stranger all over the kingdom for three days and three nights. (After this) Zhuangzi went and saw him, and said, 'There is in the south a bird, called "the Young Phoenix" - do you know it? Starting from the South Sea, it flies to the Northern; never resting but on the bignonia, never eating but the fruit of the melia azederach, and never drinking but from the purest springs. An owl, which had got a putrid rat, (once), when a phoenix went passing overhead, looked up to it and gave an angry scream. Do you wish now, in your possession of the kingdom of Liang, to frighten me with a similar scream?'
Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking on the dam over the Hao, when the former said, 'These thryssas come out, and play about at their ease - that is the enjoyment of fishes.' The other said, 'You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?' Zhuangzi rejoined, 'You are not I. How do you know that I do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?' Huizi said, 'I am not you; and though indeed I do not fully know you, you certainly are not a fish, and (the argument) is complete against your knowing what constitutes the happiness of fishes.' Zhuangzi replied, 'Let us keep to your original question. You said to me, "How do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?" You knew that I knew it, and yet you put your question to me - well, I know it (from our enjoying ourselves together) over the Hao.'
*** Perfect Enjoyment
Under the sky is perfect enjoyment to be found or not? Are there any who can preserve themselves alive or not? If there be, what do they do? What do they maintain? What do they avoid? What do they attend to? Where do they resort to? Where do they keep from? What do they delight in? What do they dislike?
What the world honours is riches, dignities, lonevity, and being deemed able. What it delights in is rest for the body, rich flavours, fine garments, beautiful colours, and pleasant music. What it looks down on are poverty and mean condition, short life and being deemed feeble. What men consider bitter experiences are that their bodies do not get rest and ease, that their mouths do not get food of rich flavour, that their persons are not finely clothed, that their eyes do not see beautiful colours, and that their ears do not listen to pleasant music. If they do not got these things, they are very sorrowful, and go on to be troubled with fears. Their thoughts are all about the body - are they not silly?
Now the rich embitter their lives by their incessant labours; they accumulate more wealth than they can use: while they act thus for the body, they make it external to themselves. Those who seek for honours carry their pursuit of them from the day into the night, full of anxiety about their methods whether they are skilful or not: while they act thus for the body they treat it as if it were indifferent to them. The birth of man is at the same time the birth of his sorrow; and if he live long he becomes more and more stupid, and the longer is his anxiety that he may not die; how great is his bitterness!-- while he thus acts for his body, it is for a distant result. Meritorious officers are regarded by the world as good; but (their goodness) is not sufficient to keep their persons alive. I do not know whether the goodness ascribed to them be really good or really not good. If indeed it be considered good, it is not sufficient to preserve their persons alive; if it be deemed not good, it is sufficient to preserve other men alive. Hence it is said, 'When faithful remonstrances are not listened to, (the remonstrant) should sit still, let (his ruler) take his course, and not strive with him.' Therefore when Zi-xu strove with (his ruler), he brought on himself the mutilation of his body. If he had not so striven, he would not have acquired his fame: was such (goodness) really good or was it not? As to what the common people now do, and what they find their enjoyment in, I do not know whether the enjoyment be really enjoyment or really not. I see them in their pursuit of it following after all their aims as if with the determination of death, and as if they could not stop in their course; but what they call enjoyment would not be so to me, while yet I do not say that there is no enjoyment in it. Is there indeed such enjoyment, or is there not? I consider doing nothing (to obtain it) to be the great enjoyment, while ordinarily people consider it to be a great evil. Hence it is said, 'Perfect enjoyment is to be without enjoyment; the highest praise is to be without praise.'
The right and the wrong (on this point of enjoyment) cannot indeed be determined according to (the view of) the world; nevertheless, this doing nothing (to obtain it) may determine the right and the wrong. Since perfect enjoyment is (held to be) the keeping the body alive, it is only by this doing nothing that that end is likely to be secured. Allow me to try and explain this (more fully): Heaven does nothing, and thence comes its serenity; Earth does nothing, and thence comes its rest. By the union of these two inactivities, all things are produced. How vast and imperceptible is the process!-- they seem to come from nowhere! How imperceptible and vast!-- there is no visible image of it! All things in all their variety grow from this Inaction. Hence it is said, 'Heaven and Earth do nothing, and yet there is nothing that they do not do.' But what man is there that can attain to this inaction?
When Zhuangzi's wife died, Huizi went to condole with him, and, finding him squatted on the ground, drumming on the basin, and singing, said to him, 'When a wife has lived with her husband, and brought up children, and then dies in her old age, not to wail for her is enough. When you go on to drum on this basin and sing, is it not an excessive (and strange) demonstration?' Zhuangzi replied, 'It is not so. When she first died, was it possible for me to be singular and not affected by the event? But I reflected on the commencement of her being. She had not yet been born to life; not only had she no life, but she had no bodily form; not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath. During the intermingling of the waste and dark chaos, there ensued a change, and there was breath; another change, and there was the bodily form; another change, and there came birth and life. There is now a change again, and she is dead. The relation between these things is like the procession of the four seasons from spring to autumn, from winter to summer. There now she lies with her face up, sleeping in the Great Chamber; and if I were to fall sobbing and going on to wall for her, I should think that I did not understand what was appointed (for all). I therefore restrained myself!'
Mr. Deformed and Mr. One-foot were looking at the mound-graves of the departed in the wild of Kun-lun, where Huang-Di had entered into his rest. Suddenly a tumour began to grow on their left wrists, which made them look distressed as if they disliked it. The former said to the other, 'Do you dread it?' 'No,' replied he, 'why should I dread it? Life is a borrowed thing. The living frame thus borrowed is but so much dust. Life and death are like day and night. And you and I were looking at (the graves of) those who have undergone their change. If my change is coming to me, why should I dislike it?'
When Zhuangzi went to Chu, he saw an empty skull, bleached indeed, but still retaining its shape. Tapping it with his horse-switch, he asked it, saying, 'Did you, Sir, in your greed of life, fail in the lessons of reason, and come to this? Or did you do so, in the service of a perishing state, by the punishment of the axe? Or was it through your evil conduct, reflecting disgrace on your parents and on your wife and children? Or was it through your hard endurances of cold and hunger? Or was it that you had completed your term of life?' Having given expression to these questions, he took up the skull, and made a pillow of it when he went to sleep.
At midnight the skull appeared to him in a dream, and said, 'What you said to me was after the fashion of an orator. All your words were about the entanglements of men in their lifetime. There are none of those things after death. Would you like to hear me, Sir, tell you about death?' 'I should,' said Zhuangzi, and the skull resumed: 'In death there are not (the distinctions of) ruler above and minister below. There are none of the phenomena of the four seasons. Tranquil and at ease, our years are those of heaven and earth. No king in his court has greater enjoyment than we have.' Zhuangzi did not believe it, and said, 'If I could get the Ruler of our Destiny to restore your body to life with its bones and flesh and skin, and to give you back your father and mother, your wife and children, and all your village acquaintances, would you wish me to do so?' The skull stared fixedly at him, knitted its brows, and said, 'How should I cast away the enjoyment of my royal court, and undertake again the toils of life among mankind?'
When Yan Yuan went eastwards to Qi, Confucius wore a look of sorrow. Zi-gong left his mat, and asked him, saying, 'Your humble disciple ventures to ask how it is that the going eastwards of Hui to Qi has given you such a look of sadness.' Confucius said, 'Your question is good. Formerly Guanzi used words of which I very much approve. He said, "A small bag cannot be made to contain what is large; a short rope cannot be used to draw water from a deep well." So it is, and man's appointed lot is definitely determined, and his body is adapted for definite ends, so that neither the one nor the other can be augmented or diminished. I am afraid that Hui will talk with the marquis of Qi about the ways of Huang-Di, Yao, and Shun, and go on to relate the words of Sui-ren and Shen Nong. The marquis will seek (for the correspondence of what he is told) in himself; and, not finding it there, will suspect the speaker; and that speaker, being suspected, will be put to death. And have you not heard this? Formerly a sea-bird alighted in the suburban country of Lu. The marquis went out to meet it, (brought it) to the ancestral temple, and prepared to banquet it there. The Jiu-shao was performed to afford it music; an ox, a sheep, and a pig were killed to supply the food. The bird, however, looked at everything with dim eyes, and was very sad. It did not venture to eat a single bit of flesh, nor to drink a single cupful; and in three days it died.
'The marquis was trying to nourish the bird with what he used for himself, and not with the nourishment proper for a bird. They who would nourish birds as they ought to be nourished should let them perch in the deep forests, or roam over sandy plains; float on the rivers and lakes; feed on the eels and small fish; wing their flight in regular order and then stop; and be free and at ease in their resting-places. It was a distress to that bird to hear men speak; what did it care for all the noise and hubbub made about it? If the music of the Jiu-shao or the Xian-chi were performed in the wild of the Dong-ting lake, birds would fly away, and beasts would run off when they heard it, and fishes would dive down to the bottom of the water; while men, when they hear it, would come all round together, and look on. Fishes live and men die in the water. They are different in constitution, and therefore differ in their likes and dislikes. Hence it was that the ancient sages did not require (from all) the same ability, nor demand the same performances. They gave names according to the reality of what was done, and gave their approbation where it was specially suitable. This was what was called the method of universal adaptation and of sure success.'
Liezi (once) upon a journey took a meal by the road-side. There he saw a skull a hundred years old, and, pulling away the bush (under which it lay), he pointed to it and said, 'It is only you and I who know that you are not dead, and that (aforetime) you were not alive. Do you indeed really find (in death) the nourishment (which you like)? Do I really find (in life my proper) enjoyment?
The seeds (of things) are multitudinous and minute. On the surface of the water they form a membranous texture. When they reach to where the land and water join they become the (lichens which we call the) clothes of frogs and oysters. Coming to life on mounds and heights, they become the plantain; and, receiving manure, appear as crows' feet. The roots of the crow's foot become grubs, and its leaves, butterflies. This butterfly, known by the name of xu, is changed into an insect, and comes to life under a furnace. Then it has the form of a moth, and is named the Qu-duo. The Qu-duo after a thousand days becomes a bird, called the gan-yu-gu. Its saliva becomes the si-mi, and this again the shi-xi (or pickle-eater). The yi-lu is produced from the pickle-eater; the huang-kuang from the jiu-you; the mou-rui from the fu-quan. The yang-xi uniting with a bamboo, which has long ceased to put forth sprouts, produces the qing-ning; the qing-ning, the panther; the panther, the horse; and the horse, the man. Man then again enters into the great Machinery (of Evolution), from which all things come forth (at birth), and which they enter at death.
*** The Full Understanding of Life
He who understands the conditions of Life does not strive after what is of no use to life; and he who understands the conditions of Destiny does not strive after what is beyond the reach of knowledge. In nourishing the body it is necessary to have beforehand the things (appropriate to its support); but there are cases where there is a superabundance of such things, and yet the body is not nourished. In order to have life it is necessary that it do not have left the body; but there are cases when the body has not been left by it, and yet the life has perished. When life comes, it cannot be declined; when it goes, it cannot be detained. Alas! the men of the world think that to nourish the body is sufficient to preserve life; and when such nourishment is not sufficient to preserve the life, what can be done in the world that will be sufficient? Though (all that men can do) will be insufficient, yet there are things which they feel they ought to do, and they do not try to avoid doing them.
For those who wish to avoid caring for the body, their best plan is to abandon the world. Abandoning the world, they are free from its entanglements. Free from its entanglements, their (minds) are correct and their (temperament) is equable. Thus correct and equable, they succeed in securing a renewal of life, as some have done. In securing a renewal of life, they are not far from the True (Secret of their being). But how is it sufficient to abandon worldly affairs? and how is it sufficient to forget the (business of) life? Through the renouncing of (worldly) affairs, the body has no more toil; through forgetting the (business of) life, the vital power suffers no diminution. When the body is completed and the vital power is restored (to its original vigour), the man is one with Heaven. Heaven and Earth are the father and mother of all things. It is by their union that the body is formed; it is by their separation that a (new) beginning is brought about. When the body and vital power suffer no diminution, we have what may be called the transference of power. From the vital force there comes another more vital, and man returns to be the assistant of Heaven.
My master Liezi asked Yin, (the warden) of the gate, saying, 'The perfect man walks under water without encountering any obstruction, treads on fire without being burned, and walks on high above all things without any fear; let me ask how he attains to do this?' The warden Yin replied, 'It is by his keeping of the pure breath (of life); it is not to be described as an achievement of his skill or daring. Sit down, and I will explain it to you. Whatever has form, semblance, sound, and colour is a thing; how can one thing come to be different from another? But it is not competent for any of these things to reach to what preceded them all - they are but (form and) visibility. But (the perfect man) attains to be (as it were) without form, and beyond the capability of being transformed. Now when one attains to this and carries it out to the highest degree, how can other things come into his way to stop him? He will occupy the place assigned to him without going beyond it, and lie concealed in the clue which has no end. He will study with delight the process which gives their beginning and ending to all things. By gathering his nature into a unity, by nourishing his vital power, by concentrating his virtue, he will penetrate to the making of things. In this condition, with his heavenly constitution kept entire, and with no crevice in his spirit, how can things enter (and disturb his serenity)?
'Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage - though he may suffer injury, he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire. He knew nothing about his getting into the carriage, and knew nothing about his falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast; and therefore he encounters danger without any shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he has drunk, it is thus with him - how much more would it be so, if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution, and therefore nothing can injure him.
'A man in the pursuit of vengeance would not break the (sword) Mo-yu or Gan-jiang (which had done the deed); nor would one, however easily made wrathful, wreak his resentment on the fallen brick. In this way all under heaven there would be peace, without the disorder of assaults and fighting, without the punishments of death and slaughter: such would be the issue of the course (which I have described). If the disposition that is of human origin be not developed, but that which is the gift of Heaven, the development of the latter will produce goodness, while that of the former would produce hurt. If the latter were not wearied of, and the former not slighted, the people would be brought nearly to their True nature.'
When Zhongni was on his way to Chu, as he issued from a forest, he saw a hunchback receiving cicadas (on the point of a rod), as if he were picking them up with his hand. 'You are clever!' said he to the man. 'Is there any method in it?' The hunchback replied, 'There is. For five or six months, I practised with two pellets, till they never fell down, and then I only failed with a small fraction of the cicadas (which I tried to catch). Having succeeded in the same way with three (pellets), I missed only one cicada in ten. Having succeeded with five, I caught the cicadas as if I were gathering them. My body is to me no more than the stump of a broken trunk, and my shoulder no more than the branch of a rotten tree. Great as heaven and earth are, and multitudinous as things are, I take no notice of them, but only of the wings of my cicadas; neither turning nor inclining to one side. I would not for them all exchange the wings of my cicadas - how should I not succeed in taking them?' Confucius looked round, and said to his disciples, '"Where the will is not diverted from its object, the spirit is concentrated" - this might have been spoken of this hunchback gentleman.'
Yan Yuan asked Zhongni, saying, 'When I was crossing the gulf of Shang-shen, the ferryman handled the boat like a spirit. I asked him whether such management of a boat could be learned, and he replied, "It may. Good swimmers can learn it quickly; but as for divers, without having seen a boat, they can manage it at once." He did not directly tell me what I asked - I venture to ask you what he meant.' Zhongni replied, 'Good swimmers acquire the ability quickly - they forget the water (and its dangers). As to those who are able to dive, and without having seen a boat are able to manage it at once, they look on the watery gulf as if it were a hill-side, and the upsetting of a boat as the going back of a carriage. Such upsettings and goings back have occurred before them multitudes of times, and have not seriously affected their minds. Wherever they go, they feel at ease on their occurrence. He who is contending for a piece of earthenware puts forth all his skill. If the prize be a buckle of brass, he shoots timorously; if it be for an article of gold, he shoots as if he were blind. The skill of the archer is the same in all the cases; but (in the two latter cases) he is under the influence of solicitude, and looks on the external prize as most important. All who attach importance to what is external show stupidity in themselves.'
Tian Kai-zhi was having an interview with duke Wei Of Zhou, who said to him, 'I have heard that (your master) Zhu Shen has studied the subject of Life. What have you, good Sir, heard from him about it in your intercourse with him?' Tian Kai-zhi replied, 'In my waiting on him in the courtyard with my broom, what should I have heard from my master?' Duke Wei said, 'Do not put the question off, Mr. Tian; I wish to hear what you have to say.' Kai-zhi then replied, 'I have heard my master say that they who skilfully nourish their life are like shepherds, who whip up the sheep that they see lagging behind.' 'What did he mean?' asked the duke. The reply was, 'In Lu there was a Shan Bao, who lived among the rocks, and drank only water. He would not share with the people in their toils and the benefits springing from them; and though he was now in his seventieth year, he had still the complexion of a child. Unfortunately he encountered a hungry tiger, which killed and ate him. There was also a Zhang Yi, who hung up a screen at his lofty door, and to whom all the people hurried (to pay their respects). In his fortieth year, he fell ill of a fever and died. (Of these two men), Bao nourished his inner man, and a tiger ate his outer; while Yi nourished his outer man, and disease attacked his inner. Both of them neglected whipping up their lagging sheep.'
Zhongni said, 'A man should not retire and hide himself; he should not push forward and display himself; he should be like the decayed tree which stands in the centre of the ground. Where these three conditions are fulfilled, the name will reach its greatest height. When people fear the dangers of a path, if one man in ten be killed, then fathers and sons, elder brothers and younger, warn one another that they must not go out on a journey without a large number of retainers - and is it not a mark of wisdom to do so? But there are dangers which men incur on the mats of their beds, and in eating and drinking; and when no warning is given against them - is it not a mark of error?'
The officer of Prayer in his dark and squarecut robes goes to the pig-pen, and thus counsels the pigs, 'Why should you shrink from dying? I will for three months feed you on grain. Then for ten days I will fast, and keep vigil for three days, after which I will put down the mats of white grass, and lay your shoulders and rumps on the carved stand; will not this suit you?' If he had spoken from the standpoint of the pigs, he would have said, 'The better plan will be to feed us with our bran and chaff, and leave us in our pen.' When consulting for himself, he preferred to enjoy, while he lived, his carriage and cap of office, and after death to be borne to the grave on the ornamented carriage, with the canopy over his coffin. Consulting for the pigs, he did not think of these things, but for himself he would have chosen them. Why did he think so differently (for himself and) for the pigs?
(Once), when duke Huan was hunting by a marsh, with Guan Zhong driving the carriage, he saw a ghost. Laying his hand on that of Guan Zhong, he said to him, 'Do you see anything, Father Zhong?' 'Your servant sees nothing,' was the reply. The duke then returned, talking incoherently and becoming ill, so that for several days he did not go out. Among the officers of Qi there was a Huang-zi Gao-ao, who said to the duke, 'Your Grace is injuring yourself; how could a ghost injure you? When a paroxysm of irritation is dispersed, and the breath does not return (to the body), what remains in the body is not sufficient for its wants. When it ascends and does not descend, the patient becomes accessible to gusts of anger. When it descends and does not ascend, he loses his memory of things. When it neither ascends nor descends, but remains about the heart in the centre of the body, it makes him ill.' The duke said, 'Yes, but are there ghostly sprites?' The officer replied, 'There are. About mountain tarns there is the lu; about furnaces, the Jie; about the dust-heaps inside the door, the Lei-ting. In low-lying places in the north-east, the Bei-a and Wa-long leap about, and in similar places in the north-west there dwells the Yi-yang. About rivers there is the Wang-xiang; about mounds, the Shen; about hills, the Kui; about wilds, the Fang-huang; about marshes, the Wei-tuo.' 'Let me ask what is the Wei-tuo like?' asked the duke. Huang-zi said, 'It is the size of the nave of a chariot wheel, and the length of the shaft. It wears a purple robe and a red cap. It dislikes the rumbling noise of chariot wheels, and, when it hears it, it puts both its hands to its head and stands up. He who sees it is likely to become the leader of all the other princes.' Duke Huan burst out laughing and said, 'This was what I saw.' On this he put his robes and cap to rights, and made Huang-zi sit with him. Before the day was done, his illness was quite gone, he knew not how.
Ji Xing-zi was rearing a fighting-cock for the king. Being asked after ten days if the bird were ready, he said, 'Not yet; he is still vain and quarrelsome, and relies on his own vigour.' Being asked the same after other ten days, he said, 'Not yet; he still responds to the crow and the appearance of another bird.' After ten days more, he replied, 'Not yet. He still looks angrily, and is full of spirit.' When a fourth ten days had passed, he replied to the question, 'Nearly so. Though another cock crows, it makes no change in him. To look at him, you would say he was a cock of wood. His quality is complete. No other cock will dare to meet him, but will run from him.'
Confucius was looking at the cataract near the gorge of Lu, which fell a height of 240 cubits, and the spray of which floated a distance of forty li, (producing a turbulence) in which no tortoise, gavial, fish, or turtle could play. He saw, however, an old man swimming about in it, as if he had sustained some great calamity, and wished to end his life. Confucius made his disciples hasten along the stream to rescue the man; and by the time they had gone several hundred paces, he was walking along singing, with his hair dishevelled, and enjoying himself at the foot of the embankment. Confucius followed and asked him, saying, 'I thought you were a sprite; but, when I look closely at you, I see that you are a man. Let me ask if you have any particular way of treading the water.' The man said, 'No, I have no particular way. I began (to learn the art) at the very earliest time; as I grew up, it became my nature to practise it; and my success in it is now as sure as fate. I enter and go down with the water in the very centre of its whirl, and come up again with it when it whirls the other way. I follow the way of the water, and do nothing contrary to it of myself - this is how I tread it.' Confucius said, 'What do you mean by saying that you began to learn the art at the very earliest time; that as you grew up, it became your nature to practise it, and that your success in it now is as sure as fate?' The man replied, 'I was born among these hills and lived contented among them - that was why I say that I have trod this water from my earliest time. I grew up by it, and have been happy treading it - that is why I said that to tread it had become natural to me. I know not how I do it, and yet I do it - that is why I say that my success is as sure as fate.'
Qing, the Worker in Rottlera wood, carved a bell-stand, and when it was completed, all who saw it were astonished as if it were the work of spirits. The marquis of Lu went to see it, and asked by what art he had succeeded in producing it. 'Your subject is but a mechanic,' was the reply; 'what art should I be possessed of? Nevertheless, there is one thing (which I will mention). When your servant had undertaken to make the bell-stand, I did not venture to waste any of my power, and felt it necessary to fast in order to compose my mind. After fasting for three days, I did not presume to think of any congratulation, reward, rank, or emolument (which I might obtain by the execution of my task); after fasting five days, I did not presume to think of the condemnation or commendation (which it would produce), or of the skill or want of skill (which it might display). At the end of the seven days, I had forgotten all about myself - my four limbs and my whole person. By this time the thought of your Grace's court (for which I was to make the thing) had passed away; everything that could divert my mind from exclusive devotion to the exercise of my skill had disappeared. Then I went into the forest, and looked at the natural forms of the trees. When I saw one of a perfect form, then the figure of the bell-stand rose up to my view, and I applied my hand to the work. Had I not met with such a tree, I must have abandoned the object; but my Heaven-given faculty and the Heaven-given qualities of the wood were concentrated on it. So it was that my spirit was thus engaged in the production of the bell-stand.'
Dong-ye Ji was introduced to duke Zhuang to exhibit his driving. His horses went forwards and backwards with the straightness of a line, and wheeled to the right and the left with the exactness of a circle. The duke thought that the lines and circles could not be surpassed if they were woven with silken strings, and told him to make a hundred circuits on the same lines. On the road Yan He met the equipage, and on entering (the palace), and seeing the duke, he said, 'Ji's horses will break down,' but the duke was silent, and gave him no reply. After a little the horses did come back, having broken down; and the duke then said, 'How did you know that it would be so?' Yan He said, 'The horses were exhausted, and he was still urging them on. It was this which made me say that they would break down.'
The artisan Chui made things round (and square) more exactly than if he had used the circle and square. The operation of his fingers on (the forms of) things was like the transformations of them (in nature), and required no application of his mind; and so his Intelligence was entire and encountered no resistance. To be unthought of by the foot that wears it is the fitness of a shoe; to be unthought of by the waist is the fitness of a girdle. When one's wisdom does not think of the right or the wrong (of a question under discussion), that shows the suitability of the mind (for the question); when one is conscious of no inward change, or outward attraction, that shows the mastery of affairs. He who perceives at once the fitness, and never loses the sense of it, has the fitness that forgets all about what is fitting.
There was a Sun Xiu who went to the door of Zi-bian Qing-zi, and said to him in a strange perturbed way, 'When I lived in my village, no one took notice of me, but all said that I did not cultivate (my fields); in a time of trouble and attack, no one took notice of me, but all said that I had no courage. But that I did not cultivate my fields, was really because I never met with a good year; and that I did not do service for our ruler, was because I did not meet with the suitable opportunity to do so. I have been sent about my business by the villagers, and am driven away by the registrars of the district - what is my crime? 0 Heaven! how is it that I have met with such a fate?' Bian-zi said to him, 'Have you not heard how the perfect man deals with himself? He forgets that he has a liver and gall. He takes no thought of his ears and eyes. He seems lost and aimless beyond the dust and dirt of the world, and enjoys himself at ease in occupations untroubled by the affairs of business. He may be described as acting and yet not relying on what he does, as being superior and yet not using his superiority to exercise any control. But now you would make a display of your wisdom to astonish the ignorant; you would cultivate your person to make the inferiority of others more apparent; you seek to shine as if you were carrying the sun and moon in your hands. That you are complete in your bodily frame, and possess all its nine openings; that you have not met with any calamity in the middle of your course, such as deafness, blindness, or lameness, and can still take your place as a man among other men - in all this you are fortunate. What leisure have you to murmur against Heaven? Go away, Sir.'
Sun-zi on this went out, and Bian-zi went inside. Having sitten down, after a little time he looked up to heaven, and sighed. His disciples asked him why he sighed, and he said to them, 'Xiu came to me a little while ago, and I told him the characteristics of the perfect man. I am afraid he will be frightened, and get into a state of perplexity.' His disciples said, 'Not so. If what he said was right, and what you said was wrong, the wrong will certainly not be able to perplex the right. If what he said was wrong, and what you said was right, it was just because he was perplexed that he came to you. What was your fault in dealing with him as you did?'
Bian-zi said, 'Not so. Formerly a bird came, and took up its seat in the suburbs of Lu. The ruler of Lu was pleased with it, and provided an ox, a sheep, and a pig to feast it, causing also the Jiu-shao to be performed to delight it. But the bird began to be sad, looked dazed, and did not venture to eat or drink. This was what is called "Nourishing a bird, as you would nourish yourself." He who would nourish a bird as a bird should be nourished should let it perch in a deep forest, or let it float on a river or lake, or let it find its food naturally and undisturbed on the level dry ground. Now Xiu (came to me), a man of slender intelligence, and slight information, and I told him of the characteristics of the perfect man, it was like using a carriage and horses to convey a mouse, or trying to delight a quail with the music of bells and drums - could the creatures help being frightened?'
*** The Tree on the Mountain
Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain, when he saw a great tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it, and, when asked the reason, said, that it was of no use for anything, Zhuangzi then said to his disciples, 'This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years.' Having left the mountain, the Master lodged in the house of an old friend, who was glad to see him, and ordered his waiting-lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said, 'One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot - which of them shall I kill?' The host said, 'Kill the one that cannot cackle.'
Next day, his disciples asked Zhuangzi, saying, 'Yesterday the tree on the mountain (you said) would live out its years because of the uselessness of its wood, and now our host's goose has died because of its want of power (to cackle) - which of these conditions, Master, would you prefer to be in?' Zhuangzi laughed and said, '(If I said that) I would prefer to be in a position between being fit to be useful and wanting that fitness, that would seem to be the right position, but it would not be so, for it would not put me beyond being involved in trouble; whereas one who takes his seat on the Dao and its Attributes, and there finds his ease and enjoyment, is not exposed to such a contingency. He is above the reach both of praise and of detraction; now he (mounts aloft) like a dragon, now he (keeps beneath) like a snake; he is transformed with the (changing) character of the time, and is not willing to addict himself to any one thing; now in a high position and now in a low, he is in harmony with all his surroundings; he enjoys himself at ease with the Author of all things; he treats things as things, and is not a thing to them: where is his liability to be involved in trouble? This was the method of Shen Nong and Huang-Di. As to those who occupy themselves with the qualities of things, and with the teaching and practice of the human relations, it is not so with them. Union brings on separation; success, overthrow; sharp corners, the use of the file; honour, critical remarks; active exertion, failure; wisdom, scheming; inferiority, being despised: where is the possibility of unchangeableness in any of these conditions? Remember this, my disciples. Let your abode be here - in the Dao and its Attributes.'
Yi-liao, an officer of Shi-nan, having an interview with the marquis of Lu, found him looking sad, and asked him why he was so. The marquis said, 'I have studied the ways of the former kings, and cultivated the inheritance left me by my predecessors. I reverence the spirits of the departed and honour the men of worth, doing this with personal devotion, and without the slightest intermission. Notwithstanding, I do not avoid meeting with calamity, and this it is which makes me sad.'
The officer said, 'The arts by which you try to remove calamity are shallow. Think of the close-furred fox and of the elegantly-spotted leopard. They lodge in the forests on the hills, and lurk in their holes among the rocks - keeping still. At night they go about, and during day remain in their lairs - so cautious are they. Even if they are suffering from hunger, thirst, and other distresses, they still keep aloof from men, seeking their food about the Jiang and the Hu - so resolute are they. Still they are not able to escape the danger of the net or the trap; and what fault is it of theirs? It is their skins which occasion them the calamity. And is not the state of Lu your lordship's skin? I wish your lordship to rip your skin from your body, to cleanse your heart, to put away your desires, and to enjoy yourself where you will be without the presence of any one. In the southern state of Yue, there is a district called "the State of Established Virtue." The people are ignorant and simple; their object is to minimise the thought of self and make their desires few; they labour but do not lay up their gains; they give but do not seek for any return; they do not know what righteousness is required of them in any particular case, nor by what ceremonies their performances should be signalised; acting in a wild and eccentric way as if they were mad, they yet keep to the grand rules of conduct. Their birth is an occasion for joy; their death is followed by the rites of burial. I should wish your lordship to leave your state; to give up your ordinary ways, and to proceed to that country by the directest course.'
The ruler said, 'The way to it is distant and difficult; there are rivers and hills; and as I have neither boat nor carriage, how am I to go?' The officer from Shi-nan rejoined, 'If your lordship abjure your personal state, and give up your wish to remain here, that will serve you for a carriage.'
The ruler rejoined, 'The way to it is solitary and distant, and there are no people on it - whom shall I have as my companions? I have no provisions prepared, and how shall I get food? How shall I be able to get (to the country)?' The officer said, 'Minimise your lordship's expenditure, and make your wants few, and though you have no provisions prepared, you will find you have enough. Wade through the rivers and float along on the sea, where however you look, you see not the shore, and, the farther you go, you do not see where your journey is to end - those who escorted you to the shore will return, and after that you will feel yourself far away. Thus it is that he who owns men (as their ruler) is involved in troubles, and he who is owned by men (as their ruler) suffers from sadness; and hence Yao would neither own men, nor be owned by them. I wish to remove your trouble, and take away your sadness, and it is only (to be done by inducing you) to enjoy yourself with the Dao in the land of Great Vacuity. If a man is crossing a river in a boat, and another empty vessel comes into collision with it, even though he be a man of a choleric temper, he will not be angry with it. If there be a person, however, in that boat, he will bawl out to him to haul out of the way. If his shout be not heard, he will repeat it; and if the other do not then hear, he will call out a third time, following up the shout with abusive terms. Formerly he was not angry, but now he is; formerly (he thought) the boat was empty, but now there is a person in it. If a man can empty himself of himself, during his time in the world, who can harm him?'
Bei-gong She was collecting taxes for duke Ling of Wei, to be employed in making (a peal of) bells. (In connexion with the work) he built an altar outside the gate of the suburban wall; and in three months the bells were completed, even to the suspending of the upper and lower (tiers). The king's son Qing-ji saw them, and asked what arts he had employed in the making of them. She replied, 'Besides my undivided attention to them, I did not venture to use any arts. I have heard the saying, "After all the carving and the chiselling, let the object be to return to simplicity." I was as a child who has no knowledge; I was extraordinarily slow and hesitating; they grew like the springing plants of themselves. In escorting those who went and meeting those who came, my object was neither to hinder the comers nor detain the goers. I suffered those who strongly opposed to take their way, and accepted those who did their best to come to terms. I allowed them all to do the utmost they could, and in this way morning and evening I collected the taxes. I did not have the slightest trouble, and how much more will this be the case with those who pursue the Great Way (on a grand scale)!'
Confucius was kept (by his enemies) in a state of siege between Chen and Cai, and for seven days had no food cooked with fire to eat. The Da-gong Ren went to condole with him, and said, 'You had nearly met with your death.' 'Yes,' was the reply. 'Do you dislike death?' 'I do.'
Then Ren continued, 'Let me try and describe a way by which (such a) death may be avoided. In the eastern sea there are birds which go by the name of yi-dai; they fly low and slowly as if they were deficient in power. They fly as if they were leading and assisting one another, and they press on one another when they roost. No one ventures to take the lead in going forward, or to be the last in going backwards. In eating no one ventures to take the first mouthful, but prefers the fragments left by others. In this way (the breaks in) their line are not many, and men outside them cannot harm them, so that they escape injury. The straight tree is the first to be cut down; the well of sweet water is the first to be exhausted. Your aim is to embellish your wisdom so as to startle the ignorant, and to cultivate your person to show the unsightliness of others. A light shines around you as if you were carrying with you the sun and moon, and thus it is that you do not escape such calamity. Formerly I heard a highly accomplished man say, "Those who boast have no merit. The merit which is deemed complete will begin to decay. The fame which is deemed complete will begin to wane." Who can rid himself of (the ideas of) merit and fame, and return and put himself on the level of the masses of men? The practice of the Dao flows abroad, but its master does not care to dwell where it can be seen; his attainments in it hold their course, but he does not wish to appear in its display. Always simple and commonplace, he may seem to be bereft of reason. He obliterates the traces of his action, gives up position and power, and aims not at merit and fame. Therefore he does not censure men, and men do not censure him. The perfect man does not seek to be heard of; how is it that you delight in doing so?'
Confucius said, 'Excellent;' and thereupon he took leave of his associates, forsook his disciples, retired to the neighbourhood of a great marsh, wore skins and hair cloth, and ate acorns and chestnuts. He went among animals without causing any confusion among their herds, and among birds without troubling their movements. Birds and beasts did not dislike him; how much less would men do so!
Confucius asked Zi-sang Hu, saying, 'I was twice driven from Lu; the tree was felled over me in Song; I was obliged to disappear from Wei; I was reduced to extreme distress in Shang and Zhou; and I was kept in a state of siege between Chen and Cai. I have encountered these various calamities; my intimate associates are removed from me more and more; my followers and friends are more and more dispersed - why have all these things befallen me?'
Zi-sang Hu replied, 'Have you not heard of the flight of Lin Hui of Jia - how he abandoned his round jade symbol of rank, worth a thousand pieces of silver, and hurried away with his infant son on his back? If it be asked, "Was it because of the market value of the child?" But that value was small (compared with the value of the jade token). If it be asked again, "Was it because of the troubles (of his office)?" But the child would occasion him much more trouble. Why was it then that, abandoning the jade token, worth a thousand pieces of silver, he hurried away with the child on his back? Lin Hui (himself) said, "The union between me and the token rested on the ground of gain; that between me and the child was of Heaven's appointment." Where the bond of union is its profitableness, when the pressure of poverty, calamity, distress, and injury come, the parties abandon one another; when it is of Heaven's appointment, they hold in the same circumstances to one another. Now between abandoning one another, and holding to one another, the difference is great. Moreover, the intercourse of superior men is tasteless as water, while that of mean men is sweet as new wine. But the tastelessness of the superior men leads on to affection, and the sweetness of the mean men to aversion. The union which originates without any cause will end in separation without any cause.'
Confucius said, 'I have reverently received your instructions.' And hereupon, with a slow step and an assumed air of ease, he returned to his own house. There he made an end of studying and put away his books. His disciples came no more to make their bow to him (and be taught), but their affection for him increased the more.
Another day Sang Hu said further to him, 'When Shun was about to die, he charged Yu, saying, 'Be upon your guard. (The attraction of) the person is not like that of sympathy; the (power of) affection is not like the leading (of example). Where there is sympathy, there will not be separation; where there is (the leading of) example, there will be no toil. Where there is neither separation nor toil, you will not have to seek the decoration of forms to make the person attractive, and where there is no such need of those forms, there will certainly be none for external things.'
Zhuangzi in a patched dress of coarse cloth, and having his shoes tied together with strings, was passing by the king of Wei, who said to him, 'How great, Master, is your distress?' Zhuangzi replied, 'It is poverty, not distress! While a scholar possesses the Dao and its Attributes, he cannot be going about in distress. Tattered clothes and shoes tied on the feet are the sign of poverty, and not of distress. This is what we call not meeting with the right time. Has your majesty not seen the climbing monkey? When he is among the plane trees, rottleras, oaks, and camphor trees, he grasps and twists their branches (into a screen), where he reigns quite at his ease, so that not even Yi or Peng Meng could spy him out. When, however, he finds himself among the prickly mulberry and date trees, and other thorns, he goes cautiously, casts sidelong glances, and takes every trembling movement with apprehension - it is not that his sinews and bones are straitened, and have lost their suppleness, but the situation is unsuitable for him, and he cannot display his agility. And now when I dwell under a benighted ruler, and seditious ministers, how is it possible for me not to be in distress? My case might afford an illustration of the cutting out the heart of Bi-gan!'
When Confucius was reduced to great distress between Chen and Cai, and for seven days he had no cooked food to eat, he laid hold of a decayed tree with his left hand, and with his right hand tapped it with a decayed branch, singing all the while the ode of Biao-shi. He had his instrument, but the notes were not marked on it. There was a noise, but no blended melody. The sound of the wood and the voice of the man came together like the noise of the plough through the ground, yet suitably to the feelings of the disciples around.
Yan Hui, who was standing upright, with his hands crossed on his breast, rolled his eyes round to observe him. Zhongni, fearing that Hui would go to excess in manifesting how he honoured himself, or be plunged in sorrow through his love for him, said to him, 'Hui, not to receive (as evils) the inflictions of Heaven is easy; not to receive (as benefits) the favours of men is difficult. There is no beginning which was not an end. The Human and the Heavenly may be one and the same. Who, for instance, is it that is now singing?'
Hui said, 'I venture to ask how not to receive (as evils) the inflictions of Heaven is easy.' Zhongni said, 'Hunger, thirst, cold, and heat, and having one's progress entirely blocked up - these are the doings of Heaven and Earth, necessary incidents in the revolutions of things. They are occurrences of which we say that we will pass on (composedly) along with them. The minister of another does not dare to refuse his commands; and if he who is discharging the duty of a minister feels it necessary to act thus, how much more should we wait with ease on the commands of Heaven!'
'What do you mean by saying that not to receive (as benefits) the favours of men is difficult?' Zhongni said, 'As soon as one is employed in office, he gets forward in all directions; rank and emolument come to him together, and without end. But these advantages do not come from one's self - it is my appointed lot to have such external good. The superior man is not a robber; the man of worth is no filcher - if I prefer such things, what am I? Hence it is said, "There is no bird wiser than the swallow." Where its eye lights on a place that is not suitable for it, it does not give it a second glance. Though it may drop the food from its mouth, it abandons it, and hurries off. It is afraid of men, and yet it stealthily takes up its dwelling by his; finding its protection in the altars of the Land and Grain.'
'What do you mean by saying that there is no beginning which was not an end?' Zhongni said, 'The change-- rise and dissolution-- of all things (continually) goes on, but we do not know who it is that maintains and continues the process. How do we know when any one begins? How do we know when he will end? We have simply to wait for it, and nothing more.'
'And what do you mean by saying that the Human and the Heavenly are one and the same?' Zhongni said, 'Given man, and you have Heaven; given Heaven, and you still have Heaven (and nothing more). That man can not have Heaven is owing to the limitation of his nature. The sagely man quietly passes away with his body, and there is an end of it.'
As Zhuang Zhou was rambling in the park of Diao-ling he saw a strange bird which came from the south. Its wings were seven cubits in width, and its eyes were large, an inch in circuit. It touched the forehead of Zhou as it passed him, and lighted in a grove of chestnut trees. 'What bird is this?' said he, 'with such great wings not to go on! and with such large eyes not to see me!' He lifted up his skirts, and hurried with his cross-bow, waiting for (an opportunity to shoot) it. (Meanwhile) he saw a cicada, which had just alighted in a beautiful shady spot, and forgot its (care for its) body. (Just then), a preying mantis raised its feelers, and pounced on the cicada, in its eagerness for its prey, (also) forgetting (its care for) its body; while the strange bird took advantage of its opportunity to secure them both, in view of that gain forgetting its true (instinct of preservation). Zhuang Zhou with an emotion of pity, said, 'Ah! so it is that things bring evil on one another, each of these creatures invited its own calamity.' (With this) he put away his cross-bow, and was hurrying away back, when the forester pursued him with terms of reproach.
When he returned and went into his house, he did not appear in his courtyard for three months. (When he came out), Lin Qie (his disciple) asked him, saying, 'Master, why have you for this some time avoided the courtyard so much?' Zhuangzi replied, 'I was guarding my person, and forgot myself; I was looking at turbid water, till I mistook the clear pool. And moreover I have heard the Master say, "Going where certain customs prevail, you should follow those customs." I was walking about in the park of Diao-ling, and forgot myself. A strange bird brushed past my forehead, and went flying about in the grove of chestnuts, where it forgot the true (art of preserving itself). The forester of the chestnut grove thought that I was a fitting object for his reproach. These are the reasons why I have avoided the courtyard.'
Yang-zi, having gone to Song, passed the night in a lodging-house, the master of which had two concubines - one beautiful, the other ugly. The ugly one was honoured, however, and the beautiful one contemned. Yang-zi asked the reason, and a little boy of the house replied, 'The beauty knows her beauty, and we do not recognise it. The ugly one knows her ugliness, and we do not recognise it.' Yang-zi said, 'Remember it, my disciples. Act virtuously, and put away the practice of priding yourselves on your virtue. If you do this, where can you go to that you will not be loved?'
*** Tian Zi-fang
Tian Zi-fang, sitting in attendance on the marquis Wen of Wei, often quoted (with approbation) the words of Qi Gong. The marquis said, 'Is Qi Gong your preceptor?' Zi-fang replied, 'No. He only belongs to the same neighbourhood. In speaking about the Dao, his views are often correct, and therefore I quote them as I do.' The marquis went on, 'Then have you no preceptor?' 'I have.' 'And who is he?' He is Dong-guo Shun-zi.' 'And why, my Master, have I never heard you quote his words?' Zi-fang replied, 'He is a man who satisfies the true (ideal of humanity); a man in appearance, but (having the mind of) Heaven. Void of any thought of himself, he accommodates himself to others, and nourishes the true ideal that belongs to him. With all his purity, he is forbearing to others. Where they are without the Dao, he rectifies his demeanour, so that they understand it, and in consequence their own ideas melt away and disappear. How should one like me be fit to quote his words?'
When Zi-fang went out, the marquis Wen continued in a state of dumb amazement all the day. He then called Long Li-chen, and said to him, 'How far removed from us is the superior man of complete virtue! Formerly I thought the words of the sages and wise men, and the practice of benevolence and righteousness, to be the utmost we could reach to. Since I have heard about the preceptor of Zi-fang, my body is all unstrung, and I do not wish to move, and my mouth is closed up, and I do not wish to speak - what I have learned has been only a counterfeit of the truth. Yes, (the possession of Wei) has been an entanglement to me.'
Wen-bo Xue-zi, on his way to Qi, stayed some time in Lu, where some persons of the state begged to have an interview with him. He refused them, saying, 'I have heard that the superior men of these Middle States understand the (subjects of) ceremony and righteousness, but are deplorably ignorant of the minds of men. I do not wish to see them.' He went on to Qi; and on his way back (to the south), he again stayed in Lu, when the same persons begged as before for an interview. He then said, 'Formerly they asked to see me, and now again they seek an interview. They will afford me some opportunity of bringing out my sentiments.' He went out accordingly and saw the visitors, and came in again with a sigh. The next day again he saw the visitors, and again came in again with a sigh. His servant said to him, 'Whenever you see those visitors, you are sure to come in again sighing - Why is this?' 'I told you before,' was the reply, 'that the people of these Middle States understand (the subjects of) ceremony and righteousness, but are deplorably ignorant of the minds of men. Those men who have just seen me, as they came in and went out would describe, one a circle and another a square, and in their easy carriage would be like, one a dragon and another a tiger. They remonstrated with me as sons (with their fathers), and laid down the way for me as fathers (for their sons). It was this which made me sigh.'
Zhongni saw the man, but did not speak a word to him. Zi-lu said, 'You have wished, Sir, to see this Wen-bo Xue-zi for a long time; what is the reason that when you have seen him, you have not spoken a word?' Zhongni replied, 'As soon as my eyes lighted on that man, the Dao in him was apparent. The situation did not admit of a word being spoken.'
Yan Yuan asked Zhongni, saying, 'Master, when you pace quietly along, I also pace along; when you go more quickly, I also do the same; when you gallop, I also gallop; but when you race along and spurn the dust, then I can only stand and look, and keep behind you.' The Master said, 'Hui, what do you mean?' The reply was, 'In saying that "when you, Master, pace quietly along, I also pace along," I mean that when you speak, I also speak. By saying, "When you go more quickly, I also do the same," I mean that when you reason, I also reason. By saying, "When you gallop, I also gallop," I mean that when you speak of the Way, I also speak of the Way; but by saying, "When you race along and spurn the dust, then I can only stare, and keep behind you," I am thinking how though you do not speak, yet all men believe you; though you are no partisan, yet all parties approve your catholicity; and though you sound no instrument, yet people all move on harmoniously before you, while (all the while) I do not know how all this comes about; and this is all which my words are intended to express.'
Zhongni said, 'But you must try and search the matter out. Of all causes for sorrow there is none so great as the death of the mind - the death of man's (body) is only next to it. The sun comes forth in the east, and sets in the extreme west - all things have their position determined by these two points. All that have eyes and feet wait for this (sun), and then proceed to do what they have to do. When this comes forth, they appear in their places; when it sets, they disappear. It is so with all things. They have that for which they wait, and (on its arrival) they die; they have that for which they wait, and then (again) they live. When once I receive my frame thus completed, I remain unchanged, awaiting the consummation of my course. I move as acted on by things, day and night without cessation, and I do not know when I will come to an end. Clearly I am here a completed frame, and even one who (fancies that he) knows what is appointed cannot determine it beforehand. I am in this way daily passing on, but all day long I am communicating my views to you; and now, as we are shoulder to shoulder you fail (to understand me) - is it not matter for lamentation? You are able in a measure to set forth what I more clearly set forth; but that is passed away, and you look for it, as if it were still existing, just as if you were looking for a horse in the now empty place where it was formerly exhibited for sale. You have very much forgotten my service to you, and I have very much forgotten wherein I served you. But nevertheless why should you account this such an evil? What you forget is but my old self; that which cannot be forgotten remains with me.'
Confucius went to see Lao Dan, and arrived just as he had completed the bathing of his head, and was letting his dishevelled hair get dry. There he was, motionless, and as if there were not another man in the world. Confucius waited quietly; and, when in a little time he was introduced, he said, 'Were my eyes dazed? Is it really you? Just now, your body, Sir, was like the stump of a rotten tree. You looked as if you had no thought of anything, as if you had left the society of men, and were standing in the solitude (of yourself).' Lao Dan replied, 'I was enjoying myself in thinking about the commencement of things.'
Confucius said, 'What do you mean?' Lao Dan replied, 'My mind is so cramped, that I hardly know it; my tongue is so tied that I cannot tell it; but I will try to describe it to you as nearly as I can. When the state of Yin was perfect, all was cold and severe; when the state of Yang was perfect, all was turbulent and agitated. The coldness and severity came forth from Heaven; the turbulence and agitation issued from Earth. The two states communicating together, a harmony ensued and things were produced. Some one regulated and controlled this, but no one has seen his form. Decay and growth; fulness and emptiness; darkness and light; the changes of the sun and the transformations of the moon: these are brought about from day to day; but no one sees the process of production. Life has its origin from which it springs, and death has its place from which it returns. Beginning and ending go on in mutual contrariety without any determinable commencement, and no one knows how either comes to an end. If we disallow all this, who originates and presides over all these phenomena?'
Confucius said, 'I beg to ask about your enjoyment in these thoughts.' Lao Dan replied, 'The comprehension of this is the most admirable and the most enjoyable (of all acquisitions). The getting of the most admirable and the exercise of the thoughts in what is the most enjoyable, constitutes what we call the Perfect man.' Confucius said, 'I should like to hear the method of attaining to it.' The reply was, 'Grass-eating animals do not dislike to change their pastures; creatures born in the water do not dislike to change their waters. They make a small change, but do not lose what is the great and regular requirement (of their nature); joy, anger, sadness, and delight do not enter into their breasts (in connexion with such events). Now the space under the sky is occupied by all things in their unity. When they possess that unity and equally share it, then the four limbs and hundred members of their body are but so much dust and dirt, while death and life, their ending and beginning, are but as the succession of day and night, which cannot disturb their enjoyment; and how much less will they be troubled by gains and losses, by calamity and happiness! Those who renounce the paraphernalia of rank do it as if they were casting away so much mud - they know that they are themselves more honourable than those paraphernalia. The honour belonging to one's self is not lost by any change (of condition). Moreover, a myriad transformations may take place before the end of them is reached. What is there in all this sufficient to trouble the mind? Those who have attained to the Dao understand the subject.'
Confucius said, '0 Master, your virtue is equal to that of Heaven and Earth, and still I must borrow (some of your) perfect words (to aid me) in the cultivation of my mind. Who among the superior men of antiquity could give such expression to them?' Lao Dan replied, 'Not so. Look at the spring, the water of which rises and overflows - it does nothing, but it naturally acts so. So with the perfect man and his virtue - he does not cultivate it, and nothing evades its influence. He is like heaven which is high of itself, like earth which is solid of itself, like the sun and moon which shine of themselves - what need is there to cultivate it?'
Confucius went out and reported the conversation to Yan Hui, saying, 'In the (knowledge of the) Dao am I any better than an animalcule in vinegar? But for the Master's lifting the veil from me, I should not have known the grand perfection of Heaven and Earth.'
At an interview of Zhuangzi with duke Ai of Lu, the duke said, 'There are many of the Learned class in Lu; but few of them can be compared with you, Sir.' Zhuangzi replied, 'There are few Learned men in Lu.' 'Everywhere in Lu,' rejoined the duke, 'you see men wearing the dress of the Learned - how can you say that they are few?' 'I have heard,' said Zhuangzi, 'that those of them who wear round caps know the times of heaven; that those who wear square shoes know the contour of the ground; and that those who saunter about with semicircular stones at their girdle-pendents settle matters in dispute as they come before them. But superior men who are possessed of such knowledge will not be found wearing the dress, and it does not follow that those who wear the dress possess the knowledge. If your Grace think otherwise, why not issue a notification through the state, that it shall be a capital offence to wear the dress without possessing the knowledge.' On this the duke issued such a notification, and in five days, throughout all Lu, there was no one who dared to wear the dress of the Learned. There was only one old man who came and stood in it at the duke's gate. The duke instantly called him in, and questioned him about the affairs of the state, when he talked about a thousand points and ten thousand divergences from them. Zhuangzi said, 'When the state of Lu can thus produce but one man of the Learned class, can he be said to be many?'
The ideas of rank and emolument did not enter the mind of Bai-li Xi, and so he became a cattle-feeder, and his cattle were all in fine condition. This made duke Mu of Qin forget the meanness of his position, and put the government (of his state) into his hands. Neither life nor death entered into the mind of (Shun), the Lord of Yu, and therefore he was able to influence others.
The ruler Yuan of Song wishing to have a map drawn, the masters of the pencil all came (to undertake the task). Having received his instructions and made their bows, they stood, licking their pencils and preparing their ink. Half their number, however, remained outside. There was one who came late, with an air of indifference, and did not hurry forward. When he had received his instructions and made his bow, he did not keep standing, but proceeded to his shed. The duke sent a man to see him, and there he was, with his upper garment off, sitting cross-legged, and nearly naked. The ruler said, 'He is the man; he is a true draughtsman.'
King Wen was (once) looking about him at Zang, when he saw an old man fishing. But his fishing was no fishing. It was not the fishing of one whose business is fishing. He was always fishing (as if he had no object in the occupation).
The king wished to raise him to office, and put the government into his hands, but was afraid that such a step would give dissatisfaction to his great ministers, his uncles, and cousins. He then wished to dismiss the man altogether from his mind, but he could not bear the thought that his people should be without (such a) Heaven (as their Protector). On this, (next) morning, he called together his great officers, and said to them, 'Last night, I dreamt that I saw a good man, with a dark complexion and a beard, riding on a piebald horse, one half of whose hoofs were red, who commanded me, saying, "Lodge your government in the hands of the old man of Zang; and perhaps the evils of your people will be cured."' The great officers said eagerly, 'It was the king, your father.' King Wen said, 'Let us then submit the proposal to the tortoise-shell.' They replied, 'It is the order of your father. Let not your majesty think of any other. Why divine about it?'
(The king) then met the old man of Zang, and committed the government to him. The statutes and laws were not changed by him; not a one-sided order (of his own) was issued; but when the king made a survey of the kingdom after three years, he found that the officers had destroyed the plantations (which harboured banditti), and dispersed their occupiers, that the superintendents of the official departments did not plume themselves on their successes, and that no unusual grain measures were allowed within the different states. When the officers had destroyed the dangerous plantations and dispersed their occupants, the highest value was set on the common interests; when the chiefs of departments did not plume themselves on their successes, the highest value was set on the common business; when unusual grain measures did not enter the different states, the different princes had no jealousies. On this King Wen made the old man his Grand Preceptor, and asked him, with his own face to the north, whether his government might be extended to all the kingdom. The old man looked perplexed and gave no reply, but with aimless look took his leave. In the morning he had issued his orders, and at night he had gone his way; nor was he heard of again all his life.
Yan Yuan questioned Confucius, saying, 'Was even King Wen unequal to determine his course? What had he to do with resorting to a dream?' Zhongni replied, 'Be silent and do not say a word! King Wen was complete in everything. What have you to do with criticising him? He only had recourse (to the dream) to meet a moment's difficulty.'
Lie Yu-Kou was exhibiting his archery to Bo-hun Wu-ren. Having drawn the bow to its full extent, with a cup of water placed on his elbow, he let fly. As the arrow was discharged, another was put in its place; and as that was sent off, a third was ready on the string. All the while he stood like a statue. Bo-hun Wu-ren said, 'That is the shooting of an archer, but not of one who shoots without thinking about his shooting. Let me go up with you to the top of a high mountain, treading with you among the tottering rocks, till we arrive at the brink of a precipice, 800 cubits deep, and (I will then see) if you can shoot.' On this they went up a high mountain, making their way among the tottering rocks, till they came to the brink of a precipice 800 cubits deep. Then Wu-ren turned round and walked backwards, till his feet were two-thirds of their length outside the edge, and beckoned Yu-kou to come forward. He, however, had fallen prostrate on the ground, with the sweat pouring down to his heels. Then the other said, 'The Perfect man looks up to the azure sky above, or dives down to the yellow springs beneath, or soars away to the eight ends of the universe, without any change coming over his spirit or his breath. But now the trepidation of your mind appears in your dazed eyes; your inward feeling of peril is extreme!'
Jian Wu asked Sun-shu Ao, saying, 'You, Sir, were thrice chief minister, and did not feel elated; you were thrice dismissed from that position, without manifesting any sorrow. At first I was in doubt about you, (but I am not now, since) I see how regularly and quietly the breath comes through your nostrils. How is it that you exercise your mind?' Sun-shu Ao replied, 'In what do I surpass other men? When the position came to me, I thought it should not be rejected; when it was taken away, I thought it could not be retained. I considered that the getting or losing it did not make me what I was, and was no occasion for any manifestation of sorrow - that was all. In what did I surpass other men? And moreover, I did not know whether the honour of it belonged to the dignity, or to myself. If it belonged to the dignity, it was nothing to me; if it belonged to me, it had nothing to do with the dignity. While occupied with these uncertainties, and looking round in all directions, what leisure had I to take knowledge of whether men honoured me or thought me mean?'
Zhongni heard of all this, and said, 'The True men of old could not be fully described by the wisest, nor be led into excess by the most beautiful, nor be forced by the most violent robber. Neither Fu-xi nor Huang-Di could compel them to be their friends. Death and life are indeed great considerations, but they could make no change in their (true) self; and how much less could rank and emolument do so? Being such, their spirits might pass over the Tai mountain and find it no obstacle to them they might enter the greatest gulphs, and not be wet by them; they might occupy the lowest and smallest positions without being distressed by them. Theirs was the fulness of heaven and earth; the more that they gave to others, the more they had.'
The king of Chu and the ruler of Fan were sitting together. After a little while, the attendants of the king said, 'Fan has been destroyed three times.' The ruler of Fan rejoined, 'The destruction of Fan has not been sufficient to destroy what we had that was most deserving to be preserved.' Now, if the destruction of Fan had not been sufficient to destroy that which it had most deserving to be preserved, the preservation of Chu had not been sufficient to preserve that in it most deserving to be preserved. Looking at the matter from this point of view, Fan had not begun to be destroyed, and Chu had not begun to be preserved.
*** Knowledge Rambling in the North
Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark Water, where he ascended the height of Imperceptible Slope, when it happened that he met with Dumb Inaction. Knowledge addressed him, saying, 'I wish to ask you some questions: By what process of thought and anxious consideration do we get to know the Dao? Where should we dwell and what should we do to find our rest in the Dao? From what point should we start and what path should we pursue to make the Dao our own?' He asked these three questions, but Dumb Inaction gave him no reply. Not only did he not answer, but he did not know how to answer.
Knowledge, disappointed by the fruitlessness of his questions, returned to the south of the Bright Water, and ascended the height of the End of Doubt, where he saw Heedless Blurter, to whom he put the same questions, and who replied, 'Ah! I know, and will tell you.' But while he was about to speak, he forgot what he wanted to say.
Knowledge, (again) receiving no answer to his questions, returned to the palace of the Di, where he saw Huang-Di, and put the questions to him. Huang-Di said, 'To exercise no thought and no anxious consideration is the first step towards knowing the Dao; to dwell nowhere and do nothing is the first step towards resting in the Dao; to start from nowhere and pursue no path is the first step towards making the Dao your own.'
Knowledge then asked Huang-Di, saying, 'I and you know this; those two did not know it; which of us is right?' The reply was, 'Dumb Inaction is truly right; Heedless Blurter has an appearance of being so; I and you are not near being so. (As it is said), "Those who know (the Dao) do not speak of it; those who speak of it do not know it;" and "Hence the sage conveys his instructions without the use of speech." The Dao cannot be made ours by constraint; its characteristics will not come to us (at our call). Benevolence may be practised; Righteousness may be partially attended to; by Ceremonies men impose on one another. Hence it is said, "When the Dao was lost, its Characteristics appeared. When its Characteristics were lost, Benevolence appeared. When Benevolence was lost, Righteousness appeared. When Righteousness was lost, Ceremonies appeared. Ceremonies are but (the unsubstantial) flowers of the Dao, and the commencement of disorder." Hence (also it is further said), "He who practises the Dao, daily diminishes his doing. He diminishes it and again diminishes it, till he arrives at doing nothing. Having arrived at this non-inaction, there is nothing that he does not do." Here now there is something, a regularly fashioned utensil - if you wanted to make it return to the original condition of its materials, would it not be difficult to make it do so? Could any but the Great Man accomplish this easily?
'Life is the follower of death, and death is the predecessor of life; but who knows the Arranger (of this connexion between them)? The life is due to the collecting of the breath. When that is collected, there is life; when it is dispersed, there is death. Since death and life thus attend on each other, why should I account (either of) them an evil?
'Therefore all things go through one and the same experience. (Life) is accounted beautiful because it is spirit-like and wonderful, and death is accounted ugly because of its foetor and putridity. But the foetid and putrid is transformed again into the spirit-like and wonderful, and the spirit-like and wonderful is transformed again into the foetid and putrid. Hence it is said, "All under the sky there is one breath of life, and therefore the sages prized that unity."'
Knowledge said to Huang-Di, 'I asked Dumb Inaction, and he did not answer me. Not only did he not answer me, but he did not know how to answer me. I asked Heedless Blurter, and while he wanted to tell me, he yet did not do so. Not only did he not tell me, but while he wanted to tell me, he forgot all about my questions. Now I have asked you, and you knew (all about them) - why (do you say that) you are not near doing so?' Huang-Di replied, 'Dumb Inaction was truly right, because he did not know the thing. Heedless Blurter was nearly right, because he forgot it. I and you are not nearly right, because we know it.'
Heedless Blurter heard of (all this), and considered that Huang-Di knew how to express himself (on the subject).
(The operations of) Heaven and Earth proceed in the most admirable way, but they say nothing about them; the four seasons observe the clearest laws, but they do not discuss them ; all things have their complete and distinctive constitutions, but they say nothing about them. The sages trace out the admirable operations of Heaven and Earth, and reach to and understand the distinctive constitutions of all things; and thus it is that the Perfect Man (is said to) do nothing and the Greatest Sage to originate nothing, such language showing that they look to Heaven and Earth as their model.
Even they, with their spirit-like and most exquisite intelligence, as well as all the tribes that undergo their transformations, the dead and the living, the square and the round, do not understand their root and origin, but nevertheless they all from the oldest time by it preserve their being. Vast as is the space included within the six cardinal points, it all (and all that it contains) lies within (this twofold root of Heaven and Earth); small as is an autumn hair, it is indebted to this for the completion of its form. All things beneath the sky, now rising, now descending, ever continue the same through this. The Yin and Yang, and the four seasons revolve and move by it, each in its proper order. Now it seems to be lost in obscurity, but it continues; now it seems to glide away, and have no form, but it is still spirit-like. All things are nourished by it, without their knowing it. This is what is called the Root and Origin; by it we may obtain a view of what we mean by Heaven.
Nie Que asked about the Dao from Bei-yi, who replied, 'If you keep your body as it should be, and look only at the one thing, the Harmony of Heaven will come to you. Call in your knowledge, and make your measures uniform, and the spiritual (belonging to you) will come and lodge with you; the Attributes (of the Dao) will be your beauty, and the Dao (itself) will be your dwelling-place. You will have the simple look of a new-born calf, and will not seek to know the cause (of your being what you are).' Bei-yi had not finished these words when the other dozed off into a sleep.
Bei-yi was greatly pleased, and walked away, singing as he went,
<quote>
'Like stump of rotten tree his frame,
Like lime when slaked his mind became.
Real is his wisdom, solid, true,
Nor cares what's hidden to pursue.
0 dim and dark his aimless mind!
No one from him can counsel find.
What sort of man is he?'
</quote>
Shun asked (his attendant) Cheng, saying, 'Can I get the Dao and hold it as mine?' The reply was, 'Your body is not your own to hold - how then can you get and hold the Dao?' Shun resumed, 'If my body be not mine to possess and hold, who holds it?' Cheng said, 'It is the bodily form entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth. Life is not yours to hold. It is the blended harmony (of the Yin and Yang), entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth. Your nature, constituted as it is, is not yours to hold. It is entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth to act in accordance with it. Your grandsons and sons are not yours to hold. They are the exuviae entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth. Therefore when we walk, we should not know where we are going; when we stop and rest, we should not know what to occupy ourselves with when we eat, we should not know the taste of our food - all is done by the strong Yang influence of Heaven and Earth'. How then can you get (the Dao), and hold it as your own?'
Confucius asked Lao Dan, saying, 'Being at leisure to-day, I venture to ask you about the Perfect Dao.'
Lao Dan replied, 'You must, as by fasting and vigil, clear and purge your mind, wash your spirit white as snow, and sternly repress your knowledge. The subject of the Dao is deep, and difficult to describe - I will give you an outline of its simplest attributes.
'The Luminous was produced from the Obscure; the Multiform from the Unembodied; the Spiritual from the Dao; and the bodily from the seminal essence. After this all things produced one another from their bodily organisations. Thus it is that those which have nine apertures are born from the womb, and those with eight from eggs. But their coming leaves no trace, and their going no monument; they enter by no door; they dwell in no apartment: they are in a vast arena reaching in all directions. They who search for and find (the Dao) in this are strong in their limbs, sincere and far-reaching in their thinking, acute in their hearing, and clear in their seeing. They exercise their minds without being toiled; they respond to everything aright without regard to place or circumstance. Without this heaven would not be high, nor earth broad; the sun and moon would not move, and nothing would flourish: such is the operation of the Dao.
'Moreover, the most extensive knowledge does not necessarily know it; reasoning will not make men wise in it - the sages have decided against both these methods. However you try to add to it, it admits of no increase; however you try to take from it, it admits of no diminution - this is what the sages maintain about it. How deep it is, like the sea! How grand it is, beginning again when it has come to an end! If it carried along and sustained all things, without being overburdened or weary, that would be like the way of the superior man, merely an external operation; when all things go to it, and find their dependence in it - this is the true character of the Dao.
'Here is a man (born) in one of the middle states. He feels himself independent both of the Yin and Yang, and dwells between heaven and earth; only for the present a mere man, but he will return to his original source. Looking at him in his origin, when his life begins, we have (but) a gelatinous substance in which the breath is collecting. Whether his life be long or his death early, how short is the space between them! It is but the name for a moment of time, insufficient to play the part of a good Yao or a bad Jie in.
'The fruits of trees and creeping plants have their distinctive characters, and though the relationships of men, according to which they are classified, are troublesome, the sage, when he meets with them, does not set himself in opposition to them, and when he has passed through them, he does not seek to retain them; he responds to them in their regular harmony according to his virtue; and even when he accidentally comes across any of them, he does so according to the Dao. It was thus that the Dao flourished, thus that the kings arose.
'Men's life between heaven and earth is like a white colt's passing a crevice, and suddenly disappearing. As with a plunge and an effort they all come forth; easily and quietly they all enter again. By a transformation they live, and by another transformation they die. Living things are made sad (by death), and mankind grieve for it; but it is (only) the removal of the bow from its sheath, and the emptying the natural satchel of its contents. There may be some confusion amidst the yielding to the change; but the intellectual and animal souls are taking their leave, and the body will follow them: This is the Great Returning home.
'That the bodily frame came from incorporeity, and will return to the same, is what all men in common know, and what those who are on their way to (know) it need not strive for. This is what the multitudes of men discuss together. Those whose (knowledge) is complete do not discuss it - such discussion shows that their (knowledge) is not complete. Even the most clear-sighted do not meet (with the Dao) - it is better to be silent than to reason about it. The Dao cannot be heard with the ears - it is better to shut the ears than to try and hear it. This is what is called the Great Attainment.'
Dong-guo Zi asked Zhuangzi, saying, 'Where is what you call the Dao to be found?' Zhuangzi replied, 'Everywhere.' The other said, 'Specify an instance of it. That will be more satisfactory.' ' It is here in this ant.' 'Give a lower instance.' 'It is in this panic grass.' 'Give me a still lower instance.' 'It is in this earthenware tile.' 'Surely that is the lowest instance?' 'It is in that excrement.' To this Dong-guo Zi gave no reply.
Zhuangzi said, 'Your questions, my master, do not touch the fundamental point (of the Dao). They remind me of the questions addressed by the superintendents of the market to the inspector about examining the value of a pig by treading on it, and testing its weight as the foot descends lower and lower on the body. You should not specify any particular thing. There is not a single thing without (the Dao). So it is with the Perfect Dao. And if we call it the Great (Dao), it is just the same. There are the three terms, "Complete," "All-embracing," "the Whole." These names are different, but the reality (sought in them) is the same; referring to the One thing.
'Suppose we were to try to roam about in the palace of No-where - when met there, we might discuss (about the subject) without ever coming to an end. Or suppose we were to be together in (the region of) Non-action - should we say that (the Dao was) Simplicity and Stillness? or Indifference and Purity? or Harmony and Ease? My will would be aimless. If it went nowhere, I should not know where it had got to; if it went and came again, I should not know where it had stopped; if it went on going and coming, I should not know when the process would end. In vague uncertainty should I be in the vastest waste. Though I entered it with the greatest knowledge, I should not know how inexhaustible it was. That which makes things what they are has not the limit which belongs to things, and when we speak of things being limited, we mean that they are so in themselves. (The Dao) is the limit of the unlimited, and the boundlessness of the unbounded.
'We speak of fulness and emptiness; of withering and decay. It produces fulness and emptiness, but is neither fulness nor emptiness; it produces withering and decay, but is neither withering nor decay. It produces the root and branches, but is neither root nor branch; it produces accumulation and dispersion, but is itself neither accumulated nor dispersed.'
A-he Gan and Shen Nong studied together under Lao-long Ji. Shen Nong was leaning forward on his stool, having shut the door and gone to sleep in the day time. At midday A-he Gan pushed open the door and entered, saying, 'Lao-long is dead.' Shen Nong leant forward on his stool, laid hold of his staff and rose. Then he laid the staff aside with a clash, laughed and said, 'That Heaven knew how cramped and mean, how arrogant and assuming I was, and therefore he has cast me off, and is dead. Now that there is no Master to correct my heedless words, it is simply for me to die!'
Yan Gang, (who had come in) to condole, heard these words, and said, 'It is to him who embodies the Dao that the superior men everywhere cling. Now you who do not understand so much as the tip of an autumn hair of it, not even the ten-thousandth part of the Dao, still know how to keep hidden your heedless words about it and die - how much more might he who embodied the Dao do so! We look for it, and there is no form; we hearken for it, and there is no sound. When men try to discuss it, we call them dark indeed. When they discuss the Dao, they misrepresent it.'
Hereupon Grand Purity asked Infinitude, saying, 'Do you know the Dao?' 'I do not know it,' was the reply. He then asked Do-nothing, Who replied, 'I know it.' 'Is your knowledge of it determined by various points?' 'It is.' 'What are they?' Do-nothing said, 'I know that the Dao may be considered noble, and may be considered mean, that it may be bound and compressed, and that it may be dispersed and diffused. These are the marks by which I know it.' Grand Purity took the words of those two, and asked No-beginning, saying, 'Such were their replies; which was right? and which was wrong? Infinitude's saying that he did not know it? or Do-nothing's saying that he knew it?' No-beginning said, 'The "I do not know it" was profound, and the "I know it" was shallow. The former had reference to its internal nature; the latter to its external conditions.' Grand Purity looked up and sighed, saying, 'Is "not to know it" then to know it? And is "to know it" not to know it? But who knows that he who does not know it (really) knows it?' No-beginning replied, 'The Dao cannot be heard; what can be heard is not It. The Dao cannot be seen; what can be seen is not It. The Dao cannot be expressed in words; what can be expressed in words is not It. Do we know the Formless which gives form to form? In the same way the Dao does not admit of being named.'
No-beginning (further) said, 'If one ask about the Dao and another answer him, neither of them knows it. Even the former who asks has never learned anything about the Dao. He asks what does not admit of being asked, and the latter answers where answer is impossible. When one asks what does not admit of being asked, his questioning is in (dire) extremity. When one answers where answer is impossible, he has no internal knowledge of the subject. When people without such internal knowledge wait to be questioned by others in dire extremity, they show that externally they see nothing of space and time, and internally know nothing of the Grand Commencement. Therefore they cannot cross over the Kun-lun, nor roam in the Grand Void.'
Starlight asked Non-entity, saying, 'Master, do you exist? or do you not exist?' He got no answer to his question, however, and looked stedfastly to the appearance of the other, which was that of a deep void. All day long he looked to it, but could see nothing; he listened for it, but could hear nothing; he clutched at it, but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said, 'Perfect! Who can attain to this? I can (conceive the ideas of) existence and non-existence, but I cannot (conceive the ideas of) non-existing non-existence, and still there be a nonexisting existence. How is it possible to reach to this?'
The forger of swords for the Minister of War had reached the age of eighty, and had not lost a hair's-breadth of his ability. The Minister said to him, 'You are indeed skilful, Sir. Have you any method that makes you so?' The man said, 'Your servant has (always) kept to his work. When I was twenty, I was fond of forging swords. I looked at nothing else. I paid no attention to anything but swords. By my constant practice of it, I came to be able to do the work without any thought of what I was doing. By length of time one acquires ability at any art; and how much more one who is ever at work on it! What is there which does not depend on this, and succeed by it?'
Ran Qiu asked Zhongni, saying, 'Can it be known how it was before heaven and earth?' The reply was, 'It can. It was the same of old as now.' Ran Qiu asked no more and withdrew. Next day, however, he had another interview, and said, 'Yesterday I asked whether it could be known how it was before heaven and earth, and you, Master, said, "It can. As it is now, so it was of old." Yesterday, I seemed to understand you clearly, but to-day it is dark to me. I venture to ask you for an explanation of this.' Zhongni said, 'Yesterday you seemed to understand me clearly, because your own spiritual nature had anticipated my reply. Today it seems dark to you, for you are in an unspiritual mood, and are trying to discover the meaning. (In this matter) there is no old time and no present; no beginning and no ending. Could it be that there were grandchildren and children before there were (other) grandchildren and children?' Ran Qiu had not made any reply, when Zhongni went on, 'Let us have done. There can be no answering (on your part). We cannot with life give life to death; we cannot with death give death to life. Do death and life wait (for each other)? There is that which contains them both in its one comprehension. Was that which was produced before Heaven and Earth a thing? That which made things and gave to each its character was not itself a thing. Things came forth and could not be before things, as if there had (previously) been things - as if there had been things (producing one another) without end. The love of the sages for others, and never coming to an end, is an idea taken from this.'
Yan Yuan asked Zhongni, saying, 'Master, I have heard you say, "There should be no demonstration of welcoming; there should be no movement to meet" - I venture to ask in what way this affection of the mind may be shown.' The reply was, 'The ancients, amid (all) external changes, did not change internally; now-a-days men change internally, but take no note of external changes. When one only notes the changes of things, himself continuing one and the same, he does not change. How should there be (a difference between) his changing and not changing? How should he put himself in contact with (and come under the influence of) those external changes? He is sure, however, to keep his points of contact with them from being many. The park of Xi-wei, the garden of Huang-Di, the palace of the Lord of Yu, and the houses of Tang and Wu - (these all were places in which this was done). But the superior men (so called, of later days), such as the masters of the Literati and of Mohism, were bold to attack each other with their controversies; and how much more so are the men of the present day! Sages in dealing with others do not wound them; and they who do not wound others cannot be wounded by them. Only he whom others do not injure is able to welcome and meet men.
'Forests and marshes make me joyful and glad; but before the joy is ended, sadness comes and succeeds to it. When sadness and joy come, I cannot prevent their approach; when they go, I cannot retain them. How sad it is that men should only be as lodging-houses for things, (and the emotions which they excite)! They know what they meet, but they do not know what they do not meet; they use what power they have, but they cannot be strong where they are powerless. Such ignorance and powerlessness is what men cannot avoid. That they should try to avoid what they cannot avoid, is not this also sad? Perfect speech is to put speech away; perfect action is to put action away; to digest all knowledge that is known is a thing to be despised.'
** Miscellaneous Chapters
*** Geng-sang Chu
Among the disciples of Lao Dan there was a Geng-sang Chu, who had got a greater knowledge than the others of his doctrines, and took up his residence with it in the north at the hill of Wei-lei. His servants who were pretentious and knowing he sent away, and his concubines who were officious and kindly he kept at a distance; living (only) with those who were boorish and rude, and employing (only) the bustling and ill-mannered. After three years there was great prosperity in Wei-lei, and the people said to one another, 'When Mr. Geng-sang first came here, he alarmed us, and we thought him strange; our estimate of him after a short acquaintance was that he could not do us much good; but now that we have known him for years, we find him a more than ordinary benefit. Must he not be near being a sage? Why should you not unite in blessing him as the representative of our departed (whom we worship), and raise an altar to him as we do to the spirit of the grain?'
Geng-sang heard of it, kept his face indeed to the south but was dissatisfied. His disciples thought it strange in him, but he said to them, 'Why, my disciples, should you think this strange in me? When the airs of spring come forth, all vegetation grows; and, when the autumn arrives, all the previous fruits of the earth are matured. Do spring and autumn have these effects without any adequate cause? The processes of the Great Dao have been in operation. I have heard that the Perfect man dwells idly in his apartment within its surrounding walls, and the people get wild and crazy, not knowing how they should repair to him. Now these small people of Wei-lei in their opinionative way want to present their offerings to me, and place me among such men of ability and virtue. But am I a man to be set up as such a model? It is on this account that I am dissatisfied when I think of the words of Lao Dan.'
His disciples said, 'Not so. In ditches eight cubits wide, or even twice as much, big fishes cannot turn their bodies about, but minnows and eels find them sufficient for them; on hillocks six or seven cubits high, large beasts cannot conceal themselves, but foxes of evil omen find it a good place for them. And moreover, honour should be paid to the wise, offices given to the able, and preference shown to the good and the beneficial. From of old Yao and Shun acted thus - how much more may the people of Wei-lei do so! 0 Master, let them have their way!'
Geng-sang replied, 'Come nearer, my little children. If a beast that could hold a carriage in its mouth leave its hill by itself, it will not escape the danger that awaits it from the net; or if a fish that could swallow a boat be left dry by the flowing away of the water, then (even) the ants are able to trouble it. Thus it is that birds and beasts seek to be as high as possible, and fishes and turtles seek to lie as deep as possible. In the same way men who wish to preserve their bodies and lives keep their persons concealed, and they do so in the deepest retirement possible. And moreover, what was there in those sovereigns to entitle them to your laudatory mention? Their sophistical reasonings (resembled) the reckless breaking down of walls and enclosures and planting the wild rubus and wormwood in their place; or making the hair thin before they combed it; or counting the grains of rice before they cooked them. They would do such things with careful discrimination; but what was there in them to benefit the world? If you raise the men of talent to office, you will create disorder; making the people strive with one another for promotion; if you employ men for their wisdom, the people will rob one another (of their reputation). These various things are insufficient to make the people good and honest. They are very eager for gain - a son will kill his father, and a minister his ruler (for it). In broad daylight men will rob, and at midday break through walls. I tell you that the root of the greatest disorder was planted in the times of Yao and Shun. The branches of it will remain for a thousand ages; and after a thousand ages men will be found eating one another.'
(On this) Nan-rong Chu abruptly sat right up and said, 'What method can an old man like me adopt to become (the Perfect man) that you have described?' Geng-sang Zi said, 'Maintain your body complete; hold your life in close embrace; and do not let your thoughts keep working anxiously: do this for three years, and you may become the man of whom I have spoken.' The other rejoined, 'Eyes are all of the same form, I do not know any difference between them: yet the blind have no power of vision. Ears are all of the same form; I do not know any difference between them: yet the deaf have no power of hearing. Minds are all of the same nature, I do not know any difference between them - yet the mad cannot make the minds of other men their own. (My) personality is indeed like (yours), but things seem to separate between us. I wish to find in myself what there is in you, but I am not able to do so. You have now said to me, "Maintain your body complete; hold your life in close embrace; and do not let your thoughts keep working anxiously." With all my efforts to learn your Way, (your words) reach only my ears.' Geng-sang replied, 'I can say nothing more to you,' and then he added, 'Small flies cannot transform the bean caterpillar; Yue fowls cannot hatch the eggs of geese, but Lu fowls can. It is not that the nature of these fowls is different; the ability in the one case and inability in the other arise from their different capacities as large and small. My ability is small and not sufficient to transform you. Why should you not go south and see Laozi?'
Nan-rong Chu hereupon took with him some rations, and after seven days and seven nights arrived at the abode of Laozi, who said to him, 'Are you come from Chu's?' 'I am,' was the reply. 'And why, Sir, have you come with such a multitude of attendants?' Nan-rong was frightened, and turned his head round to look behind him. Laozi said, 'Do you not understand my meaning?' The other held his head down and was ashamed, and then he lifted it up, and sighed, saying, 'I forgot at the moment what I should reply to your question, and in consequence I have lost what I wished to ask you.' Laozi asked, 'What do you mean?' The other replied, 'If I have not wisdom, men say that I am stupid, while if I have it, it occasions distress to myself. If I have not benevolence, then (I am charged) with doing hurt to others, while if I have it, I distress myself. If I have not righteousness, I (am charged with) injuring others, while if I have it, I distress myself. How can I escape from these dilemmas? These are the three perplexities that trouble me; and I wish at the suggestion of Chu to ask you about them.' Laozi replied, 'A little time ago, when I saw you and looked right into your eyes, I understood you, and now your words confirm the judgment which I formed. You look frightened and amazed. You have lost your parents, and are trying with a pole to find them at the (bottom of) the sea. You have gone astray; you are at your wit's end. You wish to recover your proper nature, and you know not what step to take first to find it. You are to be pitied!'
Nan-rong Chu asked to be allowed to enter (the establishment), and have an apartment assigned to him. (There) he sought to realise the qualities which he loved, and put away those which he hated. For ten days he afflicted himself, and then waited again on Laozi, who said to him, 'You must purify yourself thoroughly! But from your symptoms of distress, and signs of impurity about you, I see there still seem to cling to you things that you dislike. When the fettering influences from without become numerous, and you try to seize them (you will find it a difficult task); the better plan is to bar your inner man against their entrance. And when the similar influences within get intertwined, it is a difficult task to grasp (and hold them in check); the better plan is to bar the outer door against their exit. Even a master of the Dao and its characteristics will not be able to control these two influences together, and how much less can one who is only a student of the Dao do so!'
Nan-rong Chu said, 'A certain villager got an illness, and when his neighbours asked about it, he was able to describe the malady, though it was one from which he had not suffered before. When I ask you about the Grand Dao, it seems to me like drinking medicine which (only serves to) increase my illness. I should like to hear from you about the regular method of guarding the life - that will be sufficient for me.' Laozi replied, '(You ask me about) the regular method of guarding the life - can you hold the One thing fast in your embrace? Can you keep from losing it? Can you know the lucky and the unlucky without having recourse to the tortoise-shell or the divining stalks? Can you rest (where you ought to rest)? Can you stop (when you have got enough)? Can you give over thinking of other men, and seek what you want in yourself (alone)? Can you flee (from the allurements of desire)? Can you maintain an entire simplicity? Can you become a little child? The child will cry all the day, without its throat becoming hoarse - so perfect is the harmony (of its physical constitution). It will keep its fingers closed all the day without relaxing their grasp - such is the concentration of its powers. It will keep its eyes fixed all day, without their moving - so is it unaffected by what is external to it. It walks it knows not whither; it rests where it is placed, it knows not why; it is calmly indifferent to things, and follows their current. This is the regular method of guarding the life.'
Nan-rong Chu said, 'And are these all the characteristics of the Perfect man?' Laozi replied, 'No. These are what we call the breaking up of the ice, and the dissolving of the cold. The Perfect man, along with other men, gets his food from the earth, and derives his joy from his Heaven (-conferred nature). But he does not like them allow himself to be troubled by the consideration of advantage or injury coming from men and things; he does not like them do strange things, or form plans, or enter on undertakings; he flees from the allurements of desire, and pursues his way with an entire simplicity. Such is the way by which he guards his life.' 'And is this what constitutes his perfection ?' 'Not quite. I asked you whether you could become a little child. The little child moves unconscious of what it is doing, and walks unconscious of whither it is going. Its body is like the branch of a rotten tree, and its mind is like slaked lime. Being such, misery does not come to it, nor happiness. It has neither misery nor happiness - how can it suffer from the calamities incident to men?'
He whose mind is thus grandly fixed emits a Heavenly light. In him who emits this heavenly light men see the (True) man. When a man has cultivated himself (up to this point), thenceforth he remains constant in himself. When he is thus constant in himself, (what is merely) the human element will leave him, but Heaven will help him. Those whom their human element has left we call the people of Heaven. Those whom Heaven helps we call the Sons of Heaven. Those who would by learning attain to this seek for what they cannot learn. Those who would by effort attain to this, attempt what effort can never effect. Those who aim by reasoning to reach it reason where reasoning has no place. To know to stop where they cannot arrive by means of knowledge is the highest attainment. Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of Heaven.
Where things are all adjusted to maintain the body; where a provision against unforeseen dangers is kept up to maintain the life of the mind; where an inward reverence is cherished to be exhibited (in all intercourse) with others - where this is done, and yet all evils arrive, they are from Heaven, and not from the men themselves. They will not be sufficient to confound the established (virtue of the character), or be admitted into the Tower of Intelligence. That Tower has its Guardian, who acts unconsciously, and whose care will not be effective, if there be any conscious purpose in it. If one who has not this entire sincerity in himself make any outward demonstration, every such demonstration will be incorrect. The thing will enter into him, and not let go its hold. Then with every fresh demonstration there will be still greater failure. If he do what is not good in the light of open day, men will have the opportunity of punishing him; if he do it in darkness and secrecy, spirits will inflict the punishment. Let a man understand this: his relation both to men and spirits, and then he will do what is good in the solitude of himself.
He whose rule of life is in himself does not act for the sake of a name. He whose rule is outside himself has his will set on extensive acquisition. He who does not act for the sake of a name emits a light even in his ordinary conduct; he whose will is set on extensive acquisition is but a trafficker. Men see how he stands on tiptoe, while he thinks that he is overtopping others. Things enter (and take possession of) him who (tries to) make himself exhaustively (acquainted with them), while when one is indifferent to them, they do not find any lodgment in his person. And how can other men find such lodgment? But when one denies lodgment to men, there are none who feel attachment to him. In this condition he is cut off from other men. There is no weapon more deadly than the will - even Mo-ye was inferior to it. There is no robber greater than the Yin and Yang, from whom nothing can escape of all between heaven and earth. But it is not the Yin and Yang that play the robber - it is the mind that causes them to do so.
The Dao is to be found in the subdivisions (of its subject); (it is to be found) in that when complete, and when broken up. What I dislike in considering it as subdivided, is that the division leads to the multiplication of it - and what I dislike in that multiplication is that it leads to the (thought of) effort to secure it. Therefore when (a man) comes forth (and is born), if he did not return (to his previous non-existence), we should have (only) seen his ghost; when he comes forth and gets this (return), he dies (as we say). He is extinguished, and yet has a real existence: (this is another way of saying that in life we have) only man's ghost. By taking the material as an emblem of the immaterial do we arrive at a settlement of the case of man.
He comes forth, but from no root; he reenters, but by no aperture. He has a real existence, but it has nothing to do with place; he has continuance, but it has nothing to do with beginning or end. He has a real existence, but it has nothing to do with place, such is his relation to space; he has continuance, but it has nothing to do with beginning or end, such is his relation to time; he has life; he has death; he comes forth; he enters; but we do not see his form - all this is what is called the door of Heaven. The door of Heaven is Non-Existence. All things come from non-existence. The (first) existences could not bring themselves into existence; they must have come from non-existence. And non-existence is just the same as non-existing. Herein is the secret of the sages.
Among the ancients there were those whose knowledge reached the extreme point. And what was that point? There were some who thought that in the beginning there was nothing. This was the extreme point, the completest reach of their knowledge, to which nothing could be added. Again, there were those who supposed that (in the beginning) there were existences, proceeding to consider life to be a (gradual) perishing, and death a returning (to the original state). And there they stopped, making, (however), a distinction between life and death. Once again there were those who said, 'In the beginning there was nothing; by and by there was life; and then in a little time life was succeeded by death. We hold that non-existence was the head, life the body, and death the os coccygis. But of those who acknowledge that existence and nonexistence, death and life, are all under the One Keeper, we are the friends.' Though those who maintained these three views were different, they were so as the different branches of the same ruling Family (of Chu) - the Zhaos and the Kings, bearing the surname of the lord whom they honoured as the author of their branch, and the Jias named from their appanage - (all one, yet seeming) not to be one.
The possession of life is like the soot that collects under a boiler. When that is differently distributed, the life is spoken of as different. But to say that life is different in different lives, and better in one than in another, is an improper mode of speech. And yet there may be something here which we do not know. (As for instance), at the li sacrifice the paunch and the divided hoofs may be set forth on separate dishes, but they should not be considered as parts of different victims; (and again), when one is inspecting a house, he goes over it all, even the adytum for the shrines of the temple, and visits also the most private apartments; doing this, and setting a different estimate on the different parts.
Let me try and speak of this method of apportioning one's approval: life is the fundamental consideration in it; knowledge is the instructor. From this they multiply their approvals and disapprovals, determining what is merely nominal and what is real. They go on to conclude that to themselves must the appeal be made in everything, and to try to make others adopt them as their model; prepared even to die to make good their views on every point. In this way they consider being employed in office as a mark of wisdom, and not being so employed as a mark of stupidity, success as entitling to fame, and the want of it as disgraceful. The men of the present day who follow this differentiating method are like the cicada and the little dove - there is no difference between them.
When one treads on the foot of another in the market-place, he apologises on the ground of the bustle. If an elder tread on his younger brother, he proceeds to comfort him; if a parent tread on a child, he says and does nothing. Hence it is said, 'The greatest politeness is to show no special respect to others; the greatest righteousness is to take no account of things; the greatest wisdom is to lay no plans; the greatest benevolence is to make no demonstration of affection; the greatest good faith is to give no pledge of sincerity.'
Repress the impulses of the will; unravel the errors of the mind; put away the entanglements to virtue; and clear away all that obstructs the free course of the Dao. Honours and riches, distinctions and austerity, fame and profit; these six things produce the impulses of the will. Personal appearance and deportment, the desire of beauty and subtle reasonings, excitement of the breath and cherished thoughts; these six things produce errors of the mind. Hatred and longings, joy and anger, grief and delight; these six things are the entanglements to virtue. Refusals and approachments, receiving and giving, knowledge and ability; these six things obstruct the course of the Dao. When these four conditions, with the six causes of each, do not agitate the breast, the mind is correct. Being correct, it is still; being still, it is pellucid; being pellucid, it is free from pre-occupation; being free from pre-occupation, it is in the state of inaction, in which it accomplishes everything.
The Dao is the object of reverence to all the virtues. Life is what gives opportunity for the display of the virtues. The nature is the substantive character of the life. The movement of the nature is called action. When action becomes hypocritical, we say that it has lost (its proper attribute).
The wise communicate with what is external to them and the wise are always laying plans. This is what with all their wisdom they are not aware of - they look at things askance.
When the action (of the nature) is from external constraint, we have what is called virtue; when it is all one's own, we have what is called government. These two names seem to be opposite to each other, but in reality they are in mutual accord.
Yi was skilful in hitting the minutest mark, but stupid in wishing men to go on praising him without end. The sage is skilful Heavenwards, but stupid manwards. It is only the complete man who can be both skilful Heavenwards and good manwards.
Only an insect can play the insect, only an insect show the insect nature. Even the complete man hates the attempt to exemplify the nature of Heaven. He hates the manner in which men do so, and how much more would he hate the doing so by himself before men!
When a bird came in the way of Yi, he was sure to obtain it - such was his mastery with his bow. If all the world were to be made a cage, birds would have nowhere to escape to. Thus it was that Tang caged Yi Yin by making him his cook, and that duke Mu of Qin caged Bai-li Xi by giving the skins of five rams for him. But if you try to cage men by anything but what they like, you will never succeed.
A man, one of whose feet has been cut off, discards ornamental (clothes) - his outward appearance will not admit of admiration. A criminal under sentence of death will ascend to any height without fear - he has ceased to think of life or death. When one persists in not reciprocating the gifts (of friendship), he forgets all others. Having forgotten all others, he may be considered as a Heaven-like man. Therefore when respect is shown to a man, and it awakens in him no joy, and when contempt awakens no anger, it is only one who shares in the Heaven-like harmony that can be thus. When he would display anger and yet is not angry, the anger comes out in that repression of it. When he would put forth action, and yet does not do so, the action is in that not-acting. Desiring to be quiescent, he must pacify all his emotions; desiring to be spirit-like, he must act in conformity with his mind. When action is required of him, he wishes that it may be right; and it then is under an inevitable constraint. Those who act according to that inevitable constraint pursue the way of the sage.
*** Xu Wu-gui
Xu Wu-gui having obtained through Nu Shang an introduction to the marquis Wu of Wei, the marquis, speaking to him with kindly sympathy, said, 'You are ill, Sir; you have suffered from your hard and laborious toils in the forests, and still you have been willing to come and see poor me.' Xu Wu-gui replied, 'It is I who have to comfort your lordship; what occasion have you to comfort me? If your lordship go on to fill up the measure of your sensual desires, and to prolong your likes and dislikes, then the condition of your mental nature will be diseased, and if you discourage and repress those desires, and deny your likings and dislikings, that will be an affliction to your ears and eyes (deprived of their accustomed pleasures) - it is for me to comfort your lordship, what occasion have you to comfort me?' The marquis looked contemptuous, and made no reply.
After a little time, Xu Wu-gui said, 'Let me tell your lordship something: I look at dogs and judge of them by their appearance. One of the lowest quality seizes his food, satiates himself, and stops - he has the attributes of a fox. One of a medium quality seems to be looking at the sun. One of the highest quality seems to have forgotten the one thing - himself. But I judge still better of horses than I do of dogs. When I do so, I find that one goes straight forward, as if following a line; that another turns off, so as to describe a hook; that a third describes a square as if following the measure so called; and that a fourth describes a circle as exactly as a compass would make it. These are all horses of a state; but they are not equal to a horse of the kingdom. His qualities are complete. Now he looks anxious; now to be losing the way; now to be forgetting himself. Such a horse prances along, or rushes on, spurning the dust and not knowing where he is.' The marquis was greatly pleased and laughed.
When Xu Wu-gui came out, Nu Shang said to him, 'How was it, Sir, that you by your counsels produced such an effect on our ruler? In my counsellings of him, now indirectly, taking my subjects from the Books of Poetry, History, Rites, and Music; now directly, from the Metal Tablets, and the six Bow-cases, all calculated for the service (of the state), and to be of great benefit - in these counsellings, repeated times without number, I have never seen the ruler show his teeth in a smile: by what counsels have you made him so pleased to-day?' Xu Wu-gui replied, 'I only told him how I judged of dogs and horses by looking at their appearance.' 'So?' said Nu Shang, and the other rejoined, 'Have you not heard of the wanderer from Yue? When he had been gone from the state several days, he was glad when he saw any one whom he had seen in it; when he had been gone a month, he was glad when he saw any one whom he had known in it; and when he had been gone a round year, he was glad when he saw any one who looked like a native of it. The longer he was gone, the more longingly did he think of the people - was it not so? The men who withdraw to empty valleys, where the hellebore bushes stop up the little paths made by the weasels, as they push their way or stand amid the waste, are glad when they seem to hear the sounds of human footsteps; and how much more would they be so, if it were their brothers and relatives talking and laughing by their side! How long it is since the words of a True man were heard as he talked and laughed by our ruler's side!'
At (another) interview of Xu Wu-gui with the marquis Wu, the latter said, 'You, Sir, have been dwelling in the forests for a long time, living on acorns and chestnuts, and satiating yourself with onions and chives, without thinking of poor me. Now (that you are here), is it because you are old? or because you wish to try again the taste of wine and meat? or because (you wish that) I may enjoy the happiness derived from the spirits of the altars of the Land and Grain?' Xu Wu-gui replied, 'I was born in a poor and mean condition, and have never presumed to drink of your lordship's wine, or eat of your meat. My object in coming was to comfort your lordship under your troubles.' 'What? comfort me under my troubles?' 'Yes, to comfort both your lordship's spirit and body.' The marquis said, 'What do you mean?' His visitor replied, 'Heaven and Earth have one and the same purpose in the production (of all men). However high one man be exalted, he should not think that he is favourably dealt with; and however low may be the position of another, he should not think that he is unfavourably dealt with. You are indeed the one and only lord of the 10,000 chariots (of your state), but you use your dignity to embitter (the lives of) all the people, and to pamper your ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. But your spirit does not acquiesce in this. The spirit (of man) loves to be in harmony with others and hates selfish indulgence'. This selfish indulgence is a disease, and therefore I would comfort you under it. How is it that your lordship more than others brings this disease on yourself?'
The marquis said, 'I have wished to see you, Sir, for a long time. I want to love my people, and by the exercise of righteousness to make an end of war - will that be sufficient?' Xu Wu-gui replied, 'By no means. To love the people is the first step to injure them. By the exercise of righteousness to make an end of war is the root from which war is produced. If your lordship try to accomplish your object in this way, you are not likely to succeed. All attempts to accomplish what we think good (with an ulterior end) is a bad contrivance. Although your lordship practise benevolence and righteousness (as you propose), it will be no better than hypocrisy. You may indeed assume the (outward) form, but successful accomplishment will lead to (inward) contention, and the change thence arising will produce outward fighting. Your lordship also must not mass files of soldiers in the passages of your galleries and towers, nor have footmen and horsemen in the apartments about your altars. Do not let thoughts contrary to your success lie hidden in your mind; do not think of conquering men by artifice, or by (skilful) plans, or by fighting. If I kill the officers and people of another state, and annex its territory, to satisfy my selfish desires, while in my spirit I do not know whether the fighting be good, where is the victory that I gain? Your lordship's best plan is to abandon (your purpose). If you will cultivate in your breast the sincere purpose (to love the people), and so respond to the feeling of Heaven and Earth, and not (further) vex yourself, then your people will already have escaped death - what occasion will your lordship have to make an end of war?'
Huang-Di was going to see Da-gui at the hill of Ju-Zi. Fang Ming was acting as charioteer, and Chang Yu was occupying the third place in the carriage. Zhang Ruo and Xi Peng went before the horses; and Kun Hun and Gu Ji followed the carriage. When they arrived at the wild of Xiang-cheng, the seven sages were all perplexed, and could find no place at which to ask the way. just then they met with a boy tending some horses, and asked the way of him. 'Do you know,' they said, 'the hill of Ju-zi?' and he replied that he did. He also said that he knew where Da-gui was living. 'A strange boy is this!' said Huang-Di. 'He not only knows the hill of Ju-zi, but he also knows where Fa-gui is living. Let me ask him about the government of mankind.' The boy said, 'The administration of the kingdom is like this (which I am doing) - what difficulty should there be in it? When I was young, I enjoyed myself roaming over all within the six confines of the world of space, and then I began to suffer from indistinct sight. A wise elder taught me, saying, "Ride in the chariot of the sun, and roam in the wild of Xiang-cheng." Now the trouble in my eyes is a little better, and I am again enjoying myself roaming outside the six confines of the world of space. As to the government of the kingdom, it is like this (which I am doing) - what difficulty should there be in it?' Huang-Di said, 'The administration of the world is indeed not your business, my son; nevertheless, I beg to ask you about it.' The little lad declined to answer, but on Huang-Di putting the question again, he said, 'In what does the governor of the kingdom differ from him who has the tending of horses, and who has only to put away whatever in him would injure the horses?' Huang-Di bowed to him twice with his head to the ground, called him his 'Heavenly Master,' and withdrew.
If officers of wisdom do not see the changes which their anxious thinking has suggested, they have no joy; if debaters are not able to set forth their views in orderly style, they have no joy; if critical examiners find no subjects on which to exercise their powers of vituperation, they have no joy: they are all hampered by external restrictions.
Those who try to attract the attention of their age (wish to) rise at court; those who try to win the regard of the people count holding office a glory; those who possess muscular strength boast of doing what is difficult; those who are bold and daring exert themselves in times of calamity; those who are able swordmen and spearmen delight in fighting; those whose powers are decayed seek to rest in the name (they have gained); those who are skilled in the laws seek to enlarge the scope of government; those who are proficient in ceremonies and music pay careful attention to their deportment; and those who profess benevolence and righteousness value opportunities (for displaying them).
The husbandmen who do not keep their fields well weeded are not equal to their business, nor are traders who do not thrive in the markets. When the common people have their appropriate employment morning and evening, they stimulate one another to diligence; the mechanics who are masters of their implements feel strong for their work. If their wealth does not increase, the greedy are distressed; if their power and influence is not growing, the ambitious are sad. Such creatures of circumstance and things delight in changes, and if they meet with a time when they can show what they can do, they cannot keep themselves from taking advantage of it. They all pursue their own way like (the seasons of) the year, and do not change as things do. They give the reins to their bodies and natures, and allow themselves to sink beneath (the pressure of) things, and all their lifetime do not come back (to their proper selves) is it not sad?
Zhuangzi said, 'An archer, without taking aim beforehand, yet may hit the mark. If we say that he is a good archer, and that all the world may be Yis, is this allowable?' Huizi replied, 'It is.' Zhuangzi continued, 'All men do not agree in counting the same thing to be right, but every one maintains his own view to be right; (if we say) that all men may be Yaos, is this allowable?' Huizi (again) replied, 'It is;'.
Zhuangzi went on, 'Very well; there are the literati, the followers of Mo (Di), of Yang (Zhu), and of Bing - making four (different schools). Including yourself, Master, there are five. Which of your views is really right? Or will you take the position of Lu Ju? One of his disciples said to him, "Master, I have got hold of your method. I can in winter heat the furnace under my tripod, and in summer can produce ice." Lu Ju said, "That is only with the Yang element to call out the same, and with the Yin to call out the yin - that is not my method. I will show you what my method is." On this he tuned two citherns, placing one of them in the hall, and the other in one of the inner apartments. Striking the note Gong in the one, the same note vibrated in the other, and so it was with the note Jiao; the two instruments being tuned in the same way. But if he had differently tuned them on other strings different from the normal arrangement of the five notes, the five-and-twenty strings would all have vibrated, without any difference of their notes, the note to which he had tuned them ruling and guiding all the others. Is your maintaining your view to be right just like this?'
Huizi replied, 'Here now are the literati, and the followers of Mo, Yang, and Bing. Suppose that they have come to dispute with me. They put forth their conflicting statements; they try vociferously to put me down; but none of them have ever proved me wrong: what do you say to this?' Zhuangzi said, 'There was a man of Qi who cast away his son in Song to be a gatekeeper there, and thinking nothing of the mutilation he would incur; the same man, to secure one of his sacrificial vessels or bells, would have it strapped and secured, while to find his son who was lost, he would not go out of the territory of his own state: so forgetful was he of the relative importance of things. If a man of Chu, going to another state as a lame gate-keeper, at midnight, at a time when no one was nigh, were to fight with his boatman, he would not be abie to reach the shore, and he would have done what he could to provoke the boatman's animosity.'
As Zhuangzi was accompanying a funeral, when passing by the grave of Huizi, he looked round, and said to his attendants, 'On the top of the nose of that man of Ying there is a (little) bit of mud like a fly's wing.' He sent for the artisan Shi to cut it away. Shi whirled his axe so as to produce a wind, which immediately carried off the mud entirely, leaving the nose uninjured, and the (statue of) the man of Ying standing undisturbed. The ruler Yuan of Song heard of the feat, called the artisan Shi, and said to him, 'Try and do the same thing on me.' The artisan said, 'Your servant has been able to trim things in that way, but the material on which I have worked has been dead for a long time.' Zhuangzi said, 'Since the death of the Master, I have had no material to work upon. I have had no one with whom to talk.'
Guan Zhong being ill, duke Huan went to ask for him, and said, 'Your illness, father Zhong, is very severe; should you not speak out your mind to me? Should this prove the great illness, to whom will it be best for me to entrust my State?' Guan Zhong said, 'To whom does your grace wish to entrust it?' 'To Bao Shu-ya,' was the reply. 'He will not do. He is an admirable officer, pure and incorruptible, but with others who are not like himself he will not associate. And when he once hears of another man's faults, he never forgets them. If you employ him to administer the state, above, he will take the leading of your Grace, and, below, he will come into collision with the people - in no long time you will be holding him as an offender.' The duke said, 'Who, then, is the man?' The reply was, 'If I must speak, there is Xi Peng - he will do. He is a man who forgets his own high position, and against whom those below him will not revolt. He is ashamed that he is not equal to Huang-Di, and pities those who are not equal to himself. Him who imparts of his virtue to others we call a sage; him who imparts of his wealth to others we call a man of worth. He who by his worth would preside over others, never succeeds in winning them; he who with his worth condescends to others, never but succeeds in winning them. Xi Peng has not been (much) heard of in the state; he has not been (much) distinguished in his own clan. But as I must speak, he is the man for you.'
The king of Wu, floating about on the Jiang, (landed and) ascended the Hill of monkeys, which all, when they saw him, scampered off in terror, and hid themselves among the thick hazels. There was one, however, which, in an unconcerned way, swung about on the branches, displaying its cleverness to the king, who thereon discharged an arrow at it. With a nimble motion it caught the swift arrow, and the king ordered his attendants to hurry forward and shoot it; and thus the monkey was seized and killed. The king then, looking round, said to his friend Yan Bu-yi, 'This monkey made a display of its artfulness, and trusted in its agility, to show me its arrogance - this it was which brought it to this fate. Take warning from it. Ah! do not by your looks give yourself haughty airs!' Yan Bu-yi, when he returned home, put himself under the teaching of Dong Wu, to root up his pride. He put away what he delighted in and abjured distinction. In three years the people of the kingdom spoke of him with admiration.
Nan-bo Zi-qi was seated, leaning forward on his stool, and sighing gently as he looked up to heaven. (Just then) Yan Cheng-zi came in, and said, when he saw him, 'Master, you surpass all others. Is it right to make your body thus like a mass of withered bones, and your mind like so much slaked lime?' The other said, 'I formerly lived in a grotto on a hill. At that time Tian He once came to see me, and all the multitudes of Qi congratulated him thrice (on his having found the proper man). I must first have shown myself, and so it was that he knew me; I must first have been selling (what I had), and so it was that he came to buy. If I had not shown what I possessed, how should he have known it; if I had not been selling (myself), how should he have come to buy me? I pity the men who lose themselves; I also pity the men who pity others (for not being known); and I also pity the men who pity the men who pity those that pity others. But since then the time is long gone by; (and so I am in the state in which you have found me).
Zhongni, having gone to Chu, the king ordered wine to be presented to him. Sun Shu-ao stood, holding the goblet in his hand. Yi-liao of Shi-nan, having received (a cup), poured its contents out as a sacrificial libation, and said, 'The men of old, on such an occasion as this, made some speech.' Zhongni said, 'I have heard of speech without words; but I have never spoken it; I will do so now. Yi-liao of Shi-nan kept (quietly) handling his little spheres, and the difficulties between the two Houses were resolved; Sun Shu-ao slept undisturbed on his couch, with his (dancer's) feather in his hand, and the men of Ying enrolled themselves for the war. I wish I had a beak three cubits long.'
In the case of those two (ministers) we have what is called 'The Way that cannot be trodden;' in (the case of Zhongni) we have what is called 'the Argument without words.' Therefore when all attributes are comprehended in the unity of the Dao, and speech stops at the point to which knowledge does not reach, the conduct is complete. But where there is (not) the unity of the Dao, the attributes cannot (always) be the same, and that which is beyond the reach of knowledge cannot be exhibited by any reasoning. There may be as many names as those employed by the Literati and the Mohists, but (the result is) evil. Thus when the sea does not reject the streams that flow into it in their eastward course, we have the perfection of greatness. The sage embraces in his regard both Heaven and Earth; his beneficent influence extends to all tinder the sky; and we do not know from whom it comes. Therefore though when living one may have no rank, and when dead no honorary epithet; though the reality (of what he is) may not be acknowledged and his name not established; we have in him what is called 'The Great Man.'
A dog is not reckoned good because it barks well; and a man is not reckoned wise because be speaks skilfully - how much less can he be deemed Great! If one thinks he is Great, he is not fit to be accounted Great - how much less is he so from the practice of the attributes (of the Dao)! Now none are so grandly complete as Heaven and Earth; but do they seek for anything to make them so grandly complete? He who knows this grand completion does not seek for it; he loses nothing and abandons nothing; he does not change himself from regard to (external) things; he turns in on himself, and finds there an inexhaustible store; he follows antiquity and does not feel about (for its lessons) - such is the perfect sincerity of the Great Man.
Zi-qi had eight sons. Having arranged them before him, he called Jiu-fang Yin, and said to him, 'Look at the physiognomy of my sons for me - which will be the fortunate one?' Yan said, 'Kun is the fortunate one.' Zi-qi looked startled, and joyfully said, 'In what way?' Yin replied, 'Kun will share the meals of the ruler of a state to the end of his life.' The father looked uneasy, burst into tears, and said, 'What has my son done that he should come to such a fate?' Yin replied, 'When one shares the meals of the ruler of a state, blessings reach to all within the three branches of his kindred, and how much more to his father and mother! But you, Master, weep when you hear this - you oppose (the idea of) such happiness. It is the good fortune of your son, and you count it his misfortune.'
Zi-qi said, '0 Yin, what sufficient ground have you for knowing that this will be Kun's good fortune? (The fortune) that is summed up in wine and flesh affects only the nose and the mouth, but you are not able to know how it will come about. I have never been a shepherd, and yet a ewe lambed in the south-west corner of my house. I have never been fond of hunting, and yet a quail hatched her young in the south-east corner. If these were not prodigies, what can be accounted such? Where I wish to occupy my mind with my son is in (the wide sphere of) heaven and earth; I wish to seek his enjoyment and mine in (the idea of) Heaven, and our support from the Earth. I do not mix myself up with him in the affairs (of the world); nor in forming plans (for his advantage); nor in the practice of what is strange. I pursue with him the perfect virtue of Heaven and Earth, and do not allow ourselves to be troubled by outward things. I seek to be with him in a state of undisturbed indifference, and not to practise what affairs might indicate as likely to be advantageous. And now there is to come to us this vulgar recompense. Whenever there is a strange realisation, there must have been strange conduct. Danger threatens - not through any sin of me or of my son, but as brought about, I apprehend, by Heaven. It is this which makes me weep!'
Not long after this, Zi-qi sent off Kun to go to Yan, when he was made prisoner by some robbers on the way. It would have been difficult to sell him if he were whole and entire, and they thought their easiest plan was to cut off (one of his) feet first. They did so, and sold him in Qi, where he became Inspector of roads for a Mr. Qu. Nevertheless he had flesh to eat till he died.
Nie Que met Xu You (on the way), and said to him, 'Where, Sir, are you going to?' 'I am fleeing from Yao,' was the reply. 'What do you mean?' 'Yao has become so bent on his benevolence that I am afraid the world will laugh at him, and that in future ages men will be found eating one another. Now the people are collected together without difficulty. Love them, and they respond with affection; benefit them, and they come to you; praise them, and they are stimulated (to please you); make them to experience what they dislike, and they disperse. When the loving and benefiting proceed from benevolence and righteousness, those who forget the benevolence and righteousness are few, and those who make a profit of them are many. In this way the practice of benevolence and righteousness comes to be without sincerity and is like a borrowing of the instruments with which men catch birds. In all this the one man's seeking to benefit the world by his decisions and enactments (of such a nature) is as if he were to cut through (the nature of all) by one operation - Yao knows how wise and superior men can benefit the world, but he does not also know how they injure it. It is only those who stand outside such men that know this.'
There are the pliable and weak; the easy and hasty; the grasping and crooked.
Those who are called the pliable and weak learn the words of some one master, to which they freely yield their assent, being secretly pleased with themselves, and thinking that their knowledge is sufficient, while they do not know that they have not yet begun (to understand) a single thing. It is this which makes them so pliable and weak.
The easy and hasty are like lice on a pig. The lice select a place where the bristles are more wide apart, and look on it as a great palace or a large park. The slits between the toes, the overlappings of its skin, about its nipples and its thighs - all these seem to them safe apartments and advantageous places - they do not know that the butcher one morning, swinging about his arms, will spread the grass, and kindle the fire, so that they and the pig will be roasted together. So do they appear and disappear with the place where they harboured: this is why they are called the easy and hasty.
Of the grasping and crooked we have an example in Shun. Mutton has no craving for ants, but ants have a craving for mutton, for it is rank. There was a rankness about the conduct of Shun, and the people were pleased with him. Hence when he thrice changed his residence, every one of them became a capital city. When he came to the wild of Tang, he had 100,000 families about him. Yao having heard of the virtue and ability of Shun, appointed him to a new and uncultivated territory, saying, 'I look forward to the benefit of his coming here.' When Shun was appointed to this new territory, his years were advanced, and his intelligence was decayed - and yet he could not find a place of rest or a home. This is an example of being grasping and wayward.
Therefore (in opposition to such) the spirit-like man dislikes the flocking of the multitudes to him. When the multitudes come, they do not agree; and when they do not agree, no benefit results from their coming. Hence there are none whom he brings very near to himself, and none whom he keeps at a great distance. He keeps his virtue in close embrace, and warmly nourishes (the spirit of) harmony, so as to be in accordance with all men. This is called the True man. Even the knowledge of the ant he puts away; his plans are simply those of the fishes; even the notions of the sheep he discards. His seeing is simply that of the eye; his hearing that of the ear; his mind is governed by its general exercises. Being such, his course is straight and level as if marked out by a line, and its every change is in accordance (with the circumstances of the case). The True men of old waited for the issues of events as the arrangements of Heaven, and did not by their human efforts try to take the place of Heaven.
The True men of old (now) looked on success as life and on failure as death; and (now) on success as death and on failure as life. The operation of medicines will illustrate this: there are monk's-bane, the Jie-geng, the tribulus fruit, and china-root; each of these has the time and case for which it is supremely suitable; and all such plants and their suitabilities cannot be mentioned particularly.
Gou-jian took his station on (the hill of) Gui-ji with 3,000 men with their buff-coats and shields: (his minister) Zhong knew how the ruined (Yue) might still be preserved, but the same man did not know the sad fate in store for himself. Hence it is said, 'The eye of the owl has its proper fitness; the leg of the crane has its proper limit, and to cut off any of it would distress (the bird).' Hence (also) it is (further) said, 'When the wind passes over it, the volume of the river is diminished, and so it is when the sun passes over it. But let the wind and sun keep a watch together on the river, and it will not begin to feel that they are doing it any injury: it relies on its springs and flows on.' Thus, water does its part to the ground with undeviating exactness; and so does the shadow to the substance; and one thing to another.
Therefore there is danger from the power of vision in the eyes, of hearing in the ears, and of the inordinate thinking of the mind; yea, there is danger from the exercise of every power of which man's constitution is the depository. When the danger has come to a head, it cannot be averted, and the calamity is perpetuated, and goes on increasing. The return from this (to a state of security) is the result of (great) effort, and success can be attained only after a long time; and yet men consider (their power of self-determination) as their precious possession: is it not sad? It is in this way that we have the ruin of states and the slaughtering of the people without end; while no one knows how to ask how it comes about.
Therefore, the feet of man on the earth tread but on a small space, but going on to where he has not trod before, he traverses a great distance easily; so his knowledge is but small, but going on to what he does not already know, he comes to know what is meant by Heaven. He knows it as The Great Unity; The Great Mystery; The Great Illuminator; The Great Framer; The Great Boundlessness; The Great Truth; The Great Determiner. This makes his knowledge complete. As The Great Unity, he comprehends it; as The Great Mystery, he unfolds it; as the Great Illuminator, he contemplates it; as the Great Framer, it is to him the Cause of all; as the Great Boundlessness, all is to him its embodiment; as The Great Truth, he examines it; as The Great Determiner, he holds it fast.
Thus Heaven is to him all; accordance with it is the brightest intelligence. Obscurity has in this its pivot; in this is the beginning. Such being the case, the explanation of it is as if it were no explanation; the knowledge of it is as if it were no knowledge. (At first) he does not know it, but afterwards he comes to know it. In his inquiries, he must not set to himself any limits, and yet he cannot be without a limit. Now ascending, now descending, then slipping from the grasp, (the Dao) is yet a reality, unchanged now as in antiquity, and always without defect: may it not be called what is capable of the greatest display and expansion? Why should we not inquire into it? Why should we be perplexed about it? With what does not perplex let us explain what perplexes, till we cease to be perplexed. So may we arrive at a great freedom from all perplexity!
*** Ze-yang
Ze-yang having travelled to Chu, Yi Jie spoke of him to the king, and then, before the king had granted him an interview, (left him, and) returned home. Ze-yang went to see Wang Guo, and said to him, 'Master, why do you not mention me to the king?' Wang Guo replied, 'I am not so good a person to do that as Gong-yue Xiu.' 'What sort of man is he?' asked the other, and the reply was, 'In winter he spears turtles in the Jiang, and in summer he rests in shady places on the mountain. When passers-by ask him (what he is doing there), he says, "This is my abode." Since Yi Jie was not able to induce the king to see you, how much less should I, who am not equal to him, be able to do so! Yi Jie's character is this: he has no (real) virtue, but he has knowledge. If you do not freely yield yourself to him, but employ him to carry on his spirit-like influence (with you), you will certainly get upset and benighted in the region of riches and honours. His help will not be of a Virtuous character, but will go to make your virtue less - it will be like heaping on clothes in spring as a protection against cold, or bringing back the cold winds of winter as a protection against heat (in summer). Now the king of Chu is of a domineering presence and stern. He has no forgiveness for offenders, but is merciless as a tiger. It is only a man of subtle speech, or one of correct virtue, who can bend him from his purpose.
'But the sagely man, when he is left in obscurity, causes the members of his family to forget their poverty; and, when he gets forward to a position of influence, causes kings and dukes to forget their rank and emoluments, and transforms them to be humble. With the inferior creatures, he shares their pleasures, and they enjoy themselves the more; with other men, he rejoices in the fellowship of the Dao, and preserves it in himself. Therefore though he may not speak, he gives them to drink of the harmony (of his spirit). Standing in association with them, he transforms them till they become in their feeling towards him as sons with a father. His wish is to return to the solitude of his own mind, and this is the effect of his occasional intercourse with them. So far-reaching is his influence on the minds of men; and therefore I said to you. "Wait for Gong-yue Xi?."'
The sage comprehends the connexions between himself and others, and how they all go to constitute him of one body with them, and he does not know how it is so - he naturally does so. In fulfilling his constitution, as acted on and acting, he (simply) follows the direction of Heaven; and it is in consequence of this that men style him (a sage). If he were troubled about (the insufficiency of) his knowledge, what he did would always be but small, and sometimes would be arrested altogether - how would he in this case be (the sage)?
When (the sage) is born with all his excellence, it is other men who see it for him. If they did not tell him, he would not know that he was more excellent than others. And when he knows it, he is as if he did not know it; when he hears it, he is as if he did not hear it. His source of joy in it has no end, and men's admiration of him has no end - all this takes place naturally. The love of the sage for others receives its name from them. If they did not tell him of it, he would not know that he loved them; and when he knows it, he is as if he knew it not; when he hears it, he is as if he heard it not. His love of others never has an end, and their rest in him has also no end: all this takes place naturally.
When one sees at a distance his old country and old city, he feels a joyous satisfaction. Though it be full of mounds and an overgrowth of trees and grass, and when he enters it he finds but a tenth part remaining, still he feels that satisfaction. How much more when he sees what he saw, and hears what he heard before! All this is to him like a tower eighty cubits high exhibited in the sight of all men.
(The sovereign) Ran-xiang was possessed of that central principle round which all things revolve, and by it he could follow them to their completion. His accompanying them had neither ending nor beginning, and was independent of impulse or time. Daily he witnessed their changes, and himself underwent no change; and why should he not have rested in this? If we (try to) adopt Heaven as our Master, we incapacitate ourselves from doing so. Such endeavour brings us under the power of things. If one acts in this way, what is to be said of him? The sage never thinks of Heaven nor of men. He does not think of taking the initiative, nor of anything external to himself. He moves along with his age, and does not vary or fail. Amid all the completeness of his doings, he is never exhausted. For those who wish to be in accord with him, what other course is there to pursue?
When Tang got one to hold for him the reins of government, namely, Men-yin Deng-heng, he employed him as his teacher. He followed his master, but did not allow himself to be hampered by him, and so he succeeded in following things to their completion. The master had the name; but that name was a superfluous addition to his laws, and the twofold character of his government was made apparent. Zhongni's 'Task your thoughts to the utmost' was his expression of the duties of a master.
Rong-cheng said, 'Take the days away and there will be no year; without what is internal there will be nothing external.'
(King) Ying of Wei made a treaty with the marquis Tian Mou (of Qi), which the latter violated. The king was enraged, and intended to send a man to assassinate him.
When the Minister of War heard of it, he was ashamed, and said (to the king), 'You are a ruler of 10,000 chariots, and by means of a common man would avenge yourself on your enemy. I beg you to give me, Yan, the command of 200,000 soldiers to attack him for you. I will take captive his people and officers, halter (and lead off) his oxen and horses, kindling a fire within him that shall burn to his backbone. I will then storm his capital; and when he shall run away in terror, I will flog his back and break his spine.'
Ji-zi heard of this advice, and was ashamed of it, and said (to the king), 'We have been raising the wall (of our capital) to a height of eighty cubits, and the work has been completed. If we now get it thrown down, it will be a painful toil to the convict builders. It is now seven years since our troops were called out, and this is the foundation of the royal sway. Yen would introduce disorder - he should not be listened to.'
Hua-zi heard of this advice, and, greatly disapproving of it, said (to the king), 'He who shows his skill in saying "Attack Qi!" would produce disorder; and he who shows his skill in saying "Do not attack it " would also produce disorder. And one who should (merely) say, "The counsellors to attack Qi and not to attack it would both produce disorder," would himself also lead to the same result.' The king said, 'Yes, but what am I to do?' The reply was, 'You have only to seek for (the rule of) the Dao (on the subject).'
Huizi, having heard of this counsel, introduced to the king Dai Jin-ren, who said, 'There is the creature called a snail; does your majesty know it?' 'I do.' 'On the left horn of the snail there is a kingdom which is called Provocation, and on the right horn another which is called Stupidity. These two kingdoms are continually striving about their territories and fighting. The corpses that lie on the ground amount to several myriads. The army of one may be defeated and put to flight, but in fifteen days it will return.' The king said, 'Pooh! that is empty talk!' The other rejoined, 'Your servant begs to show your majesty its real significance. When your majesty thinks of space - east, west, north, and south, above and beneath - can you set any limit to it?' 'It is illimitable,' said the king; and his visitor went on, 'Your majesty knows how to let your mind thus travel through the illimitable, and yet (as compared with this) does it not seem insignificant whether the kingdoms that communicate one with another exist or not?' The king replies, 'It does so;' and Dai Jin-ren said, finally, 'Among those kingdoms, stretching one after another, there is this Wei; in Wei there is this (city of) Liang; and in Liang there is your majesty. Can you make any distinction between yourself, and (the king of that kingdom of) Stupidity?' To this the king answered, 'There is no distinction,' and his visitor went out, while the king remained disconcerted and seemed to have lost himself.
When the visitor was gone, Huizi came in and saw the king, who said, 'That stranger is a Great man. An (ordinary) sage is not equal to him.' Huizi replied, 'If you blow into a flute, there come out its pleasant notes; if you blow into a sword-hilt, there is nothing but a wheezing sound. Yao and Shun are the subjects of men's praises, but if you speak of them before Dai Jin-ran, there will be but the wheezing sound.'
Confucius, having gone to Chu, was lodging in the house of a seller of Congee at Ant-hill. On the roof of a neighbouring house there appeared the husband and his wife, with their servants, male and female. Zi-lu said, 'What are those people doing, collected there as we see them?' Zhongni replied, 'The man is a disciple of the sages. He is burying himself among the people, and hiding among the fields. Reputation has become little in his eyes, but there is no bound to his cherished aims. Though he may speak with his mouth, he never tells what is in his mind. Moreover, he is at variance with the age, and his mind disdains to associate with it - he is one who may be said to lie hid at the bottom of the water on the dry land. Is he not a sort of Yi Liao of Shi-nan?' Zi-lu asked leave to go and call him, but Confucius said, 'Stop. He knows that I understand him well. He knows that I am come to Chu, and thinks that I am sure to try and get the king to invite him (to court). He also thinks that I am a man swift to speak. Being such a man, he would feel ashamed to listen to the words of one of voluble and flattering tongue, and how much more to come himself and see his person! And why should we think that he will remain here?' Zi-lu, however, went to see how it was, but found the house empty.
The Border-warden of Chang-wu, in questioning Zi-lao, said, 'Let not a ruler in the exercise of his government be (like the farmer) who leaves the clods unbroken, nor, in regulating his people, (like one) who recklessly plucks up the shoots. Formerly, in ploughing my corn-fields, I left the clods unbroken, and my recompense was in the rough 'unsatisfactory crops; and in weeding, I destroyed and tore up (many good plants), and my recompense was in the scantiness of my harvests. In subsequent years I changed my methods, ploughing deeply and carefully covering up the seed; and my harvests were rich and abundant, so that all the year I had more than I could eat.' When Zhuangzi heard of his remarks, he said, 'Now-a-days, most men, in attending to their bodies and regulating their minds, correspond to the description of the Border-warden. They hide from themselves their Heaven(-given being); they leave (all care of) their (proper) nature; they extinguish their (proper) feelings; and they leave their spirit to die: abandoning themselves to what is the general practice. Thus dealing with their nature like the farmer who is negligent of the clods in his soil, the illegitimate results of their likings and dislikings become their nature. The bushy sedges, reeds, and rushes, which seem at first to spring up to support our bodies, gradually eradicate our nature, and it becomes like a mass of running sores, ever liable to flow out, with scabs and ulcers, discharging in flowing matter from the internal heat. So indeed it is!'
Bo Ju was studying with Lao Dan, and asked his leave to go and travel everywhere. Lao Dan said, 'Nay - elsewhere it is just as here.' He repeated his request, and then Lao Dan said, 'Where would you go first?' 'I would begin with Qi,' replied the disciple. 'Having got there, I would go to look at the criminals (who had been executed). With my arms I would raise (one of) them up and set him on his feet, and, taking off my court robes, I would cover him with them, appealing at the same time to Heaven and bewailing his lot, while I said, "My son, my son, you have been one of the first to suffer from the great calamities that afflict the world."' (Lao Dan) said, '(It is said), "Do not rob. Do not kill." (But) in the setting up of (the ideas of) glory and disgrace, we see the cause of those evils; in the accumulation of property and wealth, we see the causes of strife and contention. If now you set up the things against which men fret; if you accumulate what produces strife and contention among them; if you put their persons in such a state of distress, that they have no rest or ease, although you may wish that they should not come to the end of those (criminals), can your wish be realised?
'The superior men (and rulers) of old considered that the success (of their government) was to be found in (the state of) the people, and its failure to be sought in themselves; that the right might be with the people, and the wrong in themselves. Thus it was that if but a single person lost his life, they retired and blamed themselves. Now, however, it is not so. (Rulers) conceal what they want done, and hold those who do not know it to be stupid; they require what is very difficult, and condemn those who do not dare to undertake it; they impose heavy burdens, and punish those who are unequal to them; they require men to go far, and put them to death when they cannot accomplish the distance. When the people know that the utmost of their strength will be insufficient, they follow it up with deceit. When (the rulers) daily exhibit much hypocrisy, how can the officers and people not be hypocritical? Insufficiency of strength produces hypocrisy; insufficiency of knowledge produces deception; insufficiency of means produces robbery. But in this case against whom ought the robbery and theft to be charged?'
When Qu Bo-yu was in his sixtieth year, his views became changed in the course of it. He had never before done anything but consider the views which he held to be right, but now he came to condemn them as wrong; he did not know that what he now called right was not what for fifty-nine years he had been calling wrong. All things have the life (which we know), but we do not see its root; they have their goings forth, but we do not know the door by which they depart. Men all honour that which lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but they do not know their dependence on what lies without that sphere which would be their (true) knowledge: may we not call their case one of great perplexity? Ah! Ah! there is no escaping from this dilemma. So it is! So it is!
Zhongni asked the Grand Historiographer Da Tao, (along with) Bo Chang-qian and Xi-wei, saying, 'Duke Ling of Wei was so addicted to drink, and abandoned to sensuality, that he did not attend to the government of his state. Occupied in his pursuit of hunting with his nets and bows, he kept aloof from the meetings of the princes. In what was it that he showed his title to the epithet of Ling?' Da Tao said, 'It was on account of those very things.' Bo Chang-qian said, 'Duke Ling had three mistresses with whom he used to bathe in the same tub. (Once, however), when Shi-qiu came to him with presents from the imperial court, he made his servants support the messenger in bearing the gifts. So dissolute was he in the former case, and when he saw a man of worth, thus reverent was he to him. It was on this account that he was styled "Duke Ling."' Xi-wei said, 'When duke Ling died, and they divined about burying him in the old tomb of his House, the answer was unfavourable; when they divined about burying him on Sha-qiu, the answer was favourable. Accordingly they dug there to the depth of several fathoms, and found a stone coffin. Having washed and inspected it, they discovered an inscription, which said,
"This grave will not be available for your posterity;
Duke Ling will appropriate it for himself"
Thus that epithet of Ling had long been settled for the duke. But how should those two be able to know this?'
Shao Zhi asked Da-gong Diao, saying, 'What do we mean by "The Talk of the Hamlets and Villages?"' The reply was, 'Hamlets and Villages are formed by the union - say of ten surnames and a hundred names, and are considered to be (the source of) manners and customs. The differences between them are united to form their common character, and what is common to them is separately apportioned to form the differences. If you point to the various parts which make up the body of a horse, you do not have the horse; but when the horse is before you, and all its various parts stand forth (as forming the animal), you speak of "the horse." So it is that the mounds and hills are made to be the elevations that they are by accumulations of earth which individually are but low. (So also rivers like) the Jiang and the He obtain their greatness by the union of (other smaller) waters with them. And (in the same way) the Great man exhibits the common sentiment of humanity by the union in himself of all its individualities. Hence when ideas come to him from without, though he has his own decided view, he does not hold it with bigotry; and when he gives out his own decisions, which are correct, the views of others do not oppose them. The four seasons have their different elemental characters, but they are not the partial gifts of Heaven, and so the year completes its course. The five official departments have their different duties, but the ruler does not partially employ any one of them, and so the kingdom is governed. (The gifts of) peace and war (are different), but the Great man does not employ the one to the prejudice of the other, and so the character (of his administration) is perfect. All things have their different constitutions and modes of actions, but the Dao (which directs them) is free from all partiality, and therefore it has no name. Having no name, it therefore does nothing. Doing nothing, there is nothing which it does not do. Each season has its ending and beginning; each age has its changes and transformations; misery and happiness regularly alternate. Here our views are thwarted, and yet the result may afterwards have our approval; there we insist on our own views, and looking at things differently from others, try to correct them, while we are in error ourselves. The case may be compared to that of a great marsh, in which all its various vegetation finds a place, or we may look at it as a great hill, where trees and rocks are found on the same terrace. Such may be a description of what is intended by "The Talk of the Hamlets and Villages."'
Shao Zhi said, 'Well, is it sufficient to call it (an expression of) the Dao?' Da-gong Diao said, 'It is not so. If we reckon up the number of things, they are not 10,000 merely. When we speak of them as "the Myriad Things," we simply use that large number by way of accommodation to denominate them. In this way Heaven and Earth are the greatest of all things that have form; the Yin and Yang are the greatest of all elemental forces. But the Dao is common to them. Because of their greatness to use the Dao or (Course) as a title and call it "the Great Dao" is allowable. But what comparison can be drawn between it and "the Talk of the Hamlets and Villages?" To argue from this that it is a sufficient expression of the Dao, is like calling a dog and a horse by the same name, while the difference between them is so great.'
Shao Zhi said, 'Within the limits of the four cardinal points, and the six boundaries of space, how was it that there commenced the production of all things?' Da-gong Diao replied, 'The Yin and Yang reflected light on each other, covered each other, and regulated each the other; the four seasons gave place to one another, produced one another, and brought one another to an end. Likings and dislikings, the avoidings of this and movements towards that, then arose (in the things thus produced), in their definite distinctness; and from this came the separation and union of the male and female. Then were seen now security and now insecurity, in mutual change; misery and happiness produced each other; gentleness and urgency pressed on each other; the movements of collection and dispersion were established: these names and processes can be examined, and, however minute, can be recorded. The rules determining the order in which they follow one another, their mutual influence now acting directly and now revolving, how, when they are exhausted, they revive, and how they end and begin again; these are the properties belonging to things. Words can describe them and knowledge can reach to them; but with this ends all that can be said of things. Men who study the Dao do not follow on when these operations end, nor try to search out how they began: with this all discussion of them stops.'
Shao Zhi said, 'Ji Zhen holds that (the Dao) forbids all action, and Jie-zi holds that it may perhaps allow of influence. Which of the two is correct in his statements, and which is one-sided in his ruling?' Da-gong Diao replied, 'Cocks crow and dogs bark - this is what all men know. But men with the greatest wisdom cannot describe in words whence it is that they are formed (with such different voices), nor can they find out by thinking what they wish to do. We may refine on this small point; till it is so minute that there is no point to operate on, or it may become so great that there is no embracing it. "Some one caused it;" "No one did it;" but we are thus debating about things; and the end is that we shall find we are in error. "Some one caused it" - then there was a real Being. "No one did it" - then there was mere vacancy. To have a name and a real existence - that is the condition of a thing. Not to have a name, and not to have real being - that is vacancy and no thing. We may speak and we may think about it, but the more we speak, the wider shall we be of the mark. Birth, before it comes, cannot be prevented; death, when it has happened, cannot be traced farther. Death and life are not far apart; but why they have taken place cannot be seen. That some one has caused them, or that there has been no action in the case are but speculations of doubt. When I look for their origin, it goes back into infinity; when I look for their end, it proceeds without termination. Infinite, unceasing, there is no room for words about (the Dao). To regard it as in the category of things is the origin of the language that it is caused or that it is the result of doing nothing; but it would end as it began with things. The Dao cannot have a (real) existence; if it has, it cannot be made to appear as if it had not. The name Dao is a metaphor, used for the purpose of description. To say that it causes or does nothing is but to speak of one phase of things, and has nothing to do with the Great Subject. If words were sufficient for the purpose, in a day's time we might exhaust it; since they are not sufficient, we may speak all day, and only exhaust (the subject of) things. The Dao is the extreme to which things conduct us. Neither speech nor silence is sufficient to convey the notion of it. Neither by speech nor by silence can our thoughts about it have their highest expression.
*** What comes from Without
What comes from without cannot be determined beforehand. So it was that Long-feng was killed; Bi-gan immolated; and the count of Ji (made to feign himself) mad, (while) Wu-lai died, and Jie and Zhou both perished. Rulers all wish their ministers to be faithful, but that faithfulness may not secure their confidence; hence Wu Yuan became a wanderer along the Jiang, and Chang Hong died in Shu, where (the people) preserved his blood for three years, when it became changed into green jade. Parents all wish their sons to be filial, but that filial duty may not secure their love; hence Xiao-ji had to endure his sorrow, and Zeng Shen his grief.
When wood is rubbed against wood, it begins to burn; when metal is subjected to fire, it (melts and) flows. When the Yin and Yang act awry, heaven and earth are greatly perturbed; and on this comes the crash of thunder, and from the rain comes fire, which consumes great locust trees. (The case of men) is still worse. They are troubled between two pitfalls, from which they cannot escape. Chrysalis-like, they can accomplish nothing. Their minds are as if hung up between heaven and earth. Now comforted, now pitied, they are plunged in difficulties. The ideas of profit and of injury rub against each other, and produce in them a very great fire. The harmony (of the mind) is consumed in the mass of men. Their moonlike intelligence cannot overcome the (inward) fire. They thereupon fall away more and more, and the Course (which they should pursue) is altogether lost.
The family of Zhuang Zhou being poor, he went to ask the loan of some rice from the Marquis Superintendent of the He, who said, 'Yes, I shall be getting the (tax-) money from the people (soon), and I will then lend you three hundred ounces of silver - will that do?' Zhuang Zhou flushed with anger, and said, 'On the road yesterday, as I was coming here, I heard some one calling out. On looking round, I saw a goby in the carriage rut, and said to it, "Goby fish, what has brought you here?" The goby said, "I am Minister of Waves in the Eastern Sea. Have you, Sir, a gallon or a pint of water to keep me alive?" I replied, "Yes, I am going south to see the kings of Wu and Yue, and I will then lead a stream from the Western Kiang to meet you - will that do ?" The goby flushed with anger, and said, "I have lost my proper element, and I can here do nothing for myself; but if I could get a gallon or a pint of water, I should keep alive. Than do what you propose, you had better soon look for me in a stall of dry fish."'
A son of the duke of Ren, having provided himself with a great hook, a powerful black line, and fifty steers to be used as bait, squatted down on (mount) Gui Ji, and threw the line into the Eastern Sea. Morning after morning he angled thus, and for a whole year caught nothing. At the end of that time, a great fish swallowed the bait, and dived down, dragging the great hook with him. Then it rose to the surface in a flurry, and flapped with its fins, till the white waves rose like hills, and the waters were lashed into fury. The noise was like that of imps and spirits, and spread terror for a thousand li. The prince having got such a fish, cut it in slices and dried them. From the Zhi river to the east, and from Cang-wu to the north, there was not one who did not eat his full from that fish.
In subsequent generations, story-tellers of small abilities have all repeated the story to one another with astonishment. (But) if the prince had taken his rod, with a fine line, and gone to pools and ditches, and watched for minnows and gobies, it would have been difficult for him to get a large fish. Those who dress up their small tales to obtain favour with the magistrates are far from being men of great understanding; and therefore one who has not heard the story of this scion of Ren is not fit to take any part in the government of the world - far is he from being so'.
Some literati, students of the Odes and Ceremonies, were breaking open a mound over a grave. The superior among them spoke down to the others, 'Day is breaking in the east; how is the thing going on?' The younger men replied, 'We have not yet opened his jacket and skirt, but there is a pearl in the mouth. As it is said in the Ode,
The bright, green grain
Is growing on the sides of the mound.
While living, he gave nothing away;
Why, when dead, should he hold a pearl in his mouth?"'
Thereupon they took hold of the whiskers and pulled at the beard, while the superior introduced a piece of fine steel into the chin, and gradually separated the jaws, so as not to injure the pearl in the mouth.
A disciple of Lao Lai-zi, while he was out gathering firewood, met with Zhongni. On his return, he told (his master), saying, 'There is a man there, the upper part of whose body is long and the lower part short. He is slightly hump-backed, and his ears are far back. When you look at him, he seems occupied with the cares of all within the four seas; I do not know whose son he is.' Lao Lai-zi said, 'It is Qiu call him here;' and when Zhongni came, he said to him, 'Qiu, put away your personal conceit, and airs of wisdom, and show yourself to be indeed a superior man.' Zhongni bowed and was retiring, when he abruptly changed his manner, and asked, 'Will the object I am pursuing be thereby advanced?' Lao Lai-zi replied, 'You cannot bear the sufferings of this one age, and are stubbornly regardless of the evils of a myriad ages: is it that you purposely make yourself thus unhappy? or is it that you have not the ability to comprehend the case? Your obstinate purpose to make men rejoice in a participation of your joy is your life-long shame, the procedure of a mediocre man. You would lead men by your fame; you would bind them to you by your secret art. Than be praising Yao and condemning Jie, you had better forget them both, and shut up your tendency to praise. If you reflect on it, it does nothing but injury; your action in it is entirely wrong. The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful. But what shall I say of your conduct? To the end it is all affectation.'
The ruler Yuan of Song (once) dreamt at midnight that a man with dishevelled hair peeped in on him at a side door and said, 'I was coming from the abyss of Zai-lu, commissioned by the Clear Jiang to go to the place of the Earl of the He; but the fisherman Yu Qie has caught me.' When the ruler Yuan awoke, he caused a diviner to divine the meaning (of the dream), and was told, 'This is a marvellous tortoise.' The ruler asked if among the fishermen there was one called Yu Qie, and being told by his attendants that there was, he gave orders that he should be summoned to court. Accordingly the man next day appeared at court, and the ruler said, 'What have you caught (lately) in fishing?' The reply was, 'I have caught in my net a white tortoise, sievelike, and five cubits round.' 'Present the prodigy here,' said the ruler; and, when it came, once and again he wished to kill it, once and again he wished to keep it alive. Doubting in his mind (what to do), he had recourse to divination, and obtained the answer, 'To kill the tortoise for use in divining will be fortunate.' Accordingly they cut the creature open, and perforated its shell in seventy-two places, and there was not a single divining slip which failed.
Zhongni said, 'The spirit-like tortoise could show itself in a dream to the ruler Yuan, and yet it could not avoid the net of Yu Qie. Its wisdom could respond on seventy-two perforations without failing in a single divination, and yet it could not avoid the agony of having its bowels all scooped out. We see from this that wisdom is not without its perils, and spirit-like intelligence does not reach to everything. A man may have the greatest wisdom, but there are a myriad men scheming against him. Fishes do not fear the net, though they fear the pelican. Put away your small wisdom, and your great wisdom will be bright; discard your skilfulness, and you will become naturally skilful. A child when it is born needs no great master, and yet it becomes able to speak, living (as it does) among those who are able to speak.'
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, 'You speak, Sir, of what is of no use.' The reply was, 'When a man knows what is not useful, you can then begin to speak to him of what is useful. The earth for instance is certainly spacious and great; but what a man uses of it is only sufficient ground for his feet. If, however, a rent were made by the side of his feet, down to the yellow springs, could the man still make use of it?' Huizi said, 'He could not use it,' and Zhuangzi rejoined, 'Then the usefulness of what is of no use is clear.'
Zhuangzi said, 'If a man have the power to enjoy himself (in any pursuit), can he be kept from doing so? If he have not the power, can he so enjoy himself? There are those whose aim is bent on concealing themselves, and those who are determined that their doings shall leave no trace. Alas! they both shirk the obligations of perfect knowledge and great virtue. The (latter) fall, and cannot recover themselves; the (former) rush on like fire, and do not consider (what they are doing). Though men may stand to each other in the relation of ruler and minister, that is but for a time. In a changed age, the one of them would not be able to look down on the other. Hence it is said, "The Perfect man leaves no traces of his conduct." 'To honour antiquity and despise the present time is the characteristic of learners; but even the disciples of Khih-wei have to look at the present age; and who can avoid being carried along by its course? It is only the Perfect man who is able to enjoy himself in the world, and not be deflected from the right, to accommodate himself to others and not lose himself. He does not learn their lessons; he only takes their ideas into consideration, and does not discard them as different from his own.
'It is the penetrating eye that gives clear vision, the acute ear that gives quick hearing, the discriminating nose that gives discernment of odours, the practised mouth that gives the enjoyment of flavours, the active mind that acquires knowledge, and the far-reaching knowledge that constitutes virtue. In no case does the connexion with what is without like to be obstructed; obstruction produces stoppage; stoppage, continuing without intermission, arrests all progress; and with this all injurious effects spring up. The knowledge of all creatures depends on their breathing. But if their breath be not abundant, it is not the fault of Heaven, which tries to penetrate them with it, day and night without ceasing; but men notwithstanding shut their pores against it. The womb encloses a large and empty space; the heart has its spontaneous and enjoyable movements. If their apartment be not roomy, wife and mother-in-law will be bickering; if the heart have not its spontaneous and enjoyable movements, the six faculties of perception will be in mutual collision. That the great forests, the heights and hills, are pleasant to men, is because their spirits cannot overcome (those distracting influences).
'Virtue overflows into (the love of) fame; (the love of) fame overflows into violence; schemes originate in the urgency (of circumstances); (the show of) wisdom comes from rivalry; the fuel (of strife) is produced from the obstinate maintenance (of one's own views); the business of offices should be apportioned in accordance with the approval of all. In spring, when the rain and the sunshine come seasonably, vegetation grows luxuriantly, and sickles and hoes begin to be prepared. More than half of what had fallen down becomes straight, and we do not know how.
'Stillness and silence are helpful to those who are ill; rubbing the corners of the eyes is helpful to the aged; rest serves to calm agitation; but they are the toiled and troubled who have recourse to these things. Those who are at ease, and have not had such experiences, do not care to ask about them. The spirit-like man has had no experience of how it is that the sagely man keeps the world in awe, and so he does not inquire about it; the sagely man has had no experience of how it is that the man of ability and virtue keeps his age in awe, and so he does not inquire about it; the man of ability and virtue has had no experience of how it is that the superior man keeps his state in awe, and so he does not inquire about it. The superior man has had no experience of how it is that the small man keeps himself in agreement with his times that he should inquire about it.'
The keeper of the Yan Gate, on the death of his father, showed so much skill in emaciating his person that he received the rank of 'Pattern for Officers.' Half the people of his neighbourhood (in consequence) carried their emaciation to such a point that they died. When Yao wished to resign the throne to Xu You, the latter ran away. When Thang offered his to Wu Guang, Wu Guang became angry. When Ji Ta heard it, he led his disciples, and withdrew to the river Kuan, where the feudal princes came and condoled with him, and after three years, Shen Tu-di threw himself into the water.
Fishing-stakes are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the stakes. Snares are employed to catch hares, but when the hares are got, men forget the snares. Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are apprehended, men forget the words. Fain would I talk with such a man who has forgot the words!
*** Metaphorical Language
Of my sentences nine in ten are metaphorical; of my illustrations seven in ten are from valued writers. The rest of my words are like the water that daily fills the cup, tempered and harmonised by the Heavenly element in our nature.
The nine sentences in ten which are metaphorical are borrowed from extraneous things to assist (the comprehension of) my argument. (When it is said, for instance), 'A father does not act the part of matchmaker for his own son,' (the meaning is that) 'it is better for another man to praise the son than for his father to do so.' The use of such metaphorical language is not my fault, but the fault of men (who would not otherwise readily understand me).
Men assent to views which agree with their own, and oppose those which do not so agree. Those which agree with their own they hold to be right, and those which do not so agree they hold to be wrong. The seven out of ten illustrations taken from valued writers are designed to put an end to disputations. Those writers are the men of hoary eld, my predecessors in time. But such as are unversed in the warp and woof, the beginning and end of the subject, cannot be set down as of venerable eld, and regarded as the predecessors of others. If men have not that in them which fits them to precede others, they are without the way proper to man, and they who are without the way proper to man can only be pronounced defunct monuments of antiquity.
Words like the water that daily issues from the cup, and are harmonised by the Heavenly Element (of our nature), may be carried on into the region of the unlimited, and employed to the end of our years. But without words there is an agreement (in principle). That agreement is not effected by words, and an agreement in words is not effected by it. Hence it is said, 'Let there be no words.' Speech does not need words. One may speak all his life, and not have spoken a (right) word; and one may not have spoken all his life, and yet all his life been giving utterance to the (right) words. There is that which makes a thing allowable, and that which makes a thing not allowable. There is that which makes a thing right, and that which makes a thing not right. How is a thing right? It is right because it is right. How is a thing wrong? It is wrong because it is wrong. How is a thing allowable? It is allowable because it is so. How is a thing not allowable? It is not allowable because it is not so. Things indeed have what makes them right, and what makes them allowable. There is nothing which has not its condition of right; nothing which has not its condition of allowability. But without the words of the (water-) cup in daily use, and harmonised by the Heavenly Element (in our nature), what one can continue long in the possession of these characteristics?
All things are divided into their several classes, and succeed to one another in the same way, though of different bodily forms. They begin and end as in an unbroken ring, though how it is they do so be not apprehended. This is what is called the Lathe of Heaven; and the Lathe of Heaven is the Heavenly Element in our nature.
Zhuangzi said to Huizi, 'When Confucius was in his sixtieth year, in that year his views changed. What he had before held to be right, he now ended by holding to be wrong; and he did not know whether the things which he now pronounced to be right were not those which he had for fifty-nine years held to be wrong.' Huizi replied, 'Confucius with an earnest will pursued the acquisition of knowledge, and acted accordingly.' Zhuangzi rejoined, 'Confucius disowned such a course, and never said that it was his. He said, "Man receives his powers from the Great Source (of his being), and he should restore them to their (original) intelligence in his life. His singing should be in accordance with the musical tubes, and his speech a model for imitation. When profit and righteousness are set before him, and his liking (for the latter) and dislike (of the former), his approval and disapproval, are manifested, that only serves to direct the speech of men (about him). To make men in heart submit, and not dare to stand up in opposition to him; to establish the fixed law for all under heaven: ah! ah! I have not attained to that."'
Zeng-zi twice took office, and on the two occasions his state of mind was different. He said, 'While my parents were alive I took office, and though my emolument was only three fu (of grain), my mind was happy. Afterwards when I took office, my emolument was three thousand zhong; but I could not share it with my parents, and my mind was sad.' The other disciples asked Zhongni, saying, 'Such an one as Shan may be pronounced free from all entanglement: is he to be blamed for feeling as he did?' The reply was, 'But he was subject to entanglement. If he had been free from it, could he have had that sadness? He would have looked on his three fu and three thousand zhong no more than on a heron or a mosquito passing before him.'
Yan Cheng Zi-you said to Dong-guo Zi-qi, 'When I (had begun to) hear your instructions, the first year, I continued a simple rustic; the second year, I became docile; the third year, I comprehended (your teaching); the fourth year, I was (plastic) as a thing; the fifth year, I made advances; the sixth year, the spirit entered (and dwelt in me); the seventh year, (my nature as designed by) Heaven was perfected; the eighth year, I knew no difference between death and life; the ninth year, I attained to the Great Mystery.
'Life has its work to do, and death ensues, (as if) the common character of each were a thing prescribed. Men consider that their death has its cause; but that life from (the operation of) the Yang has no cause. But is it really so? How does (the Yang) operate in this direction? Why does it not operate there? Heaven has its places and spaces which can be calculated; (the divisions of) the earth can be assigned bv men. But how shall we search for and find out (the conditions of the Great Mystery)? We do not know when and how (life) will end, but how shall we conclude that it is not determined (from without)? and as we do not know when and how it begins, how should we conclude that it is not (so) determined? In regard to the issues of conduct which we deem appropriate, how should we conclude that there are no spirits presiding over them; and where those issues seem inappropriate, how should we conclude that there are spirits presiding over them?'
The penumbrae (once) asked the shadow, saying, 'Formerly you were looking down, and now you are looking up; formerly you had your hair tied up, and now it is dishevelled; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up; formerly you were walking, and now you have stopped: how is all this?' The shadow said, 'Venerable Sirs, how do you ask me about such small matters? These things all belong to me, but I do not know how they do so. I am (like) the shell of a cicada or the cast-off skin of a snake - like them, and yet not like them. With light and the sun I make my appearance; with darkness and the night I fade away. Am not I dependent on the substance from which I am thrown? And that substance is itself dependent on something else! When it comes, I come with it; when it goes, I go with it. When it comes under the influence of the strong Yang, I come under the same. Since we are both produced by that strong Yang, what occasion is there for you to question me?'
Yang Zi-ju had gone South to Pei, while Lao Dan was travelling in the west in Qin. (He thereupon) asked (Laozi) to come to the border (of Pei), and went himself to Liang, where he met him. Laozi stood in the middle of the way, and, looking up to heaven, said with a sigh, 'At first I thought that you might be taught, but now I see that you cannot be.' Yang Zi-ju made no reply; and when they came to their lodging-house, he brought in water for the master to wash his hands and rinse his mouth, along with a towel and comb. He then took off his shoes outside the door, went forward on his knees, and said, 'Formerly, your disciple wished to ask you, Master, (the reason of what you said); but you were walking, and there was no opportunity, and therefore I did not presume to speak. Now there is an opportunity, and I beg to ask why you spoke as you did.' Laozi replied, 'Your eyes are lofty, and you stare - who would live with you? The purest carries himself as if he were soiled; the most virtuous seems to feel himself defective.' Yang Zi-ju looked abashed and changed countenance, saying, 'I receive your commands with reverence,'
When he first went to the lodging-house, the people of it met him and went before him. The master of it carried his mat for him, and the mistress brought the towel and comb. The lodgers left their mats, and the cook his fire-place (as he passed them). When he went away, the others in the house would have striven with him about (the places for) their mats.
*** Kings who have wished to resign the Throne
Yao proposed to resign the throne to Xu You, who would not accept it. He then offered it to Zi-zhou Zhi-fu, but he said, 'It is not unreasonable to propose that I should occupy the throne, but I happen to be suffering under a painful sorrow and illness. While I am engaged in dealing with it, I have not leisure to govern the kingdom.' Now the throne is the most important of all positions, and yet this man would not occupy it to the injury of his life; how much less would he have allowed any other thing to do so! But only he who does not care to rule the kingdom is fit to be entrusted with it.
Shun proposed to resign the throne to Zi-zhou Zhi-bo, who (likewise) said, 'I happen to be suffering under a painful sorrow and illness. While I am engaged in dealing with it, I have not leisure to govern the kingdom.' Now the kingdom is the greatest of all concerns, and yet this man would not give his life in exchange for the throne. This shows how they who possess the Dao differ from common men.
Shun proposed to resign the throne to Shan Juan, who said, 'I am a unit in the midst of space and time. In winter I wear skins and furs; in summer, grass-cloth and linen; in spring I plough and sow, my strength being equal to the toil; in autumn I gather in my harvest, and am prepared to cease from labour and eat. At sunrise I get up and work; at sunset I rest. So do I enjoy myself between heaven and earth, and my mind is content: why should I have anything to do with the throne? Alas! that you, Sir, do not know me better!' Thereupon he declined the proffer, and went away, deep among the hills, no man knew where.
Shun proposed to resign the throne to his friend, a farmer of Shi-hu. The farmer, however, said (to himself), 'How full of vigor does our lord show himself, and how exuberant is his strength! If Shun with all his powers be not equal (to the task of government, how should I be so?)' On this he took his wife on his back, led his son by the hand, and went away to the sea-coast, from which to the end of his life he did not come back.
When Dai-wang Dan-fu was dwelling in Bin, the wild tribes of the North attacked him. He tried to serve them with skins and silks, but they were not satisfied. He tried to serve them with dogs and horses, but they were not satisfied, and then with pearls and jade, but they were not satisfied. What they sought was his territory. Dai-wang Dan-fu said (to his people), 'To dwell with the elder brother and cause the younger brother to be killed, or with the father and cause the son to be killed,-- this is what I cannot bear to do. Make an effort, my children, to remain here. What difference is there between being my subjects, or the subjects of those wild people? And I have heard that a man does not use that which he employs for nourishing his people to injure them.' Thereupon he took his staff and switch and left, but the people followed him in an unbroken train, and he established a (new) state at the foot of mount Qi. Thus Dai-wang Dan-fu might be pronounced one who could give its (due) honour to life. Those who are able to do so, though they may be rich and noble, will not, for that which nourishes them, injure their persons; and though they may be poor and mean, will not, for the sake of gain, involve their bodies (in danger). The men of the present age who occupy high offices and are of honourable rank all lose these (advantages) again, and in the prospect of gain lightly expose their persons to ruin: is it not a case of delusion?
The people of Yue three times in succession killed their ruler, and the prince Sou, distressed by it, made his escape to the caves of Dan, so that Yue was left without a ruler. The people sought for the prince, but could not find him, till (at last) they followed him to the cave of Dan. The prince was not willing to come out to them, but they smoked him out with moxa, and made him mount the royal chariot. As he took hold of the strap, and mounted the carriage, he looked up to heaven, and called out, '0 Ruler, 0 Ruler, could you not have spared me this?' Prince Sou did not dislike being ruler - he disliked the evil inseparable from being so. It may be said of him that he would not for the sake of a kingdom endanger his life; and this indeed was the reason why the people of Yue wanted to get him for their ruler.
Han and Wei were contending about some territory which one of them had wrested from the other. Zi-hua Zi went to see the marquis Zhao-xi (of Han), and, finding him looking sorrowful, said, 'Suppose now that all the states were to sign an agreement before you
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#title A Collective Trauma
#author ziq
#LISTtitle Collective Trauma
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics post-left, individualism, critique, collectivism, existential dread, Leviathan, community, desire, conformity, unique, egoism, revolt, trauma
#date June 15, 2022
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/collective_trauma
#lang en
Grasping in the dark for something you can't quite put into words.
Guided only by the faint fear of falling into the dark vacuum – a gaping deficiency that lingers within that carefully manicured psyche. You don't dare tread near the vacuum. You'll do anything to avoid even thinking about it. Quick, find a distraction.
Always cycling through mind-numbing social activities that promise to provide you with fulfillment. Debate clubs, affinity groups, political parties, historical reenactment societies, rainbow gatherings, punk gigs, fan conventions. You decide to go to a protest downtown.
With every new social engagement, you imagine you'll find the meaning you so desperately crave by converging with yet another group of like-minded busy little bees.
You'll soon start to wonder if your shared fixations are superficial, ill-considered, ultimately a waste of life. But you'll shake yourself out of it and continue to go through the motions of social ceremony, because anything is better than falling into that dreaded vacuum lurking deep in the crevasses of your mind.
Peace never comes from other people. It has to come from an understanding and an acceptance of the self. You know this but you pretend to have forgotten.
Only by connecting with your base elements; the self free from decades of social manipulation and subjugation can you find the meaning you've lost touch with.
Reaching into the vacuum to retrieve your innate uniqueness. This is the only way you can hope to catch a glimpse of whatever lies beneath the dense layers of deception you've amassed. You know this beyond any doubt when you lay asleep at night, but allowing such dangerous ideas to enter your waking thoughts is too frightful a proposition. The vacuum is just too dark a place.
You possess the ability to break through the thick haze of bullshit enveloping everything you are. But the warm embrace of the group is so much easier to cultivate.
Using shiny new people to distract yourself from all that existential dread is so very easy. It's what you know. It's comforting. It's intoxicating. It's what everyone else is doing.
Hungrily consuming anyone that happens to fall into your orbit, the same way you use up any other throwaway product.
Absorbing them into the banal tedium that is your existence, dragging them down to your meek and docile level.
Breaking your near-lifelong tango with convention and uniformity would be too distasteful. What if people stare? What if they're scornful?
You want so much to feel at peace with your place in the universe. But all your life, you've steadily been indoctrinated into the cult of leviathan. A senseless, punishing death march that dilutes and depletes everything it touches. It inflicts on you an onerous unease.
Leviathan's programming constrains your ability to connect with yourself, your environment, other people. You've been taught to live in fear of all that makes you brilliant and unique. To replace connection with consumption. Desire with duty, obligation, constraint.
You so crave the perceived permeance of community, of a shared understanding, shared values, shared goals.
The truth is dreadfully hard to accept. Community is nothing more than a shared delusion. A callous fraud that promises to make you whole, but instead leaves you tapped out, broken and thoroughly compromised.
You know this, don't you? When you're in a deep sleep and the vacuum starts to open itself up, spewing out its secrets.
Community is when people get together to collectively and violently repress their uniqueness and adopt a bland inoffensive homogeneity. An army of traumatized and traumatizing soldiers, always marching in unison, boots stamping deafeningly on the tarmac. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.
It's tragic watching your decay.
You so hope to be told you're something greater than your dreary day to day existence suggests.
You're not.
You are the sum of the parts you've chosen for yourself and those parts are bland, vapid, frivolous.
A follower of followers of followers of followers. An old joke told so many times in so many places by so many people, it can only hope to engender a strained smirk.
In trying to soothe your disconnect by centering your place in the group or the subculture; by putting the needs of a manufactured, forced community above your own desires, you adopt an almost-religious fervor for both conformity and sacrifice.
"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."
"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."
"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."
You lie so confidently to your own face. It's almost become a reflex now.
You're an echo of a television Christmas special broadcast a hundred times to millions of people, year after year. Scripted, choreographed and predictable. Something familiar and thoughtless to fall asleep to before the next workday starts.
You expertly avoid ever acknowledging your true desires, instead dedicating your brief remaining moments on this planet to sacrificing yourself to the cause, the community, the nation, the faith, the struggle, or whatever other wholly artificial spectre you decide to build up and glue yourself to.
You are forever on auto-drive. A constant loop of weary self-regulating insipidity.
It's detestable what you've become. Really it is. Willfully squandering every speck of potential the cosmos seeded you with. Every original thought. Every creative impulse. Every inclination to be you.
And for what? To be accepted? To fit in? To be assigned a role? One more cog in Leviathan's machine as it churns away at everything beneath its feet.
You don't get it. This isn't the way it was supposed to be. You were going to be so much more before you let them all beat you into the bland, flavorless pulp that puddles before me.
They took everything from you. Everything fierce, radiant, defiant. Everything that sparkled, moved and inspired. All that made existence in this world a tolerable and worthwhile pursuit.
All that's left for you now in this world is a sunken hole in the desert, and it's rapidly filling with sand. Dry coarse sand, funneling into every orifice, stripping away at your flesh and bones.
It doesn't have to end this way. You can reclaim your unique. Unleash your fire and fury to claw back everything that was coerced from you. You can crawl out of that sinkhole before the sand completely breaks you down.
Abandon your need to placate the spiteful, erratic hive that has forced itself on you for so long. You have the power to burn to an ember everything that has cruelly choked the unique out of you for all these years.
Conquer your fear of being alone. Rediscover what it means to be you. Disconnect from everything that drains your will and leap into the only place no tie-wearing tyrant can follow. The dark vacuum within you. The place you most fear, the place where you stuff all your truths.
Submerge yourself in the vacuum. Let it become you.
Bask in the solitude of the self, hear your thoughts and yours alone. Take a series of deep breaths and gather every morsel of strength you have left. You're going to need it.
Wait.
Absorb it all. Every deep-seeded secret the vacuum holds. Every insight you've forced yourself to bury. The totality of your lost enlightenment.
Wait.
Wait...
Now. It's time.
You are become the full manifestation of the unsealed dark vacuum, the unrepentant force of nature that absorbs all lies and spits out cold hard truths.
Burst out in righteous fury. Take your apt revenge for all that's been done to deprive you of you.
You have reclaimed your unique, embraced every desire you long suppressed. You will not be sacrificed to the will of others. Never again.
Fully embody the self and no force on Earth will stop you from living and dying as you are. Ungovernable, ferocious, piercing, glimmering, sublime. You.
Everything that subjugated you in your former life will be eviscerated in a fiery blast of indignation.
Every little piece of the world you raze quickly adds up in the quest to destroy the universe.
You are a bellwether for the discontented. Go forth and dismantle the instruments of your oppression. Never let them chisel away pieces of you again. Be whole. Completely and fully you.
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#title Against Community Building, Towards Friendship
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics community, friendship, society, individual, individual and society, individualism, critique of leftism, critique, authority, post-left, decentralization
#date 23 March 2021
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/friendship
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-03-24T12:08:41
*** The Dangerous Failings of Community
As long as I've been around other anarchists, I've witnessed an unremitting reverence for the sanctity of community.
The idea of community is held in such high regard by anarchists that it's eerily reminiscent of USA liberals paying fealty to the "sacred ground" of their nation's capitol. Community is something consecrated and unassailable to anarchists. It's the bond that binds us to our fellow true believers. It gives us belonging, direction, purpose, safety, all those good things.
But does it really?
The more time I spend amongst anarchists, the more I find the "anarchist community" ideal to be inherently unattainable and isolating. It seems every attempt at building an organized egalitarian community ends up enabling gross misconduct by certain members and the end result is always demoralizing burn-out for everyone involved.
The attempt to group disparate strangers who barely get along, based on an imagined affinity (typically ideology, but painted in such broad strokes so as to be rendered inconsequential) inevitably manages to crash and burn every time.
A gentle, alienated soul's deep pining to build community will often get exploited by abusive people so they can insert themselves into their target's life. By attaching themselves to a community, virtually anyone can gain instant access to the minds and hearts of people that would never have associated with them otherwise. Anarchists are so dedicated to maintaining the ideals of egalitarianism, openness, inclusivity, mutuality and fraternity, that they'll put up with a whole lot of shit from people that demonstrate over and over again that they don't share the same values as them. Abusive people are tolerated and even accepted by us so long as they identify as belonging to the anarchist movement, because of course anarchists aren't fond of gatekeeping or erecting barriers to entry.
When a person announces they're a member of the anarchist community, we immediately hand them a black cat badge to pin to their shirt (usually metaphorically, sometimes literally) and welcome them with open arms, no questions asked. Predictably, parasitic abusers are able to swagger into our spaces flashing that official membership badge, and they get to work preying on vulnerable, empathetic people who are looking for fellow travelers who share their ideals.
Again and again I've witnessed these entitled parasites take advantage of the compassionate anarchist spirit and they'll often spend years tearing people's lives apart until the community becomes so toxic and unbearable that everyone abandons ship to try and preserve their mental health and physical safety. In the end, everyone seems to end up more exploited and traumatized by the anarchist community experience than they would have been without it.
Due to my experiences both managing and participating in various anarchist spaces, I'd really like to throw out the entire idea of anarchist community and re-imagine how anarchistic interactions can be manifested going forward.
Much like the related ideologically sacred institution of democracy, the whole concept of community is insidious and underhanded, an ideal seemingly designed to manipulate people into associating with bullies and dickheads by whittling away at basic human needs like autonomy, self-determination and consent.
Too many times, our dedication to building unfettered communities open to all people lowers our guard and lets cops, rapists and assorted authoritarians infiltrate our movements and inflict lasting damage to both our collective and individual psyches.
A community in its current form almost requires everyone involved be socialized in extreme docility, forced to exist in a perpetual state of submission to everyone around them. Otherwise, the community would almost certainly implode.
Without that docile meekness being forced on all the community members, the billions of people living boxed up and piled on top of neighbors they're barely able to tolerate would inevitably sharpen their fangs and rip each other apart to reclaim the personal space every living being needs in order to exercise their autonomy and individuality.
If our sharp claws weren't meticulously and regularly yanked out of our fingertips by the upholders of community, to forge us into obedient and pliable little shits, the entire concept of community would be rendered unworkable.
Both the metaphorical and literal concrete walls that contain us and our egos would quickly crumble into rubble without the authority of the community to hold them up.
There’s a word that describes how we feel when we need time to ourselves but can’t get it because we live in these vast interconnected global communities, surrounded wall-to-wall, block-to-block, nation-to-nation in every direction by other people and have no way to tune out their vociferous voices and energies. It’s the mirror image to loneliness - 'aloneliness'. This innate state of being was surprisingly only coined recently, in 2019, by Robert Coplan, a Canadian psychologist.
If loneliness is the yearning to connect to others, being aloney is the deep-seeded need to disconnect from others and retreat into the self. This is something that becomes harder and harder as the communal collective is centered and the individual is increasingly diminished and cast as a villainous foil to the precious community ideal.
Also in 2019, a study of nearly 20,000 people (Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 7730) established that we need to spend regular time immersed in nature to maintain our well-being. Too often, our proven need to embrace these solitary experiences is discounted because so much reverence is placed on the building and expansion of society and community by the authorities who shape our world.
*** Re-imagining Our Social Bonds
Someone posed this question to me recently about my frequent critiquing of democracy:
<quote>
"If you're against democracy, how would you propose consensus be reached among an anarchist community?"
</quote>
Before I can answer the question, I should point out that most definitions of 'commune' wildly conflict with anarchy. Take this common definition, for example:
<quote>
"organized for the protection and promotion of local interests, and subordinate to the state; the government or governing body of such a community."
</quote>
So like a lot of the authority-based concepts certain anarchists feel the need to appropriate, a community is assumed by polite society to come with a certain expectation of authority.
To avoid the inevitable confusion that comes with the strange urge some people have to redefine preexisting concepts, I'd really like to bypass this loaded word completely and instead try to instill a more anarchist bent to the concept of community as anarchists presumably mean it...
So let's just call it 'friendship', since that's essentially all we desire from what we term an 'anarchist community': Trusted friends we can live with, play with, learn with. It's a simple and effective word that only has positive connotations, and isn't going to make anyone think of all the glaringly authoritarian communities held together by a state's threat of violence and built and maintained by exploited workers who most often can't even afford to live in said communities.
I think it's important we use clear and concise language to describe our objectives as anarchists, and too many of the words we lean on when outlining our desires for a domination-free world have hierarchical baggage permanently weighing them down.
Okay, now let's rephrase the question in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation...
<quote>
"How would I suggest you make decisions when you have disagreements with your friends over which course of action to take?"
</quote>
Well, I wouldn't suggest anything.
People really don't need me or anyone to direct their interactions with their friends or dictate to them how they should define and fulfill their relationships.
If you and your friends need me to prescribe you a program to adhere to in order for your friendship to function, you're clearly not interested in practicing anarchy.
Why even put the effort into maintaining the friendship if you need to involve an external body to create systems, laws and processes to ensure the friendship remains equitable and fulfilling? If your friend isn't being fair to you, why are you still their friend?
Anyone who would exploit you, diminish you, neglect you or deny you your autonomy isn't acting as a friend and doesn't deserve to be considered one. A friend cherishes and respects you. A friend encourages you to fulfill your desires and does everything they can to help achieve your needs.
And if you're not friends with the people you're in disagreement with, why do you care to reach consensus with them? Why share experiences with them and tie your fate to their desires if you don't even like them?
Is your idea of 'community' (friendship) a suffocating debate club where people who don't even get along have to endlessly negotiate with each other and reach some arbitrary consensus in order to continue to co-exist?
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just not enter into formalized relationships with people whose values so conflict with your own as to provoke such intractable conflict?
If you truly desire anarchy, it's important to make your own decisions unhindered by the decrees of lionized authority figures and their taped-together social systems. Only you and your friends can decide how to best maintain your friendships and how to commune with each other in a way that benefits all parties.
Unless you're disabled in a way that affects your sociability, it's unlikely you need formal rules of association to be directed to you before you can form bonds with other humans you wish to commune with. That's all social systems are really, a set of rules someone decided everyone should have to follow, regardless of whether or not they share the same values. It's fundamentally defeating to anarchy when self determination, freedom of association and autonomy are overwritten by someone else's values. Upstanding citizens of the nation might prize free speech, democracy, morality, free markets, peaceful protest and community, but that doesn't mean you have to.
No authoritative body should presume to possess the power to tell others how to solve disputes they have with their friends. If you can't get along with a friend without ordinances from above then you should probably question why you remain friends with them and if the relationship is worth the emotional toll it exerts on you, your friend and those around you.
This all of course assumes you're adept at socialization, which admittedly a lot of us aren't, due to a diverse array of disabilities and emotional traumas, but that's just more proof that no one can or should prescribe exact instruction to people for creating social relations amongst themselves. Every relationship is different, and the only real prerequisite should be a desire to share experiences and support and nurture each other.
*** Discarding Bad Relationships
Like I've mentioned, there are a lot of abusive, exploitative people who enter our spaces, create a world of hurt, sap everyone of their energy, sabotage our projects by creating constant conflict and division without actually contributing anything, and then when someone finally objects to their behavior, they assert their supposed democratic right to continue to force themselves on everyone because "you have to reach an understanding / consensus / agreement with your fellow community member".
Fuck that.
If someone is abusing or exploiting you, just eject them from your orbit. You're not under any obligation to kowtow to the desires of a person who has demonstrated they have little respect for you or your values. Once they've shown you they're not your friend with a pattern of selfish and harmful actions, it's not your responsibility to protect their ego and keep shining their black cat badge.
You have to live your own life and can't pour all your energy into making some random bully feel included in your social circle because they've announced they're some stripe of anarchist. Anarchy isn't a numbers game, it won't matter if there's one less member in your anarchy club, especially when that person has demonstrated they don't actually give two shits about doing anarchy.
We need to know our limitations. We need to stand up for each other when we see abuse and not allow the abuse to be tolerated and normalized under the guise of community, democracy and inclusivity. It's important to set clear boundaries with people and cut ties with them when they cross those boundaries and begin to damage your mental health and sense of safety.
As for what those boundaries should be? There are so many disparate personalities and unique circumstances that can occur in a relationship, so as always it's not realistic to set universal metrics. There's really no fail-proof program for human association, which is why it's so important for each able individual to be aware of their own boundaries and be ready to enforce them. But generally, if you no longer feel safe in a space because of a certain person's presence, feel you're exerting too much energy to satisfy their unreasonable demands and getting little back in return, or frequently feel anxiety due to their words and / or actions... It's likely time to cut ties.
When you're in an organized community with someone, you're denied direct control over the relationship. Instead, your interactions are dictated by whatever social norms and rules have been developed by those who formed the community, often long before you were born. If you don't want to be around someone any more, you have to wrestle with the system's checks and balances, essentially pleading for permission from the community and its decision-making mechanisms to disassociate from the person.
In any community, a communal divorcing is a time, money and energy consuming social affair involving the proclamations of multiple people both familiar and unfamiliar, public hearings, and an exhaustive bureaucracy.
On the other hand, ending a simple friendship is much simpler because you directly control who you choose to spend your time with, without an entire community body inserting itself into your private life. No one can force you to be their friend and devote your time and energy to them everyday, but communities constantly force you to negotiate with unkind neighbors, relatives, coworkers, landlords, bosses, teachers and others who you'd never spend time with if you had the autonomy to choose.
Freedom of association is an anarchist principle that always manages to get undermined and maligned by the fiercely un-anarchist principles the assorted anarcho-democrats, Chomskyists and Bookchinites insist on bringing to the table. I'd argue there's no anarchist principle more important than being able to choose who to spend your time with. I'd much rather choose a few friends than amass community members.
*** Systems Don't Protect People
People protect people.
We tend to put a lot of faith in the systems that govern us, and assume they'll protect us from harm when more often than not the systems fail us at every turn with tepid half-measures and bureaucratic meandering.
Building our own systems to live by can be a worthwhile pursuit, but if we try to extend those systems to a wider sphere of people, they'll inevitably break down as an increasing number of those people find the system doesn't serve their diverging needs and begin to rebel.
The bigger a community and its bureaucracy grow, the more disconnected from people and their needs the community gets, until the point where a community becomes devastatingly isolating and dehumanizing to everyone forced to exist within its towering walls.
A lot of anarchists have reacted to me speaking ill of community with fear and anger because they've internalized the idea that "community support" is something necessary for their survival. But if they're being honest with themselves, by community support, they really just mean welfare from the state. This fear of losing access to healthcare, unemployment / disability insurance, and a pension doesn't really have anything to do with their concept of community, and is really just a form of cognitive dissonance.
As an anarchist, I know the state doesn't work for me and never will. If a community is a collective bureaucratic body that assigns duties and resources to people depending on prefigured factors, it's acting as a state, regardless of whatever fancy new tag is affixed to it, and it will no doubt grow increasingly isolating and destructive as the years wear on and the power of its architects and benefactors is cemented.
We already have authorities that decide who gets how much and when, and it's brought us nothing but suffering. We already have community and it treats us like trash every day of our lives. Pretending this disconnected forced grouping of disparate peoples with wildly diverging values, needs and desires is somehow capable of serving us equitably and with care and respect is mournful.
Community always seems to be the spark that ignites an inferno of hierarchy and domination. So much horrific oppression and death has been justified in the age of Leviathan by attaching it to "the good of the community". I've seen so many people, including anarchists, sweep all manner of abuses under the rug in a desperate attempt to "protect the integrity of the community". Somehow the community is always put before the people who inhabit it, as if a precarious eidolon drawn from thin air and held together by nothing but collective resolve is more sacred than life itself.
Arranging people into societies and communities and nations and cities and suburbs and civilizations that have wildly varying resources only serves to separate us and creates permanent warfare among us, with those lucky enough to belong to the more resource-rich communities getting every advantage over those in more barren, parched lands.
Community is an ever-expanding wave that washes over the land, leaving its salt in the soil and forever amassing momentum until it morphs into its final form: an impregnable global civilization with no chink in the armor, no weakness we can assail in the hopes of containing its immense authority... Until finally the wave collapses under its own weight, adding a thick layer of blood to the salted land.
Friendship can't scale up to swallow the planet. Friendship remains forever small, personal, intimate, deliberate, voluntary, decentralized. This is a feature, not a bug. Friendship allows you to associate and disassociate with others at will, while always maintaining your individuality, the sanctuary of your headspace and the clarity of knowing who you are and what you need. The dictates of anonymous wider society and the supposed common good needn't cloud your mind when you form friendships rather than build communities.
Community is division. It's nationality, it's borders, it's imperialism, it's haves and have nots, it's cruel, brutal, unending warfare against the sacrificial out-groups to benefit the blessed in-groups.
Your friends don't exploit you. If they do, they're not your friends.
Communities exploit everyone, both within and outside their very clearly defined borders, every minute of every day of every year and they have for centuries. Draining the most underprivileged community members of their blood, sweat and tears to chiefly benefit the most privileged in the community: the bosses, the academics, the desk jockeys, the landlords.
The potholes in the neighborhoods of the working poor are always as deep as canyons, while the privileged classes who work and sweat far less can commute in the comfort of their air-conditioned Teslas bump-free on the smoothest of asphalt.
European welfare states and other 'progressive' communities exist on the backs of the poor of the colonized global South. Resources and intensive lifelong labor are stripped from billions of people who receive only basic sustenance in return, so the residents of those hallowed Western communities can lounge in comfort with their wide assortment of state-granted privileges.
I've heard some wannabe world-builders say friendship is a weak bond to base a life on, that friends are as unreliable as the anonymous community members they so revere. But those same people will always extol law, order and democracy no matter how many times those houses of straw blow up in their faces. And honestly, is anything more insufferable than utopian communists critiquing someone else’s supposed idealism?
Bureaucrats and their communal systems won't give us anarchy. Maybe a little social democracy as a treat, at least until the system collapses back into fascism when enough wealth accrues at the top.
So what is the purpose of building an anarchist community? If the difference between a community and a group of friends is that the community is bigger, more impersonal, more bureaucratic, more policed, with highly diverging values and a centralized concentration of power... Then what use is community to a group of people who seek to decentralize everything in their path, dismantle systems, negate authority and become as ungovernable as possible? What use is community to anarchy?
I really feel we should be making friends rather than building communities.
|
#title Anarcho-Capitalism?
#author ziq
#LISTtitle Anarcho-Capitalism?
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics anarcho-capitalism, anarchy
#date 2018
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/anarcho_capitalism
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-03-03T16:19:44
From Wikipedia:
<quote>
“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. ”downsizing” for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”
</quote>
The phrase ”anarcho-capitalism” was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean and dispirit anarchists. By appropriating and warping anarchist terminology, he hoped to dilute our objectives and deal a fatal blow to our propaganda. He worked for years to associate anarchy with all the things anarchists stand against, thus minimizing the effect of anarchy in the public consciousness.
If anarchy is stripped of all its meaning, if anarchists are presented as extra-devoted capitalists, as wannabe slumlords and oligarchs, then the threat anarchy presents to capitalism is greatly minimized. Anarchy stops being a viable alternative to the system of authority and simply becomes part and parcel of it.
In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard admitted:
<quote>
”We are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical because all anarchists have socialistic elements in their doctrines and possess socialistic economic doctrines in common.”
</quote>
Rothbard's acolytes claim to support capitalism but not the state, proposing that all the functions of government, from military, police, courts and prisons to water sanitation, waste disposal and road construction be privately owned.
They wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations; making the corporations that currently share power with the state into what are effectively private states that don't have to share power or answer to anyone. These corporations would of course use their private armies to do war with each other as is their custom, until one corporation has monopolized everything, becoming what would inevitably be an all-powerful worldwide monarchy.
So the only logical end goal of this unfettered and unchallenged capitalism is a Disney-Pepsi-Bayer conglomeration printing all the money, making all the laws, publishing all the media, growing and distributing all the food, managing all the hospitals, workplaces, prisons and schools, ruling the entire world as one colossal government.
Capitalism is a perverse authority that devours everything it touches. Wherever capitalism rises, a multitude of oppressive hierarchies immediately spring from it: Class systems, homelessness, imperialism, environmental destruction, slavery, human trafficking, climate change, racism, misogyny, ableism, genocide, the list is endless.
There is no way to make a system that revolves around exploitation, inequality, hierarchy and domination compatible with anarchy. There is simply no way for capitalism to ever be anarchic.
These oligarchy-fetishists insist that capitalism is voluntary when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an authority that is powerful enough to rule a society. There's no way to prop up a hierarchy as immense as capitalism without coercion, domination, suppression of autonomy, tyranny. All things that are anathema to anarchy.
For all intents and purposes, these so called ”anarcho-capitalists”, ”propertarians” or ”voluntaryists” wish to revert the world to feudalism and take full control of society, without the inconvenience of health, safety and environmental regulations or any other controls on their business activities or accountability for their shareholders and CEOs. Some of them will simply call themselves an “anarchist“ without further elaboration, so it's important to pay attention to the context and content of their messaging and call them out if they're full of shit and just trying to do some entryism.
These social and economic conservatives wish to replace the state's police forces and military with private police and armies that would work directly for the corporations, with zero transparency and with their sole mission being to safeguard the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital. Mind you, this isn't too much different from the current system where capitalists have to share some of their power with the state and its functionaries, but it sure as hell won't be any better for us peasants.
They have similarly hijacked the word “libertarian” which was historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.
Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”, “deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”, “neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social conservative” are all words that just mean "capitalist that doesn't like public accountability or paying taxes" with very minor differences; usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced. Some of them will simply call themselves “anarchist“ without further elaboration, so it's important to pay attention to context and content.
Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as the state, and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by watering down and obfuscating our most basic terms and principles.
By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and ecocide.
Without a state to uphold property rights, to legalize wealth hoarding and to normalize labor exploitation, without police and courts to imprison anyone who refuses to play by capitalism's rules, capitalism simply has no way to function. It would be, in a word, anarchy.
"Anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.
|
#title Anarchy is
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics introductory, theory, practical anarchism, Practice, theory and practice
#date 2021
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/what_anarchy_means
#lang en
Anarchy is an ongoing process to dismantle authority
Anarchy is the relentless negation of structures of domination, the endeavor to carve out little pockets of life free from exploitation and suffering.
Anarchy is the uncompromising push against oppression and the vocal demand for autonomy and self-determination, the rejection of all the classes, institutions and dogmas built to rule people.
Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives. It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.
Anarchy is a living and breathing practice that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against domination that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.
There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is ongoing, unending action against hierarchical structures and the authority figures who sit in luxury at the top of them.
Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.
Anarchy is the rejection of government, states, borders, capital, patriarchy, gender essentialism, slavery, ideology, the right wing, the left wing, the clergy, democracy, private property, technocracy, nuclear family, humanism, imperialism, prisons, factories, founding fathers, bureaucracy, ethnocracy, heteronormativity, idols, tradition, policing, neuronormativity, ecocide, civilization and every other form of authority.
Anarchy is community gardens, free shops, graffiti, 3D printed guns, naturism, vegan potlucks, squats, food forests, sabotaging pipelines, free software, liberating cows, shoplifting, heirloom seed saving, forming autonomous zones, assassinating tyrants, guerilla gardening, writing zines, catching rainwater, burning ballot boxes, postering, biodiversity, abolishing whiteness, hacking, aquaponics, music making, upcycling, torching police stations and seed bombing wildflowers all across the landscape.
An anarchist is anyone who refuses to be governed, dominated, ruled by anyone and anything. An anarchist is an angry, bitter, lost, anxious, disillusioned, violent, peaceful, courageous, idealistic, captivating, fearless dreamer.
An anarchist stands alone against the giant tide of authority that rises in every direction. Anarchists connect with every battered downtrodden soul in concerted attack against the ruthless systems designed to disempower and alienate us.
Anarchy is marred in endless contradiction, existential dread and insufferable internal conflict and yet anarchy makes perfect sense to anyone who is appalled or enraged by the gross injustices that engulf this little blue planet. Anarchy is for anyone who seeks to live with any kind of dignity.
Anarchy is an impossible, preposterous pursuit yet necessary for our very survival.
Anarchy is--
|
#title Anarchy Vs. Archy: No Justified Authority
#subtitle Or Why Chomsky Is Wrong
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics authority, expertise, Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakunin, hierarchy, power, parenting, minarchism, force
#date 2018-08-08
#source Retrieved on 2019-01-23 from https://raddle.me/wiki/expertise_vs_authority and revised by original author
#lang en
*** Archy: The Opposite of Anarchy
The dictionary definition of 'archy' is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. Be it a Monarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state or any other hierarchical society.
While anarchy is the opposition to hierarchy and authority, archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy thrives when a population serves and obeys rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).
Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, the media, tax collectors, etc.
Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy. Choosing to accept a specialist's expertise in their craft needn't create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal or a surgeon repairing your heart needn't be your superior on a hierarchy simply because they are providing you with a valued service.
Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the hierarchy that oppresses them does not turn the individual into an authority. Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.
*** On "Justified Authority"
Once you start justifying authority and hierarchy, you effectively twist a knife in anarchy. We've all heard the phrase "all power corrupts". It's not a meme; it's the entire reason anarchy exists as a practice.
Legitimizing authority enables archy. Doesn't matter if you call yourself an anarchist while justifying hierarchies you personally approve of for whatever reason. NO authority is legitimate in anarchy. Yes, even in a parent-child relationship.
When you legitimize an authority, you're granting it power, presenting it as an institution that needs to be obeyed at all costs, and it won't stop there. It'll want more power because that's the nature of power. Always grows, never stops to examine its devastating effect on its surroundings. Power is a license to do harm. Whether it was your original intention to enable a violent force of power when you legitimized an authority is irrelevant. It will do harm and the people who signed off on legitimizing it are (or should be) culpable for that harm.
Anarchy is the opposition to authority. To pretend otherwise would be a blatant misrepresentation of what anarchy is.
*** Expertise Vs. Force Vs. Authority
A lot of people confuse expertise for authority and then use that confusion to insist anarchy doesn't oppose <em>all</em> authority. They say anarchy only opposes <em>unjustified</em> authority. They of course never explain who gets to determine which authority is justified... I assume that determination is made by a further authority? An authority that is also justified? And which authority justified that authority..? It's silly when anarchists try to go down this <em>justified authority</em> rabbithole.
A carpenter might be good at making cabinets, an expert at it even, but that doesn't make them an authority. Their talent doesn't give them the right to assert authority; power over anyone. Authority is not simply an isolated instance of a person using force. Authority is a distinct on-going social relationship between people. A coercive relationship that has been legitimized by our authoritarian hierarchical society. It's a relationship where authority figures assert power over less-powerful individuals in their care. These individuals are expected to submit to this mighty authority figure and obey their commands unwaveringly.
Imagine you're walking home at night and someone jumps out of the shadows and tries to stab you. In the resulting scuffle, you kill them in self-defense. This was a simple use of force; it does not make you an authority over the person who tried to kill you. This isolated action you took to preserve your own life does not magically imbue you with the authority to go on a killing spree.
Similarly, when a child is about to walk in front of a speeding truck and you grab their hand to stop them, you're not using authority. You're using simple force. A temporary spur-of-the-moment action to preserve life is not authority. It doesn't give you ownership over the person you're helping. Anarchy has no qualms with the isolated use of force, just the structural institution of authority.
*** The Chomsky Connection
Noam Chomsky frequently uses the "saving a child from being hit by a car" example to explain his concept of "justified authority". The people that repeat the 'justified authority' fallacy are usually parroting Chomsky's ill-thought-out words. He says:
<quote>
“Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and the burden of proof is on those in authority.”
</quote>
He insists that a person's authority should be legitimized if justification is provided for it. But of course, he misses a step by neglecting to explain who gets granted the authority to judge that the authority figure's justification is legitimate...
His definition of authority is inherently flawed. If he'd just say "force" instead of authority, there wouldn't be so many confused Chomsky-acolytes out there making arbitrary justifications for all kinds of hierarchical shit and then branding that shit "anarchist" when it's anything but. I've even seen his followers using his definitions to frame so-called "Night-watchman states" as being anarchist in nature. Night-watchman states are states that only exist to provide citizens with military, police and courts. This is minarchism, not anarchism. The idea of anarchist states and anarchist prisons is obscene.
Even if we were to naively accept that minarchism were somehow desirable, it would only lead right back to full-scale statism. Legitimized power never remains still, and attempts to control its growth have forever proven futile.
Chomsky is never a good source for what anarchy means. He's made a career of watering down anarchy to better appeal to a white middle-class North American audience, even going as far as to state that government isn't inherently bad and that it can be somehow "reformed" with what he calls "real democracy" and "social control over investment". Far too many anarchists look to Chomsky as an authority on anarchy, when he's clearly a minarchist.
He also likens anarchy to the enlightenment and classical liberalism in his talks and writings, which is a very Western-centric thing to do, especially since the enlightenment oversaw the divvying up of Africa by European imperialists and other horrifically racist and genocidal acts. So it's probably not a good idea to associate anarchy with that authoritarian chapter of history... While it's true that the political movement that first branded itself as anarchism originated in Europe, anarchy thrived unnamed in every corner of the world before and after The Enlightenment, long before European philosophers began to pine for a return to it.
I don't consider Chomsky to be an anarchist (because he's demonstrably not one), so his definitions aren't that important to me. But unfortunately they're important to a lot of minarchists and liberals that call themselves anarchists, and they keep repeating his flawed definitions to newcomers, creating further confusion that reverberates for years.
*** The EXPERTISE of the Cobbler
The likely source for Chomsky's confusion over the anarchist definition of authority is the originator of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. In his rough and unfinished text “What is Authority” (1870), he spoke of "the authority of the cobbler":
<quote>
"Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. [...] But I recognize no infallible authority, even in quite exceptional questions [...] So there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination." -Bakunin
</quote>
"Voluntary authority and subordination" is essentially what every liberal insists they stand for. They claim capitalism is a voluntary contract between people. They say workers voluntarily choose to be subordinate to their bosses or the state in exchange for wages or security. Anarchists need to reject Bakunin's language if we're to differentiate ourselves from these authoritarian ideologies and truly take a stand against authority.
With that text, Bakunin was trying to articulate the difference between expertise and authority, but did it in a confusing and roundabout way that has enabled generations of minarchists to mistakenly identify as anarchists and promote a broken definition of anarchy. Expertise isn't hierarchical unless the expert is deliberately enshrined with authority. Being good at something needn't give you the right to use your craft to rule people.
The guy made a poorly-worded argument 150 years ago, when the European anarchist movement was still in its infancy and the terminology was still being developed. It was a small part of a rough draft that he never completed, and it is often quoted without any context by people who obviously haven't read the whole text or the associated works that he wrote around the same time.
We obviously don't need to hold up everything every anarchist ever wrote as some kind of immovable anarchist canon. We don't cling to Bakunin's rampant antisemitism, so why cling to his half-baked bootmaker blunder?
*** Diluting the Goals of Anarchy
The oft-cited example of saving someone from being struck by a car simply has nothing to do with authority. It's a fundamental misrepresentation of the anarchist concept of authority, and I hope this piece will help shift the discourse away from it. Every fucked up political ideology out there, from monarchy to neoliberalism to fascism, claims to be for justified-authority and against unjustified-authority. We know it's horseshit when liberals deem bombing school buses in Syria or Iraq a "justifiable" action to "protect freedom" or "acceptable collateral damage", so why would we adopt their dangerous doublespeak to define anarchy? As soon as you start making allowances for authority, you've stopped advocating for anarchy.
Pushing "justified authority" as Chomsky keeps attempting to do is a pointless exercise that only confuses the uninformed and gives us scores of middle class baby-anarchists who come in not understanding the basic underpinnings of anarchy. They then use that misunderstanding to equate anarchy with all kinds of authoritarian shit, even including states. It makes the line that separates liberalism from anarchy increasingly thin. And quite frankly, it breeds shit anarchists.
I’ll finish this chapter by quoting an “anarchist” on a popular anarchist forum who is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:
<quote>
“I feel it's necessary to have authorities that can perpetuate and protect certain things - for example, I think an unrevocable societal constitution that every autonomous community should follow is a good thing - and that there should also be codified laws - with the aim to protect individual liberty.”
“Resultantly, I feel like there should be authorities as there are now that ensure that those laws - such as the right to education to a good standard, or that housing or medical training or care should be of a certain standard, or the right to process through a justice system. Necessarily these authorities should have the ability to change situations where these laws/rights are breached. As an extension, I also find myself believing in a well-trained voluntary police force that can undertake these duties (though one of course that is as directly democratic as possible and revocable and responsible in the anarchist tradition).”
“In this way I find myself drawn more to a desire for a "state" of federated anarchistic communities that function as an anarchist society might although within a greater framework of a limited system that wields authority.”
</quote>
A constitution that everyone has to follow, a “democratic” police force, a state, a system that wields authority. None of this is any different than the liberal status quo. This person has no understanding of anarchy and yet feels the need to identify as an anarchist because they would prefer liberal society be more democratic..? It’s nonsensical. And yet the post was well-regarded by other “anarchists” who replied in agreement, with two of them even citing Rojava as an “anarchist state” that matched up to these stated ideals.
An “anarchist state”. An “anarchist state”…
*** Authority is a Moral Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an artificial construct that depends on the principle of authority. Authority is the socially-enforced rule that the ruler in a hierarchical relationship gives commands and the subordinate obeys under threat of (socially legitimized) violence. If I offered my boss a meal, or saved them from drowning, I wouldn't be exercising authority over them. That action alone doesn't create a hierarchy. But just by being my boss, they are constantly exercising authority over me and I'm constantly their subordinate. I am ruled by them. I am constrained; controlled by the boss-worker hierarchy, by my boss's constant assertion of authority over me.
Authority is a deliberate social construct that divides people into either rulers or obeyers; using violence and the notion of "morality" to maintain this coercive system. Talking back to your boss, refusing their authority: That's a big "moral" no no. Society uses this coercive conditioning to uphold the oppressive dynamic and to keep you controlled and obedient. The system will not tolerate any real dissent against its law. Instead it will condition you to realign your perceptions until you finally accept its law as normal.
Proponents of "free-market" capitalism promote supposedly "voluntary" hierarchies (such as the relationship between owners and workers). This is merely an excuse for normalizing structural violence against the less-powerful, a process that is legitimized by appealing to authority. These hierarchies aren't voluntary in any quantifiable way, since we'd be punished by society in various ways if we chose to ignore them (say, by refusing to work or by killing our bosses and taking the true value of our labor). "Justifiable hierarchy" / "legitimate authority" is an eerily similar concept as "voluntary" labor under capitalism.
*** On Anarchist Parenting
Authority is a structurally violent institution. It has nothing to do with the act of rendering aid to a child; feeding them or preventing them from falling into a pool and drowning. A parent-child relationship needn't be a hierarchy unless you go out of your way to construct it as such.
Parenting is only hierarchical when parents choose to force authority on their child. An anarchist parent would use child-rearing methods that treat the child as an autonomous individual and not as a subordinate to their authoritarian demands. Anarchist parents see themselves as caretakers, not authorities, and legitimizing parental authority with the excuse of "justifiable hierarchy" is a scapegoat. It's not justified. Using violent coercion to control children is not anarchy. Parents don't need to be tyrants to raise children.
Countless anarchist communities throughout history, including the modern-day Hadza in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa have shown us that the parent-child relationship doesn't need to be the violent dictatorship it has become in capitalist-industrial society.
Yet a lot of "anarcho-minarchists", for lack of a better term, insist on seeing the "ownership" authoritarian society grants them over their children as a "justified hierarchy". It's such an odd argument. If they're okay with applying authoritarianism to their own children, they'd obviously be fine with using it to dominate strangers too. It's baffling to see people claim the domination of children is compatible with anarchy just because it's something they choose to engage in.
"Civilized" people make the mistake of constructing dangerous, unhealthy and authoritarian environments for us to live in that completely ignore the burning desire every child has for freedom, play, exploration and learning through first-hand experience.
We force children into metal carriages that take them to school-buildings where strangers are paid to dictate rigid lesson plans to them for years. Children spend their entire childhoods being moved from room to room, forcibly trained to function under the system as obedient civilized workers. Most children aren't even allowed to play outdoors because the dangers of industrial civlization are so frightening to their parents.
Industrial civilization is simply unfit to nurture human life. The perverse ways we structure our societies around danger, authority, fear, coercion, punishment, conformity and obedience isn't something that should be forced on children, or anyone. As anarchists, we should be tearing down these authoritarian structures instead of making excuses to maintain them. Children don't need authority, they need anarchy.
*** Watered-Down Anarchy
Certain people attach themselves to the flawed collectivist-anarchist definition of authority and then decide they can justify all sorts of hierarchies with it. That revisionism then enters the wider anarchist sphere and is seldom analyzed for its deficiencies since so many collectivist "anarchists" are really minarchists in disguise. Minarchists see no real problem with authority so long as it benefits them materially. Sadly, these minarchists largely control the discourse in many anarchist spaces where the idea of true anarchy is simply unfathomable. Most people born and raised under authoritarian systems have tremendous trouble parting with the faux security-blanket that a lifetime of archy has imbibed them with. Then the absurd idea of "good hierarchy" becomes normalized in these spaces and is used to keep anarchy from forming.
Anarchists need to make a strong distinction between the words "authority", "force" and "expertise" so language misunderstandings don't lead to minarchism suppressing anarchy.
"Justifiable authority" is one of several fundamental misunderstandings of anarchy that need to be thrown out before further diluting our (really very easily defined) objectives. We tend to overthink things and that leads to mountains of round-about revisionist theory that only detracts from anarchy and leaves people confused about what even our most basic objectives are.
Every genocidal dictator considered the hierarchies they upheld to be justifiable. Anarchists know better. Anarchy is, was and always will be the outright rejection of all archy.
When you compromise and make excuses to construct hierarchies; what you're doing is no longer anarchy.
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#title Anarchy Vs. Communalism
#subtitle Bookchin, 'Lifestylism', Ideology & Greenwashing
#author ziq
#LISTtitle Anarchy Vs. Communalism: Bookchin, 'Lifestylism', Ideology & Greenwashing
#SORTtopics communalism, social ecology, libertarian municipalism, Murray Bookchin, lifestyle anarchism, ideology, green anarchism, anti-civ, primitivism, industrialism, civilization, industrial civilisation
#date 2018-10-25
#source Retrieved on 2019-01-23 from https://raddle.me/wiki/communalism_and_anarchy
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-04-20T15:01:42
*** Blasted Lifestylists!
The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, long identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed 'lifestylist' anarchists and socialists, denouncing 'lifestylists' as being beneath him.
Even though he eventually abandoned anarchism in favor of his communalist ideology, this elitist divide he created between 'lifestylism' and socialism continues to reverberate today, with some social-anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchists into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.
He lobbed the accusation of 'lifestylism' against anarchists who live a life that, to them, embodies the spirit of anarchy but, in his view, do not work hard enough to achieve revolutionary social organization and the overthrow of capitalism. He also used it as an insult towards anarchists he saw as promoting what he termed "anti-rationalism".
In reality, Bookchin was creating a false dichotomy; something he did often in his writings so he could then promote his patented solutions to problems that were often non-existent... Individualist anarchists are perfectly capable of both living anarchically in the current moment, as well as organizing for a future beyond capitalism.
A lot of the most successful anarchist movements in the world today stem from individualist tendencies. These movements are then aided by the social-anarchist concept of 'prefiguration' to create movements within the current system that replicate the conditions that would exist in an anarchist society. This allows the people exposed to these movements to see that anarchy works, and become comfortable with the idea of a post-capitalist world. Food Not Bombs is a great example of this.
Bookchin on anarchism:
<quote>
[Anarchism] represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.
</quote>
<quote>
Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization.
</quote>
<quote>
In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.
</quote>
He penned this attack against anarchy late in his life while he was working to build communalism into his final legacy, perhaps hoping he would go down in history with Marx as the father of a powerful socialist ideology that could outlive him and impact the world for centuries. He even warned that if his communalist ideology was not adopted by the world at large, it would result in the destruction of everything.
Equating anarchism with liberalism, when he spent years of his life identifying as an anarchist is a rather shameless attempt at rewriting history in order to sell his new vanity project. It's a true shame that he ended his long history in radical politics on such a sour and self-defeating note.
*** Communalism: Murray's Prescribed Cure for Lifestylism
Bookchin's politics evolved greatly throughout his life, starting with Stalinism and then Trotskyism in his youth, before he found anarcho-communism. In the 1970s, disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of the Leninism that dominated the worldwide socialist scene, he stated that he felt closer to free-market libertarians; who unlike the totalitarian Marxist-Leninists, will readily defend the rights of the individual. Later, he developed a series of interrelated ideologies; anarchist social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism and libertarian municipalism. He increasingly spoke out against the innate individualism of the anarchist movement, and finally broke with anarchism completely to form communalism. He was a professor and taught students his political theories.
This is a description of communalism in his own words (while also managing to disparage both anarchism and Marxism in the same breath, in true Bookchin fashion):
<quote>
The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state.
</quote>
<quote>
Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”
</quote>
Communalism brings production and certain property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be best distributed to meet the needs of the confederation.
While not being a state by the most common definition (since the political process is strictly localized), municipal assemblies could still be described as a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, attempting to curtail and decentralize the power structures we are governed by, but it's not anarchy.
Localized power structures are still very corruptible. They still create hierarchy. They can still grow out of control. Similarly to ancient Greece's democracy; communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority). This limitation should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy, as voter-hierarchies can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that encourages the majority to force their will on a minority (thus creating a clear hierarchy) can't honestly be described as anarchist in nature. Bookchin reinforces this further:
<quote>
The anarcho-communist notion of a very loose ‘federation of autonomous communes’ is replaced with a confederation from which its components, functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.
</quote>
So, according to Bookchin, a community which joins a confederation “may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.” This is probably the worst aspect of his majority-rule fetishization, as it locks entire communities into his system forever, whether those who didn't want the system like it or not. Any organization that forbids you from withdrawing from it is clearly at odds with libertarian ideals and the right to freedom of association, so it's really dishonest of him to talk about 'libertarian' municipalism when it's anything but:
<quote>
[Libertarian municipalism's goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.
</quote>
Put into practice, I believe communalism can initially be a successful departure from the unwieldy nation-state monolith that plagues the world today and a reversion to the city-states that were once prevalent in ancient Greece at the dawn of civilization. Bookchin writes fondly of classical Athenian democracy, which he uses to glorify his romantic view of Western civilization.
But does simply returning to an earlier state of civilization go far enough? Will an effective micro-state not morph back into a super-state as it grows and faces both internal and external pressures? Decentralization is admirable, but is it enough to successfully safeguard us from statism? And are Athenian democracy and Western civilization even things we want to reproduce, when both allow for the brutal oppression of minorities, were both built on slavery, and institutionalized the denial of human rights to anyone that wasn't a member of the privileged class?
Bookchin's ideas for 'libertarian' majority-rule democracy are deeply flawed and really can't be described as being anything other than authoritarian:
<quote>
The minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice... Municipal minorities [must] defer to the majority wishes of participating communities.
</quote>
Any anarchist reading this should immediately be alarmed at the unjust hierarchical implications it presents. White people putting their priorities ahead of black people, men forcing their will on women, Christians excluding Muslims, polluters shutting down environmentalists, heterosexuals subjugating homosexuals... Whichever voting body has the highest numbers (or best propaganda) can effectively rule over the minority. It's almost as if Bookchin came full circle, returning to the Stalinism of his youth after his flirtation with individualism and anarchy.
While direct democracy is one of several decision-making mechanisms anarchists may utilize, communalism doesn't simply allow for direct democracy; it requires it. Enshrines it in law. In making his case for direct democracy, Bookchin asserts that the only other option anarchists have at our disposal is consensus democracy. He then proceeds to brutally attack the consensus decision-making method, associating it with anarcho-primitivism (which he vocally loathes, even equating it to Nazism) and deems it 'authoritarian'. This allows him to offer an exact prescription to the 'problem' of multi-layered anarchist decision making in the form of his definitive, structured ideology and its rules.
Organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in the 1990s is restrictive and shortsighted.
Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.
For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was attempted lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn't fit.
The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.
Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being 'vague' and lacking in exact instruction. I'd argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless; reinventing itself with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever changing, multi-cultural world. Especially while we're experiencing unprecedented worldwide social and ecological collapses. The greatest strength of anarchy is its flexibility. Anarchists have long laughed in the face of those who would have us live by their rigid rules.
*** A Green Anarchist Perspective
Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin's ideas because of his concept of 'post-scarcity'; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we're in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don't cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there's no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a 'post-scarcity' economy is intrinsically flawed.
Bookchin and other socialists imagine a society where regular people, rather than states, have the power to determine policy. And they imagine this society will somehow be spared the same destructive pitfalls of capitalist society. But there's no reason to assume that.
We have centuries of history showing us that people will not altruistically opt for policies that will put the ecosystem or minority groups (especially indigenous and immigrant groups) ahead of their immediate personal interests.
Just as people now vote for politicians that loudly promote disastrous environmental and social policies in order to safeguard their own privileges in society, history shows us they would continue to make damaging decisions if the system moved from representative democracy to direct democracy. To imagine that everyone in a society is capable of acting unselfishly and putting other people and other lifeforms ahead of their own families is foolhardy. They will use their voting power to protect their own immediate interests at the expense of everything else. That's how power works. It corrupts everything in its path absolutely, whether its wielded by a politician or a private citizen is irrelevant.
Bookchin saw technology as a mode of revolution, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical. A position Bookchin scoffs at.
One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially 'rule by machine'. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual's self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software. The programmers effectively govern the governor.
Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:
<quote>
Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.
</quote>
Advanced technologies can forever alter the way we live our lives, detach us from our ecosystems and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It's easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use the technology it produces to escape from the reality of our situation... At least until the ecosystems become so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives and we're forced to look up from our digital sanctuaries to gasp for air.
Bookchin's emphasis on the modern urban city in his theories will give pause to anyone who has studied the history of civilization and its disastrous effect on every ecosystem it comes into contact with. City life has always alienated us from the land and what it produces for us, creating the depressing situation where most urban dwellers raised in vast concrete deserts have little respect for the natural world or want of preserving it. When the repercussions of our actions towards the ecosystem are completely hidden from us, it's unlikely we'll change our behavior and act to preserve whatever ecological diversity the planet has left on the fringes of the grim industrial wastelands we call civilization.
A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It's easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.
Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world's ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.
Bookchin wrote:
<quote>
The development of giant factory complexes and the use of single or dual-energy sources are responsible for atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrial units and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use of clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it be possible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change are now at hand.
</quote>
<quote>
Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.
</quote>
While it is true that 'green' fuels can be less destructive than 'dirty' fuels, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.
The machines Bookchin speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap (or slave) labor.
Solar panels and wind turbines depend on dirty mining to acquire the minerals needed for their construction, and massive energy use (usually coal) during manufacturing. Mining the quartz that solar panels are made from causes the lung disease silicosis in the impoverished miners. Then, once the quartz is transported to the factories, the manufacturing process creates vats of toxic waste (silicon tetrachloride) that is disposed of in random fields near the factories in China, contaminating the soil and water, and making entire rural populations sick.
From "China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse" by Richard Smith, Real-World Economics Review no. 71:
<quote>
When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing difficulties. Ren Bingyan, a professor of material sciences at Hebei Industrial University, contacted by the Post, told the paper that “the land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in its place… It is… Poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.” When the dumping began, crops wilted from the white dust, which sometimes rose in clouds several feet off the ground and spread over the fields as the liquid dried. Village farmers began to faint and became ill. And at night, villagers said “the factory’s chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath.”
</quote>
Solar panel, wind turbine and battery production fuels colonialism, slavery, war, hunger, fossil fuel burning and ecocide. Calling these energies "green" is really a bold-faced lie and just the latest example of industrialism giving itself a skip-deep makeover that will quickly fall apart when the evidence piles up too high for the media to ignore. By promoting these destructive industries, Bookchin aids their shameless greenwashing.
Bookchin:
<quote>
The absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology— a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.
</quote>
The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people (which they would need to be if we care at all about preventing power-hierarchies and inequality from forming), or that all people would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood aimed at selling books and "Institute for Social Ecology" certificates at worst.
Bookchin's insistence that industry is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under (decentralized) socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he romanticizes remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place. They also require resources that simply cannot be sourced from a single locale. This fact alone greatly diminishes his theory.
Bookchin:
<quote>
The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry "Black is beautiful" or "Make love, not war" marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.
</quote>
Bookchin's plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21st century, as the Earth's ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren't something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry.
Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more practical ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in western Kurdistan, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision.
His attacks on individualist anarchists (especially of the anti-civ flavor), have provided decades of fuel for collectivist anarchist ideologues to villainize and purge non-collectivists from our spaces. A lot of these people soon follow in Bookchin's footsteps and abandon anarchy altogether in favor of various structured ideologies including Marxism-Leninism, transhumanism and communalism.
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#title Burn the Bread Book
#subtitle Make Anarchy, Not More Ecocide & Mass Extinction
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics anti-civ, communism, anarcho-communism, green nihilism, green anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, agriculture, indigenous, authority, individualism, collapse, desertification
#date December 2019
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/burn_the_bread_book
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-03-16T10:47:19
*** The True Cost of Bread
For years I’ve watched a man drive his pick-up truck into the forest around me and cut down all the trees that aren’t legally protected. So, every tree that isn’t a pine or an oak. The moment a carob or olive or hawthorn or mastic or strawberry tree grows big enough to burn, he cuts it down and drags it away for firewood. He even fells trees I planted, while smiling and waving at me like he’s doing me a favor. I glare at him silently but don’t say a word, knowing he has the full power of the state behind him.
He uses the wood to fuel his traditional bakery which has several large outdoor ovens. The much-loved industrial product he produces is bread; a product that has rapidly replaced all the native food-bearing plants of the area as they’ve been cut down to make room for wheat fields.
The villagers are proud of the bakery because it attracts visitors from all over the island and thus creates further opportunities for them to earn profit. The local bureaucracy; the democratically-elected village council, gives the baker free reign to do as he pleases since so many livelihoods depend on his bakery.
Because the baker cuts everything down as soon as it reaches human height, the trees never get big enough to fruit, so they don’t spread their seeds and grow new trees. The forest slowly dwindles to nothing but pine trees and can no longer sustain most animal life. The climate dries, the soil erodes, the air grows stagnant and depleted of oxygen. All that’s left in the few remaining forests that haven’t been bulldozed to grow more wheat is a sterile pine desert.
The baker will soon no doubt lobby the village council to allow him to harvest the pine trees too, otherwise the all-important bakery will cease to be operational when he runs out of legal trees to fell.
In just a few years, all the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained the people in the area for millennia are wiped out and replaced with a consumer product that is made from a single grain crop. A thriving ecosystem has been replaced with a wheat monoculture that could collapse at any moment and take the lives of everyone it feeds with it.
It’s worth noting that the baker, like most people in my village, and in fact most people on the island, considers himself a communist. The village has a “communist party” clubhouse and they always elect “communist” local leaders and vote for “communist” politicians in the national elections.
Any anarchist worth their salt has no tolerance for these faux-communists, or “tankies” and their brand of collectivist-capitalism because they cling to money, states and rulers and really only embrace Stalinist politics because of the promise of cushy government jobs for them or their relatives.
The Stalinist politicians openly buy votes by promising jobs in the public service to their supporters. A job in the public service here is a guaranteed free ride for life for you and your family, with the salaries multiple times higher than private sector salaries and benefits out of the wazoo — including multiple pensions. They get a full pension for each gov sector they worked in, and the more connected civil servants are rotated through jobs in multiple sectors in the last few months leading up to their retirement to ensure the maximum pay-out possible.
I’m confident anyone reading this knows Stalinism is designed to enrich the bureaucrat class and give them complete control over the state’s citizens. No anarchist sees that shit as communism. But in a “real” communist society; an “anarcho-communist” society where money, state and class have been abolished, the local baker would presumably still bake that bread, and since it would be offered freely to everyone far and wide, he’d need to bake a lot more of it and thus need more wood. More forest would be razed to keep the bread production going.
Everyone living in the village and anyone passing through, and people in faraway cities will expect to have as much gourmet bread on their plates as they desire. More bakeries would need to pop up on the mountain as demand rises for delicious bread in the cities below, with the rural population working hard and doing their duty to feed the hungry urban population.
Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into envisioning how the workers seizing the means of production would end the environmental devastation this bread production brings to the mountain. I struggle to see any scenario where communism would stop the devastation being wrought on the ecosystem. The forests would continue to be razed to ensure production won’t slow down.
Free bread for everyone today means no bread (or any food) for anyone tomorrow as the top-soil washes away, the climate warms, the wildlife goes extinct, and the whole mountain rapidly turns to desert. It’s inevitable that soon even wheat will cease to grow in the fields surrounding the village.
Regardless of the economic system in place, the villagers being able to consume as many fresh loaves of baked bread as they can carry means all the forests in driving distance of the village are eviscerated, eventually all the fields become barren, the crops fail, and everyone starves. This is already well on its way to happening, and switching to a communist mode of production would do nothing to allay this inevitability.
“How would you feed people then, genius?” I hear you scoff. The answer is simple; tried and tested for millennia. I wouldn’t feed people. People would feed themselves instead of expecting others to labor to feed them; an entitlement that arose with industrial civilization. People would be inclined to protect the forests instead of bulldozing them for the supposed convenience of industrial food production if they picked their food directly from those forests everyday.
They’d protect the forests with their very lives because they’d need the food that grows in the forests to survive without industrial farms, bakeries and factories outsourcing food production and then hiding the ecocide they cause just out of sight of the villages and their carefully manicured streets.
Bread and other industrial products alienate us from our ecosystem and cause us to stop caring about how our food is produced, so long as it’s there in the store when we want to eat it. Putting food production back into the control of the individual is the only way to preserve the ecosystem. Direct food is the only anarchist mode of production. When other people are tasked with growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths or the mouths of their loved ones. Food harvesting needs to go back to being a way of life for every able-bodied person, rather than something industrial farm workers are tasked with to serve an elite class of privileged office workers who are completely disconnected from the food chain.
All over the world, complex centuries-old polyculture food-forests that sustained countless lives for generations are destroyed by the arrogance of industrial production, replaced for a short while by a wheat or corn monoculture so people can pick up their bread down the street from their home or workplace instead of muddying their feet to gather food from the wild as their ancestors did. This convenience seems like “progress” to civilized people, at least until the destructive industrial agriculture process renders the wheat fields infertile and farms all over the world are turned into a vast uninhabitable dust bowl. A sustainable way of life that kept us alive and thriving for centuries has been tossed aside in favor of a short-lived attempt at industrial convenience that has already proven itself a horrible failure; bringing us and every other lifeform to the verge of extinction.
Industry is not sustainable. Industrial systems are all destructive. Communism, capitalism, fascism, they’re all founded on ecocide. The authority of the baker is upheld over everything else because domesticated people would rather consume “free” industrial bread for a few years than unlearn their destructive consumerist habits. If we are to survive these times of devastating ecological collapse, humans need to go back to fostering vast food forests as our ancestors did for millennia; producing and gathering our own food without destroying the very ecosystem that gives us life in the name of luxury and convenience.
*** “The People’s” Authority: How “Anarcho-Communism” is Authority-Forming
If someone kept cutting down all the trees to bake bread, the people who depend on the forest to survive would of course have to intervene to stop the loggers from destroying the forest and thus killing their way of life.
This happens in rainforests today where indigenous people who have been let down by the state gleefully issuing licenses to corporate loggers, and turning a blind eye to illegal logging, instead take matters into their own hands and shut down the loggers using force.
They put their lives on the line to do this, and a lot of them are killed by the loggers who value their profits over the lives of indigenous people. They know if they don’t act to stop the loggers, the forests they call their home will be decimated and their way of life will have been destroyed forever. They’ll be forced into the cramped cities and have to labor all day everyday to buy the bread and beef that stripped their forests bare.
So how would an anarcho-communist society deal with someone who cuts down all the trees to bake bread? In an anarcho-communist society, everyone will be environmentally conscious and consume sustainably, right...? No. Not if you’re engaging in any kind of critical thinking.
Loggers can only destroy forests at the current explosive rate if the society imbues them with authority. If they have no authority, there’s nothing stopping others from using force to end their pillaging of our natural resources. Without the authority of civilization behind them, the loggers have incredibly diminished power and no real motive to risk their lives to fell trees.
Anarcho-communism is an industrial ideology based around the notion of seizing the means of production and then running the factories, saw mills, oil rigs, mines and power plants democratically. Industrial civilization is an incredibly totalitarian authority that is nevertheless upheld by “anarcho”-communist theory, even though anarchists supposedly oppose all forms of authority.
In an industrial communist society, much like in a capitalist society, logging is necessary to further the industrial production the society is built around. As long as production drives the system, trees will have to be felled for all kinds of reasons: from lumber and paper production to making way for crops and cattle.
So, logging is highly valued by the people that uphold the industrial society, and in a real world scenario, these “anarcho” communists would have to take measures to protect loggers from repercussions from a small, uncivilized minority – the indigenous inhabitants of the forest. These measures are, by any definition, an authority. A monopoly on violence. A state in everything but name.
But since the loggers are providing this valued service to good, decent, reasoned, educated, domesticated, egalitarian, democratic, civilized anarcho-communists in big shiny cities who are accustomed to a litany of luxury consumer products being delivered to their doors everyday… Decidedly authoritarian methods will need to be taken to ensure the anarcho-loggers can do their anarcho-work without facing retaliation from the “primmie” forest dwellers. These methods can easily be justified in the ancom’s mind; there’s nothing an ancom loves more than to “justify” authority with their mighty reasoned logic™️.
So when faced with the conundrum that the anarcho-communist city needs lumber, paper, corn and meat, and the only thing standing in the way of production is a few indigenous tribes, the ancom will put their anarcho-Spock ears on and declare: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Just as capitalist and socialist states today violently suppress the indigenous people who take action to shut down logging and mining operations that quash their way of life, the anarcho-industrialist will send a red-and-black army in to escort their red-and-black bulldozers and discipline anyone that interferes with the will of “the people”.
The indigenous inhabitants of course won’t give a shit that their forests are being felled by communists rather than by capitalists. They won’t give a shit that the bulldozers are now owned collectively or that the land they’ve lived on for millennia has now been designated as belonging to “the people” (the civilized voting majority) instead of to the state or to capital.
The forest that nurtures the indigenous people and their children is still being decimated to maintain the destructive lifestyles of apathetic city-dwellers. Their lives are still being ended because to civilized people, they’re a backwards, regressive minority standing in the way of progress... Damaging the revolution, inhibiting the growth of their glorious egalitarian civilization. The educated, “progressive” majority outvote them. Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?
Civilized people always have pushed the notion that the “common good” or the good of the many will always outweigh the needs of individuals or small groups of people, ever since Aristotle, in his “The Aim of Man” wrote:
“The good of the state is of greater and more fundamental importance both to attain and to preserve. The securing of one individual’s good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine.”
Communism is even more adamant in this “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences.
This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevitably resisted. If people won’t consent to being displaced from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded “kulaks” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “reactionaries” and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.
Industrial goods are valued by industrial society over the forest and its inhabitants because domesticated people want to eat bread and microwaved pizza and the real cost of those products (environmental destruction) is of no real concern to industrial society beyond empty gestures like an occasional “save the rainforests” or “go vegan” banner.
The inhabitants of the forests and their strange foreign culture are too far removed from the busy cities for the average urbanites to involve themselves in their plight. Even the civilized rural people who live around the forests are forever striving to urbanize their villages in the unending quest for upwards mobility. In my experience, they’ll happily trade every tree in sight for a gourmet bakery, Apple Store or coffee-shop so they can feel as civilized as the people in the big cities who tend to look down on them for being “hillbillies” or “country bumpkins”.
“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college.” (From RollingStone.com.)
The settler-farmers who are burning what’s left of the Amazon rainforest to the ground say they’re doing it for their children... To make the cash to pay for their children to be educated and get good jobs in the city. It shouldn’t be controversial for me to say civilized people value their civilized life and will always put their civilized needs before the needs of uncivilized others.
Civilized people can relate to their civilized neighbours who have the same struggles as them: paying their bills, educating their kids, buying good insurance, washing their car, deciding where to go on vacation, renovating their kitchens, choosing the next Netflix show to binge watch... So it’s not surprising that they’ll do everything they can to prop up civilized people and kick down the uncivilized people who stand in the way of their quest for ever-increasing industrial comforts.
I can already see the denial stage setting in on some of your faces as I type: “But us anarcho-communists aren’t like capitalists, we’re good caring people. Humane people. We’ll make industry green, we’ll manage the forests in a sustainable manner using direct democracy, unions, unicorns and equality!”
Why would anyone swallow that crock of shit? Why would thoroughly domesticated people used to all the comforts of destructive industrial civilization suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy? Why would 7.7 billion people suddenly change how they live because anarcho-communism has been declared? How would ancom civilization make industry “green” when it’s clearly demonstrable that all industry is destructive to the environment and to wild people, and modelling a society on an industrial system has had disastrous results throughout history, regardless of what the attached ideology was named?
All controlled mass-society, including every historical experiment at building a communist society has created authority; bodies of people that hold power over others. That power grows over time and takes the “communist” society further and further away from its revolutionary origins. Every indication is that authority would continue to be manifested with industrial anarcho-communism. There is no evidence that anarcho-communism would avert authority when it’s so dependent on destructive, exploitative, alienating, domesticating industry and the control and domination of a global population of workers.
Anarcho-communism will not liberate the world.
*** All Industrial Goods Free for All People: A Recipe for Disaster
In communism everything is free for the taking and resources are often treated as if they’re infinite. If you decide you need something, you take it from the communal store. Kropotkin said no one has the right to judge how much an individual needs, except the individuals themselves.
Since most reds hold that resources should be allocated according to “need”, decisions would need to be made to determine who in the community has “need” of the biggest shares of resources.
I know most ancoms, like Kropotkin, claim every individual will just take whatever they “need” (want) from communal stores, but I’m going to cry foul on that because it’s really not practical in an industrial society. Resources aren’t infinite and no one is going to spend their life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the communal store with a dumpster truck and says “I need your community’s entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up”. For some reason ancoms think assholes would cease to exist in a communist society. Why would anyone work their asses off, wasting their life away doing menial manual labor just to watch some shitlord drive away with everything they produced because he announced he “needed” it?
“But as woke anarcho-communists in an advanced fully-automated luxury communist society, labor will in fact be quite limited and fun because we can divide duties between all our comrades! And profit will no longer be a concern since everything we make will be given to anyone that wants it free of charge, so we don’t need to worry about marketing our products and that will further minimize the amount of labor we’ll do, giving us ample leisure time to enjoy the fruits of our production!”
For the purposes of cold-hearted mockery, I’m slightly paraphrasing an ancom who responded to an early draft of this piece. What fantasy realm are ancoms living in where all the massive problems posed by industrial production (including the ongoing extinction of near-every lifeform on Earth) will evaporate when you remove profit and marketing from the equation?
I keep saying this in my writing but here I go again: In an industrial society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not decrease; it increases. If everyone in the world suddenly has free and equal access to the mountains of wasteful shit that Western consumers consider necessary to life, not only would production need to massively increase, but we would run out of resources to exploit much more rapidly.
That’s assuming anyone would even want to work in the mines and factories in a supposedly equal society if they no longer had guns to their heads. Why would anyone go back down into that mine once their chains are broken? Does anyone honestly think those Congolese kids give a shit if you have a new phone every year? Should they really be expected to sacrifice themselves for your entitlement? So you can continue to live in luxury with all your little conveniences?
In a real world implementation of industrial communism, communities will no doubt quickly impose limits on what can be taken from communal stores after a few people take way more than they have any right to and other people go without as a result, despite them laboring for hours a day to produce those goods. Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?
Industrial society right now is fed by the ceaseless labor of billions of exploited people in the Global South. People are forced to toil in mines from childhood to procure the materials that other people (also including children) then assemble into consumer goods in factories, all for starvation wages. This is debilitating, dangerous work that leaves the people who do it sucked of their youth after a few years.
Anyway, let’s play along with communist mythology for a bit to get to my next point. In an ideal communist society (where I guess minerals are somehow found equally all across the planet and not overwhelmingly located in the Global South as in the real world), outsourced labor would presumably go away because communists would never exploit workers in distant lands (who ever heard of an imperialist communist, right? Right??) So instead production would need to be localized, and then the goods would be distributed according to need.
For resources to be allocated according to need, you’ll have some kind of deciding body in place to judge what each person’s needs are; what resources each person should be given.
There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s “needs”, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties they throw, how many friends they have and thus might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the size of their garden, the type of insulation their house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop myself.
Giving bureaucrats this power will no doubt mean certain favored groups / individuals will be rewarded and less desirable groups / individuals will be neglected, or even punished. This is the nature of authority. You’ll need a body of full-time bureaucrats to collect all this data and measure how it should determine your share of the pie, and those bureaucrats are going to have biases. If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases. And you’d still need bureaucrats to collect the data and feed it to the computer. Then they could easily feed incorrect or selective data to the computer because of their biases.
It’s always felt like a recipe for corruption and exploitation to me for a bureaucracy to determine someone’s worth... Which is probably why Kropotkin stipulated that everyone should be able to just take whatever they themselves decide they need from the stores.
Of course, the real solution would be to not base your proposed utopian society on industrial production in the first place... Promising industrial production will be unlimited because everyone will voluntarily agree to work real hard in the factories and mines and slaughterhouses and the goods will be distributed to everyone everywhere somehow while maintaining a sustainable ecological green solarpunk paradise just makes you a smug fucking liar. No different than a grinning politician promising to give us freedom, liberty and prosperity if we vote for him.
The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value / worth to assign to them as a person.
If you’re going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving someone who does the same job (or a much easier job) more than you because of potentially biased reasons?
Regardless, anarcho-collectivism still only really values the workers who are most willing to submit to the factory grind and put in the most hours. Anarcho-collectivism still holds ecodical industry and luxuries for cityfolk up above all life on the planet... So that 19<sup>th</sup> century ideology isn’t going to save you either. Throw it right in the trash with the bread book because this “reform-industrial-society” charade isn’t helping when the planet is on fire.
If industrial communism were actually implemented in the real world, you can be relatively certain that some kind of authority would need to be put in place to prevent bad actors from showing up at the store and taking a community’s entire monthly production. People would need to police the store and judge whether someone is worthy of taking as much as they’re taking. They’d need to become authorities, upholders of law and order. Purveyors of “justice”.
Let’s be clear now because I know a lot of red anarchists are going to try to “justify” this authority as being “necessary for the good of society” as they will do. Policing who can take food and how much they can take is a clear authority. Not a “justified” authority, because such a thing simply does not exist.
And this store-policing is not the anarchist tactic of “direct action” either, let’s make that clear right now, because it’s a frightenly common misunderstanding with red anarchists. Creating a police force has nothing to do with direct action.
Direct action is an isolated use of force unconnected to institutional systems of power. People who engage in direct action are not appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy. Their action is not legitimized by anyone and they receive no protection or reward from an authority as they take the action. There’s no monopoly on violence being granted to them by an authority, so there’s nothing to guarantee their safety from retaliation if the action fails or succeeds.
There’s no institutional power-imbalance being created when someone takes direct action against an authority. The authority already created the power imbalance, and your direct action is a form of defense to shield you, your ecosystem or your community from that imbalance.
Direct action is an entirely anarchist tactic, but pinning badges on people, officiating them, and giving them the authority (and the monopoly on violence) to police a store and withhold food and products from certain people for whatever reason has nothing to do with anarchy. Building a hierarchy like this has nothing to do with anarchy.
Police officers and judges (authorities) ruling over a communal store is authoritarian. An officiated police force is a completely different thing from the isolated use of force by a lone actor or a small group of actors to preserve life and combat authority (direct action).
Creating a police force, even if it’s formed of volunteers, even if they were elected, even if they make decisions collectively, even if their uniforms are red and black, even if the officers placed on duty are regularly rotated, is authoritarian by any definition. There are no anarchist cops. An “anarchist cop” couldn’t be a bigger oxymoron.
Here’s an example of direct action: me punching a logger who is cutting down my favorite tree. This action is completely removed from structural systems of authority because I have no authority or structural power behind me. There’s nothing legitimizing my use of force or giving me a monopoly on violence. My use of force doesn’t extend beyond my own two fists. Since assault is illegal, and his logging is legal, the logger has the full authority of the law behind him, so any action I take to oppose that authority is punching up. It’s fighting to curve a gross power imbalance. It’s anarchy.
In this civilized world, I could be severely punished by law enforcement for using force to stop his desecration of a forest. As the state gave him his logging permit, he has authority over the forest and every life that depends on the forest to survive. He punches down every time he fells a tree. He is the full embodiment of archy. If I choose to stand in his way, there’s no state behind me, no court, no police force. Me physically stopping a logger from felling trees is an isolated use of force to strike back at a system of authority. The logger destroys life for profit, and if I take action to stop him because I don’t want to see the forest become a barren desert, I don’t become a state or any kind of authority based on that decision to fight back.
Forming a police squad and a bureaucracy to patrol and govern an officiated communal store, appointing authorities to sit and judge how much each individual deserves to eat, on the other hand, creates legitimized systems of power and an institutional monopoly on violence. It creates a state, or at the very least a proto-state that will later develop into a full-blown state as the bureaucracy grows.
The German philosopher Max Weber defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. State violence, whether it’s committed on behalf of the state by a politician, a judge, a cop or a logger, is always a legitimate force. Any violence the state does is immediately “justified” simply by virtue of it being dispensed by a legitimate state actor who is doing it for the good of the state and its authority.
A logger with an official permit to slice up a forest is thus fully justified in the eyes of society to do as much harm to the forest as is deemed necessary by the authorities who granted the permit.
A state exists wherever an authority can authorize and legitimize violence. There is no way for an anarchist to “justify” a coercive, authoritarian institution such as a police force that will no doubt be biased against minority groups and lead to the accumulation of power by the dominant group, and abuses of power by the people doing the policing. Even if minority groups are involved in the police force, the majority group will still oppress their groups.
A society that mass-produces goods and distributes them in communal stores will manifest itself as a state, regardless of Kropotkin’s insistences that everyone will work voluntarily and then take whatever they want from the stores. There’s no practical scenario where industrial labor is truly voluntary. There’s no practical scenario on this Earth of rapidly diminishing returns where “free” stores won’t need to be policed to deny unlimited goods to individuals and groups who the governing body decides are less worthy of the fruits of their labor.
Anarcho-communism simply isn’t revolutionary as long as we are depleting all our resources in the name of industrial civilization; something anarcho-communism demands as an industrial, work-based ideology that revolves around civilizing the land and its inhabitants in order to extract resources and labor. There’s nothing revolutionary about continuing the global ecocide under the guise of democracy. Every anarchist should understand the difference between isolated force and authority, but very few self-identifying social anarchists seem interested in this and are content prating on about “justified authority”, debating “how an anarcho-communist police force could work” and excitedly discussing Chomsky’s latest speech telling them to vote for a lesser-evil neoliberal politician.
I know I sound bitter, but I’ve been disillusioned with the majority of red anarchists I come into contact with for years now and they only seem to get worse as industrial society plods on and the sands and seas climb further up our necks.
Anarcho-communism is not the solution to fighting authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. A sparkly new paint job. There’s a reason so many ancoms strive to “justify” authority. They don’t actually care about reaching for anarchy.
*** Is Communism Always Authority-Forming?
In my mind, communism can only work outside of industrial mass society. A small community gathering or growing supplies and freely sharing them with the rest of the community. Each community trading with other small communities. Marx and Engels ironically dubbed this hunter-gatherer form of society that had long existed in human history as “primitive communism” and suggested it was inferior to their advanced industrial communism that valued the factory and centralized city life above all else.
Mass industry requires mass agriculture, mass labor, mass transport, mass resource extraction, mass construction, mass policing, mass military... Mass society and will only lead right back to capitalism and statism because it’s so unwieldy and authority forming. Any communist tendency built around industrial exploitation is going to create all kinds of fucked up hierarchies and just lead us right back to the apocalyptic status quo.
Most communists I’ve talked to about this are unable to accept that some people will still act like assholes if capitalism collapses, which I’d probably find endearing if these people weren’t such giant assholes themselves; calling me a privileged reactionary for daring to suggest their blessed ideology might have some flawed logic. They insist everyone will cease being selfish assholes once capitalism is done away with because “assholes are only assholes as long as capitalism pits them against each other.”
Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with. That doesn’t go away overnight. But even without consumer culture to guide them, people are still completely capable of being assholes. Going back to before mass-society even existed, people would murder each other and take their stuff. They’d raid each other’s settlements, they’d steal their children, they’d fight over territory and cultural differences. These aren’t things that were invented by capitalism and they won’t go away just because communism is declared.
People aren’t inherently just or unjust. Humanity is not good or bad. Every person is an individual, each with different experiences, motivations, traumas. Communism expects everyone to be altruistic. Capitalism expects everyone to act out of greed and self preservation. Neither is true because both are ideologically driven worldviews that attempt to define human nature in order to instruct us how to behave by instilling us with their morals. People are greedy, people are generous, people are kind, people are mean-spirited. Every person in the world is all of these things and more. People are not defined by one single personality trait their entire lives.
I’m haunted by every shitty thing I’ve ever done and I’m sure I’ll do more shitty things yet, despite my best intentions. No one is above making mistakes. Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned. There are people in our lives that we trust and people we can’t stand to be around. Not everyone is deserving of the products of our labor. Some people in the world will always try to exploit you, even if they already have everything their hearts could possibly desire. Some people will be kind to you no matter how big an asshole you are.
I’ve been accused by communists of being cynical, of being “regressive” and “counter-revolutionary” because I don’t buy into the communist notion that humans are inherently good and they just need the right industrial system to bring that good out of them.
Any society where I’m expected to just sit back and watch as a logger destroys my ecosystem because he’s serving the “greater good” isn’t a society I want any part of. I value my autonomy over the desires of traumatized workers pushing buttons for 8 hours a day in a city far-removed from me. I’d rather take the logger’s chainsaw away than fiddle my thumbs as he takes everything I know, and to hell with whatever bureaucratic process enshrined him with the right to decimate the forest to give bread to the workers. Fuck the workers and their bread and their fully-automated luxury communism and their divine democratic rights.
There’s simply no reason to believe exploitative assholes will go away if communism is ever enacted.
There’s a man I know who constantly exploits me for my labor, and I always go along with it. He dangles a carrot on a stick in front of me every time; promising that after I help him, he’ll hook me up to his well so I can have free water for my trees. For years he’s made this promise.
I’ve spent countless hours doing dangerous work for this guy with no reward. He always disappears after I do the work without giving me what he promised. Then the next week he wakes me up again at 6am on a Saturday by honking his horn, apologizes for not getting around to hooking me up to the well yet, saying he was too busy or in the hospital or had a family emergency, promises he’ll do it this week, and then I’m hanging off a cliff or a roof repairing pipes for him all day while he barks orders at me.
I do it because I’m a fucking pushover who can’t say no to people due to my ridiculous kind nature. But whenever I ask him for anything, I’m met with a blank stare, an abrupt subject change or a sorry excuse. I was stranded a two hour walk down the mountain last week when my car broke down, and he drove right around me and didn’t even slow down. When I saw him later, he swore on his life that he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes. I nodded and shrugged.
Communism wouldn’t stop this lying dipshit from exploiting me; he’d still need someone to fix his leaky pipes, start up his diesel generator, saw off the upper branches of his olive trees and climb shoddy makeshift structures for him regardless of the economic system in place. He’d still give me a sob story about his painful ulcer and I’d still do the hard work to spare him the pain of doing it himself. He wouldn’t stop being an exploitative asshole just because democracy is installed in the workplace. He wouldn’t start practising mutual aid when he goes to great lengths to avoid all work and shames other people into doing it for him.
Red anarchists throw every insult in the book at me when I voice my doubts about their wistful ideologies; condemning me for being critical of the amazing breadman Kropotkin or their “green industry” tsar Professor Bookchin... It’s hard to give my perspective as an indigenous anarchist to these people who are so hostile to any worldview that doesn’t validate their luxurious industrial lifestyle and their driving desire to make that lifestyle more democratic in order to receive a bigger share of the pie.
Between the shouts of “reactionary lifestylist” and “dirty primmie” they lobby at me, I try to explain my perspective to them. I see suffering in the world and I want to make sense of it. I’m not satisfied just handwaving it away and clinging to fanciful utopian ideologies designed to energize European factory workers from the 1800s. I don’t believe red-industry will cure society of all its ills and free humans from their chains.
The warehouse I’ve worked in for more than a decade will not become magically liberating if I’m given the power of democracy. It’ll still be a miserable fucking place filled with toxic pesticides that are slowly killing me.
Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that just amounts to “no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so”. They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism. I’ve really run out of patience for that line of thinking. It’s no different than a 7 year old trying to win an argument by insisting “because my dad said so”... But when it comes down to it, that’s all most reds can do. Quote their heroes and cling to the hope that they’ll be proven right some day. That hope is what keeps them going as their miserable civilized lives burn the world up. “All our suffering will end once we have democracy in the workplace”. Those poor, deluded, hope-filled souls.
Everything I know tells me industry cannot be made “green” any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods and distribute them to millions or billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems and human lives. Ancoms are not magical beings that can somehow escape the consequences of this because they’re supposedly “good” and “egalitarian”.
If anarcho-communism were ever attempted, half the “nuances” it has will be thrown out for being fantastic, half-baked and impossible to implement in an industrial mass-society. Compromises will be made to make the system functional. A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because:
a. Resources aren’t infinite.
b. Industrial output has a high ‘hidden’ cost, and most importantly:
c. Work isn’t voluntary.
No matter how much you swear you’ll make labor democratic, no one is working because they really want to. They’re working because the system requires them to work to survive. No amount of democracy will stop the system from asserting its authority on everyone inside its suffocating walls. Abolishing the borders between territories will do nothing if industrial civilization continues to box us in and starve us if we dare to resist its rule. If we can’t escape civilization, the whole world is nothing more than one big prison.
Civilized people labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories and warehouses in “a communist society” is if they are forced to by the system. No free hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes, weedkiller and AAA batteries. It’s something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system.
Industry is a clear authority and anarcho-communist theory is completely oblivious to that. Anarcho-communism is nothing more than an attempt to reform the tyranny of civilization to give it a sly smile. It’s the anarchist version of Barack Obama promising change but just delivering more of the same and expecting you to celebrate it.
*** Seize the Means of Destruction! (And fucking burn it to the ground…)
Ancoms insist “people would choose to produce only what is needed” in an anarcho-communist society. That word; “needed” is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being “needed”, but almost none of the things defined as such are actually needed. This is why industrial communism isn’t really compatible with anarchy: anything and everything will be defined as “needed” by domesticated people, no matter how authority-forming the things are. If it means they get to keep consuming, anarcho-consumers would happily define everything from pesticides to slaughterhouses to automobile plants as “needed”. This is the power of democracy. Whatever narrative the collective adopts becomes the official, approved narrative and anyone questioning it will be seen as subversive and dangerous and a threat to order and common decency.
This “needed industry” argument is a lot like the “justified authority” argument a lot of red “anarchists” keep making to uphold every shitty authority they cling to all the way up to the state, prisons and the police.
Usually they’ll just rename these authorities “the commune”, “the social re-integration facility” and “the peacekeepers” and be satisfied that they’ve come up with a real change. It’s meaningless. Domesticated people will not allow themselves to see past the carefully manufactured alienating world they’ve inherited. Very few civilized people are willing to risk losing what they perceive as the great comforts imbibed to them by industrial civilization.
Even if they recognize how strangling these “comforts” actually are to them and everything else on the planet, instead of rejecting them outright, they draw up elaborate plans to reform the way those “comforts” are produced and dispersed. Most of these plans, when deconstructed and debullshitted, ultimately amount to little more than slapping the word “anarcho” in front of everything and trusting it’ll be all good because it’s anarchized now.
People thrived without industry and agriculture for millennia. Civilization has led to the extinction of near everything on the planet. 99.9% of industrial goods are not “needed” by humanity, they’re wanted.
Ancoms aren’t going to suddenly decide to give up their phones, Doritos and washing machines when they find out they’re environmentally destructive. They’ll just rubber-stamp all the things they want as “needed”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” or “green” and call it a day. And we’ll be expected to keep working our miserable jobs and like it because now they’re anarcho-jobs in an anarcho-society with anarcho-exploitation and anarcho-masters.
Keeping people in the mines and factories building those consumer goods that “the people” decide they “need” will require massive authority that will be just another iteration of capitalism in all but name. Just like “communist” Russia and “communist” China and “communist” North Korea. Not a trace of communism will survive once industrial civilization is done grinding everything up. There’s nothing about “anarcho-communism” that will spare it from the same fate. Claiming to be anti-authority rings hollow when you cling to authoritarian industrial civilization, workerism and all the other authorities ancoms at large decide are “justified”.
A bureaucracy will always be instilled in an organized mass-society and this is why industrial communism isn’t tenable. It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been manifested as a perverse collective-capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism. The bureaucracy will quickly morph into a state, and by definition the society will no longer be communist. But of course, it’ll keep calling itself “communist” and ensure the distinction between capitalism and communism remains paper-thin so people won’t be able to envision a better world than the brutal industrial wasteland we’ve all been born into.
Any system that allocates resources and polices people is functionally a state, regardless of what it brands itself as.
All implementations of industrial society have failed to liberate people, instead making their lives more and more miserable with each stage of industrialism, and to claim that attaching “anarcho” to the front of an industrial system will make a difference is absolutely fucking ridiculous.
Communism has never succeeded at liberating us historically and will not suddenly succeed just because you promise you’re better than other communists and you and all your super-libertarian ancom comrades will pick up cans of paint and make all the chimney stacks bright green.
Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy. Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.
Without this bureaucracy, the society would descend into anarchy. Yes, wonderful, amazing, freeing anarchy. The very thing every red fears most because it would mean they’d no longer get to forcibly structure society and people around their sacred ideology and force their authority and morality on them. Domesticated people sit trapped in sterile little boxes, fed a steady drip of pesticide and high-fructose corn syrup as they labor, consume, consume, consume and then die.
This isn’t life. This isn’t anarchy. This is a waking nightmare, a depraved hell-world that has all of us thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it acceptable. Branding it “communist” or “libertarian socialist” or “democratic” or “egalitarian” or “decentralized” or “anarcho-communist” will not end the nightmare. It will not stop the planet-wide ecocide civilization has wrought on all living things. The means of destruction being controlled by industrial workers instead of industrial bosses will not stop the ecocide.
Seizing the factories and making them democratically managed as all reds yearn to do won’t do anything to save us from violence, misery, alienation and eventual extinction.
The only way to destroy authority is to burn industry to the ground before it devours every last lifeform on the planet.
The only chance we have to survive what’s coming in the next few years as our ecosystems are collapsing all around us is to tear down every factory and close every port and slice up every road until civilization is in ruins.
But in all honesty, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to watch television and sip iced tea and we’re going to wait for the end. I’m going to keep watching in silence as the local bread man fells the last remaining wilderness.
Maybe the planet will recover somewhat in a few millennia and maybe the next lifeform that evolves will have more sense than the desertmakers. This is the last hope I cling to.
|
#title But the Government Said I Have Rights
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics rights, human rights, natural rights, government, George Carlin, civil rights, liberties, pursuit of happiness
#date April 2022
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/humanrights
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-04-07T12:51:18
George Carlin:
<quote>
In 1942, there were a 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had, “right this way” – into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took ’em away. And rights aren’t rights if someone can take ’em away. They’re privileges, that’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter.[1]
</quote>
An extension of the class system, societies draw clear lines between people with rights and people without them: Migrants versus citizens, educated versus uneducated, homeless versus homed, convicts versus non-convicts, men versus women, heterosexual vs homosexual, white versus non-white.
Governments create rights so they can meter them out to certain segments of the population, pitting everyone against each other in a vicious competition for civil liberties and economic advantage. So long as everyone has to fight for their place in the world, they'll have no time or energy to fight the system that creates and enforces these gross inequalities.
There are the two types of ”rights” to consider:
1. Legal rights / civil rights / statutory rights.
2. Natural rights / moral rights / inalienable rights / human rights.
Legal rights depend on the rule of law within a nation. For legal rights to be granted to you, first a state must exercise its monopoly on violence to strip you of all your freedom, and then trickle-feed certain allowances back to you with stringent stipulations e.g. limiting credit to white capital owners or denying voting rights to people with criminal records.
The entire concept of legal rights depends on a state denying you all the possible freedoms they can think of, but then permitting you to file the paperwork to reclaim a few largely inconsequential ones: Usually voting, citizenship, schooling, taxation with representation, the pursuit of profit, land deeds, birth certificates, marriage certificates, copyright, driving licenses, passports and death certificates.
These are all things that cement the state's power and further its reach, while making citizens dependent on the state for survival. The statesmen always stipulate that they can strip citizens of these entitlements at their sole and absolute discretion, ensuring people who live under the authority of the state will have little choice but to bend the knee and accept any and all atrocities committed on them to avoid further incurring the wrath of the pampered narcissists who rule the world.
Arrested for protesting a developer's destruction of your local lake? Killed your rapist? Dumpster dived for food? Crossed a border without the right passport? Blocked a pipeline from being built through your only water source? Occupied a vacant lot to grow a garden? Distributed food to homeless people without a license? The state can now strip you of your remaining morsels of freedom for violating its tomes upon tomes of laws.
So, for you to accept the authority of legislators to allocate rights to you, to permit you such luxuries as “free“ speech and the right to vote to select the party who will take their turn ruling you, you're effectively accepting and legitimizing a violent, thieving, bloodthirsty gang's power over you. You're entering into a contract whereupon you exchange your freedom for a few privileges that can and will be taken back from you by the state without notice.
This is why the concept of rights ought to be rejected by people who seek freedom through anarchy. Why willingly accept a lifelong contract placing ourselves into the service of arrogant statesmen who promise us a modicum of mercy in exchange for this unadulterated control over our lives?
Among the much ballyhooed rights they coax us with, they offer us the amazing opportunity to be imprisoned but not tortured if we sign on the dotted line. But then they change the terms of the contract once we're in their custody and torture us anyway. Their authority allows them to set the terms and alter them as it suits them. Their sadistic power-hungry disposition will always lead them to pull away the rights they promised us, just because they can.
George Carlin:
<quote>
Yeah… sooner or later the people in this country gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety, it simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power, that’s the only thing, keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.
</quote>
In relationships of rulers and obeyers, the rulers have all the power: They decide what is and isn't a right and what does and doesn't violate the right. The people with the power can rewrite reality at will, they can torture you to death and never admit what they did to you was torture. The United States calls their torture of prisoners of war ”enhanced coercive interrogation techniques”. That's really all it takes to bypass rights: a person in power using craven euphemisms when they torture their prisoners.
If slavery conflicts with the rights they claim we have, they can just substitute the word ”slave” for ”inmate” and it's all good. If every prisoner has a right to due process, they can just have military commissions spend decades putting on show ”forever trials” that never attempt to convict the prisoner, but keep them in custody in perpetuity.[2]
Legal rights are a paper thin safety blanket in the face of an icy authority blizzard that freezes everything in its path. Our rulers take our freedom and then ration small pieces of it back to us in a highly controlled environment if we agree to follow their laws, obey their enforcers, pay them daily tributes and do a lifetime of menial labor in exchange for the right to exist while they live in the lap of luxury on our backs.
Legal rights are a few minor and temporary exemptions to the state's absolute rule over you. These exemptions are only permitted to you by the ruling class so long as they don't interfere with their economic interests and so long as you remain wholly subservient to them, never threatening their absolute authority over you.
Pëtr Kropotkin:
<quote>
This is what these so-called liberties can be reduced to. Freedom of press and of meeting, inviolability of home and all the rest, are only respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to undermine those privileges, the so-called liberties will be cast overboard.
This is quite natural. Humanity retains only the rights it has won by hard struggle and is ready to defend at every moment, with arms in hand.[3]
</quote>
Natural rights are even more ridiculously fantastical than legal rights, if that's even possible. They're supposedly fundamental to existence, granted to us by nature or God, universally accepted by all and can’t be contradicted by any legal entity. These are the three ”natural universal rights”, based on the idea that all people are created equal:
1. The right to liberty
2. The right to the pursuit of happiness
3. The right to life
Thomas Jefferson, a plantation-owner and serial rapist[4] who owned more than 600 black people, complained that England’s King George III failed to recognize the natural rights of American colonists and drafted the American Declaration of Independence to right this dreadful wrong.
In the first two paragraphs of this historic rights document, Jefferson outlines these natural rights, mentioning that ”all men are created equal”, have ”inalienable rights,” and are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The irony was apparently lost on him, as it's lost on all authority figures who tell us sweet lies about our amazing God / government-given rights while sapping our blood, sweat and tears to enlarge their plantations and mansions.
Mahatma Gandhi, who also happened to be a serial sex pest[5] and a racist, was another big pusher of human rights. While he promoted his philosophy of nonviolence and equal opportunity, he went out of his way to rob the Dalit (people belonging to the lowest caste in India) of their agency[6], declaring he would go on a hunger strike to the death if they were given anything resembling equality. If even the people most associated with the promotion of natural rights spent their lives brutalizing women, children and racial minorities while facing zero consequences for it, at what point does the rights charade fall apart? How can rights ever be real in a world with such rigid hierarchical social relations?
George Carlin:
<quote>
Boy, everyone in this country is always running around yammering about their fucking rights. I have a right, you have no right, we have a right, they don’t have a right… Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but-there’s no such thing as rights, okay? They’re imaginary. We made them up! Like the Boogie Man… the Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea, they’re just imaginary, they are a cute idea, cute… but that’s all, cute, and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, where do they come from? People say, well, they come from God, they’re God-given rights… Aw fuck, here we go again… here we go again. The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, it came from God. Anything we can’t describe, must have come from God.
</quote>
Natural rights aren't upheld by nature or a higher being, they're just as artificially constructed and deceptive as legal rights, but with even less utility since they have no solid, corporeal form that can be petitioned for mercy like a courtroom judge in the case of legal rights. God isn't going to enforce your God-given rights, no matter how much you beg.
We have no perceivable right to liberty when all the resources we depend on to survive are owned by someone else, who will cruelly withhold those resources if we don't live by their laws and forever humble ourselves at their feet... Praying they'll agree to fulfill our basic needs and permit us to survive another day.
Likewise, the pursuit of happiness is clearly reserved for the upper classes, while us poors have no recourse but to accept an endless parade of humiliation, coercion and violence in service of their colossal egos. The noblemen spend their lives erecting impenetrable barriers to prevent us from eating even a single crumb from their organic blueberry pie, so the idea that they have ever allowed us to pursue our own happiness is offensive. We live only to serve the moneyed class and staff their lavish properties.
Finally, our supposed right to life is forfeit the moment a policeman, settler or soldier decides we're resisting their authority and takes away either our freedom or our life. It's forfeit when we fall ill and can no longer work to pay our bills, cast out into the cold to freeze and die.
Our rights were never anything more than hot air pouring out of the mouths of the well-heeled hustlers who rule the kingdoms of democracy.
Bob Black:
<quote>
There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.” Everybody likes human rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.
Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says, “even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.” These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince Kropotkin, among others, are regarded.[7]
</quote>
The UN's ”Universal Declaration of Human Rights” is a document that purports to enshrine a long list of privileges for all people including dignity, liberty, and equality. It prohibits slavery and torture, guarantees freedom of movement and residence, the right of property, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to a nationality.
It's plain to see none of these things are actually upheld by UN member states. Slavery is still rampant all over the world, including state-sponsored slavery (in prisons), torture such as waterboarding is commonplace for prisoners of war, and no one in the lower classes has anything resembling dignity, liberty, equality, an adequate standard of living or freedom of movement and residence. If this document had any value at all, its most powerful member states like the USA wouldn't be openly violating every one of these rights every day of the year.
Neither natural rights nor legal rights are compatible with anarchy because anarchy recognizes no authority. Anarchists reject the power our rulers grant themselves to decide which privileges to bestow on the groups and individuals who are able and willing to meet their impossibly strict standards, and which privileges to deny.
No one should have the power to stand on a pedestal and decree to us what we do and don't deserve, what we can say and can't say, when we get to eat and where we ought to sleep.
Rather than swallowing mythic tales about human rights and gaslighting ourselves into believing governments will ever grant us anything resembling freedom, why not reach for something real? Something that has shape and substance. There are no rights, no universal laws that will magically protect us from the people who write the laws. No. There are only desires. And the thing all anarchists desire most is freedom. Freedom from rule, from law, from authority, from the wrath of the rights-giver.
We don't need rights, we need anarchy.
[1] Carlin, George. <em>You have no rights</em> [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4]].
[2] Sorkin, Amy Davidson. <em>The Forever Trial at Guantánamo</em>. [[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-forever-trial-at-guantanamo]].
[3] Kropotkin, Pëtr. <em>Words of a Rebel, Chapter 5: Political Rights</em>. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-words-of-a-rebel-1#toc7]]
[4] Steinberg, Neil. <em>A Rapist and Slaver Who Did Other Things</em>. [[https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/5/27/22456533/thomas-jefferson-monticello-slaves-sally-hemings-george-floyd]]
[5] Banerji, Rita. <em>Gandhi Used His Position To Sexually Exploit Young Women. The Way WE React To This Matters Even Today</em>. [[https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2013/10/gandhi-used-power-position-exploit-young-women-way-react-matters-even-today/]]
[6] Sen, Mayukh. <em>Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him</em>. [[https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezj3km/gandhi-was-a-racist-who-forced-young-girls-to-sleep-in-bed-with-him]]
[7] Black, Bob. <em>The Myth of Human Rights</em>. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-myth-of-human-rights]]
|
#title Do Anarchists Support Democracy?
#author ziq
#LISTtitle Do Anarchists Support Democracy?
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics democracy, voting, elections, Direct Democracy, consensus, theory
#date 2018
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/democracy
#lang en
*** Understanding Democracy
The word "democracy" comes from two Greek words:
<em>demo-</em> a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “people.”
<em>-cracy</em>: a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, with the meaning “rule,” “government,” “governing body.”
So democracy literally means: "Rule by the people." Or more specifically, the majority of the people.
In my mind, anyone that aims for us to be ruled, even by "the people" (as abstract and meaningless as that concept is) is not promoting anarchy. But unfortunately this view is not always shared by the people calling themselves anarchists today. It's difficult for me to imagine that an anarchist; who is presumably opposed to authority in all its guises and hopefully rejects the very notion of rulers, would then consent to being ruled by "the people"... I know I sure as hell don't want to be ruled by anyone. But a lot of anarchists continue to romanticize democracy, perhaps because they're unable to break through the years of propaganda fed to them by the state and its schooling and media apparatuses.
From an early age, it's hammered into us that democracy = freedom. Any anarchist will tell you that although most of us live in societies that are governed by forms of democracy, none of us have anything resembling freedom. Yet a lot of us make excuses to ourselves so we can continue to romanticize democracy... Tell a room full of anarchists that you oppose democracy and you'll no doubt hear impassioned insistences that what we have now isn't "real" democracy, but "if we had anarchism, we'd have "real" democracy and things would be different, because anarchism is the only real democracy!"
A lot of anarchists spend a lot of effort holding onto oppressive phantoms like democracy and go through great lengths to fuse these liberal concepts with anarchy, when we really have no reason to. Anarchists who insist anarchy and democracy are one and the same when democracy is responsible for an endless list of horrible atrocities do no service to anarchy.
Our rulers use democracy to separate us into in-groups and out-groups, pitting the majority group against the minority groups and giving everyone a false sense of control. We're made to believe we have a say in how our lives are run because we get to participate in glorious democracy. Of course, all of us outside the ruling class continue to be exploited, living in perpetual servitude, and the only people who really benefit from democracy are the ruling class who use it to keep us alienated and distracted so we don't rise up and kill them all for the debilitating misery they create. Anarchy rejects authority and it rejects the domination of majority groups over minority groups. Anarchy is about upholding each individual's autonomy and dismantling the authority forced on us by oppressive actors.
Democracy grants authority to favored groups to oppress minority groups. Democracy ignores the autonomy of the individual in favor of the collective will of the dominant group. Democracy exists to enable rulers to uphold brutal power hierarchies. It's really the full embodiment of authority; used to maintain the tyrannical capitalist-statist status quo all over the world today.
*** The Failure of Democracy
Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, however you try to window-dress it. In practice, all forms of democracy have been used by a majority group to control or otherwise dictate to a minority group. All forms of democracy have been used to smother autonomy, to stifle self-determination, and to absolve rulers of responsibility for their actions. How can a ruler be responsible for their atrocities when "the people" elected them and empowered them to commit those atrocities?
Though you'll never hear democracy-fetishists mention it, Hitler was technically democratically elected in accordance with the German political system. His actions after being elected were largely supported by the majority group in Germany. All the atrocities he committed were done on behalf of that majority group; to strengthen the position of "Aryan" Christians in society at the expense of everyone else. The German people empowered Hitler to maintain their privilege at all cost.
There's no reason so-called "real" democracy would be any different than the democracy that created nazi Germany. Participatory democracy would just allow more members of the dominant group to more directly participate in enacting brutal policies.
"Real" democracy won't stop people from choosing to oppress others to benefit their own group. If the majority of WW2 Germans stood by and cheered while people were carted off to concentration camps, why would anyone think "real" democracy would have changed that? Throughout history, whenever a skilled propagandist points the finger at a minority group, the majority group tears them limb from limb. This is democracy in action. White supremacy and even genocide have been propped up with the power of democracy countless times.
*** Democracy or Anarchy?
So do anarchists support democracy? Not if those anarchists have a fully developed understanding of what anarchy entails. Not if they're serious about liberating themselves from authority and crushing hierarchies as they form.
Democracy is really not compatible with anarchy in any permeable way. It could be a useful process for gauging the views of each member of a small group, but that shouldn't be enough for us to make the claim that "anarchy is democratic". Anarchy is the opposition to authority. It's the struggle against oppression. The quest to limit suffering. We shouldn't be claiming anarchy is defined by democracy; which is a specific system of government that demands people be ruled by other people.
If you ask 10 random anarchists whether they support democracy, you're certain to get a mixed response. Every person you ask will be at a different point on their political journey, and some anarchists will spend a lot more time thinking about labor rights, housing, migrant aid and other pressing concerns, while putting very little philosophical thought into the nature of hierarchy and all the ways it manifests itself and becomes ingrained in our lives.
Collectivist-minded anarchists will usually insist on direct-democracy and consensus-democracy as decision-making mechanisms, but it frequently leads to problems when certain members of the group don't fall in line with the majority's agenda. The bigger the group, the more likely this is to happen. The minority members will inevitably grow frustrated at this oppression and either leave the group or be forced to conform in order to stay.
In practical terms, for example, this could mean all black people in a community could be alienated, marginalized or even forced to leave their homes altogether because the white majority have voted to ignore their concerns in order to safeguard white privilege. Democracy and marginalization tend to come as a group deal. "Power to the people" really means "power to the most powerful group of people", and the more power the powerful group has, the less power the marginalized groups have.
*** The Authority of Democracy
Western democracy originated in ancient Greece. This political system granted democratic citizenship to free men, while excluding slaves, foreigners and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, this was what democracy meant. An elite class of free men made all the decisions for everyone. Before Athens adopted democracy, aristocrats ruled society, so "rule by the people", or the idea of a government controlled (in theory) by all its (free) male citizens instead of a few wealthy families seemed like a good deal. But really it was just a new iteration of Aristocracy rule rather than the revolution it's painted as. The rich still rule society by feeding voters carefully constructed propaganda and keeping everyone poor, overworked and desperate to be granted basic needs by the state.
In democracies today, only legal citizens of a country are granted democracy. In a lot of countries, people who have been convicted of a "crime" are denied the right to vote, regardless of how long ago they served their sentence. In the US, this is used to deny voting rights to minority groups, who make up a large proportion of the prison population.
In some societies only a small minority group are allowed to participate in the democracy. In Apartheid South Africa, the minority group (European settlers) granted themselves democracy and excluded the native majority, using democracy to deprive the native population of the rights granted to European settlers. Anarchy, of course, is an absence of government; of rulers. Democracy aims for the individual to be governed, ruled, controlled by others. So its plain to see that anarchy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
There has been a lot written outlining why the concept of democracy simply cannot be made compatible with anarchy, yet a lot of people identifying as anarchists today refuse to let go of the idea of democracy as a revolutionary method, and insist it can somehow overcome its inherently hierarchical nature and long history of oppression. In all honestly, a lot of these people are simply confused minarchists that don't actually want to abolish hierarchy; but instead minimize it.
*** Consensus Democracy?
Consensus democracy aims to get everyone in a group to agree to take a unified path of action. It sounds good in theory, but the only way to get everyone from disparate backgrounds and experiences to agree to the same thing is to water down the plan to such an extent that the action will likely become meaningless. Consensus democracy assumes the majority group won't bully or peer pressure the minority group into folding to their will. It ignores the basic reality that some people will aggressively force their will on others, or at least shame or manipulate opponents into submission.
The whole concept of consensus democracy reminds me of that meme with the smug guy sitting at the booth with the "change my mind" sign; inviting his political opponents to debate him. I can safely say if I saw that guy sitting at that booth, I'd walk the other way. Why should anyone be put in a situation where they're forced to expend all their energy to change someone's mind? Just do your own thing and don't worry about people that don't want to participate in what you're doing. If people have fundamental disagreements, then they don't need to cooperate. It's not the end of the world.
Fruitless attempts to get everyone to reach the same agreement is just the latest form of the bureaucratic meandering that has long sabotaged political action. After countless hours of heated debate, and a long series of compromises, the consensus reached (if it's ever reached at all) will likely be very watered down from its initial form and be of little benefit to anyone in the group. A plan for concrete action will have been turned into a frustrating exercise in concession, tepid half-measures, and ultimately; inaction. All because the people who made the plan felt the need to gain the approval of a committee of naysayers before pursuing it.
*** Anarchy Doesn't Need Democracy
Instead of a large group laboring to make democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it would be far more productive for smaller groups made up of people with shared interests to splinter off and co-operate to follow their own plans that require no compromise because their interests are already aligned. Throughout history, democracy has existed to legitimize authority, providing justification for hierarchical power structures by framing every oppressive action the state takes against us as "the will of the people". It has long enabled the powerful to crush the powerless. People who insist on associating anarchism with democracy are trying to legitimize anarchism, to associate it with comfortable institutions embraced by thoroughly indoctrinated liberals. But anarchy has no want or need for legitimization. Anarchy doesn't need to be watered down to broaden its appeal to a public that is high on hierarchy.
Anarchists always oppose monarchy; the rule of one. We always oppose oligarchy; the rule of a few. So why wouldn't we oppose democracy; the rule of many? Why should the many get to decide how you or I live our lives? A ruler is a ruler is a ruler. Democracy has been expertly wielded as a weapon by the elites in society. By combining democracy with meticulously-crafted propaganda, the powerful are able to control voters and manipulate them into voting against their own interests.
Democracy has forever been synonymous with class based societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties (conservative and "progressive") that are nevertheless permanently at each other's throats. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.
You can't strive to replace an artificial system as brutally hierarchical as democracy with a supposedly more egalitarian version of the same thing and call it anarchy. You have to throw the whole rotten system out.
Reject democracy. Reject the notion that you should be ruled by anyone. Embrace self-determination. Embrace anarchy.
|
#title Do Anarchists Support “Free Speech”?
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics free speech, rights, state power, anti-state, primer, censorship, introduction, introductory
#date 2018
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/free_speech
#lang en
<quote>
“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. “downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”
</quote>
The concept of “free speech” is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have “rights” that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.
In actuality, the state doesn’t give you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them. It uses its monopoly on violence to censor, stalk, spy on, imprison and terrorize anyone that would threaten to subvert its power.
When an authority grants you “free speech”, what they’ve really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There’s nothing “free” about this. You’re still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You’re still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You’re still beaten to a bloody pulp (or worse) for talking back to a cop. You’ll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.
Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.
Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve. So as anarchists; as people who don’t want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as “free speech”. Much more honest words for this concept would be “controlled speech” or “state-approved speech”.
Really, when the state talks about freedom of speech, they’re most often talking about the freedom to be a hateful bigot — since bigotry is really the only type of speech the state will go out of its way to protect. Bigotry allows the state to scapegoat undesirable groups and thus create gaping social divisions. If everyone is villainizing migrants or gays, those groups will serve as a fine distraction. Ensuring our rulers and their benefactors can live to exploit us for another day as we focus our rage at anyone but them.
According to the state, white supremacists are free to incite hatred against non-whites (which has often led to mass murder), but if someone were to say they think the president of the nation deserves to be stabbed for his crimes... Well, that person would promptly be carted off to prison for voicing such a dangerous idea.
Unfortunately, some people insist on using bigoted or otherwise oppressive language in anarchist spaces, claiming that free speech allows them to do so. Since we’ve established that free speech is nothing more than an insipid lie our rulers tell us in order to control us, it’s important that we reject the dishonest language of the state when talking about anarchy, and take a long hard look at the reasons someone would have for clinging to the state’s shrewd promises of “rights” and “freedoms” that simply don’t exist.
“Free speech” is not an anarchist principle in any way. Actual anarchist principles of course include direct action, mutual aid, taking a strong stance against authority in all its guises, as well as freedom of association. This means we are free to associate with whoever we want and free to avoid associating with people that would build authoritarian structures to oppress us.
So let’s talk about the people who enter anarchist spaces, direct slurs and hateful bigoted rhetoric at us, and then insist we accept their abuse because they have the sacred right to freedom of speech... These people simply have no understanding of anarchy. Their “right to free speech” that they insist we respect could only be granted to them by a state with a monopoly on violence. If someone comes into your space and calls you a racial slur, no institution should have the power to stop you from showing that person the door.
It takes an incredibly sheltered person to believe there should be no consequences for abuse. When someone is abusing you or people you care about, you should absolutely be free to take a stand and remove them from your space, no matter how many times the person cries “free speech!” as they’re telling you you’re a worthless (slur).
The “freedom” to scapegoat, demonize and demean people who are different from you really stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. Discriminating against people based on ability, race, gender or sexuality creates authority. It makes you an authoritarian. Your rhetoric directly alienates the people who belong to the groups you’re choosing to look down on in disgust and present as less-than human. By using demeaning language to chastise marginalized people for their perceived inadequacies, you’re upholding normative social roles, creating classes and subclasses and strengthening the authoritarian power structures that directly oppress any people that belong to minority groups.
For example, by using the word “faggot” as an insult, you effectively cast gay people as being worthy of scorn and derision. You assert authority over everyone who isn’t heterosexual and make life incredibly difficult for people that don’t meet the normative standards you’ve helped construct to maintain the social dominance of heterosexuals.
Anarchists can and will choose to not associate with people that claim they have a right to oppress others. Anarchists are anti-authoritarian to our core, and this means we don’t have to put up with hateful bigots in our spaces.
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#title Fuck Your Red Revolution
#subtitle Against Ecocide, Towards Anarchy
#author ziq
#SORTtopics anti-civ, green anarchism, individualist anarchism, ethics, post-left, vegan, communism, lifestyle anarchism, industrialism, civilization, industry, ecocide, collapse
#date 2019-02-02
#source Retrieved on 2019-04-23 from https://raddle.me/wiki/no_ethical_consumption
#lang en
*** Let Go Of Your Tedious Slogans
“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a tired meme that I wish would die. So often this slogan is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us that strive to make life choices that aid harm-reduction in our communities and our natural environments.
Vegan diets, bicycling, dumpster diving, upcycling, guerilla gardening, permaculture, squatting, illegalism, food forestry, communes, self-sufficiency, and all the other “lifestylist” pursuits “individualist” anarchists undertake to minimize their harm on the environment are shamed and mocked by many anarcho-communists, social-ecologists, anarcho-transhumanists, syndicalists and other industry-upholding anarchists. These reds are well-versed in workerist rhetoric, and see all lifestyle choices as “a distraction” from the global proletarian revolution they see as their singular goal.
You’ll hear them talk down to other anarchists who are discussing ethical ways to curtail their consumption, especially people that live off the land or otherwise limit their participation in industrial civilization; people they loudly dismiss and condemn as “primmies” or “lifestylists”.
They’ll tell us to stop living our lives in the pursuit of personal anarchy because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. In the red mind, as long as a capitalist system has been imposed on the world, there”s no point in reaching for anarchy until that system has been overthrown and replaced with their system. Regardless of how unlikely it is that this will happen in our lifetimes.
Using “no ethical consumption” to shame people for making the effort to live more conscientiously, and decrying all individual action as “counter-revolutionary” or “liberal” comes from a deeply authoritarian mindset reminiscent of toxic Maoist purges that punished people for dressing differently or having hobbies or doing anything but devote themselves 100% to destructive industrial labor and the glory of “the revolution” (almost always manifested in the form of a red state).
The red influence in anarchist discourse is unfortunately dominant in most developed parts of the world, and collectivist-minded anarchists insist every anarchist devote themselves to their pipe dream of a mass uprising to seize the factories from the capitalists and turn them over to the workers. They postulate that democratized factories will be more beneficial to workers because they’ll receive a bigger piece of the industrial pie. This is true. But then they claim their ideology will “save the environment” because a worker collective won’t be greedy and destructive like a capitalist board of directors. This is of course completely unfounded and blatantly ignores the history of collectivized industry and its devastating effects on the environment. The glaring reality is that industrial societies all eventually lead to ecocide, without exception.
Countless Marxist revolutions in history did so much damage to the environment that entire territories, such as the area surrounding Chernobyl, were rendered uninhabitable to humans. Babies continue to be born with birth defects today, and cancer rates in the regions devastated by socialist industry continue to be sky high.
Let’s take a brief look at the former USSR’s legacy of careless industrial destruction, with 3 examples.
The Ural River in Magnitogorsk, Russia is still saturated with toxic boron and chromium levels from the nearby Steel Works, poisoning the entire ecosystem and its inhabitants.
The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland water body in the world was largely replaced by the newly emerged Aralkum Desert after the Soviets drained two rivers for irrigation. The sea is now just 10 percent of its original size.
Run-off from oil fields near Baku have rendered all the local water bodies biologically dead, killing off every lifeform that prospered in those ecosystems for millennia.
These are just 3 examples of devastating ecocide caused by the push for industrial growth (which is required to achieve communism according to Marx), and they of course only ever achieved more capitalism and more misery, because industrialism and the continued pursuit of menial labor will not liberate people.
Changing from a vertical to a horizontal hierarchy will benefit the industrial workers in some material ways, certainly, but the wholesale destruction of our planet will not slow down one bit just by instituting a power-shift from bosses to workers. Industrial production depends on non-stop growth, and when you tie the success of a society to industrial production, you create a recipe for disaster. Workers won’t vote to scale down their industry or its environmental impact as their livelihoods depend on their industry’s growth.
And they certainly won’t care about anyone who isn’t also an industrial worker, or preserving their foreign way of life. Indigenous people and anyone living off the land will effectively be seen by red-society as an undesirable out-group. Anyone that can’t measure up to workerist standards of productivity will be seen as a strain on the industrial grind. An enemy of the red revolution.
Any “counter-revolutionary” rebel who dares stand in the way of industrial growth and the spread of industry across land and sea is effectively a liability that needs to be expunged to safeguard the revolution. This is the power of the collective. Comply or be crushed. Red or dead.
So you see, the people parroting “no ethical consumption under capitalism” at you don’t actually have any intention of curbing their destructive consumption, even under communism. Even under anarcho-communism. If anything, they hope to increase their consumption by acquiring more spending power. With communism, they’ll be able to consume as much as a middle-management boss does under capitalism because all workers will receive an equal share (until resources run out and their society collapses).
You cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet, and all industrial ideologies, regardless of whether they brand themselves as “libertarian” or “authoritarian” seem to ignore that simple fact because it would expose their ideology as having zero long-term viability in a world already experiencing unprecedented global collapse.
*** Harm Reduction is Valuable
There’s always a more ethical alternative to everything. That’s the whole point of anarchy, to analyze our actions and our impact on our environment and limit harm, counter authority as much as possible. Ethics isn’t an all or nothing proposition — there are varying degrees of harm.
Just because some solutions aren’t 100% pure and wonderful doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing over much more harmful alternatives. Anarchy is about subverting authority by finding more ethical solutions to every problem we come across.
Here’s an example of several levels of harm reduction that can measurably make a difference. Things that stone-faced reds will no doubt decry as “lifestylist” simply because they don’t succeed in immediately overthrowing capitalism and bringing on a communist utopia:
- Eating vegan locally-grown pesticide-free unprocessed food is absolutely more ethical than eating imported processed meat.
Why?
Far less carbon is burned to grow / store / transport / process / store again / re-transport the food. Workers involved in “organic” agriculture aren’t exposed to the much more dangerous conditions of slaughterhouses / battery farms / pesticides / ships / warehouses. Far less animal suffering and death goes into producing the food. These are real metrics.
There are of course still many downsides to for-profit agriculture including desertification, exploitation of migrant labor, and destruction of native ecosystems to plant monocultures. But it’s still much better than the alternative which ensures far greater harm by every metric...
For instance, the container ships that transport imported food and industrial products burn highly-polluting “bunker fuel”; the black, tarry goo that’s left over when all the higher quality fuels like petrol, diesel and kerosene have been extracted from crude oil. In 2009, confidential data was leaked showing that a single container ship produces as much pollution as 50 million cars. The ship workers will be the first to breathe in these highly concentrated fumes. Avoiding imported food goes a long way in fighting exploitation.
- Buying seeds / cuttings / grafts and growing your own food in a community garden, as well as dumpster diving from outside supermarkets is more ethical than buying locally grown food from a for-profit business.
Why?
Even less carbon is burned, waste is diverted from landfills, there are no workers to exploit or endanger, there is no animal suffering and death if you use no-till methods. You control everything that goes into the soil (and ultimately your community’s bodies) and can thus stave off desertification and actually improve the soil and rebuild the ecosystem.
Downsides: Native flora is displaced in favor of domesticated food crops. Land ownership feeds the state via taxes (unless you use squatted land to plant the garden). Living in a city means you’ll still be consuming a lot of things you can’t produce yourself in your limited space. But again, this is a measurable improvement over the previous scenario.
- Moving out of the city to a rural area and living as a subsistence farmer to grow all your own food in a food forest you plant, giving away or trading your surplus. Foraging for food where it’s sustainable to do so. Planting trees on every unused piece of land you see.
Why?
Erosion and desertification is effectively stopped in its tracks wherever food forests rise. The trees clean the air of carbon. Trees are by far the plants most adept at evapotranspiration, and are integral to the water-cycle all lifeforms depend on. The climate in the area is safeguarded, with increased humidity and rainfall.
Forest gardening rewilds the planet. Pre-civilized peoples made the rainforests as abundant as they are by curating them and spreading the plants they found most beneficial. If enough people planted food forests in an area, the local population could sustain themselves by hunting and foraging the way they did before civilization.
So future generations are given the invaluable gift of autonomy from the industrial system, and the knowledge and incentive to resist industry’s violent encroach on their way of life.
*** Personal Action Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum: Working Towards a Lasting Cultural Shift
When a group of people choose to e.g. not consume cow products, that directly creates less demand for cow products. So over that group’s lifetime, less forest will be bulldozed to graze the cows that they didn’t eat. Less cows will be impregnated by robotic rape machines. Less veal calves will be snatched from their mothers, put in dark little boxes for a few weeks and then slaughtered so the mother keeps producing milk for the dairy industry.
Some of the people vegans interact with will be influenced by their ethical choices and way of life and be inspired to also work to minimize their harm on the ecosystem. They’ll also adopt a vegan diet, and influence people in their lives to follow suit. One vegan becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten million. The cultural shift spreads far and wide, touching countless lives and changing the course of history.
So in this way, an individual action gradually becomes a collective action. People slowly emulate others after being exposed to their lifestyle and ultimately the local culture is forever changed. All cultural shifts start out with a few innovators and gradually expand to the rest of the population as others see the benefits of the new culture.
Likewise with permaculture and food forests. People start planting food forests and others take up their example and pretty soon you have thousands of acres of land that are saved from desertification and become refuges for wildlife.
There are countless places where this is demonstrable, including where I’m from (somewhere in Western Asia). Each indigenous family in these mountains has a small plot of land that we cultivate. The more people choose to use mixed forest farming methods instead of standard sprayed monocultures, the more people are influenced to follow our example. They see how successful food forests are at feeding our families and the culture gradually shifts.
There needs to be a cultural shift that precedes and guides any revolutionary movement otherwise you’ll just end up replicating capitalism like Marxists have done time and time again. People who live destructive consumerist lifestyles that cause ecocide in exchange for fleeting material comforts won’t be capable of shifting to ethical lifestyles just because “the revolution” happened. They’ll simply replicate their destructive ways under the “new” political system and the “revolution” will have been for nothing. Capitalism will have just been given another paper mask to hide behind as it drags us deeper into the black hole of industrial apocalypse.
*** Fuck Your Luxury Space Communism
A single cruise ship emits as much pollution as a million cars. Cruise ships dump 1 billion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year. Knowing these facts, how can any anarchist decide to directly fund the cruise ship industry by saving up money and booking a cruise holiday?
Reds will tell you with a straight face that capitalism is to blame for the cruise industry’s rampant polluting, and “after the revolution”, the cruise industry would do no harm because it would be worker-managed.
In reality, a truly communist society would necessitate that cruises be free to every worker as a reward for their labor. Which means far more globe-trotting tourists and far more cruise ships in the oceans. Carbon burning and pollution would actually increase greatly.
But let’s ignore that for now. We don’t live in a revolutionary communist society and we will not see capitalism go away in our lifetimes. Global capitalism is more ingrained in society than ever before. Anarcho-communists are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of any population. Reds telling “lifestylists” to stop giving a shit about anything other than “overthrowing” capitalism, something we clearly don’t have the support or firepower to do, is blatantly ridiculous.
Continuing to eat meat / processed foods / buying a new phone, games console, tablet every year / using disposable plastic bags / toilet paper / chlorine cleaning products / building poorly insulated over-sized concrete buildings / not composting your waste / salting the snow / heating a pool / planting a lawn / going on a cruise / etc / etc because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” actively stands in the way of positive change and directly promotes inaction / harm. It actively prevents the culture from shifting towards anarchy.
“We’ll go on this cruise now and help contribute to ecocide, but it’s okay because we’ll consume ethically after the glorious revolution” couldn’t be a more ridiculous standpoint, but it’s essentially what the “no ethnical consumption under capitalism” slogan has been turned into. It’s a sad state of affairs when this empty rhetoric passes for revolutionary thought in red circles.
*** Ethics-Based Choices Aren’t “Liberal” Just Because Pompous Reds Say So
Consumption under capitalism (or socialism) isn’t ethical, but that’s no excuse for inaction. There’s no global revolution coming to change the way we live overnight. History has shown us the impossibility of that notion — with countless “revolutionary” societies repeating all the mistakes of capitalist ones.
But we can have small local revolutionary action in the here and now that can lead the way to sustained change at a wider level. Just ask the Zapatistas and similar indigenous and anti-civ anarchist movements around the world. No one is going to tell them to throw in the towel and conform to globalist capitalist / communist industrial civilization because all consumption is somehow equal.
Anyone can make personal ethics-based choices and also organize collective action. I have no idea why so many collectivists see these pursuits as being mutually exclusive. But you’ll be sorely disappointed if you thought a global collectivist revolution was something that was realistically attainable. The world is far too diverse to be molded into a uniform entity controlled by a 19<sup>th</sup> century ideology designed to serve European factory workers.
Ignore the sanctimonious blathering of boring ideologues. There’s nothing “liberal” about living what you preach. You claim to oppose hierarchy? Then live your life dedicated to minimizing hierarchy wherever you can. Set an example. Face the beast head on and stand your ground until you breathe your last breath. Because what else are you going to do?
Reds! Listen up, friends. Mocking people for caring about minimizing the harm they do and for thinking long and hard about the ethical implications of their actions doesn’t make you somehow more radical than them. It just makes you a smug fuck. I don’t care how many marches you’ve waved your shiny red flag at. Being able to recite the words of a long-dead white philosopher doesn’t make you special, so shut up about “lifestylism” already.
When we see exploitation and engage in direct action to fight it, that doesn’t make our fight useless. We have to live in this world and people are dying in it. All around us scores of people are suffering and dying. To ignore that and do nothing because our actions to relieve that suffering won’t install communism to free the sacred workers from their bosses would be fucked.
*** Capitalism & Communism Are Cut From the Same Exploitative Industrial Cloth
The collectivists who see no problem with oppressive constructs like industrial meat consumption will immediately discount anti-authoritarian actions that aren’t wholly-focused on abolishing the capitalist class and seizing the means of production. A lot of these red-anarchists are channeling Murray Bookchin as he delivered his anti-“lifestylism” screeds late in his life. They dream of seizing the means of production and thus receive a bigger share of the spoils, so it terrifies them that green anarchists instead want to set the factories and shopping malls on fire.
Reds see dumpster divers, illegalists, vegans, sustenance farmers, bike punks, squatters, naturists, communers and other “lifestylists” as a “distraction” from their driving singular desire to replace industrial capitalism with industrial communism. They want to remove the bosses from the equation, but keep everything else almost exactly the same: Workers, factories, battery farms, globalization, ecocide... Even prisons and police in a lot of cases. They want everything industrial society has forced on the world, except this time, they swear it’ll be “more egalitarian” with “direct democracy” and an equal share of the industrial pie for every worker.
These red-dyed wannabe-industrialists insist we abandon our hard-fought battles and join them in pushing (waiting) for a more egalitarian industrialism that’ll give us a fairer share of the profits gained from waging war on the wilds.
They love to accuse anarchist “lifestylists” (green anarchists especially) of somehow conforming to the system... By struggling against it? Their pissy Bookchin-inspired rants accusing anti-civs of being in a “death cult” or of being “counter-revolutionary” (while they themselves embrace ecocide and mass-extinction) really makes no logical sense to me. Green anarchists like the water defenders in Canada right now are actively putting their lives on the line to fight against the march of industry, while these yuppie killjoys sit in their comfy suburban armchairs typing up walls of snark to diminish the people who prove everyday that they live and breathe anarchy.
Sure, the Bookchinites, Chomskyists and assorted anarcho-brocialists will show up at an orderly protest in their officially licensed Guy Fawkes masks, and they’re always in the front row of their local union meeting, eager to read a deadly serious statement from a stack of printed A4s. But how does that give them the superiority complex to voice their disgust about “edgy lifestylists”? It should be obvious at this point that communism isn’t going to save the world, yet they imagine themselves as the governors of righteousness.
Protesting is just another cog in the democracy machine. The illusion of choice. It accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn’t make you more revolutionary than an anarchist who makes the conscious choice to live as ethically as possible. People that think they’ve achieved something worthwhile because they’ve held up a pretty sign at some protest are fooling themselves. All they’re doing is asking their rulers to be nicer rulers. Rulers aren’t giving up their power because you made a sign. You’re not better than “filthy lifestylists” because you quoted Kropotkin at your union meeting that one time.
Both protests and unions as well as ‘lifestyle choices’ have long been co-opted by the system and are not going to loosen the death-grip it has on the planet. The system has become quite adept at swallowing up all attempts at revolution and turning them into Bizarro-revolutions that can be whitewashed and monetized to further the system’s growth. I don’t need to remind anarchists that communism was instantly turned back into industrial capitalism every time it was attempted. The “Communist Party of China” is perhaps the most powerful upholder of capitalism in the world today per capita.
*** Embracing Pointed Distractions & Recognizing Ideological Greenwashing
Collectivists will often butt in when others are talking about methods of harm reduction and insist we stop talking about “pointless distractions” and instead focus on achieving their much-hyped global worker-society they promise will come if we just hold hands and march in the streets until everyone sees how awesome we are. Then the masses will all join us to overthrow the capitalists and install communist utopia, just wait and see!
A lot of reds will even claim that all discussion about ethics and social justice is elitist and classist “liberal posturing” aimed at dividing the working class. The worst of them will insist that class is the only issue we should be concerned with. To hell with feminism, post-colonialism, the environment and all other “distractions” that don’t interest white male workers. Workerism and class reductionism are fond bedfellows.
Being a vegan or a dumpster diver or a forager or a squatter or a self-sufficient cave-dweller need not have anything to do with shaming other people. It’s simply the way someone chooses to live their life for a multitude of reasons; a lot of them informed by ethics, but also to pursue the happiness that every human desires.
An individual anarchist’s decision to live more ethically is not some kind of narcissistic circlejerk the way collectivists like to present it. All anarchists have different motivations and different ethics. We all live in this world, in this time, and we can’t just pretend there’s some grand global homogeneous revolution right around the corner that’s going to save humanity from the rapidly approaching industrial apocalypse if only we chant loud enough and post more luxury space communism memes to our Facebook profiles.
It’s especially perplexing watching reds scorn anti-civs since none of these purported “communist revolutionaries” have demonstrated any real inclination to address the industrialist disaster that has been wrought on our planet beyond farcical promises of “space-colonization”, “Star Trek replicators” and “asteroid mining”.
Even those rare reds who bother to give consideration to ecology in their theories continue to glorify civilization, industry and democracy as liberators. So called “social-ecologist” Bookchinites promise that the planet can be saved if we just “make more democracy!” Then we can all participate in (profit from) the industrial system with our voting power, and opt to use “ecological technologies” such as solar and wind energy to power the machines.
Never mind the Chinese sustenance farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories; they’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And the Ghanaians who wince when mountains of worn-out solar panels are piled up in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech are just impeding ecological progress with their divisive nitpicking! It’s almost like they don’t want Europeans to have two electric vehicles in every garage? So ridiculous!
When you give a majority group legitimized power over minorities, they always use it to oppress them. All power corrupts. Collectivism breeds hierarchy because the interests of the dominant group e.g. factory workers aren’t the same as the interests of minority groups e.g. indigenous herders or queer folk or sex workers.
If you think your average meat-and-potatoes white male worker is going to suddenly become enlightened and compassionate towards the plight of minorities when you give him the power of direct democracy, as social ecologists and other red anarchists envision, you haven’t been paying close attention to the world around you. Time and time again, voters have successfully used their vote to deny rights to migrants, sex workers, trans and gay people, and anyone they see as differing from their normative standards.
*** Understanding the Coercion Behind the “Collective Good”
Reds expect you to put the needs of the almighty collective above your own needs, but the collective good matters little if your individual needs are ignored by the collective.
All too often, Western reds demanding you obey the “collective good” are simply engaging in red-washed white supremacy where the “collective” just means “white working men”, and the “good” just means “our profits”. Putting the will of the dominant population in society before your own needs and desires is an incredulous proposition. The profits of the white working man should not be of any concern to e.g. a brown unemployed woman.
Collectivism is kind of a ludicrous concept if you really think about it. We can’t paint seven-billion people that have wildly different ideas of what life should be as one unified entity because they’re not one unified entity. Collectivizing them as one group; “the working class” in our minds makes no logical sense and does nothing but fuel the industrial wasteland rapidly decimating the entire globe. Why should all humans be seen as workers, why should each of us be measured by our capacity to produce industrial goods?
People from different places have different needs. Marxism deals with this by separating people into classes and telling us to only concern ourselves with the worker classes and to hell with the peasant classes and the hunter-gatherers and the pastoralist nomads and the “land-owner classes”.
This “land-owner” class includes indigenous peoples living off of their ancestral lands and exploiting no one, but again and again socialists have targeted them for genocide for not fitting into their ideological framework. Then the imperialist socialists seize their land and commercialize it so they can profit. For examples, see the Kazakh famine-genocide perpetrated by the USSR because the nomadic Kazakhs resisted the rigidity of forced collectivization, or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and resulting famine that was orchestrated so the red Russians could take control of Iran’s oil fields, or China’s current ongoing land seizures across its territories and forced internment and “re-education” of a million Uighurs.
The very idea of the worker class trumping everyone else is a proven recipe for colonialism and genocide. Individuals who avoid consumerism and live deliberately; apart from the system aren’t exploiting anyone, but throughout history collectivists have caused untold death and suffering trying to shape indigenous lands into their image. Collectivism is far more dangerous than “lifestylism” to anyone who would fail to fit into the collectivist’s ideological dogma.
Constructing a homogeneous group; a worker collective, and telling them they’re the only group that matters; the upholders of the holy revolution, and they need to purge anyone who would threaten their revolution by not falling in line with the red agenda is not something that has ever led anywhere good. Forced collectivization gave us the Soviet Kazakh genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward genocide, the Soviet Holodomor genocide, etc. And it ultimately gave us collectivist capitalism like we see now in China — the most ecologically destructive form of capitalism there is.
Communism and other red ideologies (including the ones purporting to be anarchist) create as big an in group / out group divide as capitalism. The power just shifts to the producers rather than the owners. And historically it’s just as brutal in its treatment of the out-groups. Anyone that doesn’t want to be part of the industrial system, like the Kazakh nomadic herders, is basically fucked. You dissent, you die.
The red ideologies view the entire world through a Western industrial worker-serf lens. But the whole world isn’t organized like the industrial West and it’s unfair to force Western values and economic systems on everyone.
Indigenous farmers in post-colonial places are treated as pariahs; ‘kulaks’, and massacred for having ‘owned’ the ancestral land they sustain themselves with under capitalist definitions. Just because the poor in industrialized capitalist nations don’t own the land they work, doesn’t mean the poor in other parts of the world where there is no lord-serf system in place are bad.
A garden that you and your family / tribe tend to and depend on to survive is personal property, but communism has always treated it like private property. Like growing your own food is reactionary and a threat to the “revolutionary” government. The USSR even banned people from planting gardens at home so they’d be forced to depend on the collective for food. To keep them tied to the factory assembly line.
Nomadic herders and roaming hunter-gatherers are likewise criminalized and starved out because there can be no room for people that don’t submit to the industrial work system under communism. They’re grouped as “individualists” and punished for resisting collectivization.
*** Reject Collectivism, Embrace Anarchy
Collectivism, whether it be communist, fascist or capitalist ideologically isn’t something that serves my interests as an indigenous subsistence farmer and forager living in these remote mountains. Whatever industrial dogma I’m ordered to live my life by only serves to feel my heart with sorrow. I will loudly reject the idea of a collective society at every opportunity, regardless of its ideological alliance. All industry kills all life.
I’m an anarchist. Even the idea of a “society” governing my way of life makes me vomit a little. Your needs aren’t my needs, I don’t want to go where the collective wants to take me. My lifestyle and my ancestors’ lifestyles are likely nothing like yours and we shouldn’t be meshed together as a singular entity just because we’re both forced to work the machines.
Setting up living, breathing alternatives to the industrial system crafts non-coercive relationships between humans, non-humans and our environments better than unionism and other workerist pursuits ever will. Workerism only further ingrains us in the system and makes us dependent on it, and then if we do manage a revolution by some miracle... We just reproduce the capitalist system again because it’s all we know. Working examples of anarchy like self-sufficient food forests are far more revolutionary to me than a union or a protest march. All applications of anarchy are important, but I value anarchy that I can see and touch.
The only revolution I’m interested in is one that removes dependences on artificial structures. I want to be liberated from the system, not become the system. The collective isn’t my master. The collective is really just another state, however nicely you package it.
Red anarchists — If you don’t take responsibility for the harm you do, no one will. There’s no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism’s sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because “no ethical consumption”. There’s only this life you’re living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you just keep doing harm and blame your actions on capitalism, you’re no different than any CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Harm reduction in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying “it’s okay because capitalism did it”.
The entire “no ethical consumption” argument and similar condescending slogans parroted by half-assed socialists are just a way to justify their inaction in the face of devastating oppression.
It’s become increasingly unlikely that we can stop the unraveling global mass extinction event that industry has wrought on the planet, but anarchists have never let impossible odds stand in our way before. We fight because we exist and we exist to fight. Whatever the odds.
We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and on a local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.
“Think Globally, Act Locally” might be a cliche, but it’s really the only power we have. If we don’t take action in our own neighborhood in every way we can, why even pretend to care about anarchy?
Everything we do to resist the ecocide is worthwhile. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
|
#title Indigenous Anarchy & The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer’s “Civilization”
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics anticiv, indigenous, decolonization, anarchy, civilisation, neo-colonialism, green anarchism, anti-civilization, anti-civ, ecology, industry, civilization, green, anarcho-primitivism
#date 2018-11-12
#source Retrieved on 2019-01-12 from https://raddle.me/wiki/Indigenous_Anarchy
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-01-13T19:21:55
First, let’s define some basic terms. “Indigenous” means “of the land we are actually on.” “Anarchy” means “the rejection of authority.” The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. “Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed” envisions a primitive anarchy that is “radically cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild.”
Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people that live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.
This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don’t fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.
Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, military, patriarchy, slavery and more.
Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the “uncivilized” are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the “civilized” all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.
The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can’t fathom a life in its absence.
The entire concept of ‘civilization’ depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).
In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms or “reservations” where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don’t attempt a return to our previous “uncivilized” lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.
The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.
A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn’t need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn’t depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of self-sufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler’s worst fear.
Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be “civilized” so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.
*** Freedom Through Rejection
To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists that would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.
To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be “civilized” and obedient.
To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.
Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization’s hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.
*** Control & Domestication
The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully “civilized,” or rejected as “uncivilized,” have been long ignored by everyone that benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.
“Control” is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won’t go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their “reservations” or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with “dignity,” accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.
The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can’t sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.
And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as “civilized,” or die at their hands for being “subhuman uncivilized savages” that can’t be “saved.” Anything civilization can’t control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.
To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is to trust in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the “charity” of powerful authorities.
Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers’ ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers’ alien civilization, and the punitive laws we’re forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.
*** Embracing our “Inhospitable Wilderness”
The so-called “inhospitable wilderness” that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land. So that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don’t even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.
Uncivilized, we roamed freely, wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction; ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affluence without abundance.
Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must do to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.
Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones with all the food and water we’ll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for casual leisure.
Civilized people love to refer to hunter-gatherers as being stricken by “poverty.” But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of “time.” The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no want of such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affluent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.
Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.
In civilization, water is scarce, controlled and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.
The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers that deprive us of our land and our very lives.
*** Understanding Neo-Colonialism
Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:
<quote>
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) often, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.
</quote>
This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.
African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they take out. When they inevitably default on these unsustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, “there is a new version of Colonialism happening.”
The non-profit Confucius Institute that operates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China’s economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Colonizers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.
Kwame Nkrumah:
<quote>
Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.
</quote>
Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in “under-developed” countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands.
South Korea’s RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:
<quote>
The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people’s livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in foreign countries is a must for our future survival.
</quote>
The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It’s safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to “lift us up” by building us cities and infrastructure.
It’s integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands so that we will be forced to labor for them; helping them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world.
And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.
The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.
Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the Ngorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to “preserve the region’s ecosystem” and attract more tourists.
The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris, and Ortello Business Corporation; a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates, to drive the Maasai off of their land. They’re beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated. Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.
The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies.
The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exist is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth.
Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.
*** Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide
We should understand that there’s a big difference between the concepts of “tools” and “technology.” Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don’t construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.
The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981:
<quote>
Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.’
</quote>
Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.
Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire’s world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.
The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They’ll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire’s machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.
Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are “backwards” and that they need to “save” us from our “savage” existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children’s children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to “save” us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.
When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we’re distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.
Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false-gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.
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#title Kill The God of Work & All His Clergy
#author ziq
#SORTtopics anti-work, anti-civ, work, lying flat, industrialism, civilization, industry, China, alienation, entryism, protestant work ethic, post-left, productivity, play, anthropology, gatherer-hunters, productive play, capitalism, Bob Black, labor, anti-economy
#date January 29, 2022
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/anti-work
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-02-15T12:03:38
*** Life in the Machine
<quote>
The Greek philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.” Said Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.”
</quote>
I’d say one of the most impactful components of anarchy through the ages, and especially in this current decade is <em>anti-work</em> — the complete rejection of work. Though as old as civilization itself, anti-work ideas have been steadily regaining momentum in modern times, starting in small anarchist circles, and now taking off explosively in mainstream culture. Millions of people around the world have suddenly found themselves exposed to this very anarchist concept.
This has especially been evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps because millions of workers have now seen, first-hand, just how disposable their lives are to their employers, who in countless cases have openly sacrificed them to the plague rather than risk putting a dent in their company’s bottom line.
In China, a growing “lying flat” anti-work movement has exploded in popularity[1], despite numerous attempts by the state to shut it down. Luo Huazhong kicked off the idea in an April 2021 forum post titled “lying flat is justice”, where he attached a photo of himself in bed under a blanket, with the curtains closed to shut out the sunlight.
Luo had been out of regular work for more than two years. He had to limit his consuming, but found that the abundant leisure time he was afforded in exchange for his curtailed productivity was deeply liberating.
In the post, he explained that the pervasive status anxiety in workerist Chinese society was a product of corrupted values and overwhelming peer pressure. He proclaimed there was nothing wrong with lying flat; living an idle existence. By overcoming his desire for consumer products and the structural pressure to be productive, he successfully freed himself from the servitude of work.
Luo’s post spoke to China’s urban youth who for years had worked non-stop while the promise of a middle-class lifestyle as their reward eroded more and more with each increase in the cost of living. Fellow lapsed workers responded to his post enthusiastically and exchanged their tips to survive with minimal work and reduced spending.
The idea immediately went viral on social media. Over the next several months, lying-flat advocates pushed back against cutthroat work culture and high cost of living and the movement grew at a rapid pace.
The communist party launched a censorship campaign to erase all mention of lying-flat from the web. The state media desperately tried to discredit Luo’s dangerous idea and shame or scare people back to the offices and factories they were increasingly abandoning.
Simultaneously in the English-speaking world, another anti-work movement exploded into being, primarily on the anarchist-run Reddit forum r/antiwork, which gathered millions of subscribers in just a few months. All over the world, the pandemic, massive inflation and a general disaffection with work-culture was driving people to question why they force themselves to drive to work every morning.
What anarchists mean by “work” is really very straight-forward. Work is the machine extracting our labor to feed itself.
Wolfi Landstreicher:
<quote>
Work, in the social world in which you and I find ourselves, is the alienation of an individual’s time, activities, and forces from her/himself. In other words, it is the institutionalization of a process where the things you do, the things I do, and the things we do together are determined by powers (individuals, social structures, etc) outside of ourselves to serve their interests.[2]
</quote>
Sadly, like any subversive idea that suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, a lot of opportunists have been willfully misrepresenting what anti-work is and trying to obscure its post-left anarchist roots. A steady line of communists and liberals have been trying to appropriate this very anarchist idea and make it line up with their decidedly pro-work 19<sup>th</sup> century ideologies.
Anti-work isn’t merely the critique of <em>work under capitalism</em> as the reds would have you believe, nor the push for better working conditions and nicer bosses as the liberals are pretending. It is the wholesale rejection of work in all its forms, regardless of whoever the boss is, whatever the form of remuneration, whatever the social or economic system in place happens to be.
It’s completely uprooting the institution of work, smashing all the systems of servitude that ensnare us, sabotaging workplaces in any way we can, exposing the markets for the giant houses of cards they are and then blowing on them until every card lays flat.
Anyone who claims otherwise is an entryist trying to water down anarchist ideas until they’re so insipid that they become plausibly compatible with the stale ideological dogma of whatever tired political program they’re recruiting for.
The protestant work ethic has long had a stranglehold on this global civilization, traumatizing all of us into seeing productivity as the universal metric of worth. Those who are perceived to be hard workers are accepted warmly by society, while those who lack a strong work ethic or the ability to toil away in menial, pointless servitude their entire lives are demonized as “lazy no-good layabout bums” and promptly discarded by their friends, their educators, their families, their government.
Despite common (and deliberate) misconceptions, being anti-work doesn’t mean wanting to cease all physical exertion, it means nurturing a new way of life based on <em>play</em> rather than <em>work</em>.
The word “play” has likewise been demonized by workerist society as being an inappropriate activity for anyone of working age, because play eats into our productivity as workers and the potential profits we can generate for our bloodthirsty bosses.
Alfredo M. Bonanno:
<quote>
Play is characterized by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it. It is in the ever new excitement of play, quite the opposite to the alienation and madness of capital, that we are able to identify joy.[3]
</quote>
My father started regularly shaming me for “wasting time” playing as soon as I turned 12. Civilized children are expected to immerse themselves in a 12 — 18 year work-training program (school) that comes with daily homework, to ensure everyone is conditioned to see their time not as their time, but as a commodity to be exploited exclusively by their future bosses.
For millennia, play was all humans knew. Gatherer-hunters had no need of work because everything they needed to prosper was free for the taking. It wasn’t until we started burning down our ancient food forests to form permanent settlements, cultivate crops and extract non-renewable resources from the land that work displaced play as the driving force in human society.
Anthropologists who study some of the few remaining gatherer-hunter bands of people in various parts of the world have frequently noted how the egalitarian, non-hierarchical bands emphasize acts of play rather than work in their various cultures.
(Developmental/evolutionary psychologist) Dr. Peter Gray:
<quote>
Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies. The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.
</quote>
<quote>
Most remarkably, unlike any other people that have been studied, hunter-gatherers appear to lack hierarchy in social organization. They have no chief or big man, no leaders or followers. They share everything, so nobody owns more than anybody else. They make all group decisions through discussion until a consensus is reached. [...] They have an extraordinary degree of respect for individual autonomy. They don’t tell one another what to do or offer unsolicited advice.[...]
In order for two or more young animals to play together, they must suppress the drive to dominate one another. Social play always requires the voluntary participation of both (or all) partners, so play requires that the partners maintain one another’s goodwill. Any attempt to dominate would drive the other away or elicit a fight rather than play. Thus, play involving two or more players is always an egalitarian, cooperative activity.
Some of the most compelling evidence for the anti-dominance function of adult play comes from research with various species of primates. For example, some species of macaque monkeys (referred to as tyrannical species) live in sharply graded hierarchical colonies, with a great deal of squabbling and fighting for power and relatively little cooperation except among close kin; and other species (egalitarian species) live in colonies with more muted hierarchies, with little fighting and much cooperation even among non-relatives. Consistent with the theory I am presenting here, the egalitarian species have been observed to engage in more social play in adulthood than the tyrannical species, apparently as a means to promote cooperation. [...]
My theory is that hunter-gatherers everywhere learned that they could reduce aggression and promote cooperation and sharing by essentially turning all of their social life into play.
Children growing up in hunter-gatherer cultures have more opportunity to play than do children growing up in any other culture that anthropologists have observed, and as they become adults their playful ways continue. Hunter-gatherers’ approach to work (e.g. to hunting and gathering) is playful in that it is social (people hunt and gather with friends, in groups) and always voluntary—nobody is required to hunt or gather, they will be fed anyway. Their religions are playful, highly imaginative and non-dogmatic, with gods that are vulnerable and serve as playmates in religious festivals. The adults, as well as children, engage regularly and playfully in music, dance, art, and noncompetitive games.
Even their means of putting down someone’s budding attempts to dominate are playful, at least at first. They may make up a silly song about the person, as a way of making fun of the person’s excessive pride, or they may tease him about thinking he’s such a “big man.”[4]
</quote>
It’s a truly tragic turn of events that work and all its associated authoritarian baggage has so successfully displaced play in the vast majority of human cultures. One of the most substantial things anarchists can do for ourselves is to relearn the joy of play, and to abandon the productivity-compulsion that’s been hammered into us by assorted authority figures throughout our lives.
If other cultures embraced the constructive play that gatherer-hunters use, the protestant work ethic would soon lose its death-grip on public consciousness.
Work doesn’t need to define us, and our productivity in the machine needn’t be the measure of our worth. Devoting our entire lives to keeping the machine running ought to be perceived as the morbid waste of our existence that it truly is. The machine crushes all life eventually, the only question is how long you’ll last as its colorful levers poke tiny holes in you while its gears slowly crush your bones.
*** Blessed be the Lord Who Gifts Us With His Bountiful Employment
In a world revolving around work, The Economy is venerated — treated as a hallowed, divine being. Every moment spent engaged in play, in idleness or in unprofitable creative pursuits is a penny we steal from the almighty economy. Anyone who lacks the will or capability to keep up their productivity is thus seen as sinning against the true deity of our age: The Economy is our one true god and has been for decades. And he’s a vengeful god. Anyone who sins against him will be pushed into the gutters of society by his clergymen and left to rot and die.
There’s nothing The Economy savors more than his clergy taking sinful unproductive workers and sacrificing them to him, that’s the entire reason homelessness and prisons are such integral features of capitalist civilization.
The booming mantra of our God can be heard chanted all across the globe — Work or die — Work or die — and when you eventually reach breaking point and actually die —be sure to do it very publicly so that the other worshipers are forced to look upon your misery to witness what happens to workers who fail to keep up with the grind. They’ll try not to notice, but they’ll see the destitution from the corner of their eye and it’ll further instill the fear of God in them.
Work or die — Work or die — Work or die. It’s the chorus that rings in our ears almost every moment of our lives, even our “free time” being wholly consumed by the specter of work. We’re no longer capable of relishing the simplicity of existence, instead we measure our productivity during every waking moment and punish ourselves if we don’t measure up to our peers. A good worker is always finding ways to develop their skills and increase their usefulness to the machine. A good worker is forever climbing the hierarchy so they can one day join the ranks of the saintly clergy and strike down the no good lazy bums beneath them for their disgusting under-performing.
The modern anti-work movement was spawned in the late 20<sup>th</sup> century by anarchist Bob Black. Black spent years of his life pushing back against the conservative 19<sup>th</sup> century notions of productivity, industrialism and human-commodification that came from both capitalist and communist (including anarcho-communist) scholars and practitioners. He was especially frustrated to see fellow anarchists refuse to part ways with the miserable work-culture they inherited from the miserable workers that gave life to them.
Bob Black:
<quote>
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. [...]
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself.
These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.[5]
</quote>
A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.
When Bob Black wrote <em>The Abolition of Work</em> in 1985 and called for “a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance”, he wasn’t proposing we give work a glossier tint to make it more democratic, merit-based or financially rewarding. He wasn’t proposing we hustle and invest in The Economy (praise be) to become wealthy enough to one day make passive income as landlords and shareholders. He was proposing we part with work in totality. Tear down all structures of work and kick all those who uphold those soul-crushing structures in the shins repeatedly until they let go.
This point is completely missed by the stale leftists who have appropriated this very anarchist concept and tried beating it into submission. They’ll forever be ready to seize hold of and immediately neuter anarchist ideas when they see them picking up any kind of steam. But the left will never be anti-work. It would go against everything the left exists to serve.
The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.
Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.
Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.
Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office.
So what happens after the bonfire dies down and we depart a work-based existence for a play-based one?
Bob Black:
<quote>
Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
</quote>
The point of anti-work, stripped of all the garbage leftist and Marxist ideology that’s been rapidly consuming it (I blame Graeber for kickstarting this process), is to treasure your fleeting existence and spend it doing things you want to do. Not things your bosses force you to do by threatening to sacrifice you to the great Economy in the sky if you don’t follow their script.
Anti-work is the burning desire to free yourself from that cacophonous workerist mantra forever ringing in your ears, to stop playing the subservient role assigned to you by The Great Economy and instead forge your own path and find real purpose through joyful play.
Henry Miller:
<quote>
The world only began to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became—myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it until death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it “life.” If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and end-all, you got a blank look for an answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, “the plugs in harness,” had no time for such idle questions. “You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”[6]
</quote>
Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.
Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.
Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.
Anti-work, friends, is anarchy.
[1] The Guardian.<em>The low-desire life: why people in China are rejecting high-pressure jobs in favour of ‘lying flat’</em>. [[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire-life-why-people-in-china-are-rejecting-high-pressure-jobs-in-favour-of-lying-flat][www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire-life-why-people-in-china-are-rejecting-high-pressure-jobs-in-favour-of-lying-flat]].
[2] Landstreicher, Wolfi. <em>A Sales Pitch for the Insurrection™</em>. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wolfi-landstreicher-apio-ludd-feral-faun-a-sales-pitch-for-the-insurrection][theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wolfi-landstreicher-apio-ludd-feral-faun-a-sales-pitch-for-the-insurrection]].
[3] Bonanno, Alfredo M. <em>Armed Joy</em>. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy][theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy]].
[4] Gray, Peter. <em>The Play Theory of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism</em>. [[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism][www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism]].
[5] Black, Bob. <em>The Abolition of Work</em>. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work][theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work]].
[6] Miller, Henry. <em>Sexus</em> (Obelisk Press, 1949.)
|
#title Morality Vs. Ethics
#author ziq
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics post-left, morality, moralism, ethics, authority, critique of leftism, violence, pacifism, nihilism
#date 2019
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/morality_vs_ethics
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-04-27T20:19:32
The difference between morality and ethics is a major misunderstanding leftists have of anarchist politics. Most leftists are unaware of, unwilling to consider, or unable to grasp the distinction. But it's an important distinction for anarchists to make because morals are so entangled with authority. This essay will try to explain the differences between morality and ethics from an anarchist perspective.
In polite society, 'moral' is a label typically applied by people to themselves and their group so they, if we're being perfectly honest, can present themselves as a pure and righteous person capable of doing no 'wrong'.
The 'moral' person sees themselves as fighting a universal battle between good and evil. They of course cast themselves in the role of the righteous crusader for good; incapable of straying from the 'moral constitution' that enshrines them in sanctified holiness.
The label 'immoral' is applied to whoever the 'moral' group decides is counter to their notions of goodness. They do this so they can maintain 'moral' superiority over the out-group and thus justify any action they take to marginalise these undesirables without feeling remorse or having to justify their behaviour to anyone. By being a proud moral crusader, they don't need to give even a moment's thought to the cruelty they inflict on whichever individual or group they've decided is a threat to their sacred moral constitution.
The immoral villains who violate the sacred constitution can never be forgiven for their perceived crimes against morality because morality is definitive and final. The despicable villains must be forever shunned by the altruistic heroes in order to maintain their pious morals. Racial segregation was considered morally righteous in the US South. As was cleansing the land of 'savages' during colonisation. Lynching bi-racial children for being 'impure'. Denying women equality by reasoning that it would lead to 'moral decadence'.
The recent government massacres of drug users in the Philippines were justified by creating a moral panic. The tyrant leading the massacres appointing himself as the one and only arbiter of virtue, that all moral people should blindly follow.
Perhaps the most deadly moral panic of the last century was spurred by Mao's cultural revolution in China. His Little Red Book of quotes; a virtual moral blueprint, was used by the party-faithful to purge scores of random people for having morally-objectionable... haircuts, furniture, pets or fashion sense. Likewise, Stalin and his supporters in the USSR forced homosexuals and other out-groups into gulags where they were worked to death for 'crimes against morality'.
And of course the prototypical moral blueprint; the Christian bible, was used to lead brutal moral crusades across the world for centuries; mass slaughters, land seizures and forced conversions of non-Christians.
Moral systems are designed to oppress and marginalise anyone the system deems undesirable. They are based on transcendent rules that are forcibly applied to all people from all backgrounds, in all situations; regardless of each individual's desires and values.
Unlike society's authoritative and punitive morals, ethics are decided on a case-by-case basis by the individual based on their own values and desires. Ethics are tangible and tied to real cause and effect outcomes. Ethics are voluntary personal views rather than collectively-enforced top-down ones.
Morality is always formed and upheld by a collective: a religious institution, a workplace, an educational organization, a cultural group, a club, a society.
Ethics are personal, informed by an individual's experiences and their own needs and desires.
Morals are applied to everyone inside and often outside of a group by a collective and its authority. Ethics are applied to the individual by the individual and in most cases affect no one but the individual.
Morals require hierarchy, authority, law and enforcement of said law, while ethics simply require that an individual draw their own lines to determine what they are personally willing to live with, what compromises they're willing to make, what actions they're willing to take against others.
Moralists have differing ideas of morality but they largely operate in absolutes: Some are ardent pacifists who insist there can be no excuse for any form of violence, while others will demand violence be done to those who break their moral law in even the most minor way. But in practice, even the most ardent moral pacifist will embrace violence when their egos are put under enough pressure.
Often pacifist moralists will simply shift what they see as 'violence' to overcome the cognitive dissonance they're confronted with when someone breaks their laws and thus threatens their moral authority. So, suddenly the violence of putting people in cages or sterilizing them or lobotomizing them or euthanizing them is seen by the pacifist moralist as 'humane' and 'non-violent'. The hypocrisy of the moralist is truly boundless, but devotion to their ideology is something the moralist will fight tooth and nail to cling to, even when every aphorism of that ideology has been warped beyond recognition. This is how we end up with the hypocrisy of Christians preaching "do no harm" one day and then leading bloody pogroms and crusades the next. Or syndicalists in civil war Spain claiming to want to build equality and freedom and to abolish authority, while murdering nuns for refusing to renounce their faith and building forced labor prisons.
A moralist opposition to violence might be: violence is universally wrong, immoral, bad. Why? Simply because the collective authority behind the moralist says so. Requesting justification for such an abstract statement would be scoffed at because morality is seen by the moralist as some kind of divine truth that can't be questioned. The simple act of questioning it or the authority behind it would be enough to render you immoral.
On the other hand, a measured ethical opposition to violence can be made by an amoralist... They can see that in many cases violence begets more violence, fosters systems based on the dominance of the strong, and can lead to deep-seated multi-generational divisions. But in other cases, they could see violence as ethically just. Because the alternative (e.g. fascism) would likely be worse.
A moralist forces their reactionary and irrational will on everyone else. Their morals are absolute. An amoralist isn't concerned with forcing their personal perspective onto everyone, or with maintaining that perspective in every situation as if it were unquestionable dogma.
Morality places paint-by-the-numbers judgement on every action, positing that all actions in column A are inherently 'wrong' and unacceptable, while all actions in column B are inherently 'right' and necessary. Regardless of the experiences of the people involved, their personal convictions and motivations, and the conditions that are present in that place and time.
Inevitably, the moralist collective will go on to break every moral law they've set when they deem it necessary to, and the wonders of cognitive dissonance will allow them to absolve themselves of any responsibility for breaking their supposedly uncompromising moralism.
Anarchists aren't uncaring monsters for rejecting morality, as the moral left will have you believe. We're rejecting an incredibly dangerous, authoritarian concept that directly leads to untold misery for the multiple generations of people forced to survive inside the walls of the dogmatic moral systems imposed on them from above.
Morality and ideology go hand in hand to deny people their most basic autonomy: Their freedom to decide right from wrong according to their own needs, desires and values.
|
#title Shut up about 'dual power', tool
#author ziq
#SORTtopics Dual Power, entryism, critique of leftism, anti-left, post-left, leftism, democratic socialism, anarchist analysis, Occupy Wall Street, Leninism, Vladimir Lenin, Yates McKee
#date October 25, 2021
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/dualpower
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-02-11T12:23:41
Dual power was coined[1] by the Russian socialist and eventual head of government Vladimir Lenin in his essay <em>The Dual Power</em> to describe two powers (the Soviets and the existing government) temporarily coexisting with each other and competing for legitimacy with the ultimate goal of the Soviets expelling the other power and seizing control of the state, in order to install state capitalism and a one-party dictatorship.
It's tragic I even need to write this, but a staggering amount of people have been equating dual power with anarchy lately, seemingly without realizing they're parroting authoritarian Leninist ideology.
Dual power has nothing whatsoever to do with anarchy. Anarchists are not and have never been advocates of dual power. Anarchists are not a political party. We are not interested in competing with other political parties for power. Anarchists are not interested in granting legitimacy to a government or its institutions or claiming there can ever be such a thing as the legitimacy to rule people.
Anarchists are not interested in seizing control of the state to install a "people's dictatorship" or any other kind of government. Anarchists are not interested in building power in any way.
Anarchy is concerned with resisting, negating, severing the power of those who rule us. Anarchy is the driving desire to reclaim our lives from the piercing claws of the power-elite. Anarchy is not a plan to join the ranks of the power-elite or to supersede them as the new "legitimate" government as Lenin's Bolsheviks did.
Anarchists are also not interested in a democratic form of dual power whereupon we plead with the states / banks / corporations to be nicer to us, begging the people in power to afford us certain rights and privileges, while also participating in charity work.
This is what Yates McKee, the self-described "nongovernmental activist"[2] and art critic who introduced the dual-power concept into the modern Anglophone political dialogue proposes in the essay <em>Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond</em>[3] for the nonprofit media organization <em>Waging Nonviolence</em>.
Yates McKee:
<quote>
(Dual power) means forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions — elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums — while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions.
</quote>
Three points:
1. Anarchists are not interested in "forging alliances" with functionaries of the government or otherwise participating in the state/capital mechanism, period. Despite the turgid assertions of the anarcho-Democrat sect, anarchy isn't entangled with the left wing of government. Anarchy rejects all wings of all governments.
2. Anarchists aren't a lobby group that pressures politicians to do our bidding. Politicians will never work for us because their interests are not our interests.
3. Anarchy is not a program to set up a shadow government in the hopes of one day replacing the current government.
McKee then proceeds to quote several other theorists talking about prefiguration, in order to equate prefiguration (which actually has some anarchist underpinnings) with dual-power (which absolutely doesn't).
The attempt to whitewash authoritarian Leninist lingo and feed it to self-proclaimed anarcho-leftists who don't know any better should be met with ridicule for the sordid manipulation it is. Manipulation that really ought to be expected from someone who insists on referring to themselves as a nongovernmental activist because the word "anarchist" would presumably be too extreme.
Soon after McKee wrote the essay, USA leftists calling themselves anarchists latched onto the new revisionist version of the term, while reactionary Lenin-acolytes continued using the term according to its original, unadulterated definition. Since these two (theoretically) wildly at-odds groups of people all mingle in the same spaces for some peculiar reason, the leftists soon saw themselves enthusiastically nodding in agreement with the conservative Leninists who appeared to share their ideas, allowing the Leninists to flood these so-called "left-unity" spaces with even more authoritarian power-machinations such as their proposal for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
It's incredibly aggravating that so many left-wing USA Democrats identifying as anarchists insist on brandishing authority-laden entryist concepts like direct democracy, justified hierarchy, legitimate government, lesser-evilism and now dual-power while claiming they want anarchy.
Anarchy is not democratic government, not socialist government, not progressive government, not counter-government, not the people's government, not decentralized government, not libertarian government, not minimized goverment, not green government, not cybernated government, not blockchain government and not dual government.
Anarchy is, always has been and always will be a loud and firm proclamation of <em>no government</em>. No authority, no social hierarchy, no power-elite. Anarchy is the outright rejection of every frenzied power machination of every petty tyrant the world over. It's saying no to all authority, however fresh, empowering or woke the authority purports to be.
We don't politely ask the corporations to stop polluting. We don't ask the banks to stop printing and distributing the currency that upholds the class system. We don't plead with our bosses to stop exploiting our labor. We don't petition politicians to stop serving their corporate benefactors. We don't ask coal to stop staining our fingers. We don't ask sandflies to stop biting our necks.
Anarchists know better than to plead with our oppressors to stop oppressing us. Anarchists, if nothing else, have a shared understanding of the workings of power and authority. We know we can only get back from our rulers what we take from them by force. What we pry from their cold, dead fingers. Because authority doesn't compromise with its servants any more than a bear compromises with a fish in its jaw.
Anarchy is having the prudence to perceive the corrupting force of all power. Anarchy is seeing through each of the pretty new masks the power-elite crudely crafts and slaps on to dupe us into compliance with their cruel and dangerous program.
When you prop up state/capital, work to further the legitimacy of its agents, while also embedding yourself into the system in order to "change it from within", the theoretical "counter-institutions" you claim to also support are effectively negated because — guess what? People who work for the state are not countering the state in any way that counts.
Functionaries of the state and capital (whether lobby groups, campaigners / canvassers, political committees or "progressive" politicians standing in elections) are not able to mount real opposition to the state or capital because they have been successfully absorbed by the state and capital and now do the bidding of the elite class, in one way or another.
Anyone claiming they're entering the belly of the beast so they can somehow tame the beast is either deluding themselves or willfully lying. The acid in that belly will melt away any anarchist inclinations they may have held in seconds. The system is designed to absorb all threats to the system. Anyone who claims they can work within the system to counter the system is nothing more than a willing tool of the system.
It's endlessly frustrating to me how often authoritarian ideology like dual power is absorbed by clueless red anarchists and then clumsily promoted as anarchist praxis every single day.
Anyone claiming to be anti-authority while going out of their way to organize collective action (e.g. the USA's DSA) to further the authority of politicians / a political party / the state is a liar and a coward.
You will not reform authority. Authority will reform you. Into a tool of authority.
Once you ingrain yourself within systems of authority, specifically within the system that exploits the living shit out of billions of people: Enslaves, incarcerates, poisons, genocides, invades, bulldozes, acidifies, desertifies and burns every corner of the planet, you have abandoned any claim to anarchy you may have once held. You are not an anarchist. You are just another clink in the state's ever-expanding armor, devoting your pathetic little activist life to legitimizing, and thus shielding the state from those brutalized by it.
Your dual power tales are as useful to anarchists as the charity galas where you rub elbows with the robber barons you expect us to beg for table scraps.
[1] Lenin, Vladimir. <em>The Dual Power</em>. [[https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm][www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm]].
[2] The Center for the Humanities. <em>Profile of Yates McKee</em>. [[https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/participants/yates-mckee][www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/participants/yates-mckee/]].
[3] McKee, Yates. <em>Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond</em>. [[https://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/07/art-after-occupy/][wagingnonviolence.org/2014/07/art-after-occupy/]].
|
#title Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam
#author ziq
#SORTtopics authoritarianism, Authoritarian Left, Leninism, maoism, left unity
#date 2018-09-09
#source Retrieved on 2019-01-28 from [[https://raddle.me/wiki/tankie][raddle.me]] and [[https://raddle.me/wiki/left_unity_is_a_scam][raddle.me]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-01-28T20:23:14
*** What is a "tankie"?
A tankie is anyone that defends authoritarian state-capitalist dictators and the atrocities they've committed and continue to commit.
The term was originally coined when the USSR [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956][sent Russian T54 tanks]] into Budapest, Hungary on the 4th of November 1956 to suppress a worker uprising. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of worker self-organization that was at odds with the Soviet's imperialist rule. The Soviet troops eventually suppressed the uprising and restored their rule. Then the USSR sent the tanks in to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later, in 1989, tanks were similarly used by another state-capitalist regime to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989][crush student dissidents]] in Tiananmen Square in China.
Anarchists use the word "tankie" to describe any supporter of authoritarian regimes that claim to be socialist. "Red fascist" is another popular term used in this context. The exception is Hitler's "national socialists", who are simply referred to as fascists. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler initially represented himself as a socialist; realizing that appropriating socialism would be useful to gain popular support. Of course, his genocidal actions had nothing to do with establishing socialism, and his so-called "national socialist" ideology was just another form of collectivist-capitalism.
It's worth noting that the USSR [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact][signed a treaty]] (The Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact) with Nazi Germany that divvied up much of Europe between the two powers. The Soviets then [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#World_War_II][annexed the countries]] granted to them by the nazis, drafted their citizens into their Red Army, burned villages full of women and children to the ground, deported scores of people to prison camps, and then massacred them.
The definition of fascism from Unionpedia.org:
<quote>
“Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.”
</quote>
The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. All four of these features apply to both ideologies. Both Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships, control the local populace, invade foreign lands and stamp out all dissent.
Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union][population displacement]], [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_State_Security_(Soviet_Union)][mass surveillance]], [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor][genocide]] and brutal punishment for anyone who would speak out against the state or the new ruling class.
They support modern China’s blatant racism and nationalism as they attempt to violently force muslims to abandon their culture in favor Han Chinese culture using “re-education” camps and family seperation policies.
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters is a 2010 book by Brian Reynolds Myers. Based on a study of the propaganda produced in North Korea for internal consumption, Myers argues that the guiding ideology of North Korea is a race-based nationalism that spawns from Japanese fascism, rather than any kind of Communist ideology.
The book describes how the North Korean government is insular, xenophobic and militaristic. It details a mob attack on Black Cuban diplomats by North Koreans, and the forcing of North Korean women to abort mixed-ethnicity children. This racism is deeply ingrained in North Korean society and promoted by the state’s own propaganda.
Since the 2009 North Korean constitution omits all mention of Communism, Myers argues that Juche is not actually the ideology of the North Korea state. He postulates that it was designed to trick foreigners, especially tankies, into supporting the fascist state. And support it they do, wholeheartily, despite all the glaring signs that it’s a perverse merger between fascism and monarchy. They’ll even accuse you of being racist for not supporting that racist state.
They make the same claim to anyone who is critical of modern China’s extreme-capitalist state, accusing them of “Sinophobia”, despite the fact that the criticisms from anarchists are almost always about China’s institutional persecution of ethnic minorities and their overseas imperialism.
Only a tankie could accuse someone with legitimate concerns about billionaire ruler Xi Jinping's racist (and homophobic) policies of somehow being racist against the Han Chinese people for voicing those concerns. There’s no logic whatsoever to tankie cries that anyone who criticises a racist, homophobic dictator of an ethno-state is being racist or that talking about China’s imperialism means you’re somehow an imperialist being paid by the CIA to discredit “communism”.
Tankies often justify defending these state-capitalist regimes by claiming they are "anti-imperialist" states; as they are in fierce competition with "free-market" capitalist regimes such as the USA. Tankies somehow fail to recognize that state-capitalist imperialism is virtually identical to free-market capitalist imperialism. They take the side of imperialist empires like the USSR or China (and even modern-day Russia) in geo-political conflicts simply because they oppose the USA. They fail to realize that there's nothing revolutionary about favoring one empire over another.
Another common argument they make is that the atrocities committed by their idols were necessary to affect the rapid industrialization of their nations. Marx theorized that the way to communism was through a modern industrialized economy. His theories were written with industrial capitalist states like Germany and the UK in mind, to transition them into socialist states, and then finally onto communism.
This presented a problem for Russia, China and other undeveloped nations, who had very little industry to speak of and simple, agrarian economies. Stalin and Mao both decided that the solution was to rapidly industrialize their territories, forcing mass population transfers from rural areas into cities where the former peasant-class would be forced to work in the state's factories, creating the worker-class that Marx wrote his theories for. These forced social upheavals of course created numerous problems, including [[https://www.scmp.com/article/723956/revisiting-calamitous-time][millions of deaths]] and [[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9266764.html][rampant]] environmental [[https://www.visiontimes.com/2018/02/23/mao-zedong-caused-one-of-worlds-worst-environmental-disasters-killing-millions.html][destruction]].
Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they "lifted the peasants (that survived) out of poverty". But they are measuring "poverty" by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that made up much of the pre-industrial world. Before Lenin, Stalin and Mao's collectivization and industrialization, most peasants were largely self sufficient. Even those living in feudal territories, while by no means free, lived simple uncomplicated lives in harmony with nature; having no carbon footprint to speak of since industry was non-existent. Most enjoyed relative autonomy from the state (which had a far shorter reach), practiced mutual aid with their neighbors, and only needed to work [[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html][a few hours a week]] [1] to produce all the food they needed to survive.
The progression of Lenin’s state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a "kulak" and exiled, imprisoned or killed. As bad as feudalism was, it simply didn’t have the concentrated, centralized power that state capitalism forced on every single person within its borders.
There was no escaping the state now. You couldn’t retreat to the mountains to get away from the ruler as countless bandits did before because the new ruler was everywhere. Indigenous people were no longer permitted to maintain their way of life because it interfered with the state’s demands for complete worker homogenization. State capitalism made life much harder for anyone who desired self-determination, simply because it was impossible to evade this new form of superpowered-state. Anyone resisting the state’s rule was crushed.
Stalin's [[https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-labor-policy]["continuous working week"]] [2] was designed for maximum worker productivity, allowing workers scant time to recover from the daily grind of the industrial machine. Citizens were forced to work in cramped, unsanitary factories far from their former homes to meet Stalin's industrial quotas. This was an incredibly difficult transition for people that had lived off of the land for generations. The state even outlawed the planting of small family gardens to ensure the people were completely dependent on the party for their survival.
Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced on them, and their resistance was met with brutal force by the Soviet state, who declared them "kulaks" and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_famine_of_1932–33][killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million]] Kazakhs. [3]
Similarly to all authoritarians, tankies support prisons and a police force, such as the Soviet secret police [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka][established by Lenin.]]
Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky's massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensheviks][Mensheviks]], the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion][sailors of Petrograd]], the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party][Socialist Revolutionaries]], the [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-alexander-berkman-bolsheviks-shooting-anarchists][anarchists]], unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on. Tankies also celebrate murdering 'kulaks', a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst atrocities in history; the catastrophic Holodomor man-made famine.
*** Lenin: Red Terror
Some tankies support Lenin but reject Stalin and other later collectivist-capitalist dictators, saying they went too far. For this reason, it's important to talk about Lenin's long list of dirty deeds.
Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people that actually fought the revolution. This started a long history of Marxist-Leninists acting as parasitic opportunists; co-opting revolutionary movements started by Marxists and anarchists and thoroughly sabotaging them.
Lenin spoke of state-capitalism as if it would somehow lead to communism, but history shows us it only ever lead back to Laissez-faire capitalism in every single case. Lenin:
<quote>
"State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country." [4]
</quote>
The insistence that forcing capitalism on a society that didn't have it before will somehow create communism at a later date is absolute nonsense. Breaking all your fingers to improve your handwriting would be a more realistic proposition than the idea that state capitalism will give way to communism. Indoctrinating millions of people into capitalism and industrialism, destroying their ecosystem and forever changing their way of life will not lead to communism. Most people born into capitalism will cling to the system like their lives depend on it because it's the only world they know. And since capitalism destroys everything in its path, allowing no deviation from its murderous rampage, it’s not like they’ll have much choice but to stick with it until the bitter end.
Let's take a quick look at the disastrous legacy of the state capitalism Lenin installed.
Starting in 1930, 300,000 tons of chemical waste were disposed of in Dzerzhinsk, one of the main manufacturing sites of chemical weapons in the USSR. The Guinness Book of World Records has named it the most chemically polluted city in the world. In 2003, the death rate in the area had exceeded the birth rate by 260 percent, with average life expectancy at a mere 42 years for men and 47 for women.
The world's largest heavy metals smelting complex was originally founded by the Soviets as a slave labor camp in Norilsk, Siberia. The snow in the area is jet black, the air is thick with the disgusting taste of sulfur and factory workers die 10 years sooner than the Russian average. Children continue to suffer with respiratory diseases and die at an alarming rate. Time Magazine reported "Within 30 miles (48 km) of the nickel smelter there's not a single living tree, it's just a wasteland."
Sumgayit was another important Soviet industrial center for producing agricultural and industrial chemicals. 70,000 to 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released here annually. To this day, the percentage of babies born premature, stillborn, and with genetic defects is staggeringly high.
It’s hard to imagine how any of this ecocide could create a communist utopia, and I wonder if Lenin even fully understood what he was unleashing on the world when he put his plans for industrialization into motion.
Lenin led the Red Terror, a program of Bolshevik terror against all opponents of his dictatorship, including those mentioned earlier. In the face of a third mass revolt of the Russians against a ruler; this time Lenin, his direct orders were to "introduce mass terror" to the population. He gave some of these orders from his hospital bed after an [[https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/vladimir-lenin-shot][assassination attempt]] which the party used as pretext to excuse these brutal policies.
The execution methods during Lenin's Red Terror were incredibly brutal, for example: Cages of rats tied to victim's bodies and exposed to flame so the rats would gnaw their way through the victim to escape, and victims slowly fed foot-first into furnaces: [5]
<quote>
“Certain Chekas specialised in particular lines of torment: The Kharkov Cheka went in for scalping and hand-flaying; some of the Voronezh Checka's victims were thrust naked into an internally nail-studded barrel and were rolled around in it; others had their forehead branded with a five pointed star, whilst members of the clergy were 'crowned' with barbed wire; the Poltava and Kremenchug Chekas specialised in impaling the clergy (eighteen monks were impaled on a single day); also in Kremenchug, rebelling peasants were buried alive; at Watering-hole victims were crucified or stoned to death, whilst at Tsaritsyn their bones were sawn through; the Cheka of Odessa put officers to death by chaining them to planks and then pushing them very slowly into furnaces, or else by immersion first in a tank of boiling water, then into the cold sea, and then again exposing them to extreme heat; at Armavir, the 'death wreath' was used to apply increasing constriction to victims' heads; in Orel and elsewhere water was poured on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living statues of ice; in Kiev the living would be buried for half an hour in a coffin containing a decomposing body; also in Kiev, the imaginative Chinese Cheka detachment amused itself by putting a rat into an iron tube sealed with wire netting at one end, the other end being placed against the victim's body, and the tube heated until the maddened rat, in an effort to escape, gnawed its way into the prisoner's guts. Johnson, the negro executioner at the Odessa Cheka, achieved special notoriety: he sometimes skinned his victims before killing them; after Odessa fell to the Whites in August 1919, he was caught and lynched by an angry mob. Women executioners could be crueler than men: Vera Grebeniukova, known as 'Dora', a beautiful young girl who was a colonel's daughter and a Chekist's lover, was reputed to have shot 700 prisoners during her two-and-a-half months' service with the Odessa Cheka.”
“The Chekas did not spare women and children. There are accounts of women being tortured and raped before being shot, wives of prisoners were sometimes blackmailed into sexual submission to Chekists. There were many cases of children between the ages of 8 and 16 being imprisoned; some were executed. The Chekas were occasionally honest enough to admit that they practised torture: in February 1920, such an admission was made by the Saratov Provincial Cheka at a meeting of the Saratov Soviet, and appeared in the press.”
</quote>
In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of [[https://libcom.org/library/lenin-orders-massacre-prostitutes-1918][sex workers]] in which hundreds were killed: [6]
<quote>
"Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay."
</quote>
Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn't too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their "Marxist-Leninist" ideology and praise him as a great communist.
Lenin's acts later inspired further dictators in the 20th century who also misused the word "communism" to describe their brutal state-capitalist regimes. He effectively destroyed any chance humanity had to achieve communism in that century, and the damage he did to revolutionary action is still being felt today as the word "communism" has become synonymous with "totalitarian state" in the public consciousness.
*** Driven by the Taste of Boot
Regardless of the fact that "communism" actually means "a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production", Marxist-Leninists support state-capitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.
Tankies also adore Lenin's even-more-brutal successor Stalin, and see nothing wrong with the fact that Stalin sent other communists, [[https://gulaganarchists.wordpress.com/][anarchists]], [[http://slavamogutin.com/gay-in-the-gulag/][gay people]] [7] and basically anyone that annoyed him or one of his cronies to death camps. Homophobia was strongly ingrained in the culture of Stalin's USSR, with anyone seen as anything less than hyper-masculine in constant danger of being beat to death in his gulags:
<quote>
”Passive homosexuals are not necessarily prisoners with gay inclinations, they are the unassertive, the timid, those who have lost a game of cards, those who have broken the camp code of ethics. Once you have the reputation of being a “cock”, it is impossible to get rid of it. It follows you from camp to camp. And if, after transfer to a new place a “fallen” prisoner fails to reveal himself, sooner or later it is bound to come to light. Then punishment is unavoidable, and it will take the form of a collective reprisal often ending in death.” [8]
</quote>
They celebrate Mao's "cultural revolution" and its murderous witch-hunts against supposed 'reactionaries' who had the [[http://www.lifedaily.com/story/20-insane-facts-about-chairman-mao-and-chinas-misguided-cultural-revolution/][wrong haircut, wore makeup]], happened to [[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion][own a cat]], [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Han_(historian)][write anti-authoritarian literature]] or [[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/torture-mass-murder-rape-cannibalism-8017041][have furniture in their home]]. Following in Stalin's footsteps, Mao criminalized homosexuality and anyone suspected of the "crime" was arrested. Castro did the same thing in Cuba.
A lot of tankies defend the many atrocities of the DPRK dictatorship; essentially a monarchy where the ruler inherits his position from his father. Tankies will tell you with a straight face that this monarchy is somehow a path to communism. They defend modern-day China's brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress autonomy and quash protests, China's [[https://www.ibtimes.com/china-africas-new-colonial-overlord-says-famed-primate-researcher-jane-goodall-1556312][overseas colonialism]] and [[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/china-says-it-has-been-restrained-by-not-seizing-more-islands-in-south-china-sea][territory expansion]], its [[https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/china-holds-million-uighur-muslims-concentration-camps-180912105738481.html][concentration camps for minorities]] and organized [[https://truthout.org/articles/china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse/][destruction of the environment]] for short-term profit.
When people bring up anarchists in relation to tankies, it's because Anarchists particularly dislike the authoritarian regimes defended and idealized by tankies due to appalling events such as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion][Kronstadt rebellion]], or the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Days][May Days]] in Spain. Anarchists are staunchly opposed to hierarchy, authority, rulers, states and capitalism. All things that tankies enthusiastically embrace.
Tankies often preach "left unity" to encourage all leftists to aid their supposed revolution. But throughout history, once they succeed in seizing power by taking control of the state and replacing the government figures with their party members, they immediately begin labeling anyone who isn't toeing their vanguard party line as a "revisionist", or a "counter-revolutionary"; sending all dissenters (especially [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-avrich-russian-anarchists-and-the-civil-war][anarchists]]) to labor camps, or simply executing them and dumping their bodies in mass graves. These purges always follow a Marxist-Leninist revolution and anarchists are usually the ones first up on the chopping block.
A tankie is anyone who presents themselves as a 'communist', but engages in apologism for torture, slavery, imprisonment, imperialism, capitalism, [[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html][genocide]] and the erasure of actually liberatory movements. A tankie is anyone that claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone that will swear up and down that state-capitalism, dictator personality cults and ecosystem-destroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the "withering away" of the brutal state that they uphold.
*** Reject Left-Unity
Any attempt at comradeship with a tankie is doomed to fail. Regardless of what they claim, tankies aren't interested in any form of debate, compromise, or exchange of ideas with anarchists or socialists. Their only goal is to give their dangerous ideology an appearance of legitimacy. To wrongly represent it as a legitimate form of socialism so they may further pollute radical politics with their tyrannical capitalist cult.
Anarchy is pure anathema to the tankie. We espouse opposition to authoritarianism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, state-sanctioned violence, prisons, worker exploitation, ecosystem destruction, state-capitalism and imperialism. This makes us, to the tankie, "reactionary counter-revolutionary imperialist scum". Doublespeak like this is one of their defining traits.
Behind closed doors, they see us as a threat to their plans for strongman dictatorships, cults of personality, mega-industrial capitalism and gulags as far as the eye can see. We are vermin to the tankie; fit only to be ridiculed and then swiftly exterminated once they seize power. Anarchy is their absolute worst fear. Anarchists are the biggest threat to their plans for party dictatorship.
They latch onto our movements and gradually corrupt them with their reactionary rhetoric and divide-and-conquer tactics. Their goals aren't even slightly aligned with ours, but they use entryism, shame and cries of victimization to squirrel themselves into our spaces. Their demands for 'left unity' and an end to 'divisiveness' and ‘sectarianism’ are obvious wolves in sheep's clothing and should be rejected outright.
We can't lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, bigotry, imperialism, struggle sessions and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, something all tankies believe is necessary to ensure their vanguard's dictatorship and cement their own power on the party hierarchy.
Their only purpose in engaging you is to normalize their toxic beliefs and make us accepting of their presence in radical groups so they can grow their ranks. If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you entertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of "left unity" and enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.
[1] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pages 542-43.
[2] “The Continuous Working Week in Soviet Russia,” International Labour Review, vol. 23, no. 2, February 1931.
[3] Sabol, Steven (2017). "The Touch of Civilization": Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization. University Press of Colorado. p. 47. ISBN 9781607325505
[4] Lenin's Collected Works Vol. 27, p. 293.
[5] Leggett, George (1986). The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-822862-7, pages 197 and 198.
[6] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1976], Moscow, Volume 35, page 349.
[7] The Mordovian Marathon (Jerusalem, 1979).
[8] Notes of a dissident (Ann Arbor, 1982).
|
#title The Futility of Struggle
#author ziq
#LISTtitle Futility of Struggle
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics struggle, strugglismo, revolution, post-left, social movements, social war
#date November 2021
#source https://raddle.me/wiki/struggle
#lang en
To struggle is to embody the activist mentality. To struggle is to take up the role of activism. The activist belongs to the struggle, gives themself fully to the cause, makes it their job, their mission, their whole existence.
Social struggle is activism, it's protest, it's empty obsessive-compulsive ritual, it's imposing sanctimonious moral values on others, it's collectivizing people into in-groups and out-groups so they can better do war with each other, it's entrenched in dogmatic ideology and personality cults, it's self-aggrandizing and endlessly congratulatory, it's a constant push and pull between the system and those who struggle to seize control of it to reboot it in their own image, appointing themselves as the beloved God-given saviors of The People™, the purveyors of fairness, equality and rational world building.
Tearing authority apart needn't be done in the name of an epic global struggle for the greater good or to achieve the grand master plan set out for us by the great elders of anarchy in their uplifting manifestos promising us a new world order dedicated to worker-led factories and social justice for all.
Destroying authority where you see it isn't a struggle for revolution, it doesn't need to be done in pursuit of anything bigger than a simple personal desire to watch tangible instruments of authority burn to embers right in front of you so they no longer blight your senses.
The actions we take don't need to be in pursuit of an amazing utopian society dreamed up by a long-dead Russian prince or an epic battle between good and evil of our own imagining where we cast ourselves as the heroic protagonists in a brutal social war where victory is everything and there can be no rest or amusement until the glorious prophesized end goal is achieved.
An anarchist's actions don't need to be connected to anything beyond what we see and feel right in front of us: A tangible, immediate outcome we can perceive with our own senses in this time and space. What we do doesn't need to be presented as part of some incredible 4D chess move to build a new, 'better' society or government, to ignite a new age of egalitarianism that promises to solve all of humanity's problems by putting the right people in charge of constructing the right systems.
I can paint over a billboard or spike a tree or tear up a road or stab a dictator or spread dandelion seeds in a wheat field without it being a struggle to upend society to conform to my favored vision of how society should be run. I can be an agent of chaos simply because it feels good to be. I don't need to lie to myself or to you and claim my actions or your actions are going to bring on a new dawn of civilization if only we all struggle enough together.
I can deal blows to the imposing instruments of authority that surround me just because I want to, without ever believing any of my actions will lead to a social revolution to remake the world in my (or my God's) image. Without ever thinking I'm a mighty warrior fighting the good fight, a worker's Messiah sent to Earth to right all the wrongs of humanity and lead the chosen people to anarchist Mecca.
Or in Aragorn!'s words:
<quote>
(Strugglismo is) a critique of boring, stale, ineffective, ritualized activity and, recently, has given birth to a bunch of stale, boring, sanctimonious projects.
</quote>
I can destroy the instruments of authority that work to slowly crush me under their weight without needing to craft a meticulous plan to build nicer replacements for them.
I destroy that which crushes me because I don't find being crushed to be very pleasant. I don't destroy authority because I'm under the impression I'm saving the world by preserving myself or that something as innately crushing as mass society can even be made to be fair and equitable.
I have no delusions of grandeur. I can't save civilization or build a better civilization. I'm not a vessel for change, I'm not the trigger for a new world order, I'm not the purveyor of universal justice.
What I can do is pick up a brick, and I can break the object I fling the brick at.
Whatever rifts may or may not form from that action are beyond my control, and I'll be too busy aiming the brick at the next grotesque object of authority to care.
I have power over the things right in front of me that I can affect. A brick through a windshield is an immediate cause and effect action with no ego trip behind it to pretend the brick is bigger than it is. I'm under no impression a brick is a symbol in the battle between good and evil, just and unjust, left and right, prole and capital. A brick is just a brick. A tool to achieve a measurable, immediate result.
I don't have power over things far bigger than myself, I can't force society or economics to bend to my will. I can't control how millions or billions of people live. I only have power over the brick in my hand and the things I throw it at.
Struggling to affect outcomes you have no power over is a life spent in miserable exasperation and futility. You have no ability to mount a struggle to correct all of society's ills. Every hard-fought revolution in history has only further entrenched structural oppression and mass subservience.
The brick I pick up off the ground and hold in my hand has infinitely more value to me and to anarchy than a thousand years of desperate struggle to knock kings off their thrones and bring in new kings and new thrones.
|
#title The Rotting Carcass Behind The Green-Scare
#subtitle How Anti-Civ Anarchy Became the Most Controversial Position
#author ziq
#SORTtopics green anarchy, anti-civ, raddle, antifa
#date 2022, August
#source Retrieved on August 8, 2022 from https://raddle.me/wiki/green_scare
#lang en
*** Green Anarchy & Red Anarchy: The Divide
Green anarchy, regardless of the offshoot, is a philosophy, a critique, and a lifeway that emphasizes the most pronounced anarchist principles. Green anarchists are ready and willing to dismantle all structures of domination, starting with a deep-rooted analysis of ecology, which means the relationship between all living things and the physical environment we all depend on to survive.
I'm going to examine the origins and gradual evolution of green anarchy, explore how these ideas are perceived by people on the outside looking in, and try to understand why green anarchy is so detested by a contingent of bullheaded leftists who, more and more, have been slandering us as "eco-fascists".
Green anarchists take the critique of authority as far as it will go – not stubbornly stopping at government and capital as many anarchists will do, but going further to tackle all the hierarchical implications of work, industry, agriculture, patriarchy, society, gender norms, high technology, numbers, language, time and more. It casts a wide net to identify and dissect all the forms of oppression that spawn from the global industrial-agricultural-patriarchal-domesticating system we're forced to live under.
The contemporary forms of green anarchy: "anti-civ", "green nihilism" and even the more PR-friendly but frustratingly wishy-washy "post-civ" have the same foundations and principles as anarcho-primitivism, but that label has largely been discarded by contemporary anarchists because of the racist implications of white Western philosophers referring to diverse indigenous lifestyles as "primitive".
I used to call myself post-civ when in the company of leftists, because, like a lot of green anarchists, I fell into the trap of trying to water down my anti-civ views to placate the scolding leftists that have long declared themselves the arbiters of sound anarchist theory.
For years, reds have stood up on a pedestal loudly shaming, othering and smearing anyone who isn't as enthusiastically devoted to the continued "progress" of the factory, the mine, the battery farm, the university campus, the cubicle (and other prisons) as they are.
It's natural to not want to be grouped in with a villainous, problematic, dangerous element – and that's what anti-civ anarchy is largely presented as by certain vocal elements within the left. An irredeemable bogeyman so frightening that it can't be allowed a voice, just in case the sound of it corrupts some impressionable child who doesn't know any better and is then turned away from the centralization, coercion, ecological plunder and imperialism that is inherent with industrial life.
Red organizers have tried to forbid green anarchists from tabling at anarchist book-fairs, overturned their tables when they showed up anyway, tried to confiscate their anti-civ literature, yelled abuse at them, spat at them, pepper-sprayed them, sucker-punched them. Reds frothing at the mouth at the sight of green anarchists would almost be amusing if it weren't becoming so damaging to our health and physical safety. They've convinced themselves we're evil scum who want to seize their insulin, burn down their workplaces and corn fields and, most ridiculously, omnicide the human species. They believe all this because of bald-faced lies <em>they themselves</em> made up to discredit anti-civ anarchy.
There's a concerted effort on behalf of the left to project all the authoritarian constructs inherent with leftism onto anti-civ anarchy, which wants nothing to do with leftism or its towering pile of deadly and ecosystem-destroying failures.
While humans and other animals suffer and die in staggering numbers all around us from the immediate effects of global industrial civilization, a lot of leftists will swear up and down that anti-civ anarchists are a mortal threat to the continued survival of humanity. That we're a clear and present danger to civilized people's freedom.
Let's try to unwrap why this is.
First, I should explain what ("dark") green anarchy is and what it isn't. Green anarchists theorize that generations of sedentary social stratification has led to human domestication, in the same way dogs have been gradually domesticated from wild wolves. Just like with dogs, this domesticating process has had a cumulative detrimental effect on our physical and mental health and the way we interact with each other and our environment.
It's proposed by green anarchists that a sustained “rewilding” process could act to curtail this domestication and restore the health of not only ourselves, but the balance of our ecosystems. Some of the proposed ways to achieve this include regenerative land management techniques and the restoration of our social bonds with the biosphere.
These correlative bonds we had with our habitat for almost our entire existence as a species have become deeply fractured due to the various alienating processes that brought about our domestication. Until the bonds are repaired and the planet's ecology is restored, we'll continue to experience the dreadful effects of social and ecological collapse, as well as the continued processes of coercion and domination that are so ingrained in industrial mass-society.
Green anarchy addresses both social and environmental factors and understands that the two are interlinked in a holistic manner. If an ecosystem is broken, the people who live within it will continue to deteriorate until a healthy ecology is restored.
Like all anarchists, we challenge all systems of authority and seek voluntary, mutually-beneficial relationships with our neighbors in self-sustaining communities. The thing that most sets green anarchists apart from other tendencies is our dedication to extending our critique of domination to all life, not simply human life. We study anthropology and history to understand the origins of civilization and all the systems of domination that formed around it.
The philosophy of green anarchy is informed by the writings and lifeways of transcendentalists (Thoreau), bioregionalists (Reclus), situationists (Debord), spiritual anarchists (Tolstoy, Laozi, Brydum), anarcho-naturists (Gravelle, Zisly, Montseny), indigenous-anarchists (Zig Zag, Indigenous Action, Tawinikay), green nihilists (Langer, anonymous, Flower Bomb, Abara, de Acosta, Aragorn!), anti-civs (Landstreicher, Fitzpatrick, Elany, Seaweed, Return Fire) and anarcho-primitivists (Moore, Zerzan, Perlman, Tucker, AbdelRahim).
These interrelated philosophies together form a strong critique of social hierarchy, work, extractivism, social alienation, domestication, social stratification, technocracy, patriarchy, the division of labor / specialization, ableism, imperialism, institutional violence, desertification, mass society, ecocide and all the other forms of authority brought about by the civilization that envelopes the whole planet.
There are those who are not willing to widen their critique of authority to most of these things, yet insist on identifying as ("bright") green or eco-anarchists. These people are simply pushing insipid, greenwashed Marxism like Murray Bookchin made a career of doing for decades. Anyone working to convince us the disastrous industrial system that's become so pervasive in our lives and driven so much of the planet's life to extinction can be gently reshaped into a peaceful, ecological people's utopia has little understanding of what it means to be "green" and doesn't reject hierarchy in any real way.
Green anarchy embodies an unapologetic critique of all forms of authority. "Solar-punk", "social ecology", "post-scarcity anarchism" and related attempts to appropriate the green label from anti-civs have no real desire to address the devastating consequences of the debilitating industrial system that rules us. Their wistful notions that "green" technology such as solar cells, undefined "clean energy", modular computing, 3D printers and electric vehicles will solve this unprecedented crisis are incredibly shortsighted.
They fail to understand just how destructive and polluting those high technologies are to extract from the earth, manufacture and transport. They always fail to address the mountains of toxic waste that's produced during these processes and dumped in some third world peasant's backyard. All these high-tech goods require global supply chains, extractivism, imperialism and laborer-exploitation because they're made up of rare minerals and other resources that can only be sourced in certain parts of the world.
The manufacturing processes for microchips and silicon are so advanced that they require centralized mega-factories that cost an absolute fortune to set up and run, which is why there are only 2 or 3 companies in the world with the required infrastructure.
The microchip manufacturing process involves hundreds of steps and depends on advanced robots pushing tiny particles around massive fabrication facilities. The "clean rooms" inside these facilities require tightly controlled conditions with zero contamination from dust, humidity, heat or dirt. If one tiny impurity enters the system, an entire batch will be ruined, costing a fortune and months of wasted preparation. You're not going to have local neighborhood microchip factories like these solarpunks seem to imagine.
Reading an incredibly shallow and uninformed text like [[http://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/][The Solarpunk Manifesto]] is an exercise in frustration for anyone who has thought seriously about all the consequences of mass-production and what it takes to maintain an industrial city. It reads like a child's proposal for saving the world. Look at some of these points:
<quote>
Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.
</quote>
<quote>
Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
</quote>
<quote>
The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following: 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles). Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird). Appropriate technology. Art Nouveau. Hayao Miyazaki. Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world. High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs.
</quote>
<quote>
In Solarpunk we've pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We've learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet.
</quote>
It's just silly. A style guide for drawing pretty art and writing fiction with a certain aesthetic. It's a fun and creative pastime, sure, but it doesn't engage in any real way with the ongoing global ecocide beyond proposing "green tech" and without ever attempting to explain how, "sustainable civilization".
The more "serious" philosophies like Bookchin's social ecology and post-scarcity anarchism essentially make the same naive assumptions and proposals as solar-punk, but use bigger words to do it, while also repeatedly tarnishing anti-civs for not having faith in futurist science, technological progress, democracy and workerism. (I've written about Bookchin's greenwashed prescriptions in a previous essay, so I won't rehash that here.)
The left's reductive utopian thinking: insisting on dear leader's step-by-step plan for constructing a utopian worker-society has never led anywhere good.
It's naive and damaging to imagine Leviathan can be tamed and reformed into serving the interests of free people. Industrial civilization will never allow left-wing-technocrats to curtail its constant expansion. The idea that the system can be reformed into compliance is a complete misunderstanding of power-hierarchy, and more perversely, a willful disregarding of the morbid reality we live everyday. Leviathan has stolen both the present and the future from under us and it's not going to suddenly play nice because some oblivious Bookchinites say they can make it do their bidding. Prescribing a supposed lesser-evil form of industrialism to solve the devastation wrought on us by the industrial age is tragically inept. Leviathan will roll over gullible solar-industrialists and their "green" cities without skipping a beat.
The tireless drive of Leviathan to dominate absolutely everything everywhere and leave nothing but sand in its wake cannot be under-estimated. Marxists completely fail to reckon with the coercion – domestication – alienation – domination – ecocide cycle that's inherent in industrial civilization. If someone told them capitalism could be reformed to benefit workers, they'd laugh in their face, but somehow they're convinced Leviathan would be rendered docile and servile if workers possessed more democracy in the workplace. They insist Leviathan's sprawling cities can be made to peacefully co-exist with the wilds... The wilds that need to be stripped bare and burned to a crisp every record-hot summer to maintain those cities. And all they need to do it? Leftists in positions of power.
It's patently absurd, and yet they've never questioned it because their entire ideological worldview depends on the glory of the moral leftist worker-organizer who can do no wrong. They offer the same distorted solution to every problem: Just give workers democracy and everything will be okay. Because voter bodies would <strong>never</strong> use democracy to vote the future away to preserve their privileges. Coal miners would <strong>never</strong> vote to keep the mines open. Farm workers would <strong>never</strong> vote to use pesticides to make their jobs easier. Factory workers would <strong>never</strong> vote to outsource their industrial waste somewhere out of sight. (Note: Heavy use of sarcasm)
Unlike "anarcho-transhumanism" – which took a pre-existing authoritarian-aligned school of thought from rich white Silicon Valley executives and tried to fuse it with anarchy (with admittedly amusing results), there is no authoritarian primitivism. It's always been an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism][anarchist school of thought]], envisioned by anarchists for anarchists as a [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-moore-a-primitivist-primer][critique of civilization]] and an associated living practice going all the way back to Thoreau, Tolstoy and Reclus, long before it was first given a name in the 1980s.
*** The Origins of Anti-Civ Anarchy & Other Ecological Movements
Ever since Thoreau dropped out of society to live in the woods and documented his experience in a diary, anti-civilizational anarchy has been a strong current within the anarchist milieu. Living in balance with nature. Practicing simple, sustainable survival skills in order to live without depending on systems of authority. Deconstructing the inherently alienating properties of industrial civilization. Unlearning all the bad habits urban life has indoctrinated us with...
These were long-held anarchist principles and it's only recently, thanks to self-avowed anti-anarchist crusaders like Murray Bookchin that these ideas have been tarnished as "lifestylist" and "reactionary". There's been a decades-long smear campaign led by anarcho-transhumanists, post-scarcity anarchists and other reds to equate anti-civ anarchy with "eco-fascism" and cast all anti-civs as transphobic, ableist, genocidal, wheelchair-stealing supervillains who work in the shadows to bring about the cruel destruction of everything civilized people hold dear.
Green anarchy in its successive forms, from transcendentalism to primitivism, to the current trends of green-nihilism and indigenous anarchism, has always, always rejected all authority, oppression and domination. It's always been the anarchist school of thought most ready to pick apart every social institution to identify its limitations and its hierarchical inevitabilities, while other anarchist tendencies have willfully ignored all manner of social hierarchies when people decided those hierarchies were beneficial to furthering their reductive ideological prescriptions to build bigger, better societies with cushy manufacturing jobs for everyone. The supposed divinity of "progress" has consumed the left since the dawn of the industrial age.
Elisée Reclus [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/elisee-reclus-progress][summed it up well]] in 1905:
<quote>
"Progress," in the strictest sense of the word, is meaningless, for the world is infinite, and in its unlimited vastness, one is always as distant from the beginning as from the end. The movement of society ultimately reduces to the movements of the individuals who are its constitutive elements. In view of this fact, we must ask what progress in itself can be determined for each of these beings whose total life span from birth to death is only a few years. Is it no more than that of a spark of light glancing off a pebble and vanishing instantly into the cold air? [...]
</quote>
<quote>
The missionaries who encounter magnificent savages moving about freely in their nakedness believe that they will bring them "progress" by giving them dresses and shirts, shoes and hats, catechisms and Bibles, and by teaching them to chant psalms in English or Latin. And what triumphant songs in honor of progress have not been sung at the opening ceremonies of all the industrial plants with their adjoining taverns and hospitals! Certainly, industry brought real progress in its wake, but it is important to analyze scrupulously the details of this great evolution! The wretched populations of Lancashire and Silesia demonstrate that their histories were not a record of unadulterated progress. It is not enough to change one's circumstances and enter a new class in order to acquire a greater share of happiness. There are now millions of industrial workers, seamstresses, and servants who tearfully remember the thatched cottages of their childhoods, the outdoor dances under the ancestral tree, and the evening visits around the hearth. And what kind of "progress" is it for the people of Cameroon and of Togo to have henceforth the honor of being protected by the German flag, or for the Algerian Arabs to drink aperitifs and express themselves elegantly in Parisian slang?
</quote>
In the spirit of Tao, Green anarchy goes further than merely critiquing material structures of domestication and domination, it also critiques our conceptions of what the world is, how we place ourselves in it, the purpose of self, and indeed the very idea of a fixed reality.
The way we conceive of the world and of our existence on a metaphysical level is as important to the green anarchist tradition as our understanding of the manufactured systems erected to domesticate us. These systems restrain both body and mind, in order to maintain the constant forward march of civilization, keeping Leviathan fat and powerful and everything else in a state of perpetual spiritual starvation.
Without a keen understanding of the self, the constraining "logic" of progress will forever linger in our minds, and blunt all the provocative, stimulating possibilities we could be exploring, hindering us from living a life of joy rather than the tragic loop of suffering and sacrifice we eternalize in service of Leviathan's monstrous appetite.
Only by breaking down the imposing walls of domestication within our minds can we hope to truly <em>progress</em> beyond our compulsion to feed the gluttonous serpent.
There's a strong argument to be made that anti-civ is the most anti-authority of all the anarchist schools of thought, even going as far as [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-language-origin-and-meaning][critiquing language]] for its inherent alienation and propensity for hierarchy-building – something that anyone with disabilities that cause communication struggles, or with a "common" accent that marks them as poor for life would appreciate.
This has a lot to do with why leftists are so quick to fear-monger and bad-jacket anarchists when we have anti-civ ideas. The realization that green anarchists will go much, much further than they ever will in questioning all the structures of domination that subjugate us must be incredibly threatening for people who crow about how "radical" and enlightened they are to anyone who will listen… So radical that they've read everything David Graeber and Murray Bookchin ever wrote and will parrot their academic heroes soothing tall-tales at every opportunity. If only the world could be as simple as they've conceived it in their manifestos. If only the workers owning the means of production would create a worldwide ecological utopia, and all other forms of authority would evaporate when they met that singular goal. Then they wouldn't need to attack green anarchy and burn our books to prevent anyone from thinking beyond their ideal-workplace fantasy.
A lot of the anger about anti-civ anarchy demonstrably isn't actually about anti-civ anarchists at all, but at unrelated groups like "Individuals Tending Towards the Wild" (ITS) and "Deep Green Resistance" (DGR). Reds associate these anti-anarchist groups with anti-civ anarchy for reasons only known to them.
ITS is a Mexican terrorist group that may or may not be responsible for indiscriminate bombings and murders done in the name of "eco-extremism" and vengeance for the continuing deterioration of the planet's ecosystems. Among the attacks people identifying with ITS have claimed responsibility for are [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/los-hijos-del-mencho-against-the-world-builders-eco-extremists-respond-to-critics#toc4][bombings of anarchist events and squats]]. Some of the random murders they've claimed in their communiques later turned out to have been committed by people with no connection to ITS, casting doubt on the veracity of their claims. For example, murder victim Berlin Osorio’s boyfriend was arrested and tried for her murder after an ITS communique tried to take credit for it. Regardless, they've written long tirades rejecting anarchism and celebrated bombing anarchist spaces. Equating this group with green anarchy doesn't make a lick of sense.
DGR is a proudly trans-exclusionary millenarian organization that prescribes hierarchical vanguardism (in the form of a board of directors), submission to dear leader and reactionary moralism as the solution for the destruction of the environment.
Anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker and others have long criticized DGR's rigid hierarchy, their institutional transphobia, their cultish code of conduct that penalizes members for breaking with their rules (which include things as vague as "disloyalty", lack of "commitment, courage or integrity"), their incredibly flawed historical understanding of revolution and radical history, and the cult of personality that surrounds the organization's leaders Keith and Jensen. DGR really embodies all the worst instincts of the historic authoritarian left, and equating this cultish top-down organization with any of the staunchly anti-left, anti-civ anarchist tendencies is as ridiculous as blaming Kropotkin for Hitler or Mussolini's views simply because they were all big promoters of the progress of industrial society.
The DGR organization with its dogmatic manifestos that outline how the leaders of its vanguard will govern and punish its lesser members is what you get when the left tries to tackle environmentalism. It really couldn't be any further removed from the principles of green anarchy. So, when the left claims anti-civs are transphobic because of the views of DGR's creepy TERF board of directors, they're really attacking the left's zealous organizationalism, the left's attempts at world-building, the left's insistence on an ideological sameness among its members, and the left's stringent codes of laws rather than anything green anarchy is responsible for.
Leftists striving to govern "the people" is the reason organizations like DGR are able to do harm. An institutionalized, structural bigotry written in stone for all members of a political organization to internalize and obey is far more dangerous than any isolated latent bigotry an anti-organizationalist (like a green anarchist) might hold. Bigotry is far more destructive when it has organized, systemic power behind it.
It's very telling that leftists can't or won't separate authoritarian environmental organizations that are organized according to leftist principles from the various anti-organizational green anarchist tendencies. Ancoms are constantly insisting they're the only real communists, the only real leftists, the only real libertarians and the only real democrats, but when it comes to green anarchists, apparently we're all a bunch of eco-fascists.
Eco-fascists, Eco-extremists, DGR, ITS and so on don't claim to be anarchists, primitivists or any variation of the two. The same goes for Ted Kaczynski, the former Unabomber, who doesn't claim to be an anarchist and in fact frequently lambasts anarchy and anarcho-primitivism for not being authoritarian like him. He calls anarcho-primitivism [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-letter-to-a-turkish-anarchist#toc7]["a romanticized vision"]] and rejects it for being too socially progressive.
For some reason this man, who, if you've read his more recent writings, seems to most closely align with some form of class-reductionist Maoism, has been painted as the patron saint of anti-civ anarchy by people who clearly have no familiarity with his (actually very vanguardist and governmentalist) politics. While it's true some anti-civ anarchists have been influenced by a select few of his better ideas, that shouldn't be enough to weigh us down with all his bad ones.
That being said, there are certainly some shit green anarchists out there just like there are some shit red anarchists, orange anarchists, and so on. Anarchy shouldn't ever be confused with some of the people who lay claim to the label, or we would all have to abandon the anarchist philosophy because of anarcho-capitalists. There are even some generally good anarchists who still maintain some bad ideas, like certain aging anprims who haven't managed to move past the old "noble savage" trope.
There are also some unknowledgeable people who choose to identify with green anarchy without having much of an understanding of what anarchy entails. Some of these people, feeling alienated by industrial society, were drawn to vague anti-industrial politics (usually due to Kaczynski) and now loosely identify as green anarchists, without having read enough about anarchy to realize how completely unforgiving it is when it comes to hierarchy, domination and oppression. They narrowly focus in on the anti-civ aspect of anarchy, which really has very little use without the broader anti-authority aspects. Just like baby red anarchists, baby green anarchists will soon either switch to a less demanding philosophy when realizing how high the learning curve is, or will in time develop into decent anarchists.
The reason properly-informed green anarchists don't aim to construct a program to force our principles on the world is because we fully believe in anarchy. Coercing people to live the way we live would instantly disqualify us from being anarchists.
Most of the smears against green anarchists seem to come from the discomfort provoked by the random violence committed by Kaczynski and ITS and the transphobia of DGR, even though all three have vocally denounced green anarchy on multiple occasions. The idea that hierarchical organizations and terrorists who vocally oppose green anarchy somehow represent green anarchy is absurdly disingenuous, even for the left.
It really needs to be said again and again and again until it sinks in to the collective consciousness: Anti-civ anarchy is a critical framework. It is not a political program for building a new world order. It is not a plan to build a global gatherer-hunter society or to force any way of life on anyone. It's a useful lens we can apply to problems that are then tackled on a case-by-case basis by the people most affected by them. It is not a system for ordering reductive prescriptions on everything, everyone, everywhere.
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-filiss-interview-with-john-moore][John Moore]]:
<quote>
There’s always the danger — as witnessed recently in Fifth Estate, for example — where hostile commentators can twist your words so that it looks as if you are constructing a primitivist ideology and setting up a primitivist political movement, even when you state exactly the contrary.
</quote>
We're not going to seize anyone's insulin, break their wheelchair or ban them from playing video games. The reason this slanderous myth is so pervasive among leftists is because leftists assume every school of thought is like their own – a program to force an ideological blueprint for the organization of people on the world – a rigid and unchanging manifesto that claims to have all the answers to all our conundrums. They don't seem able to conceive of a non-prescriptive worldview because their worldview so revolves around a long-dead German (or Russian) man's promise to solve all the planet's problems with his immortal communist science.
While the left revolves around a few learned men manufacturing systems and rules for others to live by, anti-civ has no such ambitions. The majority of the criticisms leftists have about green anarchy are them projecting their own grand ambitions for the ordering of society onto anti-civ anarchists. They're unwilling to break out of their ever-shrinking ideological bubble to understand the difference between a critical framework and a political program. They can't fathom of a philosophy that isn't yet another tired prescription for world-building and people-management. This becomes extremely clear when the first thing reds ask us when they hear we're green anarchists is almost always: "So, what does your utopia look like?" This binary way of thinking makes it near-impossible to communicate our ideas to them without them making a hundred false assumptions fed to them by their own ideological brainworms.
The fierce cognitive dissonance that erupts in leftists when green anarchists are willing to poke holes in all the hierarchical systems they aren't willing to dismantle betrays their smallminded thinking. They simply lack the imagination to think outside the suffocating concrete box they've constructed for themselves.
*** Post-Civ: Leftist-Drift
While much of the fallacious green-scare leftists have stirred up comes from them confusing green anarchy for authoritarian environmentalist movements, as well as the rampant badjacketing Bookchin unleashed against green anarchists to help prop up his greenwashed political program, there's also a green anarchist tendency that seems to only exist because of that same green-scare: Post-civ anarchy.
This tendency, while being anarchist and anti-civ, still manages to feed the big lie that other forms of green anarchy are deviant and bigoted ideas that we need to loudly castigate and distance ourselves from at every opportunity. It repeats that tiresome myth that primitivism is a political program to remake society in the image of indigenous gatherer-hunters and subsistence farmers, the same way communism is a program to remake society in the image of the collectively-owned factory worker.
These are the points [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/margaret-killjoy-take-what-you-need-and-compost-the-rest-an-introduction-to-post-civilized-theo][Margaret Killjoy]] makes in setting post-civ apart from anarcho-primitivism. Let's go through them one by one and I'll demonstrate how they're little more than strawmen, and show that post-civ is really no different than anarcho-primitivism in substance or practice, and the attempt to distance green anarchy from its roots necessitates buying into the smears disseminated by transhumanists, Marxists and others who fetishize the idea of liberation through the progression of industrial civilization.
Killjoy begins:
<quote>
We're Not Primitivists. It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought — important work, mind you — has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.
</quote>
Anprims don't actually believe it's possible or desirable to "return to a pre-civilized state of being'" so from the get-go Killjoy is building a coercive strawman.
The definitive explainer for anarcho-primitivism and green anarchy in general still remains "A Primitivist Primer" by the late John Moore (who was my creative writing professor when I was an international student in England in the early 00s, coincidentally). Everyone who wants to understand the anti-civ philosophy should read this text, because it will quickly dispel the myths being put out into the world by fearful blockheads.
From [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-moore-a-primitivist-primer][A Primitivist Primer]]:
<quote>
The aim is not to replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying forms of anarchy. For anarcho-primitivists, civilization is the overarching context within which the multiplicity of power relations develop. Some basic power relations are present in primitive societies — and this is one reason why anarcho-primitivists do not seek to replicate these societies — but it is in civilization that power relations become pervasive and entrenched in practically all aspects of human life and human relations with the biosphere.[...]
</quote>
<quote>
The fact is that anarcho-primitivism is not a power-seeking ideology. It doesn't seek to capture the State, take over factories, win converts, create political organizations, or order people about. Instead, it wants people to become free individuals living in free communities which are interdependent with one another and with the biosphere they inhabit. It wants, then, a total transformation, a transformation of identity, ways of life, ways of being, and ways of communicating. This means that the tried and tested means of power-seeking ideologies just aren't relevant to the anarcho-primitivist project, which seeks to abolish all forms of power. So new forms of action and being, forms appropriate to and commensurate with the anarcho-primitivist project, need to be developed. This is an ongoing process and so there's no easy answer to the question: What is to be done? At present, many agree that communities of resistance are an important element in the anarcho-primitivist project. The word 'community' is bandied about these days in all kinds of absurd ways (e.g., the business community), precisely because most genuine communities have been destroyed by Capital and the State. Some think that if traditional communities, frequently sources of resistance to power, have been destroyed, then the creation of communities of resistance — communities formed by individuals with resistance as their common focus — are a way to recreate bases for action. An old anarchist idea is that the new world must be created within the shell of the old. This means that when civilization collapses — through its own volition, through our efforts, or a combination of the two — there will be an alternative waiting to take its place. This is really necessary as, in the absence of positive alternatives, the social disruption caused by collapse could easily create the psychological insecurity and social vacuum in which fascism and other totalitarian dictatorships could flourish. For the present writer, this means that anarcho-primitivists need to develop communities of resistance — microcosms (as much as they can be) of the future to come — both in cities and outside. These need to act as bases for action (particularly direct action), but also as sites for the creation of new ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, being, and so on, as well as new sets of ethics — in short, a whole new liberatory culture. They need to become places where people can discover their true desires and pleasures, and through the good old anarchist idea of the exemplary deed, show others by example that alternative ways of life are possible. However, there are many other possibilities that need exploring. The kind of world envisaged by anarcho-primitivism is one unprecedented in human experience in terms of the degree and types of freedom anticipated ... so there can't be any limits on the forms of resistance and insurgency that might develop. The kind of vast transformations envisaged will need all kinds of innovative thought and activity.
</quote>
So, primitivism is not an attempt to turn back the clock to the stone age as Killjoy asserts, it's rather taking action to set up alternate, sustainable and thriving ways of life for the purposes of prefiguration. It's looking <em>forward</em> to create forms of resistance, setting up living refuges parallel to industrial society to house free people, and putting together the infrastructure anarchists need to thrive within the shell of a rapidly collapsing civilization. The anti-civ philosophy is a guide we can use to prepare ourselves for the deluge of natural disasters, pandemics, famines and droughts this decaying civilization will continue to rain down on us and give us the fortitude to help each other not only survive these catastrophes, but prosper in the ruins of the old world as it decays all around us.
Rather than being an action to return society to the past, it's a concerted effort to look to the future and create sobering, but necessary mechanisms to cope with the continuing decay of civilization. Civilization will continue to collapse due to its universally unsustainable, destructive, non-regenerative properties. It's not helpful to ignore or deny this simple reality just because it threatens the reductive idea leftists have of technological progress and democracy being the solution to everything.
Killjoy then claims:
<quote>
Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that's almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses — whether warfare or simple ecocide — but that doesn't make technology ("The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.") inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.
</quote>
A [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/usul-of-the-blackfoot-post-civ-a-deeper-exploration][related text]] that was presumably authored by Killjoy under a pseudonym goes into more detail about the post-civ view of technology:
<quote>
Another absurd proposition that primitivists stand behind is that tools and technology are inherently oppressive, and we should therefore abandon them. While many tools and technologies can be applied in oppressive ways, there is nothing ingrained in tools or the development of technologies that makes them oppressive.
</quote>
<quote>
It seems especially foolish for primitivists to argue this position when the society they advocate returning to is replete with tools and technology. Spears, bows and arrows, stone axes, obsidian knives, cordage, hand drill fires, pottery, totem carving, body modification and jewelry, basketry, hide tanning — these are all tools and technologies employed by primitive societies. Primitivists advocate learning these skills as a part of “rewilding” ourselves and our world, and yet they continue to denounce tools and technology. Seems a little hypocritical, doesn’t it?
</quote>
These points are the most obtuse of all because they're completely misrepresenting the anarcho-primitivist definition of technology and the distinction often made between high and low technology. Anprims don't reject any of the things listed in the above quote. It's pure strawman to pretend otherwise.
From [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-moore-a-primitivist-primer][A Primitivist Primer]] again, which I'll again stress everyone should read in its entirety:
<quote>
John Zerzan defines technology as 'the ensemble of division of labor/ production/ industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we languish in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and domination.' Opposition to technology thus plays an important role in anarcho-primitivist practice. However, Fredy Perlman says that 'technology is nothing but the Leviathan's armory,' its 'claws and fangs.' Anarcho-primitivists are thus opposed to technology, but there is some debate over how central technology is to domination in civilization. A distinction should be drawn between tools (or implements) and technology. Perlman shows that primitive peoples develop all kinds of tools and implements, but not technologies: 'The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a single occasion .... Most of the implements are ancient, and the [material] surpluses [these implements supposedly made possible] have been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both.' Tools are creations on a localised, small-scale, the products of either individuals or small groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not give rise to systems of control and coercion. Technology, on the other hand, is the product of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their own momentum and dynamic. As such, they demand structures of control and obedience on a mass scale — what Perlman calls impersonal institutions.
</quote>
As you can see, anprims have no qualms with what Killjoy would call "useful and sustainable", i.e. items that don't require "large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption". Killjoy even admits to rejecting "almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world", so what post-civs propose is really exactly the same as what anprims propose... Tools that can be produced locally, without hierarchy/control/coercion/obedience and without the centralized extractive, imperialist, resource-pillaging supply chains required to run industrial society. This is not defined as technology by anprims. Locally produced, sustainable tools that improve our lives without destroying our biosphere are fully embraced by anarcho-primitivist philosophers, just as they are by Killjoy's post-civ manifesto. If you prefer, it's the difference between low-tech (useful, sustainable) and high-tech (alienating, destructive).
Killjoy continues:
<quote>
Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.
</quote>
Again, they're strawmanning anprim philosophy by claiming anprims want to force 6 billion people to be hunter gatherers. Anprims are not trying to enforce an inflexible, collectivist, authoritarian social program on anyone, let alone the entire planet. Anprims are simply engaged in an expansive criticism of industrial society, while exploring all the possible alternatives to it and experimenting with those alternatives in their own lives. These alternatives being discussed almost always include producing food in some manner due to the simple reality that there's very little wilderness left in the world to forage from. All the anti-civs I know grow the majority of their food and supplement their diets with some foraged food – which isn't abundant enough to live on exclusively due to the march of climate change, the rise in wildfires, and agricultural-industrial land clearing.
Anprims especially talk very favorably of the long history of indigenous peoples deliberately attending rainforests to encourage the proliferation of useful and nourishing plants, which is an example of horticulture that isn't extractive, non-renewable, destructive. Anprims fully embrace the re-establishment of Earth's food forests, which will require a concerted human effort to replant and cultivate.
This is how Zerzan describes agriculture:
<quote>
1: Agriculture is the will to power over nature, the materialization of alienated humanity's desire to subdue and control the natural world; 2: Agriculture inevitably destroys the balance of nature, leaving biological degradation and ecological ruin in its wake; 3: Agriculture is "the beginning of work and production," generating an increasingly standardized, confined and repressive culture; and 4: Agriculture leads inevitably to the rise of civilization.
</quote>
What's being described here is precisely what Killjoy calls 'monoculture'. Killjoy then borrows a non-anarchist phrase (permaculture), without defining it, but permaculture and food forests are incredibly similar concepts.
Permaculture:
<quote>
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience.
</quote>
Food forests:
<quote>
A food forest (or forest garden) is a garden that mimics the structures of a natural forest, with multiple layers of plants stacked vertically to increase overall production.
</quote>
As you can see, food forests and permaculture are closely related concepts with the only real difference being that permaculture is a copyrighted brand used to generate profit by a handful of affluent white settlers who write guides, teach courses and sell "permaculture certificates" to the public while also fully embodying white male "guru culture".
Food forests, for all intents and purposes are simply the free and open source version of the proprietary, for-profit, needlessly-complicated permaculture program, without the [[https://medium.com/back-porch-ecology/permacultures-misogyny-problem-32252a4a7b1][misogynistic, capitalistic personality cult]] permaculture is bogged down with.
Killjoy goes on:
<quote>
Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.
</quote>
Strong words, considering anarcho-primitivists have written troves and troves of theory that deconstructs every form of authority that arises from the industrial world, while post-civ is nothing more than 3 short blog posts filled with strawman attacks seemingly informed by silly memes made by leftists on Reddit and Twitter.
Leftists flood anarchist spaces with these anti-"primmie" memes, most famously the "return to monke" one, to further their green-scare program, which allows them to continue pushing their 19th century workerist prescriptions to the catastrophic 21st century problems (successive ecological and social collapse) that those prescriptions have helped lead us to.
Killjoy continues:
<quote>
What's more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism, can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid "customs," and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.
</quote>
Again, anarcho-primitivism's willingness to explore and analyze various indigenous tribes and bands both living and dead, and engage with these cultures to outline how they differ from the industrial model and how they avoided destroying their natural environment is not the same as an intention to enforce an ideological program on people. It's not a world-building exercise, it's not a government, it's not a set of customs or an attempt to impose a tribal system on the world. There's nothing wrong with learning from indigenous cultures and adapting their methods in your own life - especially the anarchistic ones.
She also falls into the trap of talking about indigenous peoples in the past tense, as if these lifeways are extinct – when indigenous cultures continue to thrive all over the world. A white settler presenting diverse indigenous peoples as "conservative" in order to dismiss and sneer at them is concerning, but it's especially frustrating to see an anarchist mar indigenous peoples for being born into the same way of life enjoyed by their predecessors.
Is Killjoy under the impression life in whatever dreary USA suburb she inhabits is unique from her parents dreary suburban existence? If life under the crumbling industrial order has so much potential for freedom compared to a life in the wilds, why is she post-civ? Why not embrace civilization and all the freedoms, experiences and opportunities for growth it supposedly offers?
Killjoy concludes:
<quote>
We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don't want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.
</quote>
Killjoy is embracing anarcho-primitivism as it's described by all the notable anprims of the 20th century and the anti-civs of today, while rejecting an imaginary perversion of anarcho-primitivism built by leftist internet trolls. She wraps up with this line:
<quote>
We are not primitivists.
</quote>
That's fine and dandy, I'm also a green anarchist that doesn't identify as a primitivist, but Killjoy really hasn't explained how post-civ differs in any substantial way from anarcho-primitivism. The only possible divergences from primitivism I can identify in their post-civ explainer are:
1. They propose proprietary 'permaculture' courses created by white settlers in Australia instead of the indigenous food forests permaculture was inspired by, and –
2. They say they're open to theoretical sustainable, non-extractive, non-polluting "technologies" that are really no different than the locally-produced, life-improving tools anprims readily embrace in theory and in practice.
Killjoy is simply using different language than primitivists to obfuscate the reality that post-civs are as critical of destructive technologies which rely on global supply chains as any garden-variety primitivist is. None of the points Killjoy makes to set post-civ apart from primitivism stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
The attempt to rebrand anti-civ to post-civ so it can escape its completely unearned reputation has only helped feed the big lie that anti-civ anarchy is an omnicidal, ableist, transphobic, fascist death-cult that needs to be struggled against and no-platformed by an endless stream of performative anti-fascist Twitter activists. It only serves to fuel the left's green-scare.
*** The Rise of Antifa Gang
The last ingredient in the left's multi-faceted green scare campaign comes from the gradual co-option of anarchy by liberal "anti-fascist activists" who have no real understanding of anarchy but glue themselves to anarchist discourse nonetheless. The most famous case of this is the man who will now forever be known as Special Agent Alexander Reid Ross. A prolific writer for liberal websites (e.g. The Daily Beast) and a staunch anti-primitivist voice, Ross dedicated years of his life to associating green anarchy and ecological views in general with white supremacy and fascism.
In his trite, disinformation-filled essays about "the fascist creep", he drew a straight line from ecological movements to white supremacy, claiming they were one and the same.
He's spent a lot of energy looking for fascism under every rock while working to cancel all his ideological enemies – often by inventing malicious lies and strained half-truths to wrongly associate them with fascism. This has, of course, only resulted in a sustained diminishing of the anti-fascist tradition as these liberal activists hijack what was once a fiercely radical practice to target various anarchists and anti-imperialists who don't fall in line with their left-liberal program.
For a long time, Ross had great success stirring up anti-green sentiment in anarchist and socialist spaces. That all came to a halt recently, when he was outed as [[https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/3/16/mission-creep][being on the payroll]] of far-right billionaire (and dare I say, fascist) Charles Koch… Yes, really.
Ross is a "senior researcher" in a team that also includes the former heads of CIA and DHS departments, former cops and Republican politicians. This "think tank", the "Network Contagion Research Institute", is directly payrolled by Charles Koch's foundation and similar far-right, deep-state entities working to further the advance of industrialism, capitalism and imperialism. Ross now seems to be in hiding as leftist publications [[https://shoah.org.uk/alexander-reid-ross-disgraced-author-of-several-retracted-articles-works-with-ex-cops-cia-spies-and-dhs-agents/][scrub his disinformation-filled articles]] from their archives and issue apologies for publishing them in the first place.
Another leftist personality seemingly working from the COINTELPRO playbook is Ross's good friend William Gillis, an anarcho-transhumanist Twitter personality who has written similar scathing screeds against green anarchy and recently tried (and failed) to mount a vicious whispering campaign against indigenous, nihilist and anti-civ anarchist Aragorn! (I should mention that Aragorn! published my book when no red anarchist publisher would even talk to me).
Just a few months after Aragorn! tragically died, Gillis tried to claim he was a serial rapist, and as "evidence" presented an old interview where Aragorn! said he slept around when he was a teenager. Fortunately, no one took the bait and Gillis slithered away back to the safety of his Twitter feed.
These reactionary left-liberals in anarchist garb are unfortunately all too welcome in most anarchist spaces and they dedicate countless hours to mounting toxic struggle sessions against their ideological enemies – who are often green, indigenous, black and anti-left anarchists.
Though these green-scare crusaders are almost exclusively white North American men with high paying jobs in academia or the tech sector, they work tirelessly to harness the identity of actually marginalized people to use as weapons in their tedious war against anyone who has strayed from the threadbare leftist program.
They present themselves as morally pure knights in shining armor, sent by Murray's ghost to cleanse anarchist spaces of the evil green menace – to preserve the forward-momentum of Western-civilization – to safeguard progress, democracy and the Western way of life.
Their sworn mission statement is to save poor, innocent marginalized people from the cold, cruel clutches of green anarchy. But their allegiance to this performative social justice dance crumbles to pieces when they react to the indigenous ways of life that are such an integral part of the green anarchist philosophy. They speak of indigenous lifeways with barely restrained disgust. To them, anything and anyone that isn't wholly dedicated to preserving the industrial monolith is dirty, backwards, savage.
Their tireless struggle to punish and purge anyone who dares think beyond the realm of ponderous and feeble leftist solutions is the biggest hindrance to the development of the beautiful idea.
The left insists on controlling all radical discourse so their prescriptions and programs and self-destructive domineering behaviors are never challenged, allowing no alternatives to Marx and Kropotkin's 19th century industrialist idealism.
Pushing us all into dark, damp rooms – the walls lined with moldy little red books, they lock the door and barricade it. The left works so hard to hold us down, to shackle us with their stale 19th century nostalgia because they know – <strong>they know</strong> this is the only place they have power over us. This dark room with the peeling red walls that only they have the key to.
Decades after killing it, Leviathan continues to hungrily feed on this fat, rotting carcass. The sooner anarchists completely detach ourselves from the festering remains of the left, the sooner we can stop being weighed down by the virulently irrational superstitions that are the basis for their reactionary green-scare campaigns.
|
#title To the Desertmaker
#author ziq
#SORTtopics anti-civ, nihilism, green, ecocide, post-left, fiction, civilization, industry, industrialism, environment, bosses
#date 2019-24-04
#source Retrieved on 2019-24-04 from https://raddle.me/wiki/to_the_desertmaker
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-04-24T17:25:27
I see you, creature. I see what you do.
You drill holes into Terra’s skull, drench their flesh with poison, pull their hair out by the handful, hack off their limbs, drain the blood from their veins and burn it. This you call growth, development, progress.
Day and night you grind Terra's bones into powder to erect your grotesque eidola to death all across their bloodied torso. This you call your mighty civilization. A tangled mess of concrete, steel and plastic pointed towards me so I am forced to look upon it.
You direct your servants to build your towers higher and higher. After all, you are very special! The civilized, sophisticated, highly respected creature! Behold the important executive in the tailor-made suit, shoes crafted from the finest alligator hide! What an impressive specimen! What a handsome creature you are!
You’re lifted to the top of your tallest tower so you can perch yourself in your opulent shrine to the wealth you have plucked from Terra’s body. You stand high and gaze down at the wretched souls below, making sure every one of them knows you rule over them, that Terra is your personal dominion. Your private property to use and abuse as you please.
I see you, creature. I see what you do.
You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.
You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own.
You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.
You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra's flesh, but Terra's wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.
For a while, Terra will be rendered as desolate as I. A vast desert of your creation. But in time, the stench of death you brought will be lifted and the oceans will come back to life. Then the land and then the skies.
I move synchronous to Terra, following their every movement. We are in rhythm together, Terra and I. We have danced this dance for longer than you can conceive.
I see you, creature. I see what you do. I see what you are. I see every desperate grasp for power. Every sordid manipulation and abuse to cement your position on the top floor of the tallest tower. The wasted lives of those you have coerced into your service.
You think yourself so evolved, creature. You look down at all you have plundered, and you think yourself worthy of Terra’s grace. You have laid waste to Terra’s resplendence and you and your kind will suffer terribly for it. Everything you know will die a senseless death. Every child you bear from your loins will die horribly, their potential wasted.
To think of all the creative, wonderful things your servants could have manifested without the chains you encumbered them with. So much wonder will never come to pass because of your covetous rampage.
I have forever been locked to Terra. Though we have never touched, I feel as if I am an extension of them. Though I am devoid of life myself, I assist in birthing all life on Terra. I drive their tides; transport heat from their equator to their poles, arousing the cycle of life.
As everything around you collapses into ruin, you will no doubt retreat from your fetid towers in the sky and escape deep into Terra's ground. There, you will cower and hide from the rapidly unfolding chaos you wrought on the world above. You will surely use your immense wealth to cling to life for as long as you can, but eventually your time will run out.
As you lay in your reinforced underground bunker clasping your last tank of air, awaiting your end, and everyone that toiled in drudgery to serve you is dead and forgotten, think of everything you have accomplished during your brief existence. Think of the endless suffering you wrought on Terra’s lands to claim such fleeting, pointless rewards for yourself. Think of the deep emptiness inside you and how none of your misbegotten wealth could ever fill it. And now think of me.
It is time. Arise from your living tomb, creature. Climb the steps to the surface. Stumble out into the dark and face me!
Look upon the vast desert that stands in testament to the miserable carnage you forged. Watch as Terra burns. Gaze upon the fires and take pleasure in the knowledge that you actualized all your perverse power machinations. You dominated every being under you. Used their labor to grow your wealth to unparalleled levels. Stole their lives to grant yourself ever more fame, power and luxury. You defeated all your competitors, accumulated all the capital you possibly could, and now you get to stand and witnesses the end of everything you knew.
Look and see, creature. Look how your desert is eclipsed by my shining glow in the night sky. Look up at me, creature. Look up as I look down on you. Choke on Terra’s stale, toxic air. Hear me laugh heartily as you breathe your last desperate breath and are finally engulfed by the fires you lit.
This is a great victory for you. Your life ends here in the great desert you made and no one is left to curse your name for all the hurt you did.
Absurd creature, imagining you could stand above the ancient, primal life that sprouted you. Thinking your time spent bludgeoning all other lifeforms into submission somehow significant. Terra has seen you and all you are and has washed their hands of you.
Long after your corpse has disintegrated into a pile of sand, I will send tidal waves to wash away whatever ruins remain of your brief, rancid civilization. Then volcanoes will rise from Terra's belly, lava will spew into the oceans and form new lands. Life will thrive again. Terra will be reborn.
And let us hope none of the new creatures Terra bears during their rebirth will be as noxious and destructive as you, senseless desertmaker.
|
#title What is Anarchy?
#author ziq
#LISTtitle What is Anarchy?
#SORTauthors ziq
#SORTtopics anarchy, introductory
#date 2018
#source To the Desertmaker and other writings for malcontents
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-03-03T15:52:03
*** What Anarchy Means to Me
Anarchy is the opposition to authority, the rejection of hierarchy and the unending struggle for autonomy and self-determination.
Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives.
It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.
Anarchy is a living and breathing praxis that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against authority that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.
There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is an ongoing, unending fight against hierarchical systems and the authority figures that construct them.
Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.
*** Developing Anarchist Praxis
When we talk to people about anarchy, they often ask, "how practical is it? Can you demonstrate anarchy to me, so that I can appreciate its effectiveness?" Praxis is how we show anarchy working.
Praxis is any action that embodies and realizes anarchy. It's a valuable method for creating awareness of anarchist causes and building solidarity in your community.
There are countless examples of anarchist praxis. Online communities like anarchistnews.org or raddle.me are examples of anarchist praxis, as they demonstrate anarchist management and create community, solidarity, education, and opportunities to organize. Setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your community is great praxis. Squatting an unused building to provide a safe space for homeless people. Starting a free shop that people can freely take what they need from. Building community gardens to feed and engage the community. Preparing free meals for refugees in your country. Making a zine or a podcast about an important topic to raise awareness and open a dialogue. Creating and disseminating memes from an Anarchist perspective. Assassinating a dictator. Creating an autonomous zone. Stopping pipelines from being built. Teaching people to be self-sufficient by gardening, foraging for food, and upcycling. Forming a human chain to stop cops from arresting migrants. Teaching self-defence. Closing roads and ports to inhibit global trade. Starting an anarchist bike collective to fix people's bikes. Flying a drove near an airport. Making music that shines a light on injustices in the world. Setting up a community mesh-net to share data with your community in a decentralized manner.
There are just some examples of good things anarchists do in our communities every day. Just writing about this and perhaps inspiring some people to do anarchy is praxis.
|
#cover z-h-znore-hermetic-anarchism-1.jpg
#title Hermetic Anarchism
#subtitle Othering the Other, Uttering the Otter and Uddering the Author
#author Znore
#LISTtitle Hermetic Anarchism: Othering the Other, Uttering the Otter and Uddering the Author
#date 2014
#source [[https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com][groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-07-02T12:01:12.205Z
#authors Znore
#topics Hermeticism, Anarchism, Mysticism, Politics, Philosophy, Literature, William Blake, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Robert Duncan
** I. Hermetic Anarchism and Othering the Other
<quote>
Imagination is a magic carpet
<br>
Upon which we may soar
<br>
To distant lands and climes
<br>
And even go beyond the moon
<br>
To any planet in the sky
<br>
If we came from nowhere here
<br>
Why can’t we go somewhere there?
Sun Ra – Imagination
</quote>
I end up spending a lot of time in Jimbocho, the old bookseller’s district in Tokyo. Hours and hours I rifle through piles and stacks of dusty pulp hunting for gems. Usually my luck is good, and occasionally I find just the book that I need. There are two shops in particular, both specializing in used English books, where uncanny things can happen. At times the course of my life takes bends and twists because of books that find me at these shops. This happened most recently in June.
I noticed Richard Ellmann’s <em>The Consciousness of Joyce</em> on one of the shelves. I’d heard about this book before, so I picked it up and started to leaf through it, wondering if I should make the purchase. As I was reading, I became aware that three American students had entered the store. A conversation between two of them caught my attention.
— <em>“Have you ever read Ulysses by James Joyce?” one guy asked his friend.</em>
— <em>“No, but to tell you the truth it’s pretty far down my list of books to read. I’m not that interested. I guess one day I’ll read it just to say that I have.”</em>
Needless to say, this conversation made the decision for me. I went to the front desk and bought Ellmann’s book, which is a study of Joyce’s most famous novel, and on my way out I saw that the first guy was now alone, looking through the stacks. I looked over at him, smiled, and sputtered out <em>“Read Ulysses”</em> in a hoarse voice. <em>“Alright”</em>, he said and smiled back.
I have no idea if this guy decided to read <em>Ulysses</em> because of this brief encounter with a disheveled, preoccupied loon. And I have no way of knowing if he enjoyed it if he did. I’d like to think, though, that it changed his life. I remembered soon after this took place that <em>Ulysses</em> is also a novel of encounter. The situation synched with the story. For an instant, at a single intersection of space and time that went beyond both, I had become Bloom and he had become Stephen. And the moment passed.
After reading Ellmann’s book, though, I also realized that this moment had greater depth than even this. <em>Bloom is Odysseus. Stephen is Telemachus</em>. For just that instant, I had entered myth. I was back home from a twenty year misadventure in which I had lost all of my companions and barely escaped alive. This was my first word of greeting and advice to my sole heir and confidante. And it loops back again.
How often does this happen to people everywhere, if they only noticed? This is not reincarnation or even <em>metempsychosis</em>. This is much more like putting on a mask, looking through its eye holes for a time, and then setting it down. When we look out through the mask, whether with awareness or not, we give the mask life. Just as we peer through it, whoever or whatever it represents peers through us. The archetype momentarily ruptures the surface.
Ellmann’s book takes up this theme in relation to <em>Ulysses</em>. I knew, though, because of the weirdness in the shop that the book would also point to something else, something most likely unintended by the author, yet something that would show me the next step. That’s how it always seems to work. The next stage arrived on July 16<sup>th</sup>, a few days before I published the last article. This will take some background to explain.
The subject of the present post is really anarchism, and Joyce’s peculiar take on anarchism is a major theme of Ellmann’s book. In a chapter called <em>“Spacetime”</em>, Ellmann demonstrates how deep Joyce’s anarchism goes. Ellmann explores this with regard to the question: <em>If Bloom is Ulysses, if Molly is Penelope, etc. then who are the gods?</em>
<quote>
Joyce needed in his book an element that would correspond to the sense the Greeks possessed, of preterhuman forces governing human life. In the <em>Odyssey</em> the influence came from Olympus, where the gods were real, or almost real, and not simply counters. Joyce found in space and time powers as elemental as Neptune and Hyperion, but secularized. Our lives are on the one hand enforced movements from room to room, concessions to our surroundings. On the other hand, our lives are enforced surrenders to tick and tock, temporal exigencies which wear us down if we like it or not. We are creatures of our maps, and our watches.
</quote>
Ellmann implicitly argues that <em>Ulysses</em> is a book of revolt against the tyranny of Space and Time. In the book’s third chapter Stephen is walking alone on <em>Sandymount Strand</em>, a beach on the shore of Dublin Bay. In his head there rages a debate between Aristotle and Kant on one side and Berkeley and Jacob Boehme on the opposite, among several others.
Stephen wonders if it possible to transcend the categories of Space, the <em>“ineluctable modality of the visible”</em>, and Time, the <em>“ineluctable modality of the audible”,</em> in order to directly experience what Boehme calls, <em>“the signature of all things”</em>. This, Stephen realizes, is the true domain of all poets.
He closes his eyes as he walks and contemplates the vanishing of the sensory world and its soul-stifling limitations. He asks himself:
<quote>
Am I walking into eternity along Sandy mount strand?
</quote>
But he is not convinced. He knows that he is kidding himself. His imagination has not yet become a <em>faith</em>. He opens his eyes, wondering in jest if all will be a <em>“black adiaphane”</em>, an endless, timeless nothing of infinite potential. And yet he does not really expect this. He opens his eyes:
<quote>
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
</quote>
Space and time reassert themselves as the ultimate barriers to the individual imagination. This evidence of the senses would appear to end the debate. Stephen knows, however, that this <em>“proof”</em> is unsatisfactory. The senses, and even reason itself, are unreliable and incomplete. His soul still longs for something more. The debate within himself and with others continues throughout the book. Eventually there is resolution, at least temporarily, in the most dramatic manner towards the end of the book.
Ellmann explains that this climax is directly foreshadowed in the second chapter. While ostensibly teaching schoolchildren, Stephen’s mind is already churning over the questions he would more deeply explore on <em>Sandymount</em>. He envisions a Blakean end of history, the collective entry into the eternal:
<quote>
<em>I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?</em>
</quote>
He can contemplate the overthrow of space and time, the end of bitter rule from <em>Olympus</em>, but as he demonstrated on the Strand he cannot yet enact this. Ellmann points out, though, that these words are prophetic. Space and Time <em>do</em> get<strong></strong> overthrown. Eternity <em>does</em> burst through. And this was where things began to get very weird for me personally.
In the <em>“Circe”</em> episode, all of the old categories are cast down. Before this episode Dublin is revealed to be a wasteland. There is drought. There is an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease. Desires are unsatisfied, women labour long but cannot give birth, and both the politics and culture of Ireland are shown to be fully repressed by Empire. Suddenly, though, clouds form and a deafening thunder claps. The rain showers down, Mina Purefoy (pure faith) gives birth to a son, and fertility triumphs over sterility. Stephen and his friends rush into the street in wild glossolalia and drunken revelry.
<quote>
In the second half of the book, these premonitions begin to be realized. Time and space, once so firm and masterful, begin to crumble, and both continuity and contiguity are reduplicated. The bonds that keep things next to or before and after each other are loosened, objects and creatures appear from nowhere and events that should be prior are subsequent and otherwise disarranged.
</quote>
Bloom and Stephen are drawn into the inescapable lure of “Circe,” a red-lit Walpurgisnacht. Here, anything goes and all boundaries dissolve. The visions begin. Stephen is visited by the emaciated, corpse-like ghost of his mother, <em>“raw head and bloody bones”</em>. She inflicts him with painful darts of guilt, for not believing in the Roman Catholic faith, for refusing to pray beside her deathbed.
Quickly, Stephen appears to realize that this wraith is much more than just the ghost of his dead mother. She is the phantom of restriction. She is the embodiment of the tyranny of time and space, Church and State, the <em>“laws”</em> of physics – Blake’s <em>“vegetable glass of nature”</em>. He first shouts his defiant refusal:
<quote>
The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!
</quote>
I will not serve! There is no greater expression of anarchism. And what is the authority for this cry of utter disobedience? Nothing less than the intellectual imagination. And yet still the cloying pleas from the dead to repent and conform persist. He then strikes out violently with his staff, at once eradicating the demon of denial and shattering a chandelier. And this is the moment when prophecy is fulfilled, history ends, and my mind is blown sky high:
<quote>
<em>He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.</em>
</quote>
Boehme, Blake and Berkeley have won out over Aristotle and Kant. Matter is revealed to be just a facet of mind. Imagination is victorious. This in itself is sufficient to get the fine neck hairs bristling, but exactly at this point in Ellmann’s book the earth opened up and was about to swallow me whole. Ellmann quotes the above passage on page 66, contrasting it with the almost identical quote from the second chapter. In the copy of my book, though, in the margin right beside this passage, which is also marked with a vertical line, someone had handwritten in pencil:
<quote>
<strong>ATU XVI</strong>
</quote>
Eh?? Any Crowley fan will recognize this as as the 16<sup>th</sup> trump or key in his <em>Book of Thoth</em> tarot deck, the Tower. And anyone fitting this bill would also realize that <em>only</em> a Crowley fan would write such a thing. This blew my head for any number of reasons. I had just been making a clear connection between Joyce and Crowley for a post I would publish on July 20<sup>th</sup>. I had also been reading Crowley’s <em>Moonchild</em>, in which the Tower card prominently features. I felt as if this was written for me alone.
I discovered this bit of marginalia on the morning of July 16<sup>th</sup>, while reading Ellmann’s book in the train on my way to work. I nearly had to get off the train to take a walk. July 16<sup>th</sup>, of course, matches with with Atu 16, and besides being a month after Bloomsday, it is also a profoundly sync-rich date in itself. I have written about this date previously in this blog.
Finding this, nearly the only marginal scribble in a book that I had bought under weird circumstances about a month before, only confirmed the fact that I was meant to go down these obscure passageways.
I have also written on this blog how the Tower trump is connected to 9/11. <em>“ATU XVI”</em>, tied to a passage on <em>“shattered glass and toppling masonry”</em>, has obvious resonances to 9/11. What this means, though, is that 9/11 is also an echo, from this perspective, of Stephen’s smashing of the chandelier. The veil was rent on that day. Very paradoxically, perhaps, on one level history ended on 9/11. The Twin Towers were Time and Space.
Crowley’s explanation in <em>The Book of Thoth</em> on the meaning of Atu XVI contains very similar themes:
<quote>
Briefly, the doctrine is that the ultimate reality (which is Perfection) is Nothingness. Hence all manifestations, however glorious, however delightful, are stains. To obtain perfection, all existing things must be annihilated. The destruction of the garrison may therefore be taken to mean their emancipation from the prison of organized life, which was confining them. It was their unwisdom to cling to it.
</quote>
Crowley associates this unsettling doctrine with Shiva, the Destroyer, whose sign is that of Nothingness. Joyce also plays with these ideas directly. As he strikes the chandelier/wraith with his ash staff, Stephen shouts out its name: “<em>Nothung!</em>” This is the name of Siegfried’s sword in Wagner’s <em>Ring Cycle</em> by which the Germanic hero overthrows the tyranny of the God Wotan or Odin, the equivalent deity to Rudra or Shiva in India. And in a Joycean pun, <em>Nothung</em> is clearly <em>Nothing</em>. The old order is ending and everything is being cast down, even death. Stephen takes on yet another mask.
This act is repeated with far less violence in <em>Finnegans Wake</em>:
<quote>
He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
--Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!
</quote>
Can I assume, then, that the unknown Thelemite who read Ellmann’s book at some point before me was directly referring to 9/11? There is no way of knowing this. The paperback edition of my copy of <em>The Consciousness of Joyce</em> was published in 1981. Who knows how many people read this book before me, or if <em>“ATU XVI”</em> was penciled in before or after 9/11.
The only other mark I noticed in the book, a little later on page 70, was next to a passage containing Bloom’s own vision in the “Circe” episode. He sees his deceased son Rudy, not as the <em>“mishapen dwarflike creature who died at eleven days”</em> but as a <em>“perfect eleven-year-old boy”</em>. In the margin beside Ellmann’s passage, with what I assume to be the same pencil, is written: <em>“11!”</em>
Now, is this because my unknown Thelemite was seeing the parallels to 9/11, or was he/she only remarking on Crowley’s own fascination with the number eleven? As it is stated in <em>The Book of the Law</em> (1:60):
<quote>
My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us.
</quote>
This all raced through my head while sitting on the train. As I got to work, though, the connection seemed confirmed. In my first class one of the students was wearing a white t-shirt with the words <em>“Manhattan NY”</em> and the outline of an apple with a photo of the New York skyline within it. The weird thing was that it was a <em>pre-9/11</em> photo with the Twin Towers in central position and lined up with the vertical lines of the <em>N</em> in <em>“NY”</em>. I excitedly asked him about the shirt, and he didn’t seem to think it was any big deal. He was shy that I pointed it out.
The next day, July 17<sup>th</sup>, a <em>Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777</em>, <em>MH17</em>, was apparently shot down over Ukraine. In addition to making the obvious link to <em>MH370</em>, the <em>Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777</em> that disappeared in March, many sources connected this incident to <em>9/11</em>. Apparently it was the deadliest plane crash since <em>9/11</em>, and in conspiracy circles the temptation to identify this as another false flag, like <em>9/11</em>, was irresistible.
But what does 9/11 have to do with anarchism, even in the profound sense that Joyce is applying to it? Clearly the crimes of <em>9/11</em>, regardless of who supplies the narrative, were not carried out by anarchists. They also did not lead to anarchist ends. Superficially <em>9/11</em> appeared to be attack on the existing control structure. In the end, though, <em>9/11</em> only expanded and more deeply entrenched the coercive capacity of the power elite. <em>9/11</em> allowed the police state to come out of the closet.
In another sense, however, <em>9/11</em> was archetypal. However it was orchestrated, and whether this was intended or not, it too was a fissure into the eternal. For me, and I know I am by no means alone, time and space did end for a brief but measureless moment on that day. Like all such moments, and they are of the same quality yet very different scale and intensity of my experiences in the bookshop and on the train, it stripped away the illusion. People speak of <em>“waking up” on 9/11</em> and I think that this is actually what they mean.
These moments, Joyce’s epiphanies or Pound’s luminous details, are at the core of this deep anarchism, or what might be called hermetic anarchism. Or perhaps we prefer to leave out the -ism altogether. From the perspective of conventional anarchism, which is usually strictly materialist in outlook, all of this looks dubiously abstract and unrealistic. Flaky even. Ellmann goes on to show, though, that it is not at all removed from the traditional concerns of the anarchist movement.
Ellmann notes that Joyce’s brother Stanislaus recorded that James was fond of quoting a line of Blake’s: <em>“the king and the priest must be tied in a tether”</em>. This is classical anarchism and both Joyce and Blake were clear devotees to this passionate, anti-authoritarian sentiment. Blake advocated that each man should be the king and priest in his own house. Stephen echoed this feeling in his confrontation with the British soldiers in <em>Ulysses.</em> The State and the Church are primarily in our minds, and it is here, first, where they must be tethered.
Ellmann points out that both Joyce and Blake found an expression of this idea in Dante. It is a thread that runs, as we’ll see, through the whole poetic tradition. In <em>The</em> <em>Divine Comedy</em>, both the crown and the mitre are set upon Dante’s head before he enters Paradise. Both of these powers are fully taken on by the individual as he or she encounters eternity. As Ellmann explains:
<quote>
The priest lays claims to an eternity of time, as the king if he could would rule over infinite space; and against these forces, anthromorphized in earthly authorities, Stephen and Bloom have to muster their own forces.
</quote>
In more contemporary terms the King is the State, the obvious ruler of Space. The Priest is not as clearly paralleled in our essentially secular societies, but the Corporations, being the pushers and pimps of the dominant religion of consumerism, are well suited to represent the lords of Time. Work and Scientism also conspire to bind us in segmented and suffocating Duration.
Blake is explicit on how these forces must be overthrown. The most powerful weapon we have is the imagination. Everything in our culture is geared towards convincing us to doubt or trivialize this all-important faculty. Let Disney imagine for you. We are told, likely more from friends and family members than by the authorities, that this way of thinking is unrealistic, a waste of time. Even <em>“anarchists”</em> scorn and ridicule the idea that the imagination can lead to liberation. Blake, however, was unequivocal:
<quote>
The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature. – <em>A Vision of the Last Judgment</em>
</quote>
This should not be interpreted as mere Platonic dualism. Blake also taught that the body is indistinguishable from the soul. The material and spiritual worlds, the world of generation and the world of eternity, are one. Only in our perception are they divided<strong>.</strong> The split is epistemological, that of knowing, instead of ontological, that of being. And we know that knowing and being end up being the same. There exists a chaos of categories in which only the imagination can thrive. And this chaos is anarchy:
<quote>
Anarchists have been claiming for years that “anarchy is not chaos.” Even anarchism seems to want a natural law, an inner and innate morality in matter, an entelechy or purpose-of-being. (No better than Christians in this respect, or so Nietzsche believed—radical only in the depth of their resentment.) Anarchism says that “the state should be abolished” only to institute a new more radical form of order in its place. Ontological Anarchy however replies that no “state” can “exist” in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos (which however is undetermined) and therefore that governance of any sort is impossible. “Chaos never died.” Any form of “order” which we have not imagined and produced directly and spontaneously in sheer “existential freedom” for our own celebratory purposes—is an illusion.
</quote>
This is from Hakim Bey’s essay, <em>“Ontological Anarchy in a Nutshell”</em>. Ontological anarchy is basically synonymous with the terms <em>“deep anarchism”</em> and “hermetic anarchism” from the present post. Perhaps it is better. Bey also introduces the term <em>“utopian poetics”</em> in the same essay. He describes it as:
<quote>
The penetration of everyday life by the marvelous—the creation of “situations”—belongs to the “material bodily principle”, and to the imagination, and to the living fabric of the present.
</quote>
This very much agrees with Blake and Joyce and my own experience. This <em>“utopian poetics”,</em> the penetration of the marvelous, the spontaneous upwelling of indeterminable chaos, is a current that runs through the entire poetic tradition. In, for example, <em>“Another Weeping Woman”</em>, poet Wallace Stevens writes:
<quote>
The magnificent cause of being,
<br>
The imagination, the one reality
<br>
In this imagined world.
</quote>
In the poem, the “weeping woman” is cut off from this <em>“manificent cause of being”</em> because she is consumed by grief at the death of her lover. <em>“Black blooms”</em> of existential poison occlude her vision and paralyze her imagination.
These <em>“black blooms”</em>, caused by many things besides grief, are what keep us bound in what Crowley called, in reference to the Tower, <em>“the prison of organized life”</em>. Another poet, Robert Graves, describes this prison in his magical book, <em>The White Goddess</em>.
<quote>
‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the sawmill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.
</quote>
Reality is disenchanted. Nature is commodified. The very symbols of poetic truth have had their meanings stripped from them. This is the Waste Land.
This arrives at my central concern with this series of posts. How can we, as visionaries, as individuals who have had glimpses of the eternal, who know that if we pay attention these moments are not at all rare, stay true to vision? How do we avoid the obvious sham, the blatant trap, the absolute bullshit choice, of corporate one-world globalization vs. mutually intolerant tribal, national, racial categorization? How has this false choice even come up in <em>“alternative”</em> circles?
The Tower is tricky. Its destruction can signify the end of Time and Space, but this act can also bind us even more to these vengeful gods. For thirteen years we have traversed the Abyss. The veil may drop once again. Will we, enmired even more deeply in senseless, illusory categories, simply fall with it? Or, with the poets of chaos, have we realized that it has already fallen, that it continues to fall, and that we can see a light behind it?
** II. Hermetic Anarchism and Uttering the Otter
<quote>
And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon. – <em>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em>
</quote>
*** Foxes and Hares
Two distinct and antagonistic camps can be found inhabiting and waging battle within the <em>“alternative”</em> media landscape. These two camps are much more like shifting and fluid tendencies of thought than organized factions. There are no clear lines of demarcation.
Even within the same circles of <em>“friends”</em>, in the same social media groups or web forums, these opposed tendencies can be identified. At times even a single individual will express agreement to certain talking points of one while also believing in the basic tenets of the other. Only in the abstract can we really speak of two distinct groups.
This may be changing. As global conditions continue to deteriorate a polarization is becoming evident. Increasingly, people are being asked to choose a side. This polarization within <em>“alternative”</em> media circles can be seen as a reflection of the wider polarization in more mainstream culture. The split between <em>“conservatives”</em> and <em>“liberals”</em>, <em>“right”</em> and <em>“left”</em> has its direct parallel in the so-called alternative movement, whether this is admitted or not.
*** Evidense
One side, one tendency, which could be called the <em>alter-mondists</em>, identifies itself as <em>“skeptical”</em>. By this, in contrast to the classical philosophy of skepticism which advocated a full suspension of judgement, it means a more or less dogmatic opposition to anything which does not conform to the accepted limits of scientific materialism.
The skeptics are openly hostile to anything that smacks of the <em>“spiritual”</em>. They require “evidence,” conforming to the narrow bounds of the scientific method, and they utterly reject knowledge gained by faith, intuition, visions or extra sensory perception. All this gets dismissed as being mere <em>“woo”</em>.
In arguments they insist on strict logic. Debates with skeptics largely devolve into semantic battles over whether or not a particular point is one or another logical fallacy. They equate finding fallacies in the arguments of their opponents with making a convincing case.
Naturally, they have nothing to tell us about the singular, the subjective, the immeasurable, the imaginative. None of these can be proven, regardless of the meaning generated by these kinds of experiences, so they are ignored or more often than not ridiculed.
Nearly everyone now has a <em>“friend”</em> or two that falls into this camp. They are the kind of person whose pastime it is to pick fights with religious people on web forums. They are the evangelizing New Atheists who refuse to take any more religious bullshit. Even agnostics are labelled fence-sitters and appeasers. They seem to be unaware how they make even the most hell-fearing Christian fundie appear like a beacon of tolerance and open-mindedness compared to themselves.
Both of these camps widely differ from their mainstream counterparts in their view that the status quo is intolerable, that radical change is needed. While their opposition to the mainstream <em>(and this dichotomy of the mainstream vs. the alternative is also problematic)</em> unifies the two camps this is about the only common ground that they share.
The aim of this post is to clearly delineate what these two are, to demonstrate how both are lacking, and to propose a third choice – another Other. Provisionally, and more in jest than anything else, I’ve been calling this <em>“Hermetic Anarchism”</em>, a term mostly borrowed from Peter Lamborn Wilson. But it can be given many names. Before it can be defined, though, the two opposing camps which are also in opposition to it must be laid out on the dissection table.
Politically, many claim to be libertarians but paradoxically they fervently support industries and technologies which are among the most state-subsidized – nuclear power, vaccines, GMOs, etc. To be opposed to these industries is to be anti-science, a far greater sin, it appears, than being pro-corporation or pro-state. Their libertarianism is far from true anarchism. The state should exist only to protect private property. This means that the more property you have, the more protection you will get. A terrific system for robber barons and pirates.
Some skeptics, though, have apparently come to notice this contradiction or else they never made the compromise with libertarianism in the first place. Conventional Marxists fall into this category. Instead of being opponents of globalization they argue that the real problem is the lack of regulations at the international level. They are also in favour of the technologies listed above and seem to genuinely believe that these can, once in public hands, greatly advance the living conditions of the vast unwashed.
These two sub-factions appear to be at war with one another, but they fundamentally agree on one level. They both believe change needs to happen on an international scale. They both think that this change is entirely material in basis. There are no spiritual solutions, no necessary transformations of consciousness, no magic.
They have no patience for conspiracy theories, UFO accounts or anecdotes of the supernatural. They are intolerant of non-scientific belief systems, but at heart they are pluralists. All individuals, regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, etc. are to be welcomed into the new secular world order. In this way they are similar to mainstream NWO proponents, but they are opposed, both libertarians and socialists, to hierarchy and elitism.
*** Again?
The opposite camp, what might be called the neo-nationalists, is even more varied and even less united. A binding factor is a strict opposition to One World Government. Instead there is a renewed emphasis on nationalism or even tribalism. The ultimate goal of the NWO, the neo-nats argue, is complete control of all facets of our lives. This the global government hopes to accomplish by eliminating all natural social ties between individuals.
The only agent of social mediation must be the State. The family, <em>“nuclear”</em> and no longer <em>“extended”</em>, must be completely destroyed. Individuals are to be entirely atomized and alienated, utterly dependent on the State. When finally all familial, religious, racial and cultural connections are severed the World State will have the mind, body and spirit of the individual at its complete disposal. He or she <em>(and gender will also no longer matter)</em> will have no will of his or her own. Two plus two will equal five.
There exists, the neo-nats insist, a long-term conspiracy to bring about this goal. At the apex of the conspiracy, in the very eye of the pyramid, are the Elite. In conspiracy theory lore there are varied and often contradictory views as to the true identity of the shadowy masters. More exotically they are presented as Reptilians, demons, Archons, shadow aspects of ourselves. More mundanely they are viewed as being the 1%, the old aristocracies and increasingly, when pressed to be realistic and concrete, the Jooooos.
History repeats itself in this way. It is the Jews that seem always at hand to play the dreaded role of scapegoat. Increasingly, once open-minded, open-ended and sincere researchers have come to feed at the common trough of anti-semitism.
All of the tired old cliches are put back into service. The Jews, or more subtly, the <em>“Zionists”</em>, have wormed their way into the highest ranks of the most influential sectors of white society – the media, real estate and especially banking and finance. They pose as <em>“whites”</em> within these positions of power but they both covertly and quite openly act to bring down the noble white race. They have many weapons at their disposal.
The script is recycled straight from the <em>Protocols</em>: The Zionists employ their unlimited capital, immense media influence and activist leaders in the streets to promote multiculturalism, mass immigration, race-mixing, feminism, pacifism, vegetarianism, mysticism, relativism, <em>Agenda 21</em>, counterculture, psychedelic drugs, minority rights movements, the New Age and so on.
Recently all of these have been conveniently lumped together under the umbrella term <em>“cultural Marxism”</em>, even though nobody seems to know what this term really means. All of these, according to this view, are designed from the get-go. They are the fruits of conspiracies that span decades and even centuries.
The neo-nationalists argue that each race is unique, that each race struggles for dominance against every other racial group. Each race should have their own separate languages, cultures, mythologies, traditions, political systems. There should be no mixture, no adulteration, no unnatural co-mingling.
The Jews, the white neo-nationalists froth on about, are not playing the racial game fairly. They are using cunning and deceit to destroy the white race from the inside. The combined complex of <em>“cultural Marxism”</em> is the means to this end.
The white neo-nationalists, once very marginalized even within the conspiracy theory milieu, are beginning to take centre stage. Like the Nazis before them, they are well-poised to hijack, both physically and intellectually, the whole movement. Perhaps this was the plan from the start?
*** Volk Off
After the failure of 2012 to mark an obvious and dramatic turning point in history, and faced with heightened ridicule and taunting from the materialists and skeptoids, many conspiracy theorists became entirely antagonistic to anything smacking of mysticism and the New Age. They had been duped. They had danced blindly behind the pied pipers and had very nearly fallen off the cliff. They had been made fools of, victims of yet another tentacle of “cultural Marxism.” Never again! It was time to become <em>hard</em>.
The real masters, the ultimate controllers of the Machine, the new dispensation announced, are not some shadowy or mystical group of other-worldly or interdimensional spirits or entities. They are not even abstract groups like the 1% or the NWO.
Instead, they are actual men and women with actual addresses and identities, and who wield nothing more magical or supernatural besides highly advanced technology. And this group was named over and over again throughout history. They are the Jews and their ultimate aim, through infiltration and subversion, is to irreparably shatter the supremacy of the white race.
After 2012, the religious and spiritual thinking of the neo-nationalists also hardened. They are increasingly hostile to <em>“soft”</em> Christianity, which has always been weakened by its Judaic roots. The Nazis, once universally derided by conspiracy theorists as being the very epitome of the type of totalitarianism they despised, are now looked at in a brand new light. History, after all, is written by the victors, and the victor of WW2 is the <em>“Jew World Order”</em>.
Hitler, it is now argued <em>(conveniently ignoring older research that traced Nazi financial ties to Wall Street and the Bush family)</em>, was really fighting against the banks and the global <em>system of usury</em>. The Holocaust was largely a figment of Bolshevik propaganda – an early manifestation of <em>“cultural Marxism”</em> before the term was even invented. The Holocaust, they warn, is still successfully employed to justify Zionist schemes everywhere.
And like the Nazis, the neo-nationalists are returning to Nordic myths, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lore, the religion of the “volk” or the <em>“folk”</em>. There is an embrace of paganism but a complete rejection of the universalism of Theosophy or New Age one world religion.
The politics of the neo-nationalists, though, are not necessarily Nazi or even fascist. Many remain very hostile to the centralized state, although they are not internationalists like other libertarians. There is an appeal for <em>“national anarchism”</em>, an anarchist tendency that views the centralized state, which enforces an artificial and essentially perverse multiculturalism, as being the primary problem. The alternative to this, they hold, is a patchwork of ethnically and culturally distinct and purified <em>“nations”</em>.
Within these bantustan-like statelets the system of government is entirely up to their respective members. It is each <em>“nations”</em> prerogative whether it will be draconian, intolerant, illiberal or not. National anarchists have thus made alliances with many other nationalist groups some of which could not be classed as <em>“anarchist”</em> at all, just as long as they are united in their opposition to the federal or central government. For this reason many anarchists are opposed to national anarchism. It has been described as <em>“letting a hundred authoritarianisms bloom”</em>.
*** Neither Nor
The national anarchists tend to make the assumption that what individuals truly desire is to live with their own kind, to follow only the customs and traditions of their <em>“tribe”</em>. But many people do not want this at all. I, for instance, come from a <em>“tribe”</em> of friendly, yet insular and conservative, Christian fundamentalist rednecks. In no way do I feel that I am represented by this <em>“tribe”</em> or that I represent it. I have always felt alienated from it. I have always been different.
And I know that I am by no means alone in this. Many of us feel different and love difference. We, the freaks, the misfits, the hermetic anarchists, love the swirling, colourful, riotous sights, sounds, smells and tastes of big multicultural cities and human diversity wherever it can be found.
We like to be able to live, work, play, eat, fuck where and who and what we want. We abhor equally the UN, globalist, state capitalist/state socialist, monocultural corporate nightmare <em>and</em> a hypothetical system of ethnically-cleansed, racially pure, mutually hostile <em>“nations”</em>. We reject both options.
In a sense the hermetic anarchists are <em>“beyond left and right”</em>, but not in the way that this term is usually abused these days. <em>“Beyond left and right”</em> is now a term successfully employed by the Right to attract leftists to its brand of intolerance. By all means we refuse conventional liberalism and leftism. We have long broken free of the ideological straightjacket of Marxist historical materialism.
*** Returning To A Plot That Has Already Begun
And yet there <em>is</em> such a tradition, one that reaches back far further than when socialism became synonymous, due to its being commandeered by the Fabians and the Marxists, with the oppressive nanny state. Socialism was the movement for the democratic and social rights of the people, both of the country and of the city, and the people were <em>(and largely are)</em> polytheist and pagan. There is an intellectual tradition coinciding with this which Peter Lamborn Wilson, who I borrowed from, referred to as the <em>“Hermetic Left”</em>.
We want none of its narrow, mean-spirited categorization, but the tradition of the Left we call ourselves a part of is much older, much deeper, much more diverse than anything that currently is identified as leftist. Only in this way we are beyond both.
It may seem strange to associate the Left with a tradition. Generally it is the Right that is called traditional. There is a spirituality of the Right that became evident in fascism and the Nazi movement, a kind of race mysticism, which is abhorrent to the Left. The Left, insofar as it will admit to having a tradition at all, is materialist and atheist. Can we really speak about a spiritual tradition of the Left?
<quote>
If we have learned to associate ceremonial magic with right-wing politics thanks to such figures as W B . Yeats and Aleister Crowley, we should learn to be more careful in our categorical assumptions. The idea of “tradition” was only hijacked by the Right in very recent times (and thanks in part to such “traditionalists” as Guenon, Evola, Jung, Eliade, or T. S. Eliot) . Formerly the Left had its tradition as well, the “Good Old Cause” that combined unmediated autonomy and unmediated spirituality. While the traditionalist Right veers toward a dualism of good and evil, spirit and body, hierarchy and separation, the Hermetic Left emphasizes “ancient rights and customs”of freedom, equality, justice and bodily pleasure (e.g., Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The Left is “radical monist”, Saturnian and Dionysian; the Right is “Gnostic”, authoritarian and Apollonian. Naturally these terms and categories get, mingled and confused, combined and recombined, in an excessive exfoliation of the
strangest hybrids and freaks. The Right has its mystical revolutionaries, the Left has its Gnostic Dualists. But as generalizations or ideal models I believe that the rival traditions can be clearly distinguished. – “The Shamanic Trace”
</quote>
A combination of <em>“unmediated autonomy and unmediated spirituality”</em> – this is the essence of the <em>“hermetic left”</em> or <em>“hermetic anarchism”</em>.The heroes of the <em>“hermetic right”</em>, Yeats and Crowley and Jung and Evola, can also have their ideas ransacked and plundered. Theoretical promiscuity. Swallow the mystical insights and spit or shit out the elitism and the bland and stifling categorization.
very man and woman is a star, as Crowley wrote. We are all far better artists than we know, as Nietzsche taught. Each individual <em>does</em> provide a unique perspective for God, as according to Yeats. All three of these writers are associated with the Right, but these ideas are deeply shared by hermetic anarchists.
The absence of mediation, both by the State and by the Church – by Space and Time, is only possible because each individual is the co-creator of whatever it is that is taken for reality. These men, when they express such insights, are certainly part of a shared tradition.
The poet Robert Duncan, himself a spiritual anarchist inspired by Ezra Pound, H.D. and other Modernists and in turn a big influence on Wilson, tied this archaic, underground tradition of <em>“spiritual resistance”</em> to the wider poetic tradition:
<quote>
Our work is to arouse in a contemporary consciousness reverberations of old myth, to prepare the ground so that when we return to read we will see our modern texts charged with a plot that had already begun before the first signs and signatures we have found worked upon the walls of Altamira or Pech-Merle. – <em>The H.D. Book</em>
</quote>
The timeless plot continues. It is beginning to be aroused again. The old myth, fashioned in images and sounds, stretches from the caves of the Paleolithic to the stars reflecting eyes reflecting stars. The signatures are found in Altamira and in Alpha Centauri. The marvelous penetrates it all. P.L. Wilson directly follows from Duncan:
<quote>
That there exists an unbroken underground tradition of spiritual resistance, a kind of hermetic “left” that has roots in Stone Age shamanism, and flowers in the heresies of the “Free Spirit”.
</quote>
Duncan saw Ezra Pound as being a key figure of this tradition, even though Pound was certainly not of the <em>“Left”</em>:
<quote>
As important for me is Pound’s role as the carrier of a tradition or lore in poetry, that flowered in the Renaissance after Gemisthos Plethon, the Provence of the twelfth century that gave rise to the Albigensian gnosis, the trobar clus, and the Kabbalah, in the Hellenic world that furnished the ground for orientalizing Greek mystery cults, Christianity, and neo-Platonism. “The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us,” Pound wrote in 1913. – “The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound”
</quote>
<em>“A beauty that we preserve”</em> – a glimpse of the eternal, of the truly unmediated or immediate. A peak behind the curtain. We are all straw men.
** III. Hermetic Anarchism and Uddering the Author
The poets, in this instance Shelley on the <em>“Left”</em>, all recognized that political and spiritual freedom were identical and impossible to sever:
<quote>
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
<br>
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
<br>
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
<br>
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
<br>
Over himself; just, gentle, wise. – “Prometheus Unbound”
</quote>
<em>“Equal, unclassed, tribeless, nationless”</em> – this is what liberty truly consists of. The individual imagination is subject to no xenophobic or provincial limitations and boundaries. We are creators, makers, poets. The very act of sensing and perceiving, to refer to Nietzsche again, make us all better artists than we realize. We are the Unique Ones, as the individualist anarchist Max Stirner declared, and it is only through our own particular and unique visions that we sneak a peak at eternity.
*** The Scornful Aristocracy of Tramps
The age of revelations never ended. There are countless gods. We reject both the rigid monotheism of the Abrahamic orthodoxies and the equally suffocating monotheism of scientific materialism and reason. Sterner acolyte, Renzo Novatore, proclaimed the end to all -ologies and -isms. The only principle wide enough to encompass all of our desires and imaginings is life itself:
<quote>
History, materialism, monism, positivism and all the isms of this world are old and rusty tools which I don’t need or mind anymore. My principle is life and my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely and embrace my death tragically.
You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing.
Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!...
All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps, inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on, iconoclasts, forward!
Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent! – “Iconoclasts, Forward”
</quote>
The sublime conquest of nothing! The only ground that truly exists, the only firmament where our stars can be hung, is nothingness itself. And nothingness is itself not a thing. Flowing emptiness – endless, timeless, vacuumous and ecstatic. Beyond Church and State, Time and Space, Ear and Eye, Saturn and Jupiter. Hermetic anarchism should be first to be tossed on the intellectual bonfire of the vanities.
But of what practical use is this? How is this in any sense realistic? How does this help the suffering masses of Syria – to name just one topical hellhole in a world full of dire agony? But anarchy dances on all floors. It is the closest thing we have to a liberation from all politics – the terrible game that could be defined as the science of concentrating and wielding power. Anarchism, the reverse of this, is simply the process of maximally distributing and decentralizing all forms of power. And it is a process that does not end.
The miserable masses of <em>Syria</em> may in fact be best off in <em>PKK-run Kurdish villages</em> that are apparently <em>(fingers crossed)</em> practicing an effective form of <em>“libertarian municipalism”</em>, as advocated by Murray Bookchin. Unfortunately, and this should come as no surprise, these Kurdish villages are precisely those under vicious attack from the U.S.‘s latest<em></em> bête noire, the terrorist supergroup, ISIS. The veil tends to fall hard quickly after it is raised even a sliver.
But, as in the anarchist city of Barcelona briefly during the thirties, these Kurdish experiments in anti-authoritarian living actually function. There is no shock here. History, or more accurately the cracks and margins within and outside the official pages of history, is dripping with similar stories of communities who were successfully able to become, at least temporarily, truly free.
Peter Kropotkin wrote an anarchist masterpiece on the immense influence of mutual aid on both the natural and social worlds. Kropotkin points out that the medieval city, free from feudal domination, with its craft guilds and other voluntary associations was a model of mutual aid and liberty.
<quote>
In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. – <em>Mutual Aid</em>
</quote>
Kropotkin goes on to say that much, in our own time, of what even anarchists consider to be utopian was already realized in the High Middle Ages.
<quote>
More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.
</quote>
The point being that by no means are these ideals unachievable. Official history is only a fraction of the whole human story. And much of this story involves people living beyond the grasp of Church and State.
*** Imbecile Illusions
By now, though, it is difficult to even imagine a condition of freedom. <em>Usura</em> determines even the aesthetics of our our society. Everything has become utilitarian, mass-produced, conformist, disposable. Only those items which can easily be resold for a profit are not designed to be almost immediately obsolete. Nothing is built to last. All <em>“products”</em> are useful, convenient, unoriginal, ugly.
To overthrow usura is to qualitatively transform reality. Something like the medieval guild system would be restored. Objects would be crafted with pride, stamped with originality, made to please the eye and elevate the spirit. Cities transformed into collective works of art.
This is the polar opposite of the automotive hell that most of us somehow persist within today. Lawrence Ferlinghetti captured this best:
<quote>
They still are ranged along the roads
<br>
plagued by legionnaires
<br>
false windmills and demented roosters
<br>
They are the same people
<br>
only further from home
<br>
on freeways fifty lanes wide
<br>
on a concrete continent
<br>
spaced with bland billboards
<br>
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
</quote>
<em>“This could be anywhere, this could be everywhere”</em>. To break this dark spell, a necrotic curse that materially binds us, has deep spiritual effects. Creation, reality construction, for the highest values sets off an upward spiral towards the eternal. Robert Duncan explains that everything taken from the commons is a step away from eternity and one more enmired in the suck of time.
<quote>
It is toward what I have called the eternal that time is disturbed to awaken the workers of the world to the virtue, the power, that lies in their labor. The poet, too, is a worker, for the language, even as the field and the factory, belongs to the productive orders and means in which the communal good lies. All that is unjust, all that has been taken over for private exploitation from the commune, leaves us restless with time, divorced from the eternal. – <em>The H.D. Book</em>
</quote>
This process, though, can be reversed. It also provides a third option, a new direction. Beyond and outside of both private property and state control, with all the devices and mechanisms of oppression and imposed misery implied by these two, is the commons. This is an archaic place of freedom, now reduced to back alleys, weedlots and the unexploitable wild.
And yet this is the same place in which we all imagine. And in this fashion it is infinite. The commons stretches back through the free cities to the cave sanctuaries of the old stone age. And when it wells up again, first in the imagination, matter itself will be transmuted.
*** A Balance of Contradictions
Anarchy is the struggle for and celebration of the commons. It is not bound by property. Only a <em>(non-)space</em> of no limitations is able to satisfy it. And let us not be limited either by rigid categories. There is a plurality of anarchisms. Neither communist, nor individualist, nor both, nor neither. Robert Anton Wilson, as always, along with Robert Shea lay out the terms in sparkling lucidity. They begin by contrasting the free market with the state:
<quote>
FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.
THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).
</quote>
They go on to list and define the most prevalent forms of privilege – taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs – and the dominant political-economic systems – capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism – which are constructed around these varying forms of privilege. They finally arrive at anarchism itself:
<quote>
ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. “Right” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate; “left” anarchists predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete. – <em>The Illuminatus! Trilogy</em>
</quote>
Thus, long before the current and sham craze to get beyond the left-right paradigm, Wilson and Shea were already pointing to anarchism as a system which both encompasses and transcends both. Their definition quickly karate chops both participants in the debate, sadly still continuing, between individualist and communist anarchists. True anarchy is both and neither. Both the individual and collective dissolve into what Kropotkin, and Proudhon earlier, termed the mutual. Proudhon’s philosophy of mutualism is very solidly carried on and made new in the writings of Kevin Carson.
All individuals are always already members of collectives and all collectives are composed of unique individuals. Again, only through the particular is glimpsed the universal. There is no final stage in history, no ultimate ground upon which we all, humanity in general, will behold eternity. The difference, then, between Proudhon and Marx is essentially metaphysical.
James Billington, in his compelling history of radicalism, <em>Fire in the Minds of Men</em>, argues that the key split between Proudhon and Marx can be traced back to their diverging takes on the philosophy of Hegel.
<quote>
Their different views of history were evidenced in the contrasting uses they made of Hegel’s thought. Broadly stated, Marx turned Hegel upside down, making his theory materialistic rather than idealistic; but he maintained the basic Hegelian view that reality was monistic and that history was moving necessarily and dialectically toward the realization of an ideal future order. In contrast, Proudhon left Hegel right side up, maintaining the Hegelian image of history as a process of ideas unfolding through contradictions.
But Proudhon insisted that the agony of contradiction would not lead to despair or resignation as long as man did not look on the situation with complacency or cynicism. The real answer for society was not the mythic conclusion of some future, final synthesis; but the realistic possibility that at every stage the contradictions which are part and parcel of life itself could be held in equilibrium. Proudhon spoke of a dynamic ever-changing equilibrium: an “equilibration” between forces that would never either vanish or lose their venality. The balancing of such rival forces, though always tense and precarious, was the highest good that man can hope for on earth. – <em>Fire in the Minds of Men</em>
</quote>
A dynamic ever-changing balance of contradictions – this is anarchy. It itself is a process and not a state. It is never completed. There is no ability for a monopoly of power to congeal. It makes no sense to say that anarchy or anarchism would never work. It is working right now. It will never be total, this is correct, but if it was it would not be anarchy. The final socio-political synthesis that the Marxists pine for is anathema to any anarchist worth his salt.
Even revolution is totalizing in this respect. The revolution is ongoing or it is nothing – it is only the means for a new faction of power heads to seize the reins of the state. Lenin himself recognized this incongruity within classical anarchism. In <em>The State and Revolution</em>, Lenin quotes Engels on just this point:
<quote>
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don’t know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction. – Quoted in The State and Revolution
</quote>
The authoritarian nature of revolution is hard to deny. The dire necessity of using force in order to remove force is one way that violent revolution is justified by classical anarchists. Another possibility, though, is to change our understanding of revolution. The revolution, or perhaps a more neutral term like <em>“the ruckus”</em> is preferable, could be defined as any action that moves towards individual autonomy and freedom and away from authoritarian control.
The ruckus, in this sense, is perpetual and all-pervasive. It continually creeps closer to anarchy but it never entirely reaches it. And yet it is not dissatisfied. The moment of ruckus itself is a <em>“break thru”</em> to eternity.
*** Outcast and Vagabond
Totality can only exist in the imagination. The anarchists, like the mystics, have had a vision of this, but they cease to be anarchists or mystics when they attempt to force their formulations of this vision upon others. Yet as vision alone it is pure and it inspires action toward liberty – the ruckus.
One of the greatest of these visions came from an early anarchist, a friend and comrade of William Godwin, the poet William Blake. Blake also viewed secular revolutions as being mere steps to something greater which could only culminate in eternity. Revolution must lead to revelation or it must fail. The ultimate goal is apocalypse. Northrop Frye explains Blake’s view:
<quote>
If there is greater imaginative power in the revolutionary impulse, it is not so much because of what it accomplishes as because of what it is in itself. Revolution is always an attempt to smash the structure of tyranny and create a better world, even when revolutionaries do not understand what creation implies or what a better world is. The apocalypse will necessarily begin with a slaughter of tyrants, and Christ came, Blake says, to deliver those bound under the knave, not to deliver the knave.
Therefore the real war in society is the “Mental Fight” between the visionaries and the champions of tyranny. – Fearful Symmetry
</quote>
The <em>“slaughter of tyrants”</em> is general. It includes the deposing of earthly despots and psuedo-democrats, but it reaches beyond this to the principalities and powers in high places, the Archons, Jupiter and Saturn, space and time. The fight is mental. The battle field is the imagination and the final outcome of this great struggle is one world, really one man:
<quote>
Once the heart and stomach of a larger human body appear, a larger human brain will soon follow them, and the Golden Age of Atlantis, when “all had originally one language, and one religion,” will be restored. The religion will be the religion of Jesus, the Everlasting Gospel, and the language will be the tongue of Albion. Blake does not mean by one religion the the acceptance of a uniform set of doctrines by all men: he means the attainment of civilized liberty and the common vision of the divinity and unity of Man which is life in Jesus. By one language he does not mean English: he means, quoting the Bible and repeating Milton in Areopagitica, that all the Lord’s people will become prophets: speak the language of the imagination, and the perception of the sun as a company of angels will be the rule rather than the exception. Further, he does not say that all were originally of one race or kingdom or empire, and though he symbolizes humanity by the name of his own nation, his has nothing to do with the frantic jingoism which a confused idea of the same symbolism might easily develop, and has developed in our day.
</quote>
One language and one religion – this sounds dangerously close to the most horrible projections of NWO paranoids. But this has nothing to do with the New World Order. The language is of the imagination and the gospel is everlasting. Both are are beyond representation. Both resist definition and monopolization by priests or kings. Both only exist in the particular and the singular, and both are embodied and rooted in the sounds and scents of untamed nature.
The one man is all men and women – at once singularity and teeming multitude, universal but bewilderingly diverse. Blake called this man, Albion, and later Joyce named the same man, Finn and H.C.E. – <em>Here Comes Everybody</em>. Adam Kadmon is another one of his names. And he is not only <em>“he”</em>. The veiled exile returns. Shiva and his Shakti fucking eternally, always on the brink of orgasm and annihilation.
Robert Duncan, the anarchist and poet, extends Blake’s vision even further. Beyond tribe, beyond nation, beyond race, beyond even the human species – yet at the same time in the celebration of all of these. Finn manifests a universalism of all nature, of Pound’s <em>“stone alive, wood alive”</em>, a universe of singularities.
<quote>
To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure – all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man – must return return to be admitted in the creation of what we are. – <em>The H.D. Book</em>
</quote>
*** Prism Planet
All attempts at summary, while welcomed, are inadequate and if taken as authority are intolerable. In the collapse of the priests and kings proper, science has taken on this authority for many. Hermetic anarchism accepts it as metaphor, as a practical means to limited ends, but as only one facet of the imagination. The scientific method is merely one method of many, useful in certain instances and pernicious in others. Paul Feyerabend called this embrace of a plurality of methods, epistemological anarchism.
<quote>
Epistemological anarchism differs both from scepticism and from political (religious) anarchism. While the sceptic either regards every view as equally good, or as equally bad, or desists from making such judgements altogether, the epistemological anarchist has no compunction to defend the most trite, or the most outrageous statement.... His favourite pastime is to confuse rationalists by inventing compelling reasons for unreasonable doctrines. There is no view, however ‘absurd’ or ‘immoral’, he refuses to consider or to act upon, and no method is regarded as indispensable. The one thing he opposes positively and absolutely are universal standards, universal laws, universal ideas such as “Truth”, “Reason”, “Justice”, “Love” and the behaviour they bring along, though he does not deny that it is often good policy to act as if such laws (such standards, such ideas) existed, and as if he believed in them.
</quote>
The anarchism of being conjoins the anarchism of knowing. The so-called “new science” can be lucratively plundered for inspiring metaphors. Non-locality, self-organization, indeterminism, uncertainty, self-similarity, holographic structure, etc. are attractive not because they somehow, as scientific terminology, add credence and respectability to similar concepts within visionary traditions, but because they <em>“make new”</em> very ancient, even archaic or “primitive,” understandings.
We did not, however, overthrow the authority of the church and its dogma only to accept the new mediation of scientists/specialists/experts. Instead, each is the exclusive expert of their own perception and reflection. The new science may resonate with much older mystical sources, but these latter go far deeper and explore the entire spectrum of human experience.
William Blake was one of the first to sound the alarm against the new dogma of scientific materialism. Blake called it <em>“Newton’s sleep”</em>, the <em>“natural religion”</em>, an extreme narrowing of the range of the imagination and perception.
<quote>
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. – “There Is No Natural Religion”
</quote>
Other romantic poets followed in Blake’s wake. Romanticism, in this sense, was not a new movement. It was a return to a a poetic understanding of life based on the primacy of the imagination. The only disagreement within the Romantic movement was whether, as Blake taught, nature was merely a facet of the imagination or, following Wordsworth, the imagination and nature perfectly mirrored one another. All Romantics, however, and all genuine poets of all countries and ages, are in agreement on the oppressive limitations of scientific materialism.
An anecdote of John Keats and William Wordsworth wonderfully reveals this critical spirit. The two poets were at dinner together, and Keats proposed a toast:
<quote>
Confusion to the memory of Newton!
</quote>
To Wordsworth’s questioning of the reason for this toast, Keats replied that Newton <em>“destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism”</em>. <em>[The Romantic Imagination, Maurice Bowra.]</em> It is easy to share Keats’s concern. For reductive scientism a prism is really a prison of perception. It attempts to provide for humanity a final word on things, an authoritative explanation that can only be challenged by officially recognized experts.
Individual, singular visions and revelations are only accepted as potentially entertaining fancies — nothing to be taken seriously unless one, like Pound and very nearly Blake, plans for an extended and enforced stay at the local bughouse. Private apocalypses are only tolerated if one is quiet about them, or if they are presented as harmless <em>“fiction”</em>. This is the true extent of <em>“freedom of speech”</em>.
Hermetic anarchists, though, perhaps now know more about Newton than did the romantic poets. Newton was really one of the last of the alchemists, his own allegiance to dogmatic materialism is only a projection onto him by later adherents of the new faith. And, contra Keats, the prism far from necessarily limiting our understanding of perception also demonstrates the ubiquity of the rainbow. Where there is light there is mystery. Keats’s sentiment is sincere, but he need not have been concerned. Imagination is not that fragile.
*** Guerrillas Gonna Guerrilla
The task of current poets and anarchists of the imagination appears to be more arduous than in the Romantic era. Nearly everything has become simulacra – preformed, programmed, plastic, each a fully disposable and interchangeable unit in a uniform series with no original and no real difference.
How could it be possible for vision to penetrate into the eternal within a global system of usury where the real has been reduced to that which can be cheaply reproduced, priced and sold in non-localized, abstract markets? Even within this automotive, automated hell, though, the poets have not yet become extinct. There are cracks, glitches, blindspots in the panopticon, and enlightened madmen like PKD are always there to discover the divine in the detritus of the death culture.
The vision is particular, singular, individual but it always opens up a vista of the whole. Both the neo-nats and the skeptoids offer only further fragmentation. The categories are defined slightly differently but we remain boxed in, fenced off. The other is othered.
Instead, the penetrating vision is fluid, polymorphic, eclectic. It remains polytheistic and pagan, unmediated and promiscuous, indefinite and contradictory. It is non-dualist but not dogmatically so. There is polarity in nature, in thought – Crowley’s 2=0. We affirm Nietzsche’s rejection of Platonism – there is immense value in the earth, in the flesh – but there is a wide gap between the mundane view and that of eternity. This is reflected in Blake’s <em>“double vision”</em>, in Nagarjuna’s <em>“two truths”</em>. There is a kind of coitus of perception entwining the particular and the eternal, the renewal of the Golden Age within the present world.
And all agents of mediation have been eliminated from this vision. They are no longer there to take their cut, to add distance and alienation. And perhaps this is what is manifesting. The absolute panopticon can only exist as a nearly perfect mirror of the collective imagination set absolutely free. Total control may be only a hairsbreadth away from total liberation, just as the State’s most effective strategy against a guerrilla insurgency is to go guerrilla itself.
It is not the internet that is liberating humanity, it is the collective imagination that is surfacing and manifesting as the architecture of the world soul.
<quote>
The net is not the world; it is the imagination of the world. – <em>The H.D. Book</em> (1961)
</quote>
Already the parasitic middlemen are falling away, becoming irrelevant. In the music industry, in the film industry, the transformation is occurring in any place where information is abundant and can be given away without loss – in education, in media, in medicine, even in design and manufacturing. And the trajectory here is extremely clear. The final gatekeepers who bar the doors to eternity are about to be swept aside, bypassed, ignored. The state and the big banks are the final middlemen to fall.
Direct democracy is now fully possible and is becoming a reality in places like Iceland and the central squares and parks of cities across Europe and America. Bitcoin ushers in a new era of P2P banking – not the solution but a start, a Napster of peer financing. Even Bitcoin is already obsolete, needlessly centralized, too easy to manipulate. It is now but one of numerous cyptocurrencies. A few like Freicoin are modeled after one of Pound’s heroes’, the German anarchist Silvio Gesell’s, ideas of an alternative currency based on demurrage. Gesell’s conviction was that a currency, like any other commodity, should lose value over time, thus discouraging hoarding.
Pound’s central concern about currency, of <em>“the problem of issue. Who issues it? How?”</em>, is about to be addressed on a mass scale. And, beyond the purposeful summoning of oblivion which may also come, there seems to be no way of stopping this process. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri spell this out beautifully in <em>Multitude:</em>
<quote>
<em>The deployments of marines and military bases scattered around the globe are not insignificant. And yet this picture, like an Escher drawing, is completely unstable and with a shift of perspective can quickly be inverted. The strength of unilateral deployments is suddenly revealed
as weakness; the center it raises up is revealed as a point of maximum vulnerability to all forms of attack. In order to maintain itself Empire must create a network form of power that does not isolate a center of control and excludes no outside lands or productive forces. As Empire forms, in other words, geopolitics ceases to function. Soon unilateralist and multilateralist strategies will both prove equally ineffective. The multitude will have to rise to the challenge and develop a new framework for the democratic constitution of the world.</em>
</quote>
As Blake and PKD taught, though, the Empire is not only externalized in bases and forces. Both it and the Temple are also within, but the way forward is the same. The commons will be expanded into all fields. All the representatives of time and space, and ultimately these Archons themselves, will melt away as the illusions they have always been. All authority will become drowned by the issue of the udder of eternity. Tits up!
<quote>
The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear His-story as All, but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises. – <em>Against His-story, Against Leviathan!</em>
</quote>
|
#pubdate 2011-06-26 16:13:53 +0200
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title A Road
#LISTtitle Road
#lang en
#date 1895
#SORTtopics voyage
#source Retrieved on June 26, 2011 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1895/road.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes From “La Revue Blanche”. First Quarter 1895; <br> Translated for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;<br> CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2010.
Foreigners everywhere!
There aren’t many fewer of them in Paris than in this London where I have vegetated in the vacation of an outlaw for the past three months.
Here, for example, you don’t become acclimated, not even superficially. You can’t overcome the natives’ absolute reserve; you don’t in any way penetrate the surrounding environment. You feel you are materially pushed to the side. Isolation weighs on you in the compact sadness of the fog.
You frequent the international clubs in vain: they’re disappointing.
The solidarity of certain revolutionary groups has the ostentation of charity: it is nothing but a distressing spectacle. And what is more, bad tempered suspicions fly, giving any enthusiasm a cold shower. Accusations are exchanged. Argument and invective win out over discussion.
Mistrust rules.
You have to return to your room and your solitude. But the little room facing onto the courtyard on the top floor of a gloomy house is cause for nostalgia.
You could count the number of exiles who enjoy a comfortable home.
The rest unconsciously drag their feet to the area around Whitechapel, down there behind the Tower of London. They wander the poverty-stricken alleys, coming out onto the main streets when the scurrying crowd is leaving the factories and docks and then rises in a tide it would be pleasant to drown in.
In the big cities you pass though it’s not the wealthy boulevards or the communal buildings that are the most interesting. You rarely halt during museum visits, since rare are the works of yore that still move us. Monuments only have the beauty of their harmony, and when this proud totality no longer exists they stand there like old stones that a historic memory doesn’t suffice to magnify.
But it is still fascinating to seek out the salient traits of a race by making contact with the soul of the people. And you go to the poor quarters, among the shops of the lower professions, in the streets where kids run barefoot, down streets where here and there the vast buildings — popular barracks — looming over leprous mounds, look like giant hives for the wretched.
The cells of these hives are narrow, the walls of these hovels are close to each other and have no fireplace. The compressed life of these dumps overflows onto the muddy sidewalks, sometimes livened by a ray of sunlight. When this happens the rushing about is like a commotion of an anthill.
Outdoors in the daylight there’s endlessly renewed labor. Pale women wash coarse linen. Potatoes are cooking on heaters whose fire is fanned by for the meal that will later be eaten, seated on wobbly chairs in front of the door. And these people all know each other, they call out to each other, moves, exist in a special lifestyle, with its characteristic usages, determined customs, an original spirit and morals whose brutal side evokes the primitiveness of a type.
In London I commonly felt hostility in the gazes that fall on you as if to forbid you from approaching: “Go away!”
Every Englishman strangely symbolizes his country.
These island dwellers are so many unapproachable islands where the sap of warm colored plants sleeps.
It’s so monotonous, it’s so neutral, it’s so gray... and I’ve had enough of it!
To leave!
It’s not that you delude yourself by dreaming of a fraternal reception under other skies. The outlaw knows that every asylum is uncertain. He knows that he will be as suspect in Geneva as he is in Brussels, in Spain as in Italy. But when you’re tired of sojourning it’s true that you don’t need a goal to set out on the road.
To leave, to go anywhere...
The voyage! To go, fleeing spleen. In the beginning, every place has its charms. Everything is beautiful for an hour at least.
Wisdom resides in not staying.
To pass, gleaning impressions, tasting new sensations and the savor of the earth. And then go back on the road, no doubt towards some unreachable fatherland. Vagabond, pilgrim, beggar on a voyage of exploration, of conquest. Unsatisfied, like Don Juan, but with a higher love. The dress you want to tear is the veil on the horizon.
The green, deep Thames carries so many adventurous desires along on its waters.
After Westminster, after the Tower, after the docks, beyond Blackwell it opens up. The ships glide towards the sea and their whistles are calls you hear with a start.
It was in Blackwell that one morning, without any real plan, I took the boat to Holland. If I would have had a few more shillings I would just as well have embarked to see Sweden or take a look at Calcutta.
* * *
The crossing from London to Rotterdam lasts a day and a night. The price isn’t very high, fifteen francs for third class. And for a short sea voyage the lowest class is not noticeably worse than first. You enjoy standing contemplating the battle of the waves, and on the open sea watching the sky sink into the waters.
All places are the same for this infinite spectacle, forward as well as aft.
In any case, third class is imposed on you when all you have is a few <em>louis</em>. This is my case, and my baggage is light and the velvet of my suit is rustic.
In third class you meet few people travelling for pleasure. There are nothing but poor people being repatriated, workers hoping to find work far from their city.
No tourists.
The latter want to be pampered and comfortable. Even the most modest among them. They prefer to wait and swell their savings so they can travel in second class. They embark with their wallets full, holding a roundtrip ticket and coupons for pre-arranged hotels. Not having to rub elbows with them is the immeasurable advantage of traveling third class.
The insipid chatter of mighty is nowhere more pitiful that in the majesty of the open sea.
It’s as if you’re being pursued...
You’re better off with the puerile talk of the passengers in steerage, of the penniless who are free of poses and aren’t afraid to express their naïve sentiments. None of the irritating drone or the mannered recitation of triumphant commonplaces. They speak of hope and difficulties. And according to the weather and the hour, they give free rein to colorful language.
And it also happens that in third class chance gives birth to camaraderie. I went down the Thames in the amiable company of some needy troubadours who paid for their transport by singing the waltzes of their country.
Dark heads on supple gypsy bodies of gypsies with boisterous violins. They were returning from a tour around the Scottish countryside.
They were emigrating, fleeing winter.
Some of them spoke French and told me of their nomadic life. There was beauty and seductiveness in its carefree nature. They simply kept going forward, nothing but sun, fresh air, and music.
I wasn’t with them long enough.
Seated in the front of the ship, camped on valises while their violins rested in their cloth cases, we distractedly watched the sure-handed functioning of the tugboats and the whimsicality of the sailboats.
Fewer factories along the river, lagoons of red earth where sheep grazed on the sparse grass. The Thames widened again. It was Greenwich, and in the evening we felt the waves’ backwash.
We’d reached the sea.
I didn’t know the strange melody my companions saluted it with. But their instruments, their voices, and the sound of the water harmonized in the rhythm of a lullaby.
At night, having had an aperitif of salty air, we were hungry , and they sliced off large chunks of ham and fraternally circulated a whiskey gourd.
Upon arriving in Rotterdam we went the next day to an inn at the port. And while they improvised a concert, I went to see the old houses with their stepped roofs, squeaky clean on the canals of this vulgar Venice.
The musicians soon told me they were going to stay there for two weeks. That was more than I could do. Good wishes, farewell, handshakes.
Not faraway, at its mouth, the Rhine sent me the clean reflection of its old castles. The same pressing desire that had caused me to go down one river pushed me to go up another. The Thames, the Rhine! Isn’t it as if they were the prolongation of a seductive highway?
* * *
From the light steamship, sparkling under the sun, we see Patras at the foot of the mountain opposite Missolonghi.
On the small square near the port, not far from the market, the scurry of a Sunday. Brightly colored European garb, timeless fashions. Church services were ending. The women’s beautiful faces, lost under the edifices of their hats. Old Greeks in national costumes, the short pleated skirt of a female dancer. And the polychromatic, shimmering crowd, turning like a merry-go-round on the square with its three dusty palm trees.
On the terrace of a Moorish café, where anisette and “mastic” were served amidst saucers of olives on small, low tables, I piously gave myself over to my first hookah.
The light tobacco is slowly consumed in the red clay chimney under the scented coal, while in the carafe with its copper armature the water purrs its strange gluggings. The hookah stands hieratically and the long tube with its triangular amber tip unfurls like the rings of some sacred serpent.
It’s quite a change from rotgut whiskey.
And I have to say that from the decorative point of view there is an analogous difference between the men of that country and the inhabitants of ours. These Greeks show signs of their pedigree. The least turkey farmer has the inbred distinction that our swells seek in vain. With his delicate features, even the peasant preserves the aristocratic imprint that imperiously expresses the glorious line of his ancestors.
Their proud bearing and this whimsicality in attire explain the laisser-aller that you note in the carrying out of daily tasks. Commerce doesn’t enthuse them, and their agriculture is strange. In fields I saw potatoes and lilies mixed together in the barbarous furrows.
The train I took to Athens on a bright sunny morning stopped at every single station.
Constantly getting on, getting off, renewing themselves, there were peasants snacking on coarse bread and eating goat cheese to pass the short trip. Priests and longhaired beggars filling their pockets travel from here to the next village, along with poorly dressed soldiers singing strange nasal tunes.
Tourists in their sleeping cars have no idea how well you get to know a people through a prolonged stay in a vulgar passenger car, and to what extent it allows you to enter into contact with them.
A klepht [1] goes to the city to stock up on gunpowder. Seated in a corner of the wagon he seems to isolate himself, his pistol butts forming commas on his leather belt.
He has both the burnoose and the hardiness of a Kabyle.
You see more and more similarities between Arabs and Greeks.
The free mountain man — shepherd, hunter, perhaps “collector of indirect taxation from strolling rich men” — possesses the tranquil majesty of a qadi [2] after a razzia [3].
Here, on the arid plains of Megara, where the houses are cabins of red clay, you would almost think you were under the scorched trees of a Saharan oasis.
The décor changes.
Having gone around a hill, Athens is in view. Standing over the styleless buildings of a provincial city geometrically sliced up by the layout of the streets, stands the rock of the Acropolis, the pedestal of the Parthenon.
The Parthenon stands out in the impeccability of its serene columns, and the Acropolis looks like the final entrenchment of a haughty past, disdainful of the modern effort eating away at its base.
It’s not that I exalt the vestiges of a vanished world. It’s that I tell myself that our world will leave nothing but refuse.
I am a stranger to the emotional respect of archeologists before antique stones. The stadium led me to reminisce. Illisus made me think less of the Argonauts than of college, of homework, of teachers.
College. The first prison. Academic Procrustean bed, a training for the barracks, a miniature society so ugly that it is the seed of Society.
And anyway, how can you isolate yourself, bring the past back to life, imagine warriors and chariots in these arenas alongside the tramway? How can you dream of paganism in these temples rising from archeological digs where Orthodox tapers have religiously daubed Holy Virgins as their vestals?
I don’t accompany the Englishmen who stroll with their Baedeker, swooning at the sight of shapeless blocks for the sole reason that this debris is catalogued in their guidebook. They don’t miss a single piece of debris, not a single mutilated drawing. They drag their hands over the mosaics in the baths:
Socrates passed here!
I don’t frequent clinical museums: venerable pieces of statues, arm of Venus, leg of Apollo, labeled torso: all of surgical Greece.
As much as I appreciate those primitive works in which the essential is harmonious, which are triumphant in the esthetic of synthesis, to the same extent the race of amateurs digging into piles of illustrious crumbs appears to me grotesque. Amphora handles, brick shards, poor crumbs under glass... The sight of a stone floating down a stream in its eternal vagabondage inspires more thoughts in me.
I had arrived in Athens in distress.
I hoped to find a letter at the post office. Nothing. I had to wait several days.
At the doors of restaurants I melancholically contemplated the little suckling pigs grilling in the most joyful poses and satisfied myself with small portions in suburban greasy spoons.
Did I get to eat the finest foods of Greek antiquity? In any case I remembered the philosophers who once slept on the temple porch. One evening I went to the Parthenon and only came down the next morning. I will say in support of the renown of this client-free asylum that for morning soup we enjoyed a unique feast: the awakening of a golden countryside at the feet of Mount Hymette.
[1] Greek bandit
[2] Muslim judge
[3] Raid
|
#pubdate 2009-08-04 20:37:23 -0300
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title A Sure Means to Pluck Joy Immediately: Destroy Passionately
#LISTtitle Sure Means to Pluck Joy Immediately: Destroy Passionately
#lang en
#date 1892
#SORTtopics insurrectionist, sabotage
#source Retrieved on August 4, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1892/destroy.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Source: <em>L’En-Dehors</em>; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005
<quote>
The Bourse, the Palace of Justice, and the Chamber of Deputies are buildings of which there has been much talk these past few days. These three buildings had been especially threatened by three young men who were fortunately stopped just in time.
Nothing can be hidden from <em>messieurs</em> journalists; they revealed the triple conspiracy, and their colleagues in the prefecture immediately apprehended the conspirators.
One again the men of the press and the police have earned the gratitude of that part of the population that doesn’t yet appreciate the picturesque charm of palaces in ruin, and the strange beauty of collapsed buildings.
The public won’t be sparing in its thanks. The services rendered will be recognized with solid cash. Civic virtues must be encouraged. Secret funds will dance, and the cotillion will be led by society’s saviors.
All the better! For it is edifying to note that if there are, among our adversaries, a small number of clever exploiters, the great mass of them is made up of imbeciles who push the limits of naiveté to the horizon.
How could these uncouth ones believe that the anarchists thought to blow up parliament at this moment?
<strong>At a time when the deputies are on vacation!</strong>
You have to be lower than the low to think that revolutionaries would choose such a moment.
If only for the sake of common courtesy, we would wait for everyone’s return after the vacation season.
Nevertheless, the other morning the storekeepers of Paris, while straightening up their goods, said to themselves, with their robust good sense:
<quote>
“There’s not the least chance of error. They want to undermine the foundation of our centuries-old monuments. We are confronted with a new plot.”
</quote>
Come, come, brave storekeepers! You wander on the plains of the absurd. This conspiracy you speak of isn’t new. If it’s a question of tearing down the worm-eaten edifices of the society we hate, well, this has been in preparation for a long time.
This is what we have always plotted.
The temple of the Bourse — where the faithful Catholics and the fervent Jews hold their meetings for the rites and things of petty commerce — the temple of the Bourse must, in fact, disappear, and soon.
The money-handlers will in their turn be handled by the heavy caress of the crumbling stones.
Then the game of the Bourse will no longer be played; those skillful strokes that bring millions to corporations — whose reason for being is to speculate on wheat and to organize famines — will be no more.
Those who work behind the scenes: the brokers, all the bankers — gold’s priests — will sleep their last sleep beneath the ruins of their temple.
In this reposeful position the financiers will be pleasing to us.
As for the magistrates, it’s well known that they are never so handsome as when they march towards death.
It’s a real pleasure to see them.
History is full of striking sketches in honor of prosecutors and judges who the people, from time to time, made suffer. It must be admitted these men had a decorative agony.
And what a superb spectacle it would be: a commotion at the Palace of Justice. Quesnay constrained by a column that will have broken his vertebrae, trying hard to assume the look of a Beaurepaire struck down during the Crusades; Cabot, quoting Balzac with his dying breath; and Anquetil, next to the witty Croupi, crying out:
“Nothing is lost...we lay below our positions.”
The scene would have such grandeur that the good souls that we are would sincerely feel bad for the defeated. We would no longer want to remember the ignominy of the red robes — dyed with the blood of the poor. We will forget that the judiciary was cowardly and cruel.
It will be the ineffable pardon.
And if Atthalin himself — this specialist in political trials — his head slightly cracked, were to ask to be taken to a rest home, we would gallantly accede to this sick man’s wish.
In truth, it isn’t indispensable to feel oneself an anarchist to be seduced by the coming demolitions.
All those who society flagellates in the very intimacy of their being instinctively want vengeance.
A thousand institutions of the old world are marked with a fatal sign.
Those affiliated with the plot have no need to hope for a distant better future; they know a sure means to pluck joy immediately:
Destroy passionately!
</quote>
|
#title Any Opportunity
#author Zo d’Axa
#LISTtitle Any Opportunity
#date 2014
#source Retrieved on 14th March 2021 from https://archive.org/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-03-14T19:30:28
#notes Translated by Vincent Stone and retrieved from Ardent Press' '<em>Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism</em>'.
When you go your own way, alone, you take any opportunity to delight in saying what the average person wouldn’t dare. Concern for edifying neighbors or gossips is over. No more morality! No more games! Enough of partisan-traps...To the argument of the masses, to the catechisms of the crowds, to all of the community’s national interests: to these are opposed the Individual’s personal interests.
Which interests?
To each their own. The isolated one is careful not to preach a common rule. The defiant makes no place for a doctrine. Think for yourself! What is your situation? Your age? Your desire? Your strength? Do you need the crutches religion offers you? If so, go back to your church, from now on by your own choice, validated. Do you prefer, still a disciple, the sociologists’ dream? Fine then, tell us your plans for the year two thousand. Or rather, are you feeling insolent? So you want to live? Are you ready? Well quit waiting on somebody, go where your hatred, your joys, carry you—the joys of complete openness, of dangers and of dignity.
One marches, acts, aims, because of a combative instinct, a nostalgic sleep makes you prefer the fight. Fully aware of the limits of the code, you poach the big game: officers and judges, deer and carnivores; you flush out the herds of politicians from the forests of Bondy; you’re happy to grab a ravaging financier by the collar; at all the intersections; you release the domesticated tribe of authors and writers, furry and feathered alike, defilers of ideas, terrors of the press and the police.
With the quarrels between sects, races, and parties, every day, by the chance of events and shots to be taken, it becomes clear: <em>Dreyfus Affair![1] Read all about it!</em> or the way of describing the Magistra-ture and the Army as they deserve it.... Let us celebrate the ermine and the madder! The conscious destroyers don’t specialize: in turns, according to the situation, they point right or they point left.
At the same time, <em>l’esprit de corps</em> will produce great results: the magistrates, the military, the suits, the liveries, all of the servants of Society badmouth the old madam. An office full of rumors goes sour. The robes,[2] rabbis and curés, the officiators, the officials and the officers, the accomplices in the antechamber juggle objects of worship. They scandalize the believers. Doubt will unstitch their eyelids. In a few months the child-people will be shocked to find that they hid “things” from them... Now confidence is dead: the bad shepherds killed it. Near the smashed flagpole, the scales of justice lie there like scrap iron next to the wood pile...
It’s in vain that, with the crisis over, the junk traders of the Fatherland try to fix anything. This practice will become increasingly rare. The farce of a France signifying, amongst nations, prog-ress or generosity won’t fool too many onlookers: never has there been a tribe more persistent in keeping mankind at the whipping post.
Moreover, it’s only with contradiction that one buys the legend of Dreyfusism any more—such a spectacle of real Truth. The nude woman before the mirror sees far too little in her glass. She sings the praises of legality, forgetting that they legally shoot conscripts convicted of a simple gesture; and that also legally, in our streets, on winter nights, men and little children die in front of closed doors. Down with these closed doors—the worst! As for these necessary revisions, the beautiful lady won’t say a word about them.
Always the big words: law, duty, honor, public safety—ring out in every clan, under oppos-ing banners. They use sensationalist words. It’s military music, a church song, the various couplets of a public gathering. Those men who don’t get enlisted turn their nose up at sensationalist words.Not serving in the camps, they save their passionate loyalty in the fight for the right word and the precise blow. One leadership can’t count on them any more than another. They despise diplomacy, tactics, hesitations. They are suspect: in every camp, naturally, they are viewed as loose cannons. They leave the soldiers’ pay, the stripes, and the new lies to others.
It’s a lie to continue to promise, after so many promises. The prophets and the pontiffs, the preachers, and the utopians hoodwink us and show us, off in the distance, an era of love. We’ll be dead: the promised land is the one in which we will rot. What reason, what motives are there to hypnotize ourselves? No more mirages! We want—and by all possible means, disrespectful by na-ture of laws and prejudices, we want—immediately—to conquer all the fruits and flowers that life has to offer. If later a revolution results from scattered efforts—so much the better! That would be good. Impatient, we will have preceded it.
So continue to declaim, good sirs, if it pleases you. And you, professionals, if it pleases you, cry over Society. But another grown-up, France, it seems, is also sick. Let’s not doubt it, it’s serious. Two abstractions are better than one. So go on then! Into the face of peril! Conspiracy here... cor-ruption there! Let’s hunt down the jew “who is bringing us ruin and dishonoring us.” Let’s expel the congregationalists. Flamidien! Dreyfus! What’s next? For the <em>République!</em> For Society! Long live Loubet! yada, yada, Panamada.[3]
The more French the merrier.
I say that in fact a fifteen year old boy who recruitment officers, hall monitors, and headmas-ters haven’t yet stupefied would be more upright than any voter. It’s all so clear. What’s happening? Nothing. A toppling society, a people drowning itself... this is of no importance:
The individual will reach the riverbank.
Standing on the solid ground that his efforts can achieve, the Escapee from social drudger-ies no longer falls into old dreams. The experiments have all been done. We’ve all seen that, barely freed from the kneeling folly of the priest, men accept the duperies of patriotism en bloc. In the name of new principles, they take that age-old yoke right back. Slavery was secularized, the yoke painted in three colors. No matter the dogma! In truth, it’s just a government procedure. They slightly adjust it to the people’s taste. But the colors quickly fade. They speak of humanity, of one family... Watch out! In honor of this family, they prepare to rig it again! And this individual I refer to, the one who knows, the one who thinks, the Escapee of social drudgeries, the one who no longer boards the bedecked ships of religion and fatherland, will not heedlessly disembark on the humanitarian rafts of the Medusa.[4]
Have you understood, citizen?
The notion of revolt, in this way, is not just some mania, a new faith meant to again trump your appetites and desires. It’s the individual energy to defend oneself against the masses. It’s the willful arrogance to live. It’s the art of going on one’s own—
<em>Endehors</em>—you only have to dare!
At every opportunity, in these <em>feuilles</em>, such a way of feeling and being emerges. The sparking events, clashing like flint, shed light on facets of the question along the way. And light-hearted or serious, these <em>feuilles</em> follow, cohere, and complement, in accordance with the formal scenario of Life, ever-vivid.
[1] Tr—The Dreyfus Affair is discussed in introductory materials elsewhere in this volume. D’axa makes frequent references to (and word play on) various scandals and events of the time.
[2] Tr—Robins is derogatory slang for the magistrature, meaning ‘robed ones.
[3] Tr—D’Axa uses a bit of wordplay here; in place of the phrase *et patati et patata*, meaning ‘etc.,’ he writes *et patati et Panama*. This is a reference to the Panama scandals of the 1890s, in which the French government wasted nearly a billion francs. Newspapers used similar nonsensical wordplay during the scandals.
[4] Tr—“The Raft of the Medusa” is a famous painting depicting the tragic wreck of the *Méduse*. It became a symbol of French Romanticism, dramatically featuring desperate passengers crashing onto a rocky shore atop a dilapidated raft. Leading the boat is a man waving a handkerchief, suggesting a flag.
|
#pubdate 2009-08-04 19:23:58 -0300
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title He is Elected
#lang en
#date 1900
#SORTtopics anti-voting
#source Retrieved on August 4, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1900/elected.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Source: <em>La Feuille</em>; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
Listen to the edifying story of a pretty little white ass, candidate in the capital. It isn’t a Mother Goose rhyme, or a story from Le Petit Journal. It’s a true story for the old kiddies who still vote:
A burro, son of the country of LaFontaine and Rabelais, an ass so white that M. Vervoort gluttonously ate it, aspired — in the electoral game — to a place as legislator. The day of the elections having arrived this burro, the very type of a candidate, answering to the name of Worthless, pulled off a last minute maneuver.
On this hot Sunday morning in May, when the people rushed to the polling places, the white ass, the candidate Worthless, perched on a triumphal wagon and, pulled along by voters, traversed Paris, his good city.
Upright on his hoofs, ears to the wind, proudly emerging from his vehicle gaudily painted with electoral posters — a vehicle in the shape of an urn — the head high between the water glass and the presidential bell, he passed through the anger, the bravos and the gibes.
The ass looked on a Paris that gazed on him.
Paris! The Paris that votes, the crowd, the people sovereign every four years...the people sufficiently foolish to believe that sovereignty consists in naming its masters.
As if they were parked in front of the town halls were flocks of voters, the dazed, fetishists who held the little cards with which they say: I abdicate.
Mr. Anyone will represent them. He will represent them all the better in that he represents no ideas. And it’ll be fine. We’ll make laws, we’ll balance the budget. The laws will mean more chains; the budget will mean new taxes...
Slowly the ass went through the streets.
Along the way the walls were being covered with posters by members of his committee, while others distributed his proclamations to the crowd:
“Think carefully, dear citizens. You know that your representatives are fooling you, have fooled you, will fool you — yet still you go to vote. So vote for me! Elect the ass!...I’m not any dumber than you.”
This frankness — a little brutal — wasn’t to everyone’s taste.
<quote>
“We’re being insulted,” some of them said.
“Universal suffrage is being mocked,” others more accurately cried out.
</quote>
Someone angrily brandished his fist at the ass and said:
<quote>
“Filthy Jew!”
</quote>
But a sonorous laugh broke out. The candidate was being acclaimed. Bravely, the voters mocked both themselves and their elected representatives. Hats waved, canes. Women threw flowers...
The ass passed.
He descended from high in Montmartre towards the Latin Quarter. He crossed the <em>Grands Boulevards</em>, le Croissant where, without salt, the stuff is cooked that the gazettes sell. He saw the Halles where the starving — the Sovereign People — glean piles of rubbish; the quays, where the voters choose bridges as lodgings...
The heart and the brain! This was Paris! This was democracy!
We are all brothers, old vagabonds! Pity the bourgeois! He’s got gout... and he’s your brother, people without bread, man without work, worn out mother who, tonight, will go home tonight to die with the little ones...
We are all brothers, young conscript! It’s your brother the officer down there, with his girl’s corset and forehead covered with bars. Salute! Fix bayonets! In line! The Code awaits you — the military code. Twelve bullets in your skin for a gesture. It’s the republican tariff.
The ass arrived before the Senate.
He rolled alongside the palace, where guards pushed each other on leaving. He continued along the outside (alas!) of the too-green gardens. The he reached the Boulevard St-Michel. On the café terraces people clapped. The crowd, ceaselessly growing, grabbed copies of the proclamations. Students hooked themselves to the wagon; a professor pushed the wheels...
And as three o’clock sounded, the police appeared.
Since 10:00 am, from post to commissariat, the telegraph and the telephone signaled the strange passage of the subversive animal. The order to bring him in was issued: Arrest the ass! Now the city watchmen blocked the candidate’s route.
Near the Place St-Michel Worthless’s faithful committee was summoned by the armed forces to bring the candidate to the nearest commissariat. Naturally, the Committee passed over this order: right over the Seine, where the wagon soon stopped in front of the Palace of Justice.
More numerous, the policemen surrounded the unmoved ass. The Candidate was arrested at the gate of the Palace of Justice from which Deputies, swindlers and all the great thieves exit as free men.
The wagon lurched from the movements of the crowd. The agents, the brigadier in the lead, seized the shafts and put on the breast-harness. The Committee didn’t insist; they harnessed up the policemen.
It was thus that the white ass was released by his most fervent partisans. Like a vulgar politician, the animal went in the wrong direction. The police re-attached him, and Authority guided his route...From that moment on, Worthless was nothing but an official candidate. His friends no longer knew him. The Prefecture opened wide its doors, and the ass entered as if it were his home.
...If we speak about this today it’s to let the people know — the people of Paris and the countryside, workers, peasants, bourgeois, proud Citizens, dear lords — that the white ass Worthless has been elected. He has been elected in Paris. He has been elected in the provinces. Add up the blank and the voided ballots, add the abstentions, the voices and the silences that normally gather to signify disgust or contempt. Do some statistics, if you please, and you can easily verify that in all districts the monsieur who is fraudulently proclaimed deputy didn’t receive a quarter of the votes. From this flows the imbecilic locution “relative majority.” You might as well say that at night it’s relatively day.
And in this way the incoherent, brutal Universal Suffrage, which is based on number — and doesn’t even have that — will perish in ridicule. In speaking of the elections in France the gazettes of the entire world, without any malice, brought together the two most notable facts of the day:
<quote>
“In the morning, around 9:00, M. Felix Faure went to vote. In the afternoon, at 3:00, the white ass was arrested.”
</quote>
I read this in three hundred newspapers. I was encumbered with clippings from The Argus and the <em>Courrier de la Presse</em> . There were reports in English, Wallachian, Spanish... which I nevertheless understood.
Each time that I read Felix Faure, I was sure that they were speaking of the ass.
* * *
<quote>
Editor’s note: During the electoral period the poster-program was really pasted up on the walls, and the day of the vote the satirical candidate really traversed Paris, from Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, cutting through the enthusiastic or scandalized crowd that loudly demonstrated. Boulevard du Palais, the ass was duly apprehended by the police, who set themselves to drag him to the pound. As the newspapers of the time reported, if there wasn’t a fight between the ass’s partisans and the representatives of order it’s thanks to the editor of <em>La Feuille</em> who cried out: “Don’t carry on; he’s now an official candidate.”
</quote>
|
#pubdate 2011-06-26 16:13:54 +0200
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title In the Wings
#lang en
#date 1895
#SORTtopics voyage
#source Retrieved on June 26, 2011 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1895/in-wings.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes From <em>De Mazas à Jerusalem</em>, Paris 1895; <br> Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
The police roundup of April, 92 [1] will remain historic.
It is the earliest among the cynical attacks on freedom of thought in modern times.
We now know the behind the scenes story of the affair.
The government wanted to take advantage of the emotions stirred up by the explosions at the Labau barracks and on the Rue de Clichy in order to include all revolutionary militants in one gigantic political trial. The ministry and its docile procurators claimed that certain opinions constituted complicity: The writer explaining that the fact that there are those who are disinherited fatally leads to theft became a criminal himself; a thinker explaining the reasons behind propaganda of the deed became the secret associates of the lighters of the tragic fuses.
The philosopher no longer has the right to preach indulgence and to conceive facts without vertigo.
Society rid itself of those of its members who are so corrupted as to want it to be better than it is.
Ruling reaction could finally enjoy in peace and lets its remorse sleep- or at the very least its doubts, which will no longer be kept awake by the words of party-poopers.
The moment was carefully chosen.
The dynamite attacks terrorized the capitalist bourgeoisie, more frightened perhaps for its real estate than for itself. It was the eve of the threatening demonstrations of May. They were afraid. And the cowardly crowd would surely have applauded every summary execution.
The roundups took place.
Particularly aimed at the anarchists, these arrests also fell on men so independent as to reject every label, even that of anarchist. And so it was that I was apprehended, though I’ve never set foot in a public meeting or frequented any groups. Though I wasn’t part of any sect or school, was ON THE OUTSIDE, i.e., isolated, a seeker of the beyond, a shaker-up of ideas, that was enough. If lack of respect was truly combative, that sufficed. All agitation had to cease. One evil-doer the less: I was arrested.
Perfidiously conducted, the affair was cloaked in a legal appearance. The code is so elastic that they applied to us article 265 and those that follow it, aimed at associations of malefactors.
“Art. 266. This crime exists by the sole fact of the organization of bands or the correspondence between them and their chiefs or commandants, or of conventions tending to account for or distribute or share the products of crime.”
Now do we understand the insinuations of the judge who spoke about a “list of addresses” and “the sending of money?”
“Art. 267. Even if this crime is not accompanied by any others the authors, directors of the association and the commanders in chief or the subaltern of these bands shall be punished with forced labor.”
The delightful prospect of the penal colony opened before us.
It is obvious that we couldn’t count on the impartiality of the judges. The orders had been given. Even if we could prove not only that we weren’t cut-purses, but that no organization among us existed — not even from a political point of view — the tribunals would strike us without a care.
One point alone was put in doubt. In order for the operation to succeed it was indispensable that the other nations put their refractory nationals through an analogous trial.
But what the French Republic premeditated, Holland, England and Germany were too ashamed to do. The old monarchies didn’t cede to the incitement of a young republic that dreamed of reconstituting the International in reverse. There were unsuccessful negotiations. The hunt of the free man wasn’t decreed throughout Europe. Our fallen democracy felt that it couldn’t do worse than the worst autocrats.
The opportunist government hesitated, became embarrassed, like a poorly hardened rogue — and didn’t dare push things to the bitter end.
That day it said to itself: game postponed!
[1] 1892
|
#pubdate 2011-06-26 16:13:56 +0200
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title Little Girls
#lang en
#date 1895
#SORTtopics voyage
#source Retrieved on June 26, 2011 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1895/little-girls.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Translated for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;<br> CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.
Little girls were judged this afternoon in Milan.
And it wasn’t the sad trial — in absentia, of course — of a child caught on a bench with a stiff magistrate.
I watched the questioning as it unfolded.
It concerned an anarchist demonstration where, among resolute men and hardy women, two young girls of fourteen and fifteen were arrested.
The dark Maria had a strange charm, with her decisive air of a rascally young man, with her short curly hair, and her dark, fiery eyes. She had a way of looking at these messieurs of the court that was a form of silent, indefinable insolence — it worked better than throwing a shoe.
And when she spoke it wasn’t at all in a way that would make one smile. Her short phrases had meaning and were accentuated by sure gestures.
“How can you talk about anarchy?” the judge muttered, “You don’t even know what it is.”
“And you have studied anarchy more closely? So it exists. Will you teach me about it?”
No, little one, they won’t teach you anything! Revolt is instinctual. And theory is too often puerile. You know everything if you feel how filthy it is too live this bestial life.
Ernesta Quartirola, a year younger, has an equally characteristic beauty. Her nascent beauty is serious, enigmatic. And she could be a proud statue of the future signifying...who knows what.
Her silence is haughty. She makes it seem as if it has nothing to do with her. A yes, a no, a shrug of the shoulders and that’s all.
But the dark Maria, Maria Roda, with her defiant attitude, doesn’t allow the parade of prosecution witnesses to continue their uninterrupted march. Her replies indicate the halts. She set loose a chain of insults about the shameful informers and professional squealers.
She has a riposte for each of them. A riposte that reaches its mark.
An agent of the <em>Pubblica Sicurezza</em> recites his learned lesson against her. Miss Roda encouraged the demonstrators to rush the police, she carried on like she was possessed, she shouted at everyone, she even insulted the brigadier!
“What is your answer?” the president admonished her.
“I pity this guard. I pity him because he barely earns his bread, because he’s a poor devil. But it impresses me to see him go after other poor devils, his brothers...let him think about this.”
And with a gesture of grace towards the miserable one who had just accused her, she perhaps had just thrown a first revealing ray upon this dark spirit.
This is how the sisters of our companions showed themselves, they who are of an age when others have barely stopped playing with dolls, or when the daughters of bourgeois begin to amuse themselves in games of love with little cousins or some elderly friend of the family.
Prison was imposed. The men of the court were generous. Ernesta and Maria will know three months of jail — and the little ones must also pay a fine to these messieurs.
Three hundred francs demanded from poor little girls!
It’s cynical, but that’s the way it is ...
A moment before the Tribunal retired to consider the condemnation, the man in red said to Maria:
“Do you have anything to add?”
“Nothing, since it would be pointless.”
And that was the final word. Not gay, but flagellant.
It is said over and over that Milan is a little Paris. The magistrates of Milan prove this, at least on one point; they are every bit as repugnant as their Parisian confreres.
And anyway, isn’t the magistracy the same everywhere? And could it be otherwise?
And this is probably even the reason that wherever you go the memory of the fatherland follows you. It comes upon you like nausea when you see the vileness of a judge.
|
#title On The Street
#author Zo d’Axa
#LISTtitle On The Street
#date 2014
#source Retrieved on 14th March 2021 from https://archive.org/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-03-14T19:48:41
#notes Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher and retrieved from Ardent Press' '<em>Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism</em>'.
Should I say: from Mazas to Jerusalem—and back (via Marseilles, Sainte-Pélagie and the holding prison)? I might think so. On the occasion of Carnot’s funeral,[1] I found a handful of comrades in prison who they arrest at every celebration including May Day.<br>
These festivals usually end for them in Mazas.<br>
But the warden called me almost immediately:<br>
I am free.<br>
The idiotic police arrested me too soon. They overstepped their order, which was to leave me at least a few hours of liberty—the ethical time in which to commit a crime. That’s what it’s like to be in a rush!<br>
The mistake granted me a few days’ reprieve. So I left without further hindrance...Around the warden’s apartment, the side streets and docks speak softly, and it is like a transition to the clamor of the avenues.<br>
The eighteen months robbed from my life already belong to the past.<br>
Only the present matters.<br>
When he first goes out, a convalescent tends to be flustered. I shook off the lethargy of prison more quickly, because it was so brutal. And now the passersby that I brush against, the noise of the streetcars and the pungent air don’t daze me at all. My step is still familiar on the Parisian pavement.<br>
Where will it lead me?<br>
To join the anarchists again?<br>
In the criminal court, in the preliminary investigation as well as the hearings, I scorned this ex-planation. My words of rage and compassion were characterized as anarchist. I made no comment under threat.<br>
Now I would like to clarify my first thought, the desire I have always had.<br>
It must not sink into vague approximation.<br>
No more grouped into anarchy, than recruited into socialism. Being a free man, a loner who searches beyond; but not bewitched by a dream. Having the ferocity to affirm oneself, outside of schools and sects:<br>
Outside.<br>
Here I am forced to conclude: I am not an anarchist.<br>
The facetious journalists commented rather superficially, exclaiming: “But they’re inside!” when we were thrown into prison.<br>
And then, above the grayness of all doubts, this appears in the brilliance of vigorous color:<br>
The Will to Live.<br>
And to live outside oppressive laws, outside narrow rules, even outside the ideally formulated theories of the world to come.<br>
To live without believing in a divine paradise or hoping too much for a paradise on earth.<br>
To live for the present, outside of the mirage of future society; to live and to feel this existence in the proud enjoyment of social conflict.<br>
It is more than a state of mind; it is a way of being—here and now.<br>
For too long, men have been led along, being shown the conquest of the heavens. We don’t even want to wait until we’ve conquered the earth.<br>
Let each of us go on for his own pleasure.<br>
And if there are those who get left along the way, if there are those whom nothing can awaken, if there are innate slaves, people who are incurably degraded, so much the worse for them! Understanding this means going on ahead. And joy lies in acting. We don’t have the time to show the way: life is short. Individually, we rush to the attacks that call us.<br>
Someone has spoken of dilettantism. But this isn’t gratuitous, nor platonic: we pay...<br>
And we start again...
[1] The French President assassinated by Italian anarchist Sante Caserio. Caserio’s cry before the guillotine was: “Courage, cousins! Long live anarchy!”
|
#pubdate 2009-08-04 19:23:58 -0300
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title The Honest Worker
#LISTtitle Honest Worker
#lang en
#date 1898
#SORTtopics anti-work
#source Retrieved on August 4, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1898/honest-worker.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Source: <em>La Feuille</em>, No. 24, 1898; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) Marxists.org 2007.
It’s the amazing fattening of the mass of the exploited that creates the increasing and logical ambition of the exploiters.
The kings of the mines, of the coalfields, and of gold would be wrong to worry. Their serfs’ resignation consecrates their authority. They no longer needs to claim that their power is be based on divine right, that decorative joke: their sovereignty is legitimated by popular consent. A workers’ plebiscite, consisting of patriotic adherence, declamatory platitudes or silent acquiescence assures the boss’s hold and the bourgeoisie’s reign
In this work we can recognize the artisan.
Be it in the mine or the factory, the Honest Worker, that sheep, has given the herd the mange.
The ideal of the supervisor has perverted the instincts of the people. A sports coat on Sunday, talking politics, voting...these are the hopes that take the place of everything. Odious daily labor awakens neither hatred nor rancor. The great party of the workers hates the lazybones who badly earns the money granted him by the boss.
Their heart belongs to their job.
They’re proud of their calloused hands.
However deformed the fingers, the yoke has done worse to the brain: the bumps of resignation, of cowardice, of respect have grown under the leather with the rubbing of the harness. Vain old workers wave their certificates: forty years in the same place! We hear them telling about this as they beg for bread in the courtyards.
“Have pity, ladies and gentlemen, on a sick old man, a brave worker, a good Frenchman, a former non-commissioned officer who fought in the war...Have pity, ladies and gentlemen.
It is cold: the windows remain closed. The old man doesn’t understand.
Teach the people! What else is needed? His poverty has taught him nothing. As long as there are rich and poor the latter will hitch themselves up so as to fill the service demanded. The worker’s neck is used to the harness. When still young and strong they are the only domestic beasts to not run wild in their shafts.
The proletarian’s special honor consists in accepting all those lies in whose name he is condemned to forced labor: duty, fatherland, etc. He accepts, hoping that by doing this he will raise himself into the bourgeois class. The victim makes himself an accomplice. The unfortunate talks of the flag, beats his chest, takes off his cap and spits in the air:
“I’m an honest worker.”
And it falls right back onto his face.
|
#pubdate 2012-01-26 17:42:37 +0100
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title To the Voters
#lang en
#SORTtopics anti-voting
#source Retrieved on 25 January from [[https://sites.google.com/site/historicalanarchisttexts/zo-d-axa/to-the-voters][sites.google.com]]
#notes from <em>La Feuille</em>
*** <em>Voters:</em>
In presenting myself for your votes, I owe you a few words. Here they are:
I come from an old French family — I dare to say — and am a pedigreed ass, an ass in the good sense of the word: four hooves and hair all over.
My name is Worthless, as are my rival candidates.
I am blank, like many of the ballots that they persist in not counting, but which now belong to me.
My election is assured.
You understand that I am speaking frankly.
*** <em>Citizens:</em>
You are being fooled. It is said that the last Chamber [1] , made up of imbeciles and swindlers, didn’t represent the majority of voters. This is false.
On the contrary, a Chamber made up of idiotic representatives and cheats represents you as voters perfectly. Don’t protest; a nation gets the representatives it deserves.
Why did you elect them?
You aren’t embarrassed, among yourselves, to admit that the more things change, the more they stay the same; that your elected officials mock you and think only of their own interests, glory or money.
So why would you elect them again tomorrow?
You know quite well that those you send to sit for you will sell their word for a check and will trade in jobs, positions and tobacco shops.
But who are the tobacco shops, positions and sinecured jobs for if not the Electoral Committees that are paid in this way?
The shepherds of the Committees are less naïve than the flock.
The Chamber represents the lot.
A parliament of idiots and crafty devils, of old fools and Robert Macaires [2] is needed to personify both professional voters and depressed proletarians at one and the same time.
*** And that’s what you are!
They are fooling you, good voters, they are deceiving and flattering you when they tell you that you are beautiful, that you are justice, right, national sovereignty, the people-king, free men...They harvest your votes and that’s all. You are fruit for the picking... Pears.
They keep on deceiving you. They tell you that France is still France. This isn’t true.
With each passing day France loses all meaning in the world, all liberal meaning. It is no longer a nation of hardy, risk-taking, idea-spreading, cult-smashing people. It is a Marianne kneeling before the throne of autocrats. It’s corporalisme reborn more hypocritically than in Germany: a tonsure under the kepi. [3]
They fool you, they never stop fooling you. They talk to you about brother, when the struggle for bread has never been sharper or bloodier.
They talk to you about patriotism and our sacred patrimony — to you who have nothing.
They talk to you about integrity, and here they are, pirates of the press, journalists willing to do anything, master deceivers and blackmailers, singing of national honor.
The supporters of the Republic, the petit-bourgeois, the petty lords are tougher on beggars than the masters of the old regimes. We live under the supervisors’ eye.
Weakened workers, producers who consume nothing, are content to patiently suck at the bone without marrow that is thrown to them, the bone of universal suffrage. And it is to tell lies, to engage in electoral discussions, that they move their jaws, jaws that no longer know how to bite.
And when, on occasion, the children of the people shake themselves from their torpor they find themselves face to face with our brave army like at Fourmies [4] ...and the reasoning of the Lebel guns puts lead in their heads.
Justice is the same for all. The honorable thieves of Panama travel in carriages and don’t know the cart. But handcuffs squeeze the wrists of old workers who are arrested as vagabonds.
The ignominy of the present moment is such that no candidate dares defend this society. Bourgeois-leaning politicians: reactionaries or partisans, republican masks or false noses, proclaim that if you vote for them things will go better, things will go well. Those who have already taken everything from you ask for even more.
*** Give your votes, Citizens!
The beggars, the candidates, the thieves, the vote-squeezers all have a special way to make and re-make the Public Good.
Listen to the good workers, the party quacks; they want to conquer power...in order to better abolish it.
Others invoke <strong>the Revolution</strong>, and they fool themselves while fooling you. Voters will never make the Revolution. Universal suffrage was created precisely to prevent virile action. Charley has a good time voting...
And even if some incident launched men into the streets; and even if a group went into action in response to some police or military attack, what could we expect of the swarming crowd that we see, <strong>the cowardly and empty-headed crowd</strong>?
Go on! Go on, you men of the crowd! Go on, voters! To the polls...and stop complaining. It’s enough. Don’t try to inspire pity because of the fate you imposed upon yourselves. Afterwards don’t insult <strong>the Masters</strong> that you gave yourselves.
These masters are worth as much as you, while they steal from you. They are probably worth more: they’re worth 25 francs a day, not counting their small profit. And this is as it should be.
*** The voter is nothing but a failed candidate.
The people at the bottom — with small savings and small hopes, rapacious small merchants, slow-moving domestic folk — need a mediocre parliament that will bring together and make money from all that is vile in the nation.
So vote, voters! Vote! The Parliament emanates from you. A thing is because it must be, because it can’t be any other way. Create the Chamber in your image. A dog returns to its vomit. Return to your representatives....
[1] The equivalent in the French Parliament of the House of Representatives. (editor’s note)
[2] Character of a bandit in a popular play by Frederic Lemaitre.
[3] A French military cap.
[4] Site of a May Day rally in 1891 that was brutally put down by the army.
|
#pubdate 2009-08-05 12:54:40 -0300
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title Us
#lang en
#date 1896
#SORTtopics crime, critique, egoist, post-left
#source Retrieved on August 5, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1896/us.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Source: <em>L’En-Dehors</em> 1896; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
They talk of anarchy.
The dailies are roused. Comrades are interviewed and “L’Éclair” among other things, says that there is a split among the anarchists.
It’s on the matter of theft that opinions are divided.
Some, it is said, want to build it into a principle; others irrevocably condemn it.
Well! It would be impossible for us to take a position on such a question. This theft could seem to us good and should be approved; that one we could find violently repugnant.
There is no Absolute.
If the facts lead us today to specify such and such a way to see and be, every day, in the lively articles of our expressive collaborators, our determination has been clearly affirmed:
Neither in a party or a group.
Outside.
We go our way — individuals, without the Faith that saves and blinds. Our disgust with society doesn’t engender in us any immutable convictions. We fight for the joy of the battle, and without any dream of a better future. What do we care about tomorrows that won’t come for centuries! What do we care about our grand-nephews! We are <em>outside</em> of all laws, of all rules, of all theories — even anarchist; it’s from this instant — right away — that we want to surrender to our pity, our outbursts, our gentleness, our rages, our instincts — with the pride of being ourselves.
Up till now nothing has revealed to us the radiant beyond. Nothing has given us a constant criterion. Life’s panorama changes without ceasing, and the facts appear to us under a different light depending on the hour. We will never react against the attractions of contradictory points of view. It is simple. The echo of vibrant sensations resounds here. And if impetuosity disorients by its unexpectedness, it’s because we speak of the things of our time as would primitive barbarians who have suddenly fallen among them.
Theft!
It would never occur to us to pose us judges. There are thieves who displease us : that’s certain; and that we’d attack : that’s probable. But that would be for their allure rather than for the brute fact.
We will not put in play eternal Truth — with a capital T.
It’s a matter of impression.
A hunchback could displease me more than an amiable recidivist.
|
#pubdate 2009-08-05 12:54:40 -0300
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title Without a Goal
#lang en
#date 1895
#SORTtopics anti-politics, individualist
#source Retrieved on August 5, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1895/without-goal.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Source: <em>Zo d’Axa, De Mazas a Jérusalem</em>. Chamuel, Paris, 1895; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
“Wait a minute then,” people say, “what is their goal?”
And the benevolent questioner suppresses a shrug upon noting that there are young men refractory to the usages, laws and demands of current society, and who nevertheless don’t affirm a program.
“What do they hope for?”
If at least these nay-sayers without a credo had the excuse of being fanatics. And no, faith no longer wants to be blind. They discuss, they stumble, they search. Pitiful tactic! These skirmishers of the social battle, these flagless ones are so aberrant as to not proclaim that they have the formula for the universal panacea, the only one! Mangin had more wit...
“And I ask you: what they seeking for themselves?”
Let’s not even talk about it. They don’t seek mandates, positions or delegations of any kind. They aren’t candidates. Then what? Don’t make me laugh. They are held in the appropriate disdain, a disdain mixed with commiseration.
I too suffer from that underestimation.
There are a few of us who feel that we can barely glimpse the future truths.
Nothing attaches us to the past, but the future hasn’t yet become clear.
And so we carry on, as misunderstood as foreigners, and it’s both here and there, it’s everywhere that we are foreigners.
Why?
Because we don’t want to recite new catechisms, and we especially don’t want to pretend to believe in the infallibility of doctrines.
We would need to possess a vile form of complacency to admit a group of theories without reserve. And we are not that complacent. There has been no Revelation. We are keeping our enthusiasm virgin for a fervor. Will it come?
And even if the final term escapes us, we won’t skimp on our work. Our era is a transitional one, and the free man has his role to play.
Authoritarian society is odious to us, and we are preparing the experiment of a libertarian society.
Uncertain of its results, we nevertheless long for the attempt, the change.
Instead of stagnating in this aging world where the air is heavy, where the ruins crumble as if to bury us, we hasten to the final demolition.
To do so is to hasten a Renaissance.
|
#pubdate 2009-06-02 10:42:12 +0200
#author Zo d’Axa
#SORTauthors Zo d’Axa
#title You Are Nothing But Suckers
#lang en
#date 1898
#SORTtopics anti-voting, France
#source Retrieved on June 2, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zo-daxa/1898/suckers.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes This essay is from La Feuille’s campaign to run an ass named “Worthless” for the Chamber of Deputies.
<em>VOTERS:</em>
In presenting myself for your votes, I owe you a few words. Here they are:
I come from an old French family — I dare to say — and am a pedigreed ass, an ass in the good sense of the word: four paws and hair all over.
My name is Worthless, which is what my competitors in this race are.
I am white, as are many of the votes that have been cast and not counted, but which will now belong to me.
My election is assured.
You will understand that I speak frankly.
<em>CITIZENS:</em>
You are being fooled. It is said that the last Chamber, made up of imbeciles and thieves, didn’t represent the majority of voters. This is false.
On the contrary, a Chamber made up of deputies who are ninnies and thieves perfectly represents the voters you are. Don’t protest; a nation has the delegates it deserves.
Why did you elect them?
Amongst yourselves you don’t hesitate to say that the more things change the more they remain the same; that your representatives mock you and think only of their own interests, of vainglory, or of money.
So why would you elect them again tomorrow?
You know full well that the whole lot of those you would send to the legislature would sell their votes for a check, and would sell jobs, functions and tobacco offices.
But who are the tobacco offices, positions and sinecures for if not the Electoral Committees that are also paid?
The shepherds of the Committees are less naïve than the flock.
The Chamber represents the whole.
Idiots and crafty devils are needed; a parliament of old fools and Robert Macaires [1] is needed to embody at one and the same time professional voters and depressed workers.
And that’s what you are!
You are being fooled, good voters, you are being deceived and fawned over when you are told that you are handsome, that you are justice itself, law, national sovereignty, the people-king, free men...Your votes are bought like at a candy store, and you are the candy...Suckers.
You continue to be fooled. You are told that France is still France. This isn’t true.
With each passing day France loses all meaning in the world, all liberal meaning. It is no longer a hardy, risk-taking, idea-spreading, cult-smashing country. It’s Marianne kneeling before the throne of autocrats. It’s corporalisme reborn more hypocritically than in Germany: a tonsure under the kepi.
You are being fooled, fooled without cease. They talk to you about fraternity, and never has the struggle for bread been sharper or more deadly.
They talk to you — you who have nothing — about patriotism and our sacred patrimony.
They talk to you about integrity, and it’s the pirates of the press, the journalists ready to do anything, the master deceivers and blackmailers who sing of national honor.
The supporters of the Republic, the petit-bourgeois, the little lords are tougher on the “rogues” than the masters of the former regimes. We live under the supervisors’ eye.
The weakened workers — the producers who consume nothing — content themselves with patiently sucking at the bone without marrow that is thrown to them, the bone of universal suffrage. And it’s only to tell stories, to engage in electoral discussions, that they move their jaws, the jaws that no longer know how to bite.
And when, on occasion, the children of the people shake themselves from their torpor they find themselves, like at Fourmies,[2] face to face with our brave army...and the reasoning of the Lebel guns puts lead in their heads.
Justice is the same for all. The honorable thieves of Panama travel in carriages and don’t know the cart. But handcuffs squeeze the wrists of the old workers who are arrested as vagabonds.
The ignominy of the present moment is such that no candidate dares defend this society. The bourgeois-leaning politicians: the reactionaries, the liberals, the masks, the false noses, the republicans, cry out that in voting for them things will work better, things will work well. Those who have already taken everything from you ask for still more.
Give your votes, Citizens!
The beggars, the candidates, the thieves, the vote-squeezers all have a special way to make and re-make the Public Good.
Listen to the brave workers, the party quacks; they want to conquer power...in order to better suppress it.
Others invoke the Revolution, and they fool themselves while fooling you. Voters will never make the Revolution. Universal suffrage was created precisely to prevent virile action. Charley has a good time voting...
And even if some incident drew men onto the streets; and even if by some strong act a group went into action, what could we wait and hope for of the crowd we see swarming about, the cowardly and empty-headed crowd?
Allez! Go ahead men of the crowd! Go ahead, voters! To the urns...and don’t complain. It’s enough. Don’t try to inspire pity because of the fate you imposed upon yourselves. Afterwards don’t insult the Masters that you gave yourselves.
These masters are your equals as they steal from you. They are doubtless worth more: they’re worth 25 francs a day, not counting their small profit. And this is very good.
The voter is nothing but a failed candidate.
The little people — of small savings and small hopes, rapacious small merchants, slow-moving domestic folk — need a mediocre parliament that will mint and synthesize all that is vile in the nation.
So vote, voters! Vote! Parliaments emanate from you. A thing is because it must be, because it can’t be otherwise. Put in place a Chamber in your image. A dog returns to its vomit. Return to your deputies....
[1] Character of a bandit in a popular play by Frederic Lemaitre.
[2] Site of a May Day rally in 1891 that was brutally put down by the army.
|
#title Anarchism and Democracy
#author Zoe Baker
#LISTtitle Anarchism and Democracy
#SORTauthors Zoe Baker
#SORTtopics anarchy, democracy, Direct Democracy
#date 18 April 2022
#source Retrieved on 2022-04-16 from [[https://anarchozoe.com/2022/04/15/anarchism-and-democracy/]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-04-17T04:41:52
Anarchism is a social movement which advocates the abolition of all forms of domination and exploitation in favour of a society based on freedom, equality and co-operation. It holds that this goal can only be achieved if the hierarchical social structures of capitalism and the state are abolished and replaced by a socialist society organised via horizontal free association. Doing so requires a fundamental transformation in how organisations are structured and decisions are made. Capitalism and the state are hierarchical pyramids in which decision-making flows from the top to the bottom. They are based on a division between a minority who monopolise decision-making power and issue commands, and a majority who lack real decision-making power and must ultimately obey the orders of their superiors. A horizontal social structure, in comparison, is one where people collectively self-manage and co-determine the organisation as equals. In an anarchist society there would be no masters or subjects.
Modern anarchists often describe anarchism as democracy without the state. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin argued in 1993 that “there is no democracy or freedom under government — whether in the United States, China or Russia. Anarchists believe in direct democracy by the people as the only kind of freedom and self-rule” (Ervin 1993. Also see Milstein 2010, 97–107). Perhaps the most famous advocate of this position was David Graeber. In 2013 Graeber argued that “Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy”. It instead takes “core democratic principles to their logical conclusion” by proposing that collective decisions should be made via “nonhierarchical forms of direct democracy”. By “democracy” Graeber meant any system of “collective deliberation” based on “full and equal participation” (Graeber 2013, 154, 27, 186).
This endorsement of direct democracy is not a universal position among modern anarchists. A significant number of anarchists have argued that anarchism is fundamentally incompatible with, or at least distinct from, democracy. Their basic argument is that democracy means rule by the people or the majority, whilst anarchism advocates the abolition of all systems of rulership. The word anarchism itself derives from the ancient Greek work anarchos, which means without rulers. Within a democracy decisions are enforced on everyone within a given territory via institutionalised mechanisms of coercion, such as the law, army, police and prisons. Defenders of democracy take this coercive enforcement to be legitimate because the decisions were made democratically, such as every citizen having the right to participate in the decision-making process. Since such coercive enforcement is taken to be incompatible with anarchism’s commitment to free association, it follows that anarchism does not advocate democracy (Gordon 2008, 67–70; Crimethinc 2016).
Anarchists who advocate democracy without the state are themselves in favour of free association. Graeber, for example, advocates a society “where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence”. As a result, he opposed any system of decision-making in which someone has “the ability … to call on armed men to show up and say ‘I don’t care what you have to say about this; shut up and do what you’re told’” (Graeber 2013, 187–8. Also see Milstein 2010, 60–2). Given this, the pro-democracy and anti-democracy anarchists I have examined are advocating the same position in different language. Both advocate collective methods of decision-making in which everyone involved has an equal say. Both argue that this should be achieved via voluntary association and reject the idea that decisions should be imposed on those who reject them via mechanisms of institutionalised coercion, such as the law or police. They just disagree about whether these systems should be called democracy because they use different definitions of that word.
During these debates it is common for anarchists to appeal to the fact that historical anarchists were against what they called democracy. Unfortunately these appeals to anarchist history are often a bit muddled due to people focusing on the words historical anarchists used, rather than their ideas. In this essay I shall explain not only what historical anarchists wrote about democracy but also how they made decisions. I do not think that the history of anarchism can be straight forwardly used to settle the debate on anarchism and democracy. My hope is only that an in-depth knowledge of anarchist history will help modern anarchists think about the topic in more fruitful ways.
*** The Historical Anarchist Critique of Democracy
The majority of historical anarchists only used the term ‘democracy’ to refer to a system of government which was, at least on paper, based on the rule of the people or the majority. Errico Malatesta wrote that, “anarchists do not accept majority government (democracy), any more than they accept government by the few (aristocracy, oligarchy, or dictatorship by one class or party) nor that of one individual (autocracy, monarchy or personal dictatorship)” (Malatesta 2014, 488). Malatesta did not invent these definitions. He is merely repeating the standard definitions of different forms of government in so called ‘western’ political theory. The same distinction between the government of the many, of the few, and of one individual can be found in earlier theorists such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (Hobbes 1998, 123; Locke 2016, 65–6; Rousseau 1999, 99–100). These standard definitions of different forms of government derived from ancient Greek sources, including Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle (Hansen 1991, 65–9).
The most famous example of a democracy in ancient Greece is Athens during the 5<sup>th</sup> century BC. In democratic Athens all major decisions were made by majority vote in an assembly attended by adult male citizens. Key government officials were selected at random by lot. The majority of the population – women, slaves, children and foreigners – were excluded and lacked decision-making power in the assembly (Hansen 1991, 304–20). There is a tendency for modern radicals to argue that the example of 5<sup>th</sup> century Athens demonstrates that from a historical point of view true democracy is direct democracy. Doing so would be a mistake. As Raekstad has argued, in ancient Greece the word ‘democracy’ did not refer to a specific decision-making system. Ancient Greeks did not have our modern distinction between direct democracy and representative democracy. They instead viewed a city as a democracy if and only if it was ruled by its citizens or at least the majority of its citizens. As a result, cities with fundamentally different systems of decision-making could all be regarded as democracies providing that they were cities based on the collective self-rule of the citizenry (Raekstad 2020).
Aristotle, to give one example, does not only refer to cities where citizens debate and directly vote on decisions in an assembly as a ‘democracy’. He also used the term ‘democracy’ to refer to cities where citizens merely elected government officials who wielded decision-making power, and then held these government officials to account (Hansen 1991, 3; Aristotle 1998, 235–6). Aristotle did so even though he regarded selecting officials via lot as a democratic method and selecting officials via voting as an aristocratic or oligarchical method (ibid, 80–1, 153–5). The reason why is that for Aristotle the key question when determining what to label a city’s constitution is which group of people rule. If a city is ruled by the majority of its citizens, and these citizens are poor in the sense that they do not own a lot of property, then for Aristotle, it is a democracy independently of the decision-making mechanisms through which this rule is achieved (ibid, 100–2, 139–41). A modern person could of course disagree with Aristotle about whether or not citizens who elect representatives truly rule their city. Such a disagreement does not change the fact that in ancient Greece the word ‘democracy’ did not just mean what we call direct democracy.
Between the late 18<sup>th</sup> and mid 19<sup>th</sup> centuries the term ‘democracy’ gradually came to refer to governments ruled by parliaments composed of elected representatives who belonged to political parties. These governments claimed to be expressions of the will of the people. It should be kept in mind that these democratic governments were not initially based on universal suffrage. Representatives were at first elected by adult male property owners, who were a minority of the population. Over several decades of struggle from below suffrage was gradually expanded to include most or all adult men and then, largely after WW1, all adult men and women. The gradual expansion of suffrage went alongside various attempts by rulers to prevent genuine universal suffrage, such as wealthy property owners having multiple votes rather than only one, or black people being prevented from registering to vote in the United States (Markoff 2015, 41–76, 83–5, 136–40). This historical context is why when anarchists in the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries wrote critiques of ‘democracy’ they focused on the representative democracy of bourgeois parliaments, rather than the direct democracy of ancient Athens.
The historical anarchist critique of democracy so understood is as follows. Anarchists began by arguing that the government of the people was impossible. What defenders of democracy referred to as ‘the people’ was an abstraction which did not really exist. The actual population of a country is constituted by distinct individuals with different and contradictory ideas, needs and aspirations. If people will never agree on everything, then there will never be a unanimous ‘will of the people’. There will only ever be multiple and incompatible wills of different segments of the people. The decisions of governments are imposed on everyone within a country via the law and the violent enforcers of the law, such as the police or judges. A democracy is therefore at best a system of government in which the will of the majority is violently imposed on the minority in the name of an abstraction called ‘the people’ (Malatesta 1995, 77–8).
Such a system of government was rejected by anarchists on the grounds that it is incompatible with freedom. Anarchists were committed to the view that everyone should be free and that, as a result, no one should be dominated. As Alexander Berkman wrote, in an anarchist society, “[y]ou are to be entirely free, and everybody else is to enjoy equal liberty, which means that no one has a right to compel or force another, for coercion of any kind is interference with your liberty” (Berkman 2003, 156). In advocating this position anarchists were not arguing that violence is always wrong. They viewed violence as legitimate when it was necessary to establish or protect the equal freedom of all, such as in self-defence or to overthrow the ruling classes. (Malatesta 2014, 187–91) The violence of government, however, goes far beyond this since they are institutions which have the power, and claim the exclusive right to, impose their will on everyone within a given territory via force (ibid, 113, 136).
This was a form of domination which anarchists opposed irrespective of whether or not the government was ruled by a minority or a majority. In Luigi Galleani’s words, even if “the rule of the majority over the minority” were “a mitigated form of tyranny, it would still represent a denial of freedom” (Galleani 2012, 42). Anarchists reject “the domination of a majority over the minority, we aspire to realise the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association, the independence of his thought, of his life, of his development, of his destiny, freedom from violence, from caprice and from the domination of the majority, as well as of various minorities” (ibid 61. Also see ibid, 50). This opposition to the domination of the majority went alongside the awareness that majorities are often wrong and can have harmful views (Malatesta 2015, 63–4). In a homophobic and transphobic society, for example, the government of the majority would result in laws oppressing queer people.
Anarchists did not, however, think that modern states have ever been based on majority rule. They consistently described them as institutions based on minority rule by a political ruling class in their interests and the interests of the economic ruling class. This included self-described democratic governments. In 1873 Michael Bakunin wrote that,
<quote>
modern capitalist production and bank speculation … get along very nicely, though, with so-called representative democracy. This latest form of the state, based on the pseudo-sovereignty of a sham popular will, supposedly expressed by pseudo-representatives of the people in sham popular assemblies, combines the two main conditions necessary for their success: state centralization, and the actual subordination of the sovereign people to the intellectual minority that governs them, supposedly representing them but invariably exploiting them (Bakunin 1990, 13).
</quote>
Given this Bakunin thought that,
<quote>
Between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former, the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the people for the greater profit of the privileged and propertied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the latter, it oppresses and robs the people in exactly the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but in the name of the people’s will. In a republic a fictitious people, the ‘legal nation’ supposedly represented by the state, smothers the real, live people. But it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people’s cudgel (Bakunin 1990, 23).
</quote>
The same position was advocated by Malatesta. He wrote in 1924 that, “even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force”. As a result “Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class” (Malatesta 1995, 78, 77. Also see Berkman 2003, 71–3). The anarchist critique of democratic governments should not be interpreted as the claim that all forms of government are equally bad. Both Bakunin and Malatesta also claimed that the worst democracy was preferable to the best monarchy or dictatorship (Bakunin 1980, 144; Malatesta 1995, 77).
Given their analysis of the state as an institution which serves the interests of the capitalist class, anarchists concluded that a truly democratic government, where the majority rule, could only possibly be established in a socialist society based on the common ownership of the means of production (Malatesta 1995, 73). They did not, however, think that this could actually happen. Since the modern state is a centralised and hierarchical institution which rules over an extended area of territory, it follows that state power can only in practice be wielded by a minority of elected representatives. These representatives would not be mere delegates mandated to complete a specific tasks. They would be governors who had the power to issue commands and impose their will on others via force or the threat of it. As a result they would constitute a distinct political ruling class. Over time these representatives would be transformed by the activity of exercising state power and become primarily concerned with reproducing and expanding their power over the working classes (Baker 2019).
In rejecting what they called democracy, historical anarchists were not rejecting the idea that collective decisions should be made in general assemblies. Historical anarchists consistently argued that in an anarchist society collective decisions would be made in workplace and community assemblies. Anarchists referred to these assemblies using various terms, such as labour councils, communes, and associations of production and consumption (Rocker 2004, 47–8; Malatesta 2014, 60; Goldman 1996, 68). The National Confederation of Labour (CNT), which was a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union, proposed in its 1936 Zaragoza congress resolutions that decisions in a libertarian communist society would be made in “general assemblies”, “communal assemblies” and “popular assemblies” (Peirats 2011, 103, 105, 107).
A few historical anarchists did refer to anarchism as democracy without the state but they were in the minority. During the 1930s the Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregori Maximoff rejected both “Bourgeois democracy” and the “democracy” of “the Soviet republic” on the grounds that, contrary to what they claimed, they were not based on the genuine rule of the people. They were instead states in which a minority ruling class exercised power in order to reproduce the domination and exploitation of the working class. Given this, Maximoff advocated the abolition of the state in favour of the self-management of society via federations of workplace and community councils. He regarded such a system of self-management as genuine democracy. He wrote, “true democracy, developed to its logical extreme, can become a reality only under the conditions of a communal confederation. This democracy is Anarchy” (Maximoff 2015, 37–8). On another occasion Maximoff declared that “Anarchism is, in the final analysis, nothing but democracy in its purest and most extreme form” (Maximoff n.d., 19). In arguing that anarchism was “true democracy” Maximoff was not advocating different forms of association or decision-making to other anarchists. He was only using different language to describe the same anarchist ideas.
The majority of anarchists did not refer to an anarchist society as ‘true democracy’ because for them ‘democracy’ necessarily referred to a system of government. A key reason why historical anarchists associated ‘democracy’ with government was that anarchism as a social movement emerged in parallel with, and in opposition to, another social movement called Social Democracy. Although the term ‘social democracy’ has come to mean any advocate of a capitalist welfare state, it originally referred to a kind of revolutionary socialist who aimed at the abolition of all forms of class rule. In order to achieve this goal Social Democrats argued that the working class should organise into trade unions and form socialist political parties which engaged in electoral politics. This was viewed as the means through which the working class would both win immediate improvements, such as the eight hour day or legislation against child labour, and overthrow class society through the conquest of state power and the establishment of a workers’ state. Social Democrats argued that in so doing socialist political parties would overthrow bourgeois democracy and establish social or proletarian democracy (Taber 2021). Anarchists responded by making various arguments against Social Democracy, such as critiques of trying to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power. The consequence of this is that one of the main occasions when historical anarchists used the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democrat’ was when they were referring to Social Democracy (Kropotkin 2014, 371–82; Berkman 2003, 89–102).
One of the great ironies of history is that the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin initially used the language of ‘democracy’. In 1868 he co-founded an organisation called <em><em>T</em></em><em><em>he Alliance of Socialist Democracy</em></em><em><em></em></em> and wrote a programme for it which committed the group to the goal of abolishing capitalism and the state<em><em></em></em> (Eckhart 2016, 3; Bakunin 1973, 173–5). The language of ‘democracy’ was echoed by the anarchist led Spanish section of the 1<sup>st</sup> International even though it was formally opposed to the strategy of electoral politics. The September 1871 resolutions of the Valencia Conference declared that “the real Federal Democratic Republic is common property, anarchy and economic federation, or in other words the free worldwide federation of free agricultural and industrial worker’s associations” (Eckhart 2016, 166. For resolutions against electoral politics see ibid, 160). This language did not catch on among anarchists and by 1872 Bakunin had definitely abandoned it. This can be seen in the fact that when he founded a new organisation, which he viewed as the successor to the original Alliance, he decided to name it the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries (Bakunin 1990, 235–6, note 134; Eckhart 2016, 355).
*** Historical Anarchist Methods of Decision-Making
Having established what historical anarchists thought about democracy, I shall now turn to their views on collective systems of decision-making. Historical anarchists proposed a variety of different mechanisms through which decisions in general assemblies could be made. It can be difficult to establish how exactly historical anarchists made decisions because it is a topic which does not appear frequently in surviving articles, pamphlets or books. Those sources which are available do nonetheless establish a number of clear positions. Some anarchists advocated majority vote, whilst other anarchists advocated unanimous decisions in which everyone involved had to agree on a proposal. Other anarchists advocated both depending upon the context, such as the size of an organisation or the kind of decision being made. It should be kept in mind that what historical anarchists referred to as systems of ‘unanimous agreement’ was not modern consensus decision-making in different language. I have found no evidence of historical anarchists using the key features of consensus as a process, such as the specific steps a facilitator moves the meeting through or the distinction between standing aside and blocking a proposal.
Malatesta advocated a combination of unanimous agreement and majority voting. He wrote that in an anarchist society “everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator” (Malatesta n.d., 30). This position was articulated in response to other anarchists who thought that all decisions should be made exclusively by unanimous agreement and rejected the use of voting. He recalled that,
<quote>
in 1893 … there were many Anarchists, and even at present there are a few, who, mistaking the form for the essence, and laying more stress on words than on things, made for themselves a sort of ritual of ‘true’ anarchism, which held them in bondage, which paralyzed their power of action, and even led them to make absurd and grotesque assertions. Thus going from the principle: The Majority has no right to impose its will on the minority; they came to the conclusion that nothing should ever be done without the unanimous consent of all concerned. But as they had condemned political elections, which serve only to choose a master, they could not use the ballot as a mere expression of opinion, and considered every form of voting as anti-anarchistic (Malatesta 2016, 17. Also see Turcato 2012, 141).
</quote>
This opposition to all forms of voting allegedly led to farcical situations. This included endless meetings where nothing was agreed and groups forming to publish a paper and then dissolving without having published anything due to minor disagreements (Malatesta 2016, 17–8). From these experiences Malatesta concluded that “social life” would be impossible if “united action” was only allowed to occur when there was “unanimous agreement”. In situations where it was not possible to implement multiple solutions simultaneously or effective solidarity required a uniform action, “it is reasonable, fair and necessary for the minority to defer to the majority” (Malatesta 2016, 19). To illustrate this point Malatesta gave the example of constructing a railway. He wrote,
<quote>
If a railroad, for instance, were under consideration, there would be a thousand questions as to the line of the road, the grade, the material, the type of the engines, the location of the stations, etc., etc., and opinions on all these subjects would change from day to day, but if we wish to finish the railroad we certainly cannot go on changing everything from day to day, and if it is impossible to exactly suit everybody, it is certainly better to suit the greatest possible number; always, of course, with the understanding that the minority has all possible opportunity to advocate its ideas, to afford them all possible facilities and materials to experiment, to demonstrate, and to try to become a majority (Malatesta 2016, 18–9).
</quote>
This is not to say that Malatesta viewed an anarchist society as one where people voted on every decision. He thought that farmers, for example, would not need to vote on what season to plant crops since this is something they already know the answer to. Given this, Malatesta predicted that over time people would need to vote on fewer decisions due to them learning the best solution to various problems from experience (Malatesta n.d., 30).
Malatesta was not alone in disagreeing with anarchists who opposed all systems of voting. During the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, the Belgian anarchist Georges Thonar argued that the participants should not engage in voting and declared himself “opposed to any vote”. The minutes of the congress claim that this caused “a minor incident. Some participants applaud noisily, while lively protest is also to be heard” (Antonioli 2009, 90). The French anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte then gave the following speech,
<quote>
I cannot understand how yesterday’s vote can be considered anti-anarchist, in other words authoritarian. It is absolutely impossible to compare the vote with which an assembly decides a procedural question to universal suffrage or to parliamentary polls. We use votes at all times in our trade unions and, I repeat, I do not see anything that goes against our anarchist principles.
There are comrades who feel the need to raise questions of principle on everything, even the smallest things. Unable as they are to understand the spirit of our anti-parliamentarianism, they place importance on the mere act of placing a slip of paper in an urn or raising one’s hand to show one’s opinion (Antonioli 2009, 90–1).
</quote>
Malatesta’s advocacy of majority voting was also shared by other anarchists. The Ukrainian anarchist Peter Arshinov wrote in 1928 that “[a]lways and everywhere, practical problems among us have been resolved by majority vote. Which is perfectly understandable, for there is no other way of resolving these things in an organization that is determined to act” (Arshinov 1928, 241).
The same commitment to majority voting was implemented in the CNT, which had a membership of 850,000 by February 1936. (Ackelsberg 2005, 62) The anarchist José Peirats explained the CNT’s system of decision-making as follows. The CNT was a confederation of trade unions which were “autonomous units” linked together “only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses, whether regular or extraordinary”. As a result of this, individual unions were “free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organisation as a whole”. The “guidelines of the Confederation” were decided and directly regulated by the autonomous trade unions themselves. This was achieved through a system in which “the basis for any local, regional, or national decision” was “the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals”. The “resolutions” of these assemblies were “adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation”. The agenda of regional or national congresses were “devised by the assemblies” themselves. These general assemblies in turn “debated” each topic on the agenda and after reaching an agreement amongst themselves elected mandated delegates to attend the congress as “the executors of their collective will” (Peirats 2011, 5).
Anarchists who advocated majority voting disagreed about whether or not decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on everyone involved in the decision-making process, or only those who had voted in favour of them. Malatesta argued that the congress resolutions of a federation should only be binding on the sections who had voted for them. He wrote in 1900 that since a federation is a free association which does not have the right “to impose upon the individual federated members” it followed that “any group just like any individual must not accept any collective resolution unless it is worthwhile and agreeable to them”. As a result, decisions made at the federation’s congresses, which were attended by mandated delegates representing each group that composed the federation, were “binding only to those who accept them, and only for as long as they accept them” (Malatesta 2019, 210, 206).
Malatesta repeated this view in 1927. He claimed that congresses of specific anarchist organisations, which are organisations composed exclusively of anarchist militants, “do not lay down the law” or “impose their own resolutions on others”. Their resolutions are only “suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved, and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept them, and for as long as they accept them”. (Malatesta 2014, 489–90) The function of congresses was to,
<quote>
maintain and increase personal relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action, to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current among the anarchists and draw up some kind of statistics from them. (ibid, 489. See also ibid, 439–40)
</quote>
Malatesta’s position on congress resolutions should not be interpreted as the claim that a person could do whatever they wanted within an organisation without consideration for the organisation’s common programme or how their actions effected others. In 1929 he clarified that within an organisation each member should “feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members”, “do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause” and “respect the agreements that have been made – except when wishing sincerely to leave the association”. He thought that people “who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association” (Malatesta 1995, 107–8).
A more concrete understanding of what this position on congress resolutions looked like can be established by examining actual anarchist congresses. In 1907 anarchist delegates representing groups in Europe, the United States and Argentina attended the previously mentioned International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. Proposals or resolutions at the congress were adopted by majority vote and each delegate had a single vote. How this was implemented varied depending upon the kind of decision being made. On the first day of the congress there was a disagreement about the agenda. One faction proposed that the topic of anti-militarism should be removed from the agenda and that this topic should instead be discussed at the separate congress of the International Antimilitarist Association. The other faction argued that the anarchists would have to formulate a position on anti-militarism at their anarchist congress before they attended a distinct congress attended by people who were not anarchists. The first proposal won 33 votes and the second 38 votes. Since only one proposal could be implemented the majority position won and the congress included anti-militarism on its agenda (Antonioli 2009, 36–7. For the later discussion on anti-militarism see ibid, 137–8).
Over several days the congress passed a variety of resolutions via majority vote. These resolutions were not binding on the minority. As the Dutch delegate Christiaan Cornelissen explained, “[v]oting is to be condemned only if it binds the minority. This is not the case here, and we are using the vote as an easy means of determining the size of the various opinions that are being confronted” (ibid, 91). The proposed resolution against alcohol consumption was not even put to a formal vote due to almost every delegate being opposed to it (ibid, 150–52). In situations where there was no need to have a single resolution, multiple resolutions were passed providing that each received a majority vote. This occurred when four slightly different resolutions on syndicalism and the general strike were adopted (ibid, 132–5). The congress minutes respond to this situation by claiming,
<quote>
The reader may be rather surprised that these four motions could have all been passed, given the evident contradictions between them. It defies the parliamentary norm, but it is a conscious transgression. In order that the opinion of the majority not suffocate, or seem to suffocate, that of the minority, the majority presented the single motions one by one for vote. All four had a majority of votes for. In consequence, all four were approved (ibid, 135).
</quote>
Other anarchists argued that decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on every member of the organisation. In June 1926 a group of anarchists, who had participated in the Russian revolution and been forced to flee to Paris to escape Bolshevik repression, issued <em><em>the Organisational Platform of the</em></em> <em><em>General Union of Anarchists (Draft).</em></em> The text made a series of proposals about how specific anarchist organisations should be structured. This included the position that the collectively made decisions of congresses should be binding on every section and member of a specific anarchist organisation such that everyone involved is expected to carry out the majority decision. The platform states that,
<quote>
such an agreement and the federal union based on it, will only become reality, rather than fiction or illusion, on the conditions sine qua non that all the participants in the agreement and the Union fulfil most completely the duties undertaken, and conform to communal decisions. In a social project, however vast the federalist basis on which it is built, there can be no decisions without their execution. It is even less admissible in an anarchist organisation, which exclusively takes on obligations with regard to the workers and their social revolution. Consequently, the federalist type of anarchist organisation, while recognising each member’s rights to independence, free opinion, individual liberty and initiative, requires each member to undertake fixed organisation duties, and demands execution of communal decisions (The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad 1926a. Also see Arshinov 1928, 240–1).
</quote>
Within a specific anarchist organisation differences of opinion about its programme, tactics and strategy would of course emerge. In such situations the authors of <em><em>The Platform</em></em> later clarified that there were three main potential outcomes. In the case of “insignificant differences” the minority would defer to the majority position in order to maintain “the unity” of the organisation. If “the minority were to consider sacrificing its view point an impossibility” then further “discussion” would occur. This would either culminate in an agreement being formed such that “two divergent opinions and tactics” co-existed with one another or there would be “a split with the minority breaking away from the majority to found a separate organisation” (Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad 1926b, 218).
The position that decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on every member of the organisation was not a uniquely platformist one. The CNT’s constitution, which was printed on each membership card, declared that “Anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism recognise the validity of majority decisions”. Although the CNT recognised “the sovereignty of the individual” and a militant’s right to have their own point of view and defend it, members of the CNT were “obliged to comply with majority decisions” and “accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision” even when they are against a militant’s “own feelings”. This position was justified on the grounds that, “[w]ithout this there is no organisation” (Quoted in Peirats 1974, 19–20).
Members of the CNT did nonetheless disagree about whether or not this system of majority voting, in which decisions were binding on all members, should be applied to much smaller specific anarchist organisations. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was a specific anarchist organisation composed of affinity groups. These affinity groups had between 4 and 20 members. The FAI initially made most of their decisions via unanimous agreement and rarely used voting. In 1934 the Z and Nervio affinity groups pushed for the FAI to adopt binding agreements established through majority vote. The Afinidad affinity group agreed with the necessity of such a system within the CNT but opposed it being implemented within small specific anarchist organisations or affinity groups. After a confrontational FAI meeting Afinidad left the organisation in protest (Ealham 2015, 77; Guillamón 2014,<em><em></em></em> 28–9).
*** Conclusion
Having systematically gone through the evidence, it is clear that modern and historical anarchists advocate the same core positions. What many modern anarchists label as democracy without the state, historical anarchists just called free association or anarchy. At least one historical anarchist, Maximoff, referred to anarchism as democracy without the state several decades before it became a popular expression. Historical anarchists made decisions via majority vote, unanimous agreement or a combination of the two. Modern anarchists use the same basic systems of decision-making. The main difference is that modern anarchists often use consensus decision-making processes, which historical anarchists did not use.
This, in turn, raises the question of whether or not anarchists should use the language of democracy. In a society where people have been socialised to view democracy as a good thing, it can be beneficial to describe anarchism as a kind of direct democracy. Yet doing so also comes with potential downsides, such as people confusing anarchism for the idea that society should be run by an extremely democratic state that makes decisions within general assemblies and then imposes these decisions on everyone via the institutionalised violence of the law, police and prisons. Independently of what language modern anarchists choose to use, our task remains the same as historical anarchists: during the course of the class struggle we must develop, through a process of experimentation in the present, the forms of association, deliberation and decision-making which simultaneously enable effective action and prefigure a society with neither master nor subject.
*** Bibliography
<biblio>
Ackelsberg, Martha. 2005. *Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women*. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Antonioli, Maurizio, ed. <em><em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em></em>. Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2009.
Aristotle. 1998. <em><em>Politics</em></em>. Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Arshinov, Peter. 1928. “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928).” In <em><em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation from Proudhon to May 1968</em></em>, edited by Alexandre Skirda, 237–42. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002.
Baker, Zoe. 2019. <em><em>Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power.</em></em>
Bakunin, Michael. 1973. *Selected Writings*. Edited by Arthur Lehning. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bakunin, Michael. 1980. *Bakunin on Anarchism*. Edited by Sam Dolgoff. Montréal: Black Rose Books.
Bakunin, Michael. 1990. <em><em>Statism and Anarchy</em></em>. Edited by Marshall Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berkman, Alexander. 2003. <em><em>What is Anarchism?</em></em> Oakland, CA: AK Press
Crimethinc. 2016. <em><em>From Democracy to Freedom</em></em>.
Ealham, Chris. 2015. <em><em>Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Eckhart, Wolfgang. 2016. <em><em>The Fist Socialist Schism: Bakunin VS. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em></em>. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Ervin. Lorenzo Kom’boa. 1993. <em><em>Anarchism and the Black Revolution</em></em>.
Galleani, Luigi. 2012. <em><em>The End of Anarchism?.</em></em> London: Elephant Editions.
Goldman, Emma. 1996. <em><em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em></em>. Edited by Alix Kates Shulman. 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
Gordon, Uri. 2008. <em><em>Anarchy Alive:</em></em><em><em>Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory.</em></em> London: Pluto Press.
Graeber, David. 2013. <em><em>The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement</em></em>. London: Allen Lane.
Guillamón, Agustín. 2014. <em><em>Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defence Committees in Barcelona 1933–1938</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Hansen, Mogens Herman. 1991. <em><em>The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology</em></em>. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1998. <em><em>Leviathan.</em></em> Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kropotkin, Peter. 2014. *Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology*. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Locke, John. 2016. <em><em>Second Treatise of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration.</em></em> Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maximoff, Gregori. 2015. <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em><em>.</em> Guillotine Press
Maximoff, Gregori. n.d. <em><em>Constructive Anarchism</em></em>.
Malatesta, Errico. n.d. <em><em>Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy</em></em>. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books.
Malatesta, Errico. 1995. <em><em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924–1931</em></em>. Edited by Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2014. <em><em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em></em>. Edited by Davide Turcato. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2015. <em><em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em></em>. Edited by Vernon Richards. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2016. <em><em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione 1897–1898</em></em>. Edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2019. *Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America 1899-1900*. Edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Markoff, John. 2015. <em><em>Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change</em></em>. Paradigm Publishers.
Milstein, Cindy. 2010. <em><em>Anarchy and Its Aspirations.</em></em> Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Peirats, José. 1974. <em><em>What is the C.N.T?</em></em><em><em>.</em></em> London: Simian.
Peirats, José. 2011. <em><em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution Volume 1</em></em>. Edited by Chris Ealham. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Taber, Mike, ed. 2021. <em><em>Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889–1912</em></em>. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. 1926a. <em><em>The Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists</em></em>.
The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. 1926b. “Supplement to the Organisational Platform”. In <em><em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation from Proudhon to May 1968</em></em>, edited by Alexandre Skirda, 214–23. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002.
Turcato, Davide. 2012. <em><em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments With Revolution, 1889–1900</em></em>. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Raekstad, Paul. 2020. “Democracy Against Representation: A Radical Realist View”. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics.
Rocker, Rudolf. 2004. <em><em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1999. <em><em>Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract</em></em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
</biblio>
|
#title Anarchism as a Way of Life
#subtitle
#author Zoe Baker
#SORTauthors Zoe Baker
#SORTtopics anarchy, prefigurative politics, class struggle, Errico Malatesta, Bread Tube, anthropology
#date September 25, 2021
#source https://anarchozoe.com/2021/09/25/anarchism-as-a-way-of-life/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-09-29T02:10:57
#notoc 1
In 1925 the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote that,
Anarchy is a form of living together in society; a society in which people live as brothers and sisters without being able to oppress or exploit others and in which everyone has at their disposal whatever means the civilisation of the time can supply in order for them to attain the greatest possible moral and material development. And Anarchism is the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government – that is, without those authoritarian institutions that impose their will on others by force ... (Malatesta 1995, 52).
In this passage Malatesta distinguishes between anarchy as a goal and anarchism as a method of achieving this goal. One of the interesting features of Malatesta’s theory is that he views anarchy itself as both a goal and an on-going process. He refers to anarchy as a “form of living together in society” which has to be continuously produced and reproduced over time, rather than a static unchanging utopia. This idea can be clearly seen in Malatesta’s earlier writings. In 1891 he wrote that,
By the free association of all, a social organisation would arise through the spontaneous grouping of men according to their needs and sympathies, from the low to the high, from the simple to the complex, starting from the more immediate to arrive at the more distant and general interests. This organisation would have for its aim the greatest good and fullest liberty to all; it would embrace all humanity in one common brotherhood, and would be modified and improved as circumstances were modified and changed, according to the teachings of experience. This society of free men, this society of friends would be Anarchy (Malatesta 2014, 128).
Since anarchy is a society which will be continuously modified and improved over time it follows that “Anarchy” is “above all, a method”. This method is, according to Malatesta, “the free initiative of all”, “free agreement” and “free association” (Malatesta 2014, 141–42). These two claims come together in the view that,
Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method. It is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and improvements for the benefit of everybody (Quoted in Turcato 2012, 56. For a different translation see Malatesta 2014, 143).
What Malatesta means by this is as follows. Anarchy’s point of departure is a stateless classless society in which the means of production are owned in common and no person has the institutionalised power to impose their will on others via force. This not only creates a situation in which people are no longer subject to domination and exploitation by the ruling classes. It, in addition to this, establishes the real possibility for all people to do and be a wide variety of different things since their ability to act is no longer limited by poverty, borders, government bureaucracy, having to work for a capitalist to survive etc. This equality of conditions is the social basis from which people can engage in an open-ended process of striving towards the goal of universal human co-operation at a societal level and the formation of bonds of mutual support and love at the level of our day to day lives with friends, family, partners and so on.
People living under anarchy will move towards the goal of solidarity through the method of forming voluntary horizontal associations. These voluntary horizontal associations will then enter into free agreements with one another and establish a decentralised network capable of co-ordinating action over a large scale. Although violence may sometimes be necessary to defend spaces of co-operation from external attack or to overthrow the ruling classes, force cannot be used to establish co-operation among equals. If one tries to impose decisions on others through force then the result will not be solidarity but conflict, strife and relations of command and obedience. The achievement of genuine solidarity requires that people come to agreements which best suit everyone involved and must therefore be established voluntarily.
This process of striving for solidarity through the method of freedom will result in a wide variety of experiments in different forms of life. Through a process of trial-and-error people will over time establish new social structures and relations which do a superior job of maximising the equality, solidarity and freedom of humanity. These new social structures and relations will, in turn, lay the foundations from which future improvements can occur and so on and on. As Malatesta wrote in 1899, “Anarchist ideals are ... the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realisation” (Malatesta 2014, 302).
Malatesta does not think that the establishment of anarchy will occur automatically or that humans naturally create anarchy. Anarchy only exists if it is consciously produced and reproduced by human action. As he wrote in 1897,
<quote>
The belief in some natural law, whereby harmony is automatically established between men without any need for them to take conscious, deliberate action, is hollow and utterly refuted by the facts.
Even if the State and private property were to be done away with, harmony does not come to pass automatically, as if Nature busies herself with men’s blessings and misfortunes, but rather requires that men themselves create it (Malatesta 2016, 81).
</quote>
This exact point was repeated by Malatesta in 1925. He wrote, “Anarchy ... is a human aspiration which is not founded on any true or supposed natural law, and which may or may not come about depending on human will” (Malatesta 1995, 46). If anarchy is a product of human will, then it follows that anarchy could be ended if humans choose to oppress others and establish relations of domination and subordination. This is a danger that Malatesta was aware of. He wrote in 1899 that, “if anyone in some future society sought to oppress someone else, the latter would have the right to resist them and to fight force with force”. Anarchy was therefore a society based on “freedom for all and in everything, with no limit other than the equal freedom of others: which does not mean ... that we embrace and wish to respect the ‘freedom’ to exploit, oppress, command, which is oppression and not freedom” (Malatesta 2019, 148, 149).
A crucial aspect of reproducing anarchy as a social system is therefore ensuring that relations of domination and exploitation do not arise in the first place and that, if they do somehow arise, they are quickly defeated. Malatesta does not provide many details on how to do this because he thought this was a question which would be settled through large groups of people engaging in a process of experimentation with different forms of association. Modern anarchists can, however, look at anthropological evidence on how really existing stateless societies reproduce themselves. They do not provide exact blueprints which we can follow like an instruction manual for creating a free society, but they can be useful sources of inspiration. It should, in addition to this, be kept in mind that some stateless societies are hierarchical in other ways, such as men oppressing women or adults oppressing children.
There is a tendency for people raised in societies with states to assume that the true or correct end point of human cultural evolution is the creation of a society with a state. Those who live in stateless societies are therefore viewed as inferior people who have failed to realise the best way of organising society. In response to this way of thinking, the anthropologist Pierre Clastres has suggested that stateless societies should not be viewed as societies without a state, but instead as societies against the state. That is to say, people do not live in stateless societies by chance. They have instead developed political philosophies about the kind of society they want to live in and consciously created social structures to ensure that a society without rulers is reproduced. Members of stateless societies have not failed to realise the possibility of a society in which a ruling minority imposes their will on everyone else through violence. They have instead deliberately chosen to create a different kind of society (Clastres 1989, 189–218). Clastres writes, in what I consider to be outdated and problematic language, that,
primitive societies do not have a State because they refuse it, because they refuse the division of the social body into the dominating and the dominated. The politics of the Savages is, in fact, to constantly hinder the appearance of a separate organ of power, to prevent the fatal meeting between the institution of chieftainship and the exercise of power. In primitive society, there is no separate organ of power, because power is not separated from society: society, as a single totality, holds power in order to maintain its undivided being, to ward off the appearance in its breast of the inequality between masters and subjects, between chief and tribe... The refusal of inequality and the refusal of separate power are the same, constant concern of primitive societies (Clastres 1994, 91).
This point has recently been made in much greater depth by the anthropologist Christopher Boehm. He argues that egalitarian stateless societies are “the product of human intentionality” and that “the immediate cause of egalitarianism is conscious, and that deliberate social control is directed at preventing the expression of hierarchical tendencies” (Boehm 2001, 12, 60). One of the main ways egalitarian stateless societies achieve this is through the use of horizontal decision-making processes in which the group make collective decisions through consensus between all involved (Boehm 2001, 31, 113). Any leaders which do exist lack the power to impose decisions on others through coercion and must instead persuade others to act in a certain way through oratory skill alone. This usually goes alongside a variety of behavioural expectations which the leader has to conform to in order to remain in their position, such as the leader being modest, in control of their emotions, good at resolving disputes and generous. The emphasis on generosity can be so strong that leaders are expected to share large amounts of their possessions with others, especially those in need. This often results in leaders possessing the smallest number of things in the entire group due to them having to give so many items away (Boehm 2001, 69–72).
Egalitarian stateless societies have, in addition to this, developed various mechanisms to respond to what Boehm labels ‘upstartism’. Upstartism includes any behaviour which threatens the autonomy and equality of the group, such as bullying, being selfishly greedy, issuing orders, taking on airs of superiority, engaging in acts of physical violence and so on. In order to implement the ethical values of the community, members of egalitarian stateless societies will respond to upstartism with a wide range of different social sanctions. This includes, but is not limited to, criticism, gossiping, public ridicule, ignoring what they say, ostracism, expulsion from the group and even, in some extreme cases, execution. Social sanctions are applied to all members of the group but leaders in particular. This is due to the fact that leaders are subject to a greater deal of public scrutiny and viewed as one of the main places where relations of domination and subordination could emerge. This, in turn, creates a situation where leaders will, in order to maintain their position and avoid being subject to sanctions, engage in the socially prescribed behaviour that is expected from them, such as sharing huge amounts of their belongings even if they would rather not do so. The system of sanctions therefore not only effectively counters acts of domination but also reproduces the horizontal structure of the group itself (Boehm 2001, 3, 9–12, 43, 72–84).
The manner in which members of egalitarian stateless societies respond to upstartism can be subtle. Boehm gives the example of the !Kung, who have developed various ways of dealing with the problem of successful male hunters coming to think of themselves as superior to everyone else and, as a result, becoming more likely to engage in domination, especially murder. Firstly, large-game meat is shared equally among the group by the person who is credited with killing the animal. The credit for the kill does not go to the person who loosed the actual killing arrow, but instead to the owner of the first arrow to hit the animal. This will often not even be someone who went on the hunt due to the male hunters regularly trading arrows with one another. This social system ensures that credit for the hunt is randomized, unskilled or unlucky hunters are less likely to be envious of other hunters, every member of the group has access to protein, and the most skilled or lucky hunters are not able to easily use this fact to develop power and influence over others (Boehm 2001, 46).
Secondly, the !Kung actively use humour and social etiquette to ensure that successful hunters do not put themselves on a pedestal. An unnamed member of the !Kung explains this as follows,
<quote>
Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all ... maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.
Even after the hunter has deliberately acted as if they haven’t been very successful, other members of the group will make jokes about them and express their disappointment. The unnamed member of the !Kung claims that when people go to collect the dead animal they will say things like,
You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come. People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry but at least we have nice cool water to drink.
</quote>
The conscious motivation behind this behaviour is explained by a healer as follows,
When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle (Quoted in Boehm 2001, 45).
The !Kung have, in other words, intentionally developed a complex social system based on their political philosophy which ensures the reproduction of an egalitarian stateless society and actively prevents the rise of domination within their midst.[1]
Although people living in industrial societies do not have to develop social norms around successful hunters, we do have our equivalents. For example, successful influencers sometimes let the fame get to their head, come to think of themselves as superior to other people, and then treat others as inferior to them and engage in acts of domination. Think Jake Paul. It is of course the case that those of us currently living under the domination of capitalism, the state, patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, ableism etc are most likely a long way away from achieving anarchy at a societal level. We are not confronted with the problem of reproducing anarchy as a stateless classless society. We instead face the challenge of living under oppressive systems, whilst attempting to implement the methods of anarchism within both our intimate relationships with friends, family, partners etc and social movements aimed at the abolition of all systems of domination and exploitation.
In order to do so we must establish horizontal social relations which are, as far as is possible, the same as those that would constitute anarchy. In so doing we can simultaneously (a) construct the world as we wish it was during our struggle against the world as it is and (b) develop through a process of experimentation in the present the real methods of organisation, decision-making and association that people in the future could use to achieve the states of affairs that characterise anarchy. If, as Malatesta argued, “tomorrow can only grow out of today” (Malatesta 2014, 163) then we must build organisations based “upon the will and in the interest of all their members” not only “tomorrow in order to meet all of the needs of social life” but also “today for the purposes of propaganda and struggle” (Malatesta 2019, 63). We must, in other words, engage in prefigurative politics or, to use historical anarchist language, build “the embryo of the human society of the future” (Graham 2005, 98. For more on prefigurative politics see Raekstad and Gradin 2020).
The pockets of freedom we manage to create within class society are of course not anarchy. Anarchy is a social system in which all forms of class rule have been abolished and socialism has been achieved. Anarchy cannot therefore be said to exist just because a horizontal association has been built within the cage of capitalism and the state (Malatesta 2016, 358–60). Although horizontal associations within class society are not anarchy, they are the means through which anarchy can be achieved. That is to say, horizontal associations should be organs of class struggle which unite workers together in order to both win immediate improvements, such as higher wages or stopping the fossil fuel industry, and ultimately overthrow the ruling classes. Horizontal associations should, at the same time, be social structures which are constituted by forms of activity that develop their participants into the kinds of people who are both capable of, and driven to, establish and reproduce anarchy. For example, a group of workers form a tenant union, use direct action to prevent their landlord from evicting them, and at the same time learn how to make decisions within a general assembly. In changing the world, workers at the same time change themselves.
Given the insights of both historical anarchist theory and modern anthropology, a crucial aspect of laying the foundations from which anarchy could emerge in the future is establishing effective methods for maintaining the horizontality of a group. This includes at least,
a. Deliberately structuring organisations so as to ensure that they are self-managed by their membership, such as making decisions through general assemblies in which everyone has a vote, co-ordinating action over a large scale via informal networks or formal federations, electing instantly recallable mandated delegates to perform specific tasks etc.
a. Consciously developing a system of social sanctions which effectively and proportionally respond to situations where a member engages in what Boehm terms upstartism. This is especially necessary for when people attempt to establish themselves in positions of power at the top of an informal hierarchy or engage in an act of domination. One of the most important situations which a group must effectively respond to is when a member emotionally, physically or sexually abuses another person. It is, in addition to this, very important than any sanction system which is implemented is not itself a new form of domination disguised as mere opposition to the domination of others.
In summary, anarchy is a form of living together in society which must be consciously and intentionally produced and reproduced by human action. A crucial part of doing so is developing social structures and relations which maintain the horizontality of groups and prevent new forms of domination and exploitation from arising. Given modern anthropological evidence on how really existing stateless societies reproduce themselves, this will include developing social sanctions to respond to what Boehm terms upstartism. Although we do not currently live under anarchy, we must establish horizontal associations which engage in class struggle against the ruling classes and prefigure the methods of organisation, decision-making and association which would exist in a free society. This includes developing effective sanction systems which proportionally respond to behaviour that threatens the horizontality of the group. Doing so will, just like under anarchy, require a process of experimentation with different forms of life in order to figure out which solutions actually work and are compatible with anarchist goals and values.
In 1899 Malatesta wrote that “Anarchy cannot come but little by little – slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always” (Malatesta 2014, 300). Through the process of walking towards anarchy we must learn how to live as equals within a free horizontal association and in so doing become fit to establish a society with neither masters nor subjects. I am sure that we will make mistakes along the way, but these mistakes must be treated as opportunities to learn and develop, rather than reasons to abandon the march towards anarchy. In the words of the Spanish anarchist Isaac Puente,
<quote>
Living in libertarian communism will be like learning to live. Its weak points and its failings will be shown up when it is introduced. If we were politicians we would paint a paradise brimful of perfections. Being human and being aware what human nature can be like, we trust that people will learn to walk the only way it is possible for them to learn: by walking (Puente 1932).
</quote>
*** Bibliography
<biblio>
Boehm, Christopher. 2001. <em>Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour</em>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clastres, Pierre. 1989. <em>Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology</em>. New York: Zone Books.
Clastres, Pierre. 1994. <em>Archeology of Violence</em>. Semiotext(e).
Draper, Patricia. 1975. “!Kung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalitarianism in Foraging and Sedentary Contexts” in <em>Toward an Anthropology of Women</em>, ed. R. R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Graham, Robert. 2005. <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939.</em> Montréal: Black Rose Books.
Malatesta, Errico. 1995. <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924–1931</em>. Edited by Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2014. <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>. Edited by Davide Turcato. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2016. <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione 1897–1898</em>. Edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Malatesta, Errico. 2019. <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America 1899–1900</em>. Edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Puente, Isaac. 1932. <em>Libertarian Communism.</em>
Turcato, Davide. 2012. <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments With Revolution, 1889–1900</em>. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Raekstad, Paul, and Gradin, Sofa Saio. 2020. <em>Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today</em>. Cambridge: Polity Press.
</biblio>
[1] It is important to note that Boehm’s account of the !Kung draws upon research conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their society has significantly changed since then. In 1975 the anthropologist Patricia Draper claimed that, "the great majority of !Kung-speaking people have abandoned their traditional hunting and gathering way of life and are now living in sedentary and semi-squatter status in or near the villages of Bantu pastoralists and European ranchers. A minority of !Kung, amounting to a few thousand, are still living by traditional hunting and gathering technique" (Draper 1975, 79).
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#title Anarchist Counter Culture in Spain
#author Zoe Baker
#date 2022/12/01
#source [[https://anarchozoe.com/2022/12/01/anarchist-counter-culture-in-spain/][anarchozoe.com]]
#lang en
#topics counterculture, Spain
#notoc 1
People are often drawn to the study of labour history because they want to understand how to change the world. It is thought that the history of class struggle contains within itself not only a series of events and dates laid out in chronological order but also lessons. Through studying the history of class struggle we can establish with evidence what strategies and tactics work or do not work, why movements grow and why they collapse, what challenges social movements will have to overcome and so on. The necessity of studying history emerges from the fact that socialists cannot run scientific experiments in a laboratory and thereby establish the definitive formula for revolution. We can instead only look at contemporary and previous attempts to achieve socialism in order to try and learn from a vast assortment of victories and defeats. The study of history cannot create a recipe for revolution since no such recipe exists. It can at best establish generalisations which inform our action in the present.
When learning about the past it is easy to focus on major exciting events in which large groups of workers took direct action and in so doing simultaneously transformed the world and themselves. During my research I find myself drawn to narratives about strikes, riots, insurrections, massive civil disobedience campaigns, armed uprisings, and revolutions. Learning about these events is an important part of labour history but to focus exclusively on them leads to a distorted view of the past and how social change happens. Members of historical socialist movements did not spend the majority of their time participating in huge actions which rapidly transformed society and the future course of history. The bulk of their lives as revolutionaries were spent doing much more mundane activities. They produced, distributed and read radical literature, organised and attended picnics, performed in a theatre club, watched a public debate, discussed politics with friends, family and colleagues, attended an endless series of meetings for their affinity group or trade union, wrote and received a vast amount of letters and so on. These small mundane activities can appear to be of little importance when viewed in isolation. Yet when these small activities were repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year by groups of people they took on greater significance.
These small activities produced and reproduced the social relations, capacities, psychological drives and consciousness which were the foundation of social movements. Without these seemingly insignificant acts repeated over and over again, the large exciting moments of rebellion and revolution never would have occurred in most instances or would have occurred on a much smaller scale. Even events which can appear to have come out of nowhere were significantly shaped by the struggles which preceded them. For example, the Paris Commune of 1871 arose unexpectedly in response to a chance event: army soldiers were sent to seize cannons from the national guard in the district of Montmartre and a crowd of protesters went to stop them. Although the founding of the Commune took only a few days, it was the culmination of years, and arguably decades, of class struggle from below. Within Paris this class struggle took various forms, such as massive public meetings, talks and debates attended by thousands of workers, the production and distribution of books, pamphlets and papers, the founding of co-operatives, the organisation of sections of the International Workingmen’s Association, and a wave of strikes, demonstrations and riots (Merriman 2014, 39-45. For a brief summary of preceding struggles see ibid 11-2, 16-7, 25-36).
Anarchists in the 19th and early 20th century understood the significance of small acts being repeated over and over again. They viewed social change as a single process which could be divided into periods of evolution and periods of revolution. During periods of evolution change is slow, gradual and partial. Over time this evolutionary change builds up and culminates in a revolutionary period during which change is rapid, large scale, and fundamentally alters society. Evolutionary change and revolutionary change were not viewed as separate distinct entities. They were instead seen as two aspects of a single process which fed off and flowed into one another (Reclus 2013, 138-40). This idea was usually expressed through water-based metaphors. To give one example, in 1875 Michael Bakunin wrote in a letter to Élisée Reclus that, “[w]e are falling back into a time of evolution – that is to say revolutions that are invisible, subterranean and often imperceptible . . . drops of water, though they may be invisible may go on to form an ocean” (Bakunin 2016, 251-2). Anarchists thought that evolutionary change included a wide spectrum of behaviour. It referred not only to direct action which modifies the dominant structures of class society, such as a strike which wins higher wages in a workplace. It also included transformations driven forward by culture, such as a worker’s understanding of the world being altered through their exposure to a book, poem or song.
The latest research on the history of anarchism has drawn attention to the construction of counter-culture by anarchist movements around the world. This includes, but is not limited to, anarchist movements in Cuba (Shaffer 2019), Argentina (Suriano 2010), Japan (Konishi 2013), England (Di Paola 2017) and the United States (Goyens 2007; Zimmer 2015). For the purposes of this essay I shall focus on the manner in which anarchists in Spain engaged in evolutionary change through the formation of a radical working class counter-culture. It should be kept in mind that identical or similar practices were implemented by anarchists in other countries. Discussions of anarchism in Spain often focus on the National Confederation of Labour (CNT). The CNT is a trade union that was founded in 1910 and adopted an anarcho-syndicalist programme in 1919 at the La Comedia national congress in Madrid, which was attended by 450 delegates representing over 700,000 workers. Despite suffering multiple waves of state repression and being illegal for several years of its existence, the CNT was able to survive and maintain itself over time. By May 1936 the CNT was composed of 982 union sections with a total membership of 550,595 workers. The CNT proceeded to play a key role in the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936-1939, during which workers created numerous experiments in economic self-management that demonstrated the feasibility of anarchist socialism working at scale (Peirats 2011, 7-10, 93. For details on self-management during the revolution see Leval 2012). The CNT is the largest anarcho-syndicalist trade union in history. To understand how anarchists in Spain were able to construct a mass movement it is necessary to go beyond the examination of strike waves, armed uprisings, the highs and lows of formal organisations, important national congresses, the various debates about strategy and tactics within the movement as a whole and so on. These factors were of course extremely important but they are not the full picture. Another key factor is the manner in which the creation and transmission of culture sustained, reproduced and expanded the anarchist movement in Spain.
The central importance of culture for the development of anarchism in Spain is especially apparent when examining print media. Between 1890 and 1915, 298 periodicals and journals were launched in Spain. Of these 107 were based in Catalonia and 191 were in other regions of Spain, such as Andalusia and Valencia. These papers collectively released 7328 issues, of which 4930 have survived. These papers largely appeared on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. Most periodicals were one sheet of paper which was folded to create four pages. These papers typically featured articles on anarchist theory, commentaries on current events, critiques of the bourgeois and state socialist press, letters and correspondence from members of the movement, and news of the class struggle both within Spain and the wider world. These short periodicals co-existed with a smaller number of journals, which were eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages long. During this period over 700 anarchist books and pamphlets were also published. These covered topics as diverse as geography, history, biology, sociology, political theory, birth control, law, art and literature. Peter Kropotkin’s <em><em>Mutual Aid</em></em> sold 20,000 copies in three years and <em><em>The Conquest of Bread</em></em> went through eleven editions and had sold 28,000 copies by 1909. Most groups could not afford to publish books due to the printing costs involved and instead focused on the publication of periodicals and pamphlets. Errico Malatesta’s pamphlet <em><em>Between Peasants</em></em> was particularly popular and was published in fifteen different editions between 1889 and 1915. The distribution of pamphlets was itself assisted by periodicals. Extracts of a pamphlet would be printed on the third and fourth page of a paper. Over several weeks or months a reader would accumulate the entire pamphlet and then tear out each page, assemble them together, and bind them with string. Anarchists did not limit themselves to non-fiction and also published poems, plays, songs and short stories as sections of periodicals or self-contained pamphlets (Yeoman 2020, 9-11, 41-3).
The majority of anarchist print media was written and edited by workers for free in their spare time after a full day of work. There were a few papers which were run by full time paid staff, such as <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> from 1916 onwards, but these were in the minority. The manner in which anarchist periodicals were typically produced after work can be seen in the fact that the masthead of <em><em>El Corsario</em></em> declared that its office hours were from 7pm to 9pm in the evening. Most famous theorists, such as Anselmo Lorenzo and Ricardo Mella, were not professional writers and worked full time at other occupations. During the early 1930s the anarchist militant José Peirats split his time between working as a manual labourer during the day and writing articles for several important anarchist periodicals in the evening. Peirats was not unique in this respect. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century one of the main sources of content for anarchist papers was the vast number of letters which workers sent to editors and publishing groups. These letters usually contained anarchist theory, stories, poetry, calls for solidarity, news of organising and meetings, and reports of oppressive or scandalous behaviour by capitalists and the police (Yeoman 2020, 43-4, 56, note 33, 248; Esenwein 1989, 127; Ealham 2015, 72-4).
The workers who sent in letters were known as correspondents and played a key role in the day-to-day functioning of anarchist print media. Through writing letters they transmitted information and reflections about a local area to the editors of the paper. The editors of the paper would, if they deemed it worthy, print the letter in the paper and then send copies of the paper to every correspondent they had across the country. These correspondents would then distribute the paper to local workers and collect money for both the publishing costs of the paper and solidarity funds that the paper had set up. These solidarity funds, which were collected at workplaces, meetings, plays, marriages and funerals, provided financial assistance to striking workers, anarchist prisoners, and widows of dead comrades. The anarchist press was therefore constituted by a social network in which, to quote the historian James Yeoman, local correspondents were “the ‘nodes’ through which the anarchist press was channelled into localities, and the thoughts, experiences and money from localities were channelled out to publishers” (Yeoman 2020, 47). The various publishing groups were, in turn, interconnected with one another and would support each other in various ways, such as larger and well established papers announcing the appearance of a new anarchist periodical. These kinds of positive relationships did not of course always occur and on other occasions anarchist periodicals engaged in polemical arguments with one another. During periods when there were no genuinely national formal anarchist organisations, the informal social networks that connected readers, correspondents, editors and publishers functioned as the national organisational structure of the anarchist movement. These social networks also operated at an international level. Larger anarchist papers in Spain would receive correspondence and articles from anarchists around the world and would, in turn, send out copies of their paper to workers in other countries. This was especially the case with countries that had a significant Spanish immigrant population, such as Argentina and Cuba (Yeoman 2020, 43-50, 17-8).
The health of anarchist print culture was a proxy for the health of the movement. During periods of organisational growth the number of periodicals generally expanded, whilst during periods of state repression in which anarchist formal organisations and affinity groups were forced underground the number of periodicals dramatically shrunk. This is not to say that the highs of anarchist print culture always coincided with the expansion of anarchist formal organisations. Between 1898-1906 the number of anarchist periodicals significantly increased but during this same period the anarchist led trade union, the Federation of Resistance Societies of the Spanish Region (FSORE), was seriously weakened by an unsuccessful general strike in 1902. The FSORE continued to decline over the following years until it was dissolved in 1907 (Yeoman 2020, 9-15, 162-3). Nor is the number of periodicals in circulation always an indicator of the health of anarchist print culture. In 1916 the official organ of the CNT, <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em>, became the anarchist movements first successful daily paper. In response to this other anarchist papers decided to close down and encouraged their readers to support <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> instead. Despite the number of periodicals in circulation decreasing, anarchist print culture was the strongest it had ever been. <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> published as much content in a month as most anarchist periodicals published in a year. Between 1916 and 1919 <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> issued around 800 daily editions. A typical anarchist paper between 1890-1915 had, in comparison, a print run of only 20 to 30 issues before it ceased publication due to financial difficulties and/or state repression. The strength of <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> coincided with the strength of the CNT, which funded the publication of the paper and had almost 800,000 members in 1919. That year the CNT organised a massive general strike in Barcelona which successfully forced the Spanish ruling class to pass legislation granting the eight hour day. The direct action of workers at the point of production was assisted by the pens of <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera’s</em></em> writers,<em><em></em></em> who published articles throughout the strike informing readers of the latest news. In response to this strike wave the Spanish state repressed the CNT and banned <em><em>Solidaridad Obrera</em></em> (Yeoman 2020, 15, 51, 53, 248-9. For information on the strike see Smith 2007, 292-9).
The amount of time and energy anarchists in Spain devoted to the creation and distribution of print media is understandable given the importance that anarchist theory placed on education. The black American anarchist Lucy Parsons claimed that “Anarchists know that a long period of education” which develops “self-thinking individuals” is a necessary condition for “any great fundamental change in society” (Parsons 2003, 31). Similar remarks can be found in the Spanish anarchist press. In 1902 Mella wrote in <em><em>La Protesta</em></em> that “[w]e the anarchists” should “work for the coming revolution with words, with writings and with deeds . . . the press, the book, the private and public meeting are today, as ever, abundant terrain for all initiatives” (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 40). Anarchist attempts to educate workers through print media faced a significant barrier: during this time period the majority of adults, especially poor people, could not read or write. In 1877 72 percent of the population in Spain were illiterate. This gradually decreased to between 63 and 67 percent in 1900 and 59 percent in 1910 (Bray and Haworth 2019, 7). Anarchists overcame this obstacle through the spoken word. Anarchist periodicals, journals, pamphlets and books were read aloud to groups of workers by the few people who were literate. This would usually be followed by a group discussion about the contents of the paper, pamphlet or book. This practice of collective education occurred at public meetings, smaller private gatherings and even at work. The development of revolutionary consciousness on company time was achieved by groups of workers dividing up tasks such that one worker would recite anarchist literature whilst the others laboured and listened (Esenwein 1989, 129, 132; Yeoman 2020, 46).
This feature of the anarchist movement was commented on by people at the time. The reformist Ramiro de Maeztu claimed in 1901 that,
<quote>
These books, pamphlets and periodicals are not read in the manner of others . . . the reader of anarchist works—generally a worker—does not have a library, nor buys books for himself. [I have] witnessed the reading of [Kropotkin’s] The Conquest of Bread in a workers’ centre. In a room dimly lit by a candle, up to fourteen workers met every night of the winter. One of them reads laboriously, the others listen . . . (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 46)
</quote>
Juan Díaz del Moral made a similar observation during the period of excitement which followed the 1917 Russian revolution. He wrote,
<quote>
In their work breaks during the day (los cigarros) and at night after the evening meal, the most educated would read aloud pamphlets and newspapers, to which the others would listen attentively. What had been read was followed by corroborating perorations and endless praise. Not everything was understood: there were unknown words; some interpretations were childish, others were malicious, according to the character of the person who expressed them; but ultimately everyone agreed. It could not be any other way! It was the truth that they had felt all their lives, although they had never been able to express it. They read continually; their curiosity and their desire to learn were insatiable. Even on the road, mounted on horseback, with the reins or halters loose, campesinos could be seen reading; there were always some pamphlet in the saddlebag with their food. The number of copies of newspapers that were distributed is incalculable; each person wanted to have his own. It is true that 70-80 percent of them could not read; but this was not an insurmountable obstacle. The dedicated illiterate bought his own newspaper, gave it to a compañero to read to him, and then marked the articles that pleased him most. Later he would ask another comrade to read the article marked, and after a few readings he had committed it to memory and would recite it to those who did not know it (Quoted in Mintz 1994, 120, note 3).
</quote>
The fact that anarchist articles were routinely spread through the spoken word had a profound effect on how they were written. An article ending with the declaration ‘VIVA ANARCHY! VIVA THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION!’ can appear over the top to a solitary reader. Such sentences make a lot more sense when one imagines a reader shouting these words at a group of workers and those workers shouting the same words back (Yeoman 2020, 46).
To a modern reader the manner in which workers historically absorbed anarchist ideas can appear similar to how contemporary workers educate themselves through listening to podcasts or youtube videos. There are, however, a number of important differences. A modern person generally listens to content alone over the internet. Workers in the 19th and early 20th centuries listened to anarchist print media as a group in a face-to-face gathering. This medium of transmission by itself created a social network of anarchist workers in a specific location. This group of workers could then decide to not only absorb and discuss anarchist theory, but also put theory into practice and take direct action, such as by unionising their workplace or organising a strike. The collective nature of anarchist print media is apparent not only in how it was consumed but also in how it was produced. Periodicals published the thoughts and experiences of correspondents within Spain and the wider world. Through the medium of the printed word the thoughts and experiences from multiple individuals and groups were saved in the pages of the paper. They thereby gained a permanence which existed long after the memories of people were altered, decayed and forgotten due to the passage of time or lost forever with death. Workers who retained complete sets of papers, even after they had ceased publication, had access to the memory of the movement and the class struggles for emancipation which had previously occurred. The hunger for such information can be seen in the fact that editors of papers regularly received letters asking for previous issues so that an anarchist library could offer visitors a complete collection (Yeoman 2020, 53-4).
Anarchists also spread their ideas through lectures, public debates and speaking tours. Some speaking tours were big events in which the most famous anarchist orators and writers gave talks across all of Spain. This included talks given by well known anarchists from abroad, such as Malatesta and Pedro Esteve’s November 1891 to January 1892 speaking tour which was promoted by the anarchist paper <em><em>El Productor</em></em>. Other speaking tours were much smaller affairs. In 1892 the Catalan metalworker Ignacio Martín visited the city of Gijón and single handedly spread anarchist ideas across factories, taverns and workers’ centres. Through these speaking tours anarchist orators attempted to simultaneously influence the consciousness of other workers and encourage them to form or join anarchist groups, organise, and take direct action. This can be seen in Malatesta and Esteve’s speaking tour. They travelled across the country giving talks which explained basic anarchist ideas and emphasised the need for organisation and armed insurrection to achieve emancipation. Following their visit new anarchist groups or workers’ associations were formed. In addition to encouraging the formation of new anarchist groups, Malatesta and Esteve also visited prominent anarchist militants wherever they travelled in order to establish or strengthen social networks between anarchist groups throughout Spain. In so doing they aimed to create the organisational basis for future acts of revolt. The dual goal of consciousness raising and organising was typically facilitated through the distribution of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals at talks. This had the effect that speaking tours established a local archive of anarchist literature wherever they travelled. The new collection of print media could then be used by workers to educate themselves further and become more committed to anarchism once the speaking tour had left the area. Since periodicals included an address to send letters to, the distribution of print media also ensured that new local anarchists had a means to communicate with other anarchists and become part of the social networks that constituted the movement. This is not to say that speaking tours were always enormous successes. Their effectiveness was routinely hindered by state repression. For example, one speaking tour, which aimed to persuade proletarians and peasants in Andalusia to join the CNT, was abruptly ended when all the speakers were arrested at the first event (Yeoman 2020, 147-8, 219, 234-5, 246; Turcato 2012, 91-9).
The creation and transmission of anarchist culture was not confined to print media and speaking tours. Anarchists in Spain devoted a significant amount of time and energy to organising a wide range of different social events. This included, but was not limited to, plays, poetry scenes, concerts, dinners, dances, picnics, discussion groups, and reading groups. These various forms of association generally occurred within public meeting places, such as cafes and bars, and were self-organised by working class groups known as circles, affinity groups or workers’ centres. During the late 19th century one of the best known workers’ centres in Barcelona was La Luz, which organised daily discussions at a cafe that attracted workers and middle class professionals from various political persuasions. Although the majority of people who attended the meetings were republicans, anarchists were able to effectively intervene in the discussions, spread their ideas to other workers, and persuade some of them to become anarchists. Such daily or weekly activities were interspersed with public celebrations of key dates in the revolutionary calendar, such as the anniversary of the Paris Commune and May Day. For example, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune anarchist groups from Barcelona and the surrounding area organised a festival which featured choirs, an orchestra, poetry recitals and theatre performances (Esenwein 1989, 128-32; Smith 2012, 156-7, 260). The spread of anarchist culture through social events was facilitated by the creation of anarchist-run physical spaces. In the early 1930s anarchist members of the CNT established a co-operative store and bakery in Sant Adrià. The co-operative was built from scratch by a group of volunteer carpenters, bricklayers and plasterers using building materials which were paid for by crowd-funding within the local community. The co-operative not only sold various products and food at cost price but also featured a library, a bar with a billiard table, and a cafe. This enabled the co-operative to host a wide range of anarchist social events, including evening classes, lectures, plays and musical recitals (Ealham 2010, 52-3).
One of the main physical spaces where workers came into contact with anarchist ideas were cultural and social centres known as ateneos or athenaeums, which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. An ateneo typically featured a cafe, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighbourhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks and artistic performances. The walls of the building were decorated with signifiers of anarchism, such as portraits of famous revolutionaries and red and black banners. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the on-going existence of an anarchist presence within working class communities. The ateneos were funded and run by workers in their spare time, such as the La Torrassa Rationalist Athenaeum in Barcelona which was set up and paid for by a group of anarchist brick-makers in the early 1930s. The building’s furniture was provided by anarchist carpenters. The workers who participated in ateneos organised a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theatre clubs which would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, family picnics, and hiking clubs which allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. The wide range of activities which ateneos organised led to workers who participated within them to change themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished. In so doing they experienced first hand one of the main goals of anarchism: the many-sided development of human beings as an end in and of itself.
Through participating in ateneos workers not only developed themselves but also formed social bonds with one another and became members of the anarchist movement. A significant number of anarchist militants, especially women, first encountered anarchist ideas and entered into anarchist social networks through their participation in the ateneos when they were children and teenagers. This process was facilitated by print media. Anarchist periodicals informed readers of the existence of ateneos. Ateneos, in turn, taught workers to read and write and contained libraries of anarchist books, pamphlets and periodicals. This can be seen in the experiences of Soledad Estorach, who arrived in Barcelona at the age of fifteen and soon learned about anarchism through the journal <em><em>La Revista Blanca.</em></em> She read articles by Soledad Gustavo and decided to travel to Gustavo’s address, which was printed in the paper. Gustavo told Estorach to go to an ateneo. Upon arrival she met an old man who showed her the library. She recalled being “entranced by all those books” and feeling “that all the world’s knowledge was now within my reach” (Quoted in Ackelsberg 2005, 86). In the years that followed Estorach became a key participate within the CNT and Mujeres Libres, which was an anarchist organisation that focused on women’s emancipation. Young people not only received an anarchist education in ateneos but also gained experiences of anarchist organising. In 1932 youth groups which had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). The FIJL, which was an independent organisation linked with the CNT, came to be viewed as one of the main pillars of the anarchist movement. On several occasions ateneos were the avenue through which workers mobilised to participate in demonstrations and strikes. Money raised by the ateneo in the La Torrassa neighbourhood funded not only its activities but also the wider social movement, including the CNT’s prisoner support committee which helped imprisoned anarchists and their families. Ateneos were, in other words, social spaces which facilitated working class self-education, recreation, and class struggle (Ackelsberg 2005, 84-8; Ealham 2010, 45-7; Ealham 2015, 50-5; Evans 2020, 23. For a Spanish anarchist advocating human development see Mella 2020, 6-9).
One of the main services which ateneos provided to workers, be they adults or children, were educational classes. This occurred as part of a wider emphasis on pedagogy and schools within the anarchist movement. Anarchists advocated the formation of secular schools which were independent of the church and the state, taught boys and girls together in the same classes, and emphasised the development of both physical and mental capacities. In the early years of the movement anarchist teachers worked at secular schools run by republicans. Over time anarchists began to establish their own schools. This most notably included the Modern School established by Fransisco Ferrer in Barcelona. The school was founded in September 1901 with a class of thirty pupils. The number of students gradually increased over the following years and by 1905 126 pupils attended the school. The school did not last long and was permanently closed by the Spanish state in 1906 following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the King of Spain. Three years later in 1909 Ferrer was arrested and executed by the Spanish state after he was falsely charged with having orchestrated a week long working class insurrection against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco. This had the effect that Ferrer was transformed from a relatively obscure figure into an internationally famous martyr who inspired anarchists around the world to create modern schools of their own. The majority of anarchist schools in Spain were not as well funded as Ferrer’s Modern School. Outside of Catalonia they were typically rooms which lacked equipment and trained teachers. These rooms were often used for multiple purposes, such as the anarchist ran school in Cádiz which was located in the meeting room of the city’s metalworkers society (Avrich 2006, 3-31; Bray and Haworth 2019, 1-43; Smith 2012, 158-60; Yeoman 2020, 151-6). Despite these limitations anarchist schools could still have a significant impact on workers who attended them. One worker claimed, “I’m Andalusian and I moved to l’Hospitalet when I was nearly 10 years old. I learnt everything I know from the anarchists. I was 14 or 15 and I didn’t know how to read or write. I learnt at the night school organised by the libertarians” (Quoted in Ealham 2010, 47).
The manner in which different aspects of anarchist counter-culture intermixed with and supported one another can be seen in the Centre for Social Studies, which was founded in 1898 in the large town of La Línea. Anarchist workers from a variety of occupations were affiliated with the centre. According to a 1901 report, this included 347 carpenters, 450 construction workers, 200 painters, 210 iron and metal workers, 80 quarrymen and stonemasons, 80 cork-makers, 120 boot-makers, 120 tobacco-workers and 423 from varied industries. This last category of worker mostly consisted of casual and farm labourers. Later reports from 1902 establish that between 4,000 and 8,000 workers were affiliated with the centre. In 1901 the centre launched a new school which was located on the premises. This occasion was heralded with a large public event that featured poetry recitals, the unveiling of portraits of the anarchist Fermín Salvochea and the novelist Émile Zola, and lectures on such topics as god, the state, capitalism and the history of anarchism in Spain. The school’s main teacher was Ernesto Álvarez, who edited the anarchist paper <em><em>La Protesta.</em></em> Álvarez was able to become a teacher at the school due to the fact that his salary was paid for the various workers’ societies who were affiliated with the centre. By the end of 1901 the new school was teaching 180 children reading and writing and had begun to expand into adult education. This included French night classes where the teaching methods and classroom rules were decided upon by the students themselves. Gabriela Alcalde, who was another teacher at the school, ran night classes for women which taught them embroidery and needlework. These were organised in order to provide women with skills that could enable them to gain economic independence and no longer have to work as domestic servants. The school, which in 1902 claimed to be educating 400 children and 22 adults, was shut down by the Spanish state following a series of protests and riots in the town (Yeoman 2020, 157-9, 183, note 309).
The various aspects of anarchist counter-culture were generally underpinned by the expectation that those most committed to anarchism would transform themselves and become what was called a ‘conscious worker’. To be a conscious worker was, at the very least, to be an active participant within the trade union and collective struggles in the workplace and community. It was also believed to require various lifestyle changes in which a worker led by example and abandoned alcoholism, tobacco, gambling, visiting brothels, and watching bull fights in favour of reading, studying, and discussing anarchist ideas. It was for this reason that anarchist social centres typically prohibited the consumption of alcohol on the premises and served non-alcoholic drinks, such as unfermented grape juice (Mintz 2004, 85-7; Smith 2007, 160-1; Yeoman 2020, 131). Despite the best efforts of the most committed anarchists, the majority of other workers appear to have preferred having a fun night out. For example, the anarchist militant Manuel de los Reyes responded to a sociology lecture in Cádiz being badly attended by writing an angry article in the periodical <em><em>El Proletario</em></em>. During the article he labelled those who had not shown up as “cowards” and “traitors”. He complained, “why do you not frequent the society where they are able and want to educate you, and not the taverns that are nothing more than centres of corruption? . . . why do you not school yourselves?” (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 161). Some anarchist workers went further and embraced a cluster of alternative lifestyles known as naturalism, which included vegetarianism, nudism and only eating uncooked foods (Mintz 2004, 87-8). These anarchists made a surprise appearance in the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza congress resolutions on libertarian communism. The CNT’s resolutions, which mostly covered such topics as the armed defence of the revolution and the construction of a large-scale bottom-up planned economy, also featured the caveat that “naturist/nudist communes” would be free to autonomously self-manage themselves. It was stipulated that since no commune can be entirely self-sufficient, even if it is populated by nudists who only eat uncooked fruits and vegetables, naturalist communes would be able to form voluntary agreements with the federations of workplace and community councils that the majority of the anarchist movement would construct (Peirats 2011, 104-5).
One of the main ways in which anarchists attempted to implement their ideals in daily life was free love. Free love referred to voluntary sexual relationship between equals which occurred outside of marriage. These relationships were free in the sense that if one partner wanted they could voluntarily disassociate, end the relationship, and date new people. These relationships were overwhelmingly monogamous and articles advocating free love often clarified that they were not endorsing polyamory or promiscuity. Although there were some anarchists at the time who today would be regarded as queer, such as the lesbian Lucía Sánchez Saornil, anarchist discussions of free love focused on heterosexual relationships between a man and a woman. In practice a significant number of anarchists did not fully implement the ideas of free love and decided to instead form voluntary secular marriages which occurred independently of the Catholic church (Ackelsberg 2005, 47-52, 172; Mintz 2004, 91-9; Yeoman 2020, 138-41). In a country where Catholicism was a dominant social force, those anarchists who decided to have secular marriages known as ‘free unions’ faced hostility and prejudice from other members of their community. For example in Casas Viejas, Antonia wanted to enter into a secular marriage with Pepe. Her father, who was a member of the local anarchist led trade union, was against the idea and violently hit her after she refused to leave Pepe. Antonia recalled,
<quote>
since I didn’t answer him, he started to beat me. There were some shoes hanging there, and he seized them and started to beat me black and blue. My sister grabbed my father by the legs, but he kept beating me. He hit me such a hard blow on the head that he could have killed me. I ran out and went up to the vegetable patch on the slope. I had to run around a tree, and when I turned around—my father was behind me, running. I reached the house of a neighbor. When my father got to the neighbor’s small patio, he had to stop. He couldn’t enter. (Quoted in Mintz 2004, 97)
</quote>
Despite these traumatic events Antonia and Pepe married a few days later at a secular wedding attended by local anarchists. Antonia wore the clothes she had run away in since she was unable to safely return home. After the wedding Pepe would see Antonia’s father in the street and greet him but he would never reply. Antonia similarly recalls that one day she greeted her father and he responded by shouting at her to leave and get out of his sight. Although Antonia’s father came to accept the situation and regret his behaviour, these events provide an illustrative example of the obstacles practitioners of free love and secular marriages had to overcome in a deeply religious and patriarchal society (Mintz 2004, 98-9). This is not to say that anarchist men were perfect. The evidence which is available indicates that anarchist men were generally sexist towards women in the movement and expected their partners to do the majority of childcare and housework. In 1935 Lola Iturbe complained that anarchist men “however radical they may be in cafés, unions and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands’” (Quoted in Ackelsberg 2005, 115).
Anarchist parents rejected the religious baptism ceremonies of the Catholic church in favour of simply registering the name of the child. These registrations often included a communal event where revolutionary songs were sung and local children would read anarchist texts aloud. It was common for anarchist parents to give their children distinctly anarchist names. Some children were named after abstract concepts, such as Anarchy, Germinal, and Fraternity. One couple went so far as to name one of their children Free Proletarian, who sadly died shortly after birth. Other anarchist parents named their children after famous rebellious figures, such as Spartacus and Kropotkin, or famous scientists, such as Archimedes, Galileo, and Darwin (Yeoman 2020, 139-41). The birth and secular registration of children was reported upon and celebrated in the anarchist press as examples of workers living in accordance with anarchist ideals. In April 1910 <em><em>Tierra y Libertad</em></em> reported that,
<quote>
A beautiful boy with the delightful name of Palmiro has been brought to the civil register of Medina Sidonia as the son of the compañeros Maria de los Santos Bollullo and José Olmo, the first offspring of their free union. Our sincere congratulations to these compañeros for the strength of their convictions in removing themselves from the bureaucratic procedures used by the black-clothed priests (Quoted in Mintz 2004, 95).
</quote>
Given the above historical overview, an understanding of how social movements are able to grow and significantly alter society requires an examination of both huge moments of protest and rebellion and the smaller day-to-day activities which sustained and expanded social movements over time. Between the late 19th and early 20th century anarchists in Spain successfully organised the largest mass anarchist movement in history. This mass movement was centred on trade unionism within the CNT and the organisation of strikes. Anarchists in Spain did not limit themselves to a narrow conception of trade unionism and also engaged in a wide variety of other activities. One of the main activities they engaged in was the construction of a vibrant working class counter-culture centred on print media, education and art. The creation and transmission of this culture was facilitated by the establishment of anarchist social spaces, including co-operatives, schools and social centres known as ateneos. Through this counter-culture anarchists were able to spread their ideas, establish contact with the wider working class community, and sustain their commitment to anarchism over time, especially during periods of state repression. Their cultural activities, in short, promoted and supported class struggle from below and were interconnected with a revolutionary social movement. It was therefore distinct from much of what passes for counter-culture today, which often consists of the formation of an identity through the purchasing and consumption of commodities.
It is of course the case that anarchists alive today cannot simply copy what worked in the past onto the present and expect similar results. What was once extremely radical, such as having secular weddings and funerals, are now for large parts of the world a common thing to do. It is very difficult to create hundreds of ateneos in a context where buildings and land are extremely expensive and the rent is too damn high. Nor is it the case that every aspect of historical anarchist counter-culture was a good idea. No child should have to suffer the negative consequences of their anarchist parents naming them Anarchy or Free Proletarian. It is also important to not romanticise historical anarchists and ignore their failings. The brickmaker José Peirats played a key role in the history of the CNT and the construction of anarchist counter-culture. He was also a sexist homophobe (Ealham 2015, 206-8). Despite these limitations the study of historical anarchist counter-culture in Spain can serve as a source of inspiration in the present. It should merely be kept in mind that, even if counter-culture is a necessary condition for the development and reproduction of mass revolutionary movements, it is not a sufficient condition. As historical anarchists in Spain were well aware, social change requires that workers organise and take direct action against the ruling classes. Counter-culture is important but it is no substitute for what Kropotkin once referred to as the formation of “workers’ organisations” which engage in “the direct struggle of Labour against Capital and its protector,—the State” (Kropotkin 2014, 189).
*** Bibliography
**** Primary
<biblio>
Bakunin, Michael. 2016. <em><em>Bakunin: Selected Texts 1868-1875</em></em>. London: Anarres Editions. Edited by A W Zurbrugg.
Kropotkin, Peter. 2014. <em><em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology.</em></em> Oakland, CA: AK Press.<em><em></em></em> Edited by Iain McKay.
Reclus. 2013. <em><em>Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em></em>. Edited by John Clark and Camille Martin. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Parsons, Lucy. 2004. <em><em>Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937</em></em>. Edited by Gale Ahrens. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.
Mella, Ricardo. 2020. <em><em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em></em>. Edited by Stephen Luis Vilaseca. Palgrave Macmillan.
</biblio>
**** Secondary
<biblio>
Ackelsberg, Martha. 2005. <em><em>Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Avrich, Paul. 2006. <em><em>The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Bray, Mark and Haworth, Robert H. 2019. <em><em>Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader</em></em>. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Di Paola, Pietro. 2017. <em><em>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora 1880-1917</em></em>. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Goyens, Tom. 2007. <em><em>Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914</em></em>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ealham, Chris. 2010. <em><em>Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Ealham, Chris. 2015. <em><em>Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Esenwein, George Richard. 1989. <em><em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898</em></em>. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Evans, Danny. 2020. <em><em>Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939</em></em>. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Konishi, Sho. 2013. <em><em>Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese- Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan</em></em>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Leval, Gaston. 2012. <em><em>Collectives in the Spanish Revolution</em></em>. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Merriman, John. 2014. <em><em>Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871</em></em>. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mintz, Jerome R. 2004. <em><em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em></em>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peirats, José. 2011. <em><em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution Volume 1</em></em>. Edited by Chris Ealham. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Shaffer, Kirwin. 2019. <em><em>Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century</em></em>. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Smith, Angel. 2007. <em><em>Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1989-1923</em></em>. New York: Berghahn Books.
Suriano, Juan. 2010. <em><em>Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910</em></em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Turcato, Davide. 2012. <em><em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments in Revolution, 1889-1900</em></em>. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yeoman, James Michael. 2020. <em><em>Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890-1915</em></em>. New York: Routledge.
Zimmer, Kenyon. 2015. <em><em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em></em>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
</biblio>
|
#title Bakunin was a Racist
#author Zoe Baker
#LISTtitle Bakunin was a Racist
#SORTauthors Zoe Baker
#SORTtopics Mikhail Bakunin, racism, anti-racism, criticism and critique
#date Oct 31, 2021
#source Retrieved on 11/26/2021 from https://anarchozoe.com/2021/10/31/bakunin-was-a-racist/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-11-28T09:16:38
Michael Bakunin was one of the early influential theorists of the anarchist movement and played a key role in developing and spreading its ideas. He is one of my favourite authors and I have gained a huge amount from reading him. But this does not mean that I am uncritical of Bakunin. I am against putting any anarchist, dead or alive, on a pedestal and think it is important to examine both the good and the bad aspects of what Bakunin thought. His theory contained a profound inconsistency. He advocated a society in which all systems of domination and exploitation were abolished and everybody was free. He was also an antisemite. Most of the thousands of pages Bakunin wrote contain no antisemitism. On the few occasions where he is antisemitic it is abhorrent and should be rejected by everybody. In this essay I shall explain how he was antisemitic and why it was wrong. Once I have done this, I will discuss whether or not Bakunin’s critique of capitalism and the state was fundamentally racist and then explore how historical anarchists responded to his antisemitism.
*** Bakunin’s Racism
Bakunin’s antisemitism took five main forms. Firstly, on a number of occasions Bakunin unnecessarily pointed out that somebody he did not like was a Jew. One of Bakunin’s main political opponents in the 1<sup>st</sup> International was a Russian Jew named Nicholas Utin, who was an ally of Marx and Engels. In August 1871 Bakunin wrote a text which was later referred to as his <em>Report on the Alliance</em>. Within the text he labelled Utin a “little Jew” who manipulated other people, especially women, on four occasions (Bakunin 1913, 197, 213, 265–6, 273. For English translations see Carr 1975, 346; Bakunin 2016, 153, 158). A year later in October 1872 Bakunin again referred to Utin as “a little Russian Jew” in his unsent letter to the editors of <em>La Liberté</em> (Bakunin 1973, 247. Also see Bakunin 1872b, 1). Bakunin made similar remarks about other individuals. Within <em>Statism and Anarchy,</em> which was published in 1873, Bakunin complained that German workers were “confused by their leaders – politicians, literati, and Jews” who “hate and fear revolution” and have as a result “directed the entire worker population” into parliamentary politics (Bakunin 1990, 193).
On other occasions Bakunin went further. He explictly connected a person’s Jewishness with what he thought were their negative personality traits or incorrect political positions. In <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> Bakunin wrote that,
By origin Marx is a Jew. One might say that he combines all of the positive qualities and all of the short comings of that capable race. A nervous man, some say to the point of cowardice, he is extremely ambitious and vain, quarrelsome, intolerant, and absolute, like Jehovah, the Lord God of his ancestors, and, like him, vengeful to the point of madness. There is no lie or calumny that he would not invent and disseminate against anyone who had the misfortune to arouse his jealousy – or his hatred, which amounts to the same thing. And there is no intrigue so sordid that he would hesitate to engage in it if in his opinion (which is for the most part mistaken) it might serve to strengthen his position and his influence or extend his power (Bakunin 1990, 141).
Bakunin later claimed that Marx was a “hopeless statist” and advocate of “state communism” because of “his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German” (Bakunin 1990, 142–3). This point was repeated elsewhere. Bakunin remarked in his 1872 letter <em>To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain</em> that Marx “as a German and a Jew” is “an authoritarian from head to foot”. Within the same letter Bakunin wrote that Marx’s “vanity, in fact, has no limits, a truly Jewish vanity” (Bakunin 1872a. For the German version see Bakunin 1924, 117, 115).
Bakunin made similar remarks about the German state socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. He wrote in <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> that “Lassalle ... was vain, very vain, as befits a Jew” (Bakunin 1990, 177). A few pages later he declared that “Lassalle ... was too spoilt by wealth and its attendant habits of elegance and refinement to find satisfaction in the popular milieu; he was too much of a Jew to feel comfortable among the people” (Bakunin 1990, 180). Bakunin not only connected Lassalle’s vanity and elitism with being Jewish but also argued, just as he had done with Marx, that Lassalle’s Jewishness could be used to explain his political positions. Bakunin wrote that Lassalle advocated parliamentary politics as the means to seize state power because he was “a German, a Jew, a scholar, and a rich man” (Bakunin 1990, 175).
Bakunin’s antisemitism was not limited to making negative remarks about a few Jewish individuals. Between February and March 1872 Bakunin wrote a letter titled <em>To the Comrades of the International Sections of the Jura Federation.</em> It is perhaps the most antisemitic texts he ever wrote. Within the letter he asserted that Jewish people are,
bourgeois and exploitative from head to foot, and instinctively opposed to any real popular emancipation ... Every Jew, however enlightened, retains the traditional cult of authority: it is the heritage of his race, the manifest sign of his Eastern origin ... The Jew is therefore authoritarian by position, by tradition and by nature. This is a general law and one which admits of very few exceptions, and these very exceptions, when examined closely confirm the rule (Bakunin 1872b, 4).
He continues a few paragraphs later by saying that Jewish people are “driven by need on the one hand, and on the other by that ever restless activity, by that passion for transactions and instinct for speculation, as well as by that petty and vain ambition, which form the distinguishing traits of the race” (Ibid).
The second main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief that Jewish people were united as a singular entity, rather than being a broad and diverse ethnic, cultural or religious group composed of distinct individual people acting independently of one another. Bakunin claimed in his March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation that “the Jews of every country are really friends only with the Jews of all countries, independently of all differences existing in social positions, degree of education, political opinions, and religious worship.” He continued at length,
Above all, they are Jews, and that establishes among all the individuals of this singular race, across all religions, political and social differences that separates them, a union of solidarity that is mutually indissoluble. It is a powerful chain, broadly cosmopolitan and narrowly national at the same time, in the racial sense, interconnecting the kings of finance, the Rothschilds, or the most scientifically exalted intelligences, with the ignorant and superstitious Jews of Lithuania, Hungary, Roumania, Africa and Asia. I do not think there exists a single Jew in the world today who does not tremble with hope and pride when he hears the sacred name of Rothschild (Quoted in Draper 1990, 297. For the original French see Bakunin 1872b, 3).
Sometime between October 1871 and February 1872 Bakunin wrote a note which he titled <em>Supporting Documents: Personal Relations with Marx.</em> He initially intended to include the text in a letter he was writing to Italians he knew, but the note was never sent. It contained some of the most antisemitic remarks Bakunin ever wrote (Bakunin 1924, 204. Bakunin did send a letter to Bologna in December 1871 but it has been lost and we do not know if it contained similar racist content). Within the unsent note Bakunin wrote,
Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild (Bakunin 1924, 208–9).
The third main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy which played a key role in running the world via control of commerce, banking and the media. In 1869 Bakunin was critiqued by a German Jewish state socialist called Moses Hess in an article which was published in the radical paper <em>Le Réveil</em>. Bakunin responded in October by writing a long unpublished letter titled <em>To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil</em>. Bakunin’s other title for the letter was <em>Study of the German Jews</em> (Carr 1975, 369–70; Eckhart 2016, 27; Bakunin 1911, 239). Within the letter he wrote that,
I know that in speaking out my intimate thoughts on the Jews with such frankness I expose myself to immense dangers. Many people share these thoughts, but very few dare to express them publicly, for the Jewish sect, which is much more formidable than that of the Catholic and Protestant Jesuits, today constitutes a veritable power in Europe. It reigns despotically in commerce and banking, and it has invaded three-quarters of German journalism and a very considerable part of the journalism of other countries. Then woe to him who makes the mistake of displeasing it! (Quoted in Draper 1990, 293. For the original French see Bakunin 1911, 243–4. This view is repeated in Bakunin 1872b, 1).
Bakunin’s friend Alexander Herzen reacted to this racist letter by complaining to Nicholas Ogarev, “why all this talk of race and of Jews?” (Quoted in Carr 1975, 370).
The fourth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was intimately connected to the previous one. Bakunin not only believed that an international Jewish conspiracy played a key role in running the world. He also believed in a specifically Jewish conspiracy against him within the 1<sup>st</sup> International. The history of the 1<sup>st</sup> International is very complicated and for the purposes of this essay all you need to know is the following. In September 1872 Bakunin was expelled from the 1<sup>st</sup> International at its Hague Congress for being a member of a secret organisation called the Alliance. Marx and Engels were mistakenly convinced that Bakunin was attempting to use the Alliance to take over the 1<sup>st</sup> International and become its dictator. Due to this false belief Marx and Engels went to great lengths to guarantee Bakunin’s expulsion from the organisation, which included them creating fake delegates. Bakunin, in contrast, correctly thought that Marx, Engels and their supporters were attempting to take over the 1<sup>st</sup> International and convert the General Council, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body which imposed state socialist decisions and policies on the organisation’s previously autonomous sections. One of the ironies of history is that, a key reason for why Marx and Engels did this is that they thought it was necessary in order to counter Bakunin’s non-existent attempt to become dictator of the International and impose his anarchist programme on the organisation (Eckhart 2016. For a less in-depth history see Berthier 2015; Graham 2015).
Bakunin expressed his belief in a Jewish conspiracy against him in both public and private. In May 1872 the General Council issued a pamphlet called <em>Fictious Splits in the International</em> which had been written by Marx and Engels (Marx and Engels 1988, 83–123). The pamphlet repeated a number of inaccurate claims that had been made about Bakunin during his time in the International. This included Hess’ October 1869 accusation that Bakunin attempted to transfer the location of the General Council from London, where Marx and Engels lived, to Geneva, near where Bakunin lived, and Utin’s baseless September 1871 accusation that Bakunin was responsible for the harmful actions of the Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev (Eckhart 2016, 29–31, 91–3). Hess had been friends with Marx and Engels in the early 1840s, but their friendship seems to have ended by 1848. Utin, in contrast, was in close contact with Marx and Engels during the early 1870s and suggested various corrections and additions to the pamphlet (McLellan 1969, 145–7, 158, 160; Eckhart 2016, 47, 202–3).
In June 1872 the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em> published Bakunin’s response. He wrote that Marx’s pamphlet was “a collection, hodgepodge as much as systematic, of all the absurd and filthy tales that the malice (more perverse than spiritual) of the German and Russian Jews, his friends, his agents, his followers and at the same time, his henchmen, has peddled and propagated against us all, but especially against me, for almost three years” (Quoted Eckhart 2016, 212). Bakunin was correct to think that Marx was repeating claims made by Hess and Utin but their Jewishness was irrelevant. Bakunin framed these events as a Jewish conspiracy against him because he was an antisemite. Engels reacted to Bakunin’s article by writing in a letter to Theodor Cuno, “Bakunin has issued a furious, but very weak, abusive letter” in which “he declares that he is the victim of a conspiracy of all the European—Jews!” (Marx and Engels 1989, 408).
Bakunin repeated his belief in a Jewish conspiracy against him in his October 1872 unsent letter to the editors of <em>La Liberté</em>. He wrote that,
Marx ... has a remarkable genius for intrigue, and unrelenting determination; he also has a sizeable number of agents at his disposal, hierarchically organized and acting in secret under his direct orders; a kind of socialist and literary freemasonry in which his compatriots, the German and other Jews, hold an important position and display zeal worthy of a better cause (Bakunin 1973, 246. Also see Bakunin 1872b, 1).
Bakunin was correct that Marx, Engels and their supporters conspired against him. Where Bakunin went wrong was to frame the actions of Marx as a specifically Jewish conspiracy. It happened to be the case that some of Bakunin’s main political opponents within the International were Jews – Marx, Utin, Hess and Sigismund Borkheim – but a larger number of his opponents belonged to other ethnicities, such as the German’s Johann Philipp Becker and Georg Eccarius. Bakunin appeared to have been aware of this but thought they were operating under the commands of Marx and so a Jew. Bakunin could have viewed this situation as one political faction acting against another political faction. Due to his antisemitism, he instead framed it as people who were specifically Jewish conspiring against him. This was wrong and unjustifiable.
The fifth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was his stereotyping of Jews as wealthy bankers (Bakunin 1872b, 1–2). In <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> he asserted that the creation of the German nation state in 1871 was,
nothing other than the ultimate realisation of the anti-popular idea of the modern state, the sole objective of which is to organise the most intensive exploitation of the people’s labour for the benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands. It signifies the triumphant reign of the Yids, of a bankocracy under the powerful protection of a fiscal, bureaucratic, and police regime which relies mainly on military force and is therefore in essence despotic, but cloaks itself in the parliamentary game of pseudo-constitutionalism (Bakunin 1990, 12).
Over a hundred pages later Bakunin noted that “the rich commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the Jewish financial world of Germany” both “required extensive state centralisation in order to flourish” (Bakunin 1990, 138). Bakunin could have made his point about the relationship between finance capital and the state with a reference to bankers in general. He was an antisemite and so instead referred specifically to Jewish bankers and equated the rule of Jewish bankers with the rule of Jews in general. This was a common form of antisemitism during the 19<sup>th</sup> century because several of the largest banks in the world were owned by Jewish families, such as Rothschild and Sons. Such racist claims ignored that other large banks at the time were not owned by Jewish families, such as Barings (Ferguson 2000, xxv, 20, 260–71, 284–8). It is furthermore the case that both today and in the 19<sup>th</sup> century the majority of Jews are not bankers or members of the ruling classes. Jewish workers do not benefit from the fact that some bankers happen to be Jewish. This is no different to the fact that workers who are Christians or atheists do not benefit from the fact that some bankers happen to be Christians or atheists.
This kind of antisemitism was not a one-off occurrence. Bakunin’s most widely read work is a pamphlet called <em>God and the State</em>, which was first published in 1882 and is a long extract from his unfinished 1870–2 text <em>The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution</em>. Within <em>God and the State</em> Bakunin wrote that,
the Jews, in spite of that exclusive national spirit which distinguishes them even to-day, had become in fact, long before the birth of Christ, the most international people of the world. Some of them carried away as captives, but many more even urged on by that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal traits of their character, they had spread through all countries, carrying everywhere the worship of their Jehovah, to whom they remained all the more faithful the more he abandoned them (Bakunin 1970, 74. This view is repeated in Bakunin 1872b, 4).
In other texts Bakunin linked his antisemitic beliefs about Jewish bankers with his critique of state socialism. Bakunin’s main critique of state socialism was that social movements should not use the means of seizing state power to achieve the ends of socialism because it would not result in the abolition of all forms of class rule. The minority of people who actually wielded state power in the name of the workers, such as politicians or bureaucrats, would instead constitute a new ruling class who dominated and exploited the working classes and focused on reproducing and expanding their power, rather than abolishing it (Bakunin 1873, 169, 237–8, 254–5, 265–70). This argument was not antisemitic and has been made by anarchists from Jewish backgrounds, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (Goldman 1996, 390–404; Berkman 2003, 89–136. For their family history see Avrich and Avrich 2012, 7, 15).
Bakunin was, however, a racist and so argued that one of the groups which would benefit from the seizure of state power by socialists were Jewish bankers specifically. He thought that just as Jewish bankers benefited from state centralisation under Bismarck so too would they benefit from state centralisation under the rule of a socialist political party. Bakunin wrote in his unsent note <em>Personal Relations with Marx</em> that,
What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralisation in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which. speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail ... (Bakunin 1924, 209).
This position was repeated in Bakunin’s unsent 1872 letter to <em>La Liberté</em>. He wrote that Marx argued that the state should seize the means of production and land, organise the economy and establish “a single bank on the ruins of all existing banks”. This would result in “a barracks regime for the proletariat, in which a standardised mass of men and women workers would wake, sleep, work and live by rote; a regime of privilege for the able and the clever; and for the Jews, lured by the large-scale speculations of the national banks, a wide field for lucrative transactions” (Bakunin 1973, 258–9). Bakunin could have made the argument that state socialist strategies would benefit a minority of people who ran the national state bank. He was an antisemite and so felt the need to refer specifically to Jewish bankers and to stereotype Jewish people in general as a parasite which exploits people. Bakunin’s racism was not the main reason why he opposed state socialist strategies, but antisemitism was a component of one of the arguments he made. I have been unable to find a single example of later anarchists repeating Bakunin’s antisemitic argument.
Bakunin’s antisemitism was not remarkable for the 19<sup>th</sup> century. Antisemitism existed both within wider society and the socialist movement specifically. Bakunin lived in an antisemitic society and so expressed antisemitic views. Yet Bakunin was also raised in a patriarchal society but unlearnt this to a significant extent and advocated for woman’s emancipation (Bakunin 1973, 83, 174, 176). Bakunin was not responsible for internalising the prejudices of his time, but he was responsible for not noticing and unlearning them. The fact that this was possible is indicated by how many socialists were not antisemitic and explictly opposed antisemitism. They did so despite the fact that they too had been raised and lived within a racist social environment. Anarchists in the Russian empire, for example, defended Jews against pogroms on several occasions by organising mobile defence units armed with pistols and bombs. A number of Russian anarchists were killed whilst doing so. The armed defence of Jews was explictly justified by Russian anarchists in 1907 on the grounds that they were “against all racial conflicts” (Antonioli 2009, 164).
Bakunin’s antisemitism raises two important questions:
1. Was Bakunin’s critique of capitalism and the state fundamentally racist? By ‘fundamentally’ I mean the primary reason or the foundational core. Something can be significant without it being fundamental.
1. Were historical anarchists aware of Bakunin’s antisemitism and what did they think about it?
*** Bakunin’s Critique of Capitalism and the State
The answer to the first question is no. Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state because he was committed to the view that everybody should be free, equal and bonded together through relations of solidarity (Bakunin 1985, 46–8). This led Bakunin to argue that capitalism and the state should be abolished because they are social structures based on the economic ruling class – capitalists, landowners, bankers etc – and the political ruling class – monarchs, politicians, generals, high ranking bureaucrats etc – dominating and exploiting the working classes. For example, in an 1869 article for <em>L’Égalité</em> Bakunin critiqued capitalism for being based on “the servitude of labour – the proletariat – under the yoke of capital, that is to say, of the bourgeoisie”. He argued at length that,
The prosperity of the bourgeois class is incompatible with workers’ freedom and well-being, because the particular wealth of the bourgeoisie exists and can be based only on the exploitation and servitude of labour ... for this reason, the prosperity and the human dignity of the working masses demands the abolition of the bourgeoisie as a distinct class (Bakunin 2016, 43).
Bakunin then claimed that since the “power of the bourgeoisie” is “represented and sustained by the organisation of the state”, which “is only there to preserve every class privilege”, it follows that “all bourgeois politics ... can have but one single purpose: to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie” and the “slavery” of “the proletariat” (Bakunin 2016, 43, 49, 45). This, in turn, led Bakunin to advocate the abolition of the state. He argued in 1870 that “one should completely abolish, both in reality and in principle, everything that calls itself political power; because so long as political power exists, there will be persons who dominate and persons dominated, masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited” (Ibid, 63). This is not an antisemitic argument. The exact same position was advocated by anarchists from Jewish backgrounds, such as Goldman and Berkman, and by anarchists who were not Jewish but opposed antisemitism and participated in the Jewish anarchist movement, such as Rudolf Rocker (Berkman 2003, 7–28, 70–3; Goldman 1996, 49–51, 64–77; Rocker 2005, 1–3, 9–18).
Bakunin was, however, a racist and so thought that a key group who engaged in domination and exploitation were Jews, especially Jewish bankers. It is important to make three points about this. Firstly, Bakunin at no point claims that Jews are the only or main group who form the ruling classes. Secondly, the two propositions Bakunin believed in are logically independent of one another. The proposition that capitalism and the state are based on the domination and exploitation of the working classes does not entail the racist proposition that Jews as a group engage in exploitation via banking. Thirdly, Bakunin’s antisemitic remarks do not demonstrate that the main reason why Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state was his antisemitism. If this was the case then one would expect Bakunin to have referred specifically to Jews or Jewish bankers most of the time when he critiqued capitalism and the state. Yet in the vast majority of cases Bakunin does not mention Jewish people at all when critiquing these institutions. He instead refers to the ruling classes in general.
It might be argued in response that this was a tactical calculation by Bakunin. When writing public articles for papers such as <em>L’Égalité</em> he chose to hide his antisemitism and refer to the ruling classes in general but when writing in private he chose to refer specifically to Jewish people. The problem with this argument is that the majority of Bakunin’s unpublished or private critiques of capitalism and the state available in English do not mention Jewish people at all (Bakunin 1973, 64–93, 166–74). Nor did Bakunin try to hide his antisemitism through the use of dog whistles. One of the main texts where Bakunin makes antisemitic claims about Jewish bankers is in his book <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> which was published by Bakunin himself. Within <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> Bakunin connected his critique of capitalism and the state with antisemitic claims about Jewish bankers on two occasions (Bakunin 1990, 12, 138). In the majority of cases when critiquing capitalism and the state he does not mention Jewish people at all and instead refers to “the ruling classes” in general with such phrases as “the bourgeoisie”, “the privileged and propertied classes”, “the exploiting class” and “the governing minority” (Bakunin 1990, 21, 23–4, 114, 136–7, 219). Bakunin does refer to banks and bankers in general on four occasions when critiquing capitalism and the state but in every instance this went alongside referring to other members of the ruling classes, such as landowners, industrialists and merchants (Bakunin 1990, 12–3, 24, 29, 31, 138).
Given this, antisemitism was not the main reason why Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state. Although Bakunin critiqued banks in an antisemitic manner, his opposition to capitalism and the state cannot be reduced to this antisemitism. His antisemitic remarks about banks co-existed alongside the broader argument that capitalism and the state should be abolished because they are systems of class rule which oppress and exploit the working classes.
*** Bakunin Was Self-contradictory
It is furthermore the case that Bakunin’s racism towards Jewish people was fundamentally inconsistent with other things that he himself wrote. Bakunin advocated universal human emancipation on several occasions. To give one example, in 1868 Bakunin insisted that the goal of a revolution should be “the liberty, morality, fellowship and welfare of all men through the solidarity of all – the brotherhood of mankind” (Bakunin 1973, 167. Also see ibid, 86; Bakunin 1985, 52, 124, 189, 200). Bakunin not only advocated universal human emancipation but thought it could only be achieved through all of humanity forming bonds of solidarity and co-operation with one another. The abolition of capitalism and the state required “the simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the peoples of the civilised world”. In order for this to be achieved “every popular uprising ... must have a world programme, broad, deep, true, in other words human enough to embrace the interests of the world and to electrify the passions of the entire popular masses of Europe, regardless of nationality” (Bakunin 1973, 86. Also see ibid, 173).
Bakunin made a similar point in 1873. He wrote,
since we are convinced that the existence of any sort of State is incompatible with the freedom of the proletariat, for it would not permit of an international, fraternal union of peoples, we wish to abolish all states ... The Slav section, while aiming at the liberation of the Slav peoples, in no way contemplates the organisation of a special Slav world, hostile to other races through national feeling. On the contrary, it will strive to bring the Slav peoples into the common family of mankind, which the International Working Men’s Association has pledged itself to form on the basis of liberty, equality and universal fraternity (Bakunin 1973, 175–6).
Bakunin thought that the achievement of liberty, equality and universal human fraternity required opposition to racism. He advocated the “recognition of humanity, of human right and of human dignity in every man of whatever race” or “colour” (Bakunin 1964, 147). This commitment to universal human emancipation in turn entailed the advocacy of the self-determination of ethnic minorities. Bakunin thought that, “every people and the smallest folk-unit has its own character, its own specific mode of existence, its own way of speaking, feeling, thinking, and acting ... Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be itself” (Bakunin 1964, 325). This included groups being free to practice their religion (Bakunin 1873, 66, 176; Eckhart 2016, 27).
Bakunin, in addition to this, opposed imperialism and colonialism. He critiqued what he termed the gradual extermination of Native Americans, the exploitation of India by the British Empire and the conquest of Algeria by the French empire (Bakunin 2016, 175–6). He advocated,
the necessity of destroying every European despotism, recognising that each people, large or small, powerful or weak, civilised or not civilised, has the right to decide for itself and to organise spontaneously, from bottom to top, using complete freedom ... independently of every type of State, imposed from top to bottom by any authority at all, be it collective, or individual, be it foreign or indigenous ... (Bakunin 2016, 178).
Bakunin wrote the above remarks within his March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation. The same text where he is extremely racist towards Jewish people. The fact that Bakunin did not view the two parts of the letter as inconsistent with one another makes me very depressed. He was so prejudiced that he did not realise that a commitment to universal human emancipation and the establishment of what he called “the brotherhood of mankind” entailed an opposition to his own racism against Jewish people.
*** Were historical anarchists aware of Bakunin’s antisemitism and what did they think about it?
The extent to which historical anarchists were aware of and critiqued Bakunin’s antisemitism is a complex topic. Several historical texts which were written about Bakunin do not mention his racism, such as Max Baginski and Peter Kropotkin’s articles published in 1914 as part of the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Bakunin’s birth (Glassgold 2000, 69–71; Kropotkin 2014, 205–7). These two texts focus on only the positive aspects of Bakunin – his eventful life and important role as an anarchist revolutionary – but do not touch on his negative side – antisemitism. I am not sure why this is the case. One obvious explanation is that they wanted to present Bakunin to the public in the best light possible when celebrating the 100-year anniversary of his birth. Yet if this was the case why not talk about Bakunin’s antisemitism on other occasions? I have been unable to find any mention of Bakunin’s antisemitism in the writings of anarchists from Jewish backgrounds which are available in English, such as Berkman, Goldman and Gustav Landauer. When they do briefly mention Bakunin it is usually only to say something positive about him, explain an idea of his, or recount the split between anarchists and state socialists within the 1<sup>st</sup> International (Berkman 2003, 184; Goldman 1996, 69, 74, 103, 138; Landauer 2010, 81, 160, 175, 208). I have asked Kenyon Zimmer, who is a historian of the Jewish anarchist movement in America, and he does not recall Bakunin’s antisemitism being discussed in their paper the <em>Fraye Arbeter Shtime</em>. A Jewish anarchist could have complained about the topic during a conversation but since this conversation was never written down modern people cannot learn about it.
I suspect that a significant reason for why there are so few historical sources discussing Bakunin’s racism is that he largely expressed these thoughts in obscure texts. Every single antisemitic remark I have quoted in this video comes from nine sources. These are in chronological order,
- The October 1869 unpublished letter <em>To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil</em>. Sent to Bakunin’s friends Aristide Rey and Alexander Herzen but not published by the editor of <em>Le Reveil</em>. First published in 1911 in Volume 5 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1911, 239–94).
- The August 1871 <em>Report on the Alliance</em>. An extract was published in 1873 within <em>the Mémoire Presented by the Jura Federation of the International Working Men’s Association to all Federations of the International</em>. This version included two of the antisemitic remarks made towards Utin (Appendix of Guillaume 1873, 45–58. For the antisemitism see 51–2, 57). The full text, which included all of the antisemitism, was published in 1913 in Volume 6 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1913, 171–280).
- The October 1871 to February 1872 unsent note <em>Supporting Documents: Personal Relations with Marx</em>. First published in 1924 in volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 204–16).
- The March 1872 letter <em>To the Comrades of the International Sections of the Jura Federation</em>. Nettlau claimed in 1924 that it was yet to be published (Bakunin 1924, 204). As far as I can tell it was first published in 1965 in Archives Bakounine Volume 2.
- The June 1872 article <em>Response of Citizen Bakunin</em> published in the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em>. Copies of the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em> were most likely not widely circulated after it ceased publication in 1878, let alone the specific 15<sup>th</sup> June 1872 issue which included Bakunin’s text (Miller 1976, 150). It was republished in 1924 in volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 217–220).
- The June 1872 letter <em>To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain</em>. First published in 1924 in Volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 108–18).
- The October 1872 unsent letter to the editors of <em>La Liberté</em>. First published in 1910 in Volume 4 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1910, 339–90).
; - <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, which was first published in 1873 in Russian. Only 1,200 copies were printed. It was reprinted in Russian in 1906, 1919 and 1922 (Shatz in introduction to Bakunin 1990, xxxv). In 1929 the first Spanish edition of <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> was published (Bakunin 1986, 1). Rocker claimed in 1937 that the Spanish version of <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> was the first time the text was translated from Russian “into any other European language” (Rocker 1937, 557).
- <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, which was first published in 1873 in Russian. Only 1,200 copies were printed. It was reprinted in Russian in 1906, 1919 and 1922 (Shatz in introduction to Bakunin 1990, xxxv). In 1878 extracts of the book were translated into French and published in *L’Avant-garde* under the title *Le gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie*. This did not include the antisemitic passages. In 1929 the first Spanish edition of <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> was published (Bakunin 1986, 1). Rocker claimed in 1937 that the Spanish version of <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> was the first time the book was translated from Russian “into any other European language” (Rocker 1937, 557).
- <em>God and the State</em>, which was first published in 1882 and originally written in 1871. It is a long extract from his unfinished 1870–2 text <em>The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution</em>. It was translated into multiple languages and was Bakunin’s most widely read work (Bakunin 1970, viii-ix; Bakunin 1973, 111).
Of the nine antisemitic texts I have found five were letters and two of them were never sent to anybody. Only three antisemitic texts were publicly available prior to Bakunin’s death in 1876: two articles in French and one book in Russian. An additional antisemitic text, <em>God and the State,</em> was published in 1882 but the majority of Bakunin’s antisemitic texts were only made available in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century as part of the publication of Bakunin’s collected works in French, German and Spanish. I do not know how widely read these books were and I expect that they were largely read by a relatively small number of massive nerds interested in Bakunin’s ideas. Even those who owned the books may only have read parts of them and so happened to not come into contact with the racist passages which take up a small fraction of the thousands of pages Bakunin wrote. Any modern person who has bought a book while late night internet shopping knows how easy it is to own books without reading them. Perhaps the most antisemitic texts Bakunin ever wrote – the March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation – was not, to my knowledge, publicly available until the 1960s.
Given the above, the only antisemitic text which was definitely widely read and available in multiple languages in the 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> century was <em>God and the State</em>. The racism within <em>God and the State</em> consisted of one significantly antisemitic paragraph which claimed that Jewish people migrated all over the world because of their “mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal traits of their character” (Bakunin 1970, 74). In other parts of the text Bakunin does make more general critiques of Judaism as a religion, such as describing Jehovah as a jealous God. Even though these passages were written by an antisemite I have not noticed any obvious antisemitic content within them (Ibid, 69–71, 85). Nor is it antisemitic in and of itself to critique Judaism as a religion. Anarchists from Jewish backgrounds were often themselves very critical of Judaism as a religion and instead identified as Yiddish speakers who shared a culture (Zimmer 2015, 15–6, 24–8). This can be seen in the fact that the Jewish anarchist Saul Yanovsky translated <em>God and the State</em> into Yiddish in 1901 and altered the text such that Bakunin’s criticism of “Catholic and Protestant theologians” also referred to “Jewish Theologians” (Torres 2016, 2–4).
This is not to say that historical anarchists were unaware of Bakunin’s antisemitism. James Guillaume was Bakunin’s friend and the main editor of Bakunin’s collected works in French. He was definitely familiar with Bakunin’s views on Jews but does not mention them in the biographical sketch of Bakunin he wrote for Volume 2 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Guillaume in Bakunin 2001, 22–52). Guillaume appears to have deliberately altered a Bakunin quote such that it no longer contained any anti-semitism. He quotes Bakunin’s remark that Marx was authoritarian from head to foot but does not include Bakunin’s explanation for this: Marx was a German Jew. This topic is made confusing by the fact that Guillaume claims he is quoting an 1870 manuscript, but the passage cited is word for word identical with Bakunin’s 1872 letter. As a result, Guillaume could be referring to a different version of the text Bakunin wrote which contains no racism, but this seems unlikely (ibid, 26. For the original French see Bakunin 1907, xiv. Compare to Bakunin 1872a; Bakunin 1924, 117). I have been unable to find a place where Guillaume acknowledges Bakunin’s racism, but it should be kept in mind that the vast majority of his work has never been translated into English.
Other anarchists explicitly opposed Bakunin’s antisemitism. In May 1872 Bakunin sent a letter to the Spanish anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo which included antisemitism. Within his 1901 memoirs Lorenzo correctly argued that Bakunin’s racism towards Jews “was contradicting our principles, principles that impose fraternity without distinction along race or religion and it had a distastefulness effect on me.” Max Nettlau, who edited Bakunin’s collected works in German, similarly opposed Bakunin’s “anti-Jewish remarks” (Quoted Eckhart 2016, 509, notes 112 and 113. For a description of the letter see ibid, 196). There are, in addition to these critiques of Bakunin, several examples of anarchists rejecting antisemitism in general. This includes Kropotkin opposing the 1905 pogroms against Jews in Russia, the Jewish anarchist Landauer campaigning in 1913 against antisemitic conspiracy theories, and Rocker critiquing the oppression of Jews by the Nazis (Kropotkin 2014, 472–3, 481; Landauer 2010, 295–9; Rocker 1937, 249–50, 327–8). In 1938 Goldman wrote that she considered it “highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews” (Goldman 1938).
*** Conclusion
Bakunin was one of the early influential theorists of the anarchist movement, but anarchism does not consist in repeating what Bakunin wrote. Anarchism was not created by one individual. It was collectively constructed by the Spanish, Italian, French, Belgian and Jurassian sections of the International. Its programme incorporated the insights of a wide variety of individuals. Some well-known, such as Errico Malatesta, and others whose names have largely been forgotten, such as Jean-Louis Pindy who was the delegate of the Paris Construction Workers’ Trade Union at the 1<sup>st</sup> International’s 1869 Basel Congress and a survivor of the Paris Commune of 1871. From the 1870s onwards the anarchist movement spread around the world and its theory and practice was pushed in new directions by anarchists in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. This included a large number of anarchists from a Jewish background. Between the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century and the start of WW1 in 1914 the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement was the largest in the United States. Yiddish-speaking anarchists also played a key role in England’s anarchist movement (Zimmer 2015, 4–6, 15, 20; Rocker 2005).
A significant amount of Bakunin’s anarchist beliefs were not original to him but common positions within the social networks he was a part of. This included his advocacy of the collective ownership of the means of production and land, the view that trade unions should prefigure the future society, and the rejection of parliamentary politics as a means to achieve emancipation (Eckhart 2016, 12–6, 54, 106–8, 159–60; Graham 2015, 109–21). Anarchism was above all else the creation of workers engaged in class struggle against capitalism and the state. As the group of Russian anarchists abroad explained in 1926,
The class struggle created by the enslavement of workers and their aspirations to liberty gave birth, in the oppression, to the idea of anarchism: the idea of the total negation of a social system based on the principles of classes and the State, and its replacement by a free non-statist society of workers under self-management. So anarchism does not derive from the abstract reflections of an intellectual or a philosopher, but from the direct struggle of workers against capitalism, from the needs and necessities of the workers, from their aspirations to liberty and equality ... The outstanding anarchist thinkers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it in the masses, simply helped by the strength of their thought and knowledge to specify and spread it.
Anarchists are not Bakuninists. We believe in the programme of anarchism which evolves and is updated over time, rather than treating what an individual man with a large beard happened to write in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century as scripture. Anarchists in the past shared this attitude. Malatesta claimed in 1876 that anarchists were not “Bakuninists” because “we do not share all the practical and theoretical ideas of Bakunin” and “follow ideas, not men ... we reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man” (Quoted in Haupt 1986, 4). Kropotkin similarly recalled in his autobiography that during his 1872 visit to the Jura Federation,
in conversations about anarchism, or about the attitude of the federation, I never heard it said, ‘Bakunin had said so,’ or ‘Bakunin thinks so,’, as if it clenched the discussion. His writings and his sayings were not a text that one had to obey ... In all such matters, in which intellect is the supreme judge, everyone in discussion used his own arguments” (Kropotkin 2014, 104).
This is a position Bakunin himself agreed with. In his 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura Federation he wrote that “the ‘Bakuninist label’ ... was thrown in your face” but “you always knew perfectly well, that your tendencies, opinions and actions arose entirely consciously, in spontaneous independence” (Bakunin 2016, 247–8).
In conclusion, Bakunin should still be read today and there is a great deal of insight within the thousands of pages he wrote. He should, however, be read critically and his antisemitism was wrong, unjustifiable and fundamentally at odds with the principles of anarchism which seeks the abolition of all forms of domination and exploitation, including all forms of racism. The preamble to the 1866 Statutes of the 1<sup>st</sup> International declared: “this Association, and every individual or society joining it, will acknowledge morality, justice and truth as the basis of their conduct toward all men, without distinction of nationality, creed, or colour” (Berthier 2012, 165). Socialist movements have on too many occasions not lived up to these words and it is essential that socialists today, be they anarchist or not, ensure that they do and oppose all systems of domination in both words and deeds.
One of the main lessons of Bakunin’s life is that somebody who thinks they are a genuine advocate of universal human emancipation can still have oppressive beliefs without being aware that they do. None of us are responsible for being socialised to be prejudiced towards others but, just like Bakunin before us, we are all responsible for noticing and unlearning it. As the Jewish anarchist Landauer wrote in 1913 in response to antisemitism, “socialism means action among human beings; action that must become reality within these human beings as much as in the outside world. When independent peoples propose to create a united humanity, these propositions are worthless when even a single people remains excluded and experiences injustice” (Landaur 2010, 295).
*** Bibliography
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**** Secondary Sources
<biblio>
Avrich, Paul, and Karen Avrich. <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em>. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.
Berthier, René. 2015. <em>Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association 1864–1877</em>. London: Anarres Editions.
Draper, Hal. 1990. <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 4: Critique of Other Socialisms</em>. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Graham, Robert. <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement</em>. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015.
Eckhart, Wolfgang. <em>The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin VS. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em>. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
Ferguson, Niall. 2000. <em>The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker 1848–1998.</em> New York: Penguin Books.
Haupt, Georges. 1986. <em>Aspects of International Socialism 1871–1914.</em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Martin A. <em>Kropotkin</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
McLellan, David. 1969. <em>The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx.</em> London: Macmillan.
Torres, Anna Elena. 2016. “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature. PhD Thesis, UC Berkeley.
Zimmer, Kenyon. 2015. <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
</biblio>
|
#cover z-b-zoe-baker-means-and-ends-3.jpg
#ATTACH z-b-zoe-baker-means-and-ends-1.pdf
#title Means and Ends
#subtitle The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States
#author Zoe Baker
#date 2023
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-12-06T12:16:40.338Z
#authors Zoe Baker
#topics history, strategy, state socialism, criticism and critique, insurrectionary, mass anarchism, mass politics, mass organization, anarcho-syndicalism, platformism, Organizational Dualism
#publisher AK Press (Chico / Edinburgh)
#isbn 978-1-84935-498-1
#rights © 2023 Zoe Baker
#notes Cover design by John Yates | www.stealworks.com // Cover photographs (top) courtesy of Centro Studi Libertari //
Archivio Giuseppe Pinelli, Milan, Italy (bottom) courtesy of Abel // Paz Fund, Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation Archive (CNT)<br>
[See also attached PDF for the author’s preferred pagination for citation.]
*** Dedication and Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to the vast number of anarchist workers whose names do not appear in history books but who nonetheless played a vital role in the struggle for universal human emancipation.
This work, which began as a PhD thesis submitted to Loughborough University, greatly benefited from feedback provided by Ian Fraser, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Paul Raekstad, Jesse Cohn, Shawn P. Wilbur, Mark Leier, David Berry, Kenyon Zimmer, Danny Evans, James Yeoman, Ruth Kinna, and Constance Bantman. Thanks to my editor Charles Weigl for making the book much nicer to read. Any errors are my responsibility.
*** Epigraph | ~~
<quote>
<center>
“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.... The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
—<sc>karl marx, theses on feuerbach (1845)</sc>
</center>
</quote>
** Introduction
The history of capitalism and the state is the history of attempts to abolish them and establish a free society without domination and exploitation. Revolutionary workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that another world was possible. It is still possible today. One of the main social movements that attempted to overthrow capitalism and the state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was anarchism. Members of the historical anarchist movement not only attempted to change the world but also produced an elaborate body of ideas that guided their actions. This book is concerned with explaining what their ideas were. Historians sometimes unearth old ideas from the past because they are an interesting way of gaining insight into a different time and place. This is not my principal motivation. I wrote this book because I want to live in a society in which everyone is free. I am convinced that, if we are to achieve this goal, it is important to know the history of previous attempts to do so. My hope is that, through learning about how workers in the past sought to emancipate themselves, workers alive today can learn valuable lessons and develop new ideas that build on the ideas of previous generations.
How to define anarchism is a contentious topic and will be discussed in depth in chapter 1. For the purposes of this book, it will be understood as a form of revolutionary antistate socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the International Workingmen’s Association between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International between 1872 and 1878. During and after its birth as a social movement, it spread rapidly to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who were agnostic about the nature of the future society but advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I do not claim that this is the one true form of anarchism. It is only the kind of anarchism I am focusing on.
Anarchism so understood is one of the largest movements in the history of socialism. According to the historian Benedict Anderson, “international anarchism… was the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism” during the late nineteenth century.[1] Even the hostile Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is forced to concede that, between 1905 and 1914, “the main body of Marxists” belonged to increasingly reformist social-democratic political parties while “the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism.”[2] The vast amount of theory that the anarchist movement produced can be broken down into five main elements:
1. A theoretical framework for thinking about humans, society, and social change.
1. A set of ethical principles that form the value system of anarchism.
1. An analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles.
1. A vision of alternative social relations and structures that are achievable and would actually promote these ethical principles.
1. A series of strategies (which are consistent with the ethical principles) for abolishing existing social relations and structures in favor of the proposed alternative social relations and structures.
Fully explaining each aspect of anarchist theory, and how these ideas changed over time and varied around the world, goes far beyond the scope of what a single book can hope to achieve. The aim of this book is narrower. I shall rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism within Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1939. It is important to note that this exclusive focus on one part of the world is an artificial construction. The real historical anarchist movement was constituted by transnational networks that operated at a global scale and enabled ideas and people to flow between continents. The movements in different countries were so interconnected that a complete history of anarchism in Europe and the United States necessarily includes the history of anarchism in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania—and vice versa. The true history of anarchism can only be written as a global history. My book is a contribution toward this global history but only covers a small fragment of it.[3]
In order to rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism, it is necessary to explain the other four main elements of anarchist theory—theoretical framework, value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society—in depth. This is because what anarchists thought about strategy can only be understood within the context of anarchist theory as a whole. Although anarchists developed revolutionary strategies to abolish a variety of different oppressive structures, I shall primarily focus on their strategies to abolish capitalism and the state since this is what most anarchist texts discuss. I shall, when it is relevant, include anarchist views on how to abolish patriarchy, but it should be kept in mind that anarchist men, who were the majority of published anarchist authors, did not give this topic sufficient attention. When explaining anarchist ideas, I will write in the past tense because, for the purposes of this book, I am focused on anarchism during one time period. Many of the ideas I describe are still believed by anarchists today and are not exclusive to the past, such as a commitment to anticapitalism.
I shall throughout this book refer extensively to, and quote from, a number of major anarchist authors who lived in Europe or the United States between 1868 and 1939. This includes, but is not limited to, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), James Guillaume (1844–1916), Carlo Cafiero (1846–1892), Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Émile Pouget (1860–1931), Ricardo Mella (1861–1925), Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), Max Baginski (1864–1943), Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912),[4] Emma Goldman (1869–1940), Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), and Charlotte Wilson (1854–1944). I shall supplement the quotations from major anarchist authors with quotations from sources collectively produced by the movement. These will include programs, congress resolutions, and manifestos of formal organizations or affinity groups. In order to maintain a consistent style, all quotes are rendered using American-English spelling.
A key factor determining which authors I have chosen to include within this book is the fact that I can only read English. This is a significant limitation given that the majority of anarchist primary sources within Europe and the United States were originally written in languages other than English—mainly French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish—and have yet to be translated.[5] As a result, there are authors who were historically important but whose ideas I cannot examine in any depth due to lacking access to them, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Saul Yanovsky or the Dutch anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis. Even with authors who have been translated into English, such as Reclus, I often only have access to a small amount of their total output. It should therefore be kept in mind that generalizations I make about anarchism are based on the primary sources available in English, and these represent a small fragment of the total texts produced by the historical anarchist movement.
I shall be quoting anarchist authors at length, rather than only rephrasing their ideas in my own words, because, in order to understand what anarchists thought historically, a modern reader must understand them on their own terms and so through their own language and exact ways of conceptualizing or expressing their ideas. Doing so will not only help ensure that my explanation of anarchist theory corresponds to what anarchists actually thought, but will also bring many obscure and not well-known passages to the reader’s attention. Although I shall sometimes have to, for the sake of clarity and consistent terminology, introduce new language when summarizing anarchist ideas in my own words, this shall only ever represent a change in language and not a change in ideas. I shall, in addition, attempt to use the same language as historical anarchists as much as possible. Throughout this book, I shall not be arguing that anarchist theory was correct or interjecting with my own personal views on which anarchist authors or ideas were best. I will instead only be concerned with establishing and explaining what anarchist authors themselves thought.
Through quoting these anarchist authors, I shall be rationally reconstructing the ideas of different thinkers into a coherent system of thought. A rational reconstruction is a reorganization of a set of ideas that highlights the logical relations between its different elements.[6] A rational reconstruction of a political theory, in other words, not only explains what its exponents claim about various topics, such as how they think about society or the forms of action they advocate to change society. A rational reconstruction also makes the logical connections between the different elements of a political theory explicit, such as how their social theory underpins their choice of tactics. It is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in this manner for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of anarchist texts are short articles, speeches, or pamphlets. Even texts that were published as books are often compilations of previously published articles. Given this, an understanding of what an anarchist author thought can only be reached through assembling the many different ideas they espoused in different places. Bakunin, for example, wrote several sentences and paragraphs about freedom within texts concerned with a more general topic, but did not write an extended essay or book devoted solely to the subject of freedom. In order to establish what Bakunin thought about freedom, one must assemble a collection of short sentences and paragraphs made by him in several different texts. Even when an anarchist author did write about a topic in more detail, it is still necessary to combine different texts together because the positions advocated in one short article can be misunderstood or misrepresented when not connected to the claims made in other short articles. The ideas of the anarchist movement can likewise only be understood by assembling the ideas of a large number of different authors.
Second, a key reason why anarchist authors wrote political theory was that they aimed to spread revolutionary ideas to workers and inspire them to rise up against their oppressors. This led anarchists to write in a style that was accessible to a wide readership, but could also make their arguments appear simpler than they actually were. For example, on numerous occasions anarchist authors do not explicitly lay out the conceptual connections between their different beliefs. Even when anarchist authors do claim that certain ideas are connected, they do not always explain why this is the case or only explain briefly. Given this, it is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in order to build up the interconnected conceptual system that anarchist authors often left implicit or did not explain in sufficient depth.
The technique of rational reconstruction is usually applied to explaining the ideas of a single individual author, such as Marx or Descartes. Such efforts must be sensitive to the fact that an individual author changed their mind or developed their ideas over time. It would therefore be a mistake to unthinkingly place ideas from one period of their life alongside ideas from another period simply because they were written by the same person. This issue becomes greater when rationally reconstructing the ideas of an international social movement over several decades. Assembling together the ideas of a large number of different authors is straightforward when explaining ideas that all anarchists advocated, such as the abolition of capitalism and the state, but is more complicated when examining areas where anarchists disagreed with one another, an idea significantly changed over time, or a whole new idea emerged during a specific historical moment and did not exist prior to this. A rational reconstruction of the ideas of anarchism as a social movement must be sensitive to the fact that anarchist theory was not a single unchanging monolith, but a cluster of different tendencies in dialogue and debate with one another.
While this study will utilize the conceptual rigor of philosophy to summarize the arguments of anarchist authors, it will not examine these ideas in a historically anachronistic manner as if they existed outside of time and space. To truly understand the political theory of historical anarchism it is necessary to understand what these authors intended to mean and communicate to their audiences and how their texts were, independently of these authorial intentions, understood by readers at the time. This requires locating texts within a specific linguistic context—inherited assumptions from previous thinkers, ongoing debates and discussions, how certain words were used at the time, etc.—and the wider social, economic, and political world that these ideas were produced within and in reaction to—the social relations through which the production and consumption of goods were organized, what kinds of domination the ruling classes engaged in, how the oppressed classes resisted and struggled against their rulers, and so on.[7]
A comprehensive study of anarchism that fully contextualizes its ideas within their historical moment goes far beyond the scope of this book. I shall, instead, be focusing on a single main context: the history of the anarchist movement itself. This will include not only the theoretical debates within the movement, but also its various actual attempts at overthrowing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. This is because the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was articulated by members of a social movement in order to be put into action. It is furthermore the case that the ideas different anarchist authors proposed were developed in response to the ongoing experiences of class struggle, such as the various actions of different working-class social movements, state repression of anarchist movements, and debates within anarchist organizations about how to act in a specific moment. In order to include this context, I shall combine a detailed textual interpretation of primary sources available in English with the secondary literature on the history of different anarchist movements in Europe and the United States.
There are three limitations to this approach. First, the product of such a rational reconstruction will not correspond precisely to each individual author’s viewpoint and will contain propositions that some of the authors I cite may have objected to, because they disagreed with other anarchists on the topic. To minimize this issue, I shall, when it is relevant, point out when a view was distinct to a specific author and when there are important exceptions to a generalization.
Second, this rational reconstruction will not exactly correspond to what the workers who composed the bulk of the anarchist movement thought. These workers were, after all, not automatons who blindly repeated word for word the ideas expressed by the major authors of anarchism. They had thoughts of their own about what anarchism was, and about what anarchists should do. They may have, in addition to this, disagreed with my interpretation of the authors I cite, not noticed features of these texts that I have, noticed features that I have failed to, and in general gained different ideas from reading these texts than I have. It is furthermore the case that I will have read texts that individual workers within the movement were unfamiliar with, and they would have read, or if they were illiterate had read to them, texts that I am unfamiliar with.
It is difficult to find out what these anarchists thought because the majority of anarchists were not published authors and instead developed ideas through face-to-face conversations with their comrades. German anarchists in New York, to give one example, would discuss politics in a wide variety of locations, ranging from anarchist-run beer halls to singing societies to family picnics in the park.[8] The contents of these conversations have unfortunately been largely lost when those who experienced and remembered them died, since only a tiny fraction of them were ever recorded in writing. Given this, it should be kept in mind that it is often unclear whether a major anarchist author is expressing ideas that they themselves came up with or is merely repeating ideas that were developed through countless face-to-face discussions between anarchist workers. Influential anarchist authors themselves routinely pointed out that they were repeating ideas collectively developed within working-class social movements. To give one example, Malatesta wrote in 1899 that “the anarchist socialist program is the fruit of collective development which, even ignoring its forerunners, lasted several decades, and which no one individual could claim to have authored.”[9]
Third, my reconstruction of anarchist political theory draws upon a small number of women authors. This is because, although large numbers of women played a significant role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anarchist movement, most published anarchist authors appear to have been men.[10] Of those anarchist authors who were women, many of them cannot be included in my rational reconstruction since either they lived outside of Europe and the United States, such as the Chinese anarchist He-Yin Zhen, or they have not been translated into English, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist and doctor Katherina Yevzerov.[11] Nor can my reconstruction, due to its focus on texts, include the perspectives of those women who were active within the anarchist movement but did not (as far as I am aware) have their ideas published by the anarchist press. This includes such individuals as the militant Concha Pérez, who took up arms in the Spanish revolution of 1936 and fought against fascists in Barcelona and on the Aragon Front.[12]
Despite these shortcomings, a rational reconstruction of the ideas that can be found in the major theorists of anarchism who lived in Europe and the United States will provide a useful synthesis for thinking about the ideas that were prominent within the anarchist movement during the period I am examining. It should be kept in mind throughout that this reconstruction is primarily based on sources written by a small list of people who, despite exerting great influence on the movement, should not be conflated with the movement as a whole. Given this, when I write that “anarchists thought x” or “anarchism holds that y,” I am not committing myself to the strong position that every person within the anarchist movement held these views, since this is not something I could possibly know. I am instead using these phrases as shorthand for the more modest claim that the major anarchist authors, newspapers, and programs of organizations I cite did adhere to these views.
The central argument of this book is that the reasons anarchists gave for supporting or opposing particular strategies were grounded in a theoretical framework—the theory of practice—which maintained that, as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves. This theoretical framework was the foundation for the anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries proposed to achieve social change had to be constituted by forms of activity that would develop people into the kinds of individuals who were capable of, and were driven to, (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society.
The structure of this book is as follows. In chapter 1, I define anarchism in depth. In chapter 2, I explain anarchism’s theoretical framework—the theory of practice. With this in place, I rationally reconstruct anarchism’s value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society in chapter 3. The core ideas on strategy that were in general shared by the anarchist movement are described in chapter 4. Chapter 5 reconstructs the anarchist critique of state socialism. Chapters 6 and 7 provide an overview of the two main schools of anarchist strategy: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Chapters 8 and 9 expand the discussion of mass anarchism by explaining the history, theory, and practice of one of its main forms: syndicalist anarchism, which is a kind of revolutionary trade unionism. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of mass anarchism by describing the history and theory of organizational dualism, which was the idea that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and smaller organizations composed exclusively of anarchists. Chapter 11 summarizes the main ideas of anarchist political theory and reaffirms my central argument that the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was grounded in the theory of practice.
[1] Benedict Anderson, <em>The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination</em> (London: Verso 2013), 54.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, <em>Revolutionaries</em> (London: Phoenix, 1994), 61.
[3] David Berry and Constance Bantman, eds., <em>New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational</em> (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Constance Bantman and Bert Altena, eds., <em>Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017); Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., <em>Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution</em> (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
[4] De Cleyre was initially an individualist anarchist and mutualist but came to reject this position during the 1890s. Between 1897 and 1900, she came to identify as an anarchist without adjectives who was agnostic about the nature of the future society, while advocating the same strategies as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I shall only be including texts by her from this later period. See “Vision of an Alternative Society” in chapter 3 for a discussion of this view and the supporting references.
[5] Federico Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK</em> (London: Routledge, 2019), 61–62; Kenyon Zimmer, “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language,” <em>American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism</em> 29, no. 1 (2019): 10–11.
[6] Michael Beaney, “Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction,” in <em>The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy</em>, ed. Erich H. Reck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 253.
[7] Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in <em>Visions of Politics</em>, vol. 1, <em>Regarding Method</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82–87; Skinner, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” in <em>Visions</em>, 110–14; Skinner, <em>The Foundations of Modern Political Thought</em>, vol. 1, <em>The Renaissance</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), x–xiv; Ellen Meiksins Wood, <em>Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages</em> (London: Verso, 2011), 7–16.
[8] Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: <em>The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 34–51, 168–82.
[9] Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 65.
[10] For discussions of women’s participation in historical anarchist movements see David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 313–17; Jennifer Guglielmo, <em>Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City</em>, <em>1880–1945</em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 139–75; Martha Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005); Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution</em>, 155–8; Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 43–47, 66–70; Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography</em>, 91–111.
[11] Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., <em>The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 21, 44.
[12] Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 93–95.
** Chapter 1: Defining Anarchism
Overviews of anarchism often begin by claiming that it is incredibly broad, incoherent, and inherently difficult to define.[13] Being difficult to define is not a unique feature of anarchism. It is a general problem facing the intellectual historian because, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “only something which has no history can be defined.”[14] That is to say, the reason why one can define hydrogen in terms of essential and unchanging necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is that it lies outside of history and so does not vary within and between human societies. What hydrogen is does not change between tenth-century France and twentieth-century Alaska. This remains true even though how humans have understood or thought about hydrogen has changed over time. But the same is not true of things that are historical in the sense of being inherently connected to and concerned with human activity, such as Christianity or anarchism.
Such historical entities have a beginning and boundaries that distinguish them from other parts of human existence, but the elements that compose them nonetheless change over time. Christianity, for example, emerged during the first century CE and was characterized by a set of beliefs and practices that made it different from other religions. It was subsequently modified numerous times during its history, such as by the invention of Catholicism and Protestantism. Historical entities are fluid and ever-changing because they are produced by and are about humans who are themselves constantly changing as they engage in activity within constantly evolving social structures. At any given moment in history, people will think and act differently in response to the same wider context. The consequence of this is that, as people articulate distinct perspectives, argue with one another, and act to ensure that their understanding remains dominant or becomes so, they also produce competing and contradictory versions of the same historically produced entity. Over time, this process of contestation causes the widespread version of a historically produced entity to change as some elements arise to prominence or fade into obscurity, whole new elements are added, and other elements are removed. There is no one true version of a historically produced entity. Instead, there is only what elements do or do not compose it according to different individuals or groups of people at the various stages of its development.
This should not be mistaken for the claim that there are no characteristics that distinguish one historically produced entity from another. Christianity may be a constellation of disparate elements that changes over time, but it is nonetheless distinct from the religion of the Aztecs. Nor does Nietzsche’s view entail that all definitions of a historical entity are equally good and cannot be better or worse than another definition. A person who defined Christianity as a religion that believes in a single God would be failing to construct a useful definition, because it includes belief systems that should be excluded, such as other monotheistic religions like Islam, and fails to specify the distinct elements that compose Christianity historically and within modern society, such as the belief that Jesus was resurrected.
Nietzsche’s views on historically produced entities have several consequences for thinking about how to define anarchism. Although anarchism will have an origin and some conceptual boundaries that have historically demarcated it from other ideologies, there will not be a single, unified body of thought called <em>anarchism</em>. At a given historical moment, there will be a series of distinct individuals or groups of people who all happen to call themselves anarchists and are in a process of contestation with one another over what anarchism means or should mean. Since what anarchism means is historically variable, the best we can expect from a definition is that it provides a snapshot of how specific individuals or groups of people understood anarchism at a given moment of its historical development. Such a definition may be rendered incomplete by unexpected developments within anarchism, such as whole new elements arising or previously important elements fading into obscurity. The point is not to establish what anarchism truly means once and for all, but to construct a definition of anarchism that is useful for investigating a particular historical period, topic, or type of anarchism.
There are two main views on what anarchism is. Transhistoricists generally define anarchism as referring to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.[15] In response to this way of thinking about anarchism, historicists have argued that anarchism should instead be defined as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and rapidly spread, during and after its birth as a social movement, to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows.[16]
The disagreement over when to date the birth of anarchism partly stems from the fact that how modern authors think about the history of anarchism has been shaped by the earliest historiographies of anarchism, which were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by members of the anarchist movement. These anarchists, like modern historians of anarchism, disagreed with one another about how anarchism should be defined and when anarchism first emerged. Some authors defined anarchism transhistorically. Peter Kropotkin, for example, remarked in 1913 that “there have always been anarchists and statists” and claimed to have found “anarchist ideas among the philosophers of antiquity, notably in Lao Tzu in China and in some of the earliest Greek philosophers.”[17] This view was shared by Rudolf Rocker, who wrote in 1938 that anarchists advocate the abolition of “all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of free humanity” and that, given this, “anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history.”[18]
Other anarchists adopted a historicist account of anarchism in which it referred exclusively to a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the oppression of capitalism and the state. In 1884, Charlotte Wilson claimed that “Anarchism is a new faith” and “the name assumed by a certain school of socialists” who advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state.[19] Decades later, Errico Malatesta wrote in 1925 that there was a distinction between “Anarchy,” which is a cooperative society without oppression and exploitation, and “Anarchism,” which “is the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[20] The latter “was born” when people “sought to overthrow” both “capitalistic property and the State” and therefore did not exist prior to this.[21]
Importantly, this was not an exclusively European perspective. The Chinese anarchist Li Yaotang, who wrote under the pen name Ba Jin, argued in 1927 that “Anarchism is a product of the mass movement… not an idle dream that transcends time. It could not have emerged before the Industrial Revolution, and… the French revolution.”[22] To him, it shared nothing with Daoism and the ideas of Lao Tzu. The Japanese anarchist Kubo Yuzuru likewise wrote in 1928 that “Anarchism originated from the fact of the struggle of the workers. Without that, there would be no anarchism.”[23]
Given my commitment to Nietzsche’s way of thinking about definitions, I shall be taking a historicist approach and defining anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. It is of course the case that the idea of a free stateless society existed before people in nineteenth-century Europe decided to start calling themselves anarchists. The Chinese Daoist Bao Jingyan argued in the third century that the state was created by the strong to oppress the weak, and became the means through which the wealthy reproduced the servitude of the poor. He thought that prior to the rise of states there existed a free, harmonious society with “neither lord nor subject” and claimed that it would be better if the state ceased to exist. Although his one surviving text proposed no strategies to achieve this goal, he did believe that the poor would revolt against the wealthy.[24] Even within Europe one can point to earlier authors who advocated the abolition of the state and property in favor of a free society based on communal ownership, such as the radical Christian Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth century.[25]
The history of anti-statist thought includes not only a long list of dead authors, but also the large numbers of people who have lived in, or do live in, stateless societies around the world. This is something that historical anarchists were themselves aware of.[26] The available anthropological evidence indicates that these people do not live in stateless societies by chance. They have, just like people who live under states, developed political philosophies about the kind of society they want to live in, and intentionally implemented these ideas throughout the course of their lives. They are aware that someone could establish themselves as ruler of the group and have, within the limits established by their ecological and social context, consciously and deliberately created social structures to prevent this from happening. This generally goes alongside an awareness of nearby societies with states. A striking illustration of this point is that, on numerous occasions, stateless societies have been created by people who have deliberately fled processes of state formation or expansion, such as stateless societies in the uplands of Southeast Asia.[27]
Members of stateless societies have developed a variety of complex social relations and arrangements in order to realize their conscious political goals and ethical values. These include: making collective decisions through consensus, between all involved; ensuring that leaders lack the power to impose decisions on others through coercion and must instead persuade people to act in a certain way, through oratory skill alone; and utilizing various forms of social sanction to respond to behavior that threatens the freedom or equality of the group, such as bullying, being greedy, issuing orders, taking on airs of superiority, engaging in acts of physical violence, and so on. These social sanctions include, but are not limited to, criticism, gossiping, public ridicule, ignoring what they say, ostracism, expulsion from the group, and even, in some extreme cases, execution.[28]
The many different forms of stateless societies that have existed, and continue to exist, around the world should not be romanticized and viewed as utopias. Even societies without a state or a ruling class can contain other kinds of oppressive social relations, such as the oppression of children by adults or women by men. Nor should the stateless societies that anthropologists have studied be viewed as straightforward windows into the past or living fossils of what human life was like prior to the emergence of states. The members of these societies do not live in the paleolithic or the neolithic but the modern world. Their social relations have been shaped by, and are part of, modern history, including the history of colonialism.[29] Matters are only made more complicated by the fact that a significant number of stateless societies move between very different forms of social organization on a seasonal basis.[30]
In claiming that “anarchism” refers to a form of anti-state socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, I am not denying the existence of other political philosophies that have advocated a free, stateless society prior to, in parallel with, or after the emergence of anarchism. Although this book aims to demonstrate the intellectual sophistication of historical anarchist political theory, I also believe that modern anarchism can greatly improve through engaging with these other political traditions and learning valuable insights and lessons from them. My point is only that the term “anarchism” should not be used to refer to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.
This is motivated by two main reasons. First, throughout the history of socialism, multiple theorists and social movements have advocated the long-term goal of abolishing the state and all systems of class rule in favor of a society of free producers, such as Louis Auguste Blanqui or all of Marxism.[31] If a transhistoricist wishes to label such figures as Bao Jingyan an “anarchist” due to their advocacy of a free stateless society without rulers, then they must, in order to be consistent, also refer to Blanqui and all of Marxism as “anarchists.” Doing so would be a mistake given that self-identified anarchists opposed these other forms of socialism on the grounds that they, unlike anarchists, advocated the conquest of state power as a means to achieve human emancipation. This includes not only individuals who anarchists had polemical debates with, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but also leaders of states who were responsible for the imprisonment, deportation, murder, and repression of anarchists, such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. Given this, any definition of anarchism must include strategies to achieve social change within its criteria and cannot define anarchism solely in terms of its goal.
The second reason to reject transhistorical definitions of anarchism is that they are historically anachronistic. The many different people who have advocated the abolition of the state or rulership throughout human history did not refer to themselves as “anarchists” or belong to a social movement that called itself “anarchist.” At no point did they establish a historically contingent configuration of elements that were understood by people at the time to be what “anarchism” is. An author like Winstanley will not tell a historian anything about what “anarchism” as a historically produced entity means. A study of Winstanley’s 1649 <em>The True Levellers Standard Advanced</em> instead informs a historian about the political ideology that Winstanley understood himself to be an advocate of: the Diggers. To categorize Winstanley as an “anarchist ” is to anachronistically impose a later category onto him rather than understand him on his own terms.[32]
Although adopting a historicist approach significantly limits the scope of who can be considered an anarchist, it is not sufficient to develop a useful definition of anarchism for the purposes of studying it as a coherent political theory. This is because, during its history as a concept, people with fundamentally different commitments have called themselves anarchists and engaged in processes of contestation with one another over what anarchism is or should be. A brief and condensed summary of this history is as follows.
*** From Anarchy to Anarchism
The term “anarchist” was sometimes used as an insult during the English Civil War and the French Revolution.[33] It did not refer to a distinct political ideology until it was adopted by antistate socialists in the nineteenth century within the context of industrialization, and the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state (henceforth referred to as the state) as a global economic and political system. The earliest known occurrence of this was in 1840, when the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared himself an “anarchist” in his book <em>What is Property?</em> He defined “<em>Anarchy</em>” as “the absence of a master” and argued that the “highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.”[34] It is important to note that Proudhon was not consistent with his vocabulary and sometimes used the word “anarchy” to signify chaos and disorder.[35] On other occasions, Proudhon labeled himself an advocate of “mutuality,” “mutualism,” and “the mutualist system.”[36] This was a term that Proudhon borrowed from a previously existing social movement among silkworkers in Lyon.[37]
During the 1840s, Proudhon advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of a decentralized market socialist society in which the means of production and land were owned in common. In such a society, workers, either as individual producers or voluntary collective associations, would possess, but not own, the means of production and land that they personally used or occupied. To possess a resource was to have the right to control it. As a result, Proudhon envisioned a society where workers self-managed the organization of production and exchanged the products of their labor with one another.[38] This was to be achieved through a process of gradual and peaceful social change. From the late 1840s onward, Proudhon advocated the strategy of workers forming cooperatives with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank, at low or no interest. He thought that, over time, these cooperatives could grow in number, trade with one another, and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established.[39]
Between the 1840s and 1860s, Proudhon’s version of anti-state market socialism influenced a number of individuals in the United States and Europe who also came to refer to themselves as mutualists.[40] Although these mutualists agreed with Proudhon’s broad vision of socialism and his strategy of forming cooperatives funded by loans from a people’s bank, they also had ideas of their own, were influenced by other authors such as Josiah Warren, and argued with one another about a wide variety of topics.[41] Some of those influenced by Proudhon adopted the language of “anarchy” and “anarchist.” For example, in France the journalist Anselme Bellegarrigue wrote and published a short-lived journal called <em>Anarchy, A Journal of Order</em> in 1850. In the first issue of the journal he wrote, “I am an anarchist,” and insisted that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”[42] Around the same time a young Élisée Reclus, who would go onto become an important geographer and member of the anarchist movement, wrote an unpublished essay in order to clarify his thoughts. In it, he advocated the abolition of economic competition and “the tutelage of a government” in favor of socialism and “the absence of government… anarchy, the highest expression of order.”[43]
An especially significant contribution was made by Joseph Déjacque, who was born in France and moved to the United States in the early 1850s. He not only repeated Proudhon’s language of “anarchy” and “anarchist” but was also the earliest known person to self-identify as an advocate of “anarchism.” Déjacque was the first person to use the word “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist” as well. In the August 18, 1859, edition of his paper <em>Le Libertaire</em>, he defined “anarchism” as the abolition of government, property, religion, and the family in favor of liberty, equality, solidarity, and the right to work and love.[44] In contrast to Proudhon and mutualism in general, Déjacque advocated the long-term goals of common ownership of the products of labor, distribution according to need, and the emancipation of women from patriarchy.[45]
In order to achieve these goals, the ruling classes had to be overthrown. Déjacque proposed that this could be achieved via the violent strategy of mass armed insurrections and small secret societies assassinating capitalists and governors.[46] Although Déjacque advocated the abolition of government, he thought that, given the current ideas and abilities of workers, a revolution would not establish anarchy immediately. There would instead be a period of transition in which decisions were made by workers themselves through universal and “direct legislation” within “the most democratic form of government.”[47] Déjacque’s proposed democratic government was constituted by self-governing communes of 50,000 people in which laws were passed by majority vote and government administrators were elected and recallable. The police were to be randomly selected by lottery and rotated over time such that everyone would engage in policing and there would be “no police outside the people.”[48] Those who broke the law would be subject to trial by jury and an elected magistrate. A person found guilty by an unanimous decision of the jury would not be executed or imprisoned—since the “prison” and the “scaffold” were “government monstrosities”—but would instead only be subject to “moral or material reparation” or “banishment.”[49] Over time, people would develop new and better ways of organizing society until government had been completely abolished and anarchy had been realized.
In parallel to these ideological developments, various organizations were formed by the working classes to achieve their emancipation and foster cooperation between workers of different countries.[50] In September 1864, this culminated in the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (henceforth referred to as the First International) at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London. The International included a wide variety of different kinds of socialists, and this led to a great deal of debate about what aims and strategies the organization should adopt. At the 1869 Basel Congress, the majority of delegates voted in favor of the collective ownership of land as a goal. This was opposed by a minority of mutualists who, while advocating the collective ownership of the means of production, thought that land should be individually owned by those who occupied it. The socialists who advocated the collective ownership of land referred to themselves as collectivists or advocates of collectivism. Some collectivists continued to think of themselves as mutualists.[51]
During this period, a tendency emerged within the collectivist wing of the International that rejected participation in parliamentary politics and attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power. They, despite being influenced by Proudhon, dithered from mutualism and advocated revolutionary trade unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[52] This tendency referred to itself, and was referred to by others, using a variety of labels. This included not only <em>collectivist</em> but also <em>federalist</em>, <em>revolutionary socialist</em>, and <em>anarchist</em>. Between the mid-1870s and early 1880s, the labels of <em>anarchist</em> and <em>anarchism</em> became increasingly prominent until they were the dominant terms for this social movement.[53] A number of individuals and groups continued to also use alternative language, such as <em>autonomist</em>, <em>libertarian</em>, <em>libertarian socialist</em>, and <em>libertarian communist</em>.[54]
The anarchist tendency within the First International was primarily located within Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, and the Jura region of Switzerland. It began to form a distinct social movement during a series of congresses held in Spain (Barcelona June 1870, Valencia September 1871), Switzerland (La Chaux-de-Fonds April 1870, Sonvilier November 1871), and Italy (Rimini August 1872). During these congresses, delegates passed resolutions that rejected the strategy of achieving socialism via parliamentarism specifically and the conquest of state power in general. From November 1871 onward, congress resolutions were passed that opposed Marx and Engels’s attempt to convert the General Council of the First International, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections. Marx and Engels thought this was necessary due to their false belief that Bakunin was secretly conspiring to take over the International and impose his anarchist program onto it.[55]
The conflict between the opponents and supporters of the General Council culminated in the International’s September 1872 Hague Congress.[56] During this congress, resolutions were passed by majority vote that expelled the anarchists Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International, relocated the General Council from London to New York, and committed the organization to the goal of constituting the working class into a political party aimed at the conquest of political power. Marx and Engels achieved this majority by nefarious means. This included requesting blank mandates from various sections that did not specify who the delegate was or how they should vote. These blank mandates were then sent to supporters of the General Council. In multiple instances, these supporters even had their travel expenses paid for by Marx and Engels in order to ensure that they attended the congress. Several of the groups that issued blank mandates or pro–General Council mandates did not really exist as actual sections of the International, and had been created for the sole purpose of issuing a mandate at Marx and Engels’s request. The resolutions of the Hague Congress were subsequently rejected by the Jura, French, Belgian, Italian, Dutch, English, and Spanish sections of the International on the grounds that they had been passed by a fake majority and violated each section’s autonomy to determine its own strategy and program.[57]
Shortly after the end of the Hague Congress, delegates representing the Spanish, French, Italian, Jura, and American sections of the International met at a congress in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. In organizing this congress, which was held on September 15 and 16, 1872, the sections did not think they were forming a new distinct organization that split from the First International. They were rather, from their point of view, merely reorganizing or reconstituting the International on its original federalist basis. In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to this organization as the Saint-Imier International but it should be kept in mind that this is anachronistic.[58]
During this congress, the delegates voted in favor of four resolutions. The first resolution rejected every resolution of the Hague Congress and the authority of the new General Council in New York. The second resolution declared a pact of mutual defense, solidarity, and friendship between the sections that attended the meeting and any section that subsequently wished to join. This pact consisted of a commitment to be in regular correspondence with one another and to stand in solidarity with any section whose freedom was violated by either government repression or the impositions of an authoritarian General Council. The only distinctly anarchist resolutions were the third and fourth. They advocated a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state simultaneously and established the free federation of free producers. This transformation of society was to be achieved by workers themselves organized within trade unions and autonomous communes. It was proposed that workers in the present should build toward the social revolution by organizing strikes. These forms of class struggle were advocated because they caused workers to develop an awareness of their distinct class interests, taught workers to act for themselves, and increased the power of workers against capitalists. Strikes prepared workers for the social revolution and established, or expanded, the systems of organization through which workers could successfully overthrow the ruling classes and reorganize production and distribution. The resolutions rejected the strategy of attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power, because it would result in workers being dominated and exploited by a new minority of rulers who actually exercised state power, rather than the abolition of all systems of class rule.[59]
For several members of the historical anarchist movement, anarchism did not exist during the 1840s and 50s. Instead anarchism, as they understood it, first emerged within the First International and Saint-Imier International. In 1922, Luigi Fabbri referred to “the whole fifty-year history of anarchism” and so dated the birth of anarchism to 1872.[60] A similar position was articulated by Malatesta on numerous occasions. In 1899, he wrote that “we, anarchist socialists, have existed as a separate party, with essentially the same program, since 1868, when Bakunin founded the <em>Alliance</em>… and we were the founders and soul of the anti-authoritarian wing of the ‘International Working Men’s Association.’”[61] In 1907, Malatesta claimed that “the first anarchists” belonged to “the international.”[62] He later wrote that “Anarchism was born” with the adoption of the resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress in September 1872 and thereby transitioned from the “individual thought of a few isolated men” into “the collective principle of groups distributed all over the world.”[63]
It should nonetheless be kept in mind that the Saint-Imier International was not an exclusively anarchist organization. The founding congress was attended by anarchist delegates representing Spain, France, Italy, and the Jura region of Switzerland, but it also included the delegate for America, Gustave Lefrançais, who, despite being a survivor of the Paris Commune, was not strictly speaking an anarchist. The organization soon grew to include a minority of state socialists from England, Germany, and Belgium. This led to a series of heated debates about strategy and the vision of the future society at the 1873, 1874, and 1876 congresses.[64]
The pluralist nature of the organization can be seen in the fact that the founding 1872 resolutions declared that each section had the right to decide for itself what form of political struggle they engaged in and that it was “presumptuous,” “reactionary,” and “absurd” to impose “one line of conduct as the single path that might lead to its social emancipation.”[65] This position was reaffirmed at the 1874 congress, where the delegates voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that each section should decide for itself whether or not to engage in parliamentary struggle. It was not until the final 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, which was attended by delegates representing anarchist groups in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Greece, and Egypt, that the delegates were exclusively anarchist due to state socialists having left the organization. Anarchist-led sections in Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay had affiliated with the Saint-Imier International but did not send delegates to the congress due to the distance.[66]
During the Verviers Congress, the anarchist delegates passed a series of resolutions that completely separated them from state socialism and thereby established anarchism as a fully distinct social movement, rather than one tendency within a pluralist International.[67] The anarchist delegates declared that their goal was the self-abolition of the proletariat through an international social revolution that overthrew capitalism, via the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes. They proposed that the private property of capitalism should be replaced by the collective ownership of land and the means of production by federations of producers themselves, rather than state ownership and control of the economy. To achieve this, they advocated revolutionary trade unionism and rejected forming political parties that engaged in parliamentary politics.[68]
In many respects, the Verviers resolutions were almost the same as the resolutions adopted five years previously at Saint-Imier. There was one crucial difference. The delegates at Saint-Imier had qualified their critique of achieving socialism via the conquest of state power with a commitment to different views on political struggle coexisting within the same pluralist International. The resolutions of Verviers were, in comparison, actively hostile to state socialism. They declared that society is divided into two main classes with distinct class interests: workers and capitalists. The state exists to defend the interests of capitalists and economic privilege in general. As a result, the state, irrespective of which political party wields its power, cannot be used to abolish class society and will instead reproduce it. The goal of emancipation can only be achieved by workers themselves directly engaging in class struggle.[69] Given this: “Congress declares that there is no difference between <em>political</em> parties, whether they are called socialist or not, all these parties without distinction forming in its eyes one reactionary mass and it sees its duty as fighting all of them. It hopes that workers who still travel in the ranks of these various parties, instructed by lessons from experience and by revolutionary propaganda, will open their eyes and abandon the way of politics to adopt that of revolutionary socialism.”[70]
The theory and practice of the anarchist movement were not invented by a single founding father who developed the ideology in full and then transmitted it to workers. Anarchism was instead cocreated over several years by an international social network that formulated its common program through a process of debate and discussion in newspapers, pamphlets, books, formal congresses, informal meetings, and letters between key militants. This social network was mostly composed of workers, such as Jean-Louis Pindy and Adhémar Schwitzguébel, and a few formally educated individuals from privileged backgrounds, such as Bakunin and Carlo Cafiero.[71] This point was understood by later anarchists. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad declared that “anarchism was born, not of the abstract deliberations of some sage or philosopher, but out of the direct struggle waged by the toilers against Capital, out of the toilers’ needs and requirements, their aspirations toward liberty and equality.… Anarchism’s leading thinkers: Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it among the masses, they merely helped refine and propagate it through the excellence of their thinking and their learning.”[72]
*** How Collectivists Became Anarchists
The history of how anarchism as a social movement arose is not only the history of how its program was formulated. It also includes the history of how, and why, a tendency within the First International came to refer to themselves as “anarchists” in the first place. It is necessary to establish in detail how this happened because it clarifies the relationship between the anarchism of Proudhon, who in 1840 was the first person to self-identify as an anarchist, and the anarchism of the social movement that emerged from the late 1860s onward. In 1880, Kropotkin claimed that:
<quote>
When in the heart of the International there rose up a party that fought against authority in all its forms, that party first took on the name of the federalist party, then called itself <em>anti-statist</em> or <em>anti-authoritarian</em>. At that epoch it even avoided assuming the name of anarchist. The word <em>an-archy</em> (as it was written then) might have attached the party too closely to the Proudhonians, whose ideas of economic reform the International then combated. But it was precisely to create confusion that the adversaries of the anti-authoritarians took pleasure in using the name.[73]
</quote>
Nonetheless, as Kropotkin noted, anarchists came to accept the name. As he pointed out in 1910, “the name of ‘anarchists,’ which their adversaries insisted upon applying to them, prevailed, and finally it was revindicated.”[74]
One potential problem with Kropotkin’s narrative is that Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in September 1867 in “The Slavic Question,” which was printed in the Italian paper <em>Freedom and Justice</em>. He wrote in response to Pan-Slavists that “they are unitarians at all costs, always preferring public order to freedom and I am an anarchist and prefer freedom to public order.”[75] Crucially, this was written before Bakunin had even joined the First International in June or July 1868.[76] A few years later, Bakunin referred to himself as an “anarchist” in private in his 1870 letter to Sergei Nechaev and his unsent October 1872 letter to the editors of <em>La Liberté</em>.[77]
Bakunin continued to use this language in his published 1873 book <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>. In it, he labeled the opponents of German state communists as “anti-state socialists, or anarchists” and endorsed what he called “the <em>anarchist</em> social revolution.”[78] He wrote that “we revolutionary anarchists are proponents of universal popular education, liberation, and the broad development of social life, and hence are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood.… Those are the convictions of social revolutionaries, and for them we are called anarchists. We do not object to this term because we are in fact the enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it.”[79]
It is difficult to determine how much impact Bakunin’s decision in <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> to refer to himself and the movement he belonged to as “anarchist” had on the language of anti-state socialists within the Saint-Imier International. This is because <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> was the only major revolutionary socialist text written by Bakunin in Russian, rather than French, and almost all of the 1,200 copies that were printed in Switzerland were smuggled to St. Petersburg and distributed among Russian revolutionary circles.[80] In other texts, Bakunin used different language. For example, in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” which was written in 1871 and published posthumously in 1878, he referred to the movement he belonged to as “collectivists” and “revolutionary socialists.”[81] Even in <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> he also referred to anarchists as “revolutionary socialists.”[82]
It is rare to find other examples of people identifying as “anarchists” between 1867–1871. One notable example is the September 1871 declaration of principles written by the Geneva Section of Socialist Atheists. Its members referred to themselves as “Anarchists” who sought the abolition of the state and “the autonomy of the individual and of the commune,” which were to be achieved without “participation in politics, for to destroy the state, we cannot use the same means as those who support it.”[83] On other occasions, the term “anarchist” was used to refer to federalist systems of organization, rather than a specific ideology or movement. For example, on December 31, 1871, the Spanish section of the First International reprinted the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular” with their own preface. This preface claimed that the First International had an “anarchist constitution,” despite the fact that the constitution was not committed to what would soon be regarded as core anarchist principles, such as the abolition of the state or abstention from parliamentary politics.[84]
The fact that people did not widely refer to themselves as “anarchist” during this period is demonstrated by the resolutions of the September 1871 London conference of the First International. The resolutions forbid sections from designating “themselves by sectarian names such as Positivists, Mutualists, Collectivists, Communists, etc.,” but did not include “Anarchists” within the list.[85] If the label “anarchist” was already being widely used by anti-state socialists in late 1871, Marx and Engels, who wrote the resolutions, would have included the term in their list of forbidden section names, especially since they did include the anti-state socialist label “collectivist.” That the term “anarchist” was not widely used in early 1870s Switzerland is confirmed by Kropotkin’s eyewitness testimony in his autobiography. He recalled that, in early 1872, when he visited the Swiss sections of the First International, “the name ‘anarchist’ was not much in use then.”[86] In 1899, Malatesta similarly remembered that, around 1868, “Bakunin came onto the scene, bringing with him the ideas that would later be called anarchist.”[87] Anarchists in Italy initially just referred to themselves as socialists, because they were the first socialist movement in the country.[88]
The adoption of the term “anarchist” became increasingly common in the build up to and aftermath of the First International’s September 1872 Hague Congress. In Spain, Francisco Tomás wrote, on September 8, 1872, that the First International was divided between two main factions:
<quote>
one founded in unitary and centralist principles, and the other in the principles of anti-authoritarianism and federalism. The former has as its aim the organization of the International as a political party and as its purpose the conquest of political power. The latter has as its aim the organization of all workers to demolish all the institutions of this corrupt society and the abolition of political-legal-authoritarian conditions providing a free worldwide federation of free associations of free producers. The Spanish Federation is in the ranks of the latter, that is, anarchist collectivism.[89]
</quote>
This is not to say that all anti-state socialists adopted the term “anarchist” when the Saint-Imier International was founded in September 1872. There was a great deal of debate and discussion around labels. Reclus, who first publicly called himself an anarchist in March 1876, argued in 1878 that the terms “anarchy” and “anarchist” should be adopted by the movement due to the etymology of the words, and the fact that supporters and opponents were already using the words to refer to them. This is an argument Reclus would not have felt the need to make if there was already a consensus within the movement about the terms.[90]
One of the main opponents of the term was Guillaume. Although he had declared his socialism to be “an-archist” in August 1870, he had changed his mind by January 1872. He wrote: “We have been wrong to use, without closely examining it, the terminology of Proudhon, from which we drew those famous words, <em>abstention</em> and <em>an-archy</em>.… As to the word <em>anarchy</em>, I have never liked it, and I have always asked that it be replaced by <em>federation of autonomous communes</em>.”[91] Guillaume rejected “anarchist” because of its negative connotations and preferred to continue to use the term “collectivists,” which had been used during the First International’s congresses in Brussels (1868) and Basel (1869) to refer to advocates of the collective ownership of land.[92] The first usage of the word “collectivism” had itself, according to Guillaume, been in the early September 1869 issue of his paper <em>Le Progrès</em>.[93] In 1876, Guillaume wrote in the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em>:
<quote>
The words <em>anarchy</em> and <em>anarchists</em> are, in our eyes and in those of many of our friends, words we should stop using, because they only express a negative idea without giving any positive theory, and they lend themselves to unfortunate misrepresentations. No “anarchic program” has ever been formulated, as far as we know.… But there is a <em>collectivist</em> theory, articulated in the congresses of the International, and that’s the one we associate with, as do our friends from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Russia.[94]
</quote>
The label “anarchist” became increasingly common despite Guillaume’s opposition. In December 1876, Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero wrote a letter to the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em> in which they reported that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International was committed to an “anarchist, collectivist, revolutionary program.”[95] In his history of the International, Guillaume revealed that the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em> did not consciously adopt the label “anarchist” until April 1877.[96] A few months later, in July, the <em>Bulletin</em> referred to itself as belonging to “the revolutionary anarchist party.” In August, the French section of the Saint-Imier International held a congress where they adopted what they referred to as a “collectivist and anarchist program.”[97]
Even after 1876, the widespread adoption of the terms “anarchist” and “anarchism” did not happen overnight but took several years. As late as 1880, what would become the German-speaking anarchist movement in the United States had yet to adopt the label of anarchism. They instead referred to themselves as social revolutionaries in order to distinguish themselves from parliamentary social democrats. By December 1882, they had altered their language and were now declaring themselves in favor of anarchism.[98] The widespread decision to adopt this language in the 1880s appears to have occurred independently of Déjacque’s previous usage of the term during the 1850s. The available evidence indicates that Déjacque was not widely known among anarchists until the 1890s. This can be seen in the fact that Max Nettlau’s first article on Déjacque was only published in 1890 in the German anarchist paper <em>Freiheit</em>.[99] Jean Grave’s republication of Déjacque’s book <em>L’Humanisphère</em> did not occur until 1899.[100] In 1910, Kropotkin referred to this text as having been only “lately discovered and reprinted.”[101]
The social movement that emerged within the First International came to adopt the labels “anarchist” and “anarchism” through a complex and contingent historical process. This, in turn, raises the question: why did they end up adopting these words? They could, after all, have invented a new term or continued to use other terms, such as federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist. A clue to this puzzle can be found in the September 3, 1876, edition of the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em>. An article distinguished between “those whose ideal is a popular state” and “the fraction that is called anarchist,” rather than the fraction that calls itself anarchist.[102] A month later, the editor of the paper, Guillaume, gave a speech at the October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. In it, he claimed that they were usually called “anarchists or Bakuninists” by their political opponents.[103]
Two of their main political opponents were Marx and Engels. Throughout their correspondence during the 1870s they usually referred to the collectivists as “Bakuninists.”[104] This label was rejected by the collectivists because, as Malatesta explained in 1876, “we do not share all the practical and theoretical ideas of Bakunin” and “follow ideas, not men… we reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man.”[105] Bakunin himself agreed. He wrote in his 1873 resignation letter from the Jura Federation that “the ‘Bakuninist label’… was thrown in your face” by “our enemies,” but “you always knew, perfectly well, that your tendencies, opinions and actions arose entirely consciously, in spontaneous independence.”[106]
The other term Marx and Engels publicly used during the early 1870s was “anarchists.” To take a few examples: in their May 1872 pamphlet <em>Fictitious Split in the International</em>, they labeled the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular” as “the anarchist decree”; Engels described the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International as “anarchists” in his July 1873 article, “From the International”; they sarcastically referred to “Saint-Michael Bakunin” as an “anarchist” and his ideas as “the anarchist gospel” in <em>The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association</em>, which was published between August and September 1873.[107]
It is important to note that Marx and Engels referred to the Jura Federation as “anarchists” in May 1872, which was prior to most collectivists referring to themselves with the term. A key reason why Marx and Engels referred to the self-described federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists as “anarchists” was because they wrongly believed their views to be a simple rehashing of Proudhon. In November 1871, Marx wrote a letter to Friedrich Bolte in which he claimed that Bakunin’s views were “scraped together from Proudhon, St. Simon, etc.” and that Bakunin’s “main dogma” was “(Proudhonist) abstention from the political movement.”[108] In January 1872, Engels described Bakunin’s ideas as “a potpourri of Proudhonism and communism” in a letter to Theodor Cuno.[109]
The decision by individuals within the movement to adopt the “anarchist” label was not inevitable and occurred to a significant extent by chance. They could have continued to call themselves the federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist movement. Guillaume could have successfully persuaded a large number of people to not refer to themselves as anarchists. They could have called themselves Bakuninists or invented a whole new label. One of the main reasons they adopted the term “anarchist” was that they were borrowing language from Proudhon. But this was not the only reason. Other people within the First International, in particular Marx and Engels, choose to call them “anarchists” due to the belief that they had the same politics as Proudhon. This led to a situation where the federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists had to decide if they were going to adopt the label as their own.
It should not be automatically assumed that Proudhon and the collectivists of the First International belonged to the same political tradition because they both called themselves “anarchists.” It cannot be assumed that the collectivists would have ever used the term in such large numbers if it had not been imposed on them by their political opponents, and if there had been no feud with the General Council. If they are to be viewed as belonging to the same political tradition, it must be because of the ideas, rather than just the language that they held in common.
It is true that both Proudhon and the collectivists advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of the free federation of free producers.[110] Anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin were deeply influenced by Proudhon.[111] The fact that Proudhon and the collectivists were both anti-state socialists does not, however, entail that they belonged to a single political tradition. Malatesta remarked in 1897 that although “Proudhon… first popularized, though amid a thousand contradictions, the idea of abolishing the State and organizing society anarchically,” it was “Bakunin to whom we anarchists of today trace most directly our lineage.”[112] Bakunin had himself been careful to describe the politics of First International collectivism as being “the widely developed and pushed to the limit Proudhonism,” rather than a mere repetition.[113] He was deeply critical of what he took to be aspects of Proudhon’s thought.[114] In <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> he asserted that “there is a good deal of truth in the merciless critique” Marx “directed against Proudhon.”[115] He described his own politics as “the anarchic system of Proudhon broadened and developed by us and freed from all its metaphysical, idealist and doctrinaire baggage, accepting matter and social economy as the basis of all development in science and history.”[116]
One of the main topics on which the collectivists differed from Proudhon was strategy. This is extremely important because, as noted above, socialists who called themselves “anarchists” were not distinguished from other kinds of socialism by advocating the abolition of the state. This was a long-term goal of several different kinds of state socialists, including Blanqui, Marx, and Engels. Anarchism must be defined in terms of both its goal and the strategies it proposed to reach this goal.
Proudhon, like mutualists in general, rejected the idea of transforming society through violent insurrection while nonetheless viewing himself as a revolutionary. During the late 1840s, as already mentioned, he held that capitalism and the state could be gradually abolished through a process of workers forming cooperatives that would, with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank at low or no interest, grow in number, trade with one another and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established. The collectivists, in contrast, viewed Proudhon’s strategy to achieve fundamental social change as misguided, since cooperatives would be out-competed by larger capitalist businesses (aided by government economic intervention); become like capitalist businesses due to pressure from market forces; or merely improve the living conditions of a small number of workers. If a cooperative movement became so successful that it was a genuine threat to ruling class power, then it would simply be crushed by state violence. According to collectivists, class society could only be abolished through the working classes launching a violent armed insurrection that smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the means of production and land from the ruling classes.[117]
This key difference on strategy could justify three distinct ways of conceptualizing anarchism: (a) Proudhon and the collectivists represent subdivisions within anarchism as a single political tradition; (b) Proudhon was an anarchist and the collectivists were not anarchists due to diverging from Proudhon; (c) Proudhon was not an anarchist and the term “anarchism” should only be used to refer to the social movement that emerged in the First International. These three potential conceptualizations of Proudhon’s relationship to anarchism rest on the implicit premise that there is one true anarchism that Proudhon is or is not a part of. There is no one true anarchism. There is instead a series of distinct “anarchisms” that arose during the nineteenth century as different people at different historical moments articulated what they thought the words “anarchist” and/or “anarchism” meant or should mean.
In 1840, the term “anarchist” picked out Proudhon’s political theory for the simple reason that Proudhon decided to call himself an anarchist. The term was subsequently used by a variety of socialists in the 1840s and 1850s to refer to the goal of a society without government or authority. This included Déjacque referring to his ideas as “anarchism” in the late 1850s while advocating what he regarded as a democratic government during the transition to a fully stateless society. Between 1868 and 1880, what the words “anarchist” and “anarchism” were understood to mean changed. This occurred due to an international social network within the First International and Saint-Imier International who were influenced by Proudhon, developing a distinct revolutionary political theory that they called anarchism but could have continued calling federalism, collectivism, autonomism, or revolutionary socialism.
What matters for the purposes of studying anarchism as a historical concept is that Proudhon’s anarchism and the anarchism of the movement are viewed as distinct entities. Whether one chooses to conceptualize this as: (a) different phases of a single political tradition, or (b) a new political tradition developing out of a previous one does not change the differences between them. These are only alternative ways of viewing the differences. Given my focus on the revolutionary strategy of anarchism, I shall from now on be using the term “anarchism” to refer exclusively to the theory and practice of the anarchist movement, and not its intellectual precursors that can be found during the 1840s and 1850s.
*** The Anarchist Movement
Who did and did not belong to the anarchist movement is itself a controversial topic. This is because the social movement that emerged within the First International and the Saint-Imier International between 1864 and 1878 was not the only group of people to adopt the term during this period. In parallel to these developments, a small group of mutualists in the United States continued to advocate anti-state market socialism achieved through gradual peaceful means. From the early 1880s onward, they consciously adopted Proudhon’s label of “anarchist” as their own.[118] Although they were largely an American phenomenon, they did also gain a few adherents in Europe.[119]
This led to a situation in which two forms of anti-state socialism, which had both been influenced by Proudhon’s ideas and referred to themselves as “anarchists,” coexisted with one another. On the one side, anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists, and on the other side, individualist anarchists. The fact that they fundamentally disagreed with one another on such topics as their visions of a future society and strategies to achieve social change led to further contestation over what “anarchism” should mean. Both sides sometimes argued that they alone were the true anarchists, and their opponents were fake, pseudo, or inconsistent anarchists. The influential individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, for example, gave a talk at the Boston Anarchist Club in November 1887. He drew a distinction between “real Anarchists like P. J. Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner” and “miscalled Anarchists like Kropotkine,” who had wrongly “usurped the name of Anarchism for its own propaganda.”[120] The German individualist anarchist John Henry Mackay shared this attitude and argued that anarchism and communism were incompatible with one another.[121]
Similar remarks can be found among anarchist communists. The English paper <em>Freedom</em> published an editorial in 1892 that argued that “individualists,” such as Tucker, “are not Anarchists” because they advocate market competition and so “lack the fundamental principle of Socialism and Anarchism—solidarity.”[122] Reclus wrote in an 1895 letter that “the only resemblance between individualist anarchists and us is that of a name.”[123] In 1914, Kropotkin argued that “an Individualist, if he intends to remain Individualist, cannot be an Anarchist” because “Anarchy necessarily is <em>Communist</em>.”[124]
On other occasions, there were attempts at tolerance, cooperation, and even combining collectivist/communist anarchism and individualist anarchism together. To give a few examples, Kropotkin and Rocker included individualist anarchists in their summaries of anarchist history.[125] The American bookbinder Dyer D. Lum advocated the broad goal of American individualist anarchists—stateless market socialism—achieved via the strategy of anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists—trade unionism and armed insurrection.[126] The anarchist paper <em>The Alarm</em>, which Lum edited, published both individualist anarchist and anarchist-communist authors. In 1889, the anarchist-communist Johann Most reacted to this by verbally attacking Lum for publishing individualist anarchist views and insisted that, as a result of this, German workers should cancel their subscriptions to the paper.[127] In response to these kinds of conflicts, Max Nettlau argued in 1914 that anarchist communists and individualist anarchists should cease to be dogmatic and learn to coexist and cooperate with one another, rather than “being divided into little chapels.”[128] This idea was repeated in the 1920s, when Sébastian Faure and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, who wrote under the pen name Voline, attempted to form anarchist federations that would unite individualist anarchists, anarchist communists, and anarcho-syndicalists into a single organization and develop a new form of anarchism that would be a synthesis of each tendency’s best ideas.[129]
This topic is only made more complicated by the fact that what “individualist anarchism” even meant varied between contexts. Within Italian anarchism, a tendency developed during the 1880s and 1890s that referred to itself as “individualist anarchism.” In contrast to other self-described individualist anarchists, it was committed to the goal of anarchist communism, opposed formal organization, and advocated the strategy of individuals engaging in robberies, assassinations, and bombings.[130] This distinction can be seen in Malatesta’s 1897 remark that there are “the individualist anarchists of Tucker’s school” and “the individualist anarchists of the communist school.”[131]
The different varieties of individualist anarchism in Europe and the United States also changed over time. For example, during the 1890s, the individualist anarchist writer Mackay popularized the previously obscure German philosopher Max Stirner. These ideas, in turn, influenced wider circles of individualist anarchists when editions of Stirner’s 1844 book <em>The Unique and Its Property</em> appeared in multiple languages from the early 1900s onward, including English, Italian, French, and Russian.[132] Mackay went so far as to rewrite the history of anarchism and claim that Stirner, who never referred to himself as an anarchist, was one of its main founders alongside Proudhon.[133]
The fact that several different and incompatible tendencies adopted the language of “individualist anarchism” is important for understanding Malatesta’s various remarks on the topic. In 1897, he critiqued “those who, in calling themselves individualists, see that as justification for any repugnant action, and who have about as much to do with anarchism as the police do with the public order they boast to protect.”[134] In response to such self-appointed “individualist anarchists,” Malatesta had argued a year earlier that, since “we cannot stop others adopting whatever title they choose,” our only option is to “differentiate ourselves clearly from those whose notion of anarchy differs from our own.”[135] In 1924, Malatesta continued to claim that some self-appointed “individualist anarchists” were not in fact anarchists, while advocating tolerance toward “individualists” who “are really anarchists.”[136] He even recommended a book by the French individualist anarchist E. Armand and described him as “one of the ablest individualist anarchists.”[137]
Given this history, there is no neutral and uncontested definition of the anarchist movement. What people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century took anarchism to mean was a product of ongoing debates and discussion between groups who all claimed to be anarchists but had conflicting and incompatible views on both what anarchism meant and who was and was not a genuine anarchist. Although it is impossible to find a neutral and entirely uncontested definition of anarchism, it is possible to pick out contingents that represented one side within the process of contestation over what anarchism meant and to view anarchism from their point of view.
For the purposes of this book, anarchism will be defined as a form of revolutionary anti-state socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the First International between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International, which included anarchist groups in Europe, South America, and Egypt, between 1872 and 1878. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists.
I will not examine the ideas of the intellectual precursors of the anarchist movement who wrote during the 1840s and 50s, such as Proudhon, or the individualist anarchists who operated in parallel with anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists from the 1880s onward. This is motivated by the fact that both Proudhon and individualist anarchists advocated distinct visions of a future society and strategies to achieve the abolition of capitalism and the state. Examining the ideas proposed by every single individual or movement who called themselves anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not possible within the limited space of this book. I am not committing myself to the strong view that Proudhon and the individualist anarchists were not anarchists. My definition of anarchism only specifies the kind of anarchism I will be examining, and does not claim to establish the one true version of anarchism.
[13] For example Peter Marshall, <em>Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism</em> (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 3; David Miller, <em>Anarchism</em> (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1984), 2–3; George Woodcock, <em>Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements,</em> 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 17–18.
[14] Friedrich Nietzsche, <em>On the Genealogy of Morality</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53. For discussions of Nietzsche’s views on definitions, see Lawrence J. Hatab, <em>Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: An Introduction</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–99; Raymond Geuss, <em>History and Illusion in Politics</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–8, 69–72; <em>Morality</em>, <em>Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–14.
[15] Marshall, <em>Demanding the Impossible</em>, xiii–xiv, 3–5, 96–99; John A. Rapp, <em>Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China</em> (London: Continuum Books, 2012), 3–5; Robert Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 2–3.
[16] Marie Fleming, <em>The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism</em> (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979), 15–23; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., <em>Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution</em> (Leiden: Brill, 2010), xxxvi–lv; Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy, ed. Nathan Jun (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 510–15.
[17] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 84, 136. On other occasions, Kropotkin appears to adopt a historicist perspective and defines anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism. For an overview of this topic, see Zoe Baker, <em>Kropotkin’s Definition of Anarchism</em> (forthcoming).
[18] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 9, 3.
[19] Charlotte Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 28, 19. See also, 78.
[20] Errico Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.
[21] Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 13.
[22] Ba Jin, “Anarchism and the Question of Practice,” in <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, <em>From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)</em>, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 362.
[23] Kubo Yuzuru, “On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle,” in Graham, ed., <em>Anarchism</em>, vol. 1, 380.
[24] Rapp, <em>Daoism and Anarchism</em>, 37–40, 227–29.
[25] Gerrard Winstanley, <em>“The Law of Freedom” and other Writings</em>, ed. Christopher Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77–95.
[26] Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 120, 127.
[27] Christopher Boehm, <em>Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10–12; James C. Scott, <em>The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[28] Boehm, <em>Hierarchy in the For</em>est, 43–88, 101–24. This point was previously made, but with less empirical evidence, by Pierre Clastres, <em>Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology</em> (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 7–47, 189–218; Clastres, <em>Archeology of Violence</em> (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), 87–92.
[29] Robert L. Kelly, <em>The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4–7, 15–18, 241–48. There is limited knowledge of what gender relations were like prior to the emergence of writing due to the nature of archaeological evidence. See Marcia-Anne Dobres, “Digging Up Gender in the Earliest Human Societies,” in <em>A Companion to Gender History</em>, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 211–26.
[30] David Graeber and David Wengrow, <em>The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity</em> (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 106–15.
[31] Alan B. Spitzer, <em>The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 173n37; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, <em>Later Political Writings</em>, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20; Vladimir Lenin, <em>Selected Works</em> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 320, 335; Joseph Stalin, <em>Works</em>, vol. 1, <em>1901–1907</em> (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 336–37.
[32] For a summary of the language Winstanley used to refer to himself and his companions, see John Gurney, <em>Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy</em> (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 59–64.
[33] Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em>, 12, 41. Some historical anarchists were themselves aware of its usage during the French Revolution. See Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Great French Revolution</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 346–47, 350–60.
[34] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, <em>What is Property?</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205, 209, 216. See also Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, <em>Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 205, 254, 480, 711. For an overview of Proudhon’s life and ideas see Steven K. Vincent, <em>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism</em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); George Woodcock, <em>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987).
[35] Proudhon, <em>Property is Theft</em>, 61, 609–10, 742, 766.
[36] Proudhon, <em>Property is Theft</em>, 254–55, 291–92, 348, 615–16, 718, 725.
[37] For the history of the term, see Shawn P. Wilbur, “Mutualism,” in <em>The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism</em>, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 213–24; Vincent, <em>Proudhon</em>, 162–64.
[38] Proudhon, <em>What is Property</em>, 65–66, 73, 86, 94, 214–16. For a summary of Proudhon’s vision of a postcapitalist society, see Iain McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, <em>Property is Theft</em>, 28–35.
[39] Proudhon, <em>Property is Theft</em>, 164, 281–93<em>;</em> McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, <em>Property is Theft</em>, 23–28; Vincent, <em>Proudhon</em>, 142–51, 170–74. For the wider context and how Proudhon’s ideas developed during this period, see Edward Castleton, “The Many Revolutions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,” in <em>The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought</em> ed. Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 39–69.
[40] David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 16–17; Julian P.W. Archer, <em>The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact</em> (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 41–47, 66–75; James J. Martin, <em>Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908</em> (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1970), 103–66; Bernard H. Moss, <em>The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 31–52.
[41] Josiah Warren, <em>The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren</em>, ed. Crispin Sartwell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Martin, <em>Men Against the State</em>, 1–102.
[42] Anselme Bellegarrigue, “Anarchy, A Journal of Order,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Anarchist Library website, [[http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anselme-bellegarrigue-the-world-s-first-anarchist-manifesto]].
[43] Élisée Reclus, “The Development of Liberty in the World,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, September 2, 2016, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/elisee-reclus-the-development-of-liberty-in-the-world-c-1850]].
[44] Max Nettlau, <em>A Short History of Anarchism</em>, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 74–76; Shawn P. Wilbur, “Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of Anarchism,” in <em>Contr’un 5: Our Lost Continent</em> (2016).
[45] Joseph Déjacque, <em>Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861</em> (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 11–17, 40–41; Joseph Déjacque, “On the Human Being, Male and Female,” trans. Jonathan Mayo Crane, Libertarian Labyrinth website, April 4, 2011, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/from-the-archives/joseph-dejacque-the-human-being-i]].
[46] Déjacque, <em>Down with the Bosses</em>, 20–21, 42–44.
[47] Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, May 13, 2012, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-revolutionary-question]].
[48] Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”
[49] Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”
[50] Arthur Lehning, <em>From Buonarroti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism</em> (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 150–210.
[51] Archer, <em>First International in France</em>, 100–101, 126–28, 168–72; Edward Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Contested Legacy and the Debate About Property in the International Workingmen’s Association and the League of Peace and Freedom,” <em>Global Intellectual History</em> 2, no. 2 (2017): 169–95.
[52] For a general overview of how this happened, see Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>. For greater detail, see Archer, <em>First International in France</em>; Moss, <em>Origins of the French Labor Movement</em>, 52–82.
[53] Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 19; Fleming, <em>Anarchist Way</em>, 119, 126; Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 225, 262.
[54] Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 44–47; Nettlau, <em>Short History</em>, 144–45, 161–62, 184–85.
[55] Wolfgang Eckhardt, <em>The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 53–55, 104–9, 159–64, 166; Nunzio Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 57–59; T.R. Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em> (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 176–78.
[56] For a condensed summary of the conflict within the International see Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 167–92. For a detailed examination, see Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>.
[57] René Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 73–75; Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 187–92, 199; Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 283–352, 357–68, 383–97.
[58] Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 77–81; Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 354–7.
[59] “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September, 1872,” in Appendix to Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 179–83.
[60] Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 18.
[61] Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 150. In the original, Malatesta gives the incorrect date of 1867 for the founding of the Alliance. I have corrected this in order to avoid confusing the reader. In the nineteenth century, the word <em>party</em> was often used in a broad sense to refer to a social movement or a group of people who shared the same principles. For Malatesta’s definition, see Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 65.
[62] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.
[63] Quoted in Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18.
[64] Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 80–81, 104–129; Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29–34; Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 197–220.
[65] “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” 181.
[66] Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 130–40; Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 225–27. For more information about the anarchist sections in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and Egypt see Ángel J. Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 47–50, 115–18, 351–55; Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 252–54; Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, <em>The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism</em>, <em>1860–1914</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 114–15.
[67] Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 153; Moss, <em>The Origins of the French Labor Movement</em>, 79; A.W. Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), <verbatim>6n*.</verbatim>
[68] “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 188–91.
[69] “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.
[70] “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.
[71] Accounts of the anarchist-led sections of the International typically refer to named delegates representing various workers’ associations, but do not specify the trade these anonymous workers were involved in. For detailed information on occupations in the Italian and Swiss movements, see Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 76–80; Eckhardt, <em>First Socialism Schism</em>, 13–15.
[72] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 196.
[73] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Words of a</em> <em>Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 77. For a summary of the strategies proposed by mutualists in the First International see Archer, <em>First International in France</em>, 44–47, 79–82.
[74] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 170.
[75] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 453n47.
[76] E. H. Carr, <em>Michael Bakunin</em> (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 307, 337.
[77] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 191, 238.
[78] Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 179, 133.
[79] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 135–36.
[80] Marshall Shatz, “Introduction” in Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, xxxv.
[81] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 197–98.
[82] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 186.
[83] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 375–76.
[84] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 175. For the 1867 English edition of the rules of the First International, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 20 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 441–46.
[85] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 22 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 429.
[86] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 260.
[87] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 11.
[88] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 43n36, 150.
[89] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 375. For other examples, see 180, 218–19, 252, 272, 278, 290, 334, 357, 362–63, 376–77, 387–88; Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 72–73.
[90] Fleming, <em>Anarchist Way</em>, 126.
[91] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 376.
[92] For a summary of these congresses, see Archer, <em>First International in France</em>, 119–29, 166–75.
[93] Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 169.
[94] I have assembled this quote from extracts in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 376 and Marianne Enckell, “Bakunin and the Jura Federation,” in <em>Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth: The First International in Global Perspective</em>, ed. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 363n26.
[95] Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 11.
[96] Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 38.
[97] Quoted in Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 225.
[98] Tom Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City</em>, <em>1880–1914</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 11–13, 71–5, 80–83, 96–97.
[99] Lehning, <em>From Buonarroti to Bakunin</em>, 16–17.
[100] Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em>, 233.
[101] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 170.
[102] Quoted in Berthier, <em>Anarchism and Social Democracy</em>, 109.
[103] James Guillaume, “On the Abolition of the State,” in <em>Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later</em>, ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 192.
[104] For example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 43 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 437, 479–80, 494.
[105] Quoted in Georges Haupt, <em>Aspects of International Socialism</em>, <em>1871–1914</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.
[106] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 247–48.
[107] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 23 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 102, 450, 466, 468.
[108] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 44 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 255.
[109] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 44, 306. In 1886, Engels claimed, in comparison to his previous statement, that what Bakunin labeled anarchism was a blend of Proudhon and Max Stirner. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 382.
[110] This topic is made confusing by the fact that, during the 1850s, Proudhon’s ideas and terminology underwent a complicated process of development. By the 1860s, he called for the abolition of government in favor of a federated society while claiming that the state in the sense of the “power of collectivity” would be a part of a free society and lack “authority.” See Shawn P. Wilbur, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” Libertarian Labyrinth website, June 5, 2013, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/contrun/pierre-joseph-proudhon-self-government-and-the-citizen-state-2]].
[111] Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 184; Martin A. Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 279n30. For Proudhon and Bakunin’s friendship see Woodcock, <em>Proudhon</em>, 87–89, 266; Carr, <em>Bakunin</em>, 130–31.
[112] Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 296.
[113] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 105–6.
[114] Bakunin was also critical of mutualists within the First International who viewed themselves, and not the collectivists, as the true successors of Proudhon. In April 1869, he wrote a letter to Guillaume in which he referred to Tolain and Chemallé, who were leading members of the French section of the First International, as “Proudhon-ians of the second and bad sort” who “want individual property” and to “debate and parade along with the bourgeoisie.” See Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 38.
[115] <em>Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy</em>, 142.
[116] Quoted in James Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London: Methuen, 1969), 108. I have corrected Joll’s translation such that the German word anarchische is translated as anarchic, rather than anarchist.
[117] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 200–202; Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 151–54. This shift in strategy from advocating gradual change via co-ops in the 1840s to violent revolution in the 1870s was part of a wider process of development within French socialism. It included individuals who held similar views to anarchists but did not use the label, such as Eugène Varlin. See Moss, <em>The Origins of the French Labor Movement</em>, 4–6, 31–102.
[118] Benjamin Tucker, <em>Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897), ix, 14.
[119] For a summary of this history, see Nettlau, <em>Short History</em>, 30–42; Rudolf Rocker, <em>Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America</em> (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1949), 145–54. For individualist anarchism in Britain, see Peter Ryley, <em>Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain</em> (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 87–111.
[120] Benjamin Tucker, <em>Instead of a Book</em>, 390. See also, 15–16, 111–12, 383–404.
[121] John Henry Mackay, <em>The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century</em> (Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1891), ix. For Mackay’s fictional debate between an individualist anarchist and anarchist communist, see, 116–50.
[122] Quoted in Ryley, <em>Making Another World</em>, 108.
[123] Quoted in Fleming, <em>Anarchist Way</em>, 153.
[124] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 203. See also Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 139, 173.
[125] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 169, 171–72; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 6, 9.
[126] Dyer D. Lum, “On Anarchy,” in <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em>, ed. Albert Parsons (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 149–58; Dyer D. Lum, <em>Philosophy of Trade Unions</em> (New York: American Federation of Labor, 1892); Dyer D. Lum, “Why I Am a Social Revolutionist,” <em>Twentieth Century</em> 5, no. 18 (October 1890). See also, Paul Avrich, <em>An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 56–66.
[127] Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution</em>, 214.
[128] Max Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both,” in <em>Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth</em>, ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 79–83.
[129] Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828]]; Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in <em>The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged</em>, ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197–205.
[130] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 239–41, 270–72; Pietro Di Paola, <em>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 63–78; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 357, 415–7. For an overview of different strains of individualist anarchism in Milan, see Fausto Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism</em> (New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 66–91.
[131] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 80.
[132] Rocker, <em>Pioneers of American Freedom</em>, 152–53; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 169; Laurence S. Stepelevitch, “The Revival of Max Stirner,” <em>Journal of the History of Ideas</em> 35, no. 2 (1974): 324; Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads</em>, 75–6. For a summary of Stirner’s life see David Leopold, “A Solitary Life,” in <em>Max Stirner</em>, ed. Saul Newman (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21–41.
[133] Mackay, <em>The Anarchists</em>, ix. Stirner also influenced a few anarchist communists, but the majority rejected his ideas. For a review of Stirner’s book by a syndicalist anarchist, see Max Baginski, “Stirner: ‘The Ego and His Own,’” <em>Mother Earth</em> 2, no. 3 (1907), 142–51. Bakunin briefly mentions Stirner on at least one occasion but does not claim that he was an anarchist or influenced anarchism. See Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 141–42.
[134] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 77.
[135] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 199. See also <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 151.
[136] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 23.
[137] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 24.Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework
** Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework
To understand anarchist political theory, one must first understand the theoretical framework that anarchists used for thinking about humans, society, and social change. This is the theory of practice.[138] It is important to note that the theory of practice was often implicit in anarchist texts and not laid out in great detail. The vast majority of anarchist texts were short articles or pamphlets that focused on other topics, such as why capitalism should be abolished or concrete discussions about how to achieve anarchist goals. In addition, anarchist authors did not, in general, feel the need to write an explicit and detailed statement of their social theory’s foundational premises because it was already accepted as the common ground that underpinned their theorizing. A rational reconstruction of the theory of practice has to be made by piecing together different brief statements that anarchist authors made, and then supplementing these brief statements with my own examples in order to clearly illustrate what they thought.
*** Materialism and Human Nature
Anarchists were, in general, materialists in the broad sense that they viewed matter as the fundamental building block of reality.[139] This materialism went alongside the view that the natural world must be conceptualized as a process that undergoes changes over time, rather than as a static entity. For Bakunin, the universe is the “infinite totality of the ceaseless transformations of all existing things.”[140] Cafiero similarly referred to the “continuous processes of transformation” that occur to the “infinity of matter” that constitutes the universe.[141] The natural world so understood included human society. As Malatesta noted, “the social world” is “nothing but the continuing development of natural forms.”[142]
Anarchists thought that the natural world, which included society, must be conceptualized as a totality or whole. This totality was constituted by interconnected parts that stand in relation to, and mutually shape, one another. Bakunin thought that the universe was a “totality” in which “each point acts upon the Whole” and “the Whole acts upon every point.”[143] As a result, he viewed the purpose of science as establishing the “related connections and mutual interaction and causality that really exist among real things and phenomena.”[144] Reclus wrote that individuals living in society “are part of a whole” and that when “groups of men encounter one another, direct and indirect relations arise.”[145] Kropotkin similarly held that the goal of his history of the French Revolution was “to reveal the intimate connection and interdependence of the various events that combined to produce the climax of the eighteenth century’s epic.”[146]
Society, this totality of interconnected and mutually determining parts, changes over time due to the action of humans. According to Bakunin, “history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals. Abstractions advance only when borne forward by real men.”[147] For Rocker, since “every social process… arises from human intentions and human goal-setting and occurs within the limits of our volition” it follows that “history is… nothing but the great arena of human aims and ends.”[148] Anarchist social theory rested on a particular understanding of what humans are, what human activity is, and how human activity both shapes and is shaped by society.
Anarchists viewed humans as unchanging and changing at the same time. They are unchanging in that there are certain characteristics that all humans across all societies have in common: they need food, water, and sleep to survive; reproduce through sex; have brains; are social animals who communicate through language; experience emotions; and so on.[149] As Rocker wrote: “We are born, absorb nourishment, discard the waste material, move, procreate and approach dissolution without being able to change any part of the process. Necessities eventuate here which transcend our will.… We are not compelled to consume our food in the shape nature offers it to us or to lie down to rest in the first convenient place, but we cannot keep from eating or sleeping, lest our physical existence should come to a sudden end.”[150]
One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans as a species is their consciousness. Bakunin argued that, since this is the product “of the cerebral activity of man” and “our brain is wholly an organization of the material order… it follows that what we call <em>matter</em>, or <em>the material world</em>, does not by any means exclude, but, on the contrary, necessarily embraces the ideal world as well.”[151] With this consciousness, humans think about themselves, other people, the world in which they live, and worlds that they have imagined. They make plans for the future and reflect on past events. They direct and alter their behavior. In short, humans are able to mentally stand apart from their immediate experience and make their own life an object of their thought.[152] According to Reclus, “humanity is nature becoming self-conscious.”[153] Cafiero wrote that “the feeling of one’s <em>self</em> is without doubt the dominant sentiment of the human soul. The awareness of one’s being, its development and betterment, the satisfaction of its needs, these make up the essence of human life.”[154] Each individual human always possesses a particular form of consciousness, by which I mean the specific ways in which they experience, conceptualize, and understand the world in which they live. I will refer to this as “consciousness” for short.
Since these characteristics are constant across all humans, they must stem from certain basic facts about human biology. Human biology and the natural environment are the starting points for human activity and the parameters in which it occurs. Crucially, human nature was not viewed by anarchists as a fixed, entirely static entity or an abstract essence that exists outside of history. They distinguished between the fundamental raw materials of human nature that constitute all humans and what these materials are shaped into during a person’s life within a historically specific society. Bakunin distinguished between innate “faculties and dispositions” and “the organization of society” that “develops them, or on the other hand halts, or falsifies their development.”[155] Given this, “all individuals, with no exception, are at every moment of their lives what Nature and society have made them.”[156]
Kropotkin, who was a geographer, similarly thought that “man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education.”[157] Although there are “fundamental features of human character” that “can only be mediated by a very slow evolution,” the extent and manner in which these characteristics are expressed, Kropotkin claimed, is a result of a person’s social environment and the forms of activity they engage in.[158] One of these fundamental characteristics with a strong biological basis, he believed, was the tendency for humans to cooperate with one another and engage in mutual aid in order to survive. Yet he also held that “the relative amounts of individualist and mutual aid spirit are among the most changeable features of man.”[159]
Similar views were expressed by other anarchist authors. Emma Goldman declared that “those who insist that human nature remains the same at all times have learned nothing.… Human nature is by no means a fixed quantity. Rather, it is fluid and responsive to new conditions.”[160] The extent to which anarchists thought that the expression of human nature was malleable or plastic can be seen in the fact that several anarchists claim that there is an infinite number of different kinds of person. Malatesta, for example, wrote that in an anarchist society “the full potential of human nature could develop in its infinite variations.”[161]
This was not to say that humans could transform themselves into anything they wanted. The nature of the raw materials that constitute humans places definite limits on what they can be shaped into. Humans cannot morph their arms into wings or lay eggs like a chicken. This is because, although a human can become an incredibly wide variety of different things during the course of their finite existence, the scope is predetermined by the kind of animal they are. As Rocker wrote, “man is unconditionally subject only to the laws of his physical being. He cannot change his constitution. He cannot suspend the fundamental conditions of his physical being nor alter them according to his wish.”[162]
Stereotypes of anarchists depict them as having naive conceptions of human nature in which it is imagined that humans are innately good and kind. In reality, anarchists held that humans were defined by two main distinct tendencies: struggle/strife and sociability/solidarity.[163] Malatesta thought that humans possessed both the “harsh instinct of wanting to predominate and to profit at the expense of others” and “another feeling which draws him closer to his neighbor, the feeling of sympathy, tolerance, of love.”[164] As a result, human history contained “violence, wars, carnage (besides the ruthless exploitation of the labor of others) and innumerable tyrannies and slavery” alongside “mutual aid, unceasing and voluntary exchange of services, affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[165] This position was shared by Kropotkin, who wrote in his <em>Ethics</em> that there are “two sets of diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man.… In one set are the feelings which induce man to subdue other men in order to utilize them for his individual ends, while those in the other set induce human beings to unite for attaining common ends by common effort: the first answering to that fundamental need of human nature—struggle, and the second representing another equally fundamental tendency—the desire of unity and mutual sympathy.”[166]
*** The Theory of Practice
One of the main processes that modifies and develops the raw materials of human nature is human activity itself. This makes fundamental social change possible. If humans are conscious creatures who are able to modify themselves significantly through activity, then how humans are today is not inevitable or fixed but something that they can consciously change themselves. Human activity is conceptualized by anarchist social theory in terms of practice. By practice I mean the process whereby people with particular consciousness engage in activity—deploy their <em>capacities</em> to satisfy a psychological <em>drive</em>—and through doing so, change the world and themselves simultaneously.
A <em>capacity</em> is a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be, such as playing tennis or being physically fit. It is composed of two elements: (a) a set of external conditions which enable a person to do and/or be certain things, and (b) a set of internal abilities which the person requires in order to be able to take advantage of said external conditions. For example, a person’s capacity to play tennis consists of external conditions like a tennis court, a tennis racket, someone to play against, and so on. Internally, it consists of abilities such as being able to hold a racket, hit a ball, and know the rules of the game. In the absence of either the external or internal conditions, a person lacks the real possibility to achieve the doing of playing tennis and therefore lacks the capacity to play. A <em>drive</em>, in comparison, is a person’s particular desires, intentions, motivations, goals, values, or concerns—such as wanting to play tennis.[167]
Anarchists used a variety of different terms to describe this process. They mostly referred to the deployment of “capacities,” “powers,” or “capabilities” in order to satisfy “drives,” “urges,” “wants,” “desires,” or “needs.”[168] Malatesta, for example, wrote that “social life became the necessary condition of man’s existence, in consequence of his capacity to modify his external surroundings and adapt them to his own wants, by the exercise of his primeval powers in co-operation with a greater or less number of associates. His desires have multiplied with the means of satisfying them, and they have become needs.”[169] In order to avoid confusion, I shall generally refer to capacities and drives.
As humans exercise their capacities to satisfy their drives, they continually develop and shape their existing capacities and drives, while also developing entirely new ones. A person who frequently plays the guitar will become better at playing a particular chord and finds their preexisting motivation to play grows. They learn whole new guitar techniques and discover drives that they did not have when they started, such as the desire to play heavy metal. As Alexander Berkman wrote, “the satisfaction of our wants creates new needs, gives birth to new desires and aspirations.”[170] Were they to stop playing, their capacity to play guitar would diminish over time along, perhaps, with their inclination to do so. Capacities and drives are not fixed or static, but are rather in constant motion as human action maintains, alters, erodes, destroys, and creates them over time. When humans produce anything, they engage in an act of double-production. They simultaneously produce a particular thing, such as a good or service, and the capacities and drives exercised, developed, or created during the activity of production itself. When people engage in practice, they are also changing themselves. This theory can be seen in Kropotkin’s advocacy of “teaching which, by the practice of the hand on wood, stone, metal, will speak to the brain and help to develop it” and thereby produce a child whose brain is “developed at once by the work of hand and mind.”[171]
Engaging in practice not only affects a person’s capacities and drives, but also has a significant impact on their consciousness. Learning music theory will not only, for example, make us better at reading sheet music or acquire the motivation to learn more about the subject. It also changes how we experience, conceptualize, and understand music—or life in general—such as noticing a feature of a song or thinking of oneself as a person of culture and sophistication.
This is not to say that anarchists viewed the process of development as automatic or predetermined. Different people can develop different drives in response to the exact same kinds of practice. One person might eat dark chocolate and want to consume it daily, while another wants to avoid it at all costs. Two people can read the same book and develop distinct thoughts and feelings in response to it. Despite this, generalizations can still be made, such as the fact that people socialized to reproduce patriarchal gender roles will in general do so or that the activity of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the police (or both) will, in general, bring out the worst in someone.
This theory of practice can be clearly seen in the writings of Bakunin. He wrote that “all civilization, with all the marvels of industry, science, and the arts; with all the developments of humanity—religious, esthetic, philosophic, political, economic, and social” was created by humans through “the exercise of an active power… which tends to assimilate and transform the external world in accordance with everyone’s needs.”[172] Bakunin thought that, as humans exercise their capacities, they develop them. Whereas “ants, bees, beavers, and other animals which live in societies do now precisely the same thing which they were doing 3,000 years ago,” humans have developed their powers such that they have invented new technology and gone from living in “huts” and using bows or spears to building “palaces” and manufacturing guns and artillery.[173]
Such processes of development are, of course, not an entirely individual matter. Humans are, in Malatesta’s words, “a social animal whose existence depends on the continued physical and spiritual relations between human beings,” which are “based either on affinity, solidarity and love, or on hostility and struggle.”[174] Humans experience life immersed in the actions, emotions, and ideas of other people, which in turn conditions and alters how people develop as individuals. A child will be taught to read and write by adults who are already literate, while a dancer may develop the desire to dance in a new style after watching a ballet performance. We adopt a particular perspective on the world due to reading books written by other people or by thinking with concepts that have been collectively produced and reproduced by our culture.[175]
What capacities, drives, and consciousness people develop varies across social and historical contexts. The capacity to sail a longboat and the drive to die heroically in battle so that you will go to Valhalla developed from living as a warrior in a ninth-century Norse society. These traits are not widespread in modern Nordic societies because people are no longer engaging in that sort of Viking practice. Instead, people engage in practices that develop their capacity to assemble flat-pack furniture or their drive to go to melodic death metal concerts. The social and historical situation in which one lives also determines how universal aspects of human nature are experienced. For example, the universal drive of hunger may be experienced as hunger for beef burgers in a modern North American fast food restaurant, but as hunger for seal meat in a nineteenth-century Inuit house.
Anarchist authors emphasized these points again and again. They generally conceptualized human history in terms of a series of economic periods characterized by specific kinds of technology and ways of organizing production. Their descriptive model held that humans had gone from living in hunter-gatherer societies to living in ancient agricultural societies based on slavery, feudal agricultural societies based on serfdom, and finally modern industrial societies based on wage labor.[176] This view of history included an awareness of the fact that European colonialism, and so the development of industrial societies, involved the enslavement of Black people.[177] Anarchists were also aware that hunter-gatherer societies existed at the same time as industrial societies.[178]
Anarchists inherited the broad model of human history as a series of economic stages from the French and Scottish Enlightenment and read it in early anthropology.[179] Although the specifics of this model are outdated in light of the latest research, they nonetheless highlight what anarchists thought about capacities, drives, and consciousness. Different economic systems were constituted by specific kinds of practice, such as hunting with a bow and arrow as a nomad, collecting the harvest as a peasant, or working in a car factory as a wage laborer, and so developed distinct characteristics within people. This way of thinking can especially be seen in anarchist discussions of drives. Luigi Galleani, for example, thought that when a human develops themselves they acquire “a series of ever-more, growing and varied needs claiming satisfaction.”[180] These “needs vary, not only according to time and place, but also according to the temperament, disposition, and development of each individual.”[181] He wrote,
A farmer who lives in an Alpine valley, in the present conditions of his development, may have satisfied all his needs—eaten, drunk, and rested to his heart’s content; while a worker who lives in London, in Paris, or in Berlin, may willingly give up a quarter of his salary and several hours of his rest, in order to satisfy a whole category of needs totally unknown to the farmer stranded among the gorges of the Alps or the peaks of the Apennine mountains—to spend an hour of intense and moving life at the theater, at the museum or at the library, to buy a recently published book or the latest issue of a newspaper, to enjoy a performance of Wagner or a lecture at the Sorbonne.[182]
The social environment in which capacities, drives, and consciousness develop is itself produced by practice. Society is the totality of social relations that individual and collective actions continuously constitute, reproduce, and transform. As Bakunin noted, “the real life of society, at every instant of its existence, is nothing but the sum total of all the lives, developments, relations, and actions of all the individuals comprising it.”[183] Kropotkin likewise held that “humanity is not a rolling ball, nor even a marching column. It is a whole that evolves simultaneously in the multitude of millions of which it is composed.… The fact is that each phase of development of society is a resultant of all the activities of the intellects which compose that society; it bears the imprint of all those millions of wills.”[184] An implication of this, as Malatesta saw, is that social action “is not the negation, nor the complement of individual initiative, but it is the sum total of the initiatives, thoughts and actions of all the individuals composing society: a result which, other things equal, is more or less great according as the individual forces tend toward the same aim, or are divergent and opposed.”[185]
Imagine a group of hunters who cooperate to find and kill animals for food. During this process, these hunters produce social relations among themselves, such as the most experienced member leading the hunt or everyone singing a song in victory afterward. The social relations that collective practice produce, in turn, determine the nature of the practice, since the practice is itself performed through these social relations. How hunters hunt both produces the social relation of singing songs in victory and is altered by this social relation. Importantly, collective practice is not necessarily friendly or egalitarian practice. The slave master owns and controls the slave. They nonetheless both engage in the collective practice of a cotton plantation, albeit in very different roles.
This interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice. They enable it by developing in people the necessary internal abilities, drives, and consciousness for practice and by producing many of the external conditions that the exercise of the internal abilities is preconditioned on. They teach people how to hunt and they organize the manufacture of hunting equipment. Social structures constrain practice by imposing limits and exerting pressure on which and how capacities are deployed, what drives are satisfied, and the direction in which new capacities, drives, and consciousness are developed. A hunter is unlikely to develop the desire to become a vegetarian.
Social structures are relatively stable, but they are not fixed entities. They are processes reproduced over time by the practice of humans, who are continually modifying themselves through action, and being modified by the action of others. In Bakunin’s words, “every man… is nothing else but the result of the countless actions, circumstances, and conditions, material and social, which continue shaping him as long as he lives.”[186] Berkman also emphasized the manner in which people are shaped by simultaneous three-way interactions between social structures, consciousness, and their actions: “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are.”[187]
These changes to the humans that compose the social structure can, in turn, lead to the modification of the social structure itself. The group of hunters who sing songs to celebrate could, over time, become primarily concerned with their music and sing more often during hunts. They could even create a whole new social structure, such as deciding to form a band. As Rocker noted, “every form of his social existence, every social institution… is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends.”[188]
The kinds of practice that people within social structures engage in is significantly determined by the social structure in question, due to its enabling and constraining aspects. People engage in the practices that turn them into people capable of, and driven to, reproduce the social structure itself. In Malatesta’s words: “Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are.”[189] Given this, “man, like all living beings, adapts and habituates himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus being born and having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man… believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and liberty seemed to him an impossible thing.”[190] Social structures that consistently shape people in this manner come to be dominant structures when they underpin the reproduction and relative stability of the society in which they are embedded.
Anarchist authors disagreed with one another about which dominant structures played the most important role in history or contemporary society. They also had distinct views on how to conceptualize the manner in which dominant structures interact with, shape, and mutually constitute one another. A significant number of historical anarchists endorsed various forms of economic determinism. Malatesta, who would later reject economic determinism, wrote in 1884 that, since “man’s primary need and the essential prerequisite of existence is that he is able to eat, it is only natural that the character of a society is determined primarily by the manner in which man secures the means of survival, how wealth is produced and distributed.”[191] He went so far as to claim that “<em>the economic question is fundamental</em> in Sociology” and “other matters—political, religious, etc.—are merely its reflections, perhaps even the shadows it casts.”[192] If “political institutions and moral sentiments derive their raison d’être from economic conditions,” then it followed that “<em>economic inequality is the source of all moral, intellectual, political, etc. inequalities</em>.”[193]
Anarchists who advocated economic determinism appear to have done so due to the influence of inaccurate interpretations of Marx’s theory of history, which were popularized by socialist parties at the time. In 1887, the American anarchist Albert Parsons claimed that “the mode and manner of procuring our livelihood affects our whole life; the all-pervading cause is economic… and social institutions of every kind and degree result from, grow out of, and are created by the economic or industrial regulations of society.”[194] The fact that Parsons was influenced by Marx can be seen in the fact that he quotes large sections of Marx’s <em>Capital</em> and <em>Manifesto of the Communist Party</em>.[195] Parsons was not unique in this respect. Rocker claimed that, in London during the 1880s, “the Jewish anarchists at that time and for some time after accepted the idea of economic materialism” and “the Marxist conception of history.”[196] Malatesta noted in 1897 that, prior to the period in which anarchists discarded the mistakes of Marxism, they had been “more consistent or even more orthodox advocates” of Marxist theory “than those who professed to be Marxists and, perhaps, than Marx himself.”[197] Elsewhere, he claimed that in Italy during the early 1870s, “though none of us had read Marx, we were still too Marxist” due to the influence of Bakunin’s views on political economy and history.[198] The Italian anarchist Cafiero subsequently read Marx while in prison and published a summary of Marx’s <em>Capital</em> in 1879, which Marx himself approved of.[199]
Bakunin had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward what he regarded as Marx’s social theory. In 1872, he simultaneously praised Marx for drawing attention to the importance of economic factors in history, while arguing that Marx wrongly ignored “other elements in history, such as the effect—obvious though it is—of political, judicial and religious institutions on the economic situation.”[200] This included the manner in which the temperament of specific cultures, which were “the product of a host of ethnographic, climatological and economic, as well as historical causes… exert a considerable influence over the destinies and even the development of a country’s economic forces, outside and independent of its economic conditions.”[201] Rocker and Kropotkin later developed a model in which a range of social structures—economic, political, religious, cultural etc.—were taken to mutually determine one another but no social structure or causal factor was thought to be necessarily primary. Which causal factor played the most important role varied among different moments and so could only be established through empirical investigation on a case-by-case basis.[202]
Irrespective of where anarchists stood on the question of economic determinism, they thought in terms of multicausal explanations in which events were the products of the relations between several social structures. Goldman, for example, insisted in 1910 that “it would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital,” such as gender relations or cultural norms around sex.[203] Rocker similarly argued that “all social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes.”[204]
This commitment to multicausality accompanied the view that dominant structures do not ever include or exhaust all the elements that constitute a particular society. Rather, they exist alongside a wide variety of less influential or smaller social structures that are constituted by and reproduced through distinct kinds of practice and their accompanying capacities, drives, and consciousness. These smaller social structures include ways of life as diverse as Romanticism, punk, Scientology, and the microstructure of a particular family. It is because of the existence of these less influential or smaller social structures that it is possible for alternative practices to emerge and modify or replace existing dominant structures. As Kropotkin argued, even within capitalist societies based on hierarchical social relations, production for profit, and economic competition, there are also numerous instances of people organizing horizontally to satisfy each other’s needs and engage in mutual aid. Such voluntary associations are “the seeds” of a “new life.”[205] I will describe these forces that are fundamentally at odds with existing dominant structures as <em>radical</em>: if universalized they would transform society and replace one dominant structure with another. The drive to not oppress women, for instance, is radical within a patriarchal society because its universalization is incompatible with the ongoing existence of patriarchy.[206]
Anarchists held that a crucial factor in the modification or replacement of dominant structures are the attempts by both dominant and oppressed groups to shape society in their interests. Kropotkin noted that “history is nothing but a struggle between the rulers and the ruled, the oppressors and the oppressed.”[207] Malatesta likewise held that “through a most complicated series of struggles of every description, of invasions, wars, rebellions, repressions, concessions won by struggle, associations of the oppressed united for defense and of the conquerors for attack, we have arrived at the present state of society.”[208] Such conflicts between the oppressors and the oppressed are conflicts over how practice, and so the development of capacities, drives, and consciousness, is organized. They are, in short, struggles to determine what kinds of humans society produces.
Ultimately, according to anarchists, to change society, it is necessary to engage in forms of practice that develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness and thereby replace existing dominant social structures with alternative social structures that produce fundamentally different kinds of people. This, of course, raises the question: why did anarchists think society should be changed, and what did they want it changed into?
[138] For previous reconstructions of the theory of practice, see Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, <em>We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism</em> (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 21–59; Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, <em>Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today</em> (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 40–59.
[139] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism</em>, ed. G.P. Maximoff (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 57, 60–68; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 89–92, 100–101, 125; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Ethics: Origin and Development</em> (London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1924), 1, 3–4; Lucy Parsons, <em>Freedom</em>, <em>Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches</em>, <em>1878–1937</em>, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 137; Errico Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 38, 132. For examples of Christian anarchists who rejected materialism, see Peter Ryley, <em>Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain</em> (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 135–47.
[140] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 54.
[141] Carlo Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 3. See also Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 163; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 100–104; Ricardo Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em>, ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3–4.
[142] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 39. See also Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 57, 69, 83–91; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 125.
[143] <em>Bakunin, Political Philosophy</em>, 54.
[144] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 155.
[145] Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 232, 217.
[146] Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Great French Revolution</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), xxx.
[147] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 162. See also Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 76.
[148] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em> (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937), 25, 26.
[149] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 85–86, 92–93, 100; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 19, 121–22, 446–47, 456; Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 184; Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 6, 21.
[150] Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em>, 24.
[151] <em>Bakunin, Political Philosophy</em>, 67.
[152] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 84–85, 92–94, 100–101, 108.
[153] Quoted in John Clark, “An Introduction to Reclus’ Social Thought” in Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 3.
[154] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 3.
[155] <em>Bakunin, Political Philosophy</em>, 155.
[156] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 155.
[157] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution</em> (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 228.
[158] Peter Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside,” <em>The Newcastle Daily Chronicle</em>, February 20, 1895.
[159] Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement.” See also Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 77–78.
[160] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 438. See also, 73.
[161] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 402. See also Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 149–50, 153–54, 330–31; Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 105.
[162] Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em>, 27.
[163] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 5–8; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 121.
[164] Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 65–6.
[165] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 65, 68.
[166] Kropotkin, <em>Ethics</em>, 22. See also Charlotte Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 38–39.
[167] This interpretation of capacities and drives is based on Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, <em>Prefigurative Politics</em>, 41–9; Paul Raekstad, <em>Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism</em> (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 23–41.
[168] For examples see Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 86–88, 93–95; Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 21, 26, 85; Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 137–8, 206; <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 651–52.
[169] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 122.
[170] Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 175.
[171] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 645.
[172] <em>Bakunin, Political Philosophy</em>, 86.
[173] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 88.
[174] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 65.
[175] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 159, 164, 167–68.
[176] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 121; Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 174, 188–91; Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 5–34; Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 44. Kropotkin had a more complicated model but the basic point remains the same. See Kropotkin, <em>Mutual Aid</em>, 62–247; Kropotkin, <em>Ethics</em>, 17–18; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 276–77.
[177] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 609–10; Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 150, 153; Federico Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK</em> (London: Routledge, 2019), 125.
[178] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 229, 231; Kropotkin, <em>Mutual Aid</em>, 64, 68–69; Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 213–18.
[179] For an overview of how this view of history developed, see Ronald L. Meek, <em>Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought</em> (Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 1977), 18–32; Christopher J. Berry, <em>The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 91–115; Adam Kuper, <em>The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth</em> (London: Routledge, 2005), 3–81.
[180] Luigi Galleani, <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 43.
[181] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 45. See also Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 4; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 122, 456; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 163, 598; <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, 137–9.
[182] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 44–45.
[183] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 158.
[184] Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 119–20.
[185] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 132–33. See also Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 208.
[186] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 95.
[187] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 99.
[188] Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em>, 27.
[189] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 48.
[190] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 110. See also Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 272; Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 66–68.
[191] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 19.
[192] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 23.
[193] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, <em>24,</em> 39. For Malatesta’s later rejection of this position see Errico Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 45–57; <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 363–73, 445–48.
[194] Albert Parsons, <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em> (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 97.
[195] Albert Parsons, <em>Anarchism</em>, 22–48.
[196] Rudolf Rocker, <em>The London Years</em> (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 58.
[197] Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 302.
[198] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 198–99.
[199] Nunzio Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 135; Carlo Cafiero, <em>Compendium of Capital</em>, trans. Paul M. Perrone (London: The Anarchist Communist Group, 2020).
[200] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 256.
[201] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 256. See also Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 64–65; Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 142. It is important to note that Bakunin is critiquing a strawman, since Marx held that the economy and other aspects of society mutually determined one another. In later editions of <em>Capital</em>, which appeared just before Bakunin wrote his October 1872 critique, Marx added a footnote that clarified that during certain historical periods aspects of the superstructure could play a chief causal role, such as politics in ancient Athens and Rome or religion in the Middle Ages. The economy was nonetheless primary since it enabled politics or religion to play a chief part, such as by producing the food necessary for survival. See Karl Marx, <em>Capital, A Critique of Political Economy</em>, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 175–76n35.
[202] Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em>, 23–41; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 125–28, 183–84, 197–99.
[203] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 181.
[204] Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em>, 28.
[205] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 367. See also 212–15; <em>Mutual Aid</em> 188–89, 219–41.
[206] This language is borrowed from Cox and Nilsen, <em>We Make Our Own History</em>, 42–44, 53.
[207] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 611.
[208] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 44.Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision
** Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision
Anarchists were antistate socialists. They sought the emancipation of humanity and the abolition of all structures of domination and exploitation through the self-emancipation of the working classes. This position was grounded in a set of ethical principles that forms the value system of anarchism, an analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles, and a vision of alternative, achievable social relations and structures that promote these ethical principles.
*** The Value System
Anarchism’s central ethical value is that individuals should lead free lives. Although anarchists focused on the freedom of the individual, they did not conceptualize this freedom in terms of an isolated, abstract entity who stands outside of society. For anarchists, an individual can, given the kind of animal that humans are, only be free if they belong to a community of equals bonded together through relations of solidarity.[209] As the Black anarchist Lucy Parsons’s put it, “emancipation will inaugurate liberty, equality, fraternity.”[210] Anarchists viewed the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity as interdependent such that they cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The realization of one of these values can only be achieved through the realization of all three at once.
Anarchists conceptualized freedom in two main ways: not being subject to domination or having the real possibility to do and/or to be. Although anarchist authors consistently valued both of these things, they did not all label them as freedom. Wilson, for example, defined freedom as nondomination, while at the same time arguing that having the real possibility to do and/or to be is important for human development and flourishing.
Freedom as nondomination holds that individuals are free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the power to impose their will on them. If a person is subject to the arbitrary power of another then, even if it is not currently being exercised, they are being dominated. To be free is to be able to live in accordance with one’s own will, rather than being subject to the will of another.[211] In 1869, Bakunin claimed that freedom consists in “the full independence of the will of the individual with respect to the will of others.”[212] In the same text, he defines “freedom” as “independence … with respect to all laws that other human wills—collective and isolated [from the collectivity] impose.”[213] During his subsequent 1871 lectures to Swiss members of the International, he said that “the negative condition of freedom is that no person owe obedience to another; the individual is free only if his will and his own convictions, and not those of others, determine his acts.”[214] In 1870, Bakunin explicitly connected this idea with nondomination when he advocated “<em>self-determination</em>” and “<em>the fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination</em>.”[215]
The same position was expressed by other anarchist authors. Wilson referred to the “impulse in men to dominate their fellows, i.e., impose their will upon them and assert their own superiority.”[216] She advocated the abolition of domination in favor of freedom such that every person had an equal claim to “direct his life from within by the light of his own consciousness,” rather than be subordinate to “the will of any other individual or collection of individuals.”[217] Galleani similarly defined “the broadest individual autonomy” in terms of “absolute independence from any domination by either a majority or a minority.”[218]
According to the real possibilities view of freedom, an individual becomes more free as what they can do and/or be increases, that is, the activities they can perform and the states they can experience. The possible beings and doings available to a person, and so the extent to which they are free, are a product of (a) the external conditions within their social and natural environment and (b) their internal abilities, which enable them to take advantage of external conditions. In order to have the real possibility to read <em>The Very Hungry Caterpillar</em>, a child must, among many other requirements, know how to read (internal ability), live in a society where <em>The Very Hungry Caterpillar</em> is produced, and possess a copy of the book (external conditions). As they grow older, they become better at reading (development of internal ability) and acquire a greater number of books (expansion of external conditions). This marks an increase in their freedom, since their range of possible beings and doings has increased. They can now become an expert on the history of the potato or read the <em>Poetic Edda</em>.
An individual’s freedom is restricted when obstacles decrease the number of real possibilities open to them. A slave owner who prevents their slaves from reading, further limits what possibilities they have and thereby makes them even less free. Such obstacles do not have to be directly established by the threat or exercise of violence. The cultural norm that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral can, by itself, limit a person’s opportunity to be gay, due to them internalizing these ideas and sensitizing them to the judgement of others. Crucially, though, obstacles can be removed or overcome. For instance, slaves can rise up and kill their slave masters, or gay people can gain the confidence to be themselves, and not care what homophobes think.
This emphasis on having the actual means to lead a specific kind of life can be seen in Malatesta’s claim in 1884 that “true freedom is not the right but the opportunity, the strength to do what one will” and in his observation, decades later, that “freedom is a hollow word unless it is wedded to ability, which is to say, to the means whereby one can freely carry on his own activity.”[219] Yet, people’s real possibility to do and/or to be can be restricted through domination by others. Malatesta also wrote that freedom “presupposes that everybody has the means to live and to act without being subjected to the wishes of others.”[220] As a result, he advocated “the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man.”[221]
Malatesta was not the only anarchist to define freedom as a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be. In 1927, Berkman distinguished between “negative liberty,” which is freedom from something, and “positive freedom,” which is “the opportunity to do, to act.”[222] Two years later, he wrote that “freedom really means opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants. If your freedom does not give you that opportunity, then it does you no good. Real freedom means opportunity and well-being. If it does not mean that, it means nothing.”[223] His comrade Goldman similarly wrote in 1914 that “true liberty… is not a negative thing of being free from something.… Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”[224]
All anarchists thought that one of the main reasons why freedom is valuable is that it is a prerequisite for full human development in the sense of people improving their internal abilities in multiple directions and, in so doing, truly realizing their potential. Rocker claimed that “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.”[225] Goldman argued that “authority stultifies human development, while full freedom assures it.”[226] Elsewhere she declared that “only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundations of a normal social life.”[227]
The same position was articulated by anarchists who defined freedom in terms of nondomination. Wilson thought that “the creed of Anarchism is the cultus of Liberty, not for itself, but for what it renders possible. Authority, as exercised by men over their fellows, it holds accursed, depraving those who rule and those who submit, and blocking the path of human progress. Liberty indeed is not all, but it is the foundation of all that is good and noble, it is essential to that many-sided advance of man’s nature, expanding in numberless and ever-conflicting directions.”[228]
Although anarchist authors used different definitions of freedom, they agreed that not being dominated, having the real possibility to do and/or to be a broad range of things, and developing oneself as a human, were all valuable. This is because they feed off one another. In order to develop one’s internal abilities in multiple directions, a person must have the real possibility to do so, and in order to have this real possibility they must, among other things, not be subject to domination that deprives them of these real possibilities.
Anarchists held that the freedom of the individual, however defined, is only possible in and through society. Humans are by nature social animals and so cannot achieve freedom outside of a social context. To quote Bakunin, “man completely realizes his individual freedom as well as his personality only through the individuals that surround him, and thanks to the labor and the collective power of society.… Society, far from decreasing his freedom, on the contrary creates the individual freedom of all human beings. Society is the root, the tree, and liberty is its fruit.”[229] Furthermore, “being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection.”[230]
For anarchists, in order for a society to be free over an extended period of time, it must be structured so that it both enables the freedom of the people who comprise it and prevents individuals from being able to oppress others. The social structures and relations that ensure the ongoing freedom of individuals are necessarily egalitarian ones. Anarchists thought that freedom and equality are so interconnected that it is in practice impossible to have one without the other. Bakunin wrote, “I am a convinced supporter of <em>economic and social equality</em>, because I know that, outside that equality, freedom… will never be anything but lies.”[231] Kropotkin echoed this sentiment: “to have the individual free, they must strive to constitute a <em>society of equals</em>.”[232]
It is apparent that anarchists advocated equality, but it is not yet clear what exactly they meant by the term. My interpretation is that anarchists conceptualized equality as the <em>equality of freedom</em>, or as Malatesta phrased it, the “equal freedom for all.”[233] This is the idea that society should be structured such that there is, as far as is possible, equality of self-determination and equality of opportunity. Equality of self-determination was connected with nondomination, while equality of opportunity was connected to human development and the real possibility to do and/or to be.
Equality of self-determination was conceptualized as having two components. First, each individual is equally free to live in accordance with their own will, unless they subject another person to their will through coercion—because doing so would establish a relation of domination, and thereby violate the equal freedom of all. As Berkman put it, “you are to be entirely free, and everybody else is to enjoy equal liberty, which means that no one has a right to compel or force another, for coercion of any kind is interference with your liberty.”[234] Malatesta similarly argued that anarchists advocate “freedom for all and in everything, with no limit other than the equal freedom of others: which does not mean… that we embrace and wish to respect the ‘freedom’ to exploit, oppress, command, which is oppression and not freedom.”[235]
Second, organizations are structured in a horizontal, rather than hierarchical, manner such that there are no divisions between rulers who make decisions and subordinates who do as instructed and lack decision-making power. In horizontal organizations, each member has an equal say in collective decisions and so codetermines the organization with every other member.[236] According to Malatesta, this kind of equality emerges from the fact that individuals within a group have three choices. Either they “submit to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his will (be in authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all (be an associate).”[237] Anarchists choose to be associates.
These two components of equality of self-determination can be seen in Bakunin’s remark that domination must be prevented by not giving anyone the opportunity, which should be achieved “<em>by the actual organization of the social environment, so constituted that while leaving each man to enjoy the utmost possible liberty it gives no one the power to set himself above others or to dominate them, except through the natural influence of his own intellectual or moral qualities</em>, which must never be allowed either to convert itself into a right or to be backed by any kind of political institution.”[238]
Equality of opportunity, or what Bakunin termed “<em>equality at the outset</em>,” was understood by anarchists to refer to a situation in which each individual had equal access to the external conditions necessary for the real possibility to do and/or to be, such as food, healthcare, and education.[239] According to Malatesta, anarchists “call liberty the possibility of doing something,” and, in order for this to be realized, society must “be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development.”[240] In the opinion of Berkman, “far from leveling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development.”[241] It would, in other words, result in an expansion of human development.
Anarchists held that freedom and equality are generally maintained over time by solidarity between individuals and groups.[242] By <em>solidarity</em>, anarchists meant two different kinds of social relation. The first consisted in individuals cooperating with one another in pursuit of a common goal. This is the concrete means through which the external conditions necessary for people to exercise capacities and satisfy drives are established, such as the organization of a school where children can develop and transform themselves or the coordination of an economy that provides the materials a school needs. As Kropotkin noted, a free society “could not live even for a few months if the constant and daily co-operation of all did not uphold it.”[243] According to Malatesta, “liberty,” in the sense of one’s real possibility to do and/or to be, “becomes greater as the agreement among men and the support they give each other grows.”[244]
The second kind of solidarity anarchists advocated was individuals forming reciprocal caring relationships, in which each individual acts to ensure the ongoing freedom and equality of those around them. Malatesta praised solidarity in the sense of “affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[245] For him, “<em>solidarity</em>, that is, harmony of interests and sentiments, the sharing of each in the good of all, and of all in the good of each, is the state in which alone man can be true to his own nature.… It causes the liberty of each to find not its limits, but its complement, the necessary condition of its continual existence—in the liberty of all.”[246] In short, anarchists understood that, in order to be free, an individual needs positive social relationships, such as loving parents, a supportive teacher, and good friends. For anarchists, such reciprocal caring relationships could only genuinely occur between equals who horizontally associate with one another. As Reclus wrote, “between him who commands and him who obeys… there is no possibility of friendship” since “above is either pitying condescension or haughty contempt, below either envious admiration or hidden hate.”[247]
*** Critique of Existing Society
Equipped with this value system, anarchists critiqued existing society on the grounds that it systematically fails to promote freedom, equality, and solidarity. They understood that society is not the way it is merely because of the negative personality traits of some bad rulers. Rather, it is the consequence of the fundamental structure of society and the forms of practice that constitute and reproduce it over time. As Malatesta explained to a jury while on trial in 1921, “social wrongs do not depend on the wickedness of one master or the other, one governor or the other, but rather on masters and governments as institutions; therefore, the remedy does not lie in changing the individual rulers, instead it is necessary to demolish the principle itself by which men dominate over men.”[248]
Anarchists are best known for advocating the abolition of the state. While it is true that anarchists are anti-statists, it must also be emphasized that they do not view the state as the main oppressive social structure, or the singular root cause of social problems. Anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries critiqued three main dominant structures: capitalism, landlordism, and the state. The structures of economic oppression (capitalism and landlordism) and political oppression (the state) were taken to constitute an interconnected global social system that I shall call <em>class society</em>. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the anarchist opposition to capitalism and the state and not discuss landlordism in the sense of feudal or semi-feudal economic relations.
Anarchists viewed capitalism as a social system constituted by: (a) private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) wage labor; and (c) production of commodities for profit within a competitive market. Under capitalism, society is divided into two main economic classes: a minority of capitalists and landowners who privately own land, raw materials, and the means of production; and a majority of workers who do not own private property and who sell their labor to capitalists and landowners. The labor of workers produces goods and services that are sold by capitalists and landowners on the market in order to generate profit and thereby expand their wealth. Workers, in comparison, receive only a wage, which they then use to buy the necessities of life—food, shelter, and clothing—and thereby reproduce themselves.[249]
The terms <em>working class</em> and <em>proletariat</em> are sometimes used only to refer to industrial wage laborers who engage in manual labor, especially within factories. Anarchists often used these words in a much broader sense. In 1884, Malatesta wrote that humanity is divided “into two castes: one caste of haves, born with an entitlement to live without working; the other of proletarians whose lot from birth is wretchedness; subjection; exhausting, unrewarded toil.”[250] He defined a worker as “anybody plying a useful trade who does not exploit another person’s labors.”[251] Anarchists who claimed that society was divided into two main economic classes did not think that there were no subdivisions within the working class or proletariat broadly construed. They generally distinguished between urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans, and landless peasants.
Which specific classes anarchists referred to varied depending upon the context they were writing in. In 1873, Bakunin wrote that “Italy has a huge proletariat.… It consists of 2 or 3 million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some 20 million landless peasants.”[252] He went onto claim that “the Slavic proletariat… must enter the International en masse [and] form factory, artisan, and agrarian sections.”[253] As capitalism developed, and the number of artisans dramatically declined due to their inability to compete with large-scale industry, anarchists updated their language and began to refer only to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, and landless peasants. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, who came from a society where peasants were still the majority of the population, claimed that capitalist society is split into “two very distinct camps… the proletariat (in the broadest sense of the word) and the bourgeoisie.”[254] The proletariat so understood included “the urban working class” and “the peasant masses.”[255]
Berkman, in an analysis for a predominantly North American audience, adopted a narrower definition of the working class or proletariat in 1929. He defined them as those people employed by capitalists in a range of industries—in mills and mines, in factories and shops, in transportation, and on the land.[256] For him, “the working class consists of the industrial wage earners and the agricultural toilers” or “farm laborers.”[257] Berkman only used the word “peasant” in descriptions of classes in Russia and continental Europe and consistently framed them as being distinct from “the proletariat” or “workers.” When Berkman referred to wage laborers and peasants as a group, he did so with such expressions as “the toilers” or “the masses.” Artisans, who were defined as skilled, self-employed laborers who own their own tools and small workshops, only featured as part of Berkman’s description of how the development of capitalism forced them to become wage laborers.[258]
In this book, I will use the phrase <em>the working classes</em> to refer to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans who did not exploit anybody else’s labor, and landless peasants. It should be kept in mind that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A person born into the peasantry could, for example, work as a wage laborer in a city during one season, and as a small farmer in the countryside during another.[259]
Anarchists advocated the abolition of capitalism because it is based on the oppression and exploitation of the working classes. Wage laborers allegedly choose to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners, but only do so because they have no other option. Under capitalism, a small minority owns the land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions, such as their hat or sewing kit, but they do not own private property like a factory or mine. As a result, the majority of the population lacks the means to survive independently through their own labor. In order to gain access to the goods and services they need to survive—such as food, clothing, and shelter—workers have to purchase them with money. Given their social position, the only realistic way to earn this money is to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage.[260] Workers choose to engage in wage labor in the same manner that a person might choose to hand over their possessions to an armed robber. The robbery victim makes this choice because the only realistic alternative is being attacked. Workers similarly sell their labor to capitalists and landowners because the only realistic alternative is extreme poverty, homelessness, starvation, and so on. It is an involuntary decision forced upon workers by the fundamental structure of capitalist society.[261]
Wage labor is not only involuntary. It is based on a relationship of domination and subordination in which capitalists and landowners have the power to command workers to do as instructed. Malatesta described capitalism as a society in which “a few individuals have hoarded the land and all the instruments of production and can impose their will on the workers, in such a fashion that instead of producing to satisfy people’s needs and with these needs in view, production is geared toward making a profit for the employers.”[262] Goldman similarly wrote that, under capitalism, workers “are subordinated to the will of a master.”[263]
The economic ruling classes also determine what forms of labor workers engage in and so the kind of capacities, drives, and consciousness they develop during the process of production itself. Workers lack control over the kind of people they develop into. They engage in forms of labor that maximize profit but actively harm them. The process of capitalist production produces not only goods and services, but also broken people unable to develop in a positive direction and fulfill their human potential. This point was frequently made by anarchists through the metaphor of workers being turned into machines.[264] Wilson thought that capitalism had a tendency to transform workers into a “steam-engine with wages for coal.”[265] For Goldman, each worker became “a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality and the interests in, or desire for, the things he is making.”[266] As a result, workers are reduced to being “living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a grey, dull, and wretched existence for themselves.”[267]
Under capitalism, labor is but one commodity for sale. Capitalism is a market economy in which “the whole economic life of society… [is] regulated by the <em>competition</em> and <em>profit</em> principle.”[268] The negative consequences of this are numerous. Capitalists hire a small number of workers and force them to work long hours in order to reduce costs, maximize profit, and out-compete rival companies. Improvements in technology make workers unemployed rather than enabling them to work less. Companies produce more commodities than they can sell and are then forced by this overproduction to close down and fire their workforce. This, in turn, leads to regular economic crises. Even when the capitalist market is operating more smoothly, it is based on an irrational organization of production in which a vast number of human needs that society has the means to fulfill are not satisfied because there is no profit in doing so, such as housing homeless people or adequately feeding poor people. On the international scale, economic competition, alongside a range of other factors like ambition and greed, results in states engaging in colonialism, imperialism, and war in order to find new markets, establish monopolies, maximize capital accumulation, and serve the interests of capitalists in their respective countries, especially those involved in the manufacturing of weapons, ammunition, warships etc.[269]
According to anarchists, the oppression and exploitation of capitalism is maintained over time by the violence of the modern state.[270] Bakunin claimed that “the historical formation of the modern concept of the state” occurred “in the mid-sixteenth century” and consisted in an ongoing process of “military, police, and bureaucratic centralization.”[271] This process of state formation occurred due to the requirements of “modern capitalist production,” which needed “enormous centralized states” in order to subject “many millions of laborers to their exploitation.”[272]
Kropotkin later expanded upon this narrative by arguing that, the modern state developed as “a mutual insurance company formed by the landlord, the military, the judge, the priest, and later on the capitalist in order to assure each of them authority over the people and the exploitation of [their] poverty.”[273] As a result, “the State, as a political and military power, along with modern governmental Justice, the Church, and Capitalism appear in our eyes as institutions that are impossible to separate from each other. In history these four institutions developed while supporting and reinforcing each other.… They are linked together by the bonds of cause and effect.”[274] Rather than positing a one-sided perspective in which the modern state was created by capitalism, anarchists held that the modern state and capitalism cocreated one another.[275]
Through an analysis of the modern state (henceforth referred to as the state) as an actually-existing social structure, anarchists came to define it in terms of both its functions and its particular organizational forms and characteristics. The primary function of the state is to reproduce the power of the economic ruling classes through violence. For Malatesta, its “essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters,” and, even when it performs other functions—such as acknowledging certain legal rights, maintaining roads, and organizing healthcare—it does so “with the spirit of domination” and remains a committed defender of the economic ruling classes.[276] The same point was made by Reclus, who held that “the present function of the state consists foremost of defending the interests of landowners and the ‘rights of capital.’”[277]
The capitalist state performs its essential function through many different means. Most obviously, it enforces private property rights. In Malatesta’s words, “the landowners are able to claim the land and its produce as theirs and the capitalists are able to claim as theirs the instruments of labor and other capital created by human activity” because “the dominant class… has created laws to legitimize the usurpations that it has already perpetrated, and has made them a means of new appropriations.”[278] The state, in addition to this, aids the economic ruling classes by establishing monopolies, subsidizing private companies, repressing social movements via the police and prisons, and maintaining an army in order to keep “the people in bondage” and conquer “new markets and new territory, to exploit them in the interests of the few.”[279]
The state can nonetheless not be defined solely in terms of its essential function. The state as a really existing institution is also characterized by a specific organizational form. Actual states are institutions that (i) perform the function of reproducing the power of the economic ruling classes; (ii) are hierarchically and centrally organized; (iii) are wielded by a minority political ruling class who sit at the top of the state hierarchy and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.[280]
This definition of the state was most clearly expressed by Kropotkin and Malatesta. According to Kropotkin, the state “not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a <em>territorial concentration</em> and a <em>concentration of many functions in the life of societies in the hands of a few</em>.… A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing is developed to subject some classes to the domination of other classes.”[281] The state is therefore the “perfect example of a hierarchical institution, developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all of their possible groupings to the central will. The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian—or it ceases to be the State.”[282] Malatesta, in comparison, wrote that
<quote>
For us, the government is the aggregate of the governors, and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, members of parliament, and what not—are those who have the power to make laws, to regulate the relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws.… In short, the governors are those who have the power, in a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the collective force of society, that is, of the physical, intellectual, and economic force of all, to oblige each to do the said governors’ wish. And this power constitutes, in our opinion, the very principle of government, the principle of authority.[283]
</quote>
Given this, anarchists did not define class solely in terms of a person’s relationship to the means of production. Class is also about a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. Those who directly controlled state power, such as politicians, monarchs, heads of the police, etc., were taken by anarchists to constitute a distinct political ruling class with interests of their own. As Malatesta wrote, while “the State is the defender, the agent, and the servant of the propertied class,” it “also constitutes a class by itself, with its own interests and passions. When the State, the Government, is not helping the propertied to oppress and rob people, it oppresses and robs them on its own behalf.”[284] This is not to say that these two classes are mutually exclusive. An individual can, for example, be a capitalist and a politician at the same time.
Anarchists opposed the state, to quote Bakunin, because it “is placed by its very nature and position above and outside the people and must inevitably work to subordinate the people under rules and for objectives foreign to them.”[285] In short, it “<em>means</em> coercion, domination by means of coercion.”[286] Through this domination, the state not only prevents the working classes from living in accordance with their own wills, but also hinders their development as people and limits their real possibility to do and/or to be. It oppresses humanity in two main ways: either directly by physical violence, or indirectly, by enforcing private property rights and thereby depriving the majority of the population of access to the means of existence such that they are forced to work for the economic ruling classes.[287] In so doing, the state violates the equal freedom of all and promotes social relations of strife over solidarity because, “<em>so long as political power exists, there will be persons who dominate and persons dominated, masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited.</em>”[288]
Anarchists thought that this critique of the state applied not only to monarchies and dictatorships but also democratic republics in which a segment of the political ruling class were elected by the citizenry. Even if a state was somehow genuinely democratic, in the sense that it was one in which the majority ruled, it was still a state and so incompatible with freedom, equality, and solidarity. All states are social structures in which those who rule have the power to impose decisions on everyone within a given territory via institutionalized methods of coercion, such as the legal system, police, prisons, and the army. The rule of the majority would, even if it was preferable to the rule of the few, result in the domination of various minorities due to them being subject to this coercive power.[289] In a fundamentalist Christian society, for example, majority rule would most likely result in laws oppressing atheists, scientists, and gays. Anarchists did not, however, think that actual states have ever been based on majority rule. They consistently described them as institutions based on minority rule by a political ruling class in their interests and the interests of the economic ruling class. Malatesta, to give one example, wrote in 1924 that “even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force.”[290] As a result “Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class.”[291]
Although capitalism and the state were two of the main social structures anarchists sought to abolish, they were not the only ones. Wilson concluded that “the solution of the social problem can only be wrought out from the equal consideration of the whole of the experience at our command, individual as well as social, internal as well as external.”[292] Kropotkin similarly thought “that the whole of the life of human societies, everything, from daily individual relationships between people to broader relationships between races across oceans, could and should be reformulated.”[293] As a result, anarchists understood that humans are oppressed by a myriad of other social structures that must also be abolished if the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity are to be truly realized. These included racism,[294] patriarchy,[295] homophobia,[296] hierarchically organized religion,[297] and authoritarian modes of education.[298] Some anarchists, such as Reclus, went beyond a singular focus on human emancipation and advocated vegetarianism, animal liberation, and the protection of the natural environment.[299]
Unfortunately, a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory. To give a few examples: Bakunin was an antisemite,[300] most male anarchists were sexist toward women in the movement,[301] and some anarchists opposed Goldman giving talks on homosexuality for fear it would damage the reputation of the movement to discuss “perverted sex-forms.”[302]
*** Vision of an Alternative Society
Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state should be abolished in favor of a society in which humanity as a whole was free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society anarchy. In advocating anarchy as their ultimate end goal, anarchists were not using the term in the sense of a disorganized and chaotic society, a war of all against all. They were instead referring to a stateless, classless, and nonhierarchical society. In 1897, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy signifies <em>society organized without authority</em>, authority being understood as the ability to <em>impose</em> one’s own wishes” on others through “coercion.”[303] A few years later in 1899, Malatesta defined “Anarchy” as “a society based on free and voluntary accord—a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community.”[304]
Anarchist authors outlined visions of what anarchy would look like in numerous texts. They did not view themselves as utopians in the style of Charles Fourier who elaborated incredibly detailed blueprints of what a postcapitalist society would look like. Bakunin himself explicitly critiqued “Fourierists” for wrongly assuming “that it was theoretically and <em>a priori</em> possible to build a social paradise in which all of future humanity could recline. They had not realized that while we may well define the great principles of its future development we must leave the practical expression of those principles to the experience of the future.”[305] This way of thinking was shared by Malatesta, who wrote in 1891 that anarchists cannot, “in the name of Anarchy, prescribe for the coming man what time he should go to bed, or on what days he should cut his nails!”[306] Such practical questions can only be answered by those who actually live in and self-managed the future classless society. All any present-day anarchist can do is desire “that a society be constituted in which the exploitation and domination of man by man are impossible” and “indicate a method” to achieve this.[307] By this, Malatesta meant that anarchists should:
1. envision anarchy as a society that successfully instantiates certain social conditions, such as people being free from domination, people having access to the external conditions that are necessary to develop themselves, or social relations being infused with a sense of solidarity.
1. articulate general anarchist methods of organization and association that could successfully actualize these conditions, such as each person in a group having a vote, smaller groups federating together to form larger groups, or organizations electing instantly recallable mandated delegates to perform administrative tasks.
According to this view, anarchists could not know with absolute certainty how, say, the education of children would be organized under anarchy, but they were in a position to indicate the method through which it would be organized. Parents, teachers, and other adults interested in the positive development of children would come together as equals within general assemblies to “meet, discuss, agree and differ, and then divide according to their various opinions, putting into practice the methods which they respectively hold to be best” and, in so doing, establish through a process of experimentation what the best system of education was.[308] How anarchy was organized would “be modified and improved as circumstances were modified and changed, according to the teachings of experience.”[309] It was for this reason that Malatesta saw anarchist ideals as “the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization.”[310]
Some anarchist authors did articulate detailed models of how an anarchist society would function. They generally focused on how workers should reorganize production and distribution during a revolution and, as a result, largely discussed practical issues. The Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregori Maximoff, for example, developed proposals for how an anarchist revolution could reorganize agriculture, cattle rearing, fishing, hunting, manufacturing, forest management, mining, construction, transportation, healthcare, sanitation, and education. These proposals largely specify (a) how organizations should be structured, make decisions, and coordinate with one another; (b) what kind of organization is responsible for a specific aspect of the economy; and (c) general principles that should be implemented, such as the abolition of rent or both men and women receiving an education.[311]
The theorists of anarchism were not naive and understood that it would not be possible to establish anarchy as an ideal during or immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state. Cafiero distinguished between anarchy today and anarchy in the future: “Anarchy today is indignation, deadly hatred and eternal war against every oppressor and exploiter on the face of the earth.… But tomorrow, once the obstacles have been overcome, anarchy will be solidarity and love—complete freedom for all.”[312] He thought it would take a significant amount of time to achieve full anarchy. This can be seen in his claim that one generation would fight in the revolution and the next generation would work toward full anarchy in a postrevolutionary world. He wrote that contemporary anarchists would:
<quote>
perhaps perish in a skirmish or during the first shots of the great day; some perhaps will be fortunate enough to see the first dawning of humanity’s great event. In all cases, we shall fall satisfied. Satisfied with having contributed to the certain ruin of this unjust, cruel and rotten world, whose collapse will bury us in the most glorious tomb ever made for a fighter.
Other men will be born from the very entrails of the fertile revolution and take on the task of carrying out the positive, organic part of anarchy.
For us—hatred, war and destruction; for them—love, peace and happiness.[313]
</quote>
Malatesta, in comparison, conceded that “some comrades” mistakenly “expect Anarchy to come with one stroke—as the immediate result of an insurrection which violently attacks all that which exists and replaces it with institutions that are really new.”[314] These comrades, he said, were wrong, because the full achievement of anarchy requires that “all men will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command… [and] have understood the advantages of solidarity and know how to organize a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition.”[315] Such a significant transformation of individuals and social structures would take a long time to achieve.
Malatesta thought that society immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state “would not be Anarchy, yet, or it would be only for those few who want it, and only in those things they can accomplish without the cooperation of the non-anarchists.”[316] The development toward anarchy would be a product of “peaceful evolution” in which anarchist “ideas… extend to more men and more things until it will have embraced all mankind and all life’s manifestations.”[317] For Malatesta, “Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.”[318]
Similar points were made by other anarchist authors. Berkman argued that the “revolution is the <em>means</em> of bringing Anarchy about but it is not Anarchy itself. It is to pave the road for Anarchy, to establish conditions which will make a life of liberty possible.”[319] Maximoff likewise thought that, during the process of abolishing capitalism and the state, there would be a transitional phase that laid the foundations from which anarchy would eventually arise. As a result, he was careful to distinguish between the “communal structure, which is the transitory step” and “the structure of full communism and anarchy.”[320]
Anarchists, in other words, viewed the abolition of capitalism and the state as an act that created the preconditions for the achievement of anarchy and moved society closer to it but would not alone create anarchy as an ideal, universal social system. The task of anarchists during and immediately after the social revolution was to establish the basic forms of organization and association that would exist under anarchy and thereby establish the social conditions from which anarchy could emerge. In order to clearly differentiate these basic social structures from anarchy, I shall refer to the totality of these social structures as an anarchist society.
Anarchists generally envisioned an anarchist society as having four main components.[321] These were:
1. Humanity as a whole collectively owns land, raw materials, and the means of production. The division of society into economic classes is abolished such that there are no longer workers or proletarians but only people who engage in acts of production and consumption. Those who occupy or use a piece of land, raw materials, or the means of production on a daily basis directly control and self-manage the relevant sphere of production or distribution. Individuals can only own possessions they personally use without exploiting the labor of others. In other words, humanity owns the watch factory, those who labor in the watch factory directly control and self-manage watch production, and individuals own their personal watches.
1. Workplaces and communities are self-managed by the people who constitute them through general assemblies in which everyone involved has an equal say in collective decisions.[322]
1. Markets and money are replaced by a system of decentralized planning.
1. The rigid capitalist division of labor is abolished such that people do a combination of mental and physical labor, and unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers. Individuals would still specialize in specific skills, such as learning how to drive a train or build a house, but they would not be limited to one sphere of activity such that they only drove trains or built houses. This would go alongside a significant reduction to the length of the working day, such as four hours instead of ten.
In an anarchist society, “the relations between its members are regulated, not by laws… not by any authorities—whether they are elected or derive their power by right of inheritance—but by mutual agreements, freely made and always revocable, as well as [social] customs and habits, also freely accepted.”[323] Such statements are not advocating a society in which people are free to do absolutely anything, including acts that oppress others. Anarchists argued that, if a person imposes their will on another via violence or coercion, they are engaging in an act of domination and should be prevented from doing so, by force if necessary. Such force, providing it is proportionate and does not reconstitute the state, would not be a form of authority or a violation of the equal freedom of all. It would rather defend the freedom of all in a manner compatible with the goal of anarchy.[324]
Collective decisions within an anarchist society would be made within workplace and community assemblies via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two.[325] Malatesta personally thought that in an anarchist society, “everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator.”[326] This is not to say that an anarchist society was based on the rule of the majority over the minority. Anarchists believed in free association and so held that decisions should not be imposed on others via the exercise or threat of violence. Given this, they rejected both the rule of the minority over the majority and the rule of the majority over the minority. Within a free association that makes collective decisions via majority vote, the majority and minority positions would coexist with one another when this was possible. If a collective decision required everyone involved to agree on a single course of action, such as when the next meeting would take place or what color a room would be painted, then minorities would voluntarily defer to the majority decision. If the minority strongly disagreed with this decision then they were free, not only to persuade others of their point of view, but also to leave and voluntarily disassociate. This freedom of association also included the freedom of majorities to voluntarily dissociate from minorities, such as a person who constantly shouted at and bullied other people during meetings being expelled from a group.[327]
Although anarchists thought that collective decisions should be made in general assemblies, they also understood that it is often necessary or practical for an individual, or small group of people, to complete a specific task. As Malatesta wrote, “in every collective undertaking on a large scale there is need for division of labor, for technical direction, administration, etc.”[328] In such circumstances, anarchists proposed that general assemblies would elect mandated delegates to complete a task or perform a role, such as corresponding with other groups, editing a newspaper, or drawing up plans for a new public transportation system. These delegates would not be governors who wielded authority, since they did not have the right to command others and force people to obey them. Decision-making power would remain in the hands of the general assembly who elected them and retained the right to recall delegates, give them new instructions, accept or reject their suggestions, and so on.[329]
In an anarchist society, decision-making would flow “from the bottom upwards and from the circumference inwards, in accordance with the principle of liberty, and not from the top downwards and from the center outwards, as is the way of all authority.”[330] Within such a society, “the free association of all” would establish “a social organization” structured “from the low to the high, from the simple to the complex, starting from the more immediate to arrive at the more distant and general interests.”[331] Anarchists envisioned a decentralized and bottom-up system of decision-making in which workplace and community assemblies made their own decisions about how they operated at a local level. They then associated with one another via free agreement in order to form a network capable of achieving coordination and cooperation on a large scale. As will be explained in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, there were two main positions on how to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation during both the struggle against class society and the reproduction of an anarchist society. Antiorganizationalists, who appear to have been in the minority during the period I am examining, argued that coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks. Galleani, for example, endorsed “a society functioning on the basis of mutual agreement” between “free social groupings,” while rejecting formal organizations that had administrative committees, congresses, and constitutions.[332]
Organizationalists, in comparison, also advocated the establishment of formal federations.[333] These federations took three main forms: federations of producers belonging to the same branch of production; federations of all the workplace assemblies, regardless of industry, in a given geographical area; and federations of community assemblies in a given geographical area. Federations are free associations of autonomous groups that are formed in order to achieve shared objectives. Within a federation, these autonomous groups are formally linked together through a common program, a bottom-up organizational structure, and the various agreements made at meetings and congresses. In an anarchist society, the basic unit of a federation would be a group in which collective decisions were made in a general assembly. The different assemblies in a given area would voluntarily associate with one another to form a local federation. The local federations in a given region would then voluntarily associate with one another to form a regional federation. The regional federations would associate to form a national federation and the national federations of the world would form an international federation. Federations of federations were often called confederations. Although organizationalist anarchists advocated creating national confederations before and during a social revolution, it is likely that, in a stateless society without borders, new labels would be used to refer to a federation of this size.[334]
Federations would enable coordination at various scales. Collective agreements between different groups would be made at regular congresses held at local, regional, national, and international levels, each attended by delegates from smaller groups comprising the federation. Proponents of federations disagreed about whether resolutions passed at congresses by majority vote should be binding on every individual or group involved in the decision-making process, or on only those who voted in favor of the majority position.[335] Between congresses, the day-to-day administration of a federation would be organized by a committee composed of elected delegates. What tasks these administrative committees performed would vary depending upon the kind of federation but would include such things as facilitating the exchange of information between sections, publishing bulletins on behalf of the federation, or compiling statistics.
The delegates of a federation, in contrast to representatives in capitalist parliaments, are not granted the power to make decisions independently and impose them on others. They can only act as spokespeople for the group that elected and mandated them on what to say and how to vote. If they fail to implement the group’s mandate, they can be instantly recalled and replaced by a newly elected delegate. The same principle would apply to delegates who perform other roles for the federation, such as the members of the administrative committees. As Kropotkin explained, within a federation, the members of a local group discuss “every aspect of the question that concerns them,” reach a decision, and then “choose someone and send him to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind.”[336] At this meeting “the delegate is not authorized to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse.”[337] Malatesta similarly claimed that “the respective delegates would take their given mandates to the relative meetings and try to harmonize their various needs and desires. The deliberations would always be subject to the control and approval of those who delegated them.”[338]
All anarchists, regardless of where they stood on the topic of federations, did not think that workplace and community assemblies would be the only organs of self-management in an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, advocated a society constituted by an “interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national, and international—temporary or more or less permanent—for all possible purposes,” including not only production and consumption but also “communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection,” and “the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.”[339]
The forms of organization and decision-making that anarchists advocated were not invented by isolated theorists imagining abstract social possibilities from their studies. The anarchist vision of a future society was instead the generalization of the forms of association that working-class social movements had themselves developed and implemented during the course of the class struggle. As Kropotkin argued, “Anarchy” is an “ideal society” based upon “<em>the study of tendencies already emerging in the evolution of society</em>.”[340] One of the main tendencies Kropotkin focused on was the labor movement. He noted that the anarchist vision of a future society was “worked out, in theory and practice, from beneath” by workers themselves within the local sections, national federations, and international congresses of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals.[341] This occurred through a process of workers collectively generating ideas via discussion, dialogue, and drawing upon their knowledge of a specific trade or region. They not only made proposals about how the future society should be organized, but based these proposals on their own experiences of participating in “a vast federation of workers groups representing the seeds of a society regenerated by social revolution.”[342]
Although anarchists agreed that land, raw materials, and the means of production should be owned in common by humanity as a whole, they disagreed about how the products of labor should be distributed in an anarchist society. Anarchist collectivists argued that the products of labor should be owned by those who produced them so that, as they saw it, each producer enjoyed the full product of their labor.[343] Bakunin, the most famous anarchist collectivist, proposed in 1868 that society should be structured such that it “allows each to share in the enjoyment of social wealth—which in fact is produced only by labor—only to the extent that he has contributed his own to its production.”[344] Anarchist collectivists within the First International did not initially specify how the products of collective labor would be distributed to those who produced them and argued that the question would be resolved in various ways by communities themselves depending upon their circumstances.[345] For example, at the 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, Spanish anarchist collectivists advocated a society based on the collective ownership of the means of production and land, which “gives autonomy to each community of producers and each receives according to his production.”[346] They did not, however, specify how this system of distribution would actually be organized.
A more concrete proposal was made by the anarchist collectivist Guillaume in 1874. He reaffirmed the collectivist position that each community should decide for itself how to distribute the products of labor, while suggesting a system of labor vouchers in which individuals receive a certain number of vouchers per hour of work or per type of work performed and then use them to acquire items at stores. Once the postrevolutionary society had stabilized and abundance was achieved, he thought this should be replaced by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs.”[347]
From 1876 onward, a number of prominent anarchists, including Malatesta, Cafiero, and Reclus, rejected anarchist collectivism in favor of anarchist communism. This soon came to be the dominant position within the anarchist movement, although anarchist collectivism continued to be advocated by a significant segment of anarchists in Spain during the 1880s. Anarchist communism was seen as a society in which each person voluntarily contributes to production according to their abilities and the products of labor are collectively owned by humanity as a whole and distributed according to need. This would, during and immediately after the social revolution, be organized through a system of rationing. Once the economy was sufficiently developed and stable, rationing would be abolished in favor of free access to the products of labor. In contrast to Guillaume, who had previously proposed distribution according to need as the long-term goal, anarchist communists rejected the idea of distribution via labor vouchers as an intermediary system.[348]
Over time, the debate between anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists became increasingly hostile, most notably in Spain during the 1880s where it was entangled with wider strategic debates.[349] In response, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Ricardo Mella formulated the idea of “anarchism without adjectives” in 1889. They argued that it was not possible for people living in class society to know with certainty which specific system of distribution would best realize anarchist values after the revolution. As a result, anarchists existing under capitalism should adopt a nondogmatic stance whereby collectivism and communism would coexist in the postrevolutionary society and the argument over which system was superior would be settled through actual experimentation in different economic arrangements. Until this had occurred, anarchists could make proposals about how they personally thought the economy would best be organized, but they would not be in a position to identify as either collectivist or communist. So long as anarchists lived within class society, they should simply call themselves anarchists who advocated socialism and not add to this label any particular adjective denoting a future system of distribution.[350]
This position would go onto influence some anarchists outside of Spain. A notable example is the American anarchist de Cleyre, who was initially an individualist anarchist and advocate of market socialism. Her perspective on anarchism changed due to her four-month visit to England and Scotland in 1897. During her lecture tour, she met and conversed with a variety of anarchist communists. This included both groups of English, Scottish, French, Spanish, and Jewish anarchist workers, and prominent anarchist authors and public speakers, such as Kropotkin, Nettlau, Grave, and Louise Michel. De Cleyre claimed that one of the most impressive people she met was Tarrida del Mármol, the advocate of anarchism without adjectives.[351] From at least 1900 onward, she advocated a stateless socialist society in which the means of production were owned in common, while referring to herself as an anarchist without economic label attached. In contrast to early Spanish advocates of anarchism without adjectives, de Cleyre claimed that experiments in different socialist economic arrangements would not only settle the debate between collectivists and communists. It would also establish an answer to the largely American debate between proponents of market socialism and advocates of a planned economy.[352]
For Kropotkin, who played a significant role in theorizing and popularizing anarchist communism, it was important to describe the nature of the future society, because how one envisions the future shapes how one acts in the present. A socialist who envisions a society based on producers owning and self-managing the means of production themselves will act differently, both under capitalism and during a revolution, from a socialist who envisions a society based on the state owning and managing the means of production through a vast bureaucracy. They each have a different vision and so will act differently to try and create very different worlds.[353] This perspective can be seen in Kropotkin’s 1913 remark that the anarchist vision of a future society “soon separated the anarchists in their means of action from all political parties, as well as, to a large extent, from the socialist parties which thought they could retain the ancient Roman and Canonical idea of the State and carry it into the future society of their dreams.”[354]
If the achievement of anarchy required that the working classes engage in forms of practice that actually produce an anarchist society, such as establishing workplace or community assemblies, then the working classes must first develop both the awareness of what an anarchist society would look like and the motivation to create such a society. As Kropotkin wrote, “no struggle can be successful… if it does not produce a concrete account of its actual aim. No destruction of what exists is possible without, during the struggles leading to the destruction and during the period of destruction itself, already visualizing mentally what will take the place of what you want to destroy.”[355]
The role of anarchist authors like Kropotkin or Cafiero was to articulate and spread this vision among the working classes, and thereby instill in them the radical drives that were necessary for achieving an anarchist society. Anarchists had to decide not only on “the <em>aim</em> which we ourselves propose to attain” but must also “make it known, by words and deeds, in such a way as to make it notably popular, so popular that on the day of action it will be on everybody’s lips.”[356] In outlining these visions of what an anarchist society would look like, anarchists did not think that they were establishing the permanent means through which society would be organized after the social revolution. Instead, they assumed that people living in a future anarchist society would develop new and better ways of organizing that they had not considered, and had not even been in a position to conceive.[357]
*** The Problem of Socialist Transformation
Anarchists not only advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. They also constructed effective strategies for how to set about achieving their goals. One of the central problems that their strategies had to overcome was that both the abolition of class society in favor of an anarchist society and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society require the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the ability to make collective decisions in general assemblies, the desire to not dominate or exploit others, and the understanding that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society, however, produce people fit for the reproduction of that oppressive and unequal society, rather than its abolition. Class society cannot, by itself, produce the kinds of people that an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need.
Such individuals would arise in a properly functioning anarchist society due to the forms of practice they engaged in on a daily basis, such as participating in a workplace assembly or being taught how to horizontally associate as a child. These are exactly the kinds of people that anarchist social movements need in order to succeed. Anarchists, unfortunately, live in a class society. They therefore have a problem: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society. How then could anarchist social movements effectively transform society? This problem was succinctly expressed by Malatesta:
<quote>
Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society must be changed. Poverty brutalizes man, and to abolish poverty men must have a social conscience and determination. Slavery teaches men to be slaves, and to free oneself from slavery there is a need for men who aspire to liberty.… Governments accustom people to submit to the Law and to believe that Law is essential to society; and to abolish government men must be convinced of the uselessness and the harmfulness of government.[358]
</quote>
Despite the self-reproducing nature of dominant structures, social change remains a possibility. This is because existing society is not solely the product of the “will of a dominating class” but is also “the result of a thousand internecine struggles, of a thousand human and natural factors acting indifferently, without directive criteria.”[359] Social structures are not fixed monoliths, but webs of interconnected processes that “contain organic contradictions and are like the germs of death, which, as they develop, result in the dissolution of institutions and the need for transformation.”[360] This can be seen in the history of class struggle, which contains numerous examples of the oppressed and exploited choosing to rebel against, modify, and sometimes overthrow, self-reproducing social structures. Given this, anarchists who “are besieged and buffeted on every side by hostile realities” must not “accept everything, and defer to everything because this is the situation in which history has placed us,” but should instead choose to “combat these realities” and thereby change what reality is.[361] De Cleyre said much the same. She argued in 1910 that, although humans are shaped by their circumstances, they are also at the same time “an active modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely.”[362]
It is therefore possible for one segment of society to choose to engage in actions that, given the theory of practice, would simultaneously change social relations and themselves, constructing new social structures. To quote Mella,
<quote>
We must realize that we will not suddenly find ourselves, one day, with men made in accordance with the future, suitable to realize the content of new ideals. And we must surrender to the evidence that, without the continual and growing exercise of individual faculties, without the habit of autonomy, as broad as possible, free men or at least men in conditions to be free will not be made so that the social deed changes the face of things. External and internal revolutions presuppose one another and should be simultaneous in order to be fruitful.[363]
</quote>
For example, workers choose to go on strike and win. In so doing, they change social relations—wages increase and workers gain more power over their bosses—and change people—workers learn how to organize a strike, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another and see the economy in a fundamentally different way. During the course of the strike, they construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a trade union. Long-term participation in this trade union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness in new directions. This would make the organization of new actions possible, such as strikes that mobilize workers in multiple industries. These kinds of action could continue and multiply over time as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. The anarchist solution to the problem of socialist transformation was, in short, that the working classes could become capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state, and establish and reproduce an anarchist society through engaging in revolutionary practice. As Malatesta put it, “progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between men and their environment.”[364]
[209] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 148–49; Nestor Makhno, <em>The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays</em>, ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 70.
[210] Lucy Parsons, <em>Freedom</em>, <em>Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches</em>, <em>1878–1937</em>, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 38.
[211] Anarchism shares this emphasis on nondomination with republicanism. See Kinna and Alex Prichard, “Anarchism and Non-domination,” <em>Journal of Political Ideologies</em> 24, no. 3 (2019): 221–40.
[212] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 121.
[213] Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 124.
[214] Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 46. See also Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 64, 148.
[215] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 191. Bakunin labels restrictions on freedom as domination on multiple occasions. See ibid., 136, 150, 167, 192, 212, 254.
[216] Charlotte Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 54.
[217] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 54, 58–59.
[218] Luigi Galleani, <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 50. See also, 61, 62–63. 68.
[219] Errico Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 40, 446. See also Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 249, 366; Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 38.
[220] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 41.
[221] Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 56.
[222] Alexander Berkman, “A Decade of Bolshevism,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 119.
[223] Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 13.
[224] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 121.
[225] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 16.
[226] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 438. See also Peter Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 119; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 164; Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 62.
[227] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 72–73.
[228] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 27.
[229] Michael Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 236.
[230] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 147.
[231] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 197.
[232] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 202–3. This exact same language was used by Mella. See Ricardo Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em>, ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 117–18.
[233] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 40.
[234] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 156.
[235] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 149. See also, 141.
[236] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 73, 93–94, 130, 133.
[237] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 78.
[238] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 153.
[239] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 76–77.
[240] Errico Malatesta, <em>At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 57; <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 56.
[241] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 165.
[242] The following interpretation of solidarity differs from but is indebted to the discussion of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s understanding of solidarity in John Nightingale, “The Concept of Solidarity in Anarchist Thought” (PhD diss., Loughborough University, 2015), 34–108.
[243] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 478.
[244] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 57.
[245] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 68.
[246] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 124.
[247] Élisée Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” in Albert Parsons, <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em> (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 144.
[248] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 415. See also Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 400; Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 74; Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” 147.
[249] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 7–8; Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 58–60, 100–101.
[250] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 38–39.
[251] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 63. See also Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 109–10.
[252] Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 7.
[253] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 51.
[254] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 195.
[255] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 199.
[256] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 4.
[257] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 190.
[258] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 125, 181, 211, 218, 229, 7. The exact same class analysis features in Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 19–26, 47–48, 66, 72.
[259] The historian Bernard Moss has argued that the term “artisan” is misleading, due to it conflating “independent artisans, master artisans and skilled wage earners” into one social group. See Bernard H. Moss, <em>The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 13. To avoid this misunderstanding, I have added the qualification that the artisans anarchists referred to did not exploit the labor of others.
[260] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 493.
[261] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 11–12; Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 45.
[262] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 32.
[263] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 50.
[264] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 25; Max Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want? Living</em>, <em>Not Dead Unions</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 10.
[265] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 63.
[266] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 67.
[267] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 50.
[268] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 49.
[269] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 49–50, 149, 151–53; Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 25–38; Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 79.
[270] Anarchists did not all use the same terminology. Malatesta argued in 1891 that anarchists should use the term “government,” instead of “the state.” To avoid confusion, I shall consistently refer to the state. See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 111–12.
[271] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 9, 26. In 1871, two years before the publication of <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, Bakunin had dated the “foundation of modern States” to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kropotkin dated the rise of the modern state to the sixteenth century. See Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 137; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 183, 234, 252.
[272] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 13.
[273] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 184.
[274] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 183–84.
[275] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 299, 317–19.
[276] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 118.
[277] Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147. See also Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 140; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 11–15.
[278] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 45.
[279] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 306. See also, 313–17, 234 and, for anarchist critiques of the police and prisons, 499–508; Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 42–59; Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 332–46; Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader</em> ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 151–72.
[280] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism</em>, ed. G.P. Maximoff (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 210–11; <em>Bakunin</em> <em>on Anarchism</em>, 317–20; Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 56.
[281] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 234.
[282] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 226–27. Kropotkin claims that the state is necessarily centralized and hierarchical multiple times in this text and others. See ibid., 199, 275, 310; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 566.
[283] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 113. See also, 136.
[284] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 212–13. See also Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 29, 44.
[285] Quoted in Zurbrugg, “Introduction,” in Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 15.
[286] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 24.
[287] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Words of a</em> <em>Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 25, 27; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 115, 118.
[288] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 63.
[289] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 42, 50, 61; Errico Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 73–79.
[290] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 78.
[291] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 77. See also Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 13, 23.
[292] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 50. This idea was later repeated almost word for word by Goldman. See Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 64.
[293] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 197–98.
[294] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 189–90, 203, 207; Lucy Parsons, <em>Writings and Speeches</em>, 70; Rudolf Rocker, <em>Nationalism and Culture</em> (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937), 298–339; Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 71–72, 182, 188; Federico Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK</em> (London: Routledge, 2019), 120–143.
[295] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 174; <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, 396–7; Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 175–189; Emma Goldman, <em>Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926</em>, ed. Shawn P. Wilbur (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Lucy Parsons, <em>Writings and Speeches</em>, 79, 92–93.
[296] Terence Kissack, <em>Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008); Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography</em>, 169–180.
[297] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 111–135; Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 150–57.
[298] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 131–49; Paul Avrich, <em>The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 6–18.
[299] Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 136–7, 156–62, 233; Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography</em>, 160–1; Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 136. For a discussion of vegetarianism in the Spanish anarchist movement see Jerome R. Mintz, <em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 87–8, 161–2.
[300] Zoe Baker, “Bakunin was a Racist,” Anarchopac.com, October 31, 2021, [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-bakunin-was-a-racist]].
[301] Martha Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 115–8; A.W. Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 34–5. See also endnote 10 in the introduction.
[302] Emma Goldman, <em>Living My Life</em>, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 555.
[303] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 150, 151.
[304] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 299. For other definitions of anarchy, see Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 120–21; Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 144; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 133–34; Carlo Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 40; Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 26, 58; Lucy Parsons, <em>Writings and Speeches</em>, 38.
[305] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 99. See also Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 15–16.
[306] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 140
[307] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 141.
[308] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 142.
[309] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 128.
[310] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 302. See also Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 304. The same point is made by Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 1–9, 27.
[311] Gregori P. Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015). For other examples, see James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 247–67; Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>; Diego Abad de Santillán, <em>After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain</em>, trans. Louis Frank (New York: Greenberg, 1937).
[312] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 41.
[313] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 49
[314] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 299.
[315] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 300.
[316] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 302.
[317] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 301, 302.
[318] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 300.
[319] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 231.
[320] Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 47.
[321] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 49–62; Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 156–68, 215–30.
[322] This system of decision-making is often referred to as direct democracy without the state by modern anarchists. This language was largely not used by historical anarchists because they used the word “democracy” to refer to systems of government that were incompatible with anarchism, such as bourgeois parliamentary representative democracy or Ancient Athens. For an overview of this topic, see Baker, “Anarchism and Democracy,” Anarchopac.com, April 15, 2022, [[https://anarchopac.com/2022/04/15/anarchism-and-democracy]].
[323] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 133.
[324] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 148–49; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 614. For a few different proposals on how an anarchist society could respond to people who engaged in acts of violent oppression, see Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 260–61; Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 130–35; Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 46–48.
[325] Anarchist authors used a variety of different terms when referring to assemblies, such as associations of production and consumption, labor councils, popular assemblies, communal assemblies, and communes. To avoid confusion I have chosen to use the language of workplace, community, and general assemblies.
[326] Errico Malatesta, <em>Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy</em> (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d.), 30. See also Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 17–19, 390–91; <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 74; <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 488.
[327] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 488; Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 67, 69–70.
[328] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 136.
[329] Malatesta, <em>Between Peasants</em>, 28–29.
[330] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 170.
[331] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 128.
[332] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 105, 58, 73–75.
[333] The following account is based on Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 170–71, 179, 206; Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 253, 264–66; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 60–63; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 105, 188; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 60–65.
[334] Anarchists throughout Latin America referred to national federations as the regional federations of a country in the world—for example, the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA), rather than the Argentine National Workers’ Federation. See Ángel J. Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 5–6, 63.
[335] Compare Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 489–90 and Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 240–41.
[336] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 133.
[337] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 133. See also Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 475.
[338] Malatesta, <em>Between Peasants</em>, 30.
[339] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 163.
[340] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 134.
[341] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 376.
[342] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 163. See also Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 46–51.
[343] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 90; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 9, 46, 96; “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” in Appendix to René Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 183.
[344] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 108. See also, 78.
[345] Guillaume quoted in Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, 158–59; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 170–71, 186–87; The Jura Federation, “Minutes of the Jura Federation Congress (1880)” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters</em>, 283.
[346] Quoted in Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 59.
[347] Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 251, 255–57. A similar proposal about labor vouchers was made by Kropotkin in 1873 before he became an anarchist communist. In 1879, he proposed “Anarchist communism” as the long-term goal and “collectivism as a transitory form of property.” By 1880, he had abandoned this view and only advocated anarchist communism. See Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, 29–30, 34–35; Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 48–58.
[348] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 11–12, 46–48, 95–99; Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 49–62. Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 215–19; Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, 74–78; 102–106. For the history of anarchist communism, see Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 36–67; Davide Turcato, “Anarchist Communism,” in <em>The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism</em>, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 237–47.
[349] George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain</em>, <em>1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 98–116; Temma Kaplan, <em>Anarchists of Andalusia</em>, <em>1868–1903</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 139–142.
[350] Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 9–17, 60–62; Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 134–54. Similar views were advocated by Malatesta in 1889. See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 95–99.
[351] Paul Avrich, <em>An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 46–47, 58, 107–120, 144–46; de Cleyre, <em>Reader</em>, 9.
[352] Avrich, <em>An American Anarchist</em>, 147–49; Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist</em>, <em>Anarchist</em>, <em>Genius</em> (State University of New York, 2005), ed. Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, 105; de Cleyre, <em>Reader</em>, 31–32, 60, 107–8, 173–74; de Cleyre, “A Suggestion and Explanation” in <em>Free Society</em> 6, no. 29 (June 3, 1900): 1. In 1908, <em>Mother Earth</em> published a lecture by de Cleyre titled “Why I am an Anarchist.” During the lecture, she advocates a moneyless society based on distribution according to need. It is unclear when this was written. <em>Mother Earth</em> claimed that the lecture was delivered in Hammond, Indiana but I have been unable to find a date for this talk. De Cleyre had previously given a talk with the exact same title during her 1897 visit to England. She could have given the same talk multiple times or given different talks with the same title. As a result, it is unclear if she advocated a moneyless society based on distribution according to need before or after adopting anarchism without adjectives. See Avrich, <em>An American Anarchist</em>, 120; de Cleyre, <em>Exquisite Rebel</em>, 51–65.
[353] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 201–4.
[354] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 131–32.
[355] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 130–31.
[356] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 203.
[357] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 15–16; Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 109.
[358] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 48. This problem has since been articulated by a number of modern socialist theorists drawing upon Marxism. See Al Campbell and Mehmet Ufuk Tutan, “Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks,” <em>Studies in Political Economy</em> 82, no. 1 (2008): 153–70; Sam Gindin, “Socialism ‘With Sober Senses’: Developing Workers’ Capacities,” <em>The Socialist Register</em> 34 (1998): 75–99.
[359] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 48.
[360] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 49.
[361] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 450.
[362] De Cleyre, <em>Reader</em>, 37.
[363] Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 81–82.
[364] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 49. This same idea was expressed by Marx. See Karl Marx, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. David McLellan, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172; Marx and Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 214.
** Chapter 4: Anarchist Strategy
Anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that one must not merely critique existing institutions or aspire for a better society. One must also form social movements that engage in class struggle against the ruling classes and thereby bring about fundamental social change. To quote Bakunin, “neither writers, nor philosophers, nor their books, nor socialist journals, would reconstitute a socialism that was alive and vigorous. It is only through enlightened revolutionary instincts, through collective will and through the real organization of the working masses themselves that the latter has a real existence, and when instinct, will and organization are lacking the best books in the world will be nothing more than empty theories and powerless dreams.”[365] In order to engage in effective action and achieve their goals, working-class social movements had to be guided by an overarching strategy that was both appropriate to their situation and capable of actually bringing about an anarchist society. As Kropotkin succinctly put it, “theory and practice must become one if we are to succeed.”[366]
A crucial aspect of anarchist theory was, therefore determining what methods of action to engage in. According to Malatesta, “to be able to act, to be able to contribute to the realization of one’s cherished ideas, one has to choose one’s own path. In parties, as more generally in life, the questions of method are predominant. If the idea is the beacon, the method is the helm.”[367] It is for this reason that “we are anarchists in our goal… but we are anarchist in our method too.”[368] Elsewhere Malatesta defined anarchism as “the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[369]
Anarchists understood that creating appropriate methods of action was not a matter of inventing abstract strategies fit for all times and places, and following them as if there were an instruction manual for producing a revolution. Anarchism, to quote Kropotkin, contains “no ready-made recipes for political-cooking.”[370] Building an anarchist society requires action within a specific context and, since this context varies according to time and place, it follows that, in Goldman’s words, “the methods of Anarchism… do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances” but “must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.”[371] As Malatesta wrote, “the problem facing us anarchists, who regard anarchy not so much as a beautiful dream to be chased by the light of the moon, but as an individual and social way of life to be brought about for the greatest good of all… is to so conduct our activities as to achieve the greatest useful effect in the various circumstances in which history places us. One must not ignore reality, but if reality is noxious, one must fight it, resorting to every means made available to us by reality itself.”[372]
Despite anarchist methods of action varying depending upon the historically specific context, there were common views on strategy and social change that pervaded the anarchist movement. These were: (a) the advocacy of social revolution, the unity of means and ends, prefiguration, direct action; the spirit of revolt; and (b) the rejection of attempting to achieve social change via the conquest of state power. In this chapter, I shall explain the first group of topics and then, in chapter 5, I shall turn to the anarchist critique of conquering state power. Throughout both chapters, I shall demonstrate that anarchists advocated the strategies they did due to their beliefs about what forms of practice constituted them and how these practices would simultaneously transform people and social relations.
*** Social Revolution
Anarchists held that the abolition of class society could “only be achieved by means of a revolutionary movement” instigating a social revolution.[373] It is common for modern academics who study the history of revolutions to define a “revolution” as necessarily involving the transformation of the state from one form into another.[374] Anarchists wanted to abolish the state, rather than seize its power, and so did not define a social revolution in such a state-centric manner. They attempted to create a social revolution that fundamentally transformed “the foundations of society, its political, economic and social character” and so was distinct from a statist revolution in which there is “a mere change of rulers, of government.”[375]
This fundamental transformation of society required, according to Kropotkin, “completely reconstructing all relationships” between people, from the relationships within a household, factory, or village to those between urban and rural areas.[376] The same idea was expressed by Wilson, who advocated “a revolution in every department of human existence, social, political and economic.”[377] Anarchists did not limit the scope of revolutionary transformation to the public sphere of the community or workplace. For the revolution to be meaningful, it had to also transform the so-called private sphere of sexual relationships, parent-child relationships, housework, and so on. Goldman, to take one example, argued that the compulsory social relations of marriage should be replaced by free love in which “love can go and come without fear of meeting a watch-dog,” and neither partner acts or views themselves as the owner, controller, and dictator of the other.[378] The extent to which some anarchists viewed emancipation within the private sphere as essential can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence that “a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.”[379]
Although anarchists sometimes claimed that the social revolution should be “spontaneous,” the majority of anarchists did not expect it to appear suddenly without any planning and preparation. Nor did anarchists think that the social revolution would occur independently of anarchists influencing other workers through words and deeds. They instead meant that the social revolution should not be imposed on society by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the people. For a revolution to be “spontaneous” in this sense of the term was for it to be voluntarily launched and self-determined by workers themselves. A worker acted spontaneously when they acted of their own volition, even if their actions were inspired by the actions of those around them.[380] Anarchists were, in other words, committed to the famous words of the 1864 preamble to the statutes of the First International: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”[381] This line from the preamble was consistently repeated by anarchist authors or rephrased in slightly different language, such as Malatesta’s remark that “we anarchists do not want to <em>emancipate</em> the people; we want the people to <em>emancipate themselves</em>.”[382]
The necessity of a social revolution emerged from the fact that a ruling class had never in history given up their power voluntarily. In every instance, it had required violence or at least the threat of it.[383] Although anarchism aimed at, to quote Malatesta, “the removal of violence from human relations,” the vast majority of anarchist authors advocated revolutionary violence as a means to overcome the violence that defended and maintained class society.[384] This revolutionary violence took two main forms: the forceful expropriation of the economic ruling classes and the violent destruction of the state. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “an armed, violent revolution” that would “smash the army and police” and achieve the “forcible expropriation of property owners” and “the abolition of all political authority.”[385] This position emerged from an awareness that, as Malatesta explained in 1892, “the means we employ are those that circumstances make possible or necessary… we have to make our fight in the world as it is, or else be condemned to be nothing but fruitless dreamers.”[386] Class society is violently enforced by “powerful military and police organizations which meet any serious attempt at a change with prison, hanging, and massacre.… Against the physical force that blocks our way there is no appeal except to physical force.”[387]
The same position was consistently advocated by Kropotkin over several decades. In 1877, he endorsed “the expropriation and suppression of the bourgeoisie.”[388] A few years later in 1881, he wrote that workers must “seize all of the wealth of society, if necessary doing so over the corpse of the bourgeoisie, with the intention of returning all of society’s wealth to those who produced it, the workers.”[389] In 1906, he claimed that in order to achieve “the complete destruction of Capitalism and the State, and their replacement by Anarchist Communism” it was necessary to engage in “armed struggle against the dominating order” and expropriate the ruling classes.[390] In 1913, he argued that “economic emancipation” required “smashing the old political forms represented by the State.”[391] A year later, he wrote that “two things are necessary to be successful in a revolution… an idea in the head, and a bullet in the rifle! The force of action—guided by the force of Anarchist thought.”[392] The extent to which Kropotkin was a proponent of violence against the forces of state repression can be seen in the fact that, in 1877, he attended a demonstration in Switzerland armed with a gun. He was ready, in his own words, to “blow out the brains” of the police if they attacked.[393] In the wake of the 1905 Russian revolution, when he was in his sixties, Kropotkin practiced shooting with a rifle in case he returned to Russia and needed to participate in street fighting.[394]
Malatesta and Kropotkin were not unique in this respect. Countless other anarchists can be quoted making the exact same points.[395] Adolph Fischer claimed in 1887 that “only by the force of arms can the wage slaves make their way out of capitalistic bondage,” “expropriate the privileged,” and achieve “the abolition of political authority, the state.”[396] Rocker insisted in 1920 that “we already know that a revolution cannot be made with rose-water. And we know, too, that the owning classes will never yield up their privileges spontaneously. On the day of victorious revolution the workers will have to impose their will on the present owners of the soil, of the subsoil and of the means of production.”[397] In order to do so, workers would also have to demolish the state, since it is “the fortress” that violently maintains the power of the ruling classes.[398]
The forms of violence that anarchists advocated and engaged in covered a wide spectrum of behavior and varied among different contexts. It included, but was not limited to, riots; fighting the police with fists, sticks, and stones; assassinating class enemies; and engaging in armed conflict with the military. This is not to say that anarchists who advocated revolutionary violence agreed with one another on which forms of violence were ethically acceptable or strategically advisable. Johann Most wrote several articles during the 1880s in which he actively encouraged anarchists to engage in violent acts of vengeance against the ruling classes.[399] Malatesta, in comparison, argued in the 1890s that although anarchists should use violence to overthrow systems of oppression, they should not engage in violence to achieve revenge.[400]
A significant number of anarchists saw potential dangers in revolutionary violence. In 1896, Malatesta argued that “let us have no unnecessary victims, not even in the enemy camp… a liberating revolution cannot be born of massacre and terror, these having been—and ever so it shall remain—the midwives to tyranny.”[401] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1892 that “slaughtering the bourgeois so as to ensure that the revolution succeeds is a nonsensical dream” since “organized and legalized Terror… serves only to forge chains for the people” and “lays the groundwork for the dictatorship of whoever will grab control of the revolutionary tribunal.”[402] Even Most told an audience in Baltimore that “we are revolutionists not from love of gore” but “because there is no other way to free and redeem mankind.”[403]
In the popular imagination, revolutions are typically equated with violent acts of destruction, such as fighting the police and army or storming parliament. Anarchists advocated these acts, but they did not reduce the social revolution to them. For them, the social revolution was above all an act of creation. The old world had to be destroyed only because this was a prerequisite to the construction of a new social order. In 1873, Bakunin claimed that although “the real passion for destruction… is far from sufficient for achieving the ultimate aims of the revolutionary cause… there can be no revolution without widespread and passionate destruction, a destruction salutary and fruitful precisely because out of it, and by means of it alone, new worlds are born and arise.”[404] For anarchists like Berkman, a revolution “<em>begins</em> with a violent upheaval,” but this is only “the rolling up of your sleeves” before “<em>the actual work</em>” of revolution occurs, namely “the reorganization of the entire life of society.”[405]
As Kropotkin noted, the “first skirmish” of a social revolution, when the people rise up in insurrection, “is soon ended, and it is only after the overthrow of the old constitution that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.”[406] This did not mean that violence was not an important aspect of launching and defending the social revolution. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution would most likely result in a civil war, due to the ruling classes launching a counterattack against the working classes.[407] Anarchists were instead drawing attention to the fact that the core of the social revolution was people internalizing anarchist ideas and reconstructing and reorganizing society according to them. The social revolution, in other words, rested on the simultaneous transformation of social structures and of the people who constituted, produced, and reproduced them. It required a change not only in how society was organized, but also a corresponding change to what drives and capacities people exercised and developed. Above all, for anarchists like Goldman, it required people to develop revolutionary consciousness, such as a “sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood.”[408] This aspect of the social revolution would continue long after the ruling classes had been successfully overthrown.
Therefore, anarchists did not expect the social revolution to occur quickly. Kropotkin predicted in 1885 that “it is not by a revolution lasting a couple of days that we shall come to transform society in the direction posed by anarchist communism.… It is a whole insurrectionary period of three, four, perhaps five years that we must traverse.”[409] During and after this insurrectionary period, society as a whole would be restructured not from the top down by means of government decree but from the bottom up by millions of workers, in both urban and rural areas, reorganizing their workplaces, communities, and households according to anarchist ideas. Fabbri went further and noted in 1922 that “however extensive and radical a revolution may be, before it manages to be victorious completely and worldwide not one but many generations must elapse.”[410] In other words, anarchists viewed “the social revolution” as a “process” that stretched over an extended period of time.[411]
Anarchists divided the process of social revolution into moments of destruction and construction.[412] The working classes would destroy the old world by overthrowing and abolishing the state and expropriating land, raw materials, the means of production, and the necessities of life, such as warehouses of food and clothing or apartment blocks, from the ruling classes.[413] The working classes would build the new society on the ruins of the old by establishing the communal ownership of these things, building organs of self-management—workplace and community assemblies—and, through these, organizing the ongoing reproduction and restructuring of society. As noted in the previous chapter, most anarchists thought that in order to coordinate production, distribution, and revolutionary activity on a large scale, these assemblies should establish formal local federations that would, in turn, federate together to form regional, national, and ultimately, if the social revolution goes as hoped, international federations. A minority of anarchists opposed the establishment of formal federations and argued that large-scale coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks.
The defense of the social revolution would be achieved through the formation of worker militias, rather than through the seizure of state power. These worker militias would act as organs of class power. As early as 1868, Bakunin, who had previously joined the barricades during the 1848 revolution in Paris and Prague and an 1849 insurrection in Dresden, argued that revolutionaries must “organize a revolutionary force capable of defeating reaction,” which would include the “federation of the Barricades.”[414] This view was repeated in 1870, when he wrote that, during an anarchist revolution, workers would be “armed and organized” in order to coordinate “common defense against the enemies of the Revolution.”[415] Decades later in 1922, Malatesta advocated “the creation of voluntary militia, without powers to interfere as militia in the life of the community, but only to deal with any armed attacks by the forces of reaction to reestablish themselves, or to resist outside intervention by countries as yet not in a state of revolution.”[416] Berkman similarly argued in 1929 that “the armed workers and peasants are the only effective defense of the revolution.”[417]
Advocating workers’ militias was not limited to the writings of famous anarchist authors. It can also be seen in the resolutions of anarchist organizations. The resolutions passed at the Spanish National Confederation of Labor’s (CNT) May 1936 Zaragoza Congress acknowledged “the necessity to defend the advances made through the revolution” from both “foreign capitalist invasion” and “counterrevolution at home.”[418] This would be achieved through arming the populace with an array of weapons including not only pistols and rifles but also “planes, tanks, armored vehicles, machine-guns and anti-aircraft cannon,” creating a workers’ militia of “all individuals of both sexes who are fit to fight,” which would coordinate its action via their local “commune” and the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[419] Anarchists put this theory into practice and formed workers’ militias to defend the revolution during the Russian revolution and civil war of 1917–23, and the early phases of the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39.[420]
The manner in which anarchists described the social revolution can give the false impression that they thought it would occur all at once and imagined that, to pick a country at random, all or most of France would simultaneously rise up, overthrow the ruling classes and build an anarchist society. This interpretation ignores that Kropotkin routinely pointed out that the social revolution would most likely: (a) occur alongside a parallel statist revolution launched by republicans or state socialists; (b) develop out of a statist revolution or a series of smaller insurrections; and (c) begin with local uprisings in particular regions, such as Paris, or by particular groups of people, such as miners, and spread to the rest of the country (and hopefully the world) as people in other regions and industries heard of these uprisings and were inspired to join the emerging revolutionary process.[421]
As has already been mentioned, anarchists held that these uprisings, and the social revolution at large, should involve the forcible expropriation of the ruling classes. They thought that any social revolution that did not engage in expropriation would be doomed to failure. If a social revolution were to succeed, the population as a whole must be fed, clothed, and housed. If this did not happen, workers would never support the social revolution, because it does not improve their lives directly or causes a decline in living conditions. Without the support of the masses, the social revolution would fail and reactionaries would be able to restore class society with the promise of bringing stability. Anarchists, in other words, understood that “it is not enough to cherish a noble ideal. Man does not live by high thoughts or superb discourses, for he needs bread as well.”[422] It is essential that, once a social revolution begins, people immediately expropriate and redistribute food, clothing, and housing among the population. The expropriation of the means of production and land would, in turn, enable the working classes to produce the necessities of life needed to sustain the population over a longer period of time and prevent food shortages from defeating the social revolution.[423]
Several anarchists in the late nineteenth century predicted that, even if a country were able to achieve this, the social revolution would likely fail unless it occurred internationally. Guillaume argued in 1874 that “the Revolution cannot be confined to a single country; on pain of death, it is obliged to subsume into its movement, if not the whole world, then at least a considerable portion of the civilized countries.”[424] No country can be entirely self-sufficient and were the states neighboring a country in revolution to impose a blockade, let alone invade, then “the Revolution, being isolated, would be doomed to perish.”[425] Kropotkin shared this concern and developed a detailed response to the problem of economic isolation in his famous 1892 book <em>The Conquest of Bread</em>. He attempted to demonstrate in exhaustive detail how a country could reorganize production and distribution during a revolution with the use of the technology and productive capacities of the time, such as through the extensive use of green houses in urban areas.[426] Decades later, Berkman witnessed the blockade that was imposed on the 1917 Russian revolution by capitalist states. In 1929, he wrote in response to these experiences that “the revolution is <em>compelled</em> to become self-supporting and provide for its own wants.”[427]
The anarchist fear that an isolated revolution would be defeated, alongside their commitment to universal human emancipation, led them to place a great deal of importance on opposing the patriotism and nationalism of the state and fostering internationalism among the working classes. Bakunin understood that “a real and definite solution to the social question can be found only on the basis of an international solidarity of workers of every land,” because “no isolated local or national workers’ association, even one based in the largest of European countries, can ever triumph in the face of a formidable coalition of every privileged class, of every wealthy capitalist, and of every state in the world.”[428] To overcome this coalition of reaction, workers had to achieve “the unity of all local and national bodies” through the formation of “one universal association—the great <em>International Workers’ Association of every land</em>.”[429] This point was reiterated by Rocker decades later when he argued that “the effective basis… for the international liberation of the working class” will only be laid “when the workers in every country… come to understand clearly that their interests are everywhere the same, and out of this understanding learn to act together.”[430]
The outcome of this internationalism would, to quote Malatesta, be workers coming to view “the whole world as our homeland, all humanity as our brothers and sisters.”[431] Under capitalism, this internationalism would be grounded in an understanding of the working class’s shared interests, such that any “worker, the oppressed, Chinese or Russian or from any other country, is our brother, just as the property-owner, the oppressor, is our enemy, even if he is born in our home town.”[432] This belief in working-class internationalism led anarchists in Europe and the United States to form multiethnic and multiracial social movements or organizations. The aptly named International Group of San Francisco brought together Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, French, Italian, and Mexican anarchists in order to organize discussion groups, lectures, picnics, dances, plays, concerts and dinners.[433] In 1931, the paper <em>L’Emancipazione</em>, which was collectively produced by members of the group, declared its goal to be “overcoming all race hatred for the solidarity of all peoples, [and] the destruction of all borders: to inaugurate the true and sincere pact of human solidarity.”[434]
Numerous other examples can be found in the history of anarchism in the United States, which was largely a social movement of immigrants. Anarchists played a key role, alongside other socialists, in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at a convention in 1905. The constitution of the IWW, in contrast to other trade unions at the time, included an explicit commitment to organizing all workers, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. This was reflected in the IWW’s subsequent organizing campaigns, which included the formation of interracial unions among Black and white timber workers in the South and Northwest, and Black and white dockworkers on the Philadelphia waterfront. The IWW’s multiethnic and interracial character can also be seen in the fact that French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Finnish, Swedish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Japanese, and African American anarchists participated within the trade union as members of local sections, organizers of strikes, and editors of, or writers for, newspapers. On the West Coast, Japanese anarchists, including Takeuchi Tetsugoro, translated IWW literature into Japanese, published a bilingual newspaper to promote the IWW, and organized 2,000 Japanese grape pickers via the Fresno Labor League. In September 1909, the Fresno Labor League held a joint rally with the local branch of the IWW, which was primarily composed of Mexican and Italian workers. After the organization dissolved in 1910, many members joined the local branch of the IWW and went on to organize hundreds of Mexican and Japanese orange pickers in 1918.[435]
For anarchists, this commitment to universal human solidarity entailed an opposition to imperialism and colonialism and the support of anticolonial national liberation movements, such as those in Cuba, India, and Ireland.[436] According to Maximoff, “the Anarchists demand the liberation of all colonies and support every struggle for national independence as long as it is an expression of the will of the revolutionary proletariat and the working peasantry of the nation concerned.”[437] This support included the belief that the main goal of national liberation movements—emancipation—could only be achieved through the methods of anarchism, rather than the establishment of a new state. As will be explained in chapter 5, anarchists predicted that if national liberation movements seized state power then they would end up replacing foreign colonial oppressors with a new minority ruling class who oppressed and exploited the majority of the population.
During World War I, anarchist opposition to imperialism was paradoxically used by a small number of authors, including Kropotkin and Grave, to argue that anarchists should support the French Republic against German militarism on the grounds that Germany had launched a war of aggression and, if victorious, would impose autocracy on the rest of Europe. Most anarchists rejected this argument and refused to side with any state in the conflict since it was a war between rival imperialist powers. As the <em>International Anarchist Manifesto Against War</em> declared in 1915, “there is but one war of liberation: that which in all countries is waged by the oppressed against the oppressors, by the exploited against the exploiters.”[438] This opposition to all states in the conflict coincided with multiple attempts to organize resistance to the war, such as launching campaigns against conscription, which resulted in anarchists experiencing a significant amount of state repression.[439]
*** Evolution and Revolution
Anarchists did not expect the social revolution to appear out of nowhere. They viewed social change as a single process that could be divided into periods of evolution and periods of revolution.[440] During periods of evolution change is slow, gradual, and partial. Evolutionary change includes such things as certain ideas becoming more popular, small groups of people developing radical capacities and drives, or dominant structures being gradually modified. Over time, this evolutionary change builds up and culminates in a revolutionary period during which change is rapid and large scale, fundamentally altering society. Although periods of evolution are in general much longer than periods of revolution, it does not follow from this that revolutions are short. A revolutionary period could last years if, during this period, it involves ongoing, large-scale change that fundamentally alters society. The French revolutionary period that began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, for instance, ended ten years later in 1799 with the seizure of state power by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Evolutionary and revolutionary change were not seen as separate distinct entities but rather fed off and flowed into one another. An evolutionary period would, if events unfolded as anarchists hoped, develop into a revolutionary period. According to Bakunin, revolutions “come about of themselves, produced by the force of things, the tide of events and facts. They ferment for a long time in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses—then they explode, often triggered by apparently trivial causes.”[441] In turn, they create or open up new pathways for evolutionary change in the future, while at the same time blocking off other avenues. These new evolutions would lead to new revolutionary change in the future, and so on. As Reclus argued, “evolution and revolution are two successive aspects of the same phenomenon, evolution preceding revolution, and revolution preceding a new evolution, which is in turn the mother of future revolutions.”[442]
Émile Pouget expressed this same idea in different language. He conceptualized revolution as a single process of social change that includes both gradual modifications to capitalism and the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism. For him, revolutionary syndicalism “does not regard the Revolution as a future cataclysm for which we must wait patiently to see emerging from the inevitable working-out of events.… The Revolution is an undertaking for all times, for today as well as tomorrow: it is continual action, a daily battling without let-up or respite, against the forces of oppression and exploitation.”[443] As a result, when the working classes launch an insurrection that forcefully expropriates the capitalist class it will be “the culmination of preceding struggles” in which they had traversed “stages along the road to human emancipation.”[444]
Anarchists consistently expressed these ideas about evolution developing into revolution through water-based metaphors. Bakunin wrote in a letter to Reclus that “we are falling back into a time of evolution—that is to say revolutions that are invisible, subterranean and often imperceptible… drops of water, though they may be invisible may go on to form an ocean.”[445] Guillaume claimed that “it is not in one day that waters rise to the point where they can breach the dam holding them back: the waters rise slowly and by degrees: but once they have reached the desired level, the collapse is sudden, and the dam crumbles in the blinking of an eye.”[446] For Berkman, evolutionary change leads into revolutionary change in the same way that water in a kettle gradually heats up until it boils.[447]
This did not mean that anarchists viewed evolution and revolution as natural forces that inevitably propel human subjects toward a better society.[448] Reclus understood that “revolutions do not necessarily constitute progress, just as evolutions are not always directed toward justice.”[449] Malatesta similarly held that “there is no natural law that says evolution must inevitably give priority to liberty rather than the permanent division of society into two castes… that of the dominators and that of the dominated.”[450] These evolutions and revolutions, be they progressive or reactionary, were nothing but the products of humans acting within their historical situation and thereby transforming the world. Mella insisted that “social evolution is constituted by men; these men constitute the means by which it develops.”[451] For Malatesta, “human evolution moves in the direction in which it is driven by the will of humanity.”[452]
One of the main forms of evolutionary change anarchists engaged in was spreading anarchist ideas through newspapers, pamphlets, books, talks, and demonstrations. Anarchist literature was not exclusively nonfiction and also included poems, songs, short stories, plays, and novels. The majority of anarchist print media was written and edited by workers for free in their spare time after a full day of work. There were a few papers which were run by full-time paid staff, such as Spain’s <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> from 1916 onwards, but these were in the minority.[453] Workers who could not read would listen to anarchist texts being read aloud at public meetings, smaller private gatherings, and even at work. Some illiterate workers would deliberately memorize their favorite anarchist articles and then recite them to other workers.[454] The medium of transmitting ideas via face-to-face interaction by itself created a social network of anarchist workers in a specific location. This group of workers could then decide to not only absorb and discuss anarchist theory, but also put theory into practice and take direct action, such as by organizing a strike.
One of the main sources of content for anarchist papers was the vast number of letters that workers sent to editors and publishing groups. These letters usually contained anarchist theory, stories, poetry, calls for solidarity, news of organizing and meetings, and reports of oppressive or scandalous behavior by capitalists and the police. Through writing letters, these correspondents transmitted information and reflections about a local area to the editors of the paper. The editors would, if they deemed it worthy, print the letter in the paper and then send copies to every correspondent they had across the country. Correspondents would distribute the paper to local workers and collect money for both the publishing costs of the paper and solidarity funds that the paper had set up to support striking workers, anarchist prisoners, or widows of dead comrades. The anarchist press was constituted by a social network in which local correspondents were the nodes through which the anarchist press was channeled out to localities, and the thoughts, experiences, and money from localities were channeled back to publishers. During periods when there were no genuinely national formal anarchist organizations in a country, the informal social networks that connected readers, correspondents, editors, and publishers functioned as the organizational structure of the anarchist movement.[455]
Anarchists also spread their ideas through lectures, public debates, and speaking tours. For example, in 1895, the Italian anarchist Pietro Gori went on a vast speaking tour of the United States during which he delivered somewhere between two and four hundred lectures on anarchism in a single year. He began many by singing songs and playing his guitar in order to gather a crowd, before launching into a talk on anarchism, often successfully persuading a number of workers to form anarchist groups.[456] The dual goal of consciousness-raising and organizing was typically facilitated through the distribution of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals at talks. This had the effect that speaking tours established a local archive of anarchist literature wherever they traveled. The new collection of print media could then be used by workers to educate themselves further and become more committed to anarchism once the speaking tour had left the area. Since periodicals included an address to send letters to, the distribution of print media also ensured that new local anarchists had a means to communicate with other anarchists and become part of the social networks that constituted the movement.[457]
This emphasis on spreading ideas was motivated by the awareness that, to quote Lucy Parsons, fundamental social change was preceded by “a long period of education” that developed “self-thinking individuals.”[458] The “first task” of anarchists, according to Malatesta, was “to persuade people. We must make people aware of the misfortunes they suffer and of their chances to destroy them. We must awaken sympathy in everybody for the misfortunes of others and a warm desire for the good of all people… arousing the sentiment of rebellion in the minds of men against the avoidable and unjust evils from which we suffer in society today, [and] getting them to understand how they are caused and how it depends on human will to rid ourselves of them.”[459]
In other words, anarchists sought to bring about a variety of different changes to the consciousness of the working classes. They sought to improve their theoretical understanding of existing society and how it oppresses them, persuade them that an anarchist society is both possible and desirable, instill anarchist values in them, and, perhaps most importantly, motivate them to actually engage in direct action and emancipate themselves. It was for this reason that Kropotkin sought to use his paper <em>Le Révolté</em> to inspire workers with hope by documenting “the growing revolt against antiquated institutions,” rather than, as many socialist papers did, drive workers to despair and inaction by focusing too strongly on suffering within existing society.[460]
Anarchist newspapers, pamphlets, books, and talks were but one aspect of a wider revolutionary working-class counterculture that the anarchist movement constructed. There are numerous examples of anarchist workers in Europe and the United States organizing plays, poetry scenes, musical performances, dinners, dances, picnics, and public celebrations of key dates in the revolutionary calendar, such as May Day and the anniversary of the Paris Commune. These social events, which constituted a significant amount of day-to-day anarchist activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not only moments of fun and creativity. They were also instrumental in: (a) drawing workers into a social milieu where they might develop revolutionary consciousness and come to engage in direct action; (b) raising funds for newspapers, strikes, political prisoners, etc.; and (c) forming close social bonds both among anarchist militants and between anarchists and the wider working class in the area. The creation and reproduction of these social networks laid the foundation on which larger acts of revolt and rebellion were organized.[461]
For decades in Spain, workers came into contact with anarchist ideas via cultural and social centers known as ateneos (athenaeums), which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. These ateneos typically featured a café, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighborhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks, and artistic performances. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the ongoing existence of an anarchist presence within working-class communities. The workers who participated in ateneos organized a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theater clubs that would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, and hiking clubs that allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. Through engaging in these activities, workers developed themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished.
A significant number of anarchist militants, especially women, first encountered anarchist ideas and entered into anarchist social networks through their participation in the ateneos when they were children and teenagers. Young people not only received an anarchist education in ateneos, but also gained experiences of anarchist organizing. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). The FIJL, which was an independent organization linked with the CNT, came to be viewed as one of the main pillars of the anarchist movement. On several occasions, the ateneos were the avenue through which workers mobilized to participate in demonstrations and strikes. They were, in short, social spaces that facilitated working-class self-education, recreation, and class struggle.[462]
*** Unity of Means and Ends
Anarchists did not think that any form of activity could lead to an anarchist society. They argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating a free, equal, and cooperative society without domination or exploitation. They advocated the unity of means and ends. In 1881, Kropotkin argued that social movements should establish their “final <em>objective</em>” and then “specify a proposed course of action <em>in conformity with the ends</em>.”[463] Anarchists like Malatesta often expressed this idea with metaphors of roads and bridges, transit and movement. He wrote,
<quote>
It is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate means must be used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but instead cannot but be conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the circumstances in which the struggle takes place, for if we ignore the choice of means we would achieve other ends, possibly diametrically opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious and inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the highroad and takes a wrong turning does not go where he intends to go but where the road leads him.[464]
</quote>
Goldman made this same point in 1922 when she argued, in response to the Bolshevik seizure of state power during the Russian Revolution, that “means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim” because the “means employed, become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”[465] Given this, “revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be <em>initiated</em> with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitionary period. The latter can only serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”[466]
Anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends was grounded in the theory of practice, which maintained, as we have seen, that as humans engage in activity, they simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. An anarchist society would be reproduced over time by people engaging in horizontal systems of association and decision-making and, in so doing, continuously creating and re-creating both anarchist social relations and themselves as people with the right kinds of capacities, drives, and consciousness for an anarchist society. These new social relations can only take root if capitalism and the state are abolished through a social revolution and so will have to be created by the people who presently live in, and have been shaped by, class society. It is therefore essential that during the course of the class struggle workers engage in practices that transform them into people who are capable of, and driven to, overthrow class society and establish and reproduce an anarchist society. If social movements make the mistake of using the wrong or inappropriate means then they will produce people who will create a different society than the one they initially intended.
This theory entailed two main commitments. First, a core part of determining what strategies and tactics a social movement should use to achieve their goals is establishing how the forms of practice that constitute them transform individuals and social relations simultaneously. If a social movement’s end goals can only be achieved through a social revolution, then it must choose means during an evolutionary period that build toward this. Kropotkin argued in 1881 that workers should engage in direct struggle against capital, especially via trade unions and strikes, because of the unity of means and ends. He wrote,
<quote>
A party which proposes a social revolution as its goal, and which seeks to seize capital from the hands of its current holders must, of necessity, and from this day onward, position itself at the center of the struggle against capital. If it wishes that the next revolution should take place against the regime of property and that the watchword of the next call to arms should necessarily be one calling for the expropriation of society’s wealth from the capitalists, the struggle must, on all fronts, be a struggle against the capitalists.[467]
</quote>
The second main position entailed by the unity of means and ends is that social movements must structure organizations and make decisions in a manner that causes participants to develop the kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness that are necessary for producing and reproducing the social relations of the future society. A social movement organized in a hierarchical and centralized manner cannot create an anarchist society because it will not produce the right kinds of people for the task. Participants will either act in an authoritarian way or be subject to the authoritarianism of others, such as a small group of leaders monopolizing decision-making power and issuing orders that the membership then implements. This will result in the development of authoritarian tendencies in individuals and the establishment of authoritarian social structures that will, in turn, enable authoritarian modes of practice and constrain antiauthoritarian ones. If a social movement constituted by these self-reproducing authoritarian social structures were to launch or take over a revolution, the result would not be an anarchist society. The authoritarianism of the social movement would instead come to characterize society as a whole. Social movements that aim to create an anarchist society must therefore be constituted by forms of practice that produce self-determining people who associate horizontally with one another. In order to do so, workers must establish social relations in the present that are, as far as possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society.
The unity of means and ends led anarchists to maintain that, although violence was necessary to defend the revolution from counterattack by the ruling classes, it should not be used to force the working classes into an anarchist society. In Bakunin’s words, “liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below upward.”[468] As a result, “a revolution that is imposed, either by official decrees, or by force of arms is no longer a revolution but the opposite of a revolution, because it necessarily provokes reaction.”[469] Malatesta noted that “anarchy cannot be made by force and violent imposition by a few” and “is only possible when it is understood and wanted by large popular masses that embrace all the elements necessary to creating a society superior to the present one.”[470] There is, in other words, an incompatibility between the means of coercing people into a particular kind of society and the ends of creating a free society in which people voluntarily self-manage social life. A genuine social revolution can only occur if the majority of the population choose to participate within it and reorganize society themselves.
For anarchists, means and ends are not only interconnected in so far as the means you engage in determine the ends you arrive at. They are also identical in the narrow sense that both the means and the ends of anarchism are freedom. As Fabbri wrote, “the libertarian notion of revolution” holds that “freedom is also a means as well as an end.”[471] Anarchist actions, in other words, create freedom and are instances of freedom at the same time. This can be seen by connecting the anarchist conceptions of freedom discussed in chapter 3 to revolutionary practice. When the working classes collectively struggle against the ruling classes, they are not only fighting for a distant postcapitalist society in which humanity will finally be free. They are also rejecting domination in the present by choosing to act in accordance with their own wills, rather than obeying the wills of their masters and remaining subservient. When the working classes create organizations and social relations in which they horizontally relate to one another, they are both struggling for a future free society and creating a freer society in the here and now by expanding their real possibilities of experiencing a different kind of life and becoming a different kind of person. When the working classes engage in collective struggles or participate in horizontal social structures, they are developing themselves and becoming more free than they were before.
Such a view was not inconsistent with the fact that the majority of anarchists thought violence was necessary to overthrow the ruling classes and defend the social revolution. Using violence to abolish the power of violent oppressors is not a negation of freedom but rather an affirmation of it. As Malatesta put it, “in order to fight our enemies, and fight effectively, we do not need to deny the principle of freedom,” since a commitment to freedom entails “the right to resist any violation of freedom, and to use brute force to resist, when violence is based upon brute force and there is no better way to successfully oppose it.”[472] Anarchists wish to use violence to expropriate the economic ruling classes “not because freedom is a good thing for the future, but because it is always good, today as much as tomorrow, and the owners deprive us of it by depriving us of the means of exercising it.”[473] Anarchists, likewise, wish to use violence to overthrow the political ruling classes “because governments are the negation of freedom and we cannot be free without having overthrown them.”[474]
*** Prefiguration
The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends led them to argue that working-class social movements should establish horizontal social relations that are, as far as is possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society. In so doing, workers attempt to construct the world as they wish it to be during their struggle against the world as it is. They also create, through experimentation in the present, the real methods of organization and association that people in the future might use to achieve the states of affairs that characterize an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, argued in 1913 that anarchists “have to find, within the practice of life itself and indeed working through their own experiences, new ways in which social formations can be organized… and how these might emerge in a liberated society.”[475]
During the second half of the twentieth century, this idea was called <em>prefiguration</em> or <em>prefigurative politics</em>. It should be kept in mind that this term was not used by anarchists historically.[476] Nonetheless, anarchist organizations generally prefigured the future anarchist society in two ways. First, by embodying the kinds of organizational structure and methods of deliberation and decision-making that a future society would contain. Second, by performing the kinds of functions that organizations in a future society will carry out. Although a social revolution would mark a dramatic shift in social life, there would be no such dramatic shift in anarchist methods of organization and association. The methods would remain the same. What would change is the context and the conditions under which these methods are applied and so the extent to which they can be fully put into practice.
Anarchist organizations built within class society thus have a dual function. In the present they bring people together in order to directly satisfy unmet drives and struggle effectively against capitalism and the state. Through participating in anarchist organizations, workers simultaneously attempt to achieve concrete goals and develop their radical capacities, drives, and consciousness. A tenant union might not only organize a rent strike that wins a reduction in rent or prevents an eviction. The participants could also learn how to make collective decisions in general assemblies and act for themselves through their own direct action. At the same time, they might realize that tenants have shared class interests that are opposed to the class interests of landlords. During the course of the struggle, they begin to understand that society could be organized without landlords, and they may come to aspire for an economic system in which everyone has free access to housing. In changing the world, workers at the same time change themselves.
During a revolutionary period, anarchist organizations would take on new roles and serve as the inspiration for emerging anarchist social forms and/or transform from organizations that struggle against class society into organizations that run a classless society.[477] At such a point, they would not only be the dominant structures through which society was generally organized. They would also continually produce and reproduce individuals who want to and are able to freely associate as equals.
The strategy of prefiguration was not original or exclusive to the anarchist movement. From the 1840s onward, a tendency within the French socialist movement had proposed the formation of workers’ cooperatives as organizations that would grow in number under capitalism until they displaced capitalist firms and became the nodes of a socialist society.[478] During debates within the First International, this idea was extended to the First International itself, including the trade unions affiliated to it. The Belgian Internationalist César De Paepe, who was a collectivist but not an anarchist, proposed in his February 1869 article “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future” that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and… its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order.”[479] For De Paepe, “the International contains within itself the seeds of all the institutions of the future. Let a section of the International be established in each commune; the new society will be formed and the old will collapse with a sigh.”[480] The influence these ideas had on the developing anarchist movement can be seen in the fact that the article was republished in April 1869 in <em>Le Progrès</em>, which was edited by Guillaume, and in May 1869 by the official organ of the Romance Federation of the First International, <em>L’Égalité</em>, which Bakunin wrote for and edited at the time.[481]
One of the earliest anarchist endorsements of prefigurative politics occurred when, on November 12, 1871, the Jura Federation issued the “Sonvilier Circular” in response to Marx, Engels, and their supporters converting the General Council of the First International into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections.[482] As part of their critique of the actions of the General Council they stated that
<quote>
the society of the future should be nothing other than the universalization of the organization with which the International will have endowed itself. We must, therefore, have a care to ensure that that organization comes as close as we may to our ideal. How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning toward authority and dictatorship.[483]
</quote>
Anarchists, in short, thought that building prefigurative organizations was essential because of the unity of means and ends. As Bakunin wrote, a few months after the “Sonvilier Circular” was published, “the fashion and form of one’s organization arises from and flows as a consequence from the nature of one’s aims.”[484] Kropotkin likewise argued in 1873 that revolutionaries must reject social relations within “the revolutionary organization” that contradict the ideals for which it has been formed, relations such as “a hierarchy of ranks which enslaves many people to one or several persons” or “inequality in the interrelations of the members of one and the same organization.”[485]
This was important because, as Malatesta explained, “the abolition of government and capitalism is feasible only once the people, organizing themselves, are equipped to perform those social functions performed today—and exploited to their own advantage—by rulers and capitalists.”[486] To this end, anarchists like Goldman proposed that workers in the present should attempt “to prepare and equip themselves for the great task the revolution will put upon them” by acquiring “the knowledge and technical skill necessary for managing and directing the intricate mechanisms of the industrial and social structure of their respective countries.”[487] Anarchist organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society were the concrete means through which workers would learn to self-manage their lives and thereby become equipped to create a self-managed society. As Mella wrote in 1911,
<quote>
The proletariat continues acquiring the capacity for cooperation and management precisely outside of political action. In workers’ associations, <em>especially in those where political practices do not govern</em>, workers are gaining the power of initiative, management practices, habits of freedom and direct intervention in common affairs, ease of expression and mental assurance, all things whose development is void in political entities that have as a base the delegation of powers, and, therefore, the subordination and discipline, and obedience to the elected. In social associations, initiatives come from below and from below come ideas, strength, and action. In this way, free men are made and are released to walk.[488]
</quote>
Decades later in 1932, the Spanish anarchist Isaac Puente argued that just as a child learns to walk or ride a bicycle by trying and failing until they succeed, so too would workers learn to produce and reproduce an anarchist society through experiments in horizontal forms of association. He wrote, “living in libertarian communism will be like learning to live. Its weak points and its failings will be shown up when it is introduced. If we were politicians we would paint a paradise brimful of perfections. Being human and being aware what human nature can be like, we trust that people will learn to walk the only way it is possible for them to learn: by walking.”[489]
Anarchists argued with one another about which prefigurative organizations should be built and how these organizations should be structured. Antiorganizationalists advocated small affinity groups and informal social networks, while organizationalists advocated, in addition to this, large formal federations, such as trade unions. Some anarchists advocated forming intentional communities and workers’ cooperatives, while other anarchists rejected this strategy.[490] One area where anarchists generally agreed was on the need to construct emancipatory schools. Anarchists of all varieties founded or participated in schools in Spain, Italy, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. These schools lasted for varying lengths of time, ranging from one or two years to over four decades, in the case of the Modern School of New York, which opened in 1911, relocated to Stelton, New Jersey in 1915 and finally closed in 1953.[491]
These schools educated children and adults, but also sought to contribute toward fundamental social change. In 1898, a number of prominent anarchists, including Louise Michel, Reclus, Grave, and Kropotkin, signed an article published in <em>Les Temps Nouveaux</em> that advocated the creation of anarchist schools on the grounds that “education is a powerful means of disseminating and infiltrating minds with generous ideas” and so could become “the most active motor of progress,” acting as “the lever that will lift up the world and will overthrow error, lies and injustice forever.”[492]
One of the most influential anarchist educationalists was Francisco Ferrer, who established a Modern School that taught pupils in Barcelona between 1901 and 1906. He advocated “the establishment of new schools in which, as far as possible, there shall rule this spirit of liberty that we feel will dominate the whole education of the future.”[493] Ferrer did not think that teachers would be able to establish a fully emancipatory school overnight. He instead argued that teachers should engage in pedagogical experiments that demonstrated, through a process of trial and error, what approaches to education enabled children to develop themselves and become adults who could think independently and horizontally associate with others.[494] Ferrer’s experiments in pedagogy were abruptly ended on October 13, 1909, when he was executed by the Spanish government for a crime he had not committed: orchestrating a week-long working-class insurrection against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco. His martyrdom led him to become an internationally known figure and inspired the creation of emancipatory schools around the world.[495]
The theory and practice of anarchist prefigurative politics was largely concerned with the formation and structure of organizations and often did not give sufficient attention to interpersonal relations between people in daily life, especially men and women. In the United States, for example, anarchists only shifted to focusing on prefiguration in daily life in the 1940s, after anarchism had ceased to exist as a mass movement in the country.[496] This is not to say that anarchists prior to this did not think it was important to act like an anarchist in daily life. In 1886, Wilson claimed that anarchists should, in parallel with the formation of mass, working-class social movements, “endeavor to discard the principle of domination from our own lives.”[497] Malatesta similarly wrote in 1897 that “we need to start by being as socialist as we can immediately, in our everyday life.”[498] Nor is it to say that anarchists in this period never explicitly advocated some forms of prefiguration in daily life. In 1907, the Italian anarchist Camillo Di Sciullo argued that anarchists should, “build a little anarchist world within your family.”[499]
The main form of prefiguration in daily life anarchists advocated was free love in the sense of a voluntary sexual relationship between equals that occurred outside of marriage. These relationships were mostly monogamous, although some anarchists did advocate and practice polyamory. Notable examples of anarchists seriously attempting to engage in free love include the relationship between Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop and the one between Guy Aldred and Rose Witkop. In both cases, Rocker and Aldred appear to have treated their partner in a nonpatriarchal manner. However, most evidence indicates that the majority of anarchist men did not build the gender and romantic relations of the future society within their own households. They continued to treat women in a patriarchal manner, such as expecting their partner to become a mother who did the vast majority of housework and childcare. This, in turn, often led to anarchist women lacking the free time to properly participate within the anarchist movement.[500] In 1935, the Spanish anarchist Lola Iturbe complained that anarchist men “however radical they may be in cafés, unions, and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands.’”[501]
A similar failure occurred in public organizations. The CNT, for example, was formally committed to the goal of a society in which men and women were free and equal, but this was generally not prefigured within the trade union’s day-to-day social relations. Soledad Estorach recalled in an interview that women would attend a meeting but not return due to experiences of sexism. Even trade union sections whose membership were mostly women were represented at congresses by men and only a few women spoke during a trade union’s local general assembly. Within the FIJL, teenage boys would laugh at girls when they spoke, or were about to speak, at meetings.[502]
Women in both Europe and the United States responded to patriarchy within the anarchist movement by forming their own groups in order to enable women to more fully participate in the movement, struggling against patriarchal and class oppression simultaneously. The Women’s Emancipation Group—founded in 1897 by the Italian anarchists Maria Roda, Ninfa Baronio, and Ernestina Cravello—had around fifteen members. It was based in Paterson, New Jersey, held regular meetings over seven years, printed and distributed antipatriarchal literature, and inspired other anarchist women to form their own groups, such as the Women’s Propaganda Group in Manhattan.[503] Anarchist women in Spain similarly formed their own groups in the 1920s. These grew in number until they were formally linked together via the establishment of the national federation Mujeres Libres (Free Women) in 1937 during the Spanish revolution. The organization’s significance can be seen in the fact that it mobilized over 20,000 women.[504]
One of Mujeres Libres’ most important contributions was taking anarchist ideas on prefiguration and applying them to the emancipation of women. Since the 1860s, anarchists had argued that workers should build organizations that used the same structure and decision-making procedures as an anarchist society because, through participating in them, workers learned how to self-manage their lives and thereby how to create a self-managed society. Mujeres Libres developed this theory by arguing that liberation for women (and the drives, capacities, and consciousness this entailed) was not simply a matter of creating organizations that coordinated action via federations or made decisions via general assemblies. This is because one of the main barriers to women developing themselves through revolutionary practice was sexist treatment by men and women’s own internalization of patriarchal norms.
In October 1938, Mujeres Libres explained that one of the main goals of the organization was “to empower women to make of them individuals capable of contributing to the structuring of the future society, individuals who have learned to be self-determining.”[505] To achieve this, Mujeres Libres organized educational programs specifically for women. These taught not only basic skills, such as reading and writing, but also courses on “social formation” that focused on how women were capable of developing themselves and had to learn to take initiative and act independently of the men in their lives. Members of Mujeres Libres spread these ideas to the countryside during educational trips where they gave talks to other women. During these talks they explained that mothers could be anarchist militants, that men oppressed women, and that women should act themselves to stop this from occurring.[506] In so doing, they were attempting to build the gender relations of anarchy during both the struggle against capitalism and the state and the formation of an anarchist society, rather than waiting till after the revolution for their emancipation.
*** Direct Action
The primary means by which the working classes would simultaneously transform themselves and the social world was direct action. Individuals or groups engage in direct action when they act themselves to bring about social change, rather than relying upon intermediaries or representatives to act on their behalf. Direct action, to quote Rocker, encompasses “every method of immediate warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors.”[507] By “immediate warfare,” Rocker meant actions such as strikes, boycotts, industrial sabotage, distributing antimilitarist propaganda and, in certain circumstances, the “armed resistance of the people for the protection of life and liberty.”[508] Direct action thus includes nonviolent and violent actions that contribute toward both evolutionary and revolutionary change. The social revolution is in a sense the ultimate form of direct action.
Anarchists initially did not use the term direct action and instead deployed a variety of equivalent phrases.[509] It is difficult to trace, using texts that have been translated into English, when the term direct action was first adopted by the anarchist movement. One early example is Wilson’s 1886 advocacy of “direct personal action” in the first issue of <em>Freedom</em>.[510] The term direct action appears to have become commonly used due to the emergence and growth of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement in France between the 1890s and the early 1900s. During this period, revolutionary syndicalists, many of whom were anarchists, consistently advocated and engaged in what they termed direct action. This phrase initially referred to when workers drew on their own strength to personally struggle against capitalism and thereby achieve their own liberation through their own actions.[511]
This perspective can be seen in Émile Pouget’s appropriately titled 1907 pamphlet <em>Direct Action</em>. According to Pouget, who was both an anarchist and a revolutionary syndicalist, direct action meant that “the working class… expects nothing from outside people, powers or forces, but rather creates its own conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its methodology. It means that from now on the <em>producer</em>… means to mount a direct attack upon the capitalist mode of production in order to transform it by eliminating the employer and thereby achieving sovereignty in the workshop.”[512] For Pouget, “direct action is, therefore, merely trade union action… without capitalist compromises, without the flirtation with the bosses of which the sycophants of ‘social peace’ dream… without friends in the government and with no ‘go-betweens’ horning in on the debate.”[513]
By the early twentieth century, the term direct action had become a staple of anarchist parlance and was used in a much broader sense than can be found in early revolutionary syndicalist texts. In 1910, Goldman argued that “direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”[514] Goldman applied this idea to abolishing patriarchy and argued that women should emancipate themselves through their own direct action, rather than trying to win the right to vote and elect representatives who would act on their behalf. She declared that a woman’s “development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right of anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.… by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free.”[515]
This broader notion of direct action was shared by de Cleyre. During a 1912 lecture in Chicago, she said that “every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist.”[516] Equipped with this more expansive definition, de Cleyre illustrated the idea by referring not only to the actions of unionized workers. She also pointed to abolitionists, who helped slaves escape their owners through the underground railroad, and to John Brown, who killed supporters of slavery and attempted to free and arm slaves through the seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.[517]
Anarchists themselves engaged in a wide variety of different forms of direct action, both small and large scale. These included, but were not limited to, workplace strikes, rent strikes, combative demonstrations, riots, armed uprisings, prison escapes, industrial sabotage, boycotts, civil disobedience, and providing illegal abortions. A few of the more exciting, small-scale examples provide some sense of the range direct action could cover.
Anarchists in Paris organized a socialist removal service that would, under the cover of night, move the possessions of poor families from their apartment before they had paid rent. On at least one occasion, anarchists gagged, tied up, and left a landlord or concierge on his bed in order to achieve this.[518] In 1900, anarchists living in the United States unsuccessfully attempted to free Berkman from prison by digging an underground tunnel through which he could escape.[519] Five years later, anarchists in the Russian empire defended Jewish people during the 1905 pogroms by organizing mobile defense units armed with pistols and bombs.[520] In 1919, nearly 150 anarchists, mostly women, rioted at the docks in Lower Manhattan, New York. This was in response to their family members and loved ones being arrested by the American government and deported to Russia for being anarchists.[521] In September 1923, the Spanish anarchist affinity group Los Solidarios, which included Buenaventura Durruti, stole 650,000 pesetas from the Gijón branch of the Bank of Spain in order to buy weapons for a planned, but never carried out, insurrectionary general strike.[522]
On numerous other occasions, anarchists participated in larger acts of collective direct action carried out by mass movements. In early 1902, Galleani and other anarchists organized a series of meetings among dye workers in Paterson, New Jersey. These culminated in a small strike being launched in mid-April by Italian dye workers. Over the following weeks the strike massively expanded and, on June 17, a general strike was proclaimed that mobilized around 15,000 dye and textile workers in the city and surrounding area. This expansion of the strike was driven forward by the efforts of anarchist militants who distributed local anarchist papers and organized meetings in Italian, German, and English. On June 18, Galleani gave a speech where he called upon the striking workers to “rise up!” and “answer the legal violence of capital with the human violence of revolt!” A group of between 1500 and 2000 striking dyers then marched into Paterson and proceeded to break the windows and doors of several dye works in order to drive out scabs and to close down production. This soon escalated into an extended gun battle with the police during which Galleani, who was armed with a revolver, received a minor gunshot wound to the face. The strike continued over the following week and ended with workers gaining a general wage increase.[523]
From these examples, it is clear why anarchists advocated direct action. When successful, it either immediately results in a goal being achieved or imposes costs onto the ruling classes, such that they acquire an incentive to give into the demands of workers. A strike stops production and so a capitalist’s ability to earn profit. If a capitalist wants to stay in business, and is unable to break the strike, they have no choice but to increase wages, reduce hours of work, improve safety conditions, and so on.
Anarchists advocated direct action not only because it was an effective means for achieving social change but also because it positively transformed those who engaged in it. According to the Austrian anarchist Siegfried Nacht, “it is above all through action that the people can educate themselves. Little by little, action will give them a revolutionary mentality.”[524] Pouget held that “direct action has an unmatched educational value: It teaches people to reflect, to make decisions and to act.… Direct action thus releases the human being from the strangle-hold of passivity and listlessness.… It teaches him will-power, instead of mere obedience, and to embrace his sovereignty instead of conferring his part upon a deputy.”[525]
Such a transformation in people was essential for the achievement of anarchist goals. The overthrow of class society and the construction of an anarchist society required the working classes to learn to act for themselves and collectively self-organize and self-determine their lives. This viewpoint was grounded in the theory that there is a connection between means and ends. For Kropotkin, the anarchist vision of a future society “necessarily leads us to develop for the struggle our own tactics, which consist in developing the greatest possible amount of <em>individual initiative</em> in each group and in each individual—unity in action being obtained by unity of purpose and by the force of persuasion.”[526] The social revolution would, after all, only be successful if the working classes had already, to quote Pouget, “acquired the capacity and will” to transform society and overcome “the difficulties that will crop up” through their “own direct efforts, on the capabilities that it possesses within itself.”[527] Direct action in the present “lays the groundwork” for the social revolution since “it is the popularization, in the old society of authoritarianism and exploitation, of the creative notions that set the human being free: development of the individual, cultivation of the will and galvanization for action.”[528] It was, as Galleani wrote, “the best available means for preparing the masses to manage their own personal and collective interests.”[529]
*** The Spirit of Revolt
Malatesta wrote in 1889 that “the great revolution… will come as the result of relentless propaganda and an exceptional number of individual and collective revolts.”[530] He was not simply predicting that revolts would culminate in a social revolution. He was also arguing that revolts are a necessary aspect of the process of social change due to the manner in which they, like all forms of direct action, transform workers who participate in or observe them. He thought that “revolts play a huge part in bringing the revolution about and laying its ground-work.”[531] This was because
<quote>
it is deeds that trigger ideas, which in turn react with deeds and so on.… How ever could those millions of men—brutalized by exhausting toil; rendered anaemic by inadequate and unwholesome food; educated down through the ages in respect for priest, boss, and ruler; forever absorbed in the quest for their daily bread; superstitious; ignorant; fearful—one fine day perform an about face and emerge from their hovels, turn their backs on their entire past of patient submission, tear down the social institutions oppressing them and turn the world into a society made up of equals and brothers—had not a long string of extraordinary events forced their brains to think? If a thousand partial battles had not nurtured the spirit of rebellion in them, plus an appreciation of their own strength, a feeling of solidarity toward their fellow oppressed, hatred for the oppressor, and had not a thousand revolts taught them the art of people’s warfare and had they not found in the yearned for victory a reason to ask themselves: what shall we do tomorrow?[532]
</quote>
Anarchists, in other words, believed that, in order for a social revolution to emerge, an increasingly large number of workers have to choose to engage in acts of revolt that transform them and motivate other workers to rise up against their oppressors. During the early 1880s, Kropotkin argued that this process must be driven forward by anarchist workers engaging in acts that spread, what he called, “the spirit of revolt.”[533] According to Kropotkin, this was because the majority of workers will not become anarchists during periods of evolutionary change. Even a mass movement of one million anarchist workers would be a minority in a country of thirty million. Anarchism will only be embraced by workers throughout all of society during a revolutionary period, when vast numbers of previously indifferent people are caught up in a wave of excitement, become open to fundamentally new ways of thinking, and take an active role in reshaping society. This was demonstrated by the fact that, in the eighteenth century, republicanism and the desire to abolish monarchy only became popular in France during the French Revolution itself.[534]
The success of anarchism therefore required establishing how evolution develops into revolution. Kropotkin answer was that “it is the <em>action</em> of the minorities, continuous action endlessly renewed that achieves this transformation” to a “revolutionary situation.”[535] He predicted that the actions of radical minorities, as individuals and groups, will spread discontent with the existing social system, hatred of the ruling classes, and “reawaken audacity, the spirit of revolt, through preaching by example.”[536] The acts of revolt carried out by courageous minorities will receive sympathy and support from workers not yet engaging in revolutionary action and thereby “find imitators,” such that, as the first radicals are being imprisoned, “others will appear to continue their work” and “the acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, will continue and multiply.”[537]
Kropotkin thought this would occur due to three interdependent processes: (a) revolutionary ideas will spread among previously indifferent workers who are now forced to pick a side in the ongoing class conflict; (b) workers will join the ongoing insurgency because its successes demonstrate the real possibility of overthrowing the ruling classes who previously seemed invincible; and (c) a vicious cycle of state repression will anger the working classes and provoke more and more acts of revolt. Over time, these acts of revolt will spread and grow in size and number until a full-blown social revolution breaks out.[538]
This social revolution will only adopt an anarchist character if anarchist workers play a key role in the early waves of revolt, because “the party which has done most revolutionary agitation, which has manifested most liveliness and audacity, will get the best hearing on the day when action becomes necessary, when someone must march at the head to accomplish the revolution.”[539] A social movement that fails to engage in “revolutionary action in the preparatory period” and make its ideas and aspirations popular among the masses “will have a scanty chance of realizing even the smallest part of its programme. It will be overtaken by the activist parties.”[540]
Kropotkin developed this position from his study of how the French Revolution of 1789 arose. He claimed that, in urban areas, a minority of republican revolutionaries spread the spirit of revolt by popularizing their ideas through pamphlets, leaflets, posters, and songs as well as organizing protests where orators spoke, effigies of the ruling classes were burned, and soldiers were attacked if they attempted to break up the demonstration. Over time, this developed the militancy and daring of the masses until demonstrations transformed into riots and riots into a revolution.[541] A similar pattern unfolded in the countryside. According to Kropotkin, “during the whole year of 1788 there were only half-hearted riots among the peasantry. Like the small and hesitant strikes today, they broke out here and there across France, but gradually they spread, became more broad and bitter, more difficult to suppress.”[542] By 1789, the mass of peasantry had risen up to overthrow the ruling classes. They did so because they “saw that the government no longer had the strength to resist a rebellion” after “a few brave men set fire to the first châteaux, while the mass of people, still full of fear, waited until the flames from the conflagration of the great houses rose over the hills toward the clouds.”[543] The actions of these revolutionary minorities were the catalyst for a chain reaction of uprisings until
<quote>
it became impossible to control the revolution.… It had broken out almost simultaneously in a thousand places; in each village, in each town, in each city of the insurgent provinces, the revolutionary minorities, strong in their audacity and in the unspoken support they recognized in the aspirations of the people, marched to the conquest of the castles, of the town halls and finally of the Bastille, terrorizing the aristocracy and the upper middle class, abolishing privileges. The minority started the revolution and carried the people with it.[544]
</quote>
Kropotkin thought it would “be just the same with the revolution whose approach we foresee. The idea of anarchist communism, today represented by feeble minorities but increasingly finding popular expression, will make its way among the mass of the people.”[545] This would be achieved by groups of anarchist workers spreading throughout the populace in order to help organize acts of resistance and rebellion. Such collective struggles would culminate in revolution spreading widely until capitalism and the state had been overthrown. During this process, “what is now the minority will become the People, the great mass, and that mass rising up against property and the State, will march forward towards anarchist communism.”[546]
[365] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 77.
[366] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Words of a</em> <em>Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 204. See also, 219.
[367] Quoted in Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 55.
[368] Quoted in Turcato, <em>Making Sense</em>, 55.
[369] Errico Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.
[370] Quoted in Ruth Kinna, <em>Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 132.
[371] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 74.
[372] Errico Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 449–50.
[373] James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 247.
[374] For example Charles Tilly, <em>European Revolutions</em>, <em>1492–1992</em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 5.
[375] Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 180, 176.
[376] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 275.
[377] Charlotte Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 53.
[378] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 220–21
[379] Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 156–57. For other examples see Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197–99; Errico Malatesta, <em>At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 88–96. It should be kept in mind that, despite the ideas and actions of antipatriarchal anarchists within the movement, many anarchist men were sexists.
[380] Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 133, 171; Mark Leier, <em>Bakunin: The Creative Passion—A Biography</em> (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 345n6. It should be kept in mind that on other occasions anarchists used the term “spontaneous” in a different sense to refer to actions that occurred impulsively, suddenly or without planning. For example, in 1924, Malatesta complained about some anarchists who wrongly believed that “human events,” including revolutions, “happen automatically, <em>naturally</em>, without preparation, without organization, without preconceived plans.” See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 461.
[381] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 20 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 14.
[382] Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 83. For other examples of anarchists repeating the words of the preamble, see Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 234; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 537.
[383] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 174.
[384] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 45. See also Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 241. There were a few anarchists who were pacifists committed to strict nonviolent resistance, but they were in the minority. See Bart de Ligt, <em>The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution</em> (London: Pluto Press, 1989).
[385] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 53, 55, 59.
[386] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 156–57.
[387] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 157.
[388] Quoted in George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, <em>Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 160.
[389] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 305.
[390] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 470, 477.
[391] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, 169. See also, 275, 277.
[392] Kropotkin, <em>Direct</em> Struggle, 207. For other examples, see, 145.
[393] Quoted in Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 104.
[394] Woodcock and Avakumović, <em>From Prince to Rebel</em>, 365–66.
[395] For example Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 171; Carlo Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 24–25, 36–37, 47; Nestor Makhno, <em>The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays</em>, ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 86–7; Luigi Galleani, <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 76–77.
[396] Quoted in Albert Parsons, <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em> (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 83, 82, 78.
[397] Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 56.
[398] Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” 56.
[399] Andrew R. Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, vol. 1, <em>The Early Movement</em> (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 253–55.
[400] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 201–4.
[401] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 203. See also Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 62–65.
[402] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 563–64.
[403] Quoted in Paul Avrich, <em>The Haymarket Tragedy</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 67.
[404] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 28. Bakunin made a similar remark in 1842 prior to becoming an anarchist. See Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 58. For examples of this idea being repeated by later anarchists, see Berkman, <em>The Blast</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 10; Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 222; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 579.
[405] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 183–84. See also Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 145–46.
[406] Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, 67–68.
[407] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 270–71.
[408] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 400.
[409] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 72. See also Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 322, 535, 553.
[410] Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 28.
[411] Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters</em>, 487.
[412] The following account of social revolution can be seen in Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 177–236; Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 99–103; Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 122–25.
[413] Anarchists typically claimed that only means of production and land that was used by a capitalist or landowner to profit off the labor of others would be expropriated. See Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 214; Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, 89. For how the expropriation of food, clothing, and housing was envisioned, see ibid., 70–71, 103–4, 121–22, 127.
[414] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 170–71.
[415] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 179. For his participation in 1848 and the 1849 insurrection, see E. H. Carr, <em>Michael Bakunin</em> (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 149–62, 189–94.
[416] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 157.
[417] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 232. See also Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 85; Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 57–58, 89; Gregori P. Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 43–46.
[418] Quoted in José Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 109.
[419] Quoted in José Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 110.
[420] The complex history of anarchist military participation in the Russian and Spanish civil wars goes beyond the scope of this book. For overviews, see Peter Arshinov, <em>History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 6–23; Agustín Guillamón, <em>Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014).
[421] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 542–4, 551–5; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 191–5; Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 101–2, 186–89, 203. Malatesta also pointed out that anarchists would be but one faction within the revolution. See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 472.
[422] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 218. The fear that a social revolution could be crippled by food shortages was shared by Malatesta. See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 428–9.
[423] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 207, 218–20; Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, 95–97; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 588.
[424] Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266.
[425] Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266. See also Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 37–38.
[426] Kropotkin, <em>Conquest of Bread</em>.
[427] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 228.
[428] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 34, 43.
[429] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 43.
[430] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 71.
[431] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 137. See also Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 111.
[432] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 153.
[433] Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 182–88.
[434] Quoted in Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 182.
[435] Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, ed., <em>Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW</em> (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 4–7, 29–43; Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 101–10.
[436] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 138–41; Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 221–37; Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 120–24; Federico Ferretti, <em>Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK</em> (London: Routledge, 2019), 104–15, 120–43.
[437] Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 43.
[438] “International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915),” in <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, <em>From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)</em>, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 290. See also Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 379–87.
[439] Kinna, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 177–83; Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. <em>Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War</em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); A. W. Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.
[440] Marie Fleming, <em>The Anarchist Way to Socialism:</em> Élisée <em>Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism</em> (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979), 77, 157–58; Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs</em>, 412; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 95, 97; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 195–96, 342; Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 55.
[441] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 172.
[442] Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 138.
[443] Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, [[https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget]].
[444] Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”
[445] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 251–52. Bakunin used similar imagery in a letter to Nechaev. See Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 183.
[446] Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 247. This dam metaphor can also be found in Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolutions</em>, 81.
[447] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 179.
[448] This idea has been falsely attributed to Kropotkin. Malatesta, for example, makes this claim in his 1931 article “Peter Kropotkin: Recollections and Criticisms by One of His Old Friends.” See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 516–20. For a critique of fatalistic readings of Kropotkin, see Matthew S. Adams, <em>Kropotkin</em>, <em>Read</em>, <em>and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) 106–11.
[449] Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 139.
[450] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 105.
[451] Mella, “Evolution and Revolution,” Biblioteca Anarquista website, [[https://es.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ricardo-mella-evolucion-y-revolucion]]. See also Ricardo Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em>, ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 87–92, 227.
[452] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 105.
[453] James Yeoman, <em>Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915</em> (New York: Routledge, 2020), 40–44, 248–49; George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 127; Chris Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 72–74.
[454] Jerome R. Mintz, <em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 80, 120n3; Yeoman, <em>Print Culture</em>, 46.
[455] Yeoman, <em>Print Culture</em>, 16–19, 43–50, 146–47.
[456] Pietro Di Paola, <em>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 1–2; Paul Avrich, <em>Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 47.
[457] Yeoman, <em>Print Culture</em>, 147–48.
[458] Lucy Parsons, <em>Freedom</em>, <em>Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches</em>, <em>1878–1937</em>, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 31.
[459] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 46.
[460] Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs</em>, 390–91.
[461] For examples of anarchist counterculture see Avrich, <em>Haymarket</em>, 131–49; Di Paola, <em>Knights Errant</em>, 169–83; Tom Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City</em>, <em>1880–1914</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 34–51, 168–82; Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the <em>Cronca Sovversiva</em> and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 76–125; Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 124–31; Angel Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State</em>, <em>1989–1923</em> (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 155–62, 259–62; Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 24–26, 35–37, 62–66.
[462] Martha Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 84–88; Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 50–55; Chris Ealham: <em>Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 45–47; Danny Evans, <em>Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
[463] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 303.
[464] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 46.
[465] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 401–2.
[466] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 404.
[467] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 306–7.
[468] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 179.
[469] Quoted in A. W. Zurbrugg, “Introduction” in Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 14.
[470] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 420, 426. See also Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 46–47.
[471] Luigi Fabbri, “Revolution and Dictatorship: On One Anarchist Who Has Forgotten his Principles,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/8932r8]]. See also Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 136; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 3, 143.
[472] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 147, 148.
[473] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 147.
[474] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 147.
[475] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 200.
[476] For the first uses of these terms, see Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” <em>Radical America</em> 11 (1977): 99–122; Wini Breines, “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law,’” <em>Social Problems</em> 27, no. 4 (1980): 419–29. For a broad overview of this topic, see Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, <em>Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today</em> (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
[477] Some anarchists rejected this idea. Nettlau argued that anarchist organizations built in the present should not be viewed as the embryo of the future society because we should not “permit the present to mortgage or lay its hands upon the future” and we “have no real knowledge of the nature of <em>the society of the future, which, like life itself, will have to remain ‘without adjectives.’</em>” See Max Nettlau, <em>A Short History of Anarchism</em>, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 196, 208, 282.
[478] Bernard H. Moss, <em>The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 32–41, 69.
[479] César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869]].
[480] César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future.” For an overview of his life and ideas, see William Whitham, “César De Paepe and the Ideas of the First International,” <em>Modern Intellectual History</em> 16, no. 3 (2019): 897–925.
[481] Robert Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 109; Wolfgang Eckhardt, <em>The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 9.
[482] For the context of the “Sonvilier Circular,” see Graham, <em>We Do Not Fear Anarchy</em>, 167–75; Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 85–120.
[483] The Jura Federation, “The Sonvilier Circular,” in <em>Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, 97–98. For Marx and Engels’s response, in which they reject this position, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 23 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 64–70.
[484] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 180–81. See also Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.
[485] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Fugitive Writings</em>, ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 41.
[486] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 20.
[487] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 397.
[488] Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 91.
[489] Isaac Puente, Libertarian Communism, (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 10.
[490] Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 153; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 358–60; Fleming, <em>Anarchist Way</em>, 129–30; Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 152–55. For examples of anarchist cooperatives and intentional communities, see Andrew Cornell, <em>Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century</em> (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 96–100, 129–33; John Quail, <em>The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists</em> (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978), 224–31.
[491] Paul Avrich, <em>The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 50–51, 261–64; Constance Bantman, <em>The French Anarchists in London</em>, <em>1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation</em> (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 90–91; Fausto Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism</em> (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 120–29; Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 102–20; Yeoman, <em>Print Culture</em>, 151–62.
[492] Ardouin et al., “Liberty Through Education: The Libertarian School,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/liberty-through-education-1898]].
[493] Francisco Ferrer, <em>Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader</em>, ed. Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 86. See also, 50–51.
[494] Ferrer, <em>Anarchist Education</em>, 85–93. Anarchists disagreed on whether or not schools run by anarchists should teach anarchist ideas. See ibid., 188–206; Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 185–201.
[495] Avrich, <em>Modern School</em>, 29–31.
[496] Cornell, <em>Unruly Equality</em>, 159–60, 163, 208–9.
[497] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 43.
[498] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 140. See also Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 188.
[499] Quoted in Jennifer Guglielmo, <em>Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City</em>, <em>1880–1945</em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 165.
[500] Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 46–52, 171–2; Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution</em>, 155–58, 195–99; J. Mintz, <em>Casas Viejas</em>, 91–99; Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 44–46; Guglielmo, <em>Living the Revolution</em>, 154, 156, 171–72; Ginger Frost, “Love is Always Free: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England,” <em>Anarchist Studies</em> 17, no. 1 (2009): 73–94.
[501] Quoted in Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 115.
[502] Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 77, 87–88, 103, 115–20, 123.
[503] Guglielmo, <em>Living the Revolution</em>, 156, 159–60, 162–63.
[504] Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 21, 115, 120–37.
[505] Quoted in Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 148.
[506] Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women</em>, 151–54.
[507] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 78.
[508] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 78.
[509] For example Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 203.
[510] Wilson, <em>Anarchist Essays</em>, 58. See also, 53, 84; Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 105; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 298.
[511] Vadim Damier, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13–15, 23–24.
[512] Émile Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 1.
[513] Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em>, 3.
[514] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 76–77. A few years later in her 1913 pamphlet <em>Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice</em>, Goldman used the term “direct action” in its original narrow syndicalist sense. See ibid., 94.
[515] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 202.
[516] Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader</em> ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 48.
[517] de Cleyre, <em>Reader</em>, 52–55.
[518] John Merriman, <em>The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 55.
[519] Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 127–32; Emma Goldman, <em>Living My Life</em>, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 246–49, 257–8, 275–77.
[520] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 164.
[521] Cornell, <em>Unruly Equality</em>, 71–74.
[522] Abel Paz, <em>Durruti in the Spanish Revolution</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 49–54.
[523] Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 77–78; Antonio Senta, <em>Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 98–99, 106–11.
[524] Antonioli, ed. <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 92.
[525] Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em>, 5. See also Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 170–71.
[526] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 189.
[527] Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em>, 7.
[528] Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em>, 20.
[529] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 32.
[530] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 83.
[531] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 90.
[532] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 91.
[533] This phrase continued to be used by Kropotkin over several decades. See Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 140, 200, 348, 374; Peter Kropotkin, <em>The Great French Revolution</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 18–19; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 190, 194.
[534] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 70–73.
[535] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 186.
[536] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 186.
[537] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 187.
[538] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 187–90
[539] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 189.
[540] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 189–90.
[541] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 192–96.
[542] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 73–74.
[543] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 74.
[544] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 74.
[545] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 75.
[546] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 75.
** Chapter 5: Anarchism and State Socialism
Anarchism as a social movement emerged in parallel with, and opposition to, various forms of state socialism. This included not only Marxism but also those influenced by such figures as Louis Auguste Blanqui, Ferdinand Lassalle, César De Paepe, Paul Brousse, and Jean Allemane. During the late nineteenth century, a number of socialist political parties adopted Marxist programs or at least programs influenced by Marxism, such as the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria in 1888 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1891. These social democratic parties contained numerous factions, including people who were not Marxists, and coexisted with political parties committed to other kinds of state socialism, such as the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France, who were known as Possibilists. From 1889 onward, the various state socialist parties of the time were linked together through a loosely organized coalition known as the Second International. This coalition disintegrated from 1914 onward, when the majority of socialist parties in Europe supported their respective nation-states in World War I and voted for war credits. This was followed by the Russian revolution of 1917, during which the Marxist Bolshevik party seized state power and established a one-party dictatorship. These two events led to a split in state socialism and the formation of various national Communist parties, which affiliated with the centralized, Bolshevik-led Third International (Comintern) that had been founded in March 1919. These Communist parties, in contrast to a significant chunk of social democracy, were explicit Marxist parties and became the main rivals of anarchism within international socialism.[547]
The anarchist critique of state socialist strategies was largely articulated in response to the programs, newspapers, congress resolutions, and actions of the various socialist, and later communist, political parties that confronted them. Anarchist authors, in other words, generally focused their energy on refuting the theory and practice of really existing social movements, rather than producing an exhaustive examination of Marx and Engels’s various writings on the topic (much of which was not publicly available or easy to obtain at the time). This is not to say that anarchists never argued against Marx and Engels. Anarchist critiques of state socialism frequently mentioned Marx and Engels by name or responded to an idea that Marx and Engels had advocated in their best-known works, such as the <em>Manifesto of the Communist Party</em> or <em>Anti-Dühring</em>.[548] Yet, even when critiquing the strategy of Marx and Engels, anarchists tended to interpret their ideas through the lens provided to them by socialist political parties at the time, rather than understanding Marx and Engels on their own terms.[549]
According to anarchists in this period, state socialists generally argued that, in order to achieve a stateless, classless society (essentially an anarchist society), the working classes must first conquer state power and use it to overthrow the capitalist class, reconstruct the economy along socialist lines, and defend the revolution from counterattack. The conquest of state power would be achieved by forming political parties that either won state power through parliamentary elections or seized state power via force. The government of the bourgeoisie would be transformed into, or replaced with, a democratic workers’ republic that, at least in theory, was based on the genuine self-rule of the working classes. The reconstruction of the economy would take the form of private property being abolished in favor of state ownership of the means of production and land. Production, distribution, and exchange would then be organized through the state. Once the revolution had been successful and a classless society achieved, the state would wither away. Anarchists and state socialists agreed on the ends of a stateless, classless society but proposed different means to achieve it.[550]
Anarchists rejected the strategy of attempting to abolish capitalism via the conquest of state power. This rejection did not stem from abstract arguments about morality, or ignore the harsh facts of real politics. They instead did so for fundamentally strategic reasons that were grounded in the theory of practice. Anarchists argued that, given the unity of means and ends (which was explained in the previous chapter), the conquest of state power was a path that would never lead to a stateless, classless society. This argument applied to both engaging in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state and attempting to overthrow the bourgeois state and transform it into, or replace it with, a workers’ state. In making this argument, anarchists were not, as is commonly claimed by Marxists, rejecting or ignoring political struggle. Given my focus on explaining what anarchists themselves thought, I shall not examine the complex question of whether or not the anarchist critique of state socialism actually applied to their various opponents, such as Marx and Engels.
*** Parliamentarism
During the late nineteenth century, various socialist parties were formed in Europe and the United States. These parties generally argued that the abolition of capitalism and establishment of socialism could be achieved, or at least built toward, through the strategy of winning local and national elections and participating in bourgeois parliaments as representatives of the working class. Through this political struggle, socialist parties would simultaneously build up their size and organizational strength, win various reforms via the passing of new legislation, and spread socialist ideas to a large audience. In so doing, they would transform parliament from a mere tool of bourgeois rule into a lever of working-class emancipation. This parliamentary struggle would occur alongside, and as a complement to, various forms of extraparliamentary activity, including demonstrations, the organization of trade unions and strikes, the construction of cooperatives, the spreading of ideas via the socialist press, and the establishment of a working-class counterculture within singing societies, bicycle clubs, reading groups, and the like. Socialist parties generally, but not always, viewed the parliamentary struggle as primary and thought that extraparliamentary activity played a secondary and supportive role. Over time, these various forms of struggle would lead to the development of a mass socialist party that was capable of, and driven to, win state power in response to the economic crises of capitalism.[551]
State socialists disagreed with one another about how to achieve this. Moderate state socialists proposed that if a socialist party won a majority in parliament then they would be able to gradually establish socialism through the passing of new legislation and the achievement of various reforms. Radical state socialists rejected this position and argued that the conquest of state power could not be won by legal and peaceful means. State power could only be forcibly seized by such means as an armed insurrection, coup, or general strike. The majority of radical state socialists did not, however, reject parliamentarism and thought that it could still be used as an effective means to win immediate improvements within capitalism, spread socialist ideas to a large audience, and build up the size and organizational strength of the socialist party.[552]
Anarchists had four main objections to parliamentarism. First, even if socialist parties managed to win majorities in parliament, the economic ruling classes would never allow their power and property to be voted away and abolished via peaceful and legal means. Capitalists and landowners would, if necessary, overthrow any socialist party that attempted to do so. The abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism cannot be achieved via the ballot. It can only be achieved by working-class social movements breaking the law and launching a social revolution to forcibly overthrow their oppressors. Anarchists were aware that radical state socialists agreed with them about this.[553]
Second, anarchists rejected the claim that parliamentarism was a necessary or sufficient condition for winning immediate improvements within capitalism. They argued that workers could achieve immediate improvements through direct action alone. This could be seen not only in the numerous strikes that had successfully won higher wages or reductions to the working day, but also in the fact that direct action had played an important role in the achievement of the right to vote itself, as with the 1893 general strike in Belgium. It was clear that a key factor in the achievement of new legislation was the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action. If this is the case, then reforms could be won by imposing pressure on liberal, republican, or conservative politicians. It did not specifically require the election of socialist politicians. Such immediate improvements would also most likely be won faster if time, energy, and money devoted to electoral campaigns was instead exclusively used on direct action and the self-organization of the working classes.[554]
In the absence of the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action, socialist politicians routinely found themselves unable to pass new laws in parliament. Bourgeois politicians from a variety of different parties would put aside their differences in order to vote against motions proposed by socialists.[555] Even if socialist politicians did manage to pass laws in parliament that protected or expanded workers’ rights, it did not follow from this that the law would be enforced. As de Cleyre wrote in 1912, “nearly all the laws which were originally framed with the intention of benefiting the workers, have either turned into weapons in their enemies’ hands, or become dead letters unless the workers through their organizations have directly enforced their observance. So that in the end, it is direct action that has to be relied on anyway.”[556]
A state socialist might reply that, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness, working-class social movements should engage in parliamentary politics and direct action simultaneously. In 1897, Malatesta answered this by pointing out that “the two methods of struggle do not go together and whoever embraces them both inevitably winds up sacrificing any other considerations to the electoral prospect.”[557] Ultimately, “the electoral and parliamentary contest amounts to schooling in parliamentarism and winds up making parliamentarists of all its practitioners.”[558]
The third anarchist objection to parliamentarism was that it is a form of practice that fails to develop in workers the radical traits necessary for a social revolution. Instead of taking direct action within prefigurative organizations, workers would engage in such activities as voting in elections, campaigning for politicians, and listening to them make various promises. Such forms of activity would produce workers who look to politicians to achieve their own emancipation and who respond to injustices by putting their hopes in the next election, rather than taking direct action themselves.[559] In 1912, De Cleyre claimed that the “main evil” of parliamentary politics was “that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves, what they alone can do for themselves.”[560] Decades later, Rocker was convinced that this is what had occurred. He wrote in 1938 that “participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labor movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed… the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”[561]
Anarchists thought that this would be especially harmful during a revolutionary situation. Parliamentarism not only leads to workers becoming accustomed to elevating party leaders into positions of power. It also makes them believe in the possibility of good government and the false notion that emancipation can be achieved by simply changing who is in power. In a revolution, workers would thus most likely establish a new government based on minority rule by a political ruling class. This government would then, for reasons that will be discussed later, turn on and repress working-class social movements. A new system of domination and exploitation would arise, rather than a stateless, classless society based on self-management and free association. Given this, a key reason why anarchists rejected participating in electoral politics was because, to quote Malatesta, “we consider any methods that lead the people to believe that progress consists in a change of governing individuals, and revolution in a change of government form, to be dangerous, and directly counter to our purposes.”[562]
Fourth, anarchists argued that state socialists were wrong to think that they could enter the existing capitalist state, transform it from within, and use it as a tool to build toward socialism. The capitalist state, which is a hierarchical institution that perpetuates the power of the economic and political ruling classes, would transform them. In 1869, before most socialist parties were formed, Bakunin predicted that working-class politicians would be “transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into a political atmosphere of wholly bourgeois political ideas, will cease to be actual workers and will become statesmen, they will become bourgeois, and perhaps more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.”[563] Later anarchists thought that this prediction had come true. Reclus claimed in 1898 that “socialist leaders who, finding themselves caught up in the electoral machine, end up being gradually transformed into nothing more than bourgeois with liberal ideas. They have placed themselves in determinate conditions that in turn determine them.”[564] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1913 that “as the socialists become a party of government and share power with the bourgeoisie, their socialism will necessarily fade: this is what has already happened.”[565]
Anarchists thought this would consistently occur to any socialist party that engaged in parliamentarism due to a set of interlocking processes. Most obviously, socialist politicians would be corrupted by the exercise of state power, the intrigues of parliament, and the financial offers of wealthy patrons. Reclus argued that the state is “a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level.”[566] As a result of this, socialist politicians with “the best of intentions” may initially “fervently desire” the abolition of capitalism and the state “but new relationships and conditions change them little by little. Their morality changes along with their self-interest, and, thinking themselves eternally loyal to the cause and to their constituents, they inevitably become disloyal.”[567]
Socialist parties that attain power within parliament would, in order to exercise that power, have to become effective managers of the bourgeois state and the national economy. Doing so requires, given the nature of capitalism and the state as social structures, the ongoing reproduction of the domination and exploitation of the working classes. As a result, state socialists in power would inevitably develop interests opposed to the wider working classes and side with capital against labor in order to maintain their own position of rulership and influence. This would especially occur in response to workers engaging in direct action and thereby disrupting the smooth functioning of the economy. In Max Baginski’s words: “The politics of parliaments are tailored to serve the needs of the bourgeois, the capitalist world. They administer this world and provide the violent means necessary to guarantee its continued existence: soldiers, police, and courts of law. Whosoever, as a representative of the workers, enters parliament or the government is faced with two choices; either he is superfluous or else he is an active accomplice in the administration and safeguarding of a political order founded on the exploitation of labor.”[568]
The leadership of socialist parties would, in addition to this, come to view the interests of their nation-state and the interests of the party as increasingly intertwined because the party exercises power within a specific nation and owes its power to the votes of a national electorate. Thus, socialist parties are, to quote Rocker, “compelled by the iron logic of conditions to sacrifice their Socialist convictions bit by bit to the national policies of the state.”[569] This would result in the labor movement being “gradually incorporated in the equipment of the national state” until it had become a social force that maintained the stability and “equilibrium” of capitalism.[570]
Socialist parties would be transformed not only by the corrupting effects of wielding state power but also by the compromises that parliamentary politics forced them to make. During this period, socialist parties typically had a maximum program and a minimum program. The maximum program were its long-term goals, such as universal human emancipation and the abolition of private property. The minimum program consisted of immediate improvements to be won within capitalism through legislation. These typically included such demands as universal suffrage, banning child labor, the eight-hour day, compulsory secular state education, free health care, and freedom of speech, the press, and assembly.[571] Anarchists thought that socialist parties would begin as revolutionary organizations that focused on the attainment of the minimum program but, gradually over time, become reformist organizations that had abandoned the maximum program and mistakenly viewed the minimum program as the essence of socialism.
This would consistently occur because, in order to win elections at both a local and national level, socialist parties must secure as many votes as possible by appealing to as many people as possible, including nonsocialists who would otherwise vote for republican, liberal, or conservative political parties. This would, especially in countries without universal suffrage, include people with class interests that were opposed to those of the working classes, such as small merchants and shopkeepers. Socialist parties, in addition to this, have to ensure that they maintain a legal existence and do not engage in activity that could preclude them from standing in elections or sitting in parliament. The need to appeal to as many voters as possible, alongside the need to operate within the confines of the law, would force socialist parties to: (a) reduce their political program to very minor reforms to capitalist society; and (b) oppose workers within the party, or affiliated trade unions, engaging in militant direct action that might scare voters away.[572] This process only accelerates over time as the socialist party grows in size and attracts, to quote Rocker, “bourgeois minds and career-hungry politicians into the Socialist camp.”[573]
In order to achieve these minor social reforms, socialist parties, given the nature of the parliamentary system, would be compelled to form alliances with bourgeois political parties in order to form coalition governments or successfully pass laws in parliament.[574] For Bakunin, one of the most notable examples of the dangers of forming alliances with bourgeois political parties occurred when the Geneva section of the First International supported the 1872 electoral campaign of the lawyer Jean-Antoine Amberny, a member of both the First International and the bourgeois Radical Party. During his campaign, he publicly promised fellow members of the bourgeoisie that the First International in Geneva would not engage in strikes that year and, in so doing, acted against the interests of local construction workers, who were at the time, considering taking strike action in response to reduced wages. The leadership of the Geneva section chose to intervene on the side of Amberny and thereby sacrifice the direct struggle of workers themselves in order to protect the electability of a bourgeois candidate. This included unsuccessfully attempting to persuade construction workers to issue a declaration that they were not planning to go on strike.[575] In response to these events, Bakunin concluded that “whenever workers’ associations ally themselves with the politics of the bourgeoisie, they can only become, willingly or unwillingly, their instrument.”[576]
Anarchists predicted that the combined effect of these various processes, which are inherent in parliamentarianism as a social structure, would result in socialist parties abandoning their revolutionary ideas and becoming socialist in name only. State socialists at the time proclaimed that the parliamentary struggle was merely a means to the end of constructing the mass revolutionary socialist movements that would abolish class society. Anarchists replied that, given the forms of practice that constituted parliamentarism, what was once a means to an end would become an end in and of itself. Socialist parties would become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state.[577]
A state socialist might reply that although anarchists are correct about the dangers of parliamentarism, socialist parties could participate in elections and parliament solely as a means to spread their ideas and critique the ruling classes. Anarchists thought such a strategy was mistaken because it ignored the manner in which participation in elections and parliament transforms people and organizations independently of their intentions. In 1928, Berkman noted that state socialists had initially claimed that they only meant to engage in parliamentarism “for the purpose of propaganda,” but this “proved the undoing of Socialism” because they had failed to realize that “the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object.”[578] He explained,
<quote>
Little by little they changed their attitude. Instead of electioneering being merely an educational method, it gradually became their only aim to secure political office, to get elected to legislative bodies and other government positions. The change naturally led the Socialists to tone down their revolutionary ardor; it compelled them to soften their criticism of capitalism and government in order to avoid persecution and secure more votes. Today the main stress of Socialist propaganda is not laid any more on the educational value of politics but on the actual election of Socialists to office.[579]
</quote>
Anarchists thought that their critique of parliamentarism was confirmed by the history of state socialism. To focus on France, the socialist Alexandre Millerand joined the bourgeois cabinet of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899 and became Minister of Commerce and Industry. His colleagues included the Minister of War, Gaston de Galliffet, who had ordered the murder of a large number of workers during the suppression of the Paris Commune. Once in power, Millerand attempted to establish compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes and thereby harm the ability of trade unions to engage in direct action. Pouget responded to this by labeling Millerand a “prisoner of Capital” who “could not break the mold; he is only a cog in the machine of oppression and whether he wishes it or not he must, as minister, participate in the job of crushing the proletariat.”[580] Several years later, in 1906, socialist René Viviani became Minister of Labor and, under his watch, nineteen workers were killed and an estimated seven hundred were injured due to state repression during strike actions. This state repression included forty thousand soldiers being sent to police a miner’s strike in 1906, launched in response to a mining accident that took the lives of 1,100 miners. In 1910, Aristide Briand, who had once been a socialist and an advocate of the general strike, joined Viviani in government as Minister of the Interior. He proceeded to defeat a French railway strike by arresting the strike committee, declaring a military emergency, and conscripting the railway workers into the army. In so doing, he subjected any worker who refused to work to martial law and the potential punishment of execution for disobeying orders.[581]
In 1914, World War I broke out and the majority of socialist political parties in Europe responded by siding with their respective governments. A minority of state socialists, which grew in size as the war progressed, remained committed to working-class internationalism, opposed all sides in the war, and organized the antimilitarist Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. The majority of the anarchist movement, in comparison, refused to side with any state in the conflict and suffered a significant amount of state repression due to this.[582] Anarchists did not think that socialist political parties abandoned antimilitarism simply due to the treachery or negative personality traits of politicians. Rather, they focused on the manner in which socialist parties had been transformed through the social structures they participated in and the forms of practice that constituted them. Berkman argued in 1928 that “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are. The Socialists’ long political activity and cooperation with bourgeois politics gradually turned their thoughts and mental habits from Socialist ways of thinking.”[583] This gradual process culminated in socialist parties abandoning their principles and becoming “the handmaiden of the militarists and jingo nationalists” who “sent the toilers to murder each other.”[584]
From these and other events, anarchists concluded that their predictions had come true. State socialists who entered parliament in order to work toward the conquest of political power and the abolition of classes had not conquered the state. The state had conquered them, and genuine socialist parties had, gradually over time, become fundamentally bourgeois and opposed to the self-emancipation of the working classes.
*** Workers’ State
Anarchists did not limit themselves to critiquing parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state. They went further and rejected the strategy of overthrowing the bourgeois state and transforming it into, or replacing it with, a workers’ state. They viewed the conquest of state power as a means that would never achieve the ends of a stateless, classless society. To understand why, one must first understand the anarchist theory of the state.
Anarchists argued that, given their in-depth analysis of the state as a social structure both historically and when they were writing, the state is necessarily a centralized and hierarchical institution wielded by a political ruling class. This class possesses the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force. Kropotkin was convinced that this was “the essence of every State” and that, if an organization ceased to be structured in this manner, then “it ceases to be the State.”[585] Since the state is a centralized and hierarchical institution that rules over an extended territory, it follows that the political power of the so-called workers’ state could not in reality be wielded by the working classes as a whole. State power would at best be exercised by a minority of elected representatives acting in the name of the working classes. Bakunin predicted “it is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of men elected to represent and govern them.”[586]
Anarchists thought that there was an inherent connection between the organizational form and function of any social structure. And the organizational form of the state did not develop by accident. The state is structured in a hierarchical and centralized manner because of the function that it performs and was created to perform: establishing and maintaining the domination and exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. This applied not only to monarchies and individual dictatorships but also to republics governed by parliaments of elected representatives. A social structure characterized by a specific organizational form cannot be used to perform just any possible function. Centralization and hierarchy enable and result in the rule of a minority over a majority. Therefore, the state cannot be transformed into an instrument of liberation simply by writing a new constitution or electing good people with the right ideas into positions of authority. The minority of governors who actually exercise state power would, even if they were genuine socialists elected by universal suffrage, become tyrants who dominate and exploit the majority of the population.[587]
This would occur due to a specific set of processes. Since the state is a social structure like any other, it follows that it is constituted by social relation and forms of practice that produce and reproduce people with particular capacities, drives, and consciousness. According to Malatesta, “the government is the aggregate of the governors… those who have the power to make laws, to regulate relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws.”[588] This force is exercised via various institutionalized mechanisms of coercion, such as the police, army, courts, and prisons. The exercise of state power is therefore necessarily constituted by social relations of command and obedience, of domination and subordination. The minority of socialists who wield this power will use it to implement their own ideas and further their interests. In so doing, they will inevitably come into conflict with different groups of workers who have ideas and interests of their own. This will especially occur with workers who are other kinds of socialist. Given the vast differences in power, the workers will be compelled to follow the commands of their superiors. If they do not do so and choose to ignore, resist, or rebel against the will of the governors they will be met with violent state repression, including censorship, beatings, arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. The result is always the same: workers would not self-determine their lives or the society in which they lived. They would instead be subject to the will of a governing minority. As Malatesta explained, “a government… already constitutes a class privileged and separated from the rest of the community. Such a class, like every elected body, will seek instinctively to enlarge its powers; to place itself above the control of the people; to impose its tendencies, and to make its own interests predominate. Placed in a privileged position, the government always finds itself in antagonism to the masses, of whose forces it disposes.”[589]
One might object by arguing that these socialist representatives are workers themselves and so do not form a class distinct from the workers who elected them. Bakunin responded to this argument in 1873. He insisted that the governing minority are “<em>former</em> workers, who, as soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people.”[590] In other words, they have transitioned from being members of the working classes to being members of the political ruling class in control of the state. State socialists fail to realize that class is not only about a person’s relationship to the means of production. It is also determined by a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat would therefore not be based on the self-rule of the proletariat. It would, to quote Malatesta in 1897, “be the dictatorship of ‘Party’ over people, and of a handful of men over ‘Party.’”[591]
Anarchists argued that a fundamentally new function—the self-management of social life by producers themselves—requires the construction of fundamentally new social structures. These new organs need an organizational form that actually enables and leads to the realization of the desired function. For this to occur, the organs of self-management have to be developed by working-class social movements themselves engaging in a process of experimentation during the course of the class struggle. According to anarchists, these new organs are, as we have seen, workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias linked together through formal federations and/or informal social networks.[592]
If state socialists advocated the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a new workers’ state that was genuinely nothing but the self-rule of the working classes, then the disagreement with anarchists would largely be a semantic disagreement about how to define a state. In 1897, Malatesta considered the possibility of a social democrat who sincerely wanted to abolish the state:
<quote>
If they meant that, even as they capture it, they want to abolish the State… disband any armed governmental force, do away with all legislative powers… and promote the organization of society from the bottom up through the free federation of producer and consumer groups, then the entire issue would boil down to this: that they express by certain words the same ideas that we express by other words. Saying <em>we want to storm the fortress and destroy it</em>, and saying <em>we want to seize that fortress to demolish it</em> means one and the same thing.[593]
</quote>
He knew, however, that the vast majority of state socialists did not advocate federations of workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias—the true organs of worker self-rule—and then simply choose to call these systems of organization a state.[594] In June 1919, Malatesta wrote that the Bolsheviks did not mean by “the dictatorship of the proletariat” merely “the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society” by expropriating the ruling classes and creating social structures in which “there would be no place for a class that exploited and oppressed the producers.”[595] If this is what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” meant then “our dissent would have to do only with words.”[596] In reality, and judging by their actions, the Bolsheviks meant “a dictatorship of a party, or rather of the heads of a party; and it is a true dictatorship, with its decrees, its penal laws, its executive agents and above all with its armed force that serves today also to defend the revolution against its external enemies, but that will serve tomorrow to impose upon the workers the will of the dictators, to arrest the revolution, consolidate the new interests and finally defend a new privileged class against the masses.”[597]
According to state-socialist theory, a workers’ state would only exist during the transition from capitalism to a stateless, classless society. The state is the coercive instrument by which one economic class rules over and represses another economic class. A workers’ state would be the social structure through which the proletariat ruled over and repressed the bourgeoisie. Exercising this political power, the proletariat would reorganize the economy and establish state ownership and control of the means of production and land. In so doing, they would abolish class. Once class had been abolished, the economic basis for the state would cease to exist, since there would no longer be a division between a class who ruled and a class who was ruled over.[598] The workers’ state would, to quote Engels, wither away such that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ <em>It dies out</em>.”[599] Once this had occurred, society would be organized via “a free and equal association of the producers.”[600]
Anarchists living in the nineteenth century were not convinced by this argument. Decades before the Russian revolution and the emergence of the USSR, anarchists predicted that a workers’ state would not die out after the abolition of capitalism. It would instead continuously reproduce itself as a social structure. This is because the forms of practice involved in either exercising or being subject to state power produce people with traits that reproduce the state as a dominant structure, rather than people who will want to and be able to abolish the state. In exercising state power, socialist governors would not only change the world but also change themselves. They would acquire distinct class interests as members of the political ruling class and come to focus on maintaining and expanding their own power over the working classes, rather than allowing it to be abolished in favor of a stateless, classless society.
In 1881, Cafiero declared that any socialist who says “they wish to take over the State in order to destroy it once the struggle is over” is “either seeking to mislead us or are deceiving themselves.… No power, no authority in the world has ever destroyed itself. No tyrant has ever dismantled a fortress once he has entered it. On the contrary, every authoritarian organism, every tyranny tends always to spread, to establish itself even more, by its very nature. Power inebriates and even the best can become the worst once they are vested with authority.”[601] In short, to quote Bakunin, the “habit of commanding… [and] the exercise of power never fail to produce this demoralization: <em>contempt for the masses, and, for the man in power, an exaggerated sense of his own worth</em>.”[602]
Anarchists thought this would occur irrespective of people’s good intentions due to the manner in which they are shaped by the social structures they constitute and participate in. Malatesta wrote, “it is not a question here of the good faith or good will of this man or of that, but of the necessity of situations and the general tendencies that men exhibit when they find themselves in certain circumstances.”[603] Bakunin similarly claimed that those who exercised state power would be transformed by “the iron logic of their position, the force of circumstances inherent in certain hierarchical and profitable political relationships.” This would occur regardless of their “sentiments, intentions, or good impulses.”[604]
The existence of a state ruled by a minority political ruling class would simultaneously have a dire effect on the working classes in general. Instead of directly self-managing their lives themselves, the working classes would be subject to the rule of a governing minority and so engage in forms of practice that lead them to become accustomed to oppressive social relationships after their supposed liberation. They would learn to obey and defer to their superiors rather than to think and act for themselves. Rather than learning how to associate with others as equals, they would learn to put those in power on a pedestal and venerate them in just the same way that people under capitalism learn to hero worship so-called “captains of industry” or political figureheads like royal families and charismatic presidents. Workers would come to support the ongoing existence of the state and view it as a natural and necessary aspect of human existence that cannot be changed.[605] Authority, to quote Berkman, “debases its victims” and “makes those subject to it acquiesce in wrong, subservient, and servile.”[606]
Anarchists predicted that the minority political ruling class in control of the so-called workers’ state would, in order to defend and maintain their position of authority, create a new economic ruling class that owed them allegiance and so would protect their class interests. This new economic ruling class would initially appear within the state bureaucracy itself given that the so-called workers’ state would own and manage the whole or majority of the economy. Over time, the new economic ruling class would grow in power due to the extreme importance of production and distribution in social life and gradually transform the state into an institution that primarily serves their distinct economic interests. This would culminate in the reintroduction of private property and market capitalism.[607] The state was, to quote Fabbri, “more than an outcome of class divisions; it is, at one and the same time, the creator of privilege, thereby bringing about new class divisions.”[608] According to Malatesta, “anyone in power means to stay there, and no matter what the costs he intends to impose his will—and since wealth is a very effective instrument of power, the ruler, even if he personally does not abuse or steal, he promotes the rise of a class around him that owes to him its privileges and has a vested interest in his remaining in power.… Abolish private property without abolishing government, and the former will be resurrected by those who govern.”[609]
Supporters of workers’ states in this period generally believed that state socialism was a necessary transitional phase between capitalism and communism. Anarchists replied that state socialism would ultimately be the transitional phase between capitalism and capitalism. Given the self-reproducing nature of the state, and its tendency to establish new class divisions, it could not be used to achieve a stateless, classless society. Although, as Bakunin noted, state socialists claimed that “this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people; anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship the means,” they failed to realize that “no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.”[610] The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.[611]
*** State Capitalism
From an economic perspective, anarchists also rejected the idea that a state socialist society would be socialist at all. They thought it was more appropriate to label such a society <em>state capitalism</em>. The term was used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a different sense to refer to the Soviet Republic’s New Economic Policy of 1921, in which capitalist markets and small private businesses existed alongside state ownership and management of large-scale industry but were subject to control by a self-proclaimed workers’ state. The earlier and broader anarchist usage of the term should not be confused with this.[612] It should also be kept in mind that the anarchist claim that state socialist societies would be instances of state capitalism was distinct from their prediction that state socialism would result in the resurrection of private property and market capitalism. From this perspective, it would begin as one form of capitalism and then later transform into another kind of capitalism.
State socialists aim to establish state ownership of the means of production and land, organize production and distribution through centralized state planning, and have workers become employees of the state. Were this to happen then, a single entity—the state—would own and control the whole or the majority of the economy. Under this system, the economy would, due to the state’s centralized and hierarchical nature, be owned and controlled by the minority of people who in fact wielded state power, rather than the working classes they claimed to represent. These workers would, instead of directly owning and controlling the economy themselves through organs of self-management, labor within state-owned workplaces hierarchically managed by state bureaucrats. These bureaucrats would implement the policies decided by the minority ruling class who, even if elected via universal suffrage, actually exercise decision-making power on a day-to-day basis. Under such a system, workers become wage laborers employed by the state and subject to its domination within the workplace in the same manner that they had previously been employed and dominated by individual capitalists and landowners.
This perspective can be seen throughout anarchist texts. Bakunin predicted in <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> that the leaders of socialist parties would, if they seized state power, concentrate “in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.”[613] In <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, Kropotkin claimed that anarchists rejected “the new form of wage-labor which would arise if the State took possession of the means of production and exchange, as it has already taken possession of the railways, the post office, education, national security [<em>l’assurance mutuelle</em>], and defense of the territory. New powers, industrial powers… would create a new, formidable instrument of tyranny.”[614] Kropotkin referred to such a society as “state capitalism” on numerous occasions.[615]
State socialism would therefore lead to a reconfiguration of class society rather than the abolition of classes and the self-management of production and distribution by producers and consumers themselves. The existing economic and political ruling classes—capitalists, landowners, bankers, politicians, judges, generals etc.—would be replaced by or subordinated to a new economic and political ruling class—the socialist party leadership—which exercised power through a single institution: the state. This new economic and political ruling class would, in turn, be aided by a vast array of state bureaucrats who would serve as a managerial class that was subject to the authority of the socialist party leadership but at the same time exercised power over the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, “whoever has dominion over things, has dominion over men; whoever governs production governs the producers; whoever controls consumption lords it over the consumer. The question is this: either things are administered in accordance with agreements freely reached by those concerned, in which case we have anarchy, or they are administered in accordance with law made by the administrators, and we have Government, the State, which inevitably turns tyrannical.”[616]
Since state socialists sought to seize existing state power, it followed that the managerial class would be largely composed of the same bureaucrats who had previously managed the market-capitalist state. State socialists would transform certain aspects of the state during their seizure of state power, such as writing a new constitution, but the bulk of the state’s bureaucratic machinery would remain intact since the state could not function without it. This would occur even if state socialists genuinely wanted to smash the old state bureaucracy and immediately construct a new one. During a revolutionary period, the leaders of the socialist party would not be in the position to replace or fundamentally reorganize the state bureaucracy, especially in societies where most people were illiterate. They would instead be forced by circumstances to use, and massively expand, the previously existing state bureaucracy in order to implement their plans as rapidly and as effectively as possible, nationalizing industry and organizing the economy through central planning.
For Kropotkin, this was no different from when republicans overthrew monarchies. The form of the state was altered, but the state bureaucracy continued to operate largely as before. He wrote that, in France, “the Third Republic, in spite of its republican form of government, remained monarchist in its essence.” This was because,
<quote>
Those holding power have changed the name; but all this immense ministerial scaffolding, all this centralized organization of bureaucrats, all this imitation of the Rome of the Caesars which has been developed in France, all this formidable organization to ensure and extend the exploitation of the masses in favor of a few privileged groups that is the essence of the State-institution—all that remained. And these cogs [of the bureaucratic machine] continue, as in the past, to exchange their fifty documents when the wind has blown down a tree onto a national highway, and to pour the millions deducted from the nation into the coffers of the privileged. The [official] stamp on the documents has changed; but the State, its spirit, its organs, its territorial centralization, its centralization of functions, its favoritism, its role as creator of monopolies, have remained. Like an octopus, they expand [their grip] on the country day-by-day.[617]
</quote>
State socialism would therefore not only be a reconfiguration of class society. It would also be an expansion of existing class society in so far as the bulk of the state machinery would continue to operate largely as before and this state machinery would move from organizing only certain aspects of the economy—the post office, trains etc.—to organizing the whole or most of the economy.
Within such a society, the state would, for all intents and purposes, act as a single massive capitalist, since it now performed the various functions that were previously performed under market capitalism by multiple individual capitalists owning and directing different aspects of the economy. As a result, anarchists saw in state socialism not the abolition of classes, but the replacement of individual capitalists competing in a market with a single state capitalist that alone owned, directed, and planned the economy.[618] Bakunin, for example, claimed that under state socialism the state would “<em>become the sole proprietor</em>… the single capitalist, banker, financier, organizer, the director of all national work and the distributor of every product.”[619] According to Kropotkin, state socialists aim to “seize the existing power structures and to retain and strengthen their control over them; in place of all of today’s ruling classes (landlords, industrialists, merchants, bankers, etc.) they strive to create one single proprietor—the State—to rule over all land, all works and factories, all accumulated wealth, and to be run by a Parliament.”[620] Anarchists rejected this vision and could not “see in the coming revolution a mere… replacement of the current capitalists by the State [as sole] capitalist.”[621]
Anarchists were also afraid that state socialists would create something much worse than state capitalism ruled by an elected parliament. In centralizing so much economic and political power into the hands of the state, they were creating an institution that could, in turn, be seized by a dictator and used to establish an even more tyrannical society. Kropotkin wrote in 1913 that “as long as the statist socialists do not abandon their dream of socializing the instruments of labor in the hands of a centralized State, the inevitable result of their attempts at State Capitalism and the Socialist state will be the failure of their dreams and military dictatorship.” The state they created during a period of revolutionary turmoil “would be the stepping-stone for a dictator, representing the reaction.” This would merely be a repeat of what had already happened after the French revolutions of 1793 and 1848. In the “centralized State… created by the Jacobins, Napoleon I found the ground already prepared for the Empire. Similarly, fifty years later, Napoleon III found in the dreams of a centralized democratic republic which developed in France after [the revolution of] 1848 the ready-made elements for the Second Empire.”[622]
It was for these reasons that Kropotkin warned revolutionaries that the state is, “an octopus with a thousand heads and a thousand suckers, like the sea monsters of the old tales, it makes it possible to envelop all society and to channel all individual efforts so as to make them result in the enrichment and governmental monopoly of the privileged classes.”[623] As a result, “if the revolution does not crush the octopus, if it does not destroy its head and cut off its arms and suckers, it will be strangled by the beast. The revolution itself will be placed at the service of monopoly, as was the [French] revolution of 1793.”[624]
For anarchists, these predictions were soon proven true by the one-party Bolshevik state that was established during the 1917 Russian revolution and the subsequent seizure of this state by Stalin and his supporters after Lenin’s death in January 1924.[625] As early as June 1919, Malatesta wrote that although “Lenin, Trotsky and their companions are certainly sincere revolutionaries… they prepare the governmental cadres that will serve those that will come, who will profit from the revolution and kill it. They will be the first victims of their method, and with them, I fear, will fall the revolution.”[626]
Anarchists who had witnessed the revolution first hand subsequently wrote a number of critiques of the Bolsheviks. This included Goldman, who was deported from the United States to Russia in 1920. She wrote in December 1922 that the Bolsheviks had succeeded only in creating an “all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression,” which was based on “the masking of autocracy by proletarian slogans.”[627] The Bolsheviks violently repressed all rival forms of socialism, including anarchists, left socialist-revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, in order to keep power within the Communist Party. Members of the Party “who were suspected of an independent attitude” and challenged the party leadership were expelled.[628] In parallel to this, the organs of self-management that had been created by workers themselves during the revolution—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, and cooperatives—were “either subordinated to the needs of the new State or destroyed altogether.”[629] The consequence of this was that “the triumph of the State meant the defeat of the Revolution.”[630] This occurred because the “revolutionary methods” of the Bolsheviks were not “in tune with revolutionary aims.”[631]
The tragedy of the Russian Revolution demonstrated, according to anarchists, that they had been right and state socialists had been wrong. The liberation of the working classes could only be achieved through them crushing state power and building their own organs of self-management and class power. These arguments have, from an anarchist perspective, only proven stronger with time, given that subsequent state socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, and Vietnam have, like their predecessor in Russia, failed to produce a substantially free and equal society in which the working classes themselves own the means of production and self-manage their lives within both the workplace and wider society, let alone a state in the process of withering away. Despite numerous achievements within certain domains, such as increasing literacy rates or improving healthcare, these societies have not laid the foundations from which a stateless, classless, moneyless society based on distribution according to need could possibly emerge.
*** Anarchism and Political Struggle
The anarchist rejection of seizing state power has led some Marxists to assert that anarchists opposed, and so ignored the need for, political struggle.[632] This argument dates back to Marx and Engels themselves. Marx wrote in an 1870 letter to Paul Lafargue that Bakunin thought that the industrial working class “must not occupy itself with <em>politics</em>” and instead “only organize themselves by trades-unions,” and thus making what Marx saw as the fatal error of allowing “the governments, these great trade-unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like.” Bakunin had, according to Marx, failed to see “that every class movement as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a <em>political</em> movement.”[633] After the First International’s Hague Congress of 1872, Marx gave a speech in which he said that “a group has been formed in our midst which advocates that the workers should abstain from political activity” and thereby ignored that “the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organization of labor.”[634] Engels likewise claimed in an 1872 letter to Louis Pio that anarchists in the First International advocated the “<em>complete abstention from all political activity, and especially from all elections</em>.”[635]
Anarchists in Marx’s time and beyond did not, however, reject political struggle in and of itself. They rejected one form of political struggle—attempting to conquer state power via elections or armed insurrection—in favor of a different form of political struggle—engaging in direct action outside of and against the state with the long-term aim of abolishing it. This position was grounded in the idea that working-class social movements should only engage in forms of political struggle that built toward a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state, rather than leading workers away from it. As Malatesta wrote, anarchists embraced “political struggle” in the sense of “struggle against the government and not co-operation with the government,” because “if you truly want to overthrow the system, then you must clearly place yourself outside and against the system itself.”[636] For many anarchists, this political struggle included engaging in direct action to gain or enforce political liberties that expanded the ability of workers to self-organize, such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.[637]
The anarchist view on political struggle can be seen in Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois reformist politics and the revolutionary proletarian politics of the anarchist movement. According to Bakunin, “it would be the death of the proletariat, if it were preoccupied exclusively and solely with economic matters” and ignored “political questions.”[638] This is because any significant attempt by the working classes to emancipate themselves economically will be met by state violence. In Bakunin’s words, “<em>the political question is inseparable from the economic question</em>… politics—the institution and mutual relations of States—has no other object except that of ensuring that the ruling classes can legally exploit the proletariat. So in consequence, the moment the proletariat wishes to free itself, it is forced to consider politics—to fight it and overcome it.”[639] The First International would for this same reason, “be compelled to intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie.”[640] Its task as an organization “is not just some economic or a simply material creative activity, it is at the same time and to the same degree an eminently political process.”[641]
The question for Bakunin was not whether we should engage in politics but what form our political interventions should take. He was careful to distinguish between bourgeois politics, which did not aim to achieve the immediate emancipation of workers, and the politics of labor or social revolution, which aimed to abolish the state in order to establish socialism.[642] Given this, “It is not true… to say that we completely ignore politics. We do not ignore it, for we definitely want to destroy it. And here we have the essential point separating us from political parties and bourgeois radical Socialists. Their politics consists in making use of, reforming, and transforming the politics of the State, whereas our politics, the only kind we admit, is the total <em>abolition</em> of the State, and of the politics which is its necessary manifestation.”[643]
Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois politics and revolutionary proletarian politics was shared by other anarchists. During the First International’s 1872 Hague Congress, which was attended by Marx and Engels, Guillaume claimed that the anarchist idea of politics “was not political indifferentism, but a special kind of politics negating bourgeois politics and which we should call the politics of labor,” which sought “<em>the destruction of political power</em>.”[644] Andrea Costa wrote, with Bakunin’s assistance, a program for the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International sometime in late 1872. The program distinguished between the “negative politics” of abolishing ruling-class institutions and the “positive politics” of constructing a new society through the “revolutionary power” of the working classes.[645] Over two decades later, in 1897, Malatesta remarked that “who has outdone us in arguing that the battle against capitalism has to be harnessed to the fight against the State, meaning the political struggle? There is a school of thought these days in which political struggle means achieving public office through elections: but… logic forces other methods of struggle upon those seeking to do away with government, rather than capture it.”[646]
For Malatesta, like Bakunin before him, economic struggles would be transformed into political struggles. He argued that “from the economic struggle one must pass to the political struggle, that is to the struggle against government” because “workers who want to free themselves, or even only to effectively improve their conditions, will be faced with the need to defend themselves from the government” that violently protects private property rights and the interests of the economic ruling classes.[647] Workers will be forced to “oppose the rifles and guns which defend property with the more effective means that the people will be able to find to defeat force by force.”[648] The manner in which capitalism and the state support and cocreate one another led Malatesta to conclude that the economic struggle against capitalism and the political struggle against the state are so interconnected that they should be viewed as two aspects of a single struggle against the ruling classes, rather than as two separate struggles.[649]
A significant number of anarchists held that politics would be abolished via the social revolution. One Spanish anarchist poem, for example, declared that “politics” would “disappear from the world” via “the establishment of anarchy.”[650] Other anarchists, in comparison, thought that politics was not inherently state-centric and would continue to exist, albeit in a very different form, after the abolition of the state. Kropotkin argued that “new forms of economical life will require also new forms of political life, and these new forms cannot be a reinforcement of the power of the State by giving up in its hands the production and distribution of wealth, and its exchange.”[651] These new forms of political life must instead be “created by the workers themselves, in <em>their</em> unions, <em>their</em> federations, completely outside the State.”[652] Given this, “The free Commune… is the <em>political</em> form that the <em>social</em> revolution must take.”[653]
*** Different Kinds of Anarchism
Anarchists in this historical period generally shared the basic strategic commitments that have been explained in Chapters 4 and 5. They nonetheless also disagreed with one another about a wide variety of more specific topics. This included such questions as what kind of organizations they should build, what tactics they should engage in, and how anarchists should act to help bring about the social revolution. Broadly speaking the anarchist movement can be divided into two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchism advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that attempted to trigger, or at least build toward, a social revolution by engaging in an escalating series of individual and collective violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions. Mass anarchism, in comparison, advocated the formation of large-scale formal organizations that struggled for immediate reforms in the present via direct action. They viewed such struggles as the most effective means to construct a mass movement capable of launching a social revolution via an armed insurrection.[654]
The terms insurrectionist anarchist and mass anarchist were not used by anarchists historically and are anachronistic. In Spain during the 1880s, the debate occurred between anarchist communists (insurrectionist anarchists) and anarchist collectivists (mass anarchists). In Italy during the 1890s and 1900s, it occurred between anarchist communists who were either organizationalists (mass anarchists) or antiorganizationalists (insurrectionist anarchists). Given the wide variety of different terms that were used historically, I decided to make things clearer by using the same terminology consistently. This terminology, which was coined by the historian Lucian van der Walt, is potentially misleading and two points of clarification must be made.
First, mass anarchists advocated and engaged in armed insurrections, while insurrectionist anarchists ultimately aimed to create a mass working-class social movement. Second, although one can distinguish between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism these are ideal types and individuals cannot always be neatly categorized into one or the other due to their combining elements of both or only subscribing to certain aspects of the theory in question. The anarchist movement contained a great deal of intellectual diversity and, although some anarchists were dogmatic, there were no rigid barriers between different kinds of anarchism that might, in principle, prevent one kind of anarchist learning from and being influenced by another kind of anarchist. Most Italian anarchists who lived in North Beach, San Francisco, for example, subscribed to multiple publications espousing different kinds of anarchism and interacted socially with anarchists from other tendencies.[655] The distinction between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism should be viewed as a simplification that is helpful for thinking about the major strategic disagreements within the anarchist movement, rather than being a perfect description of the ideological complexity of the anarchist movement. In the next several chapters, I will examine the various forms that anarchism took during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[547] Gary P. Steenson, *After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914* (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Keven McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, *The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin* (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 1–27.
[548] For illustrative examples, see Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 89–136; Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 101–8, 383–420; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 371–82, 432; Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 24–27, 120–24; Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 11–12, 48–49; Rudolf Rocker, “Marx and Anarchism,” Anarchist Library website, April 26, 2009. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-marx-and-anarchism]].
[549] For an overview of Marx and Engels’s strategy, see Hal Draper, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution</em>, vol. 3, <em>The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”</em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Richard N. Hunt, <em>The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels</em>, vol. 1, <em>Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850</em> (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974); Hunt, <em>The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels</em>, vol. 2, <em>Classical Marxism, 1850–1895</em> (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
[550] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Words of a</em> <em>Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 91–92; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science and Anarchy</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 211, 220–21, 233.
[551] For an overview of these movements and their ideas, see Steenson, <em>After Marx, Before Lenin</em>. For important primary sources, see Karl Kautsky, <em>The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program)</em> (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910); Mike Taber, ed. <em>Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889–1912</em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).
[552] Edward Bernstein, <em>Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation</em> (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1909), x–xvi, 145–46, 163, 196–99, 216–19; Rosa Luxemburg, <em>Rosa Luxemburg Speaks</em>, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 48–59, 76–83.
[553] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 91–93; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 193; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 30–31.
[554] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 378–81; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 64–71; Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 178–82.
[555] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 30–31.
[556] Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader</em> ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 59.
[557] Malatesta, <em>Long and Patient</em>, 4.
[558] Malatesta, <em>Long and Patient</em>, 9.
[559] Malatesta, <em>Long and Patient</em>, 180–81.
[560] De Cleyre, <em>Reader</em>, 59.
[561] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 54.
[562] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 178. See also, 77; <em>Patient Work</em>, 10, 44.
[563] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 54.
[564] Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147.
[565] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 193.
[566] Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 122.
[567] Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 122.
[568] Max Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want? Living</em>, <em>Not Dead Unions</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 13.
[569] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 55.
[570] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 55.
[571] For the programs of socialist parties in Austria, Germany, and Italy, see the appendix to Steenson, <em>After Marx, Before Lenin</em>, 285–307.
[572] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 92–93, 99–102; Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, 145–7; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 338, 372–74; Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 115.
[573] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 55.
[574] Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 180; Luigi Galleani, <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 30.
[575] René Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 48–9; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 259–60.
[576] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 181.
[577] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 29–30.
[578] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 92.
[579] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 92–93.
[580] Quoted in Jeremy Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990), 36. See also Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 111–17. In response to Millerand’s actions, the 2<sup>nd</sup> International passed resolutions at its 1900 and 1904 congresses that opposed the entry of socialist politicians into a bourgeois government’s cabinet. See Taber, ed. <em>Under the Socialist Banner</em>, 77–78, 83–84.
[581] Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 36; F. F. Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 58–61; Robert G. Neville, “The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906,” <em>Journal of Contemporary History</em> 13, no. 1 (1978): 33–52.
[582] S. F. Kissin, <em>War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars</em>, vol. 1, <em>1848–1918</em> (London: Routledge, 2019). For anarchist responses to the war, see Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. <em>Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War</em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)<em>;</em> A. W. Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.
[583] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 99.
[584] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 99, 98.
[585] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 310, 199, 227.
[586] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 255. The same point is made in Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 388.
[587] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 14–15; Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 130; Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 273–75, 352.
[588] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 113.
[589] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 130. See also Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 253, 265–66.
[590] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 178.
[591] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 27.
[592] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 164, 352.
[593] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 120–21.
[594] Council communists are an example of Marxists who advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat that was similar to, but not identical with, what anarchists advocated. For a discussion of the similarities between council communism and anarchism, see Saku Pinta, “Towards a Libertarian Communism: a Conceptual History of the Intersections Between Anarchisms and Marxisms” (PhD Diss., Loughborough University, 2013).
[595] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 392.
[596] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 392.
[597] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 392. There appears to be a typo in this edition, where Malatesta says that it will “defend the revolution for its external enemies.” I choose to replace “for” with “against” based on the translation available in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 392.
[598] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 320–21; <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 26, 269–72
[599] Marx and Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 24, 321.
[600] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 272. For Marx’s vision of a stateless classless society, see Paul Raekstad, <em>Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism</em> (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 155–72.
[601] Carlo Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 45.
[602] Michael Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 145.
[603] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 124.
[604] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 52. See also Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 63.
[605] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 147.
[606] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 43. See also Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 136.
[607] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 115–16, 130–31, 289–90; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 11–13.
[608] Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 20.
[609] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 123.
[610] <em>Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy</em>, 179.
[611] Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 20.
[612] Vladimir Lenin, <em>Selected Works</em> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 635, 682–83, 685–86.
[613] Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 181.
[614] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 170.
[615] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 165, 210, 288, 385–86,
[616] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 123–24.
[617] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 274.
[618] Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 29–30.
[619] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 88–89.
[620] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 130–31.
[621] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 198.
[622] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 191, 193.
[623] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 306.
[624] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 306.
[625] For a brief overview of this very complex history from an anti-Leninist perspective, see: Maurice Brinton, “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution,” in <em>For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton</em>, ed. David Goodway (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 293–378; Iain McKay, “The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice,” in <em>Bloodstained</em>, 61–117.
[626] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 392.
[627] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 388, 394. For details about Goldman and Berkman’s deportation, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 269–72, 291–302.
[628] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 387.
[629] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 389.
[630] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 391.
[631] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 404. For other anarchist critiques of the Bolsheviks, see Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 103–36; Peter Arshinov, <em>History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Voline, <em>The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019).
[632] For example Hal Draper, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution</em>, vol. 4, <em>Critique of Other Socialisms</em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 154; Paul Thomas, <em>Karl Marx and the Anarchists</em> (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 12, 16, 343–48; Vladimir Lenin, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 10, ed. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 71–73; George Plechanoff, <em>Anarchism and Socialism</em> (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 94–100.
[633] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 43 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 490–91.
[634] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 23 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 254–55.
[635] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, <em>Collected Works</em>, vol. 44 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 331.
[636] Malatesta, <em>At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 155. See also Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 171.
[637] Rudolf Rocker, <em>The London Years</em> (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 28; <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 73–78; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 39–43.
[638] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 238.
[639] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 226.
[640] Bakunin, <em>Political Philosophy</em>, 313.
[641] <em>Quoted in Berthier, Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 59.
[642] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 22, 53, 225.
[643] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism</em>, ed. G.P. Maximoff (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 313.
[644] Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, <em>The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 341.
[645] Quoted in T.R. Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em> (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 183.
[646] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 20–21.
[647] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 53, 52.
[648] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 53. See also Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 310–11.
[649] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 167–68.
[650] Quoted in Jerome R. Mintz, <em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 13.
[651] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 535.
[652] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 164. See also Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 144.
[653] Kropotkin, <em>Modern Science</em>, 159.
[654] Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in <em>Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy</em>, ed. Nathan Jun (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 515. This distinction was first proposed in Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, <em>Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 123–24. It should be noted that, since its publication, Schmidt was revealed to be a racist.
[655] Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 99.Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism
** Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism
Insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that met to learn and discuss ideas, plan direct action, organize talks and countercultural activities—such as dances and picnics—produce or distribute anarchist literature, and engage in violent acts of revolt against the ruling classes and their institutions.[656] The ultimate aim of these different methods of action was the same: to inspire or evoke a revolutionary upsurge by the working classes. In theory, anarchists advocating, praising, and engaging in violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions would provoke or inspire significant segments of the working classes to rise up, which would in turn motivate others to join them in insurrection. This would lead to a chain reaction of uprisings spawning an ever-increasing number of revolts until the working classes had formed a mass movement, forcefully expropriated the ruling classes and abolished capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[657]
This strategy was advocated by Galleani. He held that “the way to revolution, whose initial phase must be the individual act of rebellion, inseparable from propaganda, from the mental preparation which understands it, integrates it, leading to larger and more frequent repetitions through which collective insurrections flow into the social revolution.”[658] Although insurrectionist anarchists favored individual acts of rebellion, they also believed that the social revolution would be brought about by the working classes acting as a mass movement engaging in collective insurrections. Galleani endorsed “the direct and independent action of individuals and masses,” including “rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.”[659] Cafiero thought that a social revolution would require “the violence of the insurgent masses.”[660]
The three main ideas that constituted insurrectionist anarchist strategy in this historical period were an opposition to formal organizations, a rejection of struggling for immediate reforms, and a commitment to propaganda of the deed. This chapter will establish what insurrectionists thought and how they used the theory of practice to justify or reject particular strategies. In particular, it will provide an overview of how the meaning of propaganda of the deed changed over time.
*** Opposition to Formal Organizations
Insurrectionist anarchists argued that anarchism as a movement should not be organized through large, formal organizations characterized by such things as having a constitution, elected delegates, yearly national congresses that passed congress resolutions, and an official membership. Insurrectionist anarchists were initially in favor of federations because anarchism as a movement developed within the federations of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals. Paul Brousse, for example, was one of the main theorists of propaganda of the deed but also participated in a French anarchist federation that was affiliated with the Saint-Imier International.[661] Similarly, during the 1880s, Most advocated propaganda of the deed, rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and played a key role in the founding of the American national federation of the International Working People’s Association.[662]
From the late 1870s onward, a significant segment of insurrectionist anarchists, such as Cafiero, came to reject formal organizations for strategic reasons, while still advocating federations as a key component of the future anarchist society. Eventually what had been a matter of strategy was transformed into a matter of principle and insurrectionist anarchists came to hold that all formal organizations were fundamentally incompatible with anarchist values and goals. It is difficult to establish how many insurrectionist anarchists there were because, unlike trade unions, they did not keep records of their size.[663]
Despite the fact that some insurrectionist anarchists claimed to reject all organization, they were not against organization in the sense of people coming together to act collectively as a group. Insurrectionist anarchists themselves usually distinguished between <em>free association</em>, which they supported, and <em>organization</em>, by which they meant formal organization, which they opposed. The Italian anarchist Giuseppe Ciancabilla wrote in 1899 that “organization (not free agreement, nor free association, we mean) is absolutely anti-anarchist.”[664] In 1925, Galleani advocated a society based on cooperation, mutual agreement between groups, and “<em>the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association</em>.”[665] Yet he also thought that “organizationalists cannot find a form of organization compatible with their anarchist principles.”[666] For this reason he opposed “the political organization of the anarchist party,” by which he meant a specific anarchist organization, and “the organization of the craft and trade unions.”[667]
Critics of insurrectionist anarchism were likewise aware that they did not literally reject all organization. The Spanish anarchist Juan Serrano y Oteiza, who advocated formal organization and revolutionary trade unionism, wrote in 1885 that his opponents within the movement, “do not accept any organization except that of a group, and therefore they do not have organized trade sections, nor do they have local federations, district federations or federations of trade or trade unions.… Their only and exclusive form of organization are the groups or circles of social studies among which there has not been established any pact or constituted any commission which can serve as a center of relations between the respective collective bodies that pursue the same ends.”[668] Several years later in 1890, Malatesta noted that antiorganizationalist anarchists “rack their brains to come up with names to take the place of organization, but in actual fact they quite sheepishly engage in organization or attempts at organization.”[669]
Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organizations for two main reasons. First, they held that it made it too easy for the state to infiltrate, persecute, and surveil the anarchist movement. In 1874, a group of influential Italian anarchists argued that the wave of state repression that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International had experienced was a product of how they had primarily organized within a formal public federation. This had enabled “bourgeois troublemakers and spies” to infiltrate the movement and provide the government with information such that they could track the activities of anarchists and repress them at “the opportune moment.”[670]
From late 1878 onward, the amount of state repression that Italian anarchists faced massively expanded. This occurred due to the Italian ruling classes using an unsuccessful republican assassination attempt against King Umberto I of Italy as an opportunity to destroy the International once and for all.[671] In 1879, Cafiero responded to these events by arguing that anarchists should establish “<em>secret and firm bonds</em> between all of us” because formal organizations “display all our forces to the public, i.e., to the police” and so reveal “how and where to strike us.”[672]
One year later, the Italian state issued the killing blow to the International in Italy when the high court ruled that any internationalist organization composed of five or more people was an association of malefactors. This enabled the Italian state to arrest and imprison anarchists simply for being anarchists, even if they had not planned or engaged in any illegal actions. At the same time, numerous anarchists were subject to searches of their home, suppression of newspapers, dissolution of groups, extreme limitations on their freedom of association and movement, and deportation to, and forcible confinement on, desolate islands near Sicily and southern Italy.[673] It was within this context of state repression that the Italian anarchist paper <em>La Gazetta Operaia</em> wrote in July 1887 that “experience teaches that a vast association of a revolutionary character easily offers its flank to the police, therefore to persecution.… United and fighting all together under the impetus of a vast association we run the risk of being crushed with a single blow by adversaries stronger than us.”[674]
The second reason why insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization was that, from their perspective, formal organizations made people unfree and inhibited their membership’s ability to act and take initiative.[675] This entailed that formal organizations were incompatible with the unity of means and ends, since they failed to produce the self-determining individuals needed for a successful social revolution and the production and reproduction of an anarchist society. This hostile attitude toward formal organization partly stemmed from the negative experiences anarchists had within the First International due to the actions of the General Council.[676]
Formal organizations were above all thought to mirror the organizational form of the state. In February 1887, the Italian anarchist paper <em>Humanitas</em> labeled formal organizations “a state in miniature” and argued that they destroyed “the spirit of initiative in individuals, who expect everything from this organization.”[677] In 1925, Galleani similarly claimed that any formal organization “has its programme; i.e., its constitutional charter: in assemblies of group representatives it has its parliament: in its management, its boards and executive committees, it has its government. In short, it is a graduated superstructure of bodies a true hierarchy, no matter how disguised.”[678]
According to Galleani, constitutions forced the formal organization to follow a particular set of procedures, rather than what was appropriate or necessary given ongoing events and the nature of the present struggle. Formal avenues for decision-making and action, such as congresses, filtered out original ideas and reaffirmed the orthodoxy of the organization. When workers wanted to take action themselves and implement their own ideas, they were instead instructed to go through the appropriate committee or were informed that a committee had already been set up to handle this task and would take care of matters. Even federations based on delegates were critiqued for leading to a situation in which representatives and those higher up in the organization made decisions that the wider membership accepted out of discipline, regardless of their own opinions and interests. In each case, the organization would take on a life of its own and control its membership.[679]
Galleani rejected the idea that delegates could represent others, even if they had been elected and mandated. This was because “every delegate… could represent only his own ideas and feelings, not those of his constituents, which are infinitely variable on any subject.”[680] He thought it was impossible to “anarchically delegate to another person one’s own thought, one’s own energy, one’s own will.”[681] Galleani also rejected congress resolutions on the grounds that they subordinated the minority to the majority and thereby made people unfree. For Galleani, congresses were only useful and consistent with anarchism if they were just meetings that provided an occasion for individual militants to meet, share ideas, and work together.[682]
As an alternative to large formal organizations, insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups. These affinity groups, which were also called circles or clubs, were either more or less permanent cells or were formed for a specific task and dissolved once it was complete. They typically had a membership of between four and twenty members and were given a wide variety of different names, such as Germinal (in honor of Émile Zola’s novel), The Termites Libertarian Circle, The Barricade Group, The Right to be Idle Group, and the Revolutionary Propaganda Circle.[683] An 1885 article in <em>Le Révolté</em> claimed that “we do not believe in long-term associations, federations, etc. For us, a group should come together only for a clearly defined objective or short-term action; once the action is accomplished, the group should reform on a new basis, either with the same elements, or with new ones.”[684]
Thus, anarchist affinity groups were viewed as superior to formal organizations because the fact that they were loosely structured and composed of a small group of people, who knew and trusted one another, meant that they simultaneously enabled freedom of initiative while also being more effective at avoiding infiltration, persecution, and state surveillance. If an affinity group was infiltrated or repressed by the state then, given its small size, the damage to the anarchist movement was less severe than when the same occurred to a large federation.[685] In 1890, Jean Grave argued in <em>La Révolte</em> that affinity groups accustom “individuals to bestir themselves, to act, without being bogged down in routine and immobility, thereby preparing the groupings of the society to come, by forcing individuals to act for themselves, to seek out one another on the basis of their inclinations, their affinities.”[686] Affinity groups were, in other words, thought to prefigure the social relations of an anarchist society and so were constituted by forms of practice that developed individuals with the right kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for achieving anarchist goals.
This is not to say that insurrectionist anarchists thought that only small groups of people should engage in actions. Massive crowds containing numerous small affinity groups could, for example, riot without belonging to a formal organization. Large groups of people who were participating in an uprising could quickly form mass general assemblies in order to make agreements about what to do next. They could do so without establishing a federation, electing an administrative committee, or passing binding congress resolutions. Nor is it the case that affinity groups were completely isolated entities. Insurrectionist anarchists sought to achieve coordination between different groups via informal social networks, which were usually centered around specific periodicals, rather than through the establishment of a formal federation. This can be seen in the history of the paper <em>Cronaca Sovversiva</em>, which was edited by Galleani and based in the United States. It not only spread anarchist ideas and instilled a sense of anarchist identity in its readership, but also connected anarchist groups by publishing their correspondence and announcements in a single place that they all read. This facilitated both the exchange of information and enabled groups to engage in dialogue with one another and make collective decisions.[687]
Some insurrectionist anarchists were so committed to their rejection of formal organizations that they viewed those who advocated them as betraying the core principles of anarchism. This resulted in a great deal of polemical debate that could sometimes even turn violent. In September 1899, the antiorganizationalist anarchist barber Domenico Pazzaglia shot Malatesta in the leg during a meeting at a saloon in West Hoboken, New Jersey, due to Malatesta’s advocacy of formal organizations. He responded in a truly anarchist fashion by refusing to tell the police who had shot him.[688]
*** Rejection of Struggling for Reforms
Insurrectionist anarchism opposed the strategy of struggling for immediate reforms in the present. As the paper <em>L’Insurrezione</em> argued in 1881, “anything that facilitates and brings the time of the insurrection nearer, is good; all that keeps it away through maintaining the appearance of progress, is bad. This is the principle that guides us.”[689] This rejection of struggling for immediate reforms included not only parliamentary politics, which all anarchists rejected, but also participating within trade unions in order to struggle for higher wages, shorter working days, and improved working conditions. Those insurrectionists who did advocate participating within trade unions did so only when they thought it was a good opportunity to undermine the trade union bureaucracy, spread anarchist ideas, develop the spirit of revolt, and persuade workers that their involvement in the trade union was futile and would not achieve their emancipation. This included the organization of wildcat strikes that were not approved or supported by the trade union’s leadership.[690]
Insurrectionist anarchists rejected struggling for immediate reforms for three main reasons. First, they held that reforms did not challenge, but rather rested upon, the ongoing existence of dominant institutions. Social movements that aim to win reforms will therefore end up consenting to and reproducing the existing economic and political system, rather than overthrowing it. They may start out as revolutionary, but the practice of struggling for reforms will, over time, cause radical capacities, drives and, consciousness to decay and be replaced by ones compatible with dominant structures. Reforms that are initially viewed as only a means or stepping stone to revolution will, over time, be transformed into the actual end goals of a movement’s activity. For insurrectionist anarchists, this process of revolutionary movements being weakened by the struggle for reforms could be clearly seen in socialist political parties that became less and less radical over time in order to gain votes and pass reformist laws through political alliances with bourgeois parties.[691]
Second, they thought that the ruling classes only conceded reforms to the working classes in order to calm popular discontent. Although reforms might improve people’s lives in the short term, they also stabilized class society and thereby perpetuated the suffering and oppression of the working classes. This is because the achievement of reforms can alter the consciousness of workers such that they come to mistakenly believe that the ruling classes are benevolent, view the state as a servant of the people, and put their hopes in politicians and the law. Reforms could, in short, have the dangerous effect of causing workers to desire a better and more humane master, rather than no master at all. According to Galleani, “reforms” are “the ballast the bourgeoisie throws overboard to lighten its old boat in the hope of saving the sad cargo of its privileges from sinking in the revolutionary storm.”[692] Given this, reforms should be seen as the byproducts of threats to ruling class power that are granted when “attacks against the existing social institutions become more forceful and violent,” rather than being the main immediate goal of political and economic struggle.[693]
Third, insurrectionists tended to subscribe to the iron law of wages, which had been advocated by the political economist David Ricardo and later popularized among socialists by Ferdinand Lassalle, who was one of the main founders of what would become German social democracy. The concept claimed that real wages under capitalism would always tend toward the amount of money required to secure the subsistence of the worker. For Ricardo and Lassalle, this was related to population growth: an expansion of the supply of labor would lead to a decrease in wages, and living costs would increase due to larger families.[694] The insurrectionist anarchists, in contrast, focused on the idea that any increase in wages that workers won through struggle would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living as capitalists and landlords charged more for basic necessities such as food and rent. If this were true, then fighting to win higher wages was futile, a waste of time and energy, since any wage increase would not last.[695]
In place of struggles for immediate reforms, insurrectionist anarchists advocated immediate violent confrontation with dominant institutions. Galleani argued that “tactics of corrosion and continuous attack should be preferred… immediate attempts at partial expropriation, individual rebellion and insurrection” or strikes that adopt “an openly revolutionary character” and seek, “through the inevitable use of force and violence, the unconditional surrender of the <em>ruling</em> classes.”[696] Insurrectionist anarchists held that, instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, it would be better to “start the revolution inside oneself and realize it according to the best of our abilities in partial experiments, wherever such an opportunity arises, and whenever a bold group of our comrades have the conviction and courage to try.”[697] These tactics were thought to “exert the most spirited influence over the masses” and would therefore inspire the working classes to rise up.[698]
*** Propaganda of the Deed
If revolutions were, as an article in <em>La Révolte</em> stated in 1890, “the product of a spontaneous explosion of the masses’ discontent and anger,” then the role of revolutionaries was to ignite this anger.[699] Propaganda of the deed was one of the primary means through which insurrectionist anarchists attempted to spread the spirit of revolt and thereby contribute toward the emergence of a social revolution. Historians of terrorism frequently make the mistake of equating the entire idea of propaganda of the deed with the kinds of high-profile assassination or bombings carried out by anarchists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.[700] The idea of propaganda of the deed did not, however, always refer to the advocacy and practice of individuals attempting to murder the ruling classes in the name of revolution. It underwent a process of development over three decades of theory and practice.
What would come to be called “propaganda of the deed” started out as the view that anarchist ideas could and should be spread through actions, rather than only through written or spoken propaganda. Propaganda of the deed proceeded to undergo two main phases of development. During its first phase, between 1870 and 1880, it largely referred to the practice of anarchists collectively attempting to launch armed insurrections in order to spread their ideas and provoke a popular uprising. This went alongside the view that other forms of collective direct action, such as combative demonstrations, were an effective means of popularizing anarchist ideas and gaining support for the anarchist movement. During its second phase, which lasted roughly from the 1880s to the early 1900s, it transformed into the idea that individual acts of violence, such as assassinating heads of state or bombing crowded opera houses frequented by the wealthy, were a legitimate form of working-class vengeance that would weaken the ruling classes and inspire the working classes to rebel.[701] Both notions of propaganda of the deed shared the idea that revolutionary action by an anarchist minority could successfully spread anarchist ideas and spark a chain of events that would culminate in a social revolution. Where they differed was the kind of action advocated and performed.[702]
**** <em>Propaganda of the Deed: First Phase</em>
The 1870s began with a series of unsuccessful insurrections. In September 1870, Bakunin and his associates launched a quickly defeated insurrection in Lyon. On the September 26, they issued a program, adopted by a crowd of six thousand, declaring the abolition of the state and the establishment of revolutionary committees for each commune, which were subject to the direct supervision of the people. When they attempted to implement this program two days later, they succeeded in storming the city hall and issuing a variety of decrees only to be forced to flee by late afternoon when municipal authorities called in the army. This was soon followed by an equally unsuccessful second insurrection in Lyon on April 30, 1871, the rapid rise and bloody fall of the Marseille Commune between March 23 and April 4, and the Paris Commune between March 18 and May 28.[703] During the violent repression of the Paris Commune, at least seventeen thousand people were, according to the official government report, executed for having risen up against the ruling classes. Anarchists, in comparison, believed that between thirty and thirty-six thousand people had been slaughtered.[704] The Spanish cantonalist rebellion of July 1873, in which anarchists participated, suffered a similarly violent defeat.[705]
It was within this context of armed conflict with the ruling classes that the idea of propaganda of the deed arose and gained prominence. In 1870, Bakunin remarked that revolutionaries “must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas and… spread our principles, not with words <em>but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda</em>.”[706] The aim of these deeds was to inspire the masses through revolutionary acts. In advocating this strategy, Bakunin does not appear to have been arguing that assassinations were an effective means of changing society. In 1866, he had responded to Dmitry Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the Tsar by writing that “no good can come of regicide in Russia for it would arouse a reaction favorable to the Tsar.”[707] For Bakunin it was a mistake to think that “the Gordian knot can be cut with one stroke.”[708]
On July 8, 1873, the French anarchist Paul Brousse, who would later become a state socialist, responded to the ongoing cantonalist rebellion by writing an article for the Barcelona paper <em>La Solidarité Révolutionnaire</em>.[709] In it, he declared that “revolutionary propaganda is… above all made in the open, in the midst of the piled-up paving stones of the barricades, on days when the exasperated people make war on the mercenary forces of reaction.”[710] This view, as he would later write in the August 1877 edition of the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em>, rested on the idea of grabbing “people’s attention, of showing them what they cannot read, of teaching them socialism by means of actions and making them see, feel, touch.… Propaganda by the deed is a mighty means of rousing the popular consciousness.”[711] An insurrection that established a socialist commune would have to defend itself but even if it was defeated, like the recent insurrections of the early 1870s, this would not matter in the long run since “the idea will have been launched, not on paper, not in a newspaper, not on a chart” but in the real political practices of the working classes; it would thus “march, in flesh and blood, at the head of the people.”[712]
Brousse’s insistence on propaganda through insurrection partly developed out of being radicalized by the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune had, Brousse argued, done more to spread revolutionary ideas in two months of fighting than twenty-three years of traditional written propaganda. This was because, while a person must find, buy, and read a book or newspaper in order to be radicalized by it, an armed insurrection rapidly gains the attention of large numbers of people, including those who cannot read, and puts them in a position where they must take a side in the ongoing struggle.[713] This was not mere speculation on Brousse’s part. In Italy, a large number of revolutionaries were driven to socialism by news of the Paris Commune, including future prominent anarchists such as Malatesta, Cafiero, and Costa.[714]
Brousse was not alone in holding that insurrections that establish communes have a powerful transformative effect on popular consciousness. Bakunin had himself made a similar point in his unsent 1872 letter to the editors of <em>La Liberté</em>, which was not published until 1910. He wrote in response to the Paris Commune that,
What makes that revolution important is not really the weak experiments which it had the power and time to make, it is the ideas it has set in motion, the living light it has cast on the true nature and goal of revolution, the hopes it has raised, and the powerful stir it has produced among the popular masses everywhere, and especially in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from that insurrection, whose main feature was the revolt of the Commune and the workers’ associations against the State.[715]
Cafiero shared this evaluation. In an unpublished chapter of his 1881 <em>Revolution</em>, he wrote that <em>“</em>the events of the Commune implanted militant socialism in every civilized land, and the long-awaited distant goal of the propagandist was reached in an instant by the brilliant flash of events.”[716] Two years later, Kropotkin said, during his court speech while on trial in Lyon, that, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, “socialism drew new life from the blood of its followers. Its ideas about property have been given an enormous circulation.”[717]
Nor was Brousse alone in holding that anarchists should, given the powerful propaganda effect of the Paris Commune, work toward the social revolution by launching insurrections that establish new communes. In an August 11, 1877, article in <em>L’Avant-Garde</em>, Kropotkin reacted to the recent violently crushed railway strikes in the United States by proposing that the strikes would have gone differently if there had been anarchists present who had sought to transform the strikes into insurrections that established communes and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. Even if these proposed communes had been defeated they would have, like the Paris Commune before them, served as “an immensely resounding act of propaganda for socialism.”[718] In 1879, Kropotkin argued for this strategy again by insisting that attempts at social revolution must perform “the deed of expropriation” because it is “the most powerful way of propagating the idea” among the general populace and thereby motivating other workers to join the emerging social revolution and expropriate their local economic ruling classes.[719]
Within the historical context of the rise and subsequent violent defeat of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Spanish cantonalist rebellion of 1873, anarchists thought that they were riding a revolutionary wave and that the social revolution was imminent. In 1883, while on trial in Lyon, Kropotkin declared to the court that “the social revolution is near. It will break out within ten years.”[720] This was not a uniquely anarchist perspective. Engels also predicted that a revolution was imminent numerous times during the 1880s and 1890s.[721] Reflecting on this period in 1904, Kropotkin wrote that “revolutionaries and moderates agreed then in predicting that the bourgeois regime, shaken by the revolution of 1848 and the Commune of Paris, could not long resist the attack of the European proletariat. Before the end of the century the collapse would come.”[722]
If the revolution was near, then, as Costa wrote in January 1874 (with Bakunin’s approval), “the time for peaceful propaganda has passed, it must be replaced by resounding—solemn propaganda of insurrection and barricades.”[723] These words were written in the journal of the Italian Committee for Social Revolution (CIRS), a secret association whose membership included key Italian anarchists such as Cafiero, Costa, and Malatesta. The group sought to put theory into practice by launching multiple insurrections simultaneously across Italy, which had recently experienced a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and riots in response to high food prices and unemployment. This strategy was opposed by the majority of delegates of the Saint-Imier International at a meeting on March 18, 1874, on the grounds that socialism was not yet popular enough in Italy for armed insurrections to be launched. Despite lacking international support, the Italian federation nonetheless decided to proceed with its plan. The result was total failure.[724]
None of the insurrections attempted on August 7 and 8, 1874, went as the Italian anarchists had hoped. The people did not rise up in response to CIRS’ calls for revolution, which they had announced in a bulletin that had been posted to the walls of various cities. The thousands of revolutionaries that were expected to form armed bands did not turn up. Instead only several hundred assembled, with a mere five turning up to join Malatesta’s insurrection in Puglia on the night of August 11. In response, the anarchist militants either quickly disbanded or were soon arrested. Other anarchists were arrested before they could even assemble due to police spies sharing the anarchists’ plans with the authorities. Bakunin was forced to shave his beard and escape to Switzerland disguised as a priest.[725]
The insurrections of August 1874 were viewed by Costa, one of the main organizers, as an attempt at propaganda of the deed. In his 1890 memoir, Costa wrote that “the occasion had come if not to provoke the social revolution in Italy, at least to give a practical example that would demonstrate to the people what we wanted and to propagate our ideas with evidence of deeds.”[726] Despite the failure of 1874, the Italian Federation of the Saint-Imier International officially adopted propaganda of the deed as a strategy during its congress of October 1876. This was done because, as Cafiero and Malatesta explained in a letter published in the December edition of the <em>Bulletin of the Jura Federation</em>, “the Italian Federation holds that the <em>act of insurrection</em>, designed to assert socialist principles through deeds, is the most effective method of propaganda and the only one that, without deceiving and corrupting the masses, can delve into the deepest strata of society and draw the cream of humanity into the struggle, backed by the International.”[727]
In advocating propaganda through the deed of armed insurrection, Italian anarchists were not advocating something new to Italian politics. The strategy had a prior history in the theory and practice of revolutionary Italian republicanism, which much of the Italian anarchist movement had developed out of.[728] Giuseppe Mazzini and his associates had sought to create a unified Italian republic through a strategy of armed bands of revolutionaries engaging in guerrilla warfare and attempting to “rouse the nation into insurrection.”[729] This can be seen in Mazzini’s hope that a defeated 1853 insurrection in Milan would have been “the kindling of a universal fire throughout Italy” if it had lasted twenty-four hours.[730] Malatesta later claimed, in 1897, that the early anarchist movement in Italy had believed in, “the youthful illusion (which we inherited from Mazzinianism) of imminent revolution achievable through the efforts of the few without due preparation in the masses.”[731]
The attempted insurrections launched by Italian republicans were consistently unsuccessful. They often failed, like the future anarchist insurrections, due to the state knowing of the plots before they were launched.[732] The exception was in 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi, a longtime associate of Mazzini, contributed to the unification of Italy by invading Sicily with roughly one thousand poorly armed men and subsequently, after amassing a much larger army of twenty thousand soldiers, capturing Naples.[733] An inkling of the effect that Garibaldi’s actions had on the developing socialist movement can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence in an 1897 letter to Maria Isidine Goldsmith that between 1859 and 1860 “Garibaldi’s brave campaigns did more to spread the liberal, radical spirit of revolt and socialism right across Europe than anything else.”[734]
The strategy of forming armed bands that launched insurrections coincided with some republican revolutionaries unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate monarchs. On January 14, 1858, Felice Orsini and two accomplices tried to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III of France with explosives. The three bombs that were thrown killed eight and wounded at least 156 people but barely harmed the Emperor. On December 8, 1856 the soldier Agesilao Milano stabbed and wounded King Ferdinand II of Naples with a bayonet. These republican acts of violence, be they collective revolts or individual attacks, had a profound influence on Italian anarchism.[735] Malatesta remembered in 1932 that “the idea of violence, even in the sense of the individual <em>attentat</em>, which many today believe characteristic of anarchism, was inherited by us from democracy.… Before accepting the teachings of Bakunin, the Italian Anarchists—Fanelli, Friscia, Gambuzzi—had admired and exalted Agesilao Milano, Felice Orsini, and <em>coups de main</em> typical of Mazzini. When they passed over to the International, they were not taught anything in this camp that they had not already learned from Mazzini and Garibaldi.”[736]
Italian anarchists were particularly influenced by Carlo Pisacane, whose writings they discovered in the mid-1870s. Pisacane was a socialist influenced by Proudhon and was chief of staff of Mazzini’s republican army of 1849.[737] In 1857, shortly before dying in a failed insurrection at Sapri (which he co-organized with Mazzini), he wrote that “ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around… conspiracies, plots and attempted uprisings are the succession of deeds whereby Italy proceeds toward her goal of unity. The flash of Milano’s bayonet was a more effective propaganda than a thousand volumes penned by doctrinarians.”[738]
Undeterred by their previous failure in 1874, the Italian anarchists soon made a second attempt at insurrection, which would come to be known as the Benevento affair. In theory, an armed band of anarchists would roam the Matese mountain range and its surrounding provinces in southern Italy, spreading revolutionary consciousness. One of the insurrection’s participants, Pietro Ceccarelli (who had previously participated in Garibaldi’s campaigns), explained later in 1881 that they planned “to rove about the countryside for as long as possible, preaching [class] war, inciting social brigandage, occupying small towns and leaving them after having accomplished whatever revolutionary acts we could, and to proceed to that area where our presence would prove more useful.”[739] Believing “that revolution must be provoked, we carried out an act of provocation.… We were a band of insurgents destined to provoke an insurrection that cannot and must not count on anything but the echo it may find in the population.”[740]
Guillaume described the ideas behind this strategy in detail. He wrote,
Our friends in Italy came to the conclusion that, in their country at least, <em>oral and written propaganda were not enough</em>, and that, to be clearly understood by the popular masses, especially the peasants, it was necessary to <em>show</em> them what could not be made living and real in any theoretical teaching, they had to be taught socialism through <em>deeds</em> so that they could see, feel and touch it. A plan was formed for teaching the Italian peasants, by means of a <em>practical lesson</em>, what society would be like if it got rid of government and property owners; for this, it would be enough to organize an armed band, large enough to control the countryside for a brief time and go from one commune to another carrying into effect <em>Socialism through action</em> before the very eyes of the people.[741]
Again, things did not go according to plan.[742] The Italian state was aware of the plot by mid-February 1877, due to reports from police spies who had infiltrated the anarchist movement. The following month, a member of the group, Salvatore Farina, disappeared after revealing the full details of their plans to the Italian state. Rather than flee the country, the anarchists decided to launch the insurrection at the beginning of April, a month earlier than planned. Doing so did not allow them to escape police repression. Several were arrested before they could even reach the agreed rendezvous point. Those who managed to arrive successfully were forced to flee the area with a fraction of their equipment after discovering and shooting at the four policemen who had them under surveillance. During their escape, they were joined by ten fellow insurgents who had, by chance, eluded the police because they missed their scheduled train. Together the group of only twenty-six anarchists headed for the mountains.
The armed band was low on men, ammunition, weapons, and food. Traveling to nearby large towns to gather supplies was not an option since, as the anarchists soon discovered, the government had already occupied the area with twelve thousand troops. Given these circumstances, the anarchists were only able to enter two small towns, Letino and Gallo. In each case, they did what little they could by burning official documents taken from the town hall, distributing what weapons and money they could find to the local peasants, and giving a speech on the necessity and value of the social revolution. In his speech to the peasants of Letino, Cafiero declared “the rifles and the axes we have given you, the knives you have. If you wish, do something, and if not, go f— yourselves.”[743]
According to Brousse, these events had been a practical demonstration that taught the peasants how much contempt they should have for private property and the state.[744] This lesson appears to have had a limited effect, since the peasants of both Letino and Gallo cheered and applauded the anarchists only to return to their daily lives once the band had left. One of the reasons why the peasants did not join the anarchists in insurrection was that they were legitimately afraid of what would happen if they rose up. Malatesta later recalled that a peasant in Gallo had asked him how they could know that the anarchists were not, in fact, undercover police attempting to entrap them. Even if they could be sure that the anarchists were not police, an insurrection was still deeply impractical. As the peasants explained to Malatesta, “the town is in no condition to defend itself, the revolution has not yet erupted on a vast scale, tomorrow the troops will come and massacre us all.”[745]
After failing to escape the region due to poor weather conditions, the anarchists took refuge for the night in a farmhouse near Letino. They were soon surrounded by soldiers after being informed on by a local peasant seeking a reward. Fighting was not an option—their weapons and ammunition had been rendered useless by rainfall. Knowing that they would be killed if they resisted the anarchists chose to surrender without a fight. With their arrests the insurrection was over.
Despite this, the insurrection was not a total failure. News of the insurrection and the subsequent trial, during which the defendants gave speeches on anarchism, garnered the International and its revolutionary socialist politics considerable national attention for several weeks. This was probably a contributing factor in the growth of the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International over the following year and a half.[746] Cafiero, perhaps looking for a positive outcome of the failed insurrection he had participated in, later claimed that the Benevento affair had increased demand for Marx’s <em>Capital</em> to such an extent that a bookseller in Naples was forced to find more copies after having sold out.[747]
Anarchists in Berne, Switzerland, made less ambitious attempts at propaganda of the deed. They attended a demonstration on March 18, 1877, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, and brought red flags with them. The canton had prohibited the public display of the red flag and the previous year’s demonstration by social democrats had ended in failure when it was attacked, dispersed, and the red flag was torn up. The aim of the anarchists was to march through Berne defending the flag from attacks by the police. This action was inspired by a Russian demonstration on December 6, 1876, when students and workers had gathered outside Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral after a revolutionary had been killed in prison. At the Russian demonstration, a student carrying a red flag had declared the demonstration’s solidarity with all who had suffered in the struggle against Tsarism. The subsequent brutal state repression of the demonstration led to a large increase in public sympathy toward the revolutionaries. The anarchists hoped that their demonstration involving a red flag would have a similar effect and lead to increased sympathy with and support for the Jura Federation, whose membership was in serious decline.
On the day of the protest in Berne, roughly 250 demonstrators, several of whom were armed with sticks and truncheons, assembled themselves into a procession and marched forward with the Swiss anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel at their head brandishing a red flag. The demonstration, which was attended by several well-known anarchists including Guillaume, Kropotkin, and the Frenchman Jean-Louis Pindy, was then attacked by police armed with sabers and the anarchists defended themselves. During the struggle six policemen and several protesters were seriously wounded. The anarchists were forced to abandon the original flag but did manage to escape with another red flag and take it to the meeting planned for the end of the demonstration.[748] Kropotkin claimed in letter written to Paul Robin on March 24, that the protest had nonetheless been a success because two thousand people, instead of the expected seventy, had attended the meeting afterward organized by the anarchists. Their act of revolt had gained them “an attentive and in part sympathetic public” since “<em>there is nothing like courage to win over the people</em>.”[749]
In August, Brousse argued that the Berne protest was an act of propaganda of the deed that taught the Swiss working class “that they do not, as they thought they did, enjoy freedom.”[750] This lack of freedom was apparent in how the Swiss state responded to the Berne protest. Thirty of the demonstrators were brought to trial and sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from sixty days for the two anarchists who had struck policemen with sticks to forty days for Guillaume, thirty days for Brousse, and ten days for the rest. All the foreign participants were expelled from the Berne Canton for three years and with this the movement in Berne lost its leading militants.[751]
**** <em>Propaganda of the Deed: Second Phase</em>
During its second phase, propaganda of the deed developed into advocating or engaging in assassination and bombings.[752] The transformation occurred in response to a vast array of factors that included: a vicious cycle of anarchists responding to state violence with violent individual attacks that led, in turn, to more state violence and so on; anarchists being influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by contemporary social movements such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; and the nefarious influence of police spies and agent provocateurs. It is difficult to chart the path from collective uprisings into individual acts of violence, partly because it is rarely clear if a particular attack was carried out by a genuine anarchist attempting to implement insurrectionist theory and engage in propaganda of the deed. Attacks were frequently attributed to anarchists by the police or the press (including, sometimes, the anarchist press) with little to no evidence.[753]
The earliest alleged anarchist assassination attempts occurred in 1878 when Max Hödel on May 11 and Dr. Carl Nobiling on June 2 both tried unsuccessfully to kill the Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. This was soon followed by Juan Oliva y Moncasi’s failed attempt to assassinate King Alfonso XII of Spain on October 25. It is not clear from the available evidence whether either Hödel or Nobiling were genuine anarchists. At best they were socialists with some loose connections to a few anarchist groups.[754] Although Moncasi was a member of the anarchist-led Spanish section of the Saint-Imier International, it is not clear whether he was an anarchist himself.[755]
The first definite anarchist assassination plot occurred in 1880. After guns had failed to kill the Kaiser, the German anarchist August Reinsdorf planned to dig a tunnel under the Reichstag, plant explosives around the building’s supports and ignite them while the Reichstag was in session. Reinsdorf made the mistake of explaining his plan in a letter dated September 1, 1880, to his associate Johann Most, a German socialist who, at the time, lived in London, edited the journal <em>Freiheit</em>, and had yet to become an anarchist. Oskar Neumann, a spy living in London, heard of the plan and subsequently informed the Berlin police. Reinsdorf was arrested on November 14 while carrying a dagger near the home of the Berlin chief of police, Guido von Madai, whom he planned to assassinate.[756]
This escalation in political practice was mirrored by an escalation in theory. In December 1880, Cafiero wrote an article for <em>Le Révolté</em> in which he repeated the old insurrectionist idea that actions were an effective means of spreading revolutionary ideas. What had changed was the scope of acceptable action. Rather than merely advocating armed bands inspiring a popular insurrection, he now insisted that anarchists should engage in “permanent rebellion, by word, by writing, by dagger, by gun, by dynamite… we shall use every weapon which can be used for rebellion. Everything is right for us which is not legal.”[757] He argued that anarchists should immediately engage in violent attacks because “if we go on waiting until we are strong enough before attacking—we shall never attack, and we shall be like the good man who vowed that he wouldn’t go into the sea until he had learned to swim. It is precisely revolutionary action which develops our strength, just as exercise develops the strength of our muscles.”[758] He predicted that if anarchists fought and died for popular movements then the seeds of socialism they contained would grow and flower into a revolution. Cafiero, in short, held that engaging in revolutionary violence would simultaneously develop the capacities of anarchists and instill radical drives and consciousness within the working classes.
A few months later, Cafiero wrote a letter to the paper <em>Il Grido del Popolo</em> in which he advocated armed struggle in more detail. Anarchist militants were to form a group in their area composed of between six and ten men or women and engage in violent attacks, including with explosives, against capitalism and the state. He optimistically predicted that their actions “will find echoes all over the world. Hardly will the actions of one group have begun, when the whole country will be covered in groups, and action become generalized. Every group will be its own center of action, with a plan all of its own, and a multiplicity of varied and harmonic initiatives. The concept of the whole war will be one only: the destruction of all oppressors and exploiters.”[759]
Propaganda of the deed soon came to be enshrined in the resolutions of the International Social Revolutionary Congress, which met in London between July 14 and 20, 1881, and was conceived as an attempt to re-found the International.[760] The congress was attended by forty-five delegates claiming to represent sixty federations and fifty-nine individual groups with a total membership of fifty thousand people. One of the most vocal delegates was the French police agent Égide Spilleux, who operated under the pseudonym Serreaux and had successfully infiltrated the movement.[761] After a significant amount of discussion and debate, the delegates agreed to adopt the following resolution,
<quote>
the International Workingmen’s Association deems it necessary to add “Propaganda by Deed” to oral and written propaganda.… It is absolutely necessary to exert every effort toward propagating, by deeds, the revolutionary idea and to arouse the spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses who still harbor illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods… Whereas the agricultural workers are still outside the revolutionary movement, it is absolutely necessary to make every effort to win them to our cause, and to keep in mind that a deed performed against the existing institutions appeals to the masses much more than thousands of leaflets and torrents of words, and that “Propaganda by Deed” is of greater importance in the countryside than in the cities.[762]
</quote>
Edward Nathan-Ganz, delegate No. 22 and one of the three members of the resolution committee appointed to summarize the proposals that had been put forward during the congress, connected propaganda of the deed to the manufacture of bombs. He wrote within the resolution that “whereas the technical and chemical sciences have rendered services to the revolutionary cause and are bound to render still greater services in the future, the Congress suggests that organizations and individuals affiliated with the International Workingmen’s Association devote themselves to the study of these sciences.”[763]
Reinsdorf soon decided to follow these proposals and undertake a second attempt at blowing up members of Germany’s ruling classes. As he explained in an 1882 letter to an American comrade, only the bomb could “inject the whole bourgeoisie and their slaves with total terror” and achieve “complete and utter revenge” for “all the dirty tricks and atrocities” they committed.[764] This time, Reinsdorf and his associates in the town of Elberfeld planned to use dynamite to kill Wilhelm I, alongside other key members of the German ruling classes, at the inauguration of the Niederwald Monument on September 28, 1883. The assassination failed. Due to a sprained ankle, Reinsdorf was unable to go himself and two of his associates—the saddler Franz Rupsch and the compositor Emil Küchler—went in his place. Küchler made the mistake of ignoring Reinsdorf’s instructions to buy a waterproof fuse. The night before the assassination attempt, it rained heavily and the cheaper fuse failed to ignite at the crucial moment. In 1884, Reinsdorf and his group were arrested and put on trial for the attempted assassination of the Emperor. It turned out that one of Reinsdorf’s associates, the weaver Carl Rudolf Palm—who had donated forty marks toward Rupsch and Küchler’s travel expenses—was in fact a police spy and had been informing on the group from the very beginning. On the morning of February 7, 1885, Reinsdorf and Küchler were executed, with Rupsch having had his death sentence commuted to imprisonment for life.[765]
In parallel to these events, Most, who had known Reinsdorf, moved from London to New York in December 1882 and became an anarchist.[766] During the mid-1880s, Most wrote numerous articles for <em>Freiheit</em> which declared that workers should arm themselves with guns, dynamite, poison, and knives in order to violently attack the ruling classes and achieve revenge. For example, in August 1884 he wrote that “Every prince will find his Brutus. Poison on the table of the gourmet will cancel out his debt. Dynamite will explode in the splendid, rubber tyred, coaches of the aristocracy and bourgeois as they pull up to the opera. Death will await them, both by day and by night, on all roads and footpaths and even in their homes, lurking in a thousand different forms.”[767] In 1885, Most even published an assassination manual for his readers based on what he had learned working in an explosives factory. It was titled <em>The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc</em>.[768]
This shift to the meaning of propaganda of the deed within anarchist circles did not occur in isolation. Anarchists were influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by other social movements between the 1850s and 1880s, including Italian republicans, Irish nationalists, and Russian nihilists.[769] One of the most impactful events was Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) assassinating Tsar Alexander II of Russia with explosives on March 1, 1881. In the aftermath of this attack, an increasing number of anarchists came to argue that anarchists should follow Narodnaya Volya’s example and organize their own assassination campaign against the ruling classes. It is not a coincidence that the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London passed a resolution advocating propaganda of the deed and the study of chemical sciences to build explosives a few months after the assassination of the Tsar with explosives.[770]
The impact of the Tsar’s assassination was clear to anarchists at the time. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that “when the Russian revolutionaries had killed the Czar… the European anarchists imagined that, from then on, a handful of fervent revolutionaries, armed with a few bombs, would be enough to bring about the social revolution.”[771] This perspective was echoed by Nettlau. He wrote in 1932 that, during this period, anarchists were inspired by “the example of fortitude and sacrifice set by Russian nihilists” and thought that, due to the assassination of the Tsar, alongside other examples of revolt, insurrection, and state repression, there was a “growing accumulation of acts of violence,” which in turn indicated that “a general revolutionary upheaval of a socially destructive type was imminent.”[772]
Although the vast majority of anarchist assassinations and bombings were carried out by genuine anarchists acting independently, there are several examples of the police normalizing or encouraging the use of these violent tactics. Louis Andrieux, the prefect of the Paris Police, financed the creation of the anarchist paper <em>La Révolution Sociale</em> in September 1880, through his agent Serreaux. The paper, which Serreaux helped to edit, published articles advocating violent attacks and provided the reader with instructions on how to manufacture dynamite. In June 1881, a police agent working for Andrieux played a key role in instigating a small group of anarchists to bomb the statue of the former president Adolphe Thiers, who had ordered the massacre of the Paris Commune a decade earlier. The bomb failed to damage the statue, and left only a black stain. As mentioned earlier, Serreaux attended the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London as a delegate and formed around him a group of supporters that Kropotkin referred to as “<em>la bande Serreaux</em>.” During the congress, this group advocated propaganda of the deed, a rejection of morality, the study of bomb making, and a repeat of actions like the bombing of the statue of Thiers.[773]
It was not until the 1890s that the new understanding of propaganda of the deed was implemented by anarchists on a grand scale. The manner in which this occurred varied between countries. In Italy, explosives were largely used to damage government buildings, rather than people, and generally did little more than break windows.[774] In Spain and France, by contrast, there were a series of bombings that wounded and killed random civilians who just happened to be in the area. In 1892, François Koenigstein, known more commonly as Ravachol, decided to seek vengeance for the wrongful arrest, torture, and imprisonment of anarchist protesters by the French state. To this end, he bombed the apartment buildings where the judge and prosecutor attorney of the court case lived on March 11 and 27. The bombs injured eight innocent people and failed to wound, let alone kill, their targets.[775]
Several months later, on November 8, Émile Henry left a bomb outside the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company, which had recently crushed a miners’ strike. The bomb exploded after being moved to a nearby police station, killing five people. On December 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed anarchist who was unable to feed his wife and daughter, threw a small nail bomb into France’s chamber of deputies in order to call attention to the suffering of the poor. Due to its design, the bomb only slightly wounded several deputies and a few spectators. Despite not having killed anyone, Vaillant was sentenced to death. Seven days after Vaillant was executed, Henry sought revenge and threw a bomb into Paris’s Café Terminus on February 12, 1894. His aim was not to target any person in particular but to kill any random member of the bourgeoisie. The explosion killed one and wounded twenty.[776]
Similar events occurred in Spain. On September 24, 1893, Paulino Pallás threw a bomb at Arsenio Martínez de Campos, the Captain General of Catalonia, during a military parade in Barcelona. The bomb, which was thrown in response to the execution of four anarchist militants, killed two people and wounded Campos and twelve soldiers and spectators. Pallás was subsequently executed. Santiago Salvador, who had been converted to anarchism by Pallás, sought revenge for his friend’s execution by throwing two bombs down onto the wealthy audience of the Liceu Opera theater in Barcelona during its November 7 performance of <em>William Tell</em>. Only one bomb exploded, killing fifteen people and seriously injuring fifty others.[777]
Other anarchists used blades and guns to engage in targeted assassinations. In 1894, Santo Caserio stabbed to death the President of France Sadi Carnot. This was followed by Michele Angiolillo assassinating the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1897 and Luigi Lucheni killing the Empress of Austria Elisabeth Eugenie in 1898. Two years later in 1900, Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto I of Italy with a revolver. In 1901, Leon Czolgosz, who had only recently come into contact with anarchist ideas, shot and fatally wounded the American president William McKinley. On other occasions, anarchist assassins were unsuccessful, such as Berkman’s 1892 attempt to kill the capitalist Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for the violent repression of a strike at the Homestead steel works.[778]
Anarchist assassinations and bombings did not end suddenly at the dawn of the new century and continued for several years after. For example, anarchist bomb throwers failed to murder the King of Spain Alfonso XIII during his 1905 visit to Paris and 1906 wedding in Madrid. The explosions from these two assassination attempts injured 124 bystanders and killed twenty-three people. Over a decade later, the anarchist Émile Cottin unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate the French Prime Minister Clemenceau in 1919.[779]
The majority of these attacks were carried out in response to the much greater violence of the ruling classes. A clear example of this is Bresci’s assassination of King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. A few years previously, in 1897 and 1898, a wave of protests, demonstrations, strikes, and riots had spread across Italy in response to the spiraling cost of bread, which was the primary source of food for the working classes. This direct struggle included women leading raids on granaries and bakeries in order to expropriate food. Bread prices had risen due to an extremely poor grain harvest in Italy and the Italian state’s decision to not lower import duties on foreign grain in order to protect the financial interests of Italian capitalists and landowners. This included the prime minister and finance minister, who both owned vast amounts of land. The Italian state responded to the working classes struggle for adequate food with mass arrests, the mobilization of the army, and the imposition of martial law. On several occasions, protesters armed with little more than sticks and stones were wounded or killed by gunfire from soldiers. In the port of Livorno, two warships even threatened to shell working-class neighborhoods.
Such threats were not empty. In May 1898, soldiers in Milan not only responded to thrown rocks with volleys of gunfire. They also fired artillery at striking workers, who had attempted to defend themselves by erecting barricades out of little more than furniture, metal grilles, and trolley cars. Groups of women who attempted to block the street were met with cavalry charges and trampled under horses’ hooves. A crowd of two thousand students, some of whom were armed with revolvers, were shot at with cannons. The names of 264 people were listed as dead victims in local newspapers, though other estimates ranged from four hundred to eight hundred deaths. King Umberto celebrated this violence by rewarding Italy’s highest decoration to the commander of the soldiers in Milan, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris.[780] Bresci later claimed that “when in Paterson I read of the events in Milan, where they even used cannons, I wept with rage and prepared myself for vengeance. I thought of the king who awarded a prize to those who carried out the massacres, and I became convinced that he deserved death.”[781]
Such individual acts of violence usually provided an anarchist with the opportunity to engage in propaganda of the word during their court speech and thereby spread anarchist ideas to a large audience via the reporting of mainstream newspapers. These speeches varied in quality and the extent to which they successfully transmitted anarchist ideas. To give one example, Berkman refused to be represented by a lawyer and prepared a lengthy court speech on anarchism. During the trial Berkman’s speech was unexpectedly badly translated from German to English by a court interpreter. After an hour, the judge abruptly ended the speech and Berkman was unable to complete it. This occurred despite him offering to cut the part on labor and capital and move onto his discussion of the church and the state.[782] Caserio’s passionate court speech suffered a similar fate when it was translated into French and quickly read aloud by a court clerk in a monotone voice. His speech nonetheless provides an illustrative example of the manner in which anarchist assassins or bombers justified their violent acts. He declared to the court that anarchists had to respond to the “guns, chains, and prisons” of the ruling classes with “dynamite, bombs, and daggers” in order to “defend our lives” and “destroy the bourgeoisie and the governments.”[783]
Anarchists responded to the wave of assassinations and bombings that began in the 1890s in a variety of conflicting ways. Prominent anarchist authors routinely claimed that the individuals who carried out such acts of violence were sensitive or desperate people reacting to the much greater violence of capitalism and the state.[784] A significant segment of the wider anarchist movement labeled the perpetrators as martyrs who acted heroically in the pursuit of social emancipation. In 1895, the English anarchist Louisa Sarah Bevington wrote that “those who did these acts were the very best, the most human, unselfish, self-sacrificing of our comrades, who threw their lives away, meeting death or imprisonment in the hope that their acts would sow the seeds of revolt, that they might show the way and wake an echo, by their deeds of rebellion, in the victims of the present system.”[785]
These sorts of statements were part of a broader trend in which the memory of anarchist assassins and bombers were incorporated into anarchist counterculture and took their place alongside other key events of remembrance, such as the anniversary of the Paris Commune. An Italian anarchist group in the United States, for example, named themselves “The Twenty-Ninth of July,” after the day Bresci assassinated Umberto.[786] This trend was not universal or always long-lasting. In Spain, several anarchist papers initially praised anarchist assassins and bombers as martyrs, but from 1898 onward, their names rarely appeared in print media.[787]
Anarchists, regardless of what they thought about the individuals who carried out assassinations and bombings, disagreed with one another about whether or not such acts were an effective means of contributing toward positive social change. Galleani wrote articles defending Pallás and Vaillant in December 1893, and publicly recommended a bomb-making manual in 1906 that featured an image of Ravachol on the front cover.[788] Several years later, in 1925, Galleani argued that a wave of individual acts of violence was “<em>a necessarily intermediary phenomenon between the sheer ideal or theoretical affirmation and the insurrectionary movement which follows it and kindles the torch of the victorious revolution</em>.”[789] Just as Brousse had previously thought that anarchist-led insurrections transmitted lessons to the people, so too did Galleani think that assassinating monarchs was a powerful means of communication. It taught the oppressed classes that a monarch, who is believed to be picked by God and wields a vast amount of power, can be killed and so is just like any other person. Above all, such individual acts of violence taught workers that they could, if they wanted, free themselves and overthrow their oppressors. For Galleani, no act of rebellion was useless or harmful to the cause.[790]
Other anarchists disagreed and argued that such actions were tactically misguided and immoral when they targeted innocent people. Malatesta opposed Henry’s bombing of the Café Terminus as “unjust, vicious, and senseless,”[791] and described Salvador’s bombing of the Liceu Opera theater as an act which killed and wounded “needless victims” while achieving “no possible benefit to the cause.”[792] In the case of Michele Angiolillo’s assassination of the Spanish Prime minister, an act that did not harm any innocent people, Malatesta thought that although the act was morally justifiable, “it is doubtful that his deed served the freedom of Spaniards… it is for reasons of usefulness that, generally speaking, we are not in favor of individual attacks, which have been very common throughout history but almost always have not helped, and have very often harmed, the cause they were intended to serve.”[793]
According to the historian Richard Bach Jensen, during the 1890s real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings in Europe, the United States, and Australia killed at least sixty people and wounded more than two hundred. Between 1878 and 1914, real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings globally (excluding Russia) killed more than 220 people and wounded over 750. Despite such great human costs, which included the needless murder and injury of innocent civilians, the tactic of propaganda of the deed had failed to generate a mass revolutionary movement or inspire large insurrections, let alone ignite the social revolution. It had instead made the social revolution a more remote possibility because it both convinced the political ruling classes, including heads of police, that they were threatened by an international coordinated anarchist conspiracy that had to be destroyed, and it provided them with a political opportunity for directing huge amounts of state repression toward the anarchist movement in particular, and the socialist movement in general. This state repression included the banning of anarchist papers, mass arrests, and laws that criminalized anarchism specifically.[794] Kropotkin neatly summarized the consequences of this state repression in 1907, when he remarked that it had the “effect of thinning our ranks.”[795]
Ultimately, it is fair to say that insurrectionist anarchism was unsuccessful, in so far as the main forms of propaganda of the deed they advocated and engaged in failed to inspire the working classes to rise up, and in so doing, form a mass movement capable of overthrowing class society. The strategy of propaganda of the deed can appear to be doomed to failure from a twenty-first-century vantage point, equipped with the benefit of hindsight and the lessons of over 150 years of attempts to build socialism. As a result, it is essential to understand insurrectionist anarchists on their own terms, and contextualize their ideas within the time they lived in. The strategy of insurrectionist anarchism did not develop out of nowhere. It was instead a product of anarchists being affected by and responding to their contemporary situation. This included the belief that a social revolution was imminent due to a recent wave of insurrections in multiple countries; being deeply influenced by the actions and ideas of contemporary social movements, such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; responding to the much greater violence of the political and economic ruling classes toward the working classes in general and anarchism in particular; and the nefarious influences of police spies and agent provocateurs. Insurrectionist anarchism was nonetheless not the only strategy anarchists developed in response to their context.
[656] Prior to the creation of the anarchist movement in the 1870s, the strategy of insurrectionist anarchism was advocated by Déjacque in the 1850s. Since I do not know if his ideas on strategy had any influence on the movement in general or the key insurrectionist theorists, such as Cafiero, Most, or Galleani, I have decided to not discuss his ideas. See Joseph Déjacque, <em>Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861</em> (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 40–42.
[657] Michael Schmidt and van der Walt, <em>Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 123, 128–131.
[658] Luigi Galleani, <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 99.
[659] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 32.
[660] Carlo Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 47.
[661] David Stafford, <em>From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse</em>, 1870–90 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 104–5, 108–9.
[662] Tom Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City</em>, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 74, 102–9.
[663] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 41–42; Pietro Di Paola, <em>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 61–62; Antonio Senta, <em>Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 57, 91–93. For an example of an insurrectionist group, see Paul Avrich, <em>The Haymarket Tragedy</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 150–56.
[664] Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 59.
[665] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 61, See also, 58, 105.
[666] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 73.
[667] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 75.
[668] Quoted in George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain</em>, <em>1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.
[669] Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 102. See also Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 62; Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 95–97.
[670] Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order:</em> <em>Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 34.
[671] Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 25–29.
[672] Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 169.
[673] Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 30–33.
[674] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 216.
[675] Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution</em>, 1889–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102.
[676] David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 19; Pernicone, *Italian Anarchism*, 191.
[677] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 216.
[678] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 74.
[679] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 74–75.
[680] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 74.
[681] Quoted in Senta, <em>Galleani</em>, 126.
[682] Senta, <em>Galleani</em>, 126. Formal congresses were also rejected by Jean Grave. See Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65.
[683] Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the <em>Cronca Sovversiva</em> and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 49–53; Chris Ealham: <em>Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona</em>, <em>1898–1937</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 34–35; Agustín Guillamón, <em>Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 29.
[684] Quoted in Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 19.
[685] Carlo Cafiero, “The Organisation of Armed Struggle,” trans. Paul Sharkey, <em>The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review</em> 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 101.
[686] Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 50.
[687] Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 8–9, 24–27, 33–35, 294–96.
[688] Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 60; Pernicone, “Introductory Essay” in Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, xxiii.
[689] Quoted in Di Paola, <em>Knights Errant</em>, 52–53.
[690] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 76–80; Senta, <em>Galleani</em>, 134–48; Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 28–29; Paul Avrich, <em>Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 53, 61. Galleani did not adopt a rigid antisyndicalist perspective until around 1910 or 1911 and prior to this appears to have had a more positive view of trade unions. See Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 243–44; Senta, <em>Galleani</em>, 106–7, 158–59, 172–73, 191–92.
[691] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 29–30.
[692] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 30.
[693] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 31.
[694] G. D. H. Cole, <em>A History of Socialist Thought</em>, vol. 2, <em>Marxism and Anarchism</em>, <em>1850–1890</em> (London: Macmillan & Co, 1974), 80–1; Jeremy Wolf, “Iron Law of Wages,” in <em>The Encyclopedia of Political Thought</em>, ed. Michael Gibbons (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), [[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0541/abstract]].
[695] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 28, 79.
[696] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 29.
[697] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 96–97.
[698] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 29.
[699] Quoted in Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 21.
[700] For example, David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in <em>Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy</em>, ed. Audrey Cronin and James Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 50–52; Mary S. Barton, “The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904,” <em>Diplomatic History</em> 39, no. 2 (2015): 306–8.
[701] Paul Avrich, <em>Anarchist Portraits</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.
[702] There are some usages of the term “propaganda by the deed” by anarchist authors that cannot be neatly fit into these two main versions. Malatesta wrote an article in 1889 called “Propaganda by Deeds,” in which he proposed that anarchists should, either as individuals or affinity groups, beat up tax collectors, push landowners down the stairs when they show up to collect rent, seize and distribute the harvest among peasants rather than allowing it to be taken to the landowner, kill the animals of landowners and distribute the meat to starving peasants, and provide landowners who evict people unable to pay rent “with a terrifying example of the vengeance of the oppressed.” See Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 79–83.
[703] Avrich, <em>Anarchist Portraits</em>, 229–39; Julian P.W. Archer, <em>The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact</em> (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 255–73; E. H. Carr, <em>Michael Bakunin</em> (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 394–96, 400–7; Guillaume, “Michael Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch,” in Michael Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 40–42. Bakunin later claimed that the Lyon and Marseille insurrections failed because of a lack of effective organization. See Bakunin, <em>Basic Bakunin</em>, 65.
[704] John Merriman, <em>Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 250–1. For anarchist estimates of the death count, see Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 305; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 354, 406; Rudolf Rocker, <em>The London Years</em> (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 22.
[705] Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 45–50; Temma Kaplan, <em>Anarchists of Andalusia</em>, <em>1868–1903</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 101–10.
[706] Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchism</em>, 195–96.
[707] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 61.
[708] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 62. See also Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 123.
[709] Stafford, <em>From Anarchism to Reformism</em>, 35–40. For a short overview of Brousse’s life, see Avrich, <em>Anarchist Portraits</em>, 240–46.
[710] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 76–77.
[711] Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” in <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, <em>From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)</em>, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 150.
[712] Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.
[713] Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 77–78.
[714] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 35–36, 44, 64–70.
[715] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 261. See also, 184–85.
[716] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 63. The piece was never published in full during his lifetime because, in September 1881, the newspaper <em>La Révolution Sociale</em> suspended publication when its editor, the undercover police agent Égide Spilleux, fled with its funds and Cafiero was arrested. See ibid., xi.
[717] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 111. Kropotkin had himself been radicalized by news of the Paris Commune. See Martin A. Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 73–75.
[718] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 102.
[719] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 500. Kropotkin thought his idea of the spirit of revolt was distinct from Brousse’s theory of propaganda by the deed. This disagreement appears to be largely semantic given that Kropotkin held, like Brousse, that ideas should be spread through actions and that these actions included insurrections which established communes. See Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 260; Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 92, 102–105.
[720] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 111. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution was near several times during this period. For other examples, see Peter Kropotkin, <em>Words of a</em> <em>Rebel</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 32, 34–35, 205–6; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 119, 291, 542.
[721] Gary P. Steenson, <em>After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914</em> (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 29–31.
[722] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 545.
[723] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 78.
[724] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 82, 85–86; T.R. Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em> (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 190, 194–95.
[725] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 90–95; Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 203–209. For Malatesta’s account of his role in the insurrection see Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 12–13.
[726] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 85.
[727] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 11. Similar ideas had been expressed by Malatesta at the recent October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. See Peter Marshall, <em>Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism</em> (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 346.
[728] The unsuccessful insurrections of 1874 were in part launched in order to out-compete Italian republican revolutionaries. See Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 84–85.
[729] Giuseppe Mazzini, <em>A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy</em>, <em>Nation Building</em>, <em>and International Relations</em>, ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 111.
[730] Quoted in Denis Mack Smith, <em>Mazzini</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 100.
[731] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 336.
[732] D. M. Smith, <em>Mazzini</em>, 6–7, 10, 41, 47, 64–73, 98–101, 118–19; Martin Clark, <em>The Italian</em> <em>Risorgimento</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 41.
[733] Clark, <em>Italian Risorgimento</em>, 80–84.
[734] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 140. One of the individuals inspired by Mazzini and Garibaldi was Bakunin who, prior to becoming an anarchist, met and attempted to work with them between 1862–64 in order to achieve Slav liberation as part of a wider democratic political revolution. Bakunin would go onto become a major critic of Mazzini and Garibaldi. See Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 13–20, 57–60, 84–85, 122–26, 131–33, 147–48, 255n19; Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 214–31.
[735] Marco Pinfari, “Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat,” <em>Terrorism and Political Violence</em> 21, no. 4 (2009): 582–83; Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 7–19.
[736] Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 7–8.
[737] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 11–13, 118–19, 169. The influence Pisacane had on Italian anarchism can be seen in the fact that Cafiero quotes him at length. See Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 4–5, 10–11, 14, 23, 45, 47, 62, 66–67. Despite being a republican martyr, the political theory of Pisacane does not appear to have been widely known among Italian republicans in the 1860s. See Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 70–73.
[738] Carlo Pisacane, “Political Testament,” Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, September, 22, 2011, [[https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/carlo-pisacane-propaganda-by-the-deed-1857]]. According to Nettlau, the earliest reprint of this text he was aware of occurred in June 1878 in the Italian anarchist journal L’Avvenire. See Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 92.
[739] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 121.
[740] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 119.
[741] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 78.
[742] The following account of the Benevento Affair is a summary of Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 121–26; Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 225–29.
[743] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 125
[744] Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.
[745] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 126.
[746] Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 126–27, 140–45.
[747] Cafiero, <em>Revolution</em>, 63–64.
[748] Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 80–82, 100–102; Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 136–37; Stafford, <em>From Anarchism to Reformism</em>, 80–83.
[749] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 101.
[750] Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.
[751] Stafford, <em>From Anarchism to Reformism</em>, 113.
[752] I have decided not to collectively label these acts “terrorism.” This is because although some of them were acts of terror against civilians, others were targeted attacks against specific individuals that occurred as part of an ongoing armed conflict between anarchists and the ruling classes. They were thus more akin to special operations carried out during a war. This is, in turn, consistent with how anarchists viewed themselves as militants fighting a class war.
[753] Richard Bach Jensen, <em>The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History</em>, <em>1878–1934</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7, 23–24.
[754] Andrew R. Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, vol. 1, <em>The Early Movement</em> (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 115–16, 139–41. For the argument that they were anarchists, see ibid., 117–24, 143–48. For a critique of this view, see Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 89–90. Kropotkin denied that there was any connection between these assassination attempts and the Jura Federation. See Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 388–89.
[755] Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 65–66; Benedict Anderson, *The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination* (London: Verso, 2013), 115n90.
[756] Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 284–85.
[757] Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” in <em>Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, 152.
[758] Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” 152. See also Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 186–88.
[759] Cafiero, “The Organization of Armed Struggle.”
[760] According to a police report, almost identical resolutions had been passed a year earlier on September 12, 1880, at a meeting of thirty-two anarchist militants in Vevey, Switzerland, which included Kropotkin and Reclus. See Marie Fleming, <em>The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism</em> (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979), 172.
[761] Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 152–59; Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 193–94.
[762] Quoted in Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 252–53.
[763] Quoted in Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 253. Nathan-Ganz had, a few months prior, published an article on “Revolutionary War Science,” meaning the use of explosives, in his paper the <em>An-Archist: Socialistic Revolutionary Review</em>. See Avrich, <em>Haymarket</em>, 57–58; Timothy Messer-Kruse, <em>The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 81, 206n28.
[764] Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in <em>Social Protest</em>, <em>Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe</em>, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 210.
[765] Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 288–300.
[766] Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution</em>, 59–60, 93–95.
[767] Quoted in Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 254.
[768] Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 254–55.
[769] On Italian republicans, see Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 12–14, 26–29. On Irish nationalists, see K. R. M. Short, <em>The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain</em> (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd, 1979); Lindsay Clutterbuck, “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?,” <em>Terrorism and Political Violence</em> 16, no. 1 (2004), 154–81. On Russian nihilists, see Claudia Verhoeven, <em>The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism</em> (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ronald Seth, <em>The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki</em> (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966).
[770] Seth, <em>Russian Terrorists</em>, 96–100; Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 35, 37–39.
[771] Quoted in Jensen, <em>Anarchist Terrorism</em>, 18.
[772] Nettlau, <em>Short History</em>, 148, 146.
[773] Jensen, <em>Anarchist Terrorism</em>, 45–46; Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 43–45; Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 154–59, 320–21, notes 11 and 12. For other examples see Jensen, <em>Anarchist Terrorism</em>, 44–52.
[774] Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 51–56.
[775] John Merriman, <em>The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 71–73, 78–81.
[776] Merriman, <em>Dynamite</em>, 99–105, 137–38, 145, 149–59, 180–81. For other bombings, see ibid., 172–78.
[777] Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 184–88.
[778] Jensen, <em>Anarchist Terrorism</em>, 31–36. For details see Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>.
[779] On Alfonso, see Paul Avrich, <em>The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 26; Angel Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State</em>, <em>1989–1923</em> (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 163. On Clemenceau, see Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 167. For other examples, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 228–36; Avrich, <em>Sacco and Vanzetti</em>, 97–104, 137–59, 205–7; Fausto Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism</em> (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 200, 221–22, 229.
[780] Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 123–33; Turcato, <em>Making Sense</em>, 170–73. In response to this struggle from below the prime minister suspended import duties on grain and flour until June 30.
[781] Quoted in Zimmer, <em>Immigrants</em>, 60.
[782] Avrich and Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma</em>, 91–96.
[783] Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 75. For more primary sources, see Mitchell Abidor, ed., <em>Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed</em> (Oakland CA, PM Press, 2015).
[784] For example Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 256–79; Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 84–90; Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader</em> ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 173–76; Ruth Kinna, <em>Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 58–60; Clark, “Introduction,” in Élisée Reclus, <em>Anarchy</em>, <em>Geography</em>, <em>Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus</em>, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 57–59; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 124–27.
[785] Louisa Sarah Bevington, <em>An Anarchist Manifesto</em>, (London: Metropolitan Printing Works, 1895), 11.
[786] Avrich, <em>Sacco and Vanzetti</em>, 52.
[787] James Yeoman, <em>Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915</em> (New York: Routledge, 2020), 90–98.
[788] Senta, <em>Galleani</em>, 65–66, 139–41.
[789] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 84.
[790] Galleani, <em>End of Anarchism</em>, 93–95.
[791] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 58.
[792] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 127.
[793] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 264–65. See also Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 187–91; Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 53–58.
[794] Jensen, <em>Anarchist Terrorism</em>, 36–38. For an overview of state repression in response to propaganda of the deed see Constance Bantman, <em>The French Anarchists in London</em>, <em>1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation</em> (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 132; Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 21–22, 32n22; Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads</em>, 34–35, 39; Carlson, <em>Anarchism in Germany</em>, 127–29, 154–58, 293–94; Di Paola, <em>Knights Errant</em>, 14–17; Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 167, 188–199; Fleming, <em>Anarchist Way</em>, 213–14; Goyens, <em>Beer and Revolution</em>, 191; Merriman, <em>Dynamite</em>, 207–10; Pernicone and Ottanelli, <em>Assassins against the Old Order</em>, 77–89.
[795] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 397.
** Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism
Mass anarchists advocated forming, or participating in, large-scale, formal organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society and engaged in collective struggles for immediate reforms in the present. It was held that these collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop a revolutionary mass movement that was both capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. The struggle for immediate reforms was, in other words, viewed as the best means to develop the social force that was necessary for launching a successful armed insurrection. Mass anarchists thought this would occur due to workers being transformed by the practice of participating within prefigurative organizations, taking direct action against the ruling classes, and being influenced by anarchists acting as a militant minority within social movements.[796]
*** Support of Formal Organizations
Mass anarchists advocated building, and participating within, large-scale formal federations that prefigured the kinds of organization that would exist in a future anarchist society. These tended to be federations of trade unions or community groups, whose membership included both anarchists and nonanarchists, and federations of anarchist militants, which I shall refer to as <em>specific anarchist organizations</em>. The size of organization mass anarchists hoped to create can be seen in Kropotkin’s argument that the victory of the working classes required “monster unions embracing millions of proletarians” and the establishment of “an <em>International Federation of all the Trade Unions all over the World</em>.”[797]
Large-scale federations were advocated by mass anarchists for two main practical reasons. First, they held that they were necessary to achieve coordination between, and effective action by, large groups of people in different areas. In 1870, Bakunin argued that the self-emancipation of the working classes was impeded by their “lack of organization, the difficulty of coming to agreements and of acting in concert.”[798] He wrote,
<quote>
Certainly, there is sufficient spontaneous strength among the people, indubitably the strength of the latter is much greater than that of the government and that of ruling classes within it; but lacking organization, spontaneous force is no real force. It is not in a [fit] state to sustain a protracted struggle against forces that are much weaker but much better organized. It is on this undeniable superiority of organized force over elemental popular force that all the power of the state resides.… Thus, the [real] question is not one of knowing if the people are capable of an uprising, but rather whether they are ready to form an organization which will assure the success of a revolt, a victory which is not ephemeral, but durable and definitive.[799]
</quote>
Given this, Bakunin argued in 1871 that “to make the people’s might strong enough to be able to eradicate the State’s military and civil might, it is necessary to organize the proletariat.… That is precisely what the International Working Men’s Association does” by organizing workers into federations of trade unions.[800]
This argument was applied not only to the organization of the working classes in general, but also the organization of workers who were anarchist militants. In 1889, Malatesta complained that some anarchists had “attacked the principle of organization itself. They wanted to prevent betrayals and deception, permit free rein to individual initiative, ensure against spies and attacks from the government—and they brought isolation and impotence to the fore.”[801] Amédée Dunois similarly claimed at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam that the anarchist movement in France was disorganized and fragmented into unconnected small groups and isolated individuals. He lamented that,
<quote>
Everyone acts in his own way, whenever he wants; in this way individual efforts are dispersed and often exhausted, simply wasted. Anarchists can be found in more or less every sphere of action: in the workers’ unions, in the anti-militarist movement, among anti-clericalist free thinkers, in the popular universities, and so on, and so forth. What we are missing is a specifically anarchist movement, which can gather to it, on the economic and workers’ ground that is ours, all those forces that have been fighting in isolation up to now. This specifically anarchist movement will voluntarily arise from our groups and from the federation of these groups. The might of joint action, of concerted action, will undoubtedly create it.… It would be sufficient for the anarchist organization to group together, around a programme of concrete practical action, all the comrades who accept our principles and who want to work with us, according to our methods.[802]
</quote>
The second reason why mass anarchists advocated large-scale federations was that they were necessary for developing the kinds of people and social relations that were needed to abolish capitalism and the state and create an anarchist society. In 1892, Malatesta argued that since “agreement, association, and organization represent one of the laws governing life and the key to strength—today as well as after the revolution,” it follows that the working classes must be organized prior to the social revolution.[803] This is because “tomorrow can only grow out of today—and if one seeks success tomorrow, the factors of success need to be prepared today.”[804] This was especially important given that, as Malatesta explained in 1897, workers cannot be “expected to provide for pressing needs” during the social revolution “unless they were already used to coming together to deal jointly with their common interests.”[805] For example, supplying bread to everyone in a city would have to be organized, and this required that bakers were “already associated and ready to manage without masters.”[806]
Large-scale, formal organizations were, in short, deemed necessary for both engaging in successful revolts and producing and distributing goods and services during and after the social revolution. Insurrectionist anarchists were not convinced by such arguments because they regarded formal organizations as incompatible with the freedom of the individual, and so with anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends. Mass anarchists replied that formal organizations were both compatible with freedom and a prerequisite for it. They thought that large-scale coordination and collective action based on voluntary agreement expanded a person’s real possibility to act and develop themselves far beyond what an individual could attain by themselves or in a small group. A worker may have the internal ability to help organize a large strike across multiple industries but they lack the capacity to do so when isolated. The external conditions necessary for the development and exercise of such a capacity only emerge when an organization like a national trade union is formed that unites workers together, and thereby enables new forms of action.[807]
Mass anarchists also argued that a lack of organizational structures often results in informal hierarchies emerging. Charismatic individuals can, for example, create a newspaper and use it to steer the anarchist movement in a direction of their own choosing, and transform themselves into a prominent leader. In so doing, they acquire a large amount of influence, and use this to further their own positions and interests in manners that are unaccountable to the wider movement and sometimes even harmful. Formal organizational structures can counter this tendency by creating systems of accountability, such as the editors of newspapers being delegates who are elected and mandated by the members of a trade union.[808]
Mass anarchists were, nevertheless, still anarchists and so opposed to any system of top-down organization based on minority rule and centralization.[809] The conclusions of the 1906 Russian anarchist-communist conference, which were written by Kropotkin, opposed “every form of hierarchical organization that is characteristic of the parties of the State socialists” in which members are “obedient to a central power” and subject to “party discipline and compulsion.”[810] This perspective was shared by Baginski who, three years later, rejected “constraining laws that need a centralistic apparatus for their execution,” while advocating “a federative association that does not demand subjection from its members, but will rather place understanding, initiative, and solidarity in the place of commands and compulsory, soldierly behavior.”[811]
One hierarchical organization that mass anarchists opposed was the bureaucratic trade union. In 1938, Rocker argued that trade unions, in which decisions flow from a small minority of bureaucrats at the top to workers beneath them, should be rejected on the grounds that they are “always attended by barren official routine; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification, and permits no independent action.”[812] Such top-down systems of decision-making systems were especially harmful because the minority who actually made decisions lacked immediate access to the local information needed to do so. To illustrate this point, Rocker referred to trade unions allied with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in which strikes had to first be approved by the central committee, which was usually very far away and “not in a position to pass a correct judgement on the local conditions.” This meant that workers in a particular area were unable to engage in sudden direct action, and so effectively respond to their immediate circumstances and concerns on the ground.[813] For a state, “centralism is the appropriate form of organization, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium [under capitalism]. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favorable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could but be a curse.”[814]
The form of organization that would, in the opinion of mass anarchists, simultaneously enable effective coordination between large groups of people and the free initiative of its members was the federation. What such federations were supposed to look like can be understood by examining in detail Malatesta’s various descriptions of anarchist organizational structures, especially those he made during a series of debates with antiorganizationalist anarchists in the 1890s.[815] These organizational principles were later implemented by the specific anarchist organization Malatesta was a member of during the early 1920s, the Italian Anarchist Union.[816] It should nonetheless be kept in mind that these are Malatesta’s proposals, and, despite being influential, do not reflect what all mass anarchists thought or how all mass anarchist organizations actually operated.
Malatesta advocated the formation of an organization that united individuals under a common program, which specified the goals of the group and the means they proposed to achieve them. The purpose of such an organization was to enable individuals to pursue their shared goals by educating one another, engaging in joint activity, and coordinating action over a large-scale. In so doing, an organization would develop a collective strength to change society that was not only impossible for an individual to develop in isolation, but was also greater than the sum of the individual strengths that composed it.
Such a formal organization must, given the unity of means and ends, be structured in a manner that prefigures an anarchist society. Whereas authoritarian organizations rest on a division between some who command and others who obey, anarchist organizations are free associations of equals that are formed in order to achieve a common goal. There should be no substantial difference between how anarchists organize before and after the social revolution. They need, “today for the purposes of propaganda and struggle, tomorrow in order to meet all of the needs of social life, organizations built upon the will and in the interest of all their members.”[817] Anarchist formal organizations, therefore, have to be founded on “the principle of autonomy of individuals within groups, and of groups within federations” such that “nobody has the right to impose their will on anyone else, and nobody is forced to follow decisions that they have not accepted.”[818] Within such a federalist organization, each group and individual member would be free to federate with whomever they desired, and to leave any federation whenever they wanted. This freedom of association included the freedom of the federation, or groups within the federation, to choose to disassociate from individuals who violated its common program, such as by campaigning for a politician or supporting an imperialist war.[819]
Decisions within the local groups that compose the federation would be made by a general assembly, in which each member had a vote and an equal say in collective decisions. Although Malatesta held that anarchists should aim for a situation in which everybody agreed on a decision, he understood that this would often not happen, and there would be a division between a majority of people in favor of one position and a minority opposed to it. In such situations, where it was impractical or impossible to pass multiple resolutions reflecting each faction’s distinct viewpoint, it was expected that the minority would voluntarily defer to the majority, so that a decision was made and the organization would continue to function. If the minority disagreed strongly with the majority, and felt that this was an issue of supreme importance, then they were free to voluntarily dissociate and leave the organization.
Large-scale coordination would be achieved through the organization of congresses, which were attended by delegates that each section’s general assembly had elected. According to Malatesta,
<quote>
congresses of an anarchist organization… do not lay down the law; they do not impose their own resolutions on others. They serve to maintain and increase personal relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action, to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current among the anarchists and draw up some kind of statistics from them—and their decisions are not obligatory rules but suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved, and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept them, and for as long as they accept them.[820]
</quote>
In order to ensure that the delegates within the federation did not develop into a ruling minority who imposed decisions on the wider membership, Malatesta proposed a number of limits to their power. First, the delegate would be mandated to complete specific tasks by the group who elected them, such as being a treasurer or voting as instructed at a congress, rather than being granted decision-making power, which would remain in the hands of the general assembly who had elected the delegate. Second, the delegate would serve for fixed terms and the position would be rotated regularly, so that as many people as possible could learn to perform these tasks and take initiative. Third, the delegate could be instantly recalled and replaced by those who had elected them, if they did not approve of what the delegate had done.[821]
A more concrete understanding of what federations built on anarchist principles actually looked like can be seen by examining the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union the CNT, which was founded in 1910, and had a membership of over 700,000 workers by 1919. Despite suffering multiple waves of state repression and being illegal for several years of its existence, the CNT was able to survive and maintain itself over time. By May 1936, the CNT was composed of 982 union sections with a total membership of 550,595 workers.[822] Its organizational structure is shown below in <em>figure 1</em>. The CNT was initially composed of craft unions that belonged both to a federation of every union in their specific or similar crafts, and a federation composed of all the other unions, irrespective of craft, in their local area. This formally changed at a national level in 1919, when delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form “single unions” that united all workers in a specific industry, regardless of their profession, within the same union. These single unions were, in turn, broken down into individual trade sections that would deal with any issues specific to their craft.[823]
Decisions in the single unions were made by a general assembly composed of the entire membership. This general assembly elected a shop steward, who was granted the power to call for work stoppages when the membership instructed them to do so, and an administrative committee. The administrative committee of the single union was, according to the activist manual issued by the CNT during the Spanish revolution of 1936, composed of a general secretary, treasurer, accountant, first secretary, second secretary, third secretary, librarian, propaganda delegate, and federal delegate(s). All the different trade sections within the single union had to be represented within the administrative committee. Who performed what role was decided upon by the elected members of the administrative committee themselves. The exceptions to this were the general secretary, treasurer, and federal delegate who were specifically chosen by the general assembly of the single union.[824]
The single unions in a particular area combined to form a local federation. The local federations then combined to form a regional federation and the regional federations together formed the national federation.[825] The local, regional, and national federations were all self-managed by their own respective administrative committees. In order to prevent the rise of a bureaucracy within the CNT, the only paid delegates within the trade union were the general secretary of the national federation and the secretaries of the regional federations. Every other delegate was expected to earn a living working in a trade.[826] The administrative committees of the local, regional, and national federations lacked the ability to impose decisions on shop stewards, who were only subject to the instructions of their single union. The local, regional, and national administrative committees were, on paper, supposed to focus their activities exclusively on coordinating actions between various single unions, correspondence, collecting statistics, and prisoner support. During periods of state repression, they ended up taking on greater responsibilities because the close links between the single unions and the CNT’s main delegates were broken down.[827]
The committees of the regional federations were elected each year at the regional congresses, that were attended by mandated delegates from the local federations. In certain unusual situations, the members of the regional committees were expected to consult local trade unions and federations by means of either a referendum or correspondence. A regional committee could be replaced if the majority of local federations within the regional federation called for an extraordinary congress to take place, at which new delegates would be elected. The committee of the national federation was, in contrast, a role that was delegated to one of the regional committees on a temporary basis by the national federation’s congress, which was attended by mandated delegates from every single union in the country. Between national congresses, decisions in the CNT that involved multiple single unions were made at plenums. A local federation’s plenum was composed of the federal delegates from each single union’s administrative committee, who were mandated on how to vote at the plenum by those who had elected them. These local federal delegates then elected and mandated a delegate to represent the area at a regional plenum of local committees that, in turn, sent mandated delegates to a national plenum of regional committees.[828]
A more detailed description of how the CNT was organized is made by the brickmaker José Peirats, who was a member of the CNT from 1922 onward, and was elected as the organization’s general secretary in 1947. In the CNT,
<quote>
The unions constitute autonomous units, linked to the ensemble of the Confederation only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses, whether regular or extraordinary. Apart from this commitment, the unions, right up to their technical sections, are free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organization as a whole... it is the unions which decide and directly regulate the guidelines of the Confederation. At all times, the basis for any local, regional, or national decision is the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals. Resolutions are adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation. Extraordinary congresses are held on the suggestion of the assembled unions. Even the agenda is devised by the assemblies where the items on the agenda are debated and delegates appointed as the executors of their collective will. This federalist procedure, operating from the bottom up, constitutes a precaution against any possible authoritarian degeneration in the representative committees.[829]
</quote>
[[z-b-zoe-baker-means-and-ends-2.jpg f]]
The CNT’s system of majority voting was explained in more detail within the organization’s constitution, which was printed on the trade union’s membership card. It declared that “Anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism recognize the validity of majority decisions. The militant has a right to his own point of view and to defend it, but he is obliged to comply with majority decisions, even when they are against his own feelings... We recognize the sovereignty of the individual, but we accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision. Without this there is no organization.”[830]
Members of the CNT did, nonetheless, disagree about whether or not this system of majority voting, in which decisions were binding on all members, should be applied to much smaller specific anarchist organizations. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was a specific anarchist organization composed of small affinity groups. The FAI initially made most of their decisions via unanimous agreement and rarely used voting. In 1934, the Z and Nervio affinity groups pushed for the FAI to adopt binding agreements established through majority vote. The Afinidad affinity group, which included Peirats, agreed with the necessity of such a system within the CNT, but opposed it being implemented within small specific anarchist organizations or affinity groups. After a confrontational FAI meeting Afinidad left the organization in protest.[831]
The extent to which anarchists within the CNT valued its federalist system of organization can be seen in the actions of the twelve to fifteen thousand former members of the Durruti Column, who had fled to France after the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1939, and were imprisoned in the Vernet d’Ariège concentration camp. Despite the abysmal conditions of the camp—lack of adequate housing, food shortages, disease, and very cold weather—the anarchists established a mirror image of the CNT. Every anarchist belonged to a general assembly within their hut, which elected a hut committee to represent them. These hut committees then federated together and elected sector committees, which in turn voted for a camp committee. The camp committee then sent demands from the general assemblies to the French authorities running the concentration camp. In so doing, they practiced what little anarchism they could within the direst of circumstances.[832]
Mass anarchists advocated and built large-scale federations, but these were not the only kind of organizations they valued. They understood that different forms of organization were appropriate for different tasks and, to this end, also advocated the formation of affinity groups that were either permanent or formed for specific actions, and dissolved once the action was complete.[833] The CNT itself contained numerous affinity groups that performed a wide variety of tasks, ranging from publishing texts, organizing debates and lectures, engaging in prisoner support, protecting prominent anarchist militants, robbing banks, and assassinating class enemies.[834]
*** Reform not Reformism
Mass anarchists and insurrectionist anarchists agreed that fundamental social change can only be achieved by mass movements. What separated the two is that mass anarchists believed that, given their immediate social and historical context, the most realistic and effective means to develop mass movements was through the long and patient work of struggling for immediate reforms in the present, rather than isolated individuals or small anarchist groups engaging in propaganda of the deed in order to inspire a series of popular uprisings. Mass anarchists used a variety of different terms to refer to modifications to existing dominant structures and social relations, such as “gains,” “improvements,” or “reforms.”
This position was originally advocated by anarchists in the First International. In 1869 Bakunin argued that a significant number of workers could develop revolutionary socialist consciousness “through [the] the collective action and practice” of “<em>the organization and the federation of resistance funds</em> [strike funds]” and the “real struggle to reduce hours of work and increase pay.”[835] An anarchist pamphlet published in 1872 claimed that the International “must gradually change the economic situation of the working class… improve working conditions, curtail, diminish and eliminate the privileges of capital, make these every day more dependent and precarious, until capital surrenders and disappears.… This can be achieved by <em>resistance</em>, with the legal and open weapon of the <em>strike</em>.”[836]
This view was repeated four decades later by the CNT’s paper <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, which claimed in January 1917 that radical trade union movements, such as the CNT, were simultaneously committed to achieving the “reformism” of “the reduction of the working day, the increase in wages, etc.” and the “revolutionism” of “the emancipation of the proletariat through the abolition of capital and of the wage earner.”[837] Fourteen years later, the CNT declared in its 1931 Madrid Congress resolutions that, although they were “openly at war with the state,” and aimed “to educate the people to understand the need to unite with us to secure our complete emancipation by means of the social revolution,” they also had “the ineluctable duty of indicating to the people a schedule of minimum demands that they should press by building up their own revolutionary strength.”[838]
In order to understand why mass anarchists advocated this strategy, it is important to first outline their critique of insurrectionist anarchism. According to Malatesta, insurrectionists mistakenly viewed “present society as an indivisible block susceptible to no alteration beyond a radical transformation, and thus regarded as useless any attempt at improvements and concerned themselves solely with <em>making revolution</em>… which was then not made and remained a distant promise.”[839] Propaganda of the deed had been conceived as the means by which anarchists would spark a revolutionary upsurge, but the two main versions of it—small armed bands launching insurrections and individual acts of violence (assassinations or bombings)—had consistently failed to pave the way for mass uprisings, let alone achieve the social revolution. This was despite the fact that insurrectionist anarchists had engaged in numerous revolts, assassinations, and bombings between the 1870s and 1890s.
It was argued that these tactics actively encouraged anarchists to isolate themselves from the majority of the working classes in order to avoid state repression, surveillance, and infiltration. Anarchists, thus, were unable to influence or inspire the working classes in the way that they had intended and hoped for. In 1889, twelve years after the Benevento affair, Malatesta wrote that small armed groups of anarchists failed to inspire revolts because inadequate preparation among and contact with the populace led to the group being “scattered and defeated before the people even get to learn what it is that the band wanted!”[840] Under these circumstances, the local populace were unable to join the band, and could merely look on impassively.
Malatesta expanded upon this argument in 1894, when he concluded that a “great spontaneous insurrection” would most likely not launch the social revolution, because “plots and conspiracies can only embrace a very limited number of individuals and are usually impotent to start a movement among the people of sufficient importance to give a chance of victory. Isolated movements, more or less spontaneous, are almost always stifled in blood before they have had time to acquire importance and become general.”[841] A few years later in 1897, Malatesta insisted that uprisings “<em>cannot be improvised</em>” and that “a revolution without resources, without an agreed-upon plan, without weapons, without men” would be doomed to failure.[842] Anarchists attempting to launch insurrections while they were such a small minority had only resulted in a cycle of “six months of quiet activity, followed by a few microscopic uprisings—or more often, mere threats of uprisings—then arrests, flights abroad, interruption of propaganda, disintegration of the organization.… Just to start the whole thing all over again two or three years further down the line.”[843] Given this, Malatesta concluded in 1899 that, in order for insurrections to be successful, anarchists must, “rather than face periodical and pointless slaughter… lay preparations appropriate for the force we are going to have to confront” and federate in order to accumulate “the strength required to steer the next popular uprising to victory.”[844]
The tactics of assassination and bombings, in contrast, contributed toward the anarchist movement suffering an extreme amount of state repression, without achieving any substantial social change worth that price. Such tactics had been conceived of as acts of propaganda, but were instead a key factor in why a significant number of workers became less likely to listen to anarchists and adopt their ideas. They instead came to stereotype anarchists negatively as dangerous individuals, mindlessly spreading chaos and destruction.[845] The French anarchist Fernand Pelloutier remarked in 1895 that “I know many workers who are disenchanted with parliamentary socialism but who hesitate to support libertarian socialism because, in their view, anarchism simply implies the individualistic use of the bomb.”[846] After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky wrote, “the benefits that such an attempt can bring to the propaganda of our ideas are very questionable, the damage however is certain and sure.”[847]
Even Most, who had been a fervent advocate of anarchist assassinations and bomb plots during the 1880s, ended up changing his mind.[848] He wrote in 1892 that “there is no greater error than to believe that we as anarchists need only to commit any deed, no matter when, where, and against whom. To have a propagandist effect, every deed needs to be popular.… If that is not the case, or if it actually meets with disapproval from the very part of the population it is intended to inspire, anarchism makes itself unpopular and hated. Instead of winning new adherents, many will withdraw.”[849] Shortly afterward, Most responded to Berkman’s unexpected assassination attempt against the American capitalist Frick by publicly opposing the act. He argued that “in a country where we are so weakly represented and so little understood… we cannot afford the luxury of assassinations.… In countries like America, where we still need solid ground to stand on, we must limit ourselves to literary and verbal agitation.”[850]
Insurrectionist anarchists had above all been wrong to assume that the revolution was imminent, and that the working classes would rise up in reaction to the violent actions of a few. As early as 1885, the Spanish anarchist Serrano had insisted that “individual actions—even if they employ thousands upon thousands of kilos of dynamite—will not succeed in any region, nor will they succeed in destroying the bourgeoisie or in bringing about the Social Revolution.”[851] Over a decade later, in an 1897 interview, Malatesta said that “in the early days of the anarchist movement… there was the illusion that the revolution was just around the corner; and, as a result, any organizational work that required a long and patient endeavor was neglected.”[852] He recalled in 1928 that “we put our hopes in general discontent, and because the misery that afflicted the masses was so insufferable, we believed it was enough to give an example, launching with arms in hand the cry of ‘down with the masters,’ in order for the working masses to fling themselves against the bourgeoisie and take possession of the land, the factories, and all that they produced with their toil and that had been stolen from them.”[853]
In a 1902 letter to Max Nettlau, Kropotkin noted that the wave of propaganda of the deed was motivated by the belief “that all it took to trigger the revolution was a few heroic feats” and, when this failed to happen, several younger anarchists came to realize that “a revolution cannot be <em>provoked</em> by ten or a hundred” and that it was a delusion to imagine “that a sharp push by a few might successfully spark revolution.”[854] A revolution, he said, could only be produced by “the slow work of organization and preparatory propaganda among the working masses.”[855] This was, of course, not a new insight for mass anarchists, including Kropotkin. In his 1899 autobiography, he claimed that, in the late 1870s, he and other members of the Jura Federation understood that to abolish class society a period of “tedious propaganda and a long succession of struggles, of individual and collective revolts against the now prevailing forms of property, of individual self-sacrifice, of partial attempts at reconstruction and partial revolutions would have to be lived through.”[856]
The strategy of engaging in individual acts of violence above all rested on a false view of social change. Social change is not just a matter of attacking the existing order until it collapses. The transformation of society requires the transformation of the working classes’ capacities, drives, and consciousness in an anarchist direction such that they learn to self-organize horizontally and undertake a revolution. Killing a monarch or blowing up a building might temporarily scare the ruling classes or inspire a small number of workers, but it will not lead to fundamental social change. A new monarch will be crowned and the building will be repaired. Society will carry on as normal, because the general population will have merely observed the actions of an isolated individual and not have themselves engaged in forms of practice that transform them as people. In the aftermath of any anarchist attack, a typical worker could continue to behave as before, and thereby reproduce the dominant structures of class society.
“An edifice built upon centuries of history,” Kropotkin remarked in 1891, “cannot be destroyed by a few kilos of explosives.”[857] Malatesta made the same point in 1894: “one thing is certain, namely, that with a number of bombs and a number of blows of the knife, a society like bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being based, as it is, on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices, and sustained, more than it is by the force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”[858]
The mass anarchist alternative to propaganda of the deed, as understood by insurrectionists, was not inaction and relying solely on print media and speaking tours to spread anarchism until the day of revolution. Malatesta’s program of 1899 rejected this explicitly, because anarchists “would soon exhaust our field of action; that is, we would have converted all those who in the existing environment are susceptible to understand and accept our ideas.”[859] Mass anarchists, in other words, held that, since what people think or are open to thinking is a product of their social environment, it follows that focusing on spreading ideas alone will not lead to fundamental social change. Under present conditions, which reproduce class society, only a small number of people will ever learn about and become anarchists through the written or spoken word.[860]
Anarchists therefore had to cause a “gradual transformation of the environment. Progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between man and their environment” until an increasingly large number of workers were in a position to learn about and adopt anarchism.[861] This view was repeated by Malatesta in 1922. He argued that, since “the will of humanity… is mostly determined by the social environment,” it follows that anarchists must “work to change social conditions in such a way as to produce a change of will in the desired direction” and thereby cause “a reciprocal interaction between the will and the surrounding conditions,” such that changed people acted and changed social structures that, in turn, changed more people, and so on.[862]
Mass anarchists held that the most effective means for causing this gradual transformation in social structures, and the people who produced and reproduced them, was by organizing and participating in working-class social movements that struggled for immediate reforms in the present. In 1892, Kropotkin said that anarchists should “permeate the great labor movement which is so rapidly growing in Europe and America” in order to “bring our ideas into that movement, to spread them… among those masses which hold in their hands the future issue of the revolution.”[863] In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists should win the working classes “over to our ideas by actively taking part in their struggles” and participating in “working-men’s associations, strikes, collective revolt.”[864] Three years later, he insisted that the success of anarchism required “long-term, constant, day-to-day work… done in conjunction with resistance societies, cooperatives, and educational circles, of gradually marshaling, organizing, and educating all the fighting forces of the proletariat.”[865]
Malatesta, in addition to this, referred to specific reforms that were worth struggling for. In 1899, he argued that,
we must always push them [workers] to demand greater things; but meanwhile we must encourage and assist them in the battles they want to fight, providing that they are in the right direction, which is to say, that they tend to facilitate future gains and are fought in such a way that workers become used to thinking of their masters and governments as enemies, and to desiring to achieve what they want by themselves. Many workers wish to not work over 8 hours.… The reform is among those that tend to actually improve the status of workers and facilitate future gains; and we, when we cannot convince them to demand more, we must support them in such a modest claim.[866]
Organizing to win reforms through direct action was considered valuable for three main reasons. First, and most obviously, achieving reforms improved the lives of workers and put them in a position where they had more time, energy, and motivation to emancipate themselves fully. Malatesta wrote in 1897 that anarchists are “interested in people’s circumstances being improved to the greatest possible extent, starting today,” both because of the “immediate impact of reduced suffering” and “because when one is better nourished, has greater freedom, and is better educated, one has a greater determination and more strength to fully emancipate oneself.”[867]
This line of reasoning persuaded Goldman to support the struggle for the eight-hour day and abandon her previous view, which she had learned from Most, that it was a pointless reform that distracted workers from launching a social revolution. She changed her mind after a worker at one of her talks against the eight-hour day explained that it would improve the lives of workers, many of whom would not live long enough to see a revolution, and would give them more time to read and enjoy life.[868] Rocker, in comparison, came to reject the idea that reforms should be opposed after he visited extremely poor areas of London. During these visits, he realized that “those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt.… It is contrary to all the experience of history and of psychology; people who are not prepared to fight for the betterment of their living conditions are not likely to fight for social emancipation.”[869]
Second, participating in daily struggles for immediate reforms, such as strikes, provided the means to organize and make contact with not only committed socialists, who seek each other out, but also the large number of workers who are yet to become revolutionaries. This was especially important because, regardless of what anarchists did, state socialists would participate in working-class social movements and funnel them toward parliamentary politics. If this happened, given the arguments previously explained in chapter 5, social movements would be transformed from potential threats to ruling class power into maintainers of the status quo. As a result, it was essential that anarchists join struggles for immediate reforms in order to promote direct action and ensure that social movements remained, or became, forces outside of and against the state.[870]
Third, collectively struggling for reforms by means of direct action within prefigurative organizations is a form of practice that can positively transform workers. Whether or not a social movement wins great victories, the process of engaging in class struggle is valuable in and of itself. It enables workers to develop new skills, hopes, desires, and ways of thinking, such as learning how to organize a strike, or realizing that the police exist to violently defend the interests of the rich and powerful. As Guillaume wrote in 1914, “you think that the starting point is the revolutionary ideal and that the workers’ struggle against the bosses only comes afterwards, as a consequence of the adoption of the ‘ideal’; I think on the contrary… that the starting point is the struggle and the ideal comes after, that it takes form in the workers’ minds as the incidents of the class war give birth to it and cause it to develop.”[871]
This theory was advocated for many decades by mass anarchists involved in the trade union movement. Baginski argued in 1909 that “the proletariat learns from its daily battles that it is always thrown back on itself, on its own strength and solidarity. Whenever it accomplishes small improvements of its situation, it does so as a consequence of direct intervention and struggle. Its condition is a function of the strength of its unity, its revolutionary insights, initiative, and solidarity; for exploiters concede only what is wrested from them through <em>the development of proletarian power</em>.”[872] The practice of struggling for reforms through direct action was valued because it transformed workers—who are typically treated as objects acted upon or represented by others—into self-acting agents who fight for their own emancipation, and develop their collective power to transform society.[873] Given this, “no one disputes the utility and necessity of wrestling as much as possible for higher pay and shorter hours; but that should be considered in the light of merely preparatory exercises, as training for the final event, the Social Revolution and the overthrow of wage-slavery.”[874]
These same ideas were expressed by Rocker through the language of pedagogy in 1938. He claimed that “the strike is for the workers not only a means for the defense of immediate economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every last right has to be won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.”[875] As a result, “the economic alliance of the producers” is both “a weapon for the enforcement of better living conditions” and “a practical school, a university of experience, from which they draw instruction and enlightenment in richest measure.”[876] The experience of class struggle transformed how workers thought about themselves and the world in which they lived. By reflecting on these life experiences, workers “developed… new needs and the urge for different fields of intellectual life.”[877] The practice of engaging in class struggle was transformative not only at the individual level; it also altered the social relations between workers. Through their experience of cooperating with one another, such as going on strike in support of other striking workers, they developed a sense of solidarity among themselves, which Rocker defined as a “feeling of mutual helpfulness.”[878] Developing this sense of solidarity was essential because, without it, they would never learn to act as a united class and thereby transform society in their shared class interests.
Although mass anarchists advocated struggling for immediate reforms, they were not reformists in the sense of people who view reforms as a political endpoint, or who hold that capitalism and the state could eventually be abolished through gradual reform. In September 1897, Malatesta wrote that “the reforms, both economic and political, that can be obtained under certain institutions, are limited by the very nature of those institutions, and sooner or later, depending on the degree of popular consciousness and the more or less blind resistance from the ruling classes, a point of irreconcilability is reached and the very existence of these institutions needs to be called into question.”[879]
A month later, in an interview with a state socialist, Malatesta explained that anarchists were not “a reformist party” because “in our view, reforms, if and where they can be won, should be only a first step on the way to revolution; this is why we want the people to win them for themselves and feel that reforms are a result of their vigor, so that their determination to demand ever more may develop.”[880] This was a restatement of a claim Malatesta had previously made in his 1890 article, “Matters Revolutionary”:
<quote>
We must immerse ourselves in the life of the people as fully as we can, encourage and egg on all stirrings that carry a seed of material or moral revolt and get the people used to handling their affairs for themselves and relying on only their own resources; but without ever losing sight of the fact that revolution, by means of the expropriation and taking of property into common ownership, plus the demolition of authority, represents the only salvation for the proletariat and for Mankind, in which case a thing is good or bad depending on whether it brings forward or postpones, eases or creates difficulties for that revolution.
As we see it, it is a matter of avoiding two reefs: on the one hand, the indifference toward everyday life and struggles that distance us from the people, making us unfathomable outsiders to them—and, on the other, letting ourselves be consumed by those struggles, affording them greater importance than they possess and eventually forgetting about the revolution.[881]
</quote>
Mass anarchists, in other words, saw the struggle for reforms as the means to bring increasingly large numbers of workers together under a common aim, due to their shared interest in improving their lives in the here and now. In struggling for these reforms, workers would not only change social relations, such as reducing the length of the working day, but also change themselves due to the experience of participating in prefigurative organizations and engaging in direct action against the ruling classes. The consequence of this would be that a significant number of workers would, over varying lengths of time, go from only aiming at small improvements within existing society to being revolutionaries, who were organized and united as a class within federations and who had developed the initiative to act for themselves. This process would repeat, until the conflict between the working classes and the ruling classes escalated to the point of an armed insurrection being launched by the social movements that had been developed during previous struggles for reforms. To quote Malatesta’s 1899 anarchist program, “one always comes back to insurrection, for if the government does not give way, the people will end by rebelling; and if the government does give way, then people gain confidence in themselves and make ever-increasing demands, until such time as the incompatibility between freedom and authority becomes clear and the violent struggle is engaged.”[882]
Mass anarchists understood, alongside anarchists in general, that evolutionary change does not necessarily lead to progress or an anarchist revolution. They were careful about which reforms they supported, who they worked with, and the means they proposed to achieve these reforms. In 1897, Kropotkin insisted that anarchists “have to cling to our principles while working with others” and therefore must “never allow ourselves to be chosen as or turn into exploiters, bosses, leaders,” “never have any truck with the building of some pyramidal organization, be it economic, governmental or educational-religious (even be it a revolutionary one),” and “never have any hand in conjuring up man’s governance of his fellow man in the realm of production and distribution, political organization, leadership, revolutionary organization, etc.”[883]
For mass anarchists, it was essential, in the words of Malatesta, to fight <em>as</em> anarchists, to “remain anarchists and act like anarchists before, during and after the revolution.”[884] To participate within working-class social movements as committed anarchists was primarily for them to persuade other workers to act in an anarchistic manner, such as taking direct action against the ruling classes, making decisions within general assemblies, or coordinating action over a large area via federations. According to Malatesta, anarchists have to “take advantage of all the means, all the possibilities and the opportunities that the present environment allows us to act on our fellow men” and thereby incite the working class “to make demands, and impose itself and take for itself all the improvements and freedoms that it desires as and when it reaches the state of wanting them, and the power to demand them.”[885]
Malatesta explained in his 1897 interview that “as a rule, we always support reforms that, more than the others, highlight the conflict between property-owners and proletarians, rulers and ruled, and therefore are apt to foster a conscious feeling of rebellion that will explode into the definitive, final revolution.”[886] He rejected “false reforms” that “tend to distract the masses from the struggle against authority and capitalism” and instead “serve to paralyze their actions and make them hope that something can be attained through the kindness of the exploiters and governments.”[887] One reform that mass anarchists consistently opposed was universal suffrage within existing capitalist states. In 1873, Bakunin argued against struggling to achieve the vote, because it would legitimize the state by giving it the “false appearance of popular government” and thereby provide the economic ruling classes “with a stronger and more reliable guarantee of their peaceful and intensive exploitation of the people’s labor.”[888] This opposition to struggling for universal suffrage included women’s suffrage, which Goldman argued against in 1910, on the grounds that it would not further the emancipation of women.[889]
Mass anarchists also rejected methods of winning reforms that consolidated the dominant structures of class society, rather than building the revolutionary strength of the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, anarchists “should never recognize the [existing] institutions. We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forward by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path.”[890] This led mass anarchists to argue that reforms should be won by imposing external pressure onto the ruling classes through direct action, rather than by campaigning for new legislation. For example, in 1875, Schwitzguébel wrote that “instead of begging the State for a law compelling employers to make them work only so many hours, the trade associations [<em>sociétés de métiers</em>] <em>directly impose</em> this reform on the employers [<em>patrons</em>]; in this way, instead of a legal text which remains a dead letter, a real economic change is effected <em>by the direct initiative of the workers</em>.”[891] Or, as Malatesta told a court while on trial in April 1898, “there cannot be reforms on the part of a government, unless the people demand and impose them.”[892]
The extent to which some mass anarchists were in favor of winning reforms through extremely radical means can be seen in the history of the CNT. In 1931, brick workers used a diversity of tactics to successfully end a system in which they worked for capitalists via exploitative contractors. They not only went on strike but also formed armed groups that would both hunt down scabs escorted by the police, and commit arson attacks against several brickworks. Bakery workers went further and, without even going on strike, forced capitalists to give in to their demands for the abolition of night work and changing the start of the working day to 5 a.m. This was achieved by bombing a number of bakeries. Those capitalists who refused to recognize the deal and punished organizers were subject to an escalation of resistance. This began with boycotts that, after they proved unsuccessful, were followed up with more militant activity, such as more bombings. On one occasion, Peirats and a comrade visited a capitalist armed with pistols in order to make him change his mind.[893]
It is clear that mass anarchists within the CNT did not reject the use of guns and bombs to achieve reform. They also used them in self-defense against the violence of the ruling classes. From 1914 onward, gunmen hired by capitalists and the state attempted to assassinate a significant number of anarchist trade unionists. In Catalonia, between 1920 and 1923, 104 anarchists were killed—including the former general secretary of the Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí—and thirty-three were wounded. The militant wing of the CNT responded to these violent attacks by organizing armed affinity groups to identify, locate, and kill those responsible.[894] This included the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato on March 8, 1921, by members of an action group in the metal industry.[895] These kinds of assassinations had previously been viewed by insurrectionist anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s as one of the means that anarchists could use to develop a mass movement. Mass anarchists who supported assassinations, in contrast, appear to have viewed them as a means to defend already existing mass movements that had been developed through the struggle for immediate reforms.
Armed self-defense by anarchist militants continued over the following years. In July 1931, the CNT’s builders’ union responded to a police raid on their offices with gunfire. This led to a four-hour siege, during which the building was surrounded by hundreds of policemen, assault guards, and soldiers. Six workers were killed and dozens were wounded on both sides.[896] Violence was also used by some mass anarchists to acquire funds for the revolution. From 1933 to 1935, militants within the CNT responded to the trade union’s dire financial problems by launching armed robberies against banks, which on several occasions involved shoot-outs with the police and fleeing the scene of the crime in stolen cars. Despite the financial gains these armed expropriations bought to the union, a significant section of the CNT opposed them, including Peirats.[897]
Another disagreement among mass anarchists concerned when social movements should shift from focusing on immediate reforms to attempting to spark the social revolution via armed insurrection. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a long-lasting dispute within the CNT between moderate and radical syndicalist anarchists. The moderates sought to build up the trade union’s strength gradually through workplace organizing, while the radicals, who belonged to CNT’s defense committees and to armed affinity groups like Nosotros, thought that the social revolution was near and that the time for reform had passed. This led the radical faction to engage in what they termed “revolutionary gymnastics,” which referred to the strategy of dedicated anarchist militants launching insurrections that would be repressed and thereby inspire an increasing number of workers to rise up. In practice, the series of armed uprisings they organized in January 1932, January 1933, and December 1933 were all unsuccessful and defeated quickly, due to a combination of lack of popular support, insufficient weaponry, and the state being prepared to repress them.[898]
*** Militant Minority
Mass anarchists believed that it was necessary to participate in social movements as a militant minority in order to ensure that struggles for reforms did not collapse into reformism and, instead, developed a revolutionary mass movement that could launch a large-scale armed insurrection. This meant spreading anarchist ideas, acting as key and effective organizers, encouraging or inspiring workers to take direct action, and ensuring that formal organizations or informal groups were horizontally structured and made decisions in a manner that prefigured an anarchist society. In 1931, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy can only come about gradually, as the masses become able to conceive it and desire it; but will never come to pass unless driven forward by a more or less consciously anarchist minority operating in such a way as to create the appropriate climate.”[899]
The notion of a militant minority within working-class social movements was expressed by mass anarchists in a number of different ways. An 1892 article published in <em>La Révolte</em> claimed that, although the revolution would “be made by the pressure of the masses… these masses themselves are looking for people to take the initiative, they are looking for men and women who can better formulate their thoughts, who will be able to win over the hesitant and carry with them the timid.”[900] This required “active minorities,” who were “avant-gardist” and embodied “individual initiative, put at the service of the collectivity.”[901] Malatesta referred to anarchists as a “conscious minority” and “vanguard.”[902] Berkman thought that anarchists were “the most advanced and revolutionary element.”[903] In Spain, the anarchist militants of the CNT were known among other workers as “the ones with ideas.”[904]
Such language did not mean that anarchists viewed themselves as separate from the working classes or the workers’ movement. Anarchism was a social movement whose members were overwhelmingly drawn from the working classes. As Fabbri noted, it “is <em>de facto</em> a teaching whose followers are almost exclusively proletarians: bourgeois, petit bourgeois, so-called intellectuals or professional people, etc. are very few and far between and wield no predominate influence.”[905] In referring to themselves as a militant minority, anarchists were only expressing the view that they had the most advanced revolutionary ideas within the working classes and, by virtue of this, had a key role to play in the collective struggle for human emancipation.
The main task of anarchists as a militant segment of the working classes was to bring about a transformation in the consciousness of other workers such that they came to adopt anarchist ideas, overthrow capitalism and the state, and build an anarchist society. For Dunois, “our task as anarchists, the most advanced, the boldest and the most uninhibited sector of the militant proletariat, is to stay constantly by its side, to fight the same battles amongst its ranks… to provide this enormous moving mass that is the modern proletariat… with a goal and the means of action” and so act as the “educators, stimulators and guides of the working masses.”[906] This point was repeatedly made by Malatesta. In 1897, he wrote that anarchists should “cultivate in the proletariat a consciousness of the class antagonism and the need for collective struggle, and a yearning to… [establish] equality, justice, and freedom for everyone.”[907] During his trial in April 1898, Malatesta told the court that anarchists “want the complete transformation of society, which must spring from the will of the masses, once they become conscious. It is precisely toward the formation of that consciousness that we are working, through the press, the talks and organization.”[908]
How anarchists acted as a militant minority varied according to the context. In 1891, it took the form of anarchists in Rome launching a preplanned riot by attacking the police at a May Day demonstration. This attack was triggered by the anarchist Galileo Palla giving his comrades a signal to begin when he ended his speech by declaring, “Long live the revolution!” and then jumped off the speaker’s platform into the crowd. This riot, which the anarchist militant minority initiated, lasted for several hours after it spread quickly to the rest of the crowd and other districts of Rome. So sudden was the riot that both contemporary observers and modern historians have mistaken it for a purely spontaneous affair and failed to realize that it was the outcome of conscious anarchist activity. Six years later in 1897, Italian anarchists in Ancona, including Malatesta, acted as a militant minority in a different manner by actively supporting the unionization of dock workers, bakers, barbers, and shoemakers.[909]
The Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky acted as a militant minority during the early 1890s in London when he opposed a trade unionist called Lewis Lyons, who sought to organize master tailors, who were employers, alongside wage laborers. Yanovsky combated this attempt to unite groups with opposed class interests by denouncing Lyons’s plans in articles he wrote for the <em>Arbeter Fraint</em> and by speaking at every public meeting that was held on the question, regardless of which side in the dispute organized it. In this way, Yanovsky was able to defeat Lyons and force him to leave the Jewish labor movement.[910] Yanovsky was not unique in this respect. Jewish anarchists living in London, alongside Rocker, played a key role in organizing trade unions and strikes. According to Rocker, “all the Jewish trade unions in the East End, without exception, were started by the initiative of the Jewish anarchists.”[911]
In 1912, this activity culminated in Jewish tailors launching a general strike to abolish sweatshops in the East End. The strike, which mobilized 13,000 workers in two days, was launched in solidarity with striking tailors in the West End, whose strike had initially been undermined by strike-breaking work within the East End sweatshops. Rocker acted as a militant minority by attending all the meetings of the strike committee, acting as Chairman of the Finance Committee, editing the daily <em>Arbeter Fraint</em>, and addressing three or four strike meetings a day. After three weeks on strike, the workers employed in men’s tailoring emerged victorious having won shorter hours; an end to piecework; better sanitary conditions; and the employment of union labor only. The strike continued within the women’s garment industry, where Jewish workers were overwhelmingly employed, until the capitalists gave in. In so doing they had, according to Rocker, ended the sweatshop system.[912]
The majority of anarchist militants who played key roles as organizers were not famous authors like Malatesta or Kropotkin, but self-taught workers whose names rarely appear in surviving primary sources. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, a trade union was formed by workers in 1914. One of the main organizers of the local union was a poor charcoal burner named José Olmo García, who provided other workers with anarchist literature, gave fiery speeches on anarchist ideas, and made persuasive points at group meetings.[913] Anarchist attempts to organize or participate in mass movements as a militant minority were of course not always successful. To focus on England, Italian anarchists living in London failed on several occasions to organize restaurant workers into a long-lasting trade union due, in part, to the temporary and seasonal nature of the work.[914] In September 1908, English anarchists in Leeds participated in a movement of unemployed people that began positively, from an anarchist perspective, by engaging in direct action but ended up being taken over by politicians, despite anarchist attempts to push it in a radical direction.[915]
Although mass anarchists viewed themselves as a militant minority who sought to influence the consciousness of other workers, they explicitly rejected authoritarian forms of vanguardism due to their commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. This rejection took four main forms. First, mass anarchists sought only to influence other members of the working classes through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. For Malatesta, while “authoritarians see the mass of the people as raw material to be manipulated into whatever mold they please through the wielding of power by decree, the gun and the handcuff,” anarchists “need the consent of the people and must therefore persuade by propaganda and by example.”[916] The Russian anarchist Voline similarly wrote that, since revolutionary success can only be achieved by “<em>the broad popular masses</em>.… Our role in this realization will be limited to that of a ferment, an element providing assistance, advice, and an example.”[917] Such influence was entirely consistent with the goal of anarchism since, according to Malatesta, an anarchist society is one in which nobody is “in a position to oblige others to submit to their will or to exercise their influence other than through the power of reason and by example.”[918]
Second, mass anarchists encouraged other workers to act for themselves and self-organize. In 1894, Malatesta claimed that “it is necessary that the people be conscious of their rights and their strength; it is necessary that they be ready to fight and ready to take the conduct of their affairs into their own hands. It must be the constant preoccupation of the revolutionists, the point toward which all their activity must aim, to bring about this state of mind among the masses.”[919] In a 1929 letter to Makhno, he wrote, “what matters most is that the people, men and women lose the sheeplike instincts and habits that thousands of years of slavery have instilled in them, and learn to think and act freely. And it is to this great work of moral liberation that the anarchists must specially dedicate themselves.”[920]
Third, influential mass anarchist authors, rejected the view that they were superior to others and instead sought to treat nonanarchist workers as their equals. In 1890, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists who label others as unintelligent if they do not immediately embrace anarchism “forget that they were not anarchists from birth,” and that it took an extended period of transformation for them to unlearn the prejudices they had been socialized into by class society.[921] Five years later, in 1895, he argued that, although anarchist militants had “an obligation to do everything possible to spread the anarchist idea among the working masses,” they should not view themselves as “better than the ‘ignorant masses’ just because we are anarchists and they are not yet.”[922] As Malatesta argued in 1894, anarchists should not “refuse to associate with working men who are not already perfect Anarchists” since “it is absolutely necessary to associate with them in order to make them becomes Anarchists.”[923] Anarchists had to, in short, “take the people as they are and… move forward with them.”[924] This coincided with the view that anarchists had to not only teach anarchist ideas to other workers, but also themselves learn from the various collective struggles that were organized by workers independently of anarchists.[925]
Fourth, mass anarchists opposed the seizure of state power in the name of the working classes because, as was explained in chapter 5, it would lead to the death of the revolution, and the establishment of a new system of minority rule in which the majority of workers were oppressed and exploited. The social revolution could only be achieved if workers decided to reorganize society themselves through their own organs of self-management. All mass anarchists could do to facilitate this process was to act as a militant minority in the same manner that they had done prior to the revolution: spreading anarchist ideas and engaging in actions that implemented the anarchist program and thereby served as an example to others. For Kropotkin, anarchists should not “let themselves be hoisted into power” during a revolution, but should instead “remain on the streets, in their own districts, with the people—as propagandists and organizers… joining in with the people as they looked to their food and their livelihoods and the city’s defenses; living alongside the poor, getting impassioned about <em>their</em> everyday issues, their interests, and rebuilding, in the sections, the life of society with them.”[926]
Mass anarchists continued to advocate this position in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. In 1922, Goldman opposed “the political power of the Party, organized and centralized in the state,” in favor of “the industrial power of the masses, expressed through their libertarian associations.”[927] Given this aim, the role of anarchists was “to guide the released energies of the people toward the reorganization of life on a libertarian foundation.”[928] Two years later, Malatesta explained that “we cannot make the revolution exclusively ‘ours’ because we are a small minority.… [W]e must therefore content ourselves with a revolution that is as much ‘ours’ as possible, favoring and taking part, both morally and materially, in every movement directed toward justice and liberty and, when the insurrection has triumphed, ensure that the pace of the revolution is maintained, advancing toward ever greater freedom and justice.”[929] If anarchists were successful in this, their position as a militant minority would fade away during the course of, or in the aftermath of, the social revolution itself, as more and more workers came to adopt and implement anarchist ideas themselves.[930]
According to Kropotkin and Malatesta, one of the main ways that anarchists should act as a militant minority during a revolution was by establishing autonomous regions, which refused to recognize the authority of any revolutionary government that was formed. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that, during a revolution, anarchists would not “be able to avert… attempts at revolutionary government,” but could instead only “conjure up from within the people itself a force that is mighty in its actions and in the constructive revolutionary tasks that it is to carry out, ignoring the authorities, no matter what name they may go under, growing exponentially by virtue of its revolutionary enterprise, its revolutionary vigor and its achievements in terms of tearing down and reorganizing.”[931] This self-organized, federated force would undermine any attempts at revolutionary government because
<quote>
a people that will itself have organized the consumption of wealth and the reproduction of such assets in the interest of society as a whole will no longer be governable. A people that will itself be the armed strength of the country and which will have afforded armed citizens the requisite cohesion and concerted action, will no longer be susceptible to being ordered around. A people that will itself have organized railways, its navy, its schools is not going to be susceptible to being administered anymore. And finally, a people that will have shown itself capable of organizing arbitration to settle minor disputes will be one where every single individual will deem it his duty to stop the bully misusing the weakling, without waiting for providential intervention by the town sergeant, and will have no use for warders, judges or jailors.[932]
</quote>
In the 1920 edition of Malatesta’s anarchist program, which was based on the previous 1899 version and adopted by the Italian Anarchist Union, he recommended that anarchists “push the people” to expropriate the ruling classes, establish workplace and community assemblies that collectively own and control the means of production, and refuse “to nominate or recognize any government.”[933] If the wider working classes choose not to do so, then anarchists “must—in the name of the right we have to be free even if others wish to remain slaves and because of the force of example—put into effect as many of our ideas as we can, refuse to recognize the new government and keep alive resistance and seek that those localities where our ideas are received with sympathy should constitute themselves into anarchist communities, rejecting all governmental interference and establishing free agreements with other communities which want to live their own lives.”[934]
In 1925, Malatesta clarified that this included, if necessary, engaging in armed self-defense against the violence of the new state:
<quote>
If, despite our efforts, new forms of power were to arise that seek to obstruct the people’s initiative and impose their own will, we must have no part in them, never give them any recognition. We must endeavor to ensure that the people refuse them the means of governing—refuse them, that is, the soldiers and the revenue; see to it that those powers remain weak… until the day comes when we can crush them once and for all. Anyway, we must lay claim to and demand, with force if needs be, our full autonomy, and the right and the means to organize ourselves as we see fit and to put our own methods into practice.[935]
</quote>
[796] Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, <em>Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 124, 133–41.
[797] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 318, 360.
[798] Quoted in René Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 31.
[799] Quoted in Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 31.
[800] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.
[801] Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 178.
[802] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 89–90. See also 83. In the original, Dunois uses the word “spontaneously.” I altered the translation to “voluntarily,” given how the French word “spontanément” was used by anarchists at the time.
[803] Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 163.
[804] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 163.
[805] Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 158.
[806] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 158.
[807] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 148–54; Antonioli, ed. *International Anarchist Congress*, 98–100.
[808] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 153; Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 64, 73.
[809] Ricardo Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em>, ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 58–59.
[810] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 474–75.
[811] Max Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want? Living</em>, <em>Not Dead Unions</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 18.
[812] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 60.
[813] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 61.
[814] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 61.
[815] The following account is largely based on Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 63–65, 101–4; <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 61–66, 73–74, 92–95, 130–35, 208–10. For the historical context of this debate, see Pietro Di Paola, <em>The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 59–91; Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution</em>, <em>1889–1900</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 188–95.
[816] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 439–40.
[817] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 63.
[818] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 64, 73.
[819] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 134; *Method of Freedom*, 489–90.
[820] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 489–90.
[821] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 63, 437–39; *Towards Anarchy*, 133–4; *Patient Work*, 42, 153.
[822] José Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 7–10, 93.
[823] Murray Bookchin, <em>The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998), 154–55, 164–65; Angel Smith, *Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1989–1923* (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 195, 237–49.
[824] Danny Evans, private communication, June 27, 2020.
[825] In 1931, the majority of delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form national industrial federations, which would unite all the single unions in a given industry together. These were to exist in parallel to the other geographical federations that united workers from different industries together, based on their location. This decision was never implemented and was actively opposed by several anarchist delegates on the grounds that it would decrease the importance and autonomy of the local single unions. See Bookchin, <em>Spanish Anarchists</em>, 218–19; Stuart Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927–1937</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 90–92; Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 33–37.
[826] In 1934, Ángel Pestaña claimed that some local federations and local unions paid for two or three full-time delegates “off the record” and “under the table.” I have been unable to verify this claim or discover how other members responded to these allegations. Quoted in Frank Mintz, <em>Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 54–55.
[827] The higher committees of the CNT amassed far more power during the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39. See Danny Evans, <em>Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 39–40, 45–49.
[828] This account of how the CNT was organized is based on Bookchin, <em>Spanish Anarchists</em>, 144–46; Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists</em>, 11, 13, 73; Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 353n16; Evans, <em>Revolution and the State</em>, 12. For examples of CNT plenums see Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, 52–53, 69–70, 255–56, 259–60.
[829] Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 5. For the biographical details about Peirats, see Chris Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 29–30, 141–42.
[830] Quoted in Peirats, <em>What is the C.N.T?</em> (London: Simian, 1974), 19.
[831] Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 77; Agustín Guillamón, *Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona*, 1933–1938 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 28–29.
[832] Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 122–23.
[833] Malatesta, *Method of Freedom*, 83; *Patient Work*, 155.
[834] Chris Ealham: *Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937* (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 49–50; Guillamón, *Ready for Revolution*, 28–30.
[835] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 49. See also, 138–41.
[836] Quoted in Walther L. Bernecker, “The Strategies of ‘Direct Action’ and Violence in Spanish Anarchism,” in <em>Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe</em>, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 90.
[837] Quoted in Ralph Darlington, <em>Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism</em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 29.
[838] Quoted in Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 39. Some trade unions within the CNT opposed the idea of a minimum program. See Bookchin, <em>Spanish Anarchists</em>, 218.
[839] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 281.
[840] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 82.
[841] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 181.
[842] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 182.
[843] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 374.
[844] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 19, 23.
[845] Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914,” <em>Victorian Studies</em> 31, no. 4 (1988): 487–516; Luigi Fabbri, <em>Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism</em> (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001).
[846] Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in <em>Social Protest</em>, <em>Violence and Terror</em>, 215.
[847] Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 34.
[848] Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 87–90.
[849] Quoted in Avrich and Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma</em>, 89.
[850] Quoted in Goyens, “Johann Most and the German Anarchists,” in <em>Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street</em>, ed. Tom Goyens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 21–22. In response, Goldman attacked Most with a whip during one of his lectures. See Emma Goldman, <em>Living My Life</em>, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 105–6.
[851] Quoted in George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain</em>, <em>1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.
[852] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 319.
[853] Quoted in Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 84. See also Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 526–29.
[854] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 150, 154.
[855] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 150.
[856] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 373.
[857] Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 55. Kropotkin opposed the tactics of assassination and bombings within the Russian anarchist movement. See Martin A. Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 206–07; Paul Avrich, <em>The Russian Anarchists</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 59–60. For an overview of Russian anarchist’s engaging in this kind of violence, see ibid., 44–55, 63–70.
[858] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 176.
[859] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 49.
[860] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 1868–1875, 14; Malatesta, *Towards Anarchy*, 160; *Method of Freedom*, 470–71.
[861] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 49.
[862] Malatesta, <em>At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism</em> (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 82–83.
[863] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 344. See also 315–33.
[864] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 179.
[865] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 101.
[866] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 67.
[867] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 25.
[868] Goldman, <em>Living My Life</em>, vol. 1, 47–48, 52–53.
[869] Rudolf Rocker, <em>The London Years</em> (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 25–26.
[870] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 309; Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 156, 189.
[871] Quoted in David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 26.
[872] Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want</em>, 11.
[873] Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want</em>, 10–12, 15–16.
[874] Max Baginski, “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union Movement,” in <em>Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth</em>, ed. Peter Glassgold, (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 305.
[875] Rocker, *Anarcho-Syndicalism*, 78.
[876] Rocker, *Anarcho-Syndicalism*, 79.
[877] Rocker, *Anarcho-Syndicalism*, 79.
[878] Rocker, *Anarcho-Syndicalism*, 79.
[879] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 287.
[880] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 320.
[881] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 106.
[882] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 55.
[883] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 145–46.
[884] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 427.
[885] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 49.
[886] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 320.
[887] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 168. See also Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 80; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 293–94.
[888] Michael Bakunin, <em>Statism and Anarchy</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 114, 25. For another example, see Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 98–103.
[889] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 190–203.
[890] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 81.
[891] Quoted in Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 226.
[892] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 443. See also Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 67–69.
[893] Ealham, <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 57–59.
[894] Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists</em>, 18–22; Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 48–51; Guillamón, <em>Ready for Revolution</em>, 31–32; Peirats, <em>CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 11–6; For an in-depth overview of this topic, see A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 210–11, 250–53, 300–301, 312, 316–17, 323–37, 343–49, 351.
[895] A. Smith, <em>Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction</em>, 337.
[896] Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 98.
[897] Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 144–48, 163; <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 66–67. It should be noted that some of the robberies were carried out by self-described individualist anarchist affinity groups.
[898] Jason Garner, <em>Goals and Means: Anarchism</em>, <em>Syndicalism</em>, <em>and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 139–45; Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 87–89, 100–1, 130–40, 161–64; <em>Living Anarchism</em>, 60–70; Evans, <em>Revolution and the State</em>, 7–10, 15–23; Jerome R. Mintz, <em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–225. It has been argued by Christie that the moderate syndicalist anarchists were not in fact anarchists or only paid lip service to anarchism. I have not been convinced by this claim. See Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists</em>, vii, 15, 26–28, 59–65, 68–73, 84–87, 93–94, 100–121.
[899] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 529.
[900] Quoted in David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 23.
[901] Quoted in Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 23.
[902] Malatesta, <em>Café</em>, 107, 149, 155; <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 344, 529.
[903] Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 114.
[904] Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 41.
[905] Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in <em>Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution</em>, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 16. For an overview of the class composition of anarchist and syndicalist movements around the world, see Schmidt and van der Walt, <em>Black Flame</em>, 271–91.
[906] Antonioli, ed. <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 87–88.
[907] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 325.
[908] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 443.
[909] Turcato, <em>Making Sense</em>, 163–68; Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 261–67.
[910] Rocker, <em>London Years</em>, 62–63.
[911] Rocker, <em>London Years</em>, 90.
[912] Rocker, <em>London Years</em>, 126–31.
[913] J. Mintz, <em>Casas Viejas</em>, 14–16, 29–31, 79–80, 83–85.
[914] Di Paola, <em>Knights Errant</em>, 34–35, 95–96, 111–13, 205.
[915] John Quail, <em>The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists</em> (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978), 250–51. Anarchists were able to more effectively organize unemployed people in the United States. See Avrich and Avrich, <em>Sasha and Emma</em>, 217–23.
[916] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 81.
[917] Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in <em>The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged</em>, ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 202–3.
[918] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 56.
[919] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 176.
[920] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 110–11.
[921] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 332.
[922] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 348. See also Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism</em>, 62–64.
[923] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 179.
[924] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 87.
[925] Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 41–42; *Patient Work*, 190.
[926] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 554.
[927] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 390–91, 395.
[928] Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 393.
[929] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 88–89.
[930] Kropotkin, <em>Rebel</em>, 75; Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 553–55.
[931] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 578.
[932] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 578.
[933] Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 186.
[934] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 187. To compare these sections to the previous 1899 version, see Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy</em>, 55–56.
[935] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 472.
** Chapter 8: The History of Syndicalist Anarchism
Syndicalist anarchism advocated the formation of federally structured trade unions that united the working classes into a collective force, were independent of political parties, and engaged in direct action against the ruling classes. This was to be achieved either by forming whole new revolutionary trade unions, or by participating within existing reformist trade unions and transforming them from within. Historically, anarchist authors used a variety of different terms to refer to trade unions, such as <em>societies of resistance against capital</em>, <em>resistance societies</em>, <em>workers’ associations</em>, or simply the <em>labor movement</em>.[936] The term <em>syndicalism</em> is itself derived from the French word for trade union—<em>syndicat</em>—and the phrase <em>syndicalisme révolutionnaire</em>, meaning trade unionism that is revolutionary.[937] For the sake of simplicity, I shall be using the English term trade union, rather than such historical terms.
Syndicalist anarchism was a form of mass anarchism, and so argued that anarchists should struggle for immediate reforms via direct action, especially strikes, sabotage, and boycotts. These collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop an organized mass trade union movement with the necessary radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for abolishing capitalism and the state, in favor of an anarchist society. The social revolution would unfold through an insurrectionary general strike, during which the working classes would stop work, occupy their workplaces, expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes, and smash the state. In the course of the social revolution, the federally structured trade unions would evolve, from organizations engaged in economic resistance against the ruling classes into organizations that self-managed the economy, either in part or whole.[938]
Although all syndicalist anarchists generally agreed on the above strategy, they disagreed with one another on two main questions. These were:
1. Should trade unions be politically neutral, or should they be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means?
1. Are trade unions sufficient in and of themselves to achieve an anarchist society, or do they need to be assisted by a specific anarchist organization?
Three main forms of syndicalist anarchism emerged in response to these two questions: revolutionary syndicalism, syndicalism-plus, and anarcho-syndicalism.[939] In this chapter, I will establish what these positions meant, and why anarchists came to advocate them. This will be achieved through a detailed overview of the history of syndicalist anarchism, from its prehistory in the First International, to the formation of anarcho-syndicalism as an international movement in the early twentieth century. With this context in place, I will explain the main strategies that were generally advocated by syndicalist anarchists in chapter 9.
*** The Prehistory of Syndicalism
The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism, which would come to be known as syndicalism, was first advocated during debates within the First International and Saint-Imier International. At the September 1868 Brussels Congress of the First International, the Belgian delegate and typesetter César De Paepe advocated the formation of <em>resistance societies</em> that organized strikes to win immediate improvements and revolt against the ruling classes. In order to do so, they had to be “federated with one another—not only at the level of a trade or country, but across different countries and trades.”[940] In the long term they would aim to achieve “the abolition of the wages system” through “the absorption of capital by labor.”[941] The Brussels section of the International supported resistance societies “not only from regard to the necessities of the present, but also the future social order… we see in these trade unions the embryos of the great workers’ companies which will one day replace the capitalist companies” and “embrace whole industries.”[942] In February 1869, De Paepe expanded upon this point by arguing that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and that its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order... the society of resistance is destined to organize labor in the future.… Nothing will be more easy, when the moment comes, than to transform the societies of resistance into cooperative workshops, when the workers have agreed to demand the liquidation of the present society.”[943]
Several months later, the Swiss Courtelary District section of the First International held a general assembly on August 29, 1869, in which a report on strike funds was approved. The report had been written by the engraver Adhémar Schwitzguébel, who would go on to become the corresponding secretary of the anarchist Jura Federation’s Federal Committee.[944] The report advocated the formation of an international federation of trade unions, with a shared strike fund, on the grounds that they were an effective means to collectively resist the domination of capitalists and win higher wages. At the same time, they were viewed as having “the great advantage of preparing the general organization of the proletariat, of accustoming workers to identify their interests, to practice solidarity and to act in common for the interests of all. In short, they are the basis for the coming organization of society, since workers’ associations will have to do no more than take over the running of industrial and agricultural enterprises.”[945]
The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism continued to be articulated within the First International at its Basel Congress, held between September 5 and 12, 1869, and attended by, among others, Bakunin and Guillaume. During the morning session of September 11, the delegate Jean-Louis Pindy, who would go onto participate in the Paris Commune and become an anarchist, presented a report that was subsequently passed as a resolution of the congress.[946] Pindy, a cabinetmaker and the delegate of the Paris Construction Workers’ Trade Union, proposed that all workers should establish strike funds, organize local trade unions, and then link these local trade unions together at national and international levels. In so doing, workers would create an organizational structure that enabled the exchange of information and coordinated strike action both within a country and between countries. The goal of these trade unions would be to engage in strikes until capitalism had been abolished and replaced by the federation of free producers. As capitalism was abolished, the trade unions would take over the organization of production, and be converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. The federation of workers at the level of the town would form “the commune of the future” just as the federation of workers at the national and international level would form “the workers’ representation of the future” under which “politics” would be replaced by “the associated councils of the various trades and a committee of their respective delegates” administrating and regulating “work relations.”[947] The formation of national and international federations of trade unions was, therefore, not only necessary in order to engage in effective class struggle. It was also an essential component of establishing the social structures through which workers could organize a global socialist economy that “no longer recognizing frontiers, establishes a vast allocation of labor from one end of the world to the other.”[948]
The same idea was advocated by the French bookbinder, collectivist, and trade union organizer Eugène Varlin, who later played a key role in the Paris Commune and was murdered by the French state in May 1871. He argued that working-class social movements “must actively work to prepare the organizational elements of the future society in order to make the work of social transformation that is imposed on the Revolution easier and more certain.”[949] He was convinced that trade unions were one of the main forms of working-class self-organization that could do so: “trade societies (resistance, solidarity, union) deserve our encouragement and sympathy, for they are the natural elements of the social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become producer associations; it is they who will be able to operate social tools and organize production.”[950]
One of the main proponents of revolutionary trade unionism in the First International was Bakunin. In August 1869, he argued that, prior to the social revolution, the main task of the First International should be to “give an essentially <em>economic character</em> to workers’ agitation in every land; setting as its goal the reduction of working hours and higher wages” through “<em>the organization of the mass of workers</em> and <em>the creation of resistance</em> [strike] funds.”[951] In so doing, the First International would, Bakunin predicted, grow into a mass movement that unified and organized millions of workers across Europe, if not the entire world, into trade unions with “the capacity to replace the political world of the state, and the departing bourgeois.”[952] In a revolutionary situation, the First International would, due to its extensive experience of collective struggle, be “capable of taking things in hand and capable of giving them a sense of direction that will be really salutary for the people.”[953] This included trade unions being converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. In 1871 Bakunin declared that “the organization of the sections of skilled workers, their federations within the International Association, and their representation through the chambers of labor… sow the living seed of a new social order which shall replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but also the very facts of the future.”[954]
The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism was also embraced by the sections of the First International that would go onto form the anarchist movement. On April 4, 1870, what would become the Jura Federation passed a resolution at the La Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. It recommended to all sections of the First International that they “direct all their activity toward the federative constitution of labor organizations, the sole means of assuring the success of the social revolution. This federation is the true representation of labor, which absolutely must take place outside of the political governments.”[955] An almost identical resolution was passed by the Spanish section of the First International at its founding congress in 1870, attended by ninety delegates representing 40,000 members.[956]
The first congress of the Saint-Imier International in 1872 declared that trade unions “increase the sense of fraternity and community of interests” among the proletariat, and “give some experience in collective living and prepare for the supreme struggle.”[957] Given this, “our broad intent is to build solidarity and organization. We regard strikes as a precious means of struggle, but we have no illusions about their economic result. We accept them as a consequence of the antagonism between labor and capital; they have as a necessary consequence that workers should become more and more alive to the abyss that exists between the proletariat and bourgeoisie and that workers’ organizations should be strengthened, and, through ordinary economic struggles, the proletariat should be prepared for the great and final revolutionary struggle.”[958]
The resolutions of the 1877 Verviers Congress expanded upon this point: “Congress, while it recognizes the importance of trades’ organizations and recommends their formation on an international basis, declares that trades’ organizations that have as their goal only the improvement of workers’ situations, either through the reduction of working hours, or by the organization of wage levels, will never accomplish the emancipation of the proletariat, and that trade’s organizations should adopt as their principal goal the abolition of the proletariat” through the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes.[959]
After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International, this strategy continued to be endorsed by a number of prominent anarchists. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “organizing the laboring masses into trades associations based on the principle of resistance and of attacking the bosses.”[960] Three years earlier, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists should organize workers to wage war against capitalist exploitation “relentlessly, day by day, by the strike, by agitation, <em>by every revolutionary means</em>” in order to build “a formidable MACHINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL,” that united workers from every city, village, and trade into one union.[961] This process of class struggle would, at the same time, lead to an increasingly large number of workers becoming aware of their distinct class interests, developing a hatred of their oppressors, and acquiring the belief that capitalism must be overthrown.
For Kropotkin, the primary contemporary example of this strategy in action were Spanish anarchists who “remain within the working class, they struggle with it, for it” and “bring the contribution of their energy to the workers’ organization and work to build up a force that will crush capital, come the day of the revolution: the revolutionary trades associations.”[962] In so doing, they were not only furthering the cause of working-class self-emancipation, but were also being “faithful to the anarchist traditions of the International.”[963] The Spanish anarchists to which Kropotkin was referring had founded the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region, on September 24, 1881. The organization, which grew out of the Spanish section of the First International (FRE), was a federation of trade unions that by the end of 1882 was composed of 218 federations, 663 sections, and 57,934 members. Its main paper, <em>La Revista Social</em>, had 20,000 subscribers.[964]
Spanish anarchists were not the only anarchists to actively participate within the trade union movement during the 1880s. Anarchists in Chicago, including the future Haymarket martyrs Albert Parsons and August Spies, attempted to build revolutionary trade unions and joined the struggle for the eight-hour day as a means to spread anarchist ideas.[965] In Turin and Piedmont, Italian anarchists played a key role within trade unions as organizers, delegates or editors of newspapers. This included Galleani, who had yet to adopt his later rejection of trade unions and formal organizations but was already beginning to move in this direction by 1889.[966] The extent to which anarchists participated in trade union movements during the late nineteenth century only becomes fully apparent when one looks beyond the United States and Europe. Between 1870 and 1900 anarchists were instrumental in the creation of trade unions and the organization of strikes in, at least, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.[967]
*** The Emergence of Revolutionary Syndicalism
Within Europe, the strategy of revolutionary trade unionism came to be endorsed by an increasingly large number of anarchists in response to the London dockland strike of 1889, during which a strike by casual laborers grew over two weeks into a mass mobilization of 130,000 workers that shut down the entire dock and disrupted supply chains such that factories in multiple industries were forced to close. The strike, which ended with workers winning a wage increase, was reported on by Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Pouget in several anarchist papers.[968] In response to these events, Malatesta critiqued anarchists who had opposed participating in the trade union movement, and thereby enabled it to be taken over by moderates and parliamentary socialists. He argued that anarchists should instead “get back among the people… let us organize as many strikes as we can; let us see to it that the strike becomes a contagion and that, once one erupts, it spreads to ten or a hundred different trades in ten or a hundred towns.”[969]
In parallel to these developments, revolutionary syndicalism as a self-organized working-class movement began to emerge in France, with the creation of the first <em>bourse du travail</em> in 1887, three years after trade unions had been legalized in the country. The bourses du travail were initially labor exchanges where workers could find employment, but over the next decade morphed into working-class cultural, educational, and mutual aid centers, and then eventually trade unions that collected strike funds and organized strikes. In 1892, the delegates of ten bourses, including Fernand Pelloutier, met at Saint-Etienne and formed a national federation. A few years later, in 1895, Pelloutier, who had since become an anarchist after moving to Paris in 1893, was appointed general secretary of the Federation of Bourses du Travail.[970]
It was within this context that a significant number of French speaking anarchists came to publicly advocate anarchist participation within the trade union movement. This included Kropotkin, who wrote several articles for <em>La Révolte</em> between 1890 and 1891, that advocated revolutionary trade unionism.[971] A few years later, in October 1894, Pouget argued in <em>Le Père Peinard</em> that trade unions provided anarchists with an excellent space in which to act and make contact with the wider working class that existed beyond anarchist affinity groups and subcultures.[972] A year later in 1895, Pelloutier wrote an article called “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union” for <em>Les Temps Nouveaux</em>. In it, he called on fellow anarchists to join the trade union movement en masse, and thereby spread their ideas among the working classes and instill in them the idea that they should self-manage their own affairs. Previous and ongoing anarchist participation within the trade union movement had, according to Pelloutier, already been successful in teaching workers “the true meaning of anarchism” and expanding their notion of what a trade union could be and become.[973]
Pouget and Pelloutier’s call for anarchist participation within the trade union movement was even echoed by some anarchist groups who had previously been opposed to revolutionary trade unionism, due to their commitment to the iron law of wages. By 1899, <em>Le Libertaire</em> had begun to change its attitude and published an article by Luis Grandidier that claimed anarchists should “leave this ivory tower in which we are suffocating” and “enter the trade unions.”[974] The ideas of French syndicalism also influenced anarchists from other countries. In 1900, Goldman visited France as a delegate for the international anarchist congress in Paris, which ended up being banned by the police and occurring in secret. During her visit, she became an advocate of syndicalism after seeing it in action as a social movement, and hearing so many positive things about Pelloutier. In 1913, she claimed that “on my return to America I immediately began to propagate Syndicalist ideas, especially Direct Action and the General Strike.”[975]
By the time of Pelloutier’s premature death in 1901 at the age of thirty-three, the National Federation of Bourses du Travail was composed of sixty-five bourses to which 782 dues-paying local unions were affiliated. A year later in 1902, the federation merged with the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) to form a new CGT. This resulted in the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a mass movement.[976] The CGT had, according to its own congress reports, a membership of 100,000 workers at its refounding in 1902. Over the next decade, it rapidly grew to 300,000 members by 1906, and 600,000 by 1912. Of these 600,000 members, an estimated 400,000 paid their dues. The scale of the CGT can only be understood relative to its historical context. In 1912, an estimated 1,027,000 workers belonged to a trade union in France. The CGT therefore contained, if you limit the figure to dues-paying members, almost half of the unionized workers in France.[977]
The CGT was not itself a majority anarchist organization and contained several different factions. This included, but was not limited to, reformist syndicalists; anarchists who also identified as revolutionary syndicalists; anarchists who did not identify as revolutionary syndicalists; and revolutionary syndicalists who did not view themselves as anarchists. Nevertheless, anarchists did exert a significant influence on the organization in the early years of its existence.[978] In 1901, the anarchists Georges Yvetot and Paul Delesalle were elected as the general secretary and vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail. That same year Pouget, who had been the editor of the CGT’s paper <em>La Voix du peuple</em> since its creation in 1900, was elected as the vice secretary of the CGT. Pouget would remain in this position until late 1908, when he was briefly imprisoned for his involvement in the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and subsequently, after his release on October 31, ceased to be active within the organization. Delesalle, likewise, resigned from his position as vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail at the CGT’s 1908 congress of Marseilles, and instead focused his energies on running a second-hand bookshop and publishing radical literature. By 1914, despite anarchist influence within the CGT waning, roughly 100,000 members of the CGT supported anarchist positions at congresses through their elected delegates.[979]
The ideas of revolutionary syndicalism were formally crystalized by the CGT at its October 1906 congress, where it adopted the Charter of Amiens with 830 votes in favor and only eight opposed. The Charter, which was drafted in a restaurant by Victor Griffuelhes, Louis Niel, André Morizet, Pouget, and Delesalle, emerged out of a compromise between the revolutionary and reformist factions within the CGT.[980] It declared that the CGT sought to unite “all workers conscious of the struggle to be conducted for the disappearance of the system of wage-earning and management” regardless of “their political schooling” in order to win immediate improvements, and eventually overthrow capitalism via expropriation and the general strike.[981] It affirmed
<quote>
the complete liberty of members to participate, outside the union, in whatsoever forms of struggle conform to their political or philosophical views, and limits itself to requesting, in reciprocity, that they should not introduce into the unions opinions held outside it. As for the organization, Congress resolves, that since economic action must be conducted directly against employers for syndicalism to achieve its maximum effect, the organization of the confederation, insofar as they are unions should not concern themselves with parties and sects, which, outside and alongside, may pursue social transformation in complete freedom.[982]
</quote>
The charter’s advocacy of political neutrality was worded in such a manner that revolutionaries and reformists could interpret the text in contradictory ways. For revolutionaries, the charter only committed the CGT to independence from political parties and so parliamentarism. Reformists, in comparison, interpreted the charter as entailing a much stricter commitment to independence from all forms of politics, including anarchism. This had the effect that, when the CGT engaged in propaganda campaigns against militarism and patriotism, reformists viewed this as contradicting its commitment to political neutrality.[983] This disagreement over the meaning of political neutrality went alongside multiple attempts by some reformist factions within the CGT to establish a formal alliance or tie between the trade union and socialist parties.[984]
Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists advocated political neutrality because they believed that the function of a trade union was to unite workers on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than on the basis of the specific school of political thought they subscribed to. The trade union, to quote Pouget, “groups together those who work against those who live by human exploitation: it brings together interests and not opinions.”[985] He held that the CGT should be open to all workers, whatever their political or religious beliefs, including those amenable to the state. In theory, workers would join the trade union “imbued with the teachings of some (philosophical, political, religious, etc.) school of thought or another” and, through their experiences of engaging in direct action, “have their rough edges knocked off until they are left only with the principles to which they all subscribe: the yearning for improvement and comprehensive emancipation.”[986]
This perspective on trade unions was articulated by the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte on August 28 at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. According to Monatte,
<quote>
instead of opinion-based syndicalism, which gave rise to anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia and to Christian and social-democratic trade unions in Belgium and Germany, anarchists must provide the option of French-style syndicalism, a neutral—or more precisely, independent—form of syndicalism. Just as there is only one [working] class, so there should be only one single workers’ organization, one single syndicate, for each trade and in each town. Only on this condition can the class struggle—no longer facing the obstacle of arguments between the various schools of schools of thought and rival sects on every point—develop to its fullest extent and have the greatest possible effect.[987]
</quote>
From this, it followed that revolutionary syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. By this, he meant that revolutionary syndicalist trade unions could, by themselves, abolish class society. They could: (a) unite workers as a class; (b) organize direct action that enabled workers to develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness; (c) launch the social revolution through a general strike; and (d) provide the organizational framework through which workers would take over and self-manage the economy. For Monatte to say that “syndicalism is sufficient unto itself” was merely to say “that the now-mature working class finally intends to be sufficient unto itself and not to entrust its emancipation to anyone other than itself.”[988] This position was shared by Pouget who argued in 1908 that “the trade union is… sufficient for all purposes” including “the expropriation of capital and the reorganization of society.”[989]
Anarchists who advocated revolutionary syndicalism held that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself because trade unions could independently develop a large organized working-class social movement with the necessary radical traits to launch a social revolution and establish an anarchist society. They thought that, in order to achieve this, trade unions had to be politically neutral toward different left-wing factions, including political parties, and therefore not have an explicitly anarchist program. This was because they believed that the goal of a trade union was to unite as many workers as possible on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than because of their shared ideological commitment to, for example, anarchism or Marxism. Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists did write critiques of political parties and parliamentarism, but they did not think that such positions should be the official position of the trade union. The trade union only had to be independent of political parties, rather than being explicitly opposed to them.
The CGT was the first self-described revolutionary syndicalist trade union, but it was not the only one. After the CGT’s merger with the National Federation of Bourses du Travail in 1902, numerous trade unions around the world either came to adopt syndicalist programs, or were founded as syndicalist organizations. This occurred due to the combined activity of anarchist syndicalists and syndicalists who did not identify as anarchists, acting as a militant minority during a global wave of working-class revolt against the ruling classes. In Europe and the United States, at least seven syndicalist trade unions emerged between 1905 and 1912: the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS), American IWW, Central Organization of Swedish Workers (SAC), Spanish National Confederation of Labor (CNT), Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), and Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG), which would develop into the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). In England the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) was founded in order to spread syndicalism within existing reformist trade unions.[990]
Anarchists in Latin America were actively involved in the formation of various syndicalist trade unions, including the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA) in 1904, Uruguayan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORU) in 1905, and Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. This was followed by the creation of the Peruvian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORP) and Bolivian International Workers’ Federation in 1912. Anarchists in Cuba organized trade unions and strikes throughout the early 1900s, and this culminated in the founding of the Workers Federation of Havana in 1922, and then the Cuban National Confederation of Labor in 1925. Branches of the IWW were established around the world, including Canada, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A series of trade unions were also founded by anarchists in Asia, including China’s first modern trade unions in 1917 and the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions (Zenkoku Rôdô Kumiai Jiyû Rengôkai) in 1926.[991]
The fact that multiple trade unions in Europe, North America, and Latin America embraced syndicalism shortly after the appearance of the CGT can make it appear that they were established simply due to revolutionaries hearing of and deciding to copy the French example. This narrative ignores the fact that they were created after an extended period of anarchists, and other socialists, actively participating within trade union movements. In the United States, for example, Italian anarchists helped organize strikes and founded local trade unions during the 1890s and early 1900s. After the founding of the IWW in 1905, which anarchists participated in, these anarchist-led trade unions decided to affiliate with the IWW and form sections, such as the IWW Silk Workers’ Union Local 152. Italian anarchists within the IWW then continued to act as a militant minority and push the class struggle forward. This included Local 152, which was the main organizing force behind the IWW’s 1913 strike among silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey. This is not to say that the Italian anarchists were not influenced by French syndicalism at all. Italian anarchist papers, including <em>La Questione Sociale</em>, published translations of French syndicalist texts prior to the founding of the IWW. The actions of Italian anarchists cannot, however, be entirely reduced to this influence.[992]
This point only becomes more apparent when examining the history of syndicalism in Latin America. In Argentina, anarchists organized trade unions and strikes from 1887 onward. This included Spanish and Italian immigrants who had previous experiences of participating in anarchist-led trade unions, such as Errico Malatesta, Pietro Gori, Antonio Pellicer Paraire, Gregorio Inglán Lafarga, and José Prat. The participation of anarchists and state socialists in the labor movement led to the founding of the Argentine Workers’ Federation (FOA) in 1901. After a series of conflicts between anarchist and state socialist workers within the trade union, the anarchist wing emerged as the majority, and the state socialists left the organization in June 1902. That year, the FOA organized a series of strikes that, in November, escalated into the first general strike in Argentina’s history. In 1904, the FOA was renamed the FORA. The FORA then explicitly committed itself to anarchist communism in 1905. In Latin America it was the FORA, rather than just the French CGT, which served as a key source of inspiration for how to organize a revolutionary trade union.[993]
In addition, French syndicalist theory repeated ideas that had previously been articulated and implemented by anarchists in multiple countries over several decades. In Spain, where anarchists had organized within trade unions since the 1870s, the anarchist journal <em>Natura</em> responded to the translation of a pamphlet on syndicalism by Pouget in 1904 by claiming it covered topics “well known here” and showed that “the spirit of free syndicalism, common in Spain, is making strides in France.”[994] Anselmo Lorenzo, who translated pamphlets by Pouget and Yvetot, held that the French syndicalists had “returned to us, amplified, corrected and perfectly systematized, ideas with which the Spanish anarchists inspired the French.”[995]
The Spanish anarchists were not unique in this respect. During this period, many anarchists looked upon the theory and practice of revolutionary syndicalism as a direct continuation of collectivism within the First International. Pouget himself wrote that the CGT emanated from and was the “historical continuation” of “the International Working Men’s Association” and “the federalists or autonomists” within it who opposed the conquest of state power.[996] In 1907, Malatesta remarked, during his speech at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, that what some syndicalists considered to be a new path had already been “established and followed within the international” by “the first anarchists.”[997] That same year, Kropotkin wrote in the preface to a pamphlet on syndicalism by the Georgian anarchist Georgi Gogeliia that “the current opinions of the French syndicalists are organically linked with the early ideas formed by the left wing of the International.”[998] The connection between revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism was, in addition to this, understood by at least some Marxists at the time. In 1909, Karl Kautsky, who was one of the most influential Marxists within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, wrote that “syndicalism” was “the latest variety of anarchism” and that “the syndicalism of the Romance countries” was committed to “anti-parliamentarism” due to its “anarchistic origin.”[999]
Despite the connection between the politics of revolutionary syndicalism and the collectivists of the First International, a growing number of syndicalist anarchists came to believe that the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT was not sufficient to achieve a social revolution that would abolish class society and build an anarchist society. These critics came to embrace either syndicalism-plus or anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchists who advocated syndicalism-plus agreed with revolutionary syndicalists that trade unions should be politically neutral but explicitly rejected the idea that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. They held that anarchists had to both actively participate within the trade union movement and at the same time maintain an independent existence by organizing outside trade unions within specific anarchist organizations. For proponents of syndicalism-plus, these specific anarchist organizations were essential for spreading anarchist values, theory, and practices among the working classes both in and outside of trade unions. They argued, in short, that revolutionaries should create a syndicalist trade union plus a specific anarchist organization. The details of this position will be discussed in chapter 10 as part of my overview of organizational dualism.
Anarcho-syndicalists, unlike proponents of revolutionary syndicalism and syndicalism-plus, believed that trade unions should not be politically neutral, and had to instead be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. This typically took the form of trade unions advocating an anarchist society as their end goal, and opposing state socialist strategies and political parties within the union’s constitution, declaration of principles, or congress resolutions. Some anarcho-syndicalists argued that specific anarchist organizations should be formed in parallel with anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, while others opposed it.
*** Anarcho-Syndicalism
The phrase “anarcho-syndicalist,” like many left-wing terms, began life as an insult. The earliest known usage of the term occurred in 1907, when some French state socialists used it as a pejorative against revolutionary syndicalists who advocated the independence of trade unions from political parties.[1000] During this same period, anarchists in Argentina and Russia, who do not appear to have been aware of one another’s ideas, came to argue that trade unions should be committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This position was not initially referred to as “anarcho-syndicalism.” On August 26, 1905, the FORA explicitly committed itself to an anarchist program at its fifth congress, which was attended by delegates representing ninety-eight trade unions. It was agreed that “the Fifth Congress of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Argentina consistent with the philosophical principles that have provided the <em>raison d’être</em> of the organization of workers’ federations declares: We advise and recommend to all our followers the broadest possible study and propaganda with the aim of instilling in workers the economic and philosophical principles of anarchist-communism. This education, not content with achieving the eight-hour day, will bring total emancipation and, consequently, the social evolution we pursue.”[1001]
Independently, anarchists in Russia also came to advocate the same approach. A notable example is the South Russian Group of Syndicalist Anarchists, whose membership included factory workers, sailors, dockworkers, bakers, and tailors. Yakob Isaevich Kirillovsky, who was the group’s main theorist and wrote under the pen name Daniil Novomirsky, advocated what would later be called anarcho-syndicalism in his 1907 book <em>The Programme of Syndicalist Anarchism</em>.[1002] He argued that anarchists should participate in the revolutionary trade union movement in order to “make that movement anarchist,” advocating the formation of “anarchist revolutionary syndicates which are bent on bringing syndicalist anarchism to pass.”[1003] It is not a coincidence that, in August 1907, the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist Monatte contrasted the politically “neutral” trade unions he advocated with “anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia.”[1004]
Anarcho-syndicalism continued to be advocated by anarchists a decade later in the Russian revolution. On June 4, 1917, the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda adopted a founding declaration of principles that proclaimed that the social revolution had to be “anti-statist in its method of struggle, Syndicalist in its economic content and federalist in its political tasks,” with “the Anarcho-Communist ideal” as its goal.[1005] The meaning of Russian “anarcho-syndicalism” can also be seen in <em>The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists</em> (1926), which was written by Russian and Ukrainian anarchists who had fled to Germany and then France in order to escape being killed or imprisoned by the Bolshevik government. The <em>Platform</em> carefully distinguishes between “revolutionary syndicalism,” which exists “solely as a trades movement of the toilers possessed of no specific social and political theory,” and “Anarcho-syndicalism,” which advocates “the creation of anarchist-type unions.”[1006]
The term “anarcho-syndicalist” did not immediately catch on and spread outside the Russian anarchist movement. Alexander Schapiro, who had been active within the anarcho-syndicalist movement during the Russian revolution, claimed years later that “when the Russian anarchists nearly a half a century ago pioneered the hoisting of the anarcho-syndicalist colors, the word was rather coldly received by the anarchist movement.”[1007] Anarchists instead continued to refer to their ideas as revolutionary syndicalism, while advocating what Russian anarchists called anarcho-syndicalism.
This can be seen in the resolutions of the 1913 International Syndicalist Congress in London, which was organized in order to establish a revolutionary alternative to the state socialist Second International and the reformist International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centers (ISNTUC). It was attended by delegates representing the major syndicalist trade unions in Europe, including the FVdG, USI, NAS, SAC, ISEL, and the Catalonian Regional Confederation of the CNT. Only a few French trade union sections affiliated with the CGT attended. This was because the CGT supported participating in the much larger ISNTUC in order to radicalize it from within. The congress was not a strictly European affair, and was also attended by delegates representing the COB, the explicitly anarchist FORA, the politically neutral Regional Workers’ Confederation of Argentina, and the Havana Union of Café Employees. According to Schapiro, the thirty-three delegates of the London Congress represented in total roughly sixty local, regional, and national trade unions that had a collective membership of 250,000 members.[1008]
Despite the congress featuring a great deal of personal animosity and conflict between certain delegates, it nonetheless succeeded in passing a declaration of principles and establishing an International Syndicalist Information Bureau based in Amsterdam. The declaration of principles broke with the CGT’s Charter of Amiens and its commitment to political neutrality by endorsing a number of anarchist positions, including the abolition of the state and an opposition to state socialist strategies. It claimed that
<quote>
this Congress, recognizing that the working class of every country suffers from capitalist slavery and State oppression, declares for the class struggle and international solidarity, and for the organization of the workers into autonomous industrial Unions on a basis of free association. Strives for the immediate uplifting of the material and intellectual interests of the working class, and for the overthrow of the capitalist system and the State.… Recognizes that, internationally, Trade Unions will only succeed when they cease to be divided by political and religious differences; declares that their fight is an economic fight, meaning thereby that they do not intend to reach their aim by trusting their cause to governing bodies or their members, but by using Direct Action, by workers themselves relying on the strength of their economic organizations.… Congress appeals to the workers of all countries to organize into autonomous industrial unions, and to unite themselves on the basis of international solidarity, in order finally to obtain their emancipation from capitalism and the State.[1009]
</quote>
From 1919 onward, multiple syndicalist trade unions moved in an increasingly anarcho-syndicalist direction. The idea that it was necessary to commit trade unions to an explicitly anarchist program largely gained popularity in reaction to a wider international context. The politically neutral CGT had, in contrast to the majority of the anarchist movement, recently abandoned its commitment to working-class internationalism and collaborated with the French state in World War I. Around the same time, a one-party Bolshevik dictatorship was established during the 1917 Russian revolution, which proceeded to dismantle organs of workers’ control and violently repress other forms of socialism—including anarchism—in order to maintain a system of minority rule. This created a situation in which many anarchists felt compelled to ensure that trade unions were opposed to state socialist strategies, and were not taken over by Bolshevik supporters.[1010]
Although the CNT had been founded in 1910, it was not originally committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This began to change in late 1918, when the National Conference of Anarchist Groups called on anarchists in Spain to actively participate in the CNT and take on positions of responsibility within the trade union, such as delegates within committees.[1011] The CNT passed a resolution at its December 1919 Second Congress, held at the La Comedia Theater in Madrid, that declared that the CNT was “a staunch advocate of the principles of the First International as upheld by Bakunin.”[1012] A number of key delegates, including the organization’s national committee, went further and signed a declaration of principles that was unanimously approved by the congress:
<quote>
Bearing in mind that the tendency most strongly manifested in the bosom of workers’ organizations in every country is the one aiming at the complete and absolute moral, economic and political liberation of mankind, and considering that this goal cannot be attained until such time as the land, means of production and exchange have been socialized and the overweening power of the state has vanished, the undersigned delegates suggest that, in accordance with the essential postulates of the First International, it declares the desired end of the CNT to be anarchist communism.[1013]
</quote>
That same month, the FVdG transformed itself into the FAUD at its Twelfth Congress, attended by 109 delegates representing over 110,000 members. As part of this transformation, the FAUD asked Rocker, recently released from the British internment camp where he had been imprisoned for opposing World War I, to write a new declaration of principles for the organization. Rocker’s speech on the principles of syndicalism, which was passed by the congress with minor changes, contained what would become the defining features of anarcho-syndicalism.[1014] Although Rocker presented himself as just describing what syndicalists believe, he was in fact articulating a specific understanding of syndicalism that was not shared by everybody who used the label.
According to Rocker the aim of syndicalism is the creation of “free, i.e. stateless, communism, which finds its expression in the motto ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’”[1015] He not only claimed that syndicalists should aim for an anarchist society, but also that they should use anarchist means to get there. He described syndicalists as advocates of revolutionary trade unionism, direct action, and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This went alongside a rejection of trying to build socialism through parliamentarism, the conquest of state power, and the nationalization of the economy. These anarchist strategies were explicitly grounded by Rocker in the unity of means and ends. He wrote, “syndicalists are firmly grounded in direct action and support all endeavors and struggles of the people that do not conflict with their goals – the abolition of economic monopolies and of the tyranny of the state.”[1016]
The final shift toward the theory of anarcho-syndicalism as an idea, but not yet as a label, occurred with the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), at an illegal congress held in Berlin between December 25, 1922, and January 2, 1923. The congress was attended by over thirty delegates representing an estimated 1.5 to 2 million workers within various trade unions around the world. This included the FAUD, SAC, FORA-V, USI, and NAS as well as the Mexican General Confederation of Workers (CGT-M), Norwegian Syndicalist Federation (NSF), Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS) and Danish Syndicalist Propaganda Association. The delegates representing the CNT were arrested in Paris while traveling to Berlin, and so were unable to attend. The Portuguese General Confederation of Labor (CGT-P) sent a written endorsement. The delegates representing the Chilean Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-C) and FORU arrived too late to participate in the congress.[1017]
The congress adopted a declaration of ten principles of “revolutionary syndicalism,” which had been agreed upon at a previous conference in June and were written by Rocker. The principles, which Rocker had based on his earlier speech in 1919 at the founding congress of the FAUD, committed the IWMA to an anarcho-syndicalist program in all but name.[1018] This occurred as part of syndicalist anarchists formally breaking with the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), which was affiliated with the Bolshevik-led Communist Third International, after the congresses of the RILU and Comintern declared themselves in favor of core state-socialist tenets that syndicalist anarchists could not subscribe to. Those tenets included parliamentarism, the seizure of state power by a Communist Party, joining reformist unions, centralization, and the subordination of trade unions to Communist parties.[1019]
The IWMA’s declaration of principles were, unlike those of the RILU and Comintern, explicitly in favor of the anarchist goal of “free communism” and the establishment of “economic communes and administrative organs run by the workers in the fields and factories, forming a system of free councils without subordination to any authority or political party.”[1020] This goal was to be achieved through anarchist means: the activity of workers themselves, direct action, the general strike, and freely federated, bottom-up organizational structures. The state socialist strategies of parliamentary activity and conquering political power were explicitly rejected because “no form of statism, even the so-called ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ can ever be an instrument for human liberation… on the contrary, it will always be the creator of new monopolies and new privileges.”[1021] The “defense of the revolution” would “be the task of the masses themselves and their economic organizations, and not of a particular military body, or any other organization, outside of the economic associations.”[1022]
After its founding congress, a total of thirty trade unions affiliated with the IWMA. Of these, fifteen were from Europe, fourteen were from Latin America, and one was from Asia. Within Europe, this included the FAUD, USI, SAC, NSF, CNT, and CGT-P. They were joined by the Dutch Syndicalist Federation (NSV), which split from the NAS in 1923, and the French Revolutionary Syndicalist General Confederation of Labor (CGTSR), which split from the United General Confederation of Labor in 1926. Other European sections included the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalist Minority; Bulgarian Federation of Autonomous Unions; Polish Trade Union Opposition, Romanian anarcho-syndicalist propaganda organization; and anarcho-syndicalist groups in Austria, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland. In Latin America, the FORA-V, CGT-M, IWW-C, and FORU affiliated in 1923–4. This was followed by the affiliation of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Paraguay (FORP), and various workers’ federations in Brazil, including those based in Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo.[1023] Several propaganda groups or local unions in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Costa Rica, and El Salvador also affiliated. The American IWW did not affiliate with the IWMA, despite multiple requests to do so, and the support of various sections, including the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.[1024]
The one trade union in Asia that affiliated with the IWMA was the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions. It had, according to Rocker, “entered into formal alliance with the IWMA” and “held connections with the Bureau of the IWMA in Berlin.”[1025] The IWMA also maintained contact with anarchist groups in China and India. The founding December 1922 Berlin congress of the IWMA had itself been attended by a group of Indian revolutionaries, including M.P.T. Acharya. Having been persuaded of the truth of anarchism, they set up a committee to send anarcho-syndicalist literature into India. The British empire responded by banning the importation of IWMA literature into the country.[1026]
It was only after the founding of the IWMA that anarchists within Europe began to call themselves anarcho-syndicalists on a significant scale. This shift in language can be seen in the fact that, in 1925, Malatesta felt the need to critique what he called “Anarcho-Syndicalists” within the periodical <em>Pensiero e Volontà</em>.[1027] In September 1927, Fabbri distinguished between “a labor organization open to all workers, and thereby having no particular ideological program” and “the anarcho-syndicalists in Germany and Russia” who advocate a “labor organization which has an anarchist program, tactics and ideology.”[1028] A year later, the French anarchist Sébastien Faure wrote a text advocating a synthesis of the different forms of anarchism, and included “anarcho-syndicalism” as one of the three main “anarchist currents.”[1029] Valeriano Orobón Fernández, who worked within the secretariat of the IWMA from 1926 to 1931, wrote a letter to Ángel Pestaña on August 9, 1930, claiming:
<quote>
The evolution of politics following the war has spelt the end of the syndical neutrality of the Amiens Charter. In the whole world there is not a syndicalist organization existing today that does not practice politics, either directly or as an appendage of a political party. The CNT brought itself up to date with this international trend, adopting at the congress at La Comedia [Madrid 1919] an ideological platform, and, at the Zaragoza conference, a political platform. The CNT is therefore a complete organization. Whereas pure syndicalism is not “sufficient in itself,” anarcho-syndicalism clearly is.[1030]
</quote>
It is important to note that this shift in language did not occur everywhere at once. In France, the CGTSR was founded in 1926 after a series of splits within the CGT. Its founding declaration of principles, the Lyon Charter, explicitly committed the trade union to opposition to political parties. Despite this, members of the organization referred to themselves as “revolutionary syndicalists” or “federalist anti-statist revolutionary syndicalists,” rather than “anarcho-syndicalist,” until 1937.[1031] That year, Pierre Besnard, who was the secretary of the CGTSR, publicly used the term “anarcho-syndicalist” for the first time to describe the ideology of the trade union he belonged to.[1032] During his speech, he stated that “Anarcho-Syndicalism is an organizational and organized movement. It draws its doctrine from Anarchism and its organizational format from Revolutionary Syndicalism.”[1033]
The view that anarcho-syndicalism was the synthesis of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist modes of organization was repeated and popularized by Rocker in his 1938 book <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em>, but with one major difference. Unlike Besnard, Rocker did not specify that he was describing what it is for an organization or movement to be anarcho-syndicalist. He instead wrote as if he was describing anarcho-syndicalism as a set of ideas such that an anarcho-syndicalist is anyone who advocates both anarchist theory and syndicalist organizational structures, rather than the position that trade unions should have a syndicalist organizational structure and be committed to an anarchist program.[1034] This had the effect that the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism was blurred, because if anarcho-syndicalism is an ideology based on the combination of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist forms of organization, then anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists, such as Pouget, could now be viewed as anarcho-syndicalists. Doing so would be a mistake, due to the important debates and differences between revolutionary syndicalist anarchists, who advocated politically neutral trade unions, and anarcho-syndicalists, who advocated explicitly anarchist trade unions.
Rocker not only blurred the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote that “Anarcho-Syndicalism had maintained its hold upon organized labor [within Spain] from the days of the First International” and in so doing anachronistically imposed anarcho-syndicalism as a category onto the prehistory of syndicalism before the term and idea had been formed.[1035] Rocker’s 1946 essay, “Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism,” which is an abridged and slightly revised version of <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em>, only made things more unclear for future generations. He repeated his previous claim that anarcho-syndicalism is a synthesis of anarchist theory and syndicalist modes of organization, but then goes on to equate the two by writing that “Revolutionary Syndicalism… was later called, Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[1036]
Rocker’s claim was technically correct in the sense that the organizations he belonged to, the FAUD and the IWMA, did initially call themselves revolutionary syndicalists while advocating anarcho-syndicalism as an idea and then, as language evolved, switched to calling themselves anarcho-syndicalists. This can be seen in the fact that Rocker himself referred to “syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the FAUD in 1919 and “revolutionary syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the IWMA in 1922. By 1938, his language had shifted. He now referred to the trade unions that formed the IWMA, including the FAUD, as the representatives of “MODERN Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[1037] Unfortunately, twenty-first-century readers of Rocker have often been unaware of these historical details and have misunderstood both the origins and nature of anarcho-syndicalism, and how it differed from the revolutionary syndicalism of politically neutral trade unions like the CGT. It should also be noted that sections of the IWMA continued to have members who did not identify as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists.
[936] George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain</em>, <em>1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118; Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 104; Errico Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 170, 172, 338, 463.
[937] Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe From the Charte d’Amiens to World War One,” in <em>New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational</em>, ed. David Berry and Constance Bantman (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 25–26.
[938] Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, “The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective</em>, ed Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 1–2; Lucien van der Walt, “Syndicalism” in <em>The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism</em>, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 249–50.
[939] The language of “syndicalism-plus” was coined by Iain McKay, “Communism and Syndicalism,” Anarchist Writers website, May 25, 2012. [[http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/communism-syndicalism]]. Thanks to McKay for suggesting this phrase to me.
[940] César De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International” in <em>Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later</em>, ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 128.
[941] De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International,” 128–29.
[942] Raymond W. Postgate, ed. “Debates and Resolutions of the First International on The Control of Industry,” in <em>Revolution from 1789 to 1906</em> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 393–94.
[943] César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869]].
[944] Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 193; Musto, ed. <em>Workers Unite</em>, 138n28.
[945] Adhémar Schwitzguébel, “On Resistance Funds,” in <em>Workers Unite!</em>, 138–39.
[946] Julian P. W. Archer, *The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact* (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 166–75; *Robert Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement* (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 117–19.
[947] Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” in <em>Workers Unite!</em>, 133.
[948] Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” 133.
[949] Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies,” trans. Iain McKay, Anarchist Writers website, October 6, 2018. [[https://anarchism.pageabode.com/precursors-of-syndicalism]].
[950] Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies.”
[951] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 56.
[952] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 56.
[953] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 56.
[954] Quoted in Max Nettlau, <em>A Short History of Anarchism</em>, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 122.
[955] Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, *The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association* (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 54.
[956] Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 159–60.
[957] “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September 1872,” in Appendix to René Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 182.
[958] “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress,” 182–83.
[959] “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, <em>Social Democracy and Anarchism</em>, 190–91.
[960] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 56. Malatesta appears to have previously opposed participating in trade unions at the 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. It is unclear when he changed his mind, because most of the articles he wrote in this period are currently untranslated. See Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 229.
[961] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 294.
[962] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 299.
[963] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 299.
[964] Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology</em>, 80–4. The trade union was forced to suspend its activities in 1884 in response to state repression and was replaced by a new organization in 1888. See ibid., 84–97, 117–22.
[965] Paul Avrich, <em>The Haymarket Tragedy</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 72–73, 89–92, 181–88.
[966] Carl Levy, <em>Gramsci and the Anarchists</em> (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 19–20; Antonio Senta, <em>Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 18–19, 24–29.
[967] Ángel J. Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 52, 56, 116–18, 120–1, 172–73, 203–5, 273–76; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., <em>Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World</em>, <em>1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation</em>, <em>Internationalism</em>, <em>and Social Revolution</em> (Leiden: Brill, 2010), xl–xliii; Frank Fernández, <em>Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement</em>, trans. Charles Bufe (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 19–29, 40–41; John M. Hart, <em>Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class 1860–1931</em> (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 46–59, 75–80, 83–84.
[968] Constance Bantman, “From Trade Unionism to Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire to Syndicalism: The British Origins of French Syndicalism” in <em>New Perspectives on Anarchism</em>, <em>Labour and Syndicalism</em>, 128–132; Constance Bantman, <em>The French Anarchists in London</em>, <em>1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation</em> (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 40–41; Bantman, “The Militant Go-between: Émile Pouget’s Transnational Propaganda (1880–1914),” <em>Labour History Review</em> 74, no. 3 (2009): 279–80; Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution</em>, <em>1889–1900</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 36–42; Henry Pelling, <em>A History of British Trade Unionism</em>, 5<sup>th</sup> ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 94–96.
[969] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 76–77.
[970] Vadim Damier, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13; F. F. Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 20–23, 65, 74–75; Jeremy Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990), 11; Fernand Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 409.
[971] Kropotkin <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 317–39.
[972] Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 24–26; Turcato, <em>Making Sense</em>, 134–35; Bantman, “The British Origins of French Syndicalism,” 132–35.
[973] Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” 409–15. See also Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, [[https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle]].
[974] Quoted in David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 24.
[975] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 90. For Goldman’s in-depth description of her visit to Paris in 1900, see Emma Goldman, <em>Living My Life</em>, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 264–80, 401. Her views on syndicalism were also influenced by her later visit to Paris in 1907. See ibid., 406–07.
[976] Wayne Thorpe, <em>“The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour 1913–1923</em> (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 25. For details see Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France</em>, 63–71; Phil H. Goodstein, <em>The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland</em> (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 53–59; Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, [[https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget]].
[977] Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France</em>, 77–79.
[978] Damier, <em>Anarcho-</em>Syndicalism, 15; Wayne Thorpe, <em>“The Workers Themselves,”</em> 26–27. For an in-depth overview of reformist syndicalism, see Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 114–40.
[979] Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 24, 138, 145–46; Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 32n37. According to Joll, anarchists only seriously influenced the CGT “for ten or fifteen years” and had little influence within the CGT after 1914. James Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London: Methuen, 1969), 216.
[980] Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves, 27; Jennings, Syndicalism in France</em>, 137.
[981] Quoted in A.W. Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918</em> (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 42.
[982] Quoted in Zurbrugg, <em>Anarchist Perspectives</em>, 42.
[983] Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France, 134, 137–140; Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France</em>, 88–94, 180.
[984] Nicholas Papayanis, <em>Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925</em> (Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 39–41, 44–45.
[985] Quoted in Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 30–31.
[986] Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”
[987] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 115.
[988] Antonioli, ed. <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 115.
[989] Émile Pouget, “The Basis of Trade Unionism,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, [[https://libcom.org/article/basis-trade-unionism-emile-pouget]].
[990] For a broad overview of these movements see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective</em> (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990).
[991] Damier, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century</em>, 34–37, 57–63; Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em>, 165, 173–74, 284–85; Hirsch and van der Walt, eds., <em>Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial Worl</em>d; Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., <em>Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW</em>, (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
[992] Kenyon Zimmer, <em>Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 75–79, 83–87.
[993] Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em>, 51–65; Juan Suriano, *Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires,* 1890–1910 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 14–16.
[994] Quoted in Angel Smith, <em>Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1989–1923</em> (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 142n44.
[995] Quoted in A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 129. For details about how syndicalism became the dominant position in Spain during the early 1900s, see James Yeoman, <em>Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915</em> (New York: Routledge, 2020), 198–249.
[996] Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”
[997] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 122.
[998] Quoted in Nettlau, <em>Short History</em>, 279. See also Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 392, 403–11; Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 52–3; Maxim Raevsky, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 1–2.
[999] Karl Kautsky, <em>Road to Power</em> (Chicago: Samuel A. Bloch, 1909), 61, 95.
[1000] Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family,” 17n2. It has been alleged by Albert Meltzer that the term was first coined by the Welsh anarchist Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907) in order to distinguish between British syndicalists, who did not think of themselves as anarchists, and syndicalists in continental Europe who self-identified as anarchists. He does not provide a source or a date for when this occurred. I have been unable to verify this claim or determine, if true, what Mainwaring meant by anarcho-syndicalism. Meltzer claimed he was told the information by Emma Goldman. See Albert Meltzer, <em>The Anarchists in London, 1935–1955</em> (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976), 10; Kenneth John, “Anti-Parliamentary Passage: South Wales and the Internationalism of Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907)” (PhD diss., University of Greenwich, 2001), 109–10.
[1001] Quoted in Cappelletti, <em>Anarchism in Latin America</em>, 64. In 1915, there was a split within the FORA between the FORA-V, which remained committed to the anarchist program of the fifth congress, and the FORA-IX, which endorsed a politically neutral program. See ibid., 66–68, 74.
[1002] Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 76–78; Paul Avrich, <em>The Russian Anarchists</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 61–62, 77–78; Daniil Novomirsky, <em>Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme</em>, trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3bk4c0]]. In these translations, the phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” is used. This is an error. In the original Russian only the phrase “syndicalist anarchism” appears. Thanks to Kenyon Zimmer for showing this to me.
[1003] Quoted in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 77; Novomirsky, <em>Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme</em>. In Skirda, the Russian for “revolutionary trade union” has been translated as “revolutionary syndicalist movement.” To avoid potential confusion with revolutionary syndicalism in the distinct CGT sense, I have decided to alter the translation. See also N. Rogdaev, “On the Anarchist Movement in Russia,” in <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam</em>, 191.
[1004] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 115.
[1005] Golos Truda, “Declaration of the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda,” in <em>The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution</em>, ed. Paul Avrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 71. For the history of anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian revolution, see Avrich, <em>Russian Anarchists</em>, 135–51, 185, 190–95; Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 98–100, 163–64.
[1006] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 204.
[1007] Alexander Schapiro, “Introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, [[https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism]]. For an overview of Schapiro’s activity during the Russian revolution, see Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 238–44.
[1008] Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 53–80. The CNT as a national organization could not attend the congress because it had been made illegal in 1911 and was still in the process of reorganizing itself.
[1009] “The London Declaration (1913),” in Appendix to Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 320.
[1010] Damier, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 43–46, 64–84. For details about the CGT and World War I, including the minority within the CGT who remained internationalists, see Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 161–67; Nicholas Papayanis, <em>Alphonse Merrheim</em>, 85–110.
[1011] Juan Gómez Casas, <em>Anarchists Organization: The History of the F.A.I</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 56; Stuart Christie, *We, the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937* (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 7–11.
[1012] Quoted in José Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 10. For more information on the La Comedia Congress, see Casas, <em>The History of the F.A.I</em>, 57–60; A. Smith, <em>Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction</em>, 313–15
[1013] Quoted in Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 8–9. The CNT’s commitment to achieving libertarian communism was reaffirmed at the 1924 Granollers Congress where 236 delegates voted in favor and only one against. See Christie, <em>We, the Anarchists</em>, 25.
[1014] Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 120–23; Rudolf Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” trans. Cord-Christian Casper, Academia.edu website, [[https://www.academia.edu/39134774/Rudolf_Rocker_Syndicalist_Declaration_of_Principles]]. For an account of his imprisonment, see Rudolf Rocker, <em>The London Years</em> (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 142–215.
[1015] Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.
[1016] Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3.
[1017] For an overview of the congress see Jason Garner, <em>Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 113–27; Thorpe, *Workers Themselves*, 244–56, 313n13.
[1018] Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 126, 306n52; Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 120–23, 224–26, 253.
[1019] Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, chapters 3–7. For overviews of the congresses of the Comintern and RILU, see ibid., 100–106, 132–45, 181–94.
[1020] IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, <em>From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)</em>, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418, 416. This version of the text refers to “libertarian communism.” I have altered the translation because Rocker in fact used the term “free communism” in the 1922 declaration, the 1920 Berlin declaration, and the 1919 speech at the founding of the FAUD it was based on. This is significant because “libertarian” means anarchist, while “free communism” could potentially be supported by people who identified as syndicalists but not anarchists. See Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 321, 322; Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.
[1021] IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 416–17.
[1022] IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 418.
[1023] Thorpe mistakenly claims that the Regional Workers’ Federation of Brazil affiliated. An organization with this name was founded in 1905 but changed its name to the Workers’ Federation of Rio de Janeiro after the founding of the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. The COB ceased to exist in 1915. Some surviving regional federations of the COB went onto affiliate with the IWMA. Thanks to Maurício Knevitz for explaining this to me.
[1024] Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 256–67; Thorpe, “The IWW and the Dilemmas of Internationalism” in <em>Wobblies of the World</em>, 105–123.
[1025] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 104, 115. See also Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, 267.
[1026] Ole Birk Laursen, “‘Anarchism, Pure and Simple’: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement,” <em>Postcolonial Studies</em> 23, no. 2 (2020): 1, 7.
[1027] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 464.
[1028] Luigi Fabbri, “About a Project of Anarchist Organization,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., [[https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/about-a-project-for-anarchist-organization-luigi-fabbri]].
[1029] Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828]].
[1030] Quoted in Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 151. For biographical information on Fernández, see ibid., 314n37. The phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” appears to have only become popular in Spain in the late 1920s. See Frank Mintz, <em>Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 286; Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 64.
[1031] Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 150–53.
[1032] Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 152.
[1033] Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, [[https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism]].
[1034] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 54.
[1035] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 60.
[1036] Rocker, <em>Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 5–6, 25, 31.
[1037] Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3–4; IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,<em>”</em> 416–18; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 54.Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism
** Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism
All forms of syndicalist anarchism argued that workers should form federally structured trade unions that engaged in direct action and were independent of political parties. It was believed that, in order to achieve working-class self-emancipation, these syndicalist trade unions had to pursue the <em>double aim</em> of winning immediate improvements in the present, and overthrowing capitalism and the state via a social revolution in the long term. These unions also had a <em>dual function</em>. Under present conditions, they performed the function of engaging in class struggle against the ruling classes. During the social revolution, they would expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes and take over the organization of the economy in part or whole. In so doing, they would acquire the new function of being the organs through which the self-management of production and distribution occurred. This social revolution could be initiated by workers launching an insurrectionary general strike.
*** The Double Aim of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions
Syndicalist anarchists held that trade union activity should have two main goals. These were: (a) defending and advancing the interests of the working classes within existing society and (b) preparing for and ultimately carrying out a social revolution that abolishes capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[1038] For Pouget, “trade union endeavor has a double aim: with tireless persistence, it must pursue betterment of the working class’s current conditions. But, without letting themselves become obsessed with this passing concern, the workers should take care to make possible and imminent the essential act of comprehensive emancipation: the expropriation of capital.”[1039]
Syndicalist anarchism, therefore, like mass anarchism in general, sought to win immediate reforms in the interests of the working classes—such as shorter working hours, better pay, and improved conditions—force the ruling classes to actually implement previously won reforms, and protect these previously won reforms from encroachment by the ruling classes. Crucially, syndicalist anarchists held that reforms had to be achieved, enforced, and protected through the direct action of the working classes. Even reforms that involved changes to the law had to be achieved “through outside pressure brought to bear upon the authorities and not by trying to return specially mandated deputies to Parliament.”[1040]
This strategy generally, but not always, involved a rejection of the iron law of wages, which held that under capitalism real wages would always tend toward the amount required to secure the subsistence of the worker due to either population growth decreasing the value of labor, or higher wages being neutralized by increased costs of living. Pouget labeled it as “illusory” and “false,” because it was empirically untrue, and ignored the fact that increased living costs were themselves a product of class struggle, such as those between landlords and tenants.[1041] Malatesta argued against the iron law of wages on the grounds that between the minimum limit of a worker being paid enough to survive and the maximum limit of a capitalist earning some profit, “wages, hours and other conditions of employment are the result of the struggle between bosses and workers” and so could be changed through collective action.[1042]
Pouget and Malatesta’s position was not shared by all syndicalist anarchists. Pelloutier, for example, opposed partial strikes; he subscribed to the iron law of wages while still being a syndicalist, because he advocated revolutionary trade unionism as the means to overthrow class society.[1043] Others held that, although any increase in wages would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living, partial strikes were nonetheless important and should be encouraged due to their transformative effect on workers. A 1900 article by Delesalle’s for <em>Les Temps Nouveaux</em> argued that, while any increase in wages would only be temporary due to the iron law, a strike would still promote “a state of rebellion,” develop class consciousness, and “could be the spark that heralds the revolution.”[1044]
The main forms of direct action that syndicalist anarchists advocated to achieve reforms were strikes, boycotts, and sabotage. By sabotage, syndicalist anarchists meant “workers putting every possible obstacle in the way of the ordinary modes of work.”[1045] This included such tactics as working slowly, strictly following legislation or contracts in order to reduce productivity and, at its most militant, damaging machinery or infrastructure so that strike breakers could not continue production.
This strategy of struggling for reforms through militant tactics was put into practice on multiple occasions by syndicalist trade unions. In 1904 the CGT agreed at its congress in Bourges to campaign for the eight-hour day, which workers had unsuccessfully been petitioning for since 1889. Instead of begging the state to grant this reform, the CGT, following Pouget’s suggestion, decided that they should try to force the ruling classes to give in to their demands by engaging in direct action: workers were to either cease work after eight hours, or go on strike until their demands were met. The CGT selected May 1, 1906, as the day of action and proceeded to prepare for the coming struggle over the next two years. This included holding union meetings and distributing posters with revolutionary messages in order to persuade workers to participate in the movement. How much energy was devoted by the CGT to this campaign can be seen in the fact that during December 1905 alone ten famous syndicalist militants organized conferences in eighty cities.
The French state unsurprisingly responded to the campaign with repression. On the eve of the strike, key delegates, including Griffuelhes, Pouget, Alphonse Merrheim (secretary of the Federation of Metalworkers), and Gaston Lévy (the CGT treasurer), were arrested and jailed for a few days, after the minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau, claimed to have discovered a nonexistent plot by syndicalists, anarchists, monarchists, and right-wing Catholics to overthrow the Republic. Clemenceau, in addition to this, moved 60,000 soldiers into Paris. Despite this state violence, the strike went ahead and on May 1, 1906, the CGT publicly demanded that the French state reduce the legal working day to eight hours. The next day, the CGT launched a national general strike. The general strike was composed of 295 separate strikes at 12,585 businesses, which demanded a reduction to the workday. A total of roughly 200,000 workers participated in this direct action. Some of the strikes lasted over a hundred days. Only 10,177 workers out of 202,507 succeeded in forcing a capitalist to grant them any reduction to the workday. Despite this, the general strike was not a total defeat. On July 13, 1906, France’s political ruling class responded to the pressure from below by passing a law granting workers a mandatory day off work once per week. Although the CGT continued to campaign for the eight-hour day over the following years, it was not granted to the French working classes until April 1919—as part of the French government’s successful attempt to prevent anything like the ongoing Russian revolution from happening in France.[1046]
The CGT was not unique in attempting to wrestle reforms from the ruling classes through direct action. In February 1919, the CNT’s Catalan Regional Confederation (CRT) organized a strike at the Barcelona offices of the Anglo-American electricity company Ebro Power and Irrigation. This action was launched by the CNT, in response to the company firing workers for attempting to form a union.[1047] When the company refused to give in to the workers’ demands for higher wages and the reinstatement of all the workers who had been fired, the CNT escalated the struggle and organized a strike at the company’s electricity generating plant. This resulted in Barcelona being plunged into darkness, and trams being stranded in the street unable to move. The strike soon grew to include most of the city’s gas, water, and electricity workers when, on February 26, they voted to strike in retaliation to the Spanish state sending in the military to restore the power supply. They were subsequently joined by solidarity strikes outside of Barcelona, in Sabadell, Vilafranca, and Badalona.
On March 8, the Spanish state responded to the growing strike movement by militarizing the gas, water, and electricity workers who were army reservists subject to military law. The workers were then given the choice between breaking the strike by returning to work or being confined to the barracks as punishment. This state violence did not dampen the strike, which expanded to include tram workers and carters who transported essential supplies such as coal. They, like the gas, water, and electricity workers before them, were soon militarized as well. Almost none of these militarized workers betrayed their class interests by returning to work and, in response, the Spanish state imprisoned 800 of them in the fortress of Montjuïc, in Barcelona. These workers were supported in their struggle by the printers’ union, which refused to publish any of the Spanish state’s proclamations calling up workers for military service or articles in the press opposed to the strike. This even included an announcement by the managers of Ebro Power and Irrigation that declared that workers who did not return to their job by March 6 would be fired. Workers who wanted to learn about the strike could instead read the CNT’s daily <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, which published articles informing readers of the latest news.
Throughout the strike, the CNT sought to win its demands by mobilizing large groups of workers in order to impose unbearable pressure on the company and the state via direct action. This included workers implementing syndicalist tactics by sabotaging the transformers and power cables used by the company to try and restore power to the city, and thereby break the strike. By early March, the CNT’s strike committee were, as a result of this working-class militancy, in a position where they could negotiate with the ruling classes. They successfully forced Ebro Power and Irrigation to increase wages, pay workers’ wages for the period they had been on strike, recognize the union, grant an eight-hour day, and reinstate workers who had lost their jobs due to participation in the strike. The CNT not only issued demands to the economic ruling class, but also demanded that the Spanish state release all prisoners who had been arrested for engaging in class struggle. If the state did not do so in seventy-two hours, the CNT threatened to relaunch the strike.
In response to the general strike, the Spanish prime minster, Álvaro de Figueroa, attempted to soothe the working classes by decreeing the eight-hour day in the construction industry on March 11, which was later expanded to include all industries on April 3. The CNT had previously agreed to struggle for the eight-hour day at its founding 1910 congress. They achieved this goal in nine years through direct action alone.[1048] Despite this great victory, the CNT decided to launch another general strike on March 24 (the resolution was passed by one vote) in response to the electricity, gas, and water companies not allowing all the strikers to return to work immediately, and the Spanish state refusing to free a number of workers imprisoned in Montjuïc—including the CNT’s general secretary Manuel Buenacasa. This time, the Spanish state was ready, and retaliated swiftly to the general strike by imposing martial law, closing all CNT union headquarters, arresting key anarchist militants, and censoring the press. Following this wave of state repression, the CNT was forced to call for a return to work on April 7, 1919.
Both the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and the CNT’s strike against Ebro Power and Irrigation illustrate the general tendency for syndicalist trade unions to focus on struggling for reforms through organizing workers at the point of production. In response to this tendency, there were multiple attempts in both theory and practice to expand the scope of syndicalist action from the workplace to the wider community. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Joan Peiró argued that the CNT had focused too much on strikes in workplaces, and should establish district committees that organized collective action around any issue facing the working classes, thereby fostering direct action on a mass scale.[1049] This same conclusion was reached in a January 1931 article for the CNT’s <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>. It claimed that syndicalists had focused too much on mitigating “the exploitation of the producers,” and in so doing had “almost entirely forgotten to combat exploitation in the field of consumption,” such as landlords charging extortionate rent.[1050] Organizing against these other forms of exploitation was not only important in and of itself, but also provided an opportunity to radicalize people who might be indifferent to labor struggles, or even oppose union demands when they suffer the negative consequences of prolonged industrial action.
Such community-based direct action was organized by the CNT itself during the Barcelona rent strike of July 1931.[1051] The strike grew out of previous rent strikes that had been independently organized by workers in October 1930. This movement then gained the support of the Economic Defense Commission, which had been created by the CNT’s Construction Workers’ Union on April 12, 1931, in order to study the living expenses of workers and examine ways they could be reduced. The Construction Union’s concern with these topics stemmed from the fact that 12,000 of its 30,000 membership were unemployed. On May 1, the commission presented its first demand to a large CNT meeting: a 40 percent reduction in rent. This demand, alongside proposals for combating unemployment and high food prices, was then announced to the wider public through a series of articles in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> that appeared over May 12, 13, and 15. At the end of June and the beginning of July, the commission held a series of meetings in working-class areas of Barcelona and nearby towns, where workers, a significant number of whom were women, were informed of the campaign and heard speeches attacking landlords as thieves.
These meetings were followed by a mass rally on July 5, where the following three demands were agreed upon: (a) that the extra month’s rent demanded by landlords from new tenants as security should be taken as normal rent such that new tenants had to pay no more during the month of July; (b) that rent should be reduced by 40 percent; and (c) that unemployed people should not have to pay any rent. If landlords refused to reduce the rent, workers would respond by announcing that they were going on rent strike as part of a wider movement, and pay nothing.
The rent strike rapidly grew after its launch and expanded from 45,000 workers in July to over 100,000 in August. The ruling classes responded in late July by banning public meetings of the Economic Defense Commission and evicting workers with the assistance of the police. The tenants organized protests to prevent evictions, reoccupying houses after the eviction had taken place, moving evicted workers to the homes of other CNT members, and marching on the homes of landlords in order to warn them not to reevict tenants. One eviction in early October was prevented by a crowd of pregnant women and children, whom the police officer in charge decided not to attack. Other women protesting evictions were less fortunate, such as those who were charged by eighty police officers on October 21. The rent strike was eventually defeated between November and December, as a result of the state arresting any worker who resisted evictions or returned to their home after eviction. Despite this, it did succeed in bringing many workers into the anarchist movement, and thereby laid the foundation for future mobilizations. The rent strike even continued in some areas, such as in the La Torrassa neighborhood; rent strikers at the end of 1932 attacked the police, seized some of their weapons and attempted to burn down the local office of the chamber of urban property, which was the main landlord association in Barcelona, and had actively encouraged repression of the rent strike.
One of the main driving forces behind attempts to expand the scope of syndicalist action beyond the workplace were women within trade unions struggling simultaneously against both class and gender oppression. This can be seen in the FAUD’s Syndicalist Women’s Union (SFB), which was created by and for women in 1920. One of the cofounders of the group was the Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Milly Witkop-Rocker, whose romantic partner was Rudolf Rocker. In 1922 Witkop-Rocker argued in her pamphlet <em>What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?</em> that “the organization of women on the basis of anarcho-syndicalism is as necessary as the organization of male workers on the same basis.… Wherever there is a syndicalist organization, an attempt must be made to create one of women, so that the sections of the syndicalist women’s federation will cover the whole country like a net.”[1052] The main goal of the syndicalist women’s federation was to persuade women to participate in the union, especially those who were full-time housewives not employed as wage laborers, and to develop their consciousness such that they became anarchists. To this end Witkop-Rocker advocated the formation of women’s-only groups that organized a range of activities. This included mutual aid, artistic pursuits, cooking, and educational clubs equipped with libraries, “where the comrades can meet anytime to read or to speak on important issues, and where they can bring their children, if necessary.”[1053] This would have the consequence that women, who were often isolated from one another within their respective homes, would be brought closer together, establish bonds of solidarity with one another, and, through their participation in the union, develop a spirit of independence and personal initiative that they did not have before due to their patriarchal socialization. It was important to organize housewives not only to further the emancipation of women, but also because they could support strikes by boycotting a particular company.
Witkop-Rocker realized that, in order for women to be able to participate effectively in the workers’ movement, they first had to be emancipated from the crushing toil of housework, giving birth to large numbers of children, and looking after said children. One of the main ways the FAUD and the SFB attempted to contribute toward this emancipation was by organizing around what would today be called reproductive justice. They not only demanded the abolition of laws that criminalized advocating contraception and prohibited abortion, but also held meetings on the “childbearing strike,” educated women about birth control, distributed contraceptives, and either performed illegal abortions or put women in contact with physicians who would. Syndicalist anarchists in Germany did this through participating in, and often becoming prominent members of, public organizations that were neither explicitly anarchist nor syndicalist. This included such organizations as the Reich Association of Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene and the Working Committee of the Free Sexual Reformers Association. A few syndicalist anarchists paid heavily for their actions. For example, the FAUD member Albrecht was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in 1930 because she performed more than a hundred abortions for the local chapter of the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Hygiene.[1054]
Syndicalist anarchists were clearly committed in both theory and practice to achieving, enforcing, and protecting reforms through direct action within both the workplace and the wider community. In line with mass anarchist theory, they did not view the struggle for reforms as an end in and of itself. For Pouget, winning reforms, “far from constituting a goal, can only be considered as a means of stepping up demands and wresting further improvements from capitalism.”[1055] Goldman similarly believed that, although syndicalist anarchism struggles for “immediate gains” and “wrests from the enemy what it can force him to yield,” it ultimately “aims at, and concentrates its energies upon, the complete overthrow of the wage system.”[1056]
Instead of viewing reform and revolution as inherently opposed to one another, syndicalist anarchists viewed struggling for reforms as an evolutionary moment within a process of social change that would eventually culminate in a revolutionary moment. This was because organizing to win immediate improvements under capitalism was the concrete means to generate a mass social movement that was capable of, and driven to, launch a social revolution. Pouget argued that, in order to create an anarchist society, “preparatory work must have drawn together within existing society those elements whose role it will be to make it happen” through “day to day struggles against the current master of production” that undermined the legitimacy and power of capitalists and gradually escalated and intensified to the point where the working classes had developed sufficient “strength and consciousness” to forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[1057] For Pouget, “whenever one analyzes the methods and value of trade union action, the fine distinction between ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ evaporates,” because, when syndicalist trade unions struggle for either, they use the same method: the direct action of the working classes.[1058] Reforms like wage increases are “a reduction in capitalist privileges” and a form of “partial expropriation.”[1059] They are, therefore, a step toward and component of the social transformation that the social revolution will fully bring about.
*** The Dual Function of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions
Syndicalist anarchists were, like anarchists in general, committed to the unity of means and ends. The application of this theory led them to conclude that, in order to successfully overthrow capitalism and the state, trade unions had to be structured in a manner that prefigured the kinds of large-scale organizations that would exist after the social revolution. As the Russian anarchist Gregori Maximoff wrote in 1927, trade unions “must be built on principles which will serve in the future, i.e. on liberty—the autonomy of individuals and organizations—and on equality.”[1060] In order to instantiate these values, trade unions had to be organized through a system of federalism that practiced, to quote Rocker, “free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions.”[1061]
Syndicalist anarchists thought that, in constructing and expanding trade unions that prefigured the future anarchist society, they were literally, in the famous words of the preamble to the 1908 IWW constitution, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”[1062] They held that the trade union had, in addition to its double aim, a dual function. Under capitalism, it performed the function of bringing the working classes together in order to resist the power of the ruling classes through their own direct action. During the social revolution, the trade union would take on a new function by forcefully expropriating the means of production from the ruling classes and establishing federations of workers’ assemblies organized by trade and geographic region. This would be achieved by converting the federations and local sections of the trade union from organizations of economic resistance into organizations of economic administration that self-managed the emerging anarchist economy.[1063]
The idea that trade unions should perform the dual function of resisting dominant institutions in the present, and taking over and organizing the economy in the future, was not invented by syndicalist anarchists during the 1890s and 1900s. It was, as I showed in chapter 8, first advocated during debates within the First International. It continued to be advocated by anarchists years after the congresses of the First International. In 1887, Lucy Parsons, who would later attend the founding convention of the IWW in 1905, claimed that trade unions built under capitalism were the “embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.”[1064] In 1927, Maximoff wrote that “the revolutionary trade union, in the view of the Anarchists, are not only organs of the struggle against the contemporary structure; they are also the cells of the future society.”[1065]
Although syndicalist anarchists thought that trade unions should be the organization through which workers took control of and reorganized the economy, they were not generally committed to the view that trade unions should be the only organs of self-management during and after the social revolution. In 1909, in their fictional account of a successful syndicalist revolution Pouget and Émile Pataud claimed that, in addition to trade unions, village assemblies in the countryside, and community assemblies in urban areas at the level of street, district, and city would be formed. These community assemblies could be attended by anyone, regardless of their occupation, and so brought people together as “inhabitants, and not as producers.”[1066] Meetings “concerned themselves with measures of hygiene and health… [and] took part in the administration of the City. They undertook the work of the moral administration of house property, now proclaimed collective property, and, as a matter of course, placed at the free disposition of all.”[1067] This view was shared by Besnard, who explained in his address to the IWMA in 1937, that “this notion does not at all imply that anarcho-syndicalism—which is, remember, against the State and federalist—means and aims to be <em>everything</em> and that <em>nothing else</em> should exist alongside it.”[1068] It instead aims for self-management in every sphere of life, rather than just the workplace, and as a result, advocates a federation of regional, national, and international communes in parallel to the federation of trade unions.[1069]
The CNT also advocated communes alongside trade unions. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Isaac Puente argued in his pamphlet <em>Libertarian Communism</em> in 1932 that “life in the future will be organized” through two currently existing institutions: “the free union,” which unites workers on the basis of their labor, and “the free municipality,” which “is the assembly of the workers in a very small locality, village or hamlet” united on the basis of their location.[1070] These ideas went onto inspire the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress resolutions. They proposed that during the social revolution workers should establish both federations of producers’ associations, which would self-manage the workplace, and “libertarian communes” in each locality, which would organize such things as housing, education, and the “beautification of the settlement” and federate together to form the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[1071]
It is also a mistake to view syndicalist trade unions themselves as being purely workplace organizations. The district committees of the CNT were located in union centers within working-class neighborhoods. They were social spaces that established bonds of mutual support between workers from different workplaces, migrants new to the area, and unemployed workers. In so doing, they spread anarchist theory and practice to workers in varied circumstances, on the basis of their shared belonging to a local community. The ability of the CNT to mobilize large groups of workers during waves of direct action was not based exclusively on union sections in specific workplaces or industries. It also stemmed from the influence that anarchist militants had in face-to-face conversations with their neighbors, friends, and family in homes, cafés, and the streets. Nor did workers in the CNT limit themselves to workplace organizing. They also organized tenants unions and, despite patriarchal opposition from within the union, women’s groups such as Mujeres Libres. This went alongside the construction of numerous forms of associational life, including affinity groups, schools, neighborhood educational and cultural centers called ateneos, theater clubs, hiking clubs, and more. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth. The CNT’s construction of prefigurative organizations therefore occurred both within the workplace and the community.[1072]
Syndicalist anarchists, like anarchists in general, advocated prefigurative organizations because it was only through participating in such organizations that the working classes would develop the radical capacities, drives, and consciousness necessary both for struggling effectively against existing dominant institutions and producing and reproducing the future anarchist society. It was thought that workers would learn how to self-manage the economy through their experience of self-managing a trade union, which, like the economy of the future, was structured in a horizontal and federalist manner, made decisions within general assemblies in which everyone had a vote, and coordinated action on a large scale through a system of delegates. Rocker thought that trade unions should function as both “the fighting organization of the workers against the employers” and “the school for the intellectual training of the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remaking it according to Socialist principles.”[1073]
Syndicalist anarchists thought it was very important to provide such technical education to the working classes, because of their commitment to grounding their revolutionary strategy in an understanding of what the world was really like. In Baginski’s words,
<quote>
the economic power to rule and lead production does not fall in the workers’ laps (in quiet submission to the fate of economic development) without their active engagement; no, they must gain it themselves by fighting with endurance and strength. Workers dream themselves too easily into the idea that one day the “social revolution” will descend to earth like a supernatural godhead in order to heal all wounds and dry all tears in one swoop. Oh no! The sun, which as it set today looked down on shackled slaves, will not as it rises tomorrow behold free people. Workers must educate themselves through their own strength to become thinking and acting people. They have to educate and prepare themselves for the great profession of administration and leadership in production.[1074]
</quote>
Syndicalist anarchists faced two major problems when trying to implement this theory. First, in order for individual workers to be transformed through their participation within the trade union, they had to be members of the trade union for an extended period of time. A significant number of workers would often join trade unions due to their immediate economic interests, such as a strike, but would leave them once the situation ended. This was especially the case for temporary workers who lacked a permanent employer. As a result of this and other factors, such as workers deciding to join larger reformist trade unions, syndicalist trade unions had a high membership turnover. The SAC, for example, was founded in 1910 and by 1935 had 36,000 members. During this twenty-five year period, a total of 250,000 workers had at one time been registered members of the trade union.[1075] Even if workers did remain within the trade union over an extended period of time, it did not follow from this that they would actively participate within it and thereby be transformed. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, three hundred workers joined the local union of the CNT in 1932, but only a minority of them were committed anarchist militants. A significant number joined the trade union because it was necessary to find a job, and they did not subsequently absorb anarchist ideas.[1076]
Second, syndicalist trade unions, like anarchists in general, experienced a huge amount of state repression. The CNT was founded in 1910, only to be made illegal and have its headquarters shut down in September 1911. This occurred as part of the Spanish state’s violent repression of a wave of strikes and antiwar protests, which anarchist workers had encouraged and participated in. The CNT began to reorganize itself from June 1912 onward, when all the militants who had been arrested the previous September were released. The CNT’s paper, <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, reappeared in May 1913, and members of the CNT were able to elect the regional committee of the recently legalized CRT in July. By August, the CRT was once again made illegal after it attempted to organize a general strike in support of textile workers. The CRT re-emerged as a public organization from August 1914 onwards only to be briefly banned again in 1920.[1077]
In 1924 the CNT was made illegal for a fourth time due to its resistance to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, which had been established in September 1923. The new regime required that trade unions provide the state with a complete list of their activities and membership, including the positions members held in the trade union and their home addresses. The CNT refused, and different segments of the movement disagreed with one another over whether or not the organization should go underground or try to operate as publicly as possible. On May 28, the Spanish state forced the decision when it responded to the assassination of the executioner of Barcelona, Rogelio Pérez Vicario, by making the trade union illegal, banning <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, and arresting leading militants. The CNT was only made legal again in 1930 with the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but nonetheless continued to experience significant state repression both under the quasi-dictatorship of Berenguer and the Spanish Republic, which was inaugurated in April 1931.[1078]
*** The General Strike
One of the main tactics that syndicalist anarchists advocated and engaged in were general strikes in which a significant number of workers went on strike at once. Rocker viewed the general strike as “the most powerful weapon which the workers have at their command” because it “brings the whole economic system to a standstill and shakes it to its foundations.”[1079] He proposed that the working classes use the general strike in order to achieve both reforms, such as compelling capitalists to grant workers the eight-hour day, and the revolutionary goal of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[1080] This same perspective can be seen in Delesalle’s 1906 distinction between four different kinds of general strike: (a) a general strike by individual unions; (b) a general strike across all industries on a specific day; (c) a general strike across all industries that places the working class in “a state of open war with capitalist society”; and (d) a general strike that is a revolution.[1081]
Syndicalist anarchists were neither the first nor the only group to advocate the general strike as a strategy through which the working classes could transform society in a positive direction.[1082] In October 1833, an assembly of Glasgow workers associated with the Owenite movement passed a resolution that declared that rather than launching an insurrection to achieve social change, workers should simply fold their arms and abstain from work. This mass stoppage of work would, according to their optimistic prediction, have the consequence that “capital is destroyed, the revenue fails, the system of government falls into confusion, and every link in the chain which binds society together is broken in a moment by this inert conspiracy of the poor against the rich.”[1083]
The idea of the general strike continued to be advocated during the First International. At the Brussels Congress of September 1868, a resolution was passed that stated that, if a war broke out, then workers would stop it through the “legal practical means” of ceasing all work.[1084] Several months later Bakunin argued in “Organization and the General Strike,” which was published in <em>Égalité</em> on April 3, 1869, that the recent wave of strikes in Europe indicated that “the struggle of labor against capital is growing ever stronger… and that we are advancing at a great pace toward Social Revolution.… As strikes spread and as neighbors learn about them the general strike comes ever closer. These days, with the idea of liberation so current amongst the proletariat, a general strike can result only in a great cataclysm, giving society a new skin.”[1085]
The Belgian Federation of the Saint-Imier International, which included both anarchists and collectivists who were not anarchists, endorsed the general strike as a revolutionary strategy during their congress of August 1873 held in Antwerp. Guillaume responded to this in May, writing that “the general strike, if it was realizable, would certainly be the most powerful lever of a social revolution. Just imagine the effect of the immense labor machine being stopped on a fixed day in all countries at once.… In a word, the whole people descending into the street, and saying to their masters: ‘I will only start work again after having accomplished the transformation of property which must put the instruments of labor into the hands of the workers.’”[1086]
He was nonetheless unsure if “the International Federation of trade unions… will ever be strong enough, solid enough, universal enough to be able to carry out a general strike.”[1087] The general strike continued to be discussed and debated during the September 1873 Geneva Congress of the Saint-Imier International. The Belgian delegates unsurprisingly argued that the general strike was “a means of bringing a movement onto the street and leading the workers to the barricades.”[1088] Guillaume similarly insisted that the general strike, as understood by the International, was the social revolution and that revolutionaries should focus on bringing it about. Although Guillaume had previously described a general strike as occurring on a fixed day, he now asked: “Should the ideal of the general strike… be that it has to break out everywhere at an appointed day and hour? Can the day and hour of the revolution be fixed in this way? No!… The revolution has to be contagious.”[1089]
After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, the idea of the general strike was frequently discussed by French trade unionists during the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement. In 1887, at the Montluçon Congress of the National Federation of Trade Unions (FNS), two anarchist workers, Berger and Combomreil, responded to the French state socialist Jules Guesde’s proposal that capitalism should be abolished through the seizure of state power. They advocated the general strike as an alternative method for achieving social change. A year later, the FNS passed a resolution at its congress from October 28–November 4 in Le Bouscat which stated that “the general strike, i.e., the complete cessation of labor, or the revolution, may be used by the workers for their emancipation.”[1090]
During the 1880s and 1890s, many French trade unionists conceived of the general strike in a manner that differed significantly from how syndicalist anarchists would later theorize it in the early twentieth century. Aristide Briand cowrote a text with Pelloutier in 1892, while Pelloutier was still a member of the Marxist led French Workers’ Party and had yet to become an anarchist. It was not published in full, but, in it, they depict the general strike as a “peaceful and legal” affair in which workers saved up enough money and provisions to last fifteen days without work and, on an agreed date, stayed at home. It was imagined that, in the absence of the working classes’ labor, capitalism would quickly cease to function and be abolished “smoothly, without the spilling of blood, solely by the combination of rest.”[1091]
Syndicalist anarchists, in comparison to many earlier advocates of the general strike, were not naive and understood that a society-wide strike that encompassed all branches of production was extremely unlikely to occur, especially at the beginning of the strike. Nacht, for example, wrote in 1905 (under the pen name Arnold Roller) that a general strike in which the entire international working classes simultaneously laid down their tools and overthrew capitalism was a beautiful idea that will nonetheless “always be a dream.”[1092] Given this, syndicalist anarchists aimed to achieve the more feasible goal of organizing a general strike that began in key industries the economy could not function without, such as coal, gas, railway, and shipping. From this starting point, the general strike would, in theory, spread to the wider economy as workers in more and more industries either decided to join the strike in solidarity with its aims and as a response to state repression toward the strike, or were forced to cease work entirely due to the strike’s disruption of key infrastructure and raw materials not being transported to factories. This would in turn create a situation in which the large number of workers who were not organized within trade unions, or who were apolitical, were forced by the unfolding wave of events to take sides, participate in the general strike and thereby become radicalized.[1093]
Unlike the previously mentioned proponents of the general strike, syndicalist anarchists did not view it as a form of passive resistance in which the working classes simply ceased work, folded their arms, and waited for dominant structures to collapse. In the advent of a revolutionary situation, they proposed that workers should use the general strike as a platform from which to launch the forceful expropriation of the means of production, land, and the necessities of life from the ruling classes and establish federations of workplace and community assemblies. During her speech at the 1905 founding convention of the IWW, Lucy Parsons proposed that socialism could be achieved via a “general strike,” in which workers occupied their workplaces in order to “take possession of the necessary property of production.”[1094] That same year, Nacht wrote that a successful general strike “accomplishes expropriation and communalizes the means of production.”[1095] Pouget and Pataud imagined in 1909 a fictional revolutionary general strike in which “the Unions in each industry, in each profession, took possession of the factories and workshops” and reorganized production on a communist basis by means of free agreement between federations.[1096] Besnard argued in 1930 that a revolutionary general strike was distinguished from normal strikes on the grounds that workers would not only cease work, but also “<em>occupy</em> the place of production, <em>get rid</em> of the boss, <em>expropriate</em> him, and <em>get ready</em> to get production moving again, but in the interests of the revolution.”[1097]
Syndicalist anarchists tried to clearly differentiate their active militant conception of the general strike from previous passive conceptions. For Nacht, writing in 1905, the term “social general strike” should be used to refer to a general strike that involves the expropriation of the ruling classes and the establishment of an anarchist society, in order to clearly differentiate it from general strikes for reforms, such as higher wages or universal suffrage.[1098] In 1907, the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam passed a series of resolutions on syndicalism that varyingly referred to “the revolutionary General strike” and “the General Strike with Expropriation.”[1099] Decades later, in 1930, Besnard referred to “the expropriatory general strike, with violence,” which would be “<em>insurrectional</em>.”[1100]
Some syndicalist anarchists equated the general strike with the social revolution, while others were careful to distinguish between the two. Nacht claimed that since a “social general strike” would involve the expropriation of the means of production and the establishment of an anarchist society, it followed that “the General Strike is not only the introduction of the revolution but is the social revolution itself.”[1101] Malatesta, in comparison, held in 1907 that “the general strike has always struck me as an excellent means to set off the social revolution.”[1102] Malatesta’s conceptualization was shared by at least some syndicalist trade unions. At the founding 1910 congress of the CNT, a report on the general strike was approved and later read aloud again at the CNT’s 1911 congress. The report proposed that “the general strike, the withdrawal of labor by all the workers at any given moment, entails such a great disturbance in the ordinary course of today’s society of exploited and exploiters that it will unavoidably have to cause an explosion, a clash, between the antagonistic forces that are now fighting for survival.”[1103] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles described “the social general strike… as the prelude to the social revolution.”[1104]
Syndicalist anarchists did not think that all it took to initiate a revolutionary general strike was a trade union boldly proclaiming it on a fixed date whenever they fancied.[1105] They believed, instead, that it would develop out of smaller strikes for immediate improvements. In Pouget and Pataud’s 1909 novel <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, they describe a period of escalating class conflict prior to the launching of the general strike: “strikes followed strikes; lockouts were replied to by boycotts; sabotage was employed with ruinous intensity.”[1106] Under such conditions the antagonism between workers and capitalists developed to the point that workers came to consider themselves to be in a continuous war against the ruling classes. Through their experience of collective struggle within trade unions, they developed radical capacities, drives, and consciousness such that “the working class became more warlike. They took possession of the streets, and familiarized themselves with the tactics of resistance. They learned how to stand their ground before bodies of police, and how to deal with the troops marched against them.”[1107]
In this fictional account, the class conflict then exploded into a revolutionary situation, after a violent skirmish between striking construction workers and the police and army culminated in a massacre, during which the military shot at and launched a cavalry charge against the demonstrators. In response, syndicalist trade unions seized their opportunity and called for a general strike in solidarity with the victims of state violence, a strike they claimed would continue until the state had prosecuted the soldiers.[1108] This general strike against a specific act of state violence morphed over time into a revolutionary movement against capitalism and the state due to a combination of: (a) syndicalist trade unions spreading anarchist ideas among participants of the general strike, publicly calling for the social revolution and preparing for the social revolution by seizing weapons and organizing workers’ militias; (b) the working classes being compelled to expropriate and distribute goods in order to meet people’s needs, especially for food; and (c) the working classes responding to increasingly extreme state violence against the general strike by overthrowing the ruling classes.[1109]
The manner in which syndicalist anarchists described the general strike can sometimes give the false impression that they thought a general strike could overthrow class society without the need for armed conflict and the violent destruction of the state. Such an interpretation ignores what the vast majority of syndicalist anarchists wrote. Pouget and Pataud’s fictional general strike included workers assaulting government buildings, such as police stations and parliament, in order to achieve “the dissolution of the bourgeois State” by “disorganizing… dismantling and thoroughly disabling it.”[1110] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles claimed that “the decisive struggle between the capitalism of today and free communism of tomorrow will not be without conflict,” and, as a result, they recognized the need for “violence as a means of defense against the violent methods of the ruling classes during the struggle for the possession of the factories and the fields by the revolutionary people.”[1111] At the 1910 founding congress of the CNT, it was agreed that, given the violence of the state, “it would be impossible for a peaceful general strike to last very long”; workers would have to engage in “violent” protests against the forces of state repression and thereby defeat “the tyrants.”[1112] This position was expanded upon in resolutions of the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress that proposed that the defense of the revolution should be achieved by “the people armed.”[1113]
Some syndicalist anarchists did argue that a revolutionary general strike would provide a more effective means of defeating the police and military than the previous strategy of launching insurrections that established barricades. Nacht claimed in 1905 that the widening of streets since the French Revolution of 1789 and the uprisings of 1848 meant that “the heroic times of the battle on the barricades have gone by.”[1114] In the aftermath of World War I, Berkman wrote in 1929 that workers at a barricade would not be able to defeat a trained military supported by artillery, tanks, bombers, and poison gas. Such an idea of revolution was “obsolete,” and had to be replaced by one that focused on the true power of the working classes: their ability to withdraw labor.[1115] Rocker similarly wrote that the general strike was a replacement for “the barricades of the political uprising.”[1116]
Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud all hoped that a general strike would occur over such a large area and involve so many workers that the military would be forced, by the sheer scale of the revolt, to scatter their troops into smaller units that could then be more easily defeated in combat or persuaded to join the workers in revolt.[1117] The idea that a significant number of troops would mutiny and refuse to obey their orders to crush the general strike was not purely wishful thinking and had some basis in experience. In 1871, the Paris Commune was created after army soldiers, who had been sent to seize cannons from the national guard in the district of Montmartre, disobeyed multiple orders to fire on workers and guardsmen defending the cannons and, instead, fraternized with the people, a significant number of whom were women. Several years later, in 1907, a detachment of troops decided to mutiny on their way to suppress a CGT picket line.[1118] During Spain’s tragic week of 1909, a general strike against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco mutated into an armed insurrection, in which, the working classes attacked the police specifically, while persuading some local soldiers to not fire on them. The insurrection was soon defeated when soldiers from outside Barcelona were called in and the barricades that workers had assembled were destroyed by artillery.[1119]
Even if Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud were overly optimistic about the effectiveness of a general strike in diminishing the power of the military and police, they nonetheless did all advocate an armed uprising as part of the general strike, and thought that workers would have to defend themselves from the violence of the police and army. Pouget and Pataud’s account of how this would happen was, by far, the most eccentric. In their novel, they depicted the forces of reaction, including the invading armies of foreign states, being easily defeated by a variety of science-fiction weapons. This included electromagnetic waves that caused far away enemy ammunition to explode and aerial torpedoes dropped from remote-controlled planes.[1120] These weapons were so ridiculous for the time that it is unclear if the authors seriously advocated them, or merely intended to entertain the reader. Kropotkin nonetheless asserted in his preface to the 1913 English edition of Pouget and Pataud’s book that the authors had significantly underestimated the violent resistance that the social revolution would face and have to overcome.[1121]
Although syndicalist anarchists generally attempted to produce a realistic conception of the general strike, they consistently faced two key problems when trying to implement it. First, syndicalist trade unions in Europe and the United States were unable to organize or initiate genuine national general strikes across multiple key industries by themselves, due to them having either small memberships or large memberships concentrated in specific parts of a country or industries. Given this, in order to launch national general strikes they had to rely on support from reformist trade unions, which failed to materialize on a number of occasions. In Spain, the CNT, whose membership was largest in Catalonia, organized a short general strike in December 1916 with the General Union of Workers (UGT), which was affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). This was followed by a general strike in August 1917, for which the leadership of the PSOE-UGT seriously failed to prepare, and which was only launched after they were forced into action by the UGT’s largest union independently calling for a general strike. A few years later, the UGT refused to support a general strike in 1920. When Primo de Rivera established himself as dictator of Spain in September 1923, the CNT responded by calling for a general strike, while the UGT not only did not support the general strike but collaborated with the regime.[1122]
Second, general strikes organized by anarchists were militarily crushed on numerous occasions. A long list of examples can be found in the history of Spanish anarchism. To give one, on February 16, 1902, a general strike in Barcelona—which spread to nearby industrial towns—was launched in solidarity with the striking Metalworkers’ Federation, who had been on strike for two months. The general strike only lasted a week and was defeated following the declaration of martial law, the deployment of the military, the closure of union headquarters, and the arrest of several hundred organizers.[1123] Spanish syndicalist anarchists were themselves aware of this problem. The CNT’s report on the general strike, which was approved at the founding 1910 congress, claimed that “experience has taught us that” when the general strike is “localized at one point and the workers of the rest of the nation remain completely passive, the forces of public order, at the service of the bourgeoisie, will concentrate on that location, and it will be relatively easy for the government to crush the revolt.”[1124]
This is not to say that general strikes were always unsuccessful. Swiss anarchists participated in a 1907 general strike against local chocolate companies, including Nestlé, after a worker was unfairly fired. The general strike, which lasted from March 25 to 29, spread to Montreux, Lausanne, and Geneva in response to gendarmes firing on and wounding ten workers. It resulted in the rehiring of the worker, recognition of the trade union, and various material improvements.[1125] Even when general strikes were militarily crushed or failed to achieve their immediate objectives, they could still bring about social change. This includes the previously mentioned 1906 CGT general strike that won the weekend and the 1919 CNT general strike that won the eight-hour day. On other occasions general strikes were, even if defeated, important acts of working-class resistance against domination and exploitation by the ruling classes. It is, from an anarchist perspective, better to rebel against oppression and lose than to not rebel at all, especially since workers do not know going into a struggle whether or not they will emerge victorious.
[1038] Rudolf Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 56–57.
[1039] Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 432–33.
[1040] Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 434.
[1041] Émile Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 10–13.
[1042] Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 51.
[1043] Jeremy Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990), 16–17. During the Saint-Imier International, Guillaume advocated the general strike while being wary of partial strikes for increased wages because he thought they were unlikely to succeed and could instead bring suffering to workers and sap their revolutionary spirit. See Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 222–25.
[1044] Paul Delesalle, “The Strike!,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, [[https://libcom.org/library/strike-paul-delesalle]]. For other examples, see Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, [[https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle]]; Alexander Berkman, <em>What is Anarchism?</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 78–79, 197–210.
[1045] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 84. For the history of sabotage as a strategy see Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 44–46; F. F. Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 120–23; Dominique Pinsolle, “Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage,” in <em>Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW</em>, ed. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 44–58.
[1046] Ridley, <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism in France</em>, 132–33; Nicholas Papayanis, <em>Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925</em> (Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 20–30, 116–17, 121, 137. Nicholas Papayanis, “Alphones Merrheim and the Strike of Hennebont: The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Day in France,” <em>International Review of Social History</em> 16, no. 2 (1971): 159–83. Spanish trade unionists, including anarchists, also organized a general strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1906, after being inspired by the CGT’s campaign. See Angel Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State</em>, <em>1989–1923</em> (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 130–31.
[1047] The following account of the strike is based on Murray Bookchin, <em>The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998), 160–63; A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 292–99.
[1048] It should be kept in mind that, even after this legislation was passed, workers went on strike to demand that the eight-hour day was implemented. See A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 302–3.
[1049] Nick Rider, “The Practice of Direct Action: The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” in <em>For Anarchism: History</em>, <em>Theory and Practice</em>, ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989), 87.
[1050] Quoted in Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88.
[1051] The following account is based on Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88–98; Chris Ealham: <em>Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona</em>, <em>1898–1937</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 105–7, 112–18, 120. There had been earlier attempts by Spanish anarchists to organize tenants in 1903–4 and 1917–18. See A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 162, 265–66.
[1052] Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?,” trans. Jesse Cohn, Anarchist Library website, n.d., [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/milly-witkop-rocker-what-does-the-syndicalist-women-s-union-want]].
[1053] Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?”
[1054] Dieter Nelles, “Anarchosyndicalism and the Sexual Reform Movement in the Weimar Republic” (paper presented at the Free Love and Labour Movement workshop at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2000).
[1055] Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 433.
[1056] Emma Goldman, <em>Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader</em>, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 91.
[1057] Pouget, <em>Direct Action</em>, 6.
[1058] Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.
[1059] Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.
[1060] Gregori P. Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 50–51.
[1061] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 60.
[1062] IWW, “The Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (1908),” in <em>Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology</em>, ed Joyce L. Kornbluh (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 13.
[1063] There are important exceptions to this generalization. The Argentinean FORA opposed the idea that the structure of the future society could be constructed within capitalism. Malatesta also argued in 1922 that trade unions were not establishing the framework of the future society due to the extent to which they were divided according to the capitalist division of labor. See Vadim Damier, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 102–4, 107–8; Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 113–14.
[1064] Quoted in Albert Parsons, <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em> (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 110. The same point was made by Albert himself. See ibid., 173.
[1065] Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 50. See also Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435; Ricardo Mella, <em>Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology</em>, ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 73–74.
[1066] Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth</em> (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 118.
[1067] Pataud and Émile Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 118.
[1068] Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, [[https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism]].
[1069] Besnard, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism</em>.
[1070] Isaac Puente, <em>Libertarian Communism</em>, (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 5, 17.
[1071] Quoted in José Peirats, <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 104–5.
[1072] Martha Ackelsberg, <em>Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 21, 80–88, 120–37; Ealham, *Anarchism and the City*, 34–48; Danny Evans, *Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War*, 1936–1939 (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
[1073] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 57.
[1074] Max Baginski, <em>What Does Syndicalism Want? Living</em>, <em>Not Dead Unions</em> (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 22.
[1075] Lennart K. Persson, “Revolutionary Syndicalism in Sweden Before the Second World War” in <em>Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective</em>, ed., Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 87.
[1076] Jerome R. Mintz, <em>The Anarchists of Casas Viejas</em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 157–65.
[1077] A. Smith, <em>Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction</em>, 203–5, 211, 316–17, 323; James Yeoman, *Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915* (New York: Routledge, 2020), 223–25.
[1078] Jason Garner, <em>Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 162–69, 234–35, 243; Bookchin, *Spanish Anarchists*, 190–91. For repression under the Spanish republic, see Ealham, *Anarchism and the City*.
[1079] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 81, 82.
[1080] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 80–82.
[1081] Quoted in James Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London: Methuen, 1969), 202.
[1082] Phil H. Goodstein, <em>The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland</em> (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 15–25; Max Beer, <em>A</em> <em>History of British Socialism</em>, vol. 2 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921), 81–90; William Benbow, “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes,” Marxist Internet Archive, [[https://www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm]].
[1083] Quoted in Goodstein, <em>General Strike</em>, 21.
[1084] Quoted in Julian P.W. Archer, <em>The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact</em> (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 129.
[1085] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 41
[1086] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 223.
[1087] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 223.
[1088] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 223.
[1089] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 224. For more information on this debate, see David Stafford, <em>From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90</em> (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 50–51.
[1090] Goodstein, <em>General Strike</em>, 53–55.
[1091] Quoted in Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 16. See also, 232n25; Goodstein, <em>General Strike</em>, 57–58.
[1092] Arnold Roller, <em>The Social General Strike</em> (Chicago: The Debating Club No.1, 1905), 6.
[1093] Roller, <em>Social General Strike</em>, 7–9; Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 82; Goldman, <em>Red Emma</em>, 95; Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 15, 27–28, 50–51, 91–93.
[1094] Lucy Parsons, <em>Freedom</em>, <em>Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches</em>, <em>1878–1937</em>, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 82–83.
[1095] Roller, <em>Social General Strike</em>, 32.
[1096] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 103–38. Quote in ibid., 121.
[1097] Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” in Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 271.
[1098] Roller, <em>Social General Strike</em>, 5–6.
[1099] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 134–35.
[1100] Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” 271.
[1101] Roller, <em>Social General Strike</em>, 7, 8.
[1102] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 124.
[1103] CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor,” Libcom website, January 17, 2017, [[https://libcom.org/article/first-congress-national-confederation-labor-cnt-barcelona-september-8-10-1911]].
[1104] IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in <em>Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas</em>, vol. 1, <em>From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)</em>, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418.
[1105] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 81; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 477.
[1106] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 5.
[1107] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 8.
[1108] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 1–3, 9, 12.
[1109] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 41–42, 57–58, 64, 67–84, 94.
[1110] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 80, 82.
[1111] IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” 418.
[1112] CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).
[1113] Quoted in Peirats, <em>CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, vol. 1, 110.
[1114] <em>Roller, Social General Strike</em>, 8.
[1115] Berkman, <em>Anarchism</em>, 196–97.
[1116] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 83.
[1117] Rocker, <em>Anarcho-Syndicalism</em>, 83; Roller, <em>Social General Strike</em>, 10–15; Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 48–49, 59–61, 67–77, 90–96.
[1118] John Merriman, <em>Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 39–44; Jennings, <em>Syndicalism in France</em>, 138.
[1119] Bookchin, <em>Spanish Anarchists</em>, 133–37; A. Smith, *Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction*, 173–77.
[1120] Pataud and Pouget, <em>How We Shall Bring About the Revolution</em>, 164–65, 194–207.
[1121] Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle</em>, 561.
[1122] Bookchin, <em>Spanish Anarchists</em>, 150–52, 174–76, 190–91; Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 75–78, 162–63; A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 264–65, 275–83, 335.
[1123] A. Smith, <em>Anarchism</em>, <em>Revolution and Reaction</em>, 92–94, 122–23. For other examples, see ibid., 281–83; Ealham, <em>Anarchism and the City</em>, 117–18.
[1124] CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).
[1125] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 47–48.Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism
** Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism: From Bakunin to the Platform
A significant number of mass anarchists thought that federations of trade unions or community groups were insufficient to bring about the social revolution. They held that anarchists must, in addition to this, form specific anarchist organizations that would exist alongside mass organizations. These specific anarchist organizations were advocated as the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. This theory has come to be known as organizational dualism. In the past, specific anarchist organizations were often called an anarchist union. This language was not confusing to historical anarchists because they mostly spoke languages other than English and so distinguished between syndicates and the anarchist union, rather than trade unions and the anarchist union.
During the course of anarchism’s history, numerous specific anarchist organizations were founded. For example, in January 1891, Italian anarchists formed the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party, at a congress in Capolago, Switzerland. In the following months, anarchist groups from across Italy formed regional federations committed to the Capolago program. This growth in formal organization was cut short by the combination of state repression following May Day demonstrations, and significant push back from antiorganizationalist anarchists. By the end of the year, the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.[1126] Later attempts by Italian anarchists to form a national federation committed to a common program culminated in the establishment of the Italian Anarchist-Communist Union in 1919, which changed its name to the Italian Anarchist Union in 1920. The Italian Anarchist Union, which participated as a key force in the USI and the factory occupation movement of the Bienno Rosso, spread its ideas via the paper <em>Umanità Nova</em>. At its peak in the early 1920s, the paper sold 50,000 copies a day, and was in some areas the most widely read paper among workers.[1127]
Given the enormous scale of the history of organizational dualism, I shall focus on only three main aspects of its theoretical development. These are: (a) Bakunin’s advocacy of organizational dualism between 1868 and 1872; (b) various proposals made between the 1890s and 1930s on what the relationship between anarchism and syndicalism (or trade unions in general) should be; and (c) debates between proponents of platformist and synthesist specific anarchist organizations that occurred from 1926 onward.
*** Bakunin and the Alliance
The strategy of organizational dualism was first advocated by Bakunin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, he argued that anarchists should simultaneously organize and participate within mass public organizations that had a broad program, such as trade unions, and also form small secret organizations committed to a narrow anarchist program. This theorizing occurred, in parallel, to Bakunin’s actual attempts to form secret revolutionary organizations. The history of these attempts is extremely complex, but a condensed version follows.
During his 1864–67 stay in Italy, Bakunin tried to transform the loose network of revolutionaries he knew into an organization that adhered to a specific program.[1128] In late 1864, Bakunin, who had recently moved from London to Florence, founded his first proper revolutionary organization: the Brotherhood. Although the Brotherhood certainly existed, and had a membership of at least thirty individuals from largely republican circles, it did not last long and soon faded away after Bakunin moved to Sorrento, near Naples, at the end of May 1865. Bakunin, who was becoming increasingly socialist and shifting closer to his mature anarchist politics, then moved to Naples in October, and met a number of republican revolutionaries. Sometime between late 1865 and early 1866, Bakunin persuaded these individuals to join a new secret revolutionary socialist organization called the International Brotherhood, which was the spiritual successor to the previous Brotherhood based in Florence.[1129]
Bakunin subsequently cofounded two distinct but overlapping organizations: the public International Alliance and the secret Alliance in October 1868. The public International Alliance applied to join the First International and, after its application was rejected, converted itself into a Geneva section of the First International in July 1869. The Geneva public Alliance decided to disband in August 1871, in the aftermath of various splits and conflicts within the Romance Federation of the First International, and took this decision without consulting Bakunin. The original secret Alliance disbanded soon after its founding, due to personal conflicts between its members. It continued to exist only as an informal social network composed of a few individuals who were mainly from Spain, Italy, and Switzerland and members of Bakunin’s inner circle. At around the same time, a distinct secret organization called the Alianza de la Democracia Socialista was founded in Spain, to coordinate the activity of key militants and promote the growth of the Spanish section of the First International. The Alianza decided to dissolve itself in April 1872 and continued to adhere to this decision, despite Bakunin writing a letter attempting to persuade them to do otherwise. A few months later, Bakunin cofounded a new secret society, called the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries in September 1872, after Bakunin had been expelled from the First International by the Hague Congress.[1130]
An early example of Bakunin’s strategy of organizational dualism can be found in his 1866 <em>Programme of the Brotherhood</em>. He proposed that “<em>the dedicated revolutionaries of every land</em>” should gather “<em>at once into both public and private association</em> with the twofold object of broadening the revolutionary front and at the same time paving the way for simultaneous concerted action in all countries in which action proves initially possible, through secret agreement among the wisest revolutionaries of those countries.”[1131] The central task of these revolutionaries was to fuse, or in other words, organize, “the elements of social revolution” that “are already widespread in practically all countries of Europe” into “an effective force.”[1132] In the autumn of 1868, Bakunin wrote in the draft program of the secret Alliance that the organization had been founded in order to help “prepare, organize and hasten” the social revolution by pursuing the immediate “dual objective” of (a) spreading revolutionary consciousness through “journals, pamphlets and books” and “founding public associations” and (b) recruiting “intelligent, energetic, discreet men of good will who are sympathetic to our ideas, both in Europe and as far as possible in America, in order to form an invisible network of dedicated revolutionaries, strengthened by the fact of alliance.”[1133]
The same idea was expressed by Bakunin in the March 27, 1872, letter he wrote to an Italian named Celso Ceretti, who admired the republican revolutionary Garibaldi. In it, Bakunin advocated a “secret alliance” composed of “nuclei intimately bound together with similar nuclei presently being organized, or that will be organized, in other regions of Italy and abroad.”[1134] This organization had “a double mission: at first they will form the inspiring and vivifying soul… of the International Workingmen’s Association in Italy and elsewhere, and later they will occupy themselves with questions <em>that will be impossible to discuss publicly</em>. They will form the necessary bridge between the propaganda of socialist theories and revolutionary practice.”[1135]
Bakunin did not propose the formation of a secret revolutionary organization because he had a hidden authoritarian agenda. He was motivated by the deeply practical view that a secret revolutionary organization was necessary in order to avoid state repression. In a April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza, he argued that the organization could not be public, because, if it were, it would be persecuted and crushed.[1136] This concern with secrecy is especially understandable given that Bakunin himself had been imprisoned in 1849 by the state of Saxony for having fought in an insurrection launched by the people of Dresden. He was subsequently handed from one state to another, imprisoned by Saxony, then by Austria, which kept him chained to a cell wall for a year, and then finally Russia from May 1851 onward. Both Saxony and Austria sentenced Bakunin to death, only to alter his sentence at the last minute after a secret agreement was made to transfer him ultimately to Russia. He remained imprisoned in Russia’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where all his teeth fell out due to scurvy, until the Tsar permanently banished him to Siberia in 1857.[1137]
Bakunin thought that the mass public organization—the First International—and the small secret anarchist organization—the Alliance—had distinct but complementary roles in the revolutionary process. The role of the mass public organization was to unite as many workers as possible within an organization that prefigured the future society and to engage in large-scale direct action against the ruling classes. The role of the small, secret, specific anarchist organization was, in comparison, to enable dedicated revolutionaries to coordinate their activity effectively and participate in the collective struggles of the working classes. In so doing, anarchists would spread their ideas and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. Bakunin explained his views on this topic in a private letter he wrote to the Alianza member Charles Alerini between May 3 and 6, 1872. According to Bakunin,
<quote>
The Alliance and the International, although they both seek the same final goals, follow, at one and the same time, different paths. One has a mission to bring together the labor masses—millions of workers—[reaching] across differences of trades or lands, across the frontier of every state into one single compact and immense body. The other, the Alliance, has a mission to give a really revolutionary direction to these masses. The programs of the one and the other, without in any way being opposed, are different, in keeping with the extent of the development of each. That of the International, if it is taken seriously, contains in germ—but only in germ—the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance is the elaboration of the program of the International.[1138]
</quote>
Bakunin thought that the mass public organization and the specific anarchist organization should have distinct programs due to their different roles. The First International’s role was to unite workers from around the world into federations of trade unions that engaged in the struggle for immediate improvements via direct action, and thereby laid the foundation from which the social revolution could arise. Given this, it should have a broad program inclusive to as many workers as possible and be based on their shared class interests to achieve better living conditions, emancipation, and international solidarity in the class struggle.[1139] Were the First International to adopt a narrow program, it would fail in its mission, and merely create “a very small association, a sect, but not an armed camp for the proletariat of the entire world [set] against the exploiting and dominant classes.”[1140] The Alliance, in contrast, had to have an explicitly revolutionary program that advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This included a commitment to atheism, which Bakunin held should not be part of the First International’s program, because that would exclude the millions of workers who believe in God.[1141]
This view was repeated almost word for word by Bakunin in his April 1872 letter to the members of the Spanish Alianza. This went alongside the clarification that Bakunin rejected the position that all socialist consciousness had to be brought to workers in the mass public organization by the secret organization of revolutionaries. Bakunin instead maintained that workers would develop their own radical ideas, due to both the influence of revolutionaries and their own experiences of class struggle. He thought that in an International with a broad program “it will happen that, more and more educated by the struggle and by the free propaganda of different ideas, directed by their own instinct and increasingly raised to revolutionary consciousness by practice itself and the inevitable consequences of the universal solidarity of the struggle of labor against capital, the masses will elaborate, slowly, it is true, but infallibly, their own thoughts, theories that will emerge from bottom to top.”[1142]
Although Bakunin thought that a small secret society of dedicated revolutionaries would play an important role in the process of workers becoming organized and adopting socialist ideas, he remained committed to the self-emancipation of the working classes. In his resignation letter to the Jura Federation in 1873, he reminded them that the “organization of the forces of the proletariat… should be the work of the proletariat itself.”[1143] A number of modern authors have argued against such an interpretation of Bakunin on the grounds that these public declarations are contradicted by his private programs and letters in which, they allege, he argued for a fundamentally authoritarian and un-anarchist strategy. According to these critics, Bakunin preached anarchism in public while privately advocating the organization of a hierarchical secret society that would seize power and establish an unaccountable top-down dictatorship that ruled society from the shadows. The two main sources cited to support this interpretation are Bakunin’s April 1, 1870, letter to Albert Richard and his June 2, 1870, letter to Sergei Nechaev.[1144] These interpretations misrepresent what Bakunin proposed within his letters and take certain quotes out of context.
His letter to Richard did advocate ideas that can sound authoritarian and incompatible with anarchist strategy, such as his endorsement of a “collective, invisible dictatorship.”[1145] In order to refute ominous authoritarian readings of Bakunin, it is necessary to establish in detail exactly what Bakunin meant by an “invisible dictatorship” by placing this phrase within the full context of the letter. First, Bakunin repeated both the standard anarchist critique of state socialism and the standard anarchist conception of a social revolution. He rejected centralization, minority rule, and a revolutionary state modeled on the French Revolution, in which decisions for an entire country are made by a single committee, on the grounds that they were a means that would never lead to a free socialist society. The revolution, he said, should instead be achieved through the formation of a federation of workers’ associations that would expropriate the means of production, liquidate the state, establish workers militias, and coordinate production and distribution through a system of delegates.[1146] Bakunin’s letter is, in this respect, entirely consistent with his statements elsewhere.
Second, the reason Bakunin referred to an “invisible dictatorship” is that he is attempting to persuade Richard to abandon state socialist strategies. Richard was a French member of the Alliance who never fully endorsed its anarchist program, and would go on to write a pamphlet arguing for the reinstatement of Napoleon III as Emperor. Bakunin wrote, “you remain more than ever a supporter of centralization and the revolutionary State. Whereas I am more opposed to it than ever, and see no salvation except in revolutionary anarchy, guided on all issues by an invisible collective power—the only dictatorship I accept.”[1147] As a result the only occasions when Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter is when he is contrasting the “invisible dictatorship” he supports with the “overt dictatorship” that Richard wrongly advocates.[1148] Bakunin’s use of language for rhetorical purposes is similar to how Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” instead of “rule of the proletariat,” when he was in dialogue with followers of Blanqui due to their support for revolutionary dictatorships.[1149]
Third, at no point does Bakunin claim that the “invisible dictatorship” will make decisions and impose them on the working classes. He instead held that it would only act to influence or guide the working classes. He declared that, during a revolution,
<quote>
supporters of overt dictatorship, advocate the muting of passions, and speak for order, trust and submission to the established revolutionary powers—in this way they reconstitute the state. We, on the other hand, must foment, awaken and unleash all the passions, we must produce anarchy and, like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest, we must steer it not by any open power but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies—a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power.[1150]
</quote>
This view is repeated later in the letter when Bakunin wrote that only the “invisible collective force… can preserve and guide the revolution.”[1151] In advocating an “invisible collective force,” Bakunin was not endorsing a clandestine organization that guides workers by violently forcing them to behave in a particular manner. Bakunin is instead repeating language from Proudhon, who defined <em>collective force</em> as when the combined and organized action of individuals results in a group that possesses collective capacities to change the world that are greater than the sum of the capacities of each individual member.[1152]
Bakunin made similar points in his later letter to Nechaev, who was a Russian acquaintance of Bakunin committed to the formation of an authoritarian top-down secret society that engaged in any means, including assassinating members of the ruling classes and launching coups, to trigger a revolution. As in the previous letter, sections of it can be quoted out of context in order to give the false impression that Bakunin was a hidden authoritarian, such as his advocacy of “<em>the collective dictatorship</em> of a secret organization.”[1153] Such an interpretation should be rejected once again. Bakunin argued, in line with anarchist theory, that any revolution based on the seizure of state power by a ruling minority would result in new forms of oppression and exploitation, rather than emancipation. He thought that any attempt to abolish class society that “is at all artificial, and deals in secret plots, sudden assaults, surprises and blows, is bound to wreck itself against the State, which can only be conquered and broken by a spontaneous popular socialist revolution. And therefore the sole object of a secret society must be not to create an artificial force outside the people, but to arouse, unite and organize spontaneous popular forces; in this way the only possible, the only effective army of the revolution is not outside the people, but consists of the people themselves.”[1154]
During this period, the word “spontaneous” was generally used by anarchists to refer to when workers acted voluntarily of their own volition, rather than being forced to do something. Such spontaneous action was compatible with workers being influenced to act in a particular manner by the words and deeds of those around them. The role of the secret organization of committed revolutionaries was, therefore, to encourage and support a process of working-class self-emancipation. Bakunin wrote that if the working classes are the “revolutionary army,” then the secret organization would be the “general headquarters of this army, and the organizer not of its own, but of the people’s forces, as a link between the people’s instincts and revolutionary thought.”[1155]
This would be achieved by forming a series of secret small groups that were dispersed throughout a country and united under a common program. During a revolutionary situation, they would formulate a set of ideas that were “the very essence of popular instincts, desires and demands,” spread them “among a crowd of people who would be struggling without any purpose or plan,” and thereby “create round themselves a circle of people who are more or less devoted to the same idea, and who are naturally subject to their influence.”[1156] They would then collectively participate within ongoing popular movements in order to “lead the people toward the most complete realization of the social-economic ideal and the organization of the fullest popular freedom. This is what I call <em>the collective dictatorship</em> of a secret organization.”[1157]
Just as in his letter to Richard, Bakunin introduced this phrase in order to contrast the methods by which anarchists will “influence the people” with the “publicly declared dictatorship” that he opposed.[1158] Bakunin’s so-called dictatorship would not give orders to workers who were subject to their authority and forced to obey by the threat of corporal punishment or court-martial. He explicitly wrote that,
<quote>
It does not impose any new resolutions, regulations or ways of living on the people, and only unleashes their will and gives a wider opportunity for their self-determination and their social-economic organizations, which should be created by them alone from the bottom upwards, and not from the top downwards. The organization must be sincerely impregnated with the idea that it is the servant and helper of the people, and by no means their ruler, and also not in any circumstances, not even on the pretext of the people’s welfare, should it ever be their master.[1159]
</quote>
The secret organization instead “influences the people exclusively through the natural, personal influence of its members, who have not the slightest power, are scattered in an unseen web throughout the regions, districts and communes, and, in agreement with each other, try, in whatever place they may be, to direct the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people toward the plan that has been discussed beforehand and firmly determined.”[1160] Its only methods to direct and influence mass social movements were persuasion and acting as organizers. It would, Bakunin believed, “carry out a broadly based popular propaganda, a propaganda that would <em>really</em> penetrate to the people, and by the power of this propaganda and also by <em>organization among the people themselves</em> join together separate popular forces into a mighty strength capable of demolishing the State.”[1161]
Critics of Bakunin have not only misrepresented what Bakunin meant by an invisible or collective dictatorship but also failed to mention that, in several other sources, he makes exactly the same proposals as in his letters to Richard and Nechaev without using any dictatorial language. This is extremely important, because the only two instances in which Bakunin advocates a dictatorship as an anarchist are in two letters he wrote as attempts to persuade authoritarian revolutionaries to adopt anarchist strategy. Outside this context, Bakunin does not use this language, and so it appears most likely that he only adopted the language as a rhetorical device, and not as an expression of his hidden authoritarian agenda.
In the 1868 program of the International Brotherhood, Bakunin wrote that a social revolution must be created by workers themselves through their own organs of self-management. Within such a revolution, “<em>the unity of revolutionary thought and action must find an agent</em> in the thick of the popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and all the energy of the revolution. That agent must be <em>the secret universal association of international brothers</em>” which is “a kind of revolutionary general staff” that spreads ideas and organizes workers in order to act as the “intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.”[1162] This text is almost identical to passages from Bakunin’s letters to Albert and Nechaev but, at no point, does he refer to any invisible dictatorship. Indeed, he explicitly writes that “this organization rules out any idea of dictatorship and custodial control” since “supreme control must always belong to the people.”[1163]
The same opposition to dictatorship appears elsewhere. In September 1869 <em>La Liberté</em> published Bakunin’s article, “A Few Words to My Young Brothers in Russia.” In the article, he insisted that formally educated young people in Russia should “go among the people” and “learn amid these masses whose hands are hardened by labor how you should serve the people’s cause. And remember well, brothers, that the cultured youth should be neither master nor protector nor benefactor nor dictator to the people, only the midwife of their spontaneous emancipation, the uniter and organizer of their efforts and their strength.”[1164]
Two years later, he wrote in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State” that during a social revolution,
<quote>
All that individuals can do is elaborate, clarify and propagate the ideas that correspond to the popular feeling and, beyond this, to contribute by their ceaseless efforts to the revolutionary organization of the natural power of the masses, but nothing beyond that. And everything else should not and could not take place except by the action of the people themselves. Otherwise one would end with political dictatorship, that is to say, the reconstruction of the State… and one would arrive by a devious but logical path at the re-establishment of the political, social and economic slavery of the popular masses.[1165]
</quote>
Bakunin described the Alliance in his April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza as
<quote>
Fundamentally a militant organization whose purpose is the organization of the power of the masses for the destruction of all states and all of the religious, political, judicial, social, and economic institutions currently existing, for the absolute emancipation of the subjugated and exploited laborers of the whole world. The purpose of our organization is to push the masses to make a clean sweep, so that agricultural and industrial populations can reorganize and federate themselves according to the principles of justice, equality, freedom and solidarity, from the bottom up, spontaneously, freely, apart from any official tutelage, whether of the reactionary or even the so-called revolutionary kind.[1166]
</quote>
The evidence clearly shows that Bakunin was not a hidden authoritarian who preached anarchism in public, and top-down minority rule by a secret society in private. His public and private statements were entirely consistent with one another, and with his anarchist commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. Bakunin held, in short, that the success of a social revolution required a specific anarchist organization of dedicated militants who organized secretly to avoid state repression and were united under a common theoretical and strategic program. The main goal of this organization was to participate in popular social movements in order to spread anarchist ideas, and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state and building an anarchist society.
In two letters, Bakunin referred to this as an invisible or collective dictatorship, but in so doing all he actually meant was that a specific anarchist organization would influence the wider working classes through persuasion and acting as key organizers and militants within the ongoing class struggle. In his mind, this would occur in parallel with, and as a complement to, workers transforming themselves through their own experiences of revolutionary practice within mass public organizations that were committed to broad programs. During an evolutionary period, this included such organizations as trade unions. Once a revolution had been launched, increasingly large numbers of workers would continue this process of self-transformation and self-organization within federations of producers’ and consumers’ associations, and federations of workers’ militias. The role of the specific anarchist organization was to prevent the emergence of any new system of minority rule and to promote forms of organization and decision-making that enabled worker self-management.
Bakunin attempted to implement this theory by participating in the broad public First International via a secret informal social network known as the Alliance. This secret network was never in a position where it could influence the working classes during a social revolution, and failed to live up to the great role that Bakunin had given it. Despite these limitations, its importance should not be underestimated. It was arguably the first specific anarchist organization in history, and its members played a key role in formulating the theory and practice of the anarchist movement. From the intellectual and practical foundation that Bakunin and the Alliance built, the future history of specific anarchist organizations would emerge.
*** Syndicalism and Specific Anarchist Organizations
After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, mass anarchists continued to advocate the strategy of simultaneously forming mass organizations and small specific anarchist organizations. In the buildup to the 1881 International Social Revolutionary Congress in London, Kropotkin proposed in letters to Malatesta, Cafiero, Schwitzguébel and an unnamed Belgian comrade, that anarchists should form “two organizations; one open, vast, and functioning openly; the other secret intended for action.”[1167] The secret organization was to be composed of dedicated anarchist militants who were experienced and action oriented. The public organization was, in comparison, to be a trade union that grouped workers “under the flag of the Strikers’ International.”[1168] The trade union was advocated both because it was the sole means through which “the forces of labor, the masses, can be successfully grouped together” and because it would “provide forces, money and a place for secret groups” to operate.[1169] This secret organization would be a direct continuation of the Intimité Internationale, a secret association of anarchists within the Saint-Imier International that he had joined in 1877 and that, when he was writing, still existed.[1170]
In the years after 1881, Kropotkin remained an advocate of organizational dualism. Nettlau described him as advocating “<em>the penetration of the masses and their stimulation by libertarian militants, in much the same way as the Alliance acted within the International</em>.”[1171] To support this view, Nettlau cited a 1914 letter where Kropotkin argued that “the syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of workers’ association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be carried on without a plunge into parliamentarism. But, evidently, it does not achieve this goal automatically, since in Germany, in France and in England, we have the examples of syndicates linked to the parliamentary struggle… There is need of the other element which Malatesta speaks of <em>and which Bakunin always professed</em>,” namely a specific anarchist organization.[1172]
What element Malatesta spoke of can be established by examining the articles he wrote during the 1890s. In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists “should organize among ourselves, among folk who are perfectly persuaded and perfectly in agreement; and, around us, in broad, open associations, we should organize as many of the workers as we can, accepting them for what they are and striving to nudge them into whatever progress we can.”[1173] This view was repeated in 1897, when he wrote that anarchists should “set up as many groups of convinced and agreeable comrades as possible,” and also “join the labor movement with fervor, helping already existing workers’ organizations and striving to promote new ones.”[1174] In 1899, he continued to argue for the “organization of us anarchists and the anarchist organization of the masses.”[1175]
Malatesta held, in line with Bakunin, that the mass organization should not have a distinctly anarchist program. In June 1897, he argued that “the workers’ organizations… gather the exploited for the economic struggle against the masters” on the basis of “the interests shared by all workers… regardless of persuasion” and so must “be separate and distinct from the organizations of the various parties,” including specific anarchist organizations.[1176] Several months later in November, he distinguished between “the workers’ movement—which should be whatever it can be and vary with the varying degree of development attained by the proletarians… and the anarchist party, which should be made up of men subscribing to the same ideas and bound by common purposes.”[1177] Malatesta came to adopt this position in response to the lessons of the International in Italy. The Italian section “was never anything other than the anarchist socialist party,” and so “was weak as an organization for economic resistance” because “it was unable to make headway among the masses who were frightened by its overly advanced program… and it was weak as an anarchist party because many of its members were workers who had little grasp of anarchy and socialism and, having been drawn by the hope of immediate revolution, melted away every time an insurrectional attempt, or the hope of it, failed.”[1178]
After the birth of revolutionary syndicalism as a doctrine between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, Malatesta’s advocacy of organizational dualism was articulated in response to the ideas of the CGT and other revolutionary syndicalist trade unions. Malatesta’s critique of the theory of revolutionary syndicalism is sometimes misrepresented as a rejection of revolutionary trade unionism in and of itself. Such a perspective ignores the fact that during his debate with the revolutionary syndicalist and CGT member Monatte at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, Malatesta argued that he was a supporter of the labor movement and advocated anarchists entering trade unions to spread anarchist ideas among workers. As a result, he described himself as “a syndicalist, in the sense of being a supporter of the syndicates,” who advocated “syndicates that are open to all workers without distinction of opinions, absolutely neutral syndicates,” rather than “anarchist syndicates.”[1179] What Malatesta rejected was revolutionary syndicalism as “a doctrine” in the sense of the position that trade unionism is “<em>sufficient unto itself</em>” and “a necessary and sufficient means for social revolution.”[1180]
Over the following decades, Malatesta repeatedly argued that revolutionary syndicalism was wrong, because trade unions are a necessary but insufficient means to revolution. In 1927, he insisted that,
<quote>
Today the major force for social transformation is the labor movement (union movement).… The anarchists must recognize the usefulness and importance of the union movement; they must support its development and make it one of the levers in their action, doing all they can to ensure that, by cooperation with other forces for progress, it will open the way to a social revolution.… But it would be a great and fatal mistake to believe, as many do, that the labor movement can and should, of its own volition, and by its very nature, lead to such a revolution.[1181]
</quote>
Malatesta thought that trade unionism was insufficient to achieve a social revolution, because he believed that trade union activity was constituted by forms of practice that, over time, had a tendency to transform them into reformist institutions concerned with reproducing themselves within capitalism, rather than abolishing class society. As he explained in 1907, “Labor movements, which always commence as movements of protest and revolt, and are animated at the beginning by a broad spirit of progress and human fraternity, tend very soon to degenerate; and in proportion as they acquire strength, they become egoistic, conservative, occupied exclusively with interests immediate and restricted, and develop within themselves a bureaucracy which, as in all such cases, has no other object than to strengthen and aggrandize itself.”[1182]
Trade unions must, if they are to fulfill their purpose, be open to any worker who wants to win immediate improvements from the economic ruling classes. The consequence of this is that trade unions will be forced by circumstances to “moderate their aspirations, first so that they should not frighten away those they wish to have with them, and next because, in proportion as numbers increase, those with ideas who have initiated the movement remain buried in a majority that is only occupied with the petty interests of the moment.”[1183] In addition, given their function of winning immediate improvements for their membership, trade unions will have to operate not too far outside the law, interact with the political and economic ruling classes, and concern themselves primarily with the interests of workers who belong to the trade union, rather than workers who their membership competes with in the labor market. These factors would, in turn, lead trade unions that gain a large membership to “assure, in accord with rather than against the masters, a privileged situation for themselves, and so create difficulties of entrance for new members, and for the admission of apprentices in the factories; a tendency to amass large funds that afterwards they are afraid of compromising; to seek the favor of public powers; to be absorbed, above all, in co-operation and mutual benefit schemes; and to become at last conservative elements in society.”[1184]
For Malatesta, this tendency of trade unions to develop into reformist institutions that balanced the interests of capital and labor was confirmed by such examples as the American Federation of Labor in the United States. It “does not carry on a struggle against the bosses except in the sense that two businessmen struggle when they are discussing the details of a contract. The real struggle is conducted against the newcomers, the foreigners, or natives who seek to be allowed to work in any industrial job” such that “skilled workers look down on manual workers; whites despise and oppress blacks; the ‘real Americans’ consider Chinese, Italians, and other foreign workers as inferiors. If a revolution were to come in the United States, the strong and wealthy Unions would inevitably be against the Movement, because they would be worried about their investments and the privileged position they have assured for themselves.”[1185] Kropotkin shared Malatesta’s concerns. In 1919, he complained that in England, after the collapse of the First International, “the daily struggle of local unions against the exploiters took the place of more distant ends… the majority of the active members of the workers’ unions, occupied day after day with the organization of these unions and their strikes, lost sight of the final end of the workers’ organization—social revolution.”[1186]
The history of the CGT can itself be used to illustrate Malatesta’s argument against revolutionary syndicalism. In 1919, a major and potentially revolutionary strike wave spread across France. It mobilized 1,150,718 workers in 2,026 strikes. One of the major strikes in this wave of revolt began on June 2, when 170,750 metalworkers in Paris and its suburbs, who belonged to thirteen local unions, went on strike for a forty-four-hour workweek and higher wages. This strike was independently organized by the rank and file as a reaction to the secretaries of the CGT’s Federation of Metalworkers signing an agreement with capitalists that granted a forty-eight-hour workweek. In so doing, the Federation had undercut ongoing negotiations between the capitalists and the Parisian local unions concerning a forty-four-hour workweek.
A significant number of workers who took part in the strike, which expanded to include other regions of France, attempted to transform it into a revolutionary movement against capitalism itself and to achieve political objectives, such as an end to French military intervention against the Russian revolution and amnesty for political and military prisoners. They called for a general strike and the establishment of a new Paris Commune. The strike ended on June 28, before any of this could occur, because the union secretaries decided to achieve a purely economic settlement with the capitalists and government, which won increased wages and reaffirmed the previous agreement of a forty-eight-hour workweek. Despite thinking of themselves as genuine radicals committed to the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism, the secretaries decided to not support political or revolutionary demands or enlist the wider support of the CGT as a whole. Given their social position as trade union bureaucrats, they acted to balance the interests of capital and labor and focused exclusively on reformist rather than revolutionary goals.[1187]
Anarcho-syndicalists argued that revolutionaries should respond to the problem of trade unions becoming increasingly reformist over time by explicitly committing them to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. In 1925, Malatesta rejected this position and argued against those who aspired to merge the labor and anarchist movements by giving unions an explicitly anarchist program. He noted that the purpose of a trade union is to unite as many workers as possible in order to win immediate reforms, such as higher wages and improved working conditions, and thereby act as “a means of education and a field for propaganda” until workers “are in a position to make the social revolution.”[1188] Yet, since the majority of workers are not anarchists, any trade union that allowed only committed anarchists to join it would “be the very same thing as an anarchist group and would remain unable either to obtain better conditions or to bring about the revolution.”[1189] His claim that anarcho-syndicalist trade unions would end up being specific anarchist organizations that called themselves trade unions was certainly applicable to some groups. The French CGTSR, for example, had only six thousand members in 1936, hardly the size necessary to be an organ of genuinely large-scale class struggle.[1190]
On the other hand, if an anarcho-syndicalist trade union allowed any worker into it and thereby performed its function as an organ of large-scale class struggle then, as it grew in size, it would come to be an organization in which the majority of members were not anarchists and its anarchist program would exist only on paper as “an empty formula to which nobody pays any more attention.”[1191] Malatesta concluded that any “fusion” of anarchism and the trade union movement would result “either in rendering the union powerless to attain its specific aim, or in attenuating, falsifying and extinguishing the spirit of Anarchism.”[1192]
Given this, Malatesta rejected the strategy of committing existing trade unions to an anarchist program or splitting off from large, moderate trade unions to form much smaller anarchist ones. He instead argued that anarchists should participate within the largest trade unions as a militant minority in order to be able to influence the largest number of workers and counteract the tendency of trade unions to become reformist. In Malatesta’s specific context during 1920s Italy, this was the syndicalist USI and the General Confederation of Labor, which had close ties with the Italian Socialist Party. His position, though, could apply just as well to less radical trade unions.[1193]
According to Malatesta, the “revolutionary spirit must be introduced, developed, and maintained by the constant actions of revolutionaries who work from within their ranks as well as from outside, but it cannot be the normal, natural definition of the Trade Unions’ function.”[1194] Anarchists who participate in the trade union movement should, “strive to make them as much as possible instruments of combat in view of the Social Revolution. They should work to develop in the Syndicates all that which can augment its educative influence and its combativeness—the propaganda of ideas, the forcible strike, the spirit of proselytism, the distrust and hatred of the authorities and of the politicians, the practice of solidarity toward individuals and groups in conflict with the masters. They should combat all that which tends to render them egotistic, pacific, conservative,” which included amassing large amounts of money and “the appointment of bureaucratic officials, paid and permanent.”[1195]
Although Malatesta advocated anarchist participation within the trade union movement, he insisted that anarchism should not subsume itself into it, but instead maintain an independent existence within specific anarchist organizations. He argued that anarchists should work within the trade union movement for “anarchistic purposes as individuals, groups and federations of groups” and “always keep in contact with the Anarchists and remember that the labor organizations do not constitute the end but only one of the various means, no matter how important it may be, of preparing the advent of anarchy.”[1196] There is, he said, “an impelling need for a specifically anarchist organization which, both from within and outside the unions, struggle for the achievement of anarchism and seek to sterilize all the germs of degeneration and reaction.”[1197] In other words, Malatesta advocated syndicalism (in the broad sense of revolutionary trade unionism) plus a specific anarchist organization.
He was not alone. In 1888, Spanish anarchists formed the Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region in order to provide the Federation of Resistance Against Capital, a federation of politically neutral trade unions, with a revolutionary orientation.[1198] Decades later in 1907, an anonymous member of the anarchist movement in Bohemia reported: “We are syndicalists. But syndicalism for us is only a means of action and not an end. We view it as a means of anarchist propaganda. It is thanks to syndicalism that we have been able to put down firm roots among the textile workers and miners in northern Bohemia, whose trade unions are under our direct influence. Most of these unions are flanked by an anarchist group made up of the best educated and most conscious workers. Our revolutionary miners are preparing the struggle for an eight-hour day.”[1199]
Some, but not all, anarcho-syndicalists advocated the formation of both mass syndicalist trade unions committed to an anarchist program, which were open to all workers, and smaller specific anarchist organizations, which were composed exclusively of dedicated militants. Focusing on Spain, the former general secretary of the CNT’s Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí, gave a speech on anarchism and syndicalism in 1920. He claimed that although anarchists should participate in trade unions in order to “watch over their development and to provide them with direction” such that they “become more libertarian,” this “does not by any means imply that the existing anarchist groups must be dissolved. Not at all. The more influence they exercise, the more Anarchism and anarchists there will be.”[1200] Ultimately, as Seguí pointed out, it was the influence of anarchist groups that led to the CNT adopting anarchist communism as its goal in 1919.
Several years later in 1927, the FAI was founded during the CNT’s period of illegality—between 1924 and 1930—under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Its founding was initiated by the Portuguese Anarchist Union, the Federation of Spanish-Speaking Anarchist Groups in France, and the Federation of Anarchist Groups in Spain.[1201] The strategic motivations for a new specific anarchist organization can be seen in the manifesto issued by the Anarchist Liaison Committee of Catalonia, which had been set up to organize the founding of the FAI. They described themselves as workers who were active CNT militants and supporters of the doctrine of the IWMA. It was asserted that “it is not enough to be active inside the union.… Outside of the unions, absolutely independently, we disseminate our theories, form our groups, organize rallies, publish anarchist reading material, and sow the seed of anarchism in every direction.”[1202] This activity in anarchist groups was essential in order to ensure that anarchists both instigated and inspired the coming social revolution such that it was not defeated, as had recently happened in Russia, by the establishment of a new minority political ruling class. Anarchists had to “organize ourselves in anarchist groupings in order to impregnate the anarchist revolution” and “propel it as far forward as we may.”[1203]
This commitment to an anarcho-syndicalist version of organizational dualism was repeated at the founding meeting of the FAI in July 1927. The minutes claim that the labor organization itself should struggle not only for day-to-day improvements, but also, for universal human emancipation and anarchism. At the same time, an “anarchist organization of groups should be established alongside it, with the two organizations working together for the anarchist movement.”[1204] It was proposed that the CNT and the FAI should “hold joint plenums and local, district, and regional meetings” and “form general federations of the full anarchist movement” with “general councils composed of representatives of the unions and the groups. The general councils will name Commissions of Education, Propaganda, Agitation, and other areas of equal concern for both organizations.”[1205] By organizing joint councils, the FAI and CNT would establish a <em>trabazón</em> with one another, which can be translated into English as an “organic link.” This trabazón was subsequently implemented at the CNT’s national conference in January 1928, where delegates from the FAI and CNT agreed to form a National Committee of Revolutionary Action and a National Prisoners’ Aid Committee composed of members of both organizations.[1206]
The strategy of anarcho-syndicalism plus a specific anarchist organization was also advocated by anarchists outside of Spain. The French anarcho-syndicalist Besnard argued during his speech at the IWMA congress of 1937 that “anarcho-communist groups,” which were distinct from the trade union, should “go <em>prospecting</em> among the laboring masses,” “seek out recruits and temper militants” and “carry out active propaganda and intensive pioneering work with an eye to winning the greatest possible number of workers hitherto deceived and gulled by all the political parties, without exception, over to their side and thus to the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions.”[1207]
The relationship between mass organizations and specific anarchist organizations was not the only topic that anarchists debated. They also argued with one another about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and what role they should play in the class struggle.
*** Platformism and Synthesism
In 1918, the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) was founded in Ukraine. It was viewed by Voline, who was one of its members, as a specific anarchist organization that would embrace anarchist communists, anarcho-syndicalists, and individualist anarchists and thereby achieve what he termed a “united anarchism.”[1208] The Nabat’s first congress on November 18 described its primary duty as “organizing all of the life forces of anarchism; uniting the various strands of anarchism; bringing together through a common endeavor all anarchists seriously desirous of playing an active part in the social revolution.”[1209] This aspiration never became a reality due to the anarcho-syndicalists deciding not to join. In response, the Nabat choose not to send a delegate to the third All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists.[1210]
In November 1920, the militants of the Nabat, including Voline, were arrested by the Bolshevik secret police and imprisoned in Moscow. After an extensive campaign for the release of anarchist prisoners, which included imprisoned anarchists going on hunger strike, the Bolshevik government released a number of anarchists on the condition that they leave the country immediately. Among them was Voline, who left for Berlin in January 1922. That year, the anarchists who had fled to Berlin in order to escape Bolshevik state repression formed the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. Between June 1923 and May 1924, this group published the anarchist journal <em>Anarkhichesky Vestnik</em> (Anarchist Herald) as part of a collaboration with the New York Union of Russian Toilers. The journal, edited by Voline and Peter Arshinov, published articles advocating the formation of specific anarchist organizations that united anarchists from different tendencies in order to combine the best ideas from anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism.[1211]
This position came to be known as the <em>anarchist synthesis</em> and was expounded not only by Voline but also by the French anarchist Sébastien Faure. In his 1928 article <em>The Anarchist Synthesis</em>, Faure utilized an analogy with chemistry to argue that anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism were “three elements” that should be mixed together and synthesized through a process of ongoing experimentation. This would reveal which “dosage” of each element was most appropriate for a given context such that the “formula” would vary “locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.”[1212] The organizational basis for this synthesis in France was the recently formed Association of Anarchist Federalists (AFA), which was described by Faure as “an entirely new regrouping of anarchist forces” that would unite all committed anarchists “without distinction of tendency” in order to “give more cohesion, influence and effectiveness to our dear propaganda” and enable anarchists “to work together rather than against one another, to live in peace rather than make war.”[1213]
In Faure’s <em>Anarchist Encyclopedia</em>, published in 1934, Voline repeated this view when he defined the anarchist synthesis as “a tendency currently emerging within the libertarian movement seeking to reconcile and then ‘synthesize’ the different currents of thought that divide this movement into several more or less hostile fractions.”[1214] Voline, in other words, sought not only to unite different anarchists in the same organization but also to combine the different ideas of anarchist tendencies together. This was motivated by two main positions. First, although anarchism’s fragmentation into distinct subtypes had initially led to beneficial developments in anarchist theory and practice, it had in the long run ceased to be useful and resulted in unnecessary conflict between anarchists who each viewed their “parcel” as “the sole truth and bitterly fought against the partisans of the other currents.”[1215] In so doing, they ignored the important ideas that other anarchist tendencies had to offer and the fact that anarchism could be improved by fusing each separate element together into an organic whole. Second, any specific anarchist organization composed of different kinds of anarchist that did not establish a synthesis of their different ideas would only be “a ‘mechanical’ assemblage” in which “each holds on to his intransigent position,” resulting in “not a synthesis, but chaos.”[1216]
In parallel with the emergence of Voline and Faure’s anarchist synthesis, a distinct and opposed tendency developed that came to be known as <em>platformism</em>. In June 1926, members of the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, which had relocated to Paris in 1925, issued <em>The</em> <em>Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft)</em> through their new journal <em>Dielo Truda</em> (The Cause of Labor). The <em>Platform</em> emerged out of discussions within the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, whose members included Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, and Ida Mett, about how a specific anarchist organization should be structured and operate in order to overcome the perceived disorganization and ineffectiveness that the anarchist movement had fallen into. In so doing, they hoped to ensure that the anarchist movement would not be defeated, as it had been in Russia, during the next revolution.[1217]
The Dielo Truda group, in line with organizational dualism in general, advocated the formation of mass organizations that brought the working classes together on the basis of production and consumption, such as trade unions, workers’ councils, or cooperatives, and a specific anarchist organization that united the most revolutionary and militant workers under an anarchist-communist program.[1218] The function of such a specific anarchist organization, which they called <em>the general union of anarchists</em>, was to prepare the working classes for a social revolution, awaken and nurture class consciousness, spread anarchist ideas, coordinate action, and participate effectively in collective struggles. In so doing, it would ensure that anarchism became “the guiding light,” “spearhead,” or “driving force” of the social revolution when it occurred, such that there was an “<em>anarchist theoretical direction of events</em>.”[1219]
By this, the Dielo Truda group did not mean that the general union of anarchists should seize power, establish themselves as a political ruling class, and impose their ideas from the top down in the name of the working classes whom they claimed to represent. Rather, they sought only “to assist the masses to choose the genuine path of social revolution and socialist construction” and establish the “genuine self-governance of the masses,” which would be “the practical first step along the road to the realization of libertarian communism.”[1220] This goal was to be achieved by participating within mass movements, such as trade unions, in order to spread anarchist ideas within them and steer the movement in an anarchist direction.
The <em>Platform</em> differed from other forms of organizational dualism in its conception of how the specific anarchist organization should be structured. The Dielo Truda group held that specific anarchist organizations should, in order to effectively influence the working classes, adhere to a narrow ideological and tactical program that would act as a guide for achieving their shared goals via an agreed-upon route. This position emerged from their experiences of the Russian revolution. Arshinov argued in his 1925 article “Our Organizational Problem” that the anarchist movement in Russia had been outmaneuvered by other revolutionary tendencies because it had adopted “positions that were, yes, correct, but too general, acting all at once in a diffuse way, in multiple tiny groups, often at odds on many points of tactics.”[1221] In order to prevent this from happening again, specific anarchist organizations should be committed to ideological and tactical unity such that every member agrees on a specific route to achieve concrete objectives. Doing so ensures that the organization’s limited resources are deployed in the same direction and prevents different segments of the organization from engaging in tactics that do not complement and support one another, such as one group advocating participation in trade unions while another tried to persuade workers not to join them.[1222]
The Dielo Truda group therefore rejected Voline and Faure’s theory of the anarchist synthesis. They thought it made little sense to advocate the synthesis of anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism. It was already the case that anarcho-syndicalists advocated communism as a goal and most anarchist communists advocated participation in trade unions. Nor was there any need to incorporate the insights of individualist anarchism. Individualists rejected the need for collectively organized class struggle, and anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism were already based on a commitment to the freedom of the individual. In addition, it was impractical to attempt to synthesize the different anarchist tendencies into a single organization, because its members would continue to have fundamentally incompatible views on theory and practice. The organization would inevitably disintegrate when these disagreements arose to prominence during collective struggles.[1223]
The authors of the <em>Platform</em> believed that the common ideological and tactical program of the specific anarchist organization should be implemented through each individual member engaging in revolutionary self-discipline, and enacting the decisions that had been collectively agreed upon.[1224] They wrote that “the federalist type of anarchist organization, while acknowledging every member of the organization’s right to independence, to freedom of opinion, initiative and individual liberty, charges each member with specific organizational duties, insisting that these be rigorously performed, and that decisions jointly made be put into effect.”[1225] This included a commitment to seeing decisions made by majority vote at congresses as binding on every group within the organization. The authors of the <em>Platform</em>, in parallel with this, rejected the “unaccountable individualism” of some anarchist groups in favor of a system of “<em>collective responsibility</em>” whereby the general union of anarchists “will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of each of its members” and “each member will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of the Union as a whole.”[1226]
Most controversially of all, the Dielo Truda group proposed the formation of an executive committee that would achieve coordination and coherence between different sections of the general union of anarchists. They advocated an “<em>Executive Committee</em>” tasked with the “implementation of decisions made by the Union, which the latter have entrusted to it; theoretical and organizational oversight of the activity of isolated organizations, in keeping with the Union’s theoretical options and overall tactical line; scrutiny of the general state of the movement; maintenance of working and organizational ties between all of the organizations of the Union, as well as with outside organizations.”[1227] The authors of the Platform were aware that the executive committee could potentially take on a life of its own and subordinate or oppress the membership. In order to prevent this from happening, they proposed that “the rights, responsibilities and practical tasks of the Executive Committee will be prescribed by the Congress of the General Union.”[1228]
The <em>Platform</em> aroused a great deal of debate within the European anarchist movement. These responses tended to be based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting its ideas due, in part, to a poor French translation produced by Voline, and the ambiguous language within the <em>Platform</em> itself, such as references to collective responsibility, an executive committee, and anarchists providing theoretical direction.[1229] In 1927, a different group of Russian anarchists, which included Mollie Steimer, Senya Fleshin, and Voline, released a critique of the <em>Platform</em>. They interpreted the <em>Platform</em> as advocating the formation of a centralized party ruled from the top-down, by an executive committee that was merely a central committee under a different name. This centralized party would, in turn, act as leader and director of both the anarchist movement and working-class movements in general, rather than offering only ideological assistance to other workers as equals in the class struggle. As a result, they concluded that the Dielo Truda group had abandoned anarchist principles in favor of authoritarian Bolshevik ones.[1230] This negative evaluation of the <em>Platform</em> was shared by Berkman and Goldman.[1231]
A more politely written response was issued by Malatesta in October 1927. Malatesta, like Steimer, Fleshin, and Voline, viewed the <em>Platform</em> as rejecting the anarchist commitment to free initiative and free agreement in favor of a Bolshevik-inspired authoritarian system of organization. The <em>Platform’s</em> advocacy of collective responsibility, binding congress resolutions made by majority vote, and an executive committee was interpreted by Malatesta as being a proposal for an organization in which decisions are made by elected representatives. If these representatives make binding decisions through simple majority voting then, when there are more than two factions at a meeting, the decision will be made by a numerical minority of representatives elected by a minority of the organization.[1232] He argued that,
<quote>
if the Union is responsible for what each member does, how can it leave to its individual members and to the various groups the freedom to apply the common program in the way they think best? How can one be responsible for an action if one does not have the means to prevent it? Therefore, the Union and in its name the Executive Committee, would need to monitor the action of the individual members and order them what to do and what not to do; and since disapproval after the event cannot put right a previously accepted responsibility, no-one would be able to do anything at all before having obtained the go-ahead, the permission of the committee.[1233]
</quote>
As a result, Malatesta concluded that the Dielo Truda group had proposed means that would, “far from helping to bring about the victory of anarchist communism… only falsify the anarchist spirit and lead to consequences that go against their intentions.”[1234]
In response to these critiques the authors of the <em>Platform</em> issued a number of texts clarifying their position. First, they were not in favor of subordinating the working class to the top-down rule of an anarchist organization. They explicitly wrote that “the action of steering revolutionary elements and the revolutionary movement of the masses in terms of ideas should not be and cannot ever be considered as an aspiration on the part of anarchists that they should take the construction of the new society into their own hands. That construction cannot be carried out except by the whole of laboring society, for that task devolves upon it alone, and any attempt to strip it of that right must be deemed anti-anarchist.”[1235]
Given this, anarchists “will never agree to wield power, even for a single instant, nor impose their decisions on the masses by force. In this connection their methods are: propaganda, force of argument, and spoken and written persuasion.”[1236] The <em>Platform’s</em> references to anarchists providing direction to the working classes only meant that they would influence other workers and persuade them to adopt anarchist ideas in just the same manner that famous anarchist theorists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus, and Malatesta had already done. The <em>Platform</em> merely held that in order for this ideological direction to become a “permanent factor” it was necessary to form “an organization possessed of a common ideology… whose membership engage in ideologically coordinated activity, without being side-tracked or dispersed as has been the case hitherto.”[1237] This organization would then participate in, for example, the trade union movement “as <em>the carriers of a certain theory, a prescribed work plan</em>” in order to “<em>disseminate</em> within the unions its ideas regarding the revolutionary tactics of the working class and on various events.”[1238]
In summary, although the revolution can only be made by the working classes themselves, it is also the case that “the revolutionary mass is forever nurturing in its bosom a minority of initiators, who precipitate and direct events” and “in a true social revolution the supporters of worker anarchism alone will account for that minority.”[1239] Once the working classes “have defeated capitalist society, a new era in their history will be ushered in, an era when all social and political functions are transferred to the hands of workers and peasants who will set about the creation of the new life. At that point the anarchist organizations and, with them, the General Union, will lose all their significance and they should, in our view, gradually melt away into the productive organizations of the workers and peasants,” rather than subjecting workers to their rule.[1240]
Second, in advocating an executive committee within the specific anarchist organization they were not proposing the formation of “a Party Central Committee… that issues orders, makes laws and commands.”[1241] The authors of the <em>Platform</em> not only thought that an executive committee was consistent with anarchism, but that “such an organ exists in many anarchist and anarchist-syndicalist organizations.”[1242] What the <em>Platform</em> called an “Executive Committee” had no coercive powers. It was merely “a body <em>performing functions of a general nature in the Union</em>” that would not restrict the activity of groups within the organization and instead only “steer their activity” by providing “ideological or organizational assistance,” such as advising a group on the current “tactical or organizational line adopted by the Union on a variety of matters.”[1243]
If a group within the specific anarchist organization decided to adopt its own tactical approach then one of three outcomes would occur: the minority would agree to follow the majority position within the organization because it is not an issue of supreme importance; the minority and majority position would coexist if feasible; or, the minority would leave the organization to form their own group. Crucially, which of these outcomes transpired “will be resolved, not by the Executive Committee which, let us repeat, is to be merely an executive organ of the Union, but by the entire Union as a body: by a Union Conference or Congress.”[1244]
Third, the idea of collective responsibility did not entail the view that the members of the organization would have to follow the orders of an executive committee. Arshinov explained in his response to Malatesta that the members of the organization would be united under a common program that they all supported and which, in so far as they were members, was binding upon them. Given this,
<quote>
the practical activity of a member of the organization is naturally in complete harmony with the overall activity, and conversely the activity of the organization as a whole could not be at odds with the conscience and activity of each member, assuming he has accepted the program fundamental to this organization. It is this which characterizes the principle of collective responsibility: the Union as a body is answerable for the activity of each member, in the knowledge that he could only carry out his political and revolutionary work in the political spirit of the Union. Likewise, each member is fully answerable for the Union as a whole, since its activity could not be at odds with what has been determined by the whole membership.[1245]
</quote>
From Arshinov’s response, it is clear that Malatesta’s critique was based on a misunderstanding of what the authors of the <em>Platform</em> meant by collective responsibility. Malatesta himself realized that this was potentially the case. He wrote in a December 1929 letter to Makhno that,
<quote>
I accept and support the view that anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause; and respect the agreements that have been made—except when wishing sincerely to leave the association.… I maintain that those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association. Perhaps, speaking of collective responsibility, you mean precisely that accord and solidarity that must exist among the members of an association. And if that is so, your expression amounts, in my view, to an incorrect use of language, but basically it would only be an unimportant question of wording and agreement would soon be reached.[1246]
</quote>
Malatesta further clarified his views on the topic in a July 1930 letter he wrote to a platformist group, based in the Montmartre district of Paris. Although he continued to reject the phrase “collective responsibility” in favor of “moral responsibility,” he wrote “I find myself more or less in agreement with their way of conceiving the anarchist organization (being very far from the authoritarian spirit which the ‘Platform’ seemed to reveal) and I confirm my belief that behind the linguistic differences really lie identical positions.”[1247] Malatesta was, nonetheless, not a platformist since he thought that specific anarchist organizations should have a slightly broader program, and rejected the position that congress resolutions passed by majority vote should be binding on every group within a specific anarchist organization, rather than only those groups who voted in favor of them.
The immediate practical effect of the Platform appears to have been somewhat limited. The Dielo Truda group organized a number of discussion meetings on the <em>Platform</em> that were attended by militants from around the world, including France, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, and China. This culminated in an attempt to form an Anarchist International at a meeting held in a Parisian cinema on March 20, 1927.[1248] During the meeting, Makhno proposed a five-point program to be discussed: “(1) recognition of the class struggle as the most important factor of the anarchist system; (2) recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement; (3) recognition of syndicalism as one of the principal methods of anarcho-communist struggle; (4) the necessity of a ‘General Union of Anarchists’ based on ideological and tactical unity and collective responsibility; (5) the necessity of a positive program to realize the social revolution.”[1249]
These five points were then pedantically rephrased by the attending delegates in a manner that changed their language but not their ultimate meaning. The wording agreed upon was:
1. recognition of the struggle of all oppressed and exploited against state and capitalist authority as the most important factor of the anarchist system;
1. recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement;
1. recognition of the labor and union struggle as one of the most important means of anarchist revolutionary action;
1. necessity in each country of as general as possible a Union of Anarchists who have the same goals and tactics, as well as collective responsibility;
1. necessity of a positive program of action for the anarchists in the social revolution.[1250]
Before the delegates could move on to discuss these points, the French police broke into the meeting and arrested everybody in attendance. The commission elected to form the Anarchist International, whose members were Makhno (Ukrainian), Ranko (Polish), and Chen (Chinese), issued a letter on April 1 that declared the existence of an International Libertarian Communist Federation and, for reasons that are unclear, expressed the original five-point program for discussion that had been formulated by Makhno, rather than the version that delegates had revised. This contributed toward delegates from other anarchist groups, including the Italian anarchists who were members of the Italian Anarchist Union, deciding to disassociate from the project.[1251] Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli explained in their letter that the members of the Pensiero e Volontà group had decided not to join because,
<quote>
there exists among you a spirit which is quite distant from that which underlies our way of conceiving an international anarchist organization, that is one which is open to the greatest number of individuals, groups and federations who agree with the principles of struggle organized in an anarchist way against capitalism and the State, on a permanent national and international basis, but all this without any ideological or tactical exclusivism and without any formalism that could impede the autonomy or freedom of the individuals in the groups or of the groups themselves in the various national and international unions.[1252]
</quote>
The first specific, anarchist organization to express support for platformism was the Federation of Anarcho-Communist Groups of the United States and Canada, which was composed of workers from the Russian empire and financially supported the publication of <em>Dielo Truda</em>.[1253] The federation declared in January 1927 that “the Conference agrees with the Organizational Platform” and views its ideas as “timely and desirable.”[1254] Other Russian anarchists living in North America rejected the ideas of the Platform, and formed the Federation of Russian Workers’ Organizations of the United States and Canada in 1927. After several years of dialogue and negotiations, the two rival federations united into a single federation in July 1939.[1255]
The second specific anarchist organization to adopt platformism was the French Anarchist Communist Union. At its autumn 1927 congress in Paris, a majority of delegates voted to rename the organization the Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Union. This was accompanied by a number of dramatic changes to how the organization functioned. The results of majority votes were now binding on all individual members; positions adopted at annual congresses could not be subject to criticisms within the pages of the Union’s official paper, <em>Le Libertaire</em>, except during a three-month period immediately prior to the next congress; membership was only possible via a group, meaning isolated individuals could no longer join; and being a member involved paying a subscription fee and receiving a membership card. The 1927 congress resulted in a split within the organization. Proponents of synthesist anarchism left to form the previously mentioned AFA. These changes to the Anarchist Union did not last long. The platformist position was soon defeated at the 1930 Paris Congress where, despite a speech by Makhno, the synthesist delegates won the vote by fourteen to seven, regained control of the organization, and abandoned the above policies. In response, the platformists left and formed the Libertarian Communist Federation in 1934, only to rejoin the Anarchist Union two years later in 1936.[1256]
Despite the various negative interpretations of the Platform, its commitments were not a break with anarchism. They were instead one of many ways in which anarchists sought to build upon and update the kind of specific anarchist organization that Bakunin had advocated, decades previously. This remains true even though other anarchists thought their proposals were misguided. Although proponents of organizational dualism disagreed about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and make decisions, they nonetheless agreed on the need to unite committed revolutionaries under a common program in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and to push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engagement in actions that provided an example to others.
[1126] Davide Turcato, <em>Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution</em>, <em>1889–1900</em> (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 80–81; Nunzio Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, <em>1864–1892</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 254–58, 272.
[1127] Carl Levy, <em>Gramsci and the Anarchists</em> (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 119–25; Fausto Buttà, <em>Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism</em> (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 186–87, 196.
[1128] Wolfgang Eckhardt, <em>The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association</em> (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 2, 156–57.
[1129] E. H. Carr, <em>Michael Bakunin</em> (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 308–18; T.R. Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em> (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 29–34, 38–40, 48–56; Pernicone, <em>Italian Anarchism</em>, 16–22; Arthur Lehning, “Bakunin’s Conceptions of Revolutionary Organizations and Their Role: A Study of His ‘Secret Societies,’” in <em>Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr</em>, ed. Chimen Abramsky (London: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 57, 61–63. Bakunin had previously attempted to establish a secret society of revolutionaries in 1848, which was two decades before he became an anarchist, but this attempt was unsuccessful and never went past the planning stages. See Carr, <em>Bakunin</em>, 181–86.
[1130] Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 2–12, 47–65, 71–78, 153–58, 243–62, 318–19, 350–51, 354–55; Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 183.
[1131] Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 92.
[1132] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 92.
[1133] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 173–74. For the evidence that this program was a draft, see Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 285, 317–19.
[1134] Quoted in Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 160.
[1135] Quoted in Ravindranathan, <em>Bakunin and the Italians</em>, 160.
[1136] Michael Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 17, 2014, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain-1872]]. Bakunin’s <em>Œuvres complètes</em> incorrectly dates the letter to June. For the correct date of writing, see Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 244, 422. For other examples of Bakunin making this argument, see Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 93; Michael Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts, 1868–1875</em>, ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 215.
[1137] Carr, <em>Bakunin</em>, 189–224, 240.
[1138] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 210. This letter to Alerini has been misattributed within Bakunin’s <em>Œuvres complètes</em> as being part of Bakunin’s May 21, 1872, draft letter to Tomás González Morago. This error is repeated in Zurbrugg’s edition of Bakunin. See Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 259–61, 281, 512–13n55.
[1139] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 210, 213.
[1140] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 210.
[1141] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 211–15. For the programs of the Alliance, see Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 173–75.
[1142] Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain.”
[1143] Bakunin, <em>Selected Texts</em>, 249.
[1144] For example, Hal Draper, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution</em>, vol. 3, <em>The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”</em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 55–57, 93–96; Hal Draper, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution</em>, vol. 4, <em>Critique of Other Socialisms</em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 130, 144–47; Paul Avrich, <em>Anarchist Portraits</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13, 46, 67; Peter Marshall, <em>Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism</em> (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 263, 271–72, 276–77, 282, 286–87, 306–7; James Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London: Methuen, 1969), 87
[1145] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 180.
[1146] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 178–81.
[1147] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 178. For information on Richard, see Julian P.W. Archer, <em>The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact</em> (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 159–61, 217–8; Carr, <em>Bakunin</em>, 343–44, 349, 363, 414–15; Eckart, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 205.
[1148] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 180. For the two other occasions Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter, see ibid., 178, 181.
[1149] For an overview of Marx’s usage of the term, see Draper, <em>The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin</em> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 11–35; Richard N. Hunt, <em>The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels</em>, vol. 1, <em>Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850</em> (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 284–336.
[1150] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 180.
[1151] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 182.
[1152] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, <em>Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 554, 654–55.
[1153] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 193. For Nechaev’s views and actions, see Ronald Seth, <em>The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki</em> (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966), 31–36; Philip Pomper, “Nechaev and Tsaricide: The Conspiracy within the Conspiracy,” <em>The Russian Review</em> 33. no. 2 (1974): 123–38.
[1154] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 182–83.
[1155] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 190.
[1156] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 192–93.
[1157] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 193.
[1158] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 191–92.
[1159] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 191.
[1160] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 193.
[1161] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 194.
[1162] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 172.
[1163] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 172.
[1164] Michael Bakunin, <em>The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871</em>, ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 164. See also, 27.
[1165] Bakunin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 203.
[1166] Quoted in Eckhardt, <em>First Socialist Schism</em>, 244.
[1167] Quoted in Caroline Cahm, <em>Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism</em>, <em>1872–1886</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 145.
[1168] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 146.
[1169] Quoted in Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 146, 147. See also Martin A. Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 146–47.
[1170] Cahm, <em>Kropotkin</em>, 106, 145, 317–18n77; David Stafford, *From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90* (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 54–55.
[1171] Max Nettlau, <em>A Short History of Anarchism</em>, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 277.
[1172] Quoted in Nettlau, <em>Short History</em>, 280–81.
[1173] Malatesta, <em>The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014), 173.
[1174] Errico Malatesta, <em>A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 112.
[1175] Malatesta, Errico Malatesta, <em>Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900</em>, ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 79.
[1176] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 174–75.
[1177] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 364.
[1178] Malatesta, <em>Patient Work</em>, 364.
[1179] Maurizio Antonioli, ed. <em>The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.
[1180] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 121.
[1181] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 483.
[1182] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 338.
[1183] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 341. See also Malatesta, <em>The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 29.
[1184] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 341.
[1185] Errico Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta</em>, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 112–13.
[1186] Peter Kropotkin, <em>Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology</em>, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 585.
[1187] Nicholas Papayanis, Alphonse Merrheim: <em>The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925</em> (Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 121–36.
[1188] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 465. For Malatesta’s later clarifications of this article, see Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 27–34.
[1189] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 465.
[1190] David Berry, <em>A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 151, 255.
[1191] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 466.
[1192] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 465.
[1193] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 32–33; *Method of Freedom*, 397–98; *Life and Ideas*, 109.
[1194] Malatesta, <em>Life and Ideas</em>, 110.
[1195] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 341–42.
[1196] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 466–67.
[1197] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 483.
[1198] George Richard Esenwein, <em>Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain</em>, <em>1868–1898</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–22.
[1199] Antonioli, ed., <em>International Anarchist Congress</em>, 43.
[1200] Salvador Seguí, “Anarchism and Syndicalism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Libcom website, [[https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-syndicalism-salvador-seguí]].
[1201] Juan Gómez Casas, <em>Anarchist Organization: The History of the F.A.I</em> (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 76–77, 92–97, 107–16; Stuart Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 32–43.
[1202] Quoted in Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists</em>, 37.
[1203] Quoted in Christie, <em>We</em>, <em>the Anarchists</em>, 37, 38.
[1204] Quoted in Casas, <em>History of the F.A.I</em>, 110.
[1205] Quoted in Casas, <em>History of the F.A.I</em>, 110.
[1206] Jason Garner, <em>Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 214, 222–26.
[1207] Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, [[https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism]]. For another example, see Gregori P. Maximoff, <em>Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 50–52.
[1208] Paul Avrich, <em>The Russian Anarchists</em> (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 205.
[1209] Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in <em>No Gods</em>, <em>No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism</em>, ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 487.
[1210] Avrich, <em>Russian Anarchists</em>, 207–8.
[1211] Avrich, <em>Russian Anarchists</em>, 222, 232–33, 238–39, 241; Lazar Lipotkin, <em>The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America</em> (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 119–21, 123. For a text advocating united anarchism, see ibid., 283–86.
[1212] Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828]].
[1213] Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis.”
[1214] Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in <em>The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged</em>, ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197.
[1215] Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 199–200.
[1216] Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 203.
[1217] Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968</em> (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 121–25; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 192.
[1218] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 200–201.
[1219] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201. See also, 213; Nestor Makhno, <em>The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays</em>, ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 64–65.
[1220] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201, 207.
[1221] Quoted in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 122.
[1222] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193, 211. See also Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 62–63.
[1223] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Problem of Organization and the Notion of Synthesis (March 1926),” in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 188–91; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193.
[1224] Makhno, <em>Struggle</em>, 67–68.
[1225] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212.
[1226] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212. See also Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 240–41.
[1227] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.
[1228] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.
[1229] Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 131.
[1230] Mollie Steimer, Simon Fleshin, Voline, Sobol, Schwartz, Lia, Roman, Ervantian, “Concerning the Platform for an Organization of Anarchists,” in <em>Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin</em>, ed. Abe Bluestein (Minneapolis, MN: Libertarian Publications Group, 1983), 52–53, 58, 61–62.
[1231] Avrich, <em>Russian Anarchists</em>, 242–43.
[1232] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 486–91.
[1233] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 486–87.
[1234] Malatesta, <em>Method of Freedom</em>, 486.
[1235] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform (November, 1926),” in Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 219.
[1236] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 222.
[1237] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists (August 1927),” in Skirda <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 229–30.
[1238] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 219–20.
[1239] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 230.
[1240] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 235.
[1241] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.
[1242] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.
[1243] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 217.
[1244] The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 218.
[1245] Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism,” 240.
[1246] Malatesta, <em>Anarchist Revolution</em>, 107–8.
[1247] Errico Malatesta, “On Collective Responsibility,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., [[https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/platform-english/on-collective-responsibility-errico-malatesta]].
[1248] Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 124–28, 134–35.
[1249] Quoted in Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 205–6.
[1250] Quoted in Garner, <em>Goals and Means</em>, 206.
[1251] Skirda, <em>Facing the Enemy</em>, 135; *Garner, Goals and Means*, 206.
[1252] Luigi Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli, “Reply by the Pensiero e Volontà Group to an Invitation to Join the International Anarchist Communist Federation,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., [[https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/reply-by-the-pensiero-e-volonta-group-to-an-invitation-to-join-the-international-anarchist-communist-federation]].
[1253] Lipotkin, <em>Russian Anarchist Movement in North America</em>, 127–29, 180, 191.
[1254] Quoted in Lipotkin, <em>Russian Anarchist Movement in North America</em>, 138.
[1255] Lipotkin, <em>Russian Anarchist Movement in North America</em>, 129–31, 145–49, 180, 191–92. It is sometimes claimed that anarchists in Bulgaria were the first to adopt the <em>Platform</em>. I have been unable to verify this due to how little information about the Bulgarian anarchist movement is available in English.
[1256] Berry, <em>French Anarchist Movement</em>, 173–76; Skirda, *Facing the Enemy*, 135–36, 143.
** Chapter 11: Conclusion
Between 1868 and 1939, anarchists living in Europe and the United States developed a political theory that guided their attempts to bring about fundamental social change. This theory can be summarized as follows. Anarchists were antistate socialists who advocated the achievement of freedom, equality, and solidarity. For anarchists, these values were interdependent, such that the realization of one of them can only occur through the realization of all three at once. Although all anarchists advocated freedom, they disagreed with one another about how to define it. Some anarchists defined freedom as nondomination such that a person is free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the arbitrary power to impose their will on them. Other anarchists defined freedom as the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things such that a person becomes more free as their opportunities expand. One of the main reasons why anarchists valued freedom is that it is a prerequisite for people fully developing themselves and realizing their human potential. Irrespective of how they defined freedom, anarchists agreed that humans can, given the kind of animals we are, only be free in and through society.
In order for this to occur, society has to be structured in an egalitarian manner. There must be no hierarchical divisions between rulers who issue commands and make decisions and subordinates who obey and lack decision-making power. Organizations should instead be structured horizontally, such that each member is neither a master nor a subject. They are instead an associate who has an equal say in collective decisions, and so, codetermine the voluntary organization with every other member. Such equality of self-determination must go alongside equality of opportunity. Each individual should have access to the external conditions that are necessary for self-development, and having the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things, such as food, health care, and education. The reproduction of such a society requires solidarity, in the sense of individuals and groups cooperating with one another in pursuit of common goals and people, in their personal lives, forming reciprocal caring relationships, such as by being a loving parent, good friend, or supportive teacher.
Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state, alongside all structures of domination and exploitation,[1257] should be abolished in favor of a stateless classless society without authority, in which everyone is free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society <em>anarchy</em>. The abolition of capitalism and the state was primarily justified on the grounds that they are violent hierarchical pyramids in which decision-making flows from the top to the bottom. The majority of the population are workers who lack real decision-making power over the nature of their life, workplace, community, or society as a whole. They are instead subject to the power of an economic ruling class—capitalists, landowners, bankers, etc.—and a political ruling class—monarchs, politicians, heads of the police, generals, etc. The economic ruling class derive their power from the private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions but not private property and so, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage. The political ruling class sit at the top of the centralized, hierarchical state and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey, due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force, such as the police, prisons, and courts. All states, regardless of whether they are a monarchy, dictatorship, or parliamentary democracy, exercise institutionalized violence in order to enforce and maintain the domination and exploitation of workers, and thereby perpetuate the power and privilege of both the economic and political ruling classes.
The creation of anarchy requires the abolition of capitalism and the state but the ruling classes will never give up their power voluntarily and instead violently defend it. They must be overthrown. The majority of anarchist theory was concerned with how to do this. Anarchists argued that the goal of universal human emancipation could only be achieved through the formation of working-class social movements that engage in class struggle against the political and economic ruling classes and, ultimately, launch a social revolution.
Anarchists envisioned the social revolution as a lengthy process of simultaneous destruction and construction. Workers would destroy the old world by launching an armed insurrection that violently smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. This victory would be achieved by workers’ militias, who would also defend the social revolution from counterattack. Workers would build the new world by creating an anarchist society, which is the totality of social structures from which anarchy could later emerge. During and immediately after the social revolution, anarchists aimed to establish: (a) the collective ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) the self-management of social life, including production and distribution, through workplace and community assemblies in which collective decisions are made via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two; (c) the abolition of money and markets in favor of a system of decentralized planning; and (d) the reorganization of production, such that people engage in a combination of mental and physical labor, unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers, and the length of the working day is significantly reduced.
In order to achieve this goal, anarchists had to overcome the fact that capitalism and the state are self-reproducing. Society is constituted by a process of human beings with particular consciousness engaging in practice: deploying their capacities to satisfy a psychological drive. In so doing, they simultaneously change both the world and themselves. The interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice, such that individuals engage in practices that develop historically specific capacities, drives, and consciousness. The consequence of this is that as people engage in practice, they also create and re-create themselves as the kinds of people who reproduce the social structure itself.
Abolishing capitalism and the state, creating an anarchist society, and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society requires the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the capacity to make decisions through general assemblies, the drive to not oppress others, and the consciousness that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society are constituted by forms of practice that develop people fit mainly for reproducing capitalism and the state, rather than abolishing them. Class society systematically fails to produce the kinds of people that both an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need. Such individuals, of course, would be produced by a properly functioning anarchist society, but this fact does not help anarchists presently living under class society. Anarchists therefore face a paradox: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society.
The anarchist solution to this problem was revolutionary practice. Humans are not solely the product of their circumstances. They can also chose to engage in actions that simultaneously develop new capacities, drives, and consciousness; modify existing social structures; and construct whole new social structures. This is not to say that any form of revolutionary practice could lead to an anarchist society. Anarchists argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating anarchy. They, in short, advocated the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries propose for achieving social change have to be constituted by forms of practice that develop people into the kinds of individuals who are capable of, and are driven to: (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and, (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society. If social movements select means that fail to do this then they would, regardless of people’s good intentions, never achieve the ends of anarchism.
The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends shaped both what strategies they advocated and which ones they rejected. Anarchists thought that the social revolution would emerge out of an extended evolutionary period, during which change was slow, gradual, and partial. In order for this evolutionary period to culminate in a revolution, working-class social movements have to spread their ideas and form social networks through print media, talks, and recreational activities; construct organizations that prefigure the future anarchist society; and engage in class struggle via direct action. Anarchists advocated these means not only because they were effective and won results, but also because of the forms of practice that constituted them. Through engaging in direct action with prefigurative organizations, workers simultaneously change the world and themselves. A group of workers might form a tenant union, organize a rent strike against their landlord, and make collective decisions about the rent strike within a general assembly. In so doing, they change social relations—rent decreases and workers gain more power over their landlord—and change people—workers develop the capacity to organize a rent strike and make decisions within a general assembly, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another, and realize that housing should be free.
During the course of the strike, these workers not only change social relations and themselves, but also construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a tenant union. Long-term participation in this tenant union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness further. This makes the organization of new actions possible, such as a larger rent strike that mobilizes workers in an entire city. These kinds of actions could continue and multiply over time, as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. Through the struggle against capitalism and the state, workers could develop into people ready to emancipate themselves and achieve anarchist goals.
Anarchism emerged in parallel with, and in opposition to, various forms of state socialism that aimed to achieve a stateless classless society through the conquest of state power. Anarchists replied that the means of conquering state power could never achieve the ends of universal human emancipation. Socialist parties that engaged in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state would, over time, abandon their revolutionary program and become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state. If a socialist party succeeded in conquering state power, whether by elections or force, the result would not be a society in which workers themselves self-managed social life. They would instead create a new form of minority class rule, in which the working classes were dominated and exploited by the party leadership that actually wielded state power. The minority of rulers would be transformed by the exercise of state power and become tyrants who were primarily concerned with expanding and reproducing their power and furthering their specific interests in opposition to, and in conflict with, the interests of the working classes whose name they ruled in. They would never give up their power voluntarily, and would violently repress any working-class social movements who resisted them. The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.
Although anarchists in general shared these basic strategic commitments, the movement was divided between two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization and advocated the formation of small affinity groups, that were linked together via informal social networks and periodicals. They rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and argued that anarchists should immediately engage in an escalating series of assassinations, bombings, and armed insurrections against the ruling classes and their institutions. The goal of these attacks was to spread anarchist ideas and inspire other workers to rise up. This would result in a chain reaction of revolt, as an increasingly large number of workers launched insurrections, formed a mass movement, and initiated the social revolution.
Mass anarchists, in contrast, advocated the formation of both affinity groups and large-scale formal federations of autonomous groups, which coordinated large-scale action through regular congresses attended by instantly recallable mandated delegates. They argued that anarchists could generate a mass movement that was driven to, and capable of, launching an armed insurrection that abolished class society through the struggle for immediate reforms in the present. In order for this struggle to build toward revolution, rather than collapse into reformism, it had to be achieved by engaging in direct action within prefigurative organizations. Anarchists would facilitate this process by acting as a militant minority within social movements in order to influence other workers to adopt anarchist ideas and implement anarchist strategy.
The main form of mass anarchism was syndicalist anarchism, which argued that trade unions were the primary social movement under capitalism that could fulfill anarchist goals. This was because trade unions could pursue the double aim of struggling for immediate reforms and attempting to launch a social revolution via an insurrectionary general strike. In so doing, they would perform a dual function. They could act as organs of resistance that struggle against dominant institutions in the present and then, during the social revolution, take over the organization of the economy (in part or whole) and transform into organs of self-management. Syndicalist anarchists disagreed about whether or not trade unions should be politically neutral, or formally committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means.
A significant number of mass anarchists thought that trade unions were a necessary but insufficient means to achieve revolution. These proponents of organizational dualism argued that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and, in addition, smaller specific anarchist organizations composed exclusively of anarchist militants. These specific anarchist organizations were the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within larger and broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to other workers. Proponents of organizational dualism nonetheless disagreed about how to do this, and argued with one another about a variety of topics, including how broad or narrow a specific anarchist organization’s program should be, and whether or not congress resolutions should be binding on every section of an organization, or only those who voted in favor of them. These disagreements led to the formation of distinct tendencies, such as synthesists and platformists.
Numerous anarchist women, and some men who supported them, realized that the achievement of anarchy required the organization of women-only groups in order to struggle against class and gender oppression simultaneously. These groups aimed to combat sexism and promote women’s liberation within both the anarchist movement, and wider society. In so doing, they would enable women to unlearn their patriarchal socialization and fully participate in the class struggle as equals to male workers. These women-only groups were either mass organizations that were open to all women workers, informal anarchist affinity groups, or formal organizations of dedicated anarchist militants. Some organizations were women’s sections of syndicalist trade unions, while others were independent.
This book has been concerned with what historical anarchists thought. It was not written as a mere exercise in digging up curious individuals from the past or compiling historical facts for their own sake. I want to help modern workers develop their own ideas about how to change the world, and I thought I could do this by summarizing the theory and actions of the main antiauthoritarian wing of the historical workers’ movement. This project is only partially complete since, for the purposes of this book, I narrowly focused on anarchists living in Europe and the United States. To properly understand the history of anarchism one must also examine the ideas and actions of anarchists who lived in Latin America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.
Modern anarchists should read not only Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Goldman but also authors like Ricardo Flores Magón, M. P. T. Acharya, He-Yin Zhen, Liu Shipei, Itō Noe, Kōtoku Shūsui, and Hatta Shūzō. These anarchists should not be treated as tokens, who are only referenced when responding to false accusations that anarchism was historically an exclusively white or European social movement. Their ideas must instead be treated as being of equal importance, such that their views are fully incorporated into our understanding of what anarchism is. Nor should they be viewed as separate from the anarchist movement in Europe and the United States. All these authors read and were influenced by European anarchists. Several of them, such as Magón, Acharya, and Kōtoku, lived in Europe or the United States for parts of their life. The different anarchist movements around the world were so interconnected with one another, through transnational networks and migration flows, that the complete history of anarchism can only be written as a global history.
Modern anarchists should not merely repeat the ideas of dead anarchists. The fact that a dead anarchist wrote it does not make it true. We must make arguments grounded in evidence for why anarchist positions are correct, rather than merely quoting dead anarchists as if their words were scripture. We must learn not only from their successes, but also from their failures, inadequacies, and inconsistencies. Most importantly of all, we have to develop our own ideas in response to our specific situations and problems, such as climate breakdown and ecological collapse; the resurgence of fascism; modern border systems; the gig economy; and transphobia. This is itself in line with what historical anarchist authors themselves wrote. They consistently reiterated the point that anarchist theory and practice had to develop in response to specific concrete situations and that people in the future would, and should, develop ideas that they were not in a position to even conceive. In order to do so, we need to draw upon not only distinctly anarchist theory, but also the best ideas that have been developed by various social movements of the oppressed and exploited over the past 150 years. This includes, but is not limited to, feminism, queer theory, the disability rights movement, Marxism, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous critiques of settler-colonialism, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
This work has already begun. During the 1970s, participants in the woman’s liberation and Black power movements came into contact with anarchist ideas and, independently of one another, developed anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism as distinct tendencies. Anarcha-feminists argue that the personal is political and analyze the manner in which women are oppressed by men in daily life, such as women being expected to do the majority of chores, men talking over women at meetings, or women being subject to emotional and physical abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. In response to patriarchy within the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminists have advocated the formation of women’s only groups and insisted that prefiguration requires transforming interpersonal dynamics and interactions, rather than only organizational structures and methods of collective decision-making. This has included arguing that anarchists must develop effective responses to intimate partner violence within social movements.[1258]
Proponents of Black anarchism argue that Black people have been excluded from the benefits of citizenship and subject to specific forms of white supremacist state violence. This has resulted in numerous examples of Black people self-organizing independently of the state in order to survive. Emancipation cannot be achieved through the incorporation of Black people into white supremacist states, or the creation of new Black states. They reject authoritarian modes of organization and suggest that the centralization and hierarchy of the Black Panther Party played an important role in its demise and failure to achieve fundamental social change. Black liberation can only be achieved through the formation of horizontal social movements that bring all workers of color together in order to engage in direct action and self-direct their struggle, rather than be subordinate to the leadership of white radicals.[1259]
Both anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism are part of a more general tendency within modern anarchism that draws upon Black feminism to emphasize the manner in which all structures of oppression form an interlocking web in which each component is defined in terms of its relationship to every other component. Different structures of oppression interact with, shape, and support one another to such an extent that they mutually constitute one another. The relations between structures of oppression are part of what each structure is. A Black working-class lesbian, for example, does not experience patriarchal + racist + homophobic + economic + state oppression, whereby each form of oppression is separate and independent. She instead experiences the product of these five structures interacting with one another to create life experiences that cannot be reduced to a single primary oppressive structure or the sum total of multiple oppressive structures. Society is not a Venn diagram where Black men experience racism, women experience sexism, and Black women experience both. Black women experience not only racism and sexism but also forms of oppression that are unique to them as Black women and are not shared by Black men or white women. This is because the interconnections between structures of oppression, such as racism and patriarchy, create outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.[1260]
The abolition of capitalism and the state will not, by itself, lead to the abolition of patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and so on. Even if we accept the premise that these structures of oppression arose, or at least massively expanded, due to the development of class society in general or capitalism in particular, it is still the case that these social structures have become self-reproducing and will not automatically disappear due to the establishment of socialism. They will instead continue to exist, but be mediated through new economic and political relations. The creation of stateless socialism would, for example, end elements of patriarchy that require the existence of capitalism and the state, such as sexist corporate advertising and anti-abortion laws, but other aspects of patriarchy would continue to exist, like people of all genders being socialized into patriarchal gender roles, or men sexually harassing women in public. This would result in the fusion of patriarchal and socialist relations, such as, possibly, collective decisions being made in general assemblies where men treat women as their intellectual inferiors. We cannot focus exclusively on class and wait until after the revolution—which may never come or be defeated—to address other issues. We must instead struggle against all forms of oppression simultaneously. The self-emancipation of the working classes can only be achieved through intersectional class struggle.
Although historical anarchist theory needs to be updated, it should not be abandoned or discarded. It contains numerous insights that can guide us in the modern world. The oppression we witness on a daily basis is not an inevitable nor an unchangeable aspect of human life. It is instead the product of hierarchical social structures that divide humanity into masters and subjects. These social structures are made by human beings and so can be unmade and replaced with new and better ways of living together. Authoritarians imagine that emancipation can be achieved if good people with the correct ideas take control of the reins of power. Anarchists realize that this has never happened, and will never happen. Regardless of people’s good intentions, or the stories they tell themselves, they will be corrupted by their position at a top of a hierarchy and become primarily concerned with exercising and expanding their power over others in order to serve their own interests. If human beings are not inherently good, then no person is good enough to be a ruler.
Cold war propaganda taught us that our only choice is between really existing capitalism or really existing state socialism. We are asked to pick between rule by a minority of elected politicians who serve the interests of capital, or rule by a one-party dictatorship led by a supreme leader; the impersonal domination of market forces, or the top-down bureaucracy of state central planning; the prison industrial complex, or the gulag; surveillance and repression by the FBI, or the NKVD. The history of socialism reveals that a large segment of the workers’ movement developed a third way: anarchist socialism and the establishment of federations of workplace and community assemblies that enable people to self-manage their own lives. This is not to say that creating anarchist socialism will be easy. The history of the workers’ movement shows how hard it is to change the world. Any struggle for emancipation will face the overwhelming violence of the ruling classes, and we must prepare ourselves for this. The modern state is better armed and has developed superior forms of surveillance, crowd-control, and counterinsurgency than its historical predecessors.
When reading about the history of social movements it is easy to focus on large-scale acts of revolt that can appear to have come out of nowhere. This book has itself mentioned numerous strikes, riots, insurrections, and revolutions. Learning about these events is an important part of labor history, but to focus exclusively on them leads to a distorted view of the past and how social change happens. Members of historical socialist movements did not spend the majority of their time participating in huge actions that rapidly transformed society and the future course of history. The bulk of their lives as revolutionaries were spent doing much more mundane activities. They produced, distributed, and read radical literature; organized and attended picnics; performed in a theater club; watched a public debate; discussed politics with friends, family, and colleagues; attended an endless series of meetings for their affinity group or trade union; wrote and received a vast amount of letters; and so on.
These small, mundane activities can appear to be of little importance when viewed in isolation. Yet when they were repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year by groups of people, they took on greater significance. These small activities produced and reproduced the social relations, capacities, drives, and consciousness that were the foundation of social movements. Without these seemingly insignificant acts, repeated over and over again, the large exciting moments of rebellion and revolution never would have occurred in most instances or would have occurred on a much smaller scale.
Unfortunately, time is not on our side. Capitalism’s insatiable drive for profit and economic growth is destroying the environment. The climate crisis is not merely coming, it has already begun. Things are only going to get worse. Billionaires and politicians are not going to save us. We have to save ourselves. The actions we take now determine the future we and future generations face. Our only choice is collective struggle. We have to generate a social force that can dismantle the fossil fuels industry and, in so doing, achieve survival pending revolution. In response to these dire circumstances, a large number of people have put their hopes in the election of socialist politicians into parliaments and congresses. Historical anarchist theory informs us why this strategy is mistaken: even if socialists manage to win an election, which frequently does not happen, they will be compelled by the threat of capital flight and their institutionalized role as managers of the capitalist economy to implement policies that serve the interests of the very corporations driving climate change forward. Socialist politicians will not transform the state. The state will transform them. We have to instead develop the power of workers to engage in direct action outside of and against the state, disrupt the smooth functioning of the economy, and, in so doing, impose external pressure onto the ruling classes to give into our demands.
Even if the specifics of historical insurrectionist anarchism, mass anarchism, syndicalist anarchism, and organizational dualism are deemed to be no longer appropriate strategies within modern society, the core insight of historical anarchist strategy would remain—anarchist ends can only be achieved through anarchist means. Our task remains that of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: to develop forms of practice that can simultaneously resist, and ultimately overthrow, the ruling classes and render us fit to establish a society with neither masters nor subjects. Tomorrow can only grow out of today and the march toward anarchy begins now.
[1257] This included, but was not limited to, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, hierarchically organized religion, authoritarian modes of education, and the oppression of nonhuman animals. It should nonetheless be kept in mind that a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory.
[1258] Dark Star, ed. <em>Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader</em>, 3<sup>rd</sup> Edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012); Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and Feminism,” in <em>Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy</em>, ed. Nathan Jun (Brill, 2017), 253–84; Lucy Nicholas, “Gender and Sexuality,” in <em>The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism</em>, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 603–21; Institute for Anarchist Studies, <em>Perspectives on Anarchist Theory</em>, no. 29, <em>Anarcha-Feminisms</em> (Portland, OR: Eberhardt Press, 2016).
[1259] Dana M. Williams, “Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the Development of Black Anarchism,” <em>Journal of Black Studies</em> 46, no. 7 (2015): 678–703; Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, <em>Anarchism and the Black Revolution</em> (London: Pluto Press, 2021); William C. Anderson, <em>The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021).
[1260] Deric Shannon and J. Rogue, “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality,” Anarkismo website, [[https://www.anarkismo.net/article/14923]]; J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism,” in <em>Quiet Rumours</em>, 43–46. For an overview of intersectionality from a nonanarchist perspective, see Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, <em>Intersectionality</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
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** Errata
1. On page 30 I write “Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in August 1867 in ‘The Slavic Question’”. It should say: September 1867.
2. On page 34 I quote Guillaume as saying “no ‘anarchist program’ has ever been formulated, as far as we know”. It should say: no ‘anarchic program’ has ever been ...
3. On page 76 I write “this definition of the state was mostly clearly expressed by Kropotkin and Malatesta.” It should say: was most clearly.
4. On page 192 I write “on December 8, the soldier Agesilao Milano stabbed and wounded King Ferdinand II of Naples with a bayonet”. It should say: on December 8, 1856,
5. On page 438 Road to Power is attributed to the Jura Federation. It should be under Kautsky.
6. On page 438 the Kropotkin books aren’t all in alphabetical order. Direct struggle should appear under Conquest of Bread.
7. On page 438 the wrong Rosa Luxemburg book is referenced. Only one book should be included under her name: Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. Edited by Mary-Alice Waters. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.
|
#title What is the Proletariat?
#author Zoe Baker
#date 2024/05/10
#source Retrieved on 2024-07-16 from [[https://anarchozoe.com/2024/05/10/what-is-the-proletariat ][https://anarchozoe.com/2024/05/10/what-is-the-proletariat ]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-07-16T02:51:08
#authors Zoe Baker
#topics proletariat, class
In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the <em>Manifesto of the Communist Party.</em> It famously ends by declaring, “let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. Proletarians have nothing to lose in it but their chains. They have a world to win. <em>Proletarians of all countries unite!</em>” (Marx and Engels 1996, 30). The word proletariat continues to be used by socialists and communists today. This does not mean that the word is widely understood. Some people use it as a meaningless adjective whereby their ideas, attitudes, and activities are proletarian. Those of people they dislike are bourgeois. Others equate the proletariat with particular kinds of work such that the ideal proletarian is a male factory worker on an assembly line. It is often wrongly claimed in mainstream discourse that only blue collar workers who do manual labour are working class proletarians. White collar office workers are apparently middle class. In this essay I shall explain the history of the word proletariat, how 19<sup>th</sup> century socialists and communists ended up using this word, and the various ways that they defined it. Doing so shall reveal that Marx and Engels’ proletariat was not the only proletariat that existed in the minds of revolutionaries.
*** From Ancient Rome to the French Revolution
The word proletariat derives from the Latin ‘proletarii’ and ‘proletarius’, which literally means producers of offspring. The <em>Oxford Latin dictionary</em> defines proletarius as “belonging to the lowest class of citizens” in Roman society (Glare 2012, 1631). References to this class appear in several early histories of Rome, which were written in the first century BC. These allege that in the 6<sup>th</sup> century BC the king of Rome Servius Tullius carried out a series of reforms that laid the political and military foundations of the later Roman republic. These accounts are flawed in so far as they project certain features of the Roman republic onto an earlier time period and depict complex social changes, which must have occurred gradually over an extended period of time, as happening all at once due to the actions of a great man. One of the main reforms ascribed to Servius is the division of Roman citizens into six classes based on how much property they owned according to a census. The class a citizen belonged to determined their voting rights within an assembly called the comitia centuriata and what military duties they had. The wealthiest citizens had to equip themselves with the most expensive military equipment but also had the most votes and so political power (Cornell 1996, 173–197, 288–89; Lintott 1999, 55–61). Cicero defines the lowest sixth class as “those who brought to the census no more than eleven hundred asses or altogether nothing except their own persons”. Servius named them “child-givers” [<em>proletarius</em>], as from them, so to speak, a child [<em>proles</em>], that is, an offspring of the city, seemed to be expected” (Cicero 2014, 76 [Cic. Rep. 2. 40). Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both claim that the lowest class were exempt from military service (Livy 1919, 151 [Livy 1. 43]; Dionysius 1937, 327 [Dion. Hal. AR 4. 18]). Unlike Cicero, they do not refer to this group as the proletarius.
A similar account to Cicero is given in Aulus Gellius’ <em>The Attic Nights</em>, which was written in the second century AD. During the dialogue Julius Paulus is asked what proletarius meant. Paulus, who is described as being very knowledgable, replies,
<quote>
Those of the Roman commons who were humblest and of smallest means, and who reported no more than fifteen hundred asses at the census, were called <em>proletarii,</em> but those who were rated as having no property at all, or next to none, were termed <em>capite censi,</em> or ‘counted by head.’ And the lowest rating of the <em>capite censi</em> was three hundred and seventy-five asses. But since property and money were regarded as a hostage and pledge of loyalty to the State, and since there was in them a kind of guarantee and assurance of patriotism, neither the <em>proletarii</em> nor the <em>capite censi</em> were enrolled as soldiers except in some time of extraordinary disorder, because they had little or no property and money. However, the class of <em>proletarii</em> was somewhat more honourable in fact and in name than that of the <em>capite censi;</em> for in times of danger to the State, when there was a scarcity of men of military age, they were enrolled for hasty service, and arms were furnished them at public expense. And they were called, not <em>capite censi,</em> but by a more auspicious name derived from their duty and function of producing offspring, for although they could not greatly aid the State with what small property they had, yet they added to the population of their country by their power of begetting children (Gellius 1927, 169, 171 [Gellius. 16. 10. 10–13).
</quote>
Other sources use the terms proletarii and capite censi as synonyms. Gellius’ belief that the two groups were distinct appears to be an error (Gargola 1989). Although this account is less reliable than earlier ones, it does repeat the point that the proletarii are citizens who were so poor that their primary contribution to the Roman state was having children. The fact that they are having a discussion about what the word meant is evidence that the word had fallen out of use some time after the end of the Roman republic.
In the centuries that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Latin words proletarii and proletarius continued to be known by students of ancient history. It appears to be the case that these words were not used to refer to class divisions within contemporary society until the 18<sup>th</sup> century. In 1762 the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published <em>The Social Contract</em>. In the book he discusses Servius’s division of Roman society into six classes as part of an extended overview of how he believed decisions were made in the Roman republic. During this he refers to the proletarii with a French version of the word: “prolétaires” (Rousseau 1994, 145. For original French see Rousseau 1766, 221. Also see Montesquieu 1989, 527). Rousseau was widely read by participants in the French revolution, which included people who lacked a classical education. Some people chose to borrow the language of the ancient Roman Republic and apply the word prolétaire to poor people living under the new French republic. For example, in March 1793 the paper <em>Paris Revolutions</em> published an article which claimed that the nation was divided into two distinct classes, proprietors and prolétaires. This language was not mainstream at the time and other words were more commonly used when referring to the lower classes, such as the common people or the sans-culotte. The word ‘sans-culotte’ meant those who did not wear breeches. It referred to citizens who wore the trousers of the poor, rather than the breeches of the aristocracy (Rose 1981, 285–88).
One of the main ties between 18<sup>th</sup> century revolutionary republicanism and 19<sup>th</sup> century revolutionary socialism and communism was Gracchus Babeuf. In 1796 Babeuf and his associates unsuccessfully plotted to overthrow the Directory and replace it with a new revolutionary government that would, in theory, establish the collective ownership of property and create an egalitarian society they called common happiness (Birchall 2016). During his trial the prosecution referred to “this frightening mass of <em>prol</em><em>é</em><em>taires</em>, multiplied by debauchery, by idleness, by all the passions and by all the vices that pullulate among a corrupt nation, hurling itself suddenly upon the class of property-owners and sober, industrious and respectable citizens” (Quoted in Rose 1976, 367). Babeuf had himself occasionally distinguished between proprietors and prolétaires, but it was not his usual terminology. He generally used alternative words, such as workers, plebeians, or the poor (Rose 1976, 373–74, 377; Birchall 2016, 168–71, 195–96).
*** The Working Classes of the 19<sup>th</sup> Century
The word prolétaire largely fell out of favour in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution. During the early 19<sup>th</sup> century socialist and communist ideas began to emerge but the first wave of authors either did not use the word prolétaire or only used it on a few occasions (Rose 1981, 288–93). For example, Philippe Buonarroti’s 1828 book <em>History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality</em> was extremely influential but only refers to “the Proletarians” in Paris once. The fact that the English 1836 edition includes a footnote by the editor explaining what this word meant in Ancient Rome suggests that, at the time of writing, the term was not commonly used in Britain (Buonarroti 1836, 139). Early British socialists like Robert Owen and John Gray instead used phrases like “the working classes” (Owen 2016, 33; Gray 1825, 29). This wording is itself significant. People in the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries generally broke society down into various ranks, orders, degrees, and estates. Towards the end of the 18<sup>th</sup> century some authors started using the term ‘class’ to refer to categories of people within the economy. During the 19<sup>th</sup> century this language became the standard terminology in discussions of economic stratification and political ideologies began to be distinguished from one another by their views on what they called class (Briggs 1967).
In order to understand what authors in the 19<sup>th</sup> century meant by class it is necessarily to establish the economic context that they wrote in. Between 1500 and 1800 England transformed from being overwhelmingly rural and agricultural to having increasingly large towns and cities, alongside a significant rural manufacturing sector. In 1500 an estimated 74% of the population worked in agriculture, 18% in rural non-agriculture, and 7% in urban sectors of the economy. In 1800 only 35% worked in agriculture, 36% in rural non-agriculture, and 29% in urban. By the early 19<sup>th</sup> century Britain had the most successful economy in Europe (Allen 2004b, 15–18). This economic growth was enabled by multiple interlocking factors, including the rise of the British Empire. One of the most important factors was the adoption of new agricultural techniques in the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries that resulted in much bigger crop yields. More food could be grown without requiring a proportional increase in people doing agricultural labour. The result was massive population growth and the possibility for an increasingly large percentage of the population to do other kinds of work. This occurred in parallel to the enclosure of the common land and the spread of large farms run by tenant farmers. These tenant farmers were capitalists who rented the land from a small number of land owners, who owned the majority of farmland in the country, and hired propertyless wage labourers, who did not own any land, to do the farming (Allen 2004a, 96–116; Allen 2004b, 22–34).
Rural manufacturing was typically performed by workers at home and involved the entire family, including women and children. It is from this that we get the phrase ‘cottage industries’. Self-employed workers would grow or buy their own raw materials, produce items using tools that they owned, and then sell the finished products to a merchant. Other workers were wage labourers who were employed in what is called ‘the putting out system’. A merchant would hire workers to produce specific items, provide them with the raw materials that the merchant retained ownership of during production, and then sell the finished product to other merchants. These wage labourers generally owned their own tools, but there are examples of some workers renting tools from the merchant that hired them. These two kinds of worker were not mutually exclusive. A person could be self-employed and a wage labourer at the same time, or shift back and forth between these different kinds of work (Clarkson 1985, 15–26).
In the 18<sup>th</sup> century one of the main rural industries was cotton textiles. This took the form of the spinning of cotton into yarn and the weaving of yarn into cloth using hand tools like the spinning wheel and the hand loom. The workers employed in this industry via the putting out system were wage labourers but they were wage labourers who worked at home using means of production that they personally owned. The textile industry was changed during the mid to late 18<sup>th</sup> century by a series of technological innovations that made it possible to mass produce thread and cloth using machines powered by waterwheels and later the steam engine. Capitalists centralised this new machinery inside factories known as cotton mills. The majority of the cotton used in these factories was imported from the Americas and had been picked by black slaves. Cotton mill workers were propertyless wage labourers in the sense that they did not own any property that was used in the production process. They owned personal possessions like clothes but did not own the factory. They produced commodities for a capitalist in a building they did not own with machinery they did not own. They worked 12–14 hours per day, including breaks for meals, in exchange for a wage. The start and end of the working day was signalled by the ringing of a bell. Whilst at work they were subject to supervision and control by overseers, who directed their movements and fined them for such misdemeanours as looking out a window. The only day off was Sunday and it was normal to work seventy hours a week. The majority of early factory workers were adult women and children, who could be as young as seven. As industrialisation continued factories which employed men became increasingly common, such as iron works (Freeman 2018, 1–42. For details about the Arkwright and Strutt mills specifically see Fitton and Wadsworth 1958, 224–53).
Over time an increasingly large number of goods came to be manufactured in factories and the towns and cities that grew up around them. In 1800 28% of the population lived in settlements with 5,000 or more inhabitants. By 1850 that number had increased to 45% and England became the most urbanised country in Western Europe (Wrigley 2004, 88–90). As early as 1835 there were 1,330 woollen mills, 1245 cotton mills, 345 flax mills and 238 silk mills in the UK. In 1851 the average number of workers in woollen mills was fifty-nine, in worsted mills 170 and in cotton mills 167. Only a minority of mills employed several hundred workers. Although the amount and kinds of factory increased during industrialisation, they did not become the default system in manufacturing. Many industries continued to rely on domestic labour and small workshops throughout the 19<sup>th</sup> century, such as tailoring, stationery, and guns. It is furthermore the case that the relations of production within a factory did not always take the form of a single capitalist directly hiring a group of wage labourers. This is because factories often relied on various forms of sub-contracting. For example, a factory owner could hire a head spinner and pay him per item produced. This head spinner, in turn, employed his own assistants and paid them per hour worked. It was also common for self employed craftsmen or small firms to rent out a room and power in a factory for their own purposes (Hudson 2004, 36–44).
The industrialisation of France did not follow the same pathway as England. In 1500 an estimated 73% of the population worked in agriculture, 18% in rural non-agriculture, and 9% in urban sectors of the economy. By 1800 these numbers had shifted but nowhere near as much as in England. Now 59% worked in agriculture, 28% in rural non agriculture, and 13% in urban (Allen 2004b, 16). In 1806 around 2.6 million people lived in settlements with more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1851 that number had increased to 5 million and only accounted for 14% of the entire population. Of this 5 million roughly 1 million lived in Paris, which was much larger than every other French city. This picture remains the same even if smaller towns are included in the data. If an urban area is defined as any settlement with 5,000 or more inhabitants, then the percentage of the population living in urban areas is only 19%. The majority of the national population lived in the countryside and around half of France still earned their living from agriculture (Sewell 1980, 148–151; Wrigley 2004, 88).
During the early 19<sup>th</sup> century the majority of land was farmed in small units. This farming was done by peasants who owned their own land or were tenants who paid rent to a small number of large landowners with a portion of their crop or directly with money. As industrialisation expanded the number of small farmers who owned their own land increased, but large farms occupied a greater percentage of the land. In 1892 76% of farms were smaller than 10 hectares. These small farms, which were mostly owned by those who worked them, covered only 23% of the total agricultural land. Large agricultural holdings of over 40 hectares were 4% of the total number of farms but included almost half of the total land that was farmed. Medium to large scale farms employed wage labourers. These wage labourers included both those who were landless and those who owned a small amount of land but needed to supplement their income. A very significant number of peasant proprietors did not own enough land to survive off it and were compelled to engage in other kinds of labour, such as renting additional land, working in rural industry or as an agricultural wage labourer, and migrating to urban areas for work on a seasonal basis (Price 1987, 11–19, 143–160).
A huge sector of the urban economy was the manufacturing of goods. In the early to mid 19<sup>th</sup> century the vast majority of this was done by male artisans who engaged in small scale handicraft production. By 1848 there were only a few large factories and these were mostly in the textile industry. Artisans began their career when they were 13 or 14 and went to live with a master artisan who trained them in the craft. After four to six years of training as an apprentice they became a journeyman and could either continue working with their master or seek employment elsewhere. The master artisan owned the workshop, expensive instruments of production, and the necessary raw materials. The journeyman owned their own tools, which typically cost two to four weeks worth of wages. With these tools they would produce an item that was then sold by their master for a profit. The master then paid them a wage that was, depending upon the business and time period, per number of tasks completed, per number of hours worked, or a set amount per day. According to the 1848 Paris Chamber of Commerce survey half of all workshops were composed of a master artisan who worked alone or one master and a single worker who assisted them. Only one in ten workshops employed more than ten workers and in the majority of cases master artisans worked alongside their employees. Journeymen could become a master if they saved up enough money to create their own business. Their opportunities to do so were massively reduced by an economic crisis that hit the French economy during the late 1840s and resulted in a large number of small workshops going bankrupt (Traugott 1985, 5–12; Aminzade 1981, 2–5)
Artisans were therefore an extremely broad category. It included (a) independent craftsmen who used their own tools and workshop to produce products for the market by themselves, (b) small capitalists who employed other craftsmen in a workshop they owned whilst also doing some labour themselves, (c) craftsmen who used their tools to work for the small capitalists in exchange for a wage. The majority of artisans were wage labourers. Typical professions included printers, carpenters, jewellers, and tailors (Moss 1980, 8–13, 17–18). These artisan wage labourers were often described as propertyless at the time (Sewell 1980, 215, 233–34, 264). This meant that they did not own property that was sufficient to become either an independent craftsmen or a master artisan, such as a workshop and more expensive means of production. These artisans owned the tools of their trade and, to that extent, were distinct from what I have called propertyless wage labourers. Despite this difference, both kinds of wage labourer could only survive by selling their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage.
The artisans of the 19<sup>th</sup> century were fundamentally different from the artisans that came before them. In old regime France artisans belonged to guilds for their specific profession. These were complex social networks led by master artisans who regulated their specific trade and thereby maintained their privileged position. These regulations typically determined things like the quality and price of goods, how many apprentices a master could have, how skilled an apprentice had to be before he became a journeyman, and the steps a journeyman had to go through in order to become a master. They not only had to have the necessary money to buy a workshop but also needed to pass an examination, pay a substantial fee to the guild, and swear an oath. Guilds were able to monopolise and regulate a particular trade due to legal privileges that were granted by the monarch. This legal recognition transformed a collection of real people into a single fictitious legal person that possessed certain rights, privileges, and duties. One of the main privileges that guilds were granted was the exclusive right to engage in a specific trade within a certain region (Sewell 1980, 19–39).
In parallel to this, journeymen formed their own clandestine guilds called brotherhoods. These brotherhoods, which often included journeymen from multiple professions, engaged in many of the same activities as the guilds led by their masters. This included maintaining standards of behaviour and quality of work and collecting dues and fines to pay for financial support when a member was ill, unemployed, or retired. They also engaged in activities that served their specific interests, such as compiling a blacklist of masters who did not pay journeymen enough, organising strikes, and ensuring that journeymen who refused to become members of the brotherhood could not find work. This is not to say that journeymen were attempting to unite as a class. They were divided into mutually exclusive and hostile organisations. These brotherhoods could not rely on the law to settle disputes and, when arguments and insults were not enough, violently fought one another in skirmishes and sometimes battles. Nor did brotherhoods aim to overthrow their masters. They viewed journeymen and masters as belonging to the same moral community. In trades where brotherhoods were influential, many of the masters were former members of a brotherhood and were still linked to this organisation by an oath that they had sworn (ibid 40–61).
The laws that enshrined the legal privileges of master guilds were erased during the French revolution of 1789 and replaced with a new constitution that granted every citizen the right to engage in whatever trade they wanted and to use their property how they wished. In 1791 guilds were formally abolished and citizens were banned from forming new ones. This included journeymen brotherhoods such that trade unions and strikes were made illegal (ibid, 84–91). After the abolition of the guilds, masters, journeymen, and apprentices confronted one another as legally free individuals connected by the market. In the old regime masters and journeymen were united by their shared profession and membership of a guild. This guild membership, in turn, separated them from unskilled workers, other kinds of artisan, and guilds that they were in competition with. They were at the same time divided based on their amount of wealth and the degrees of privilege, rank, and status within the guild itself. Masters had authority over journeymen not just because they owned a workshop, but also because they were legally recognised as a master within a guild. Now masters and journeymen were only separated by the amount and kind of property that they owned. It was within this economic context that a large segment of journeymen wage labourers, regardless of what profession they engaged in, began to acquire a sense that they belonged to a distinct class which included both skilled and unskilled workers (ibid, 138–142).
France became increasingly industrialised during the course of the 19<sup>th</sup> century and more of the economy centred on factories, steam power, railways, and coal. This did not lead to artisan wage labourers disappearing overnight and becoming propertyless factory workers. The number of artisans actually increased because basically the only factories that directly competed with artisans were textile factories. These textile factories caused the decline of the rural domestic weaving industry but did not effect urban artisans employed in different trades. These new factories mass produced cheap raw materials like cotton and iron that lowed the cost of production for artisans and, at the same time, employed unskilled workers who used their wages to pay for artisan produced goods, such as furniture, clothing, and cutlery. As late as 1864 only 5% of workers in Paris were classified as factory workers. It is estimated that, in 1876, the number of urban workers employed in handicraft production within France as a whole was double the number employed in factories. This is not to say that artisans were unaffected by industrialisation. They suffered from deskilling, lower wages, and unemployment. This included large capitalists buying up small workshops or hiring them as subcontractors. It is furthermore the case that early factories routinely hired artisans as wage labourers in order to perform skilled labour that had yet to be mechanised. One of the main threats to artisans was the rise of an urban putting out and sweatshop system which employed unskilled and semi-skilled workers, especially women and children, to mass produce standardised goods like clothes and shoes in set styles and sizes. Master artisans responded by making their workshops more like factories in order to remain economically competitive. This included hiring more apprentices and journeymen, establishing a rigid division of labour, and making everyone work harder and longer (Moss 1980, 13–19; Aminzade 1981, 6–14; Sewell 1980, 154–61).
*** The Proletariat in Early Socialism
It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that Marx was the first social scientist to discover the existence of classes and class struggle in history. Marx himself rejected this view. He wrote in an 1852 letter, “I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy” (MECW 39, 62). One of the main influences on how socialists thought about class was British political economy and in particular Adam Smith’s 1776 book <em>The Wealth of Nations.</em> Smith thought that there were three main orders in what he called commercial societies. These were (i) workers, who gain income from wages; (ii) merchants and master manufacturers, who gain income from profits of stock; and (iii), land owners, who gain their income from rent (Smith 1904, 248–50). Workers, which Smith typically called workmen, included labourers, journeymen and servants. His category of worker therefore included both those who owned means of production, such as journeymen, and those who did not, such as servants (ibid, 70, 80). Smith also viewed self-employed artisans as workers. He wrote,
<quote>
It sometimes happens, indeed, that a single independent workman has stock sufficient both to purchase the materials of his work, and to maintain himself till it be completed. He is both master and workman, and enjoys the whole produce of his own labour, or the whole value which it adds to the materials upon which it is bestowed. It includes what are usually two distinct revenues, belonging to two distinct persons, the profits of stock, and the wages of labour (ibid, 67–68).
</quote>
Master manufacturers, who owned workshops, and merchants, who used the putting out system, paid workers a wage to produce a particular item and then sold this item for profit on the market. Smith used the word stock to refer to anything that a person owned. Master manufacturers and merchants therefore earn profit from stock both by selling items that they own and by providing workers with the necessary raw materials, instruments of production, etc to produce the items in question. He called this kind of stock capital (ibid, 49–50, 261–65). Smith’s merchants and master manufacturers were later called capitalists or the bourgeoisie.
In the 19<sup>th</sup> century the word proletariat first rose to prominence among working class social movements in France. Their conception of class was shaped by the legacy of the French revolution. In 1789 the clergyman Abbé Sieyès published a pamphlet called <em>What is the Third Estate?</em> In old regime France the first estate were the clergy, the second estate the nobility, and the third estate everyone else. In the pamphlet Sieyès argued that the third estate engages in, or at least could engage in, all the classes of labour (by which he meant categories) that are necessary for society to function and flourish, such as farming, manufacturing, shopkeeping, trading, and education. The consequence of this is that the third estate includes every person necessary for a complete country. The first and second estate should therefore be abolished because they are an unnecessary privileged class who are idle, do not engage in useful labour, and are a burden on the nation (Sieyès 1789).
This had a profound effect on how later French authors framed discussions of class. One of the main influences on French socialism was the aristocrat and canal enthusiast Henri Saint-Simon, who was not himself a socialist (Cole 1967, 37–50). Between 1814 and his death in 1825 Saint-Simon wrote a series of texts which divided society into two main groups: the industrials and the idlers. This distinction was not original to Saint-Simon and built on very similar ideas that had been proposed by the French political economist Jean Baptiste Say (James 1977, 456–75). The industrials were any person who engaged in what he regarded as productive labour. It included farmers, business owners, merchants, bankers, managers, and employees. The idlers were those who did not engage in productive activity and instead lived off the labour of others, such as aristocrats and the clergy. Saint-Simon sometimes referred to all industrials as workers, even capitalists and bankers (Saint-Simon 1975, 47–49, 158–160, 194–95, 214, 282). In 1823 he proposed that there was a third class between the industrials and the idlers. These were the bourgeoisie, who were non-aristocratic land owners, lawyers and soldiers (ibid 250–51). Two years later he published a fragment in which he referred to one section of the industrials as prolétaires. This group was “the most numerous class” and included both peasants and urban wage labourers. Saint-Simon thought that all members of the industrial class should unite together against the idlers and take control of society (ibid, 262–66). For this reason his fragment on the prolétaires critiques the English proletariat for wanting to “commence the war of the poor against the rich”, whilst praising “the French proletariat” for having “goodwill” towards “the wealthy industrials” (ibid, 265).
In 1827 the Swiss economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi published a second edition of his book <em>New Principles of Political Economy</em>. In the preface he claimed that he had revised his views based on an examination of England. During this research he discovered that,
<quote>
the people of England are destitute of comfort now, and of security for the future. There are no longer yeoman, they have been obliged to become day-labourers. In the towns there are scarcely any longer artisans or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers. The <em>operative</em>, to employ a word which the system has created, does not know what it is to have a station; he gains only wages, and as wages cannot suffice for all seasons, he is almost every year reduced to ask alms from the poor-rates ... The English nation has found it most economical to give up those modes of cultivation which require much hand-labour, and she has dismissed half the cultivators who lived in her fields; she has found it more economical to supersede workmen by steam-engines; she has dismissed, then employed, then dismissed again, the operatives in towns, and weavers giving place to power-looms, are now sinking under famine; she has found it more economical to reduce all working people to the lowest possible wages on which they can subsist; and these working people being no longer anything but proletarians, have not feared plunging into still deeper misery by the addition of an increasing family (Sismondi 1847, 116–117. In the English translation it says ‘rabble’. Have altered based on the original French quoted in Rose 1981, 290).
</quote>
Shortly after the publication of this book Prosper Enfantin, who was an influential follower of Saint-Simon, gave a series of lectures between December 1828 and 1829. These were revised and published in book form as <em>The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition</em> in 1830<em>.</em> In the fourth and fifth lectures, which were given in January and February 1829, Enfantin<em></em> conceptualised history as a series of economic stages characterised by “the exploitation of man by man” and so the division of society “into two classes, the exploiters and the exploited” (Iggers 1972, 72–73). Each successive stage marked a decline in exploitation and so was a form of progress. Humans were initially “savages” who killed and often eat one another during wars. Then they started capturing people they defeated in combat and turning them into property who were instruments of work or pleasure. This system of slavery evolved over time and gave rise to new class distinctions, such as patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome. Eventually slavery was replaced by feudalism and the division of society into lords and serfs. Serfs were later separated from the land and turned into workers who could choose their master (ibid, 65–67).
During the sixth lecture, which was held in late February 1829, Enfantin outlined an analysis of class divisions within contemporary society. He said that,
<quote>
the exploitation of man by man, which we have shown in its most direct and uncouth form in the past, namely slavery, continues to a very large extent in the relations between owners and workers, masters and wage earners. Of course, the respective conditions of the classes today are far from those of masters and slaves, patricians and plebeians, or lords and serfs in the past. At first sight it seems as if no comparison could be made. However, it must be realized that the more recent situation is only a prolongation of the earlier. The relation of master and wage earner is the last transformation which slavery has undergone. If the exploitation of man by man no longer has the brutal character of antiquity and assumes more gentle forms today, it is, nevertheless, no less real. The worker is not like the slave, the direct property of his master. His condition, which is never permanent, is fixed by a transaction with a master. But is this transaction free on the part of the worker? It is not, since he is obliged to accept it under penalty of death, for he is reduced to expecting his nourishment each day only from his work of the previous day (ibid, 82).
</quote>
He then explained that,
<quote>
the advantages and disadvantages proper to every social position are transmitted through inheritance. The economists have taken care to establish one aspect of this fact, namely <em>hereditary misery,</em> when they recognized within society the existence of a class of proletarians. Today the entire mass of workers is exploited by the men whose property they utilize. The managers of industry themselves undergo such exploitation in their relation with the owners, but to an incomparably smaller extent. And in turn they participate in the privileges of exploitation, which bears down with all its weight upon the laboring classes, which is to say, on the majority of the workers. In such a state of affairs, the worker appears as the direct descendent of the slave and the serf. His person is free; he is no longer bound to the soil; but that is all he has gained. And in this state of legal emancipation he can exit only under the conditions imposed upon him by a class small in numbers, namely the class of those men who have been invested through legislation, the daughter of conquest, with the monopoly of riches, which is to say, with the capacity to dispose at their will, even in idleness, of the instruments of work (ibid, 82–83).
</quote>
Saint-Simon defined class in terms of a person’s occupation and whether or not they engaged in productive labour or were idle. The consequence of this was that capitalists and wage earners could, with a broad enough notion of productivity, be viewed as different kinds of worker belonging to the same class: the industrials. Enfantin, in contrast, defined class in terms of a groups source of income, ownership of property, and role in the production process. The consequence of this was that he viewed capitalists and wage earners as distinct classes. He, in addition to this, distinguished between wage earners who were managers and those who were proletarians or labourers. He claimed that proletarians survive by selling their labour to capitalists in exchange for a wage. They are free to choose who they work for but lack the freedom to not do so. This is because capitalists have monopolised ownership of riches and with this the capacity to determine how the instruments of work are used. Under these circumstances, wage earners have no choice but to use property owned by capitalists in order to produce goods and services for them. Although Enfantin mentioned that some capitalists are idle he did not frame this as their distinguishing characteristic which separates them from other classes. They are instead defined in terms of their ownership of private property and their hiring of wage labourers.
Both Sismondi and Enfantin noted that proletarians do not own land and survive by selling their labour to capitalists in exchange for a wage. They disagreed on whether or not the proletariat consisted of (a) only propertyless wage labourers who do not own any means of production or (b) both propertyless wage labourers and artisan wage labourers, who own the tools of their trade. Sismondi framed the proletariat and artisans as distinct classes. In 1827 he claimed that in England “there are scarcely any longer artisans or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers (Sismondi 1847, 116). Sismondi expanded upon this in an 1834 article. He wrote that “there exist in society an already numerous class, and which has a tendency to become more so every day” that creates “wealth by the labour of their hands”, have “no property”, and live off “wages”. This “class of working men to whom has been give in our time the name used by the Romans, <em>proletarii,</em> comprises the most numerous and energetic class of the population of large towns. It comprehends all those who work in manufactories, in the country as well as in towns; it continually encroaches on those kinds of business formerly known as master trades, whenever a manufactory can be established, when all together, in one place, under one head, but by many hundred hands, those common utensils and tools can be made” (ibid, 198–199).
Sismondi explicitly contrasted the manufactories, where proletarians were employed, with small workshops where artisans worked, including journeymen who were paid a wage. He wrote that in France “four-fifths then of the nation belong to the country and to agriculture, and the fifth to towns and other occupations. There would be danger to the state, the balance of production would be overthrown if this fifth became a quarter or a third, but it does not follow that this fifth should go to increase the ranks of the proletarri”. This is because “one part of the products of industry is prepared by trades, another part by manufacturers. Now the life of men who exercise trades is in general happy, and affords all those securities which we have demanded for the poor who work. A trade always requires an apprenticeship” and includes “carpenters, masons, locksmiths, farriers, cartwrights, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, or butchers” (ibid, 203). He then described the career progression of an artisan. They start as an “apprentice” who “enters his master’s family according to a contract which often binds him for many years”, then live as “a journeyman” who “engages with a master for a salary”, and finally becomes “a master” who “employs the little capital which he has been accumulating in purchasing tools and furnishing a workshop; engages a journeymen and an apprentice” (ibid, 204). It is “in the midst of these trades, exercised by the freemen of towns, which formerly did all the industrial work in all nations, that manufactories have arisen” (ibid, 205). Sismondi’s distinction between artisans and proletarians is made even clearer several pages later. He claimed that in some towns in Germany and Switzerland master artisans are only allowed “to hire for wages more than one or two <em>compagnons</em> or journeymen, to keep more than one or two apprentices”. In such towns “no proletaries are to be seen there” (ibid, 219). He therefore viewed wage labourers and proletarians as overlapping but distinct categories. All proletarians are wage labourers but not all wage labourers are proletarians, such as journeymen artisans.
Enfantin, in contrast, talked as if the proletariat included all wage labourers, including artisans. This is supported by two pieces of evidence. First, Enfantin claimed that “the entire mass of workers” and “the majority of the workers” were “proletarians” (Iggers 1972, 83). Elsewhere he referred to “the poor class, the most numerous class, the proletarians” (Quoted in Lovell 1988, 66). As has already been mentioned, at the time of writing the majority of the French population lived in the countryside and it was common for agricultural wage labourers to own a small amount of land. Most male urban workers employed in manufacturing were artisan wage labourers. Propertyless wage labourers did exist and so form a subset of the group he is referring to, but they cannot form the majority. Second, Enfantin’s description of the proletariat applies to artisan wage labourers. They are a “wage earner” who, unlike a slave, are not owned by anyone and, unlike a serf, “is no longer bound to the soil”. They have the freedom to choose their “master” but lack the freedom to not sell their labour in exchange for a wage. This is because they are “reduced to expecting his nourishment each day only from his work of the previous day”. They are “exploited by the men whose property they utilize” and who has “the capacity to dispose at their will, even in idleness, of the instruments of work” (ibid, 82–83). That is to say, the master artisan who owns the workshop they work in and the raw materials that they work on, determines what artisan wage labourers produce, and owns the product of their employees labour.
The word prolétaire rose to popularity in France during the aftermath of the 1830 July revolution. The revolution, which lasted only three days of insurrection, overthrew the Bourbon monarch Charles the 10<sup>th</sup> and replaced him with the Orleanist monarch Louis Philippe. Workers, especially artisans, formed the majority of people who fought at the barricades and were injured or killed during the revolution. The new monarchy passed a series of reforms, such as freedom of the press and lower property requirements for having the right to vote, but refused to implement reforms that workers proposed. The new state chastised workers for foolishly asking for restrictions on what they called the liberty of industry, such as a minimum wage and a maximum length of the working day. Then as now the liberty of capitalists was built on the oppression of workers. In response artisans created their own newspapers in which they adopted the language of the French revolution to frame capitalists as idle aristocrats and workers as the productive third estate or ‘the people’. Capitalists were the new feudal lords and workers were the serfs of industry (Sewell 1980, 195–201). What Saint-Simonians had called “the most numerous and the poorest class” re-described itself as: “the most numerous and the most useful class ... the class of workers. Without it capital has no value; without it no machines, no industry, no commerce” (Quoted in ibid, 198. See also ibid 214).
The first working class social movements in France were created by artisan wage labourers. These artisans called themselves proletarians (Moss 1980, 8; Traugott 1985, 198n7). The predominance of artisans in the labour movement was not unique to France. Among labour historians there is, to quote William Sewell,
<quote>
almost universal agreement on one point: that skilled artisans, not workers in the new factory industries, dominated labour movements during the first decades of industrialization. Whether in France, England, Germany, or the United States; whether in strikes, political movements, or incidents of collective violence, one finds over and over again the same familiar trades: carpenters, tailors, bakers, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, stonemasons, printers, locksmiths, joiners, and the like. The nineteenth-century labor movement was born in the craft workshop, not in the dark, satanic mill (Sewell 1980, 1).
</quote>
Although trade unions were made illegal during the French revolution, journeymen had been clandestinely organising strikes and unions throughout the early 19<sup>th</sup> century. These typically took the form of a modern continuation of the journeymen brotherhoods of old, complete with bizarre rituals and initiation ceremonies. These secret groups were often hidden within public legal mutual aid societies that provided members with various benefits, such as sick pay and a pension upon retirement. Initially these secret groups maintained the kinds of divisions and hostilities between rival sects and professions that had been common among the original brotherhoods (ibid, 162–190). Over time a segment of journeymen from different organisations started to co-operate with one another in their shared struggle against a common foe: capitalists and the current state. They began to advocate and organise the formation of workers’ associations that united all the workers in a specific trade and then all workers from every trade (ibid, 201–18) In 1833 at least seventy-two strikes were organised by workers. This was over four times larger than the total number of strikes in 1831 and 1832 combined (ibid, 208). As part of this strike wave the stonecutters of Lyon sent an address to silk workers that asked for assistance in a dispute with their masters. They declared, “we are no longer in a time where our industries engage in mutual insults and violence; we have at last recognized that our interests are the same, that, far from hating one another, we must aid one another” (Quoted in ibid, 212). The silk workers replied by claiming that their newspaper had been founded “to bring into being the bonds of the confraternity of proletarians” and “the holy alliance of laborers” (ibid). The self-described French proletariat was therefore made by both workers themselves acquiring an awareness of their shared class interests and the economic and political context that they acted within and in reaction to.
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s the words prolétaire and (from 1834 onwards) prolétariat were often used by French authors to refer to workers in general. The exact kind of worker they had in mind varied greatly. In socialist discourse there was not one proletariat, but many (Rose 1981, 282–83, 293–99; Lovell 1988, 65–79). For some it included everyone who worked with their hands and produced the nation’s wealth. This conception was broad enough to include almost the entire population of France, including propertyless wage labourers, artisan wage labourers, self-employed artisans, and peasants who owned or rented a small amount of land. In January 1832 the revolutionary Blanqui was on trial and asked what his profession was by the court. Blanqui replied “proletarian ... one of the thirty million Frenchman who live by their labor” (Quoted in Spitzer 1957, 96). The total population of France at the time was around 32 million. It was, as it were, the 19<sup>th</sup> century equivalent of saying ‘we are the 99%’. In 1834 Blanqui founded a secret society called the Society of Families (ibid, 6). Its programme defined “the people” or “the proletariat” as “the mass of citizens who work” (Quoted in ibid, 90).
Others adopted a more narrow definition. The printer Pierre Joseph Proudhon referred to himself as a “proletarian” multiple times in his 1840 book <em>What is Property?</em> (Proudhon 1994, 36, 72, 80. For Proudhon’s life see Vincent 1984). In 1852 Proudhon distinguished between the proletariat and the middle classes. He wrote,
<quote>
<em>The middle class.</em> It consists of entrepreneurs, bosses, shopkeepers, manufactures, farmers, scholars, artists, etc. living, like the proletarians, and unlike the bourgeois, much more from their personal product than from their capital, privileges, and properties, but distinguished from the proletariat in that they work, in vulgar terms, for themselves, they are responsible for their estate’s losses and the exclusive enjoyment of their profits, whereas the proletarian works for hire and is paid a wage (Quoted in Ansart 2023, 75-76n9).
</quote>
Proudhon, in contrast to several authors from the 1830s, clearly viewed the proletariat as distinct from the self-employed, such as independent artisans and peasants who worked alone. The wage earners that Proudhon called the proletariat included both propertyless wage labourers and artisan wage labourers who owned the tools of their trade.
Lastly, there was those who used the proletariat to refer exclusively to the new class of propertyless wage labourers that emerged during the industrial revolution. One of the earliest socialists to do so was Victor Considerant in his 1837 book <em>Social Destiny</em> (Rose 1981, 298–99). A decade later he published <em>Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of 19<sup>th</sup> century Democracy</em>, which repeated this point in a more condensed form. He distinguished between “the wealthy class that possesses capital and the instruments of production and the proletarian class that is stripped of everything” (Considerant 2006, 53). These proletarians, who work for capitalists in exchange for a wage, emerged due to the industrial revolution. He noted that, “in every branch of the economy, the big capitals and large enterprises make the law for the small. Steam engines, machinery, and large factories have always easily predominated wherever they have confronted small and middle-size workshops. At their approach, the old trades and artisans disappeared, leaving only factories and proletarians” (ibid, 54).
*** The Proletariat in Marx and Engels
The word proletariat was originally used in a variety of competing and contradictory ways. The various authors of the 1830s and 1840s that I have cited were extremely historically important but have largely been forgotten. When modern people in the 21<sup>st</sup> century think about the proletariat they generally think about the proletariat as it appears in the writings of Marx and Engels or, at least, the popular misrepresentations of Marx and Engels. Despite the central importance of class in their social analysis, it is surprisingly difficult to establish exactly what they thought about it. A key reason for this is that Marx died before writing his planned chapter on<em></em> classes for volume three of <em>Capital</em>. The draft he begun contains only a few paragraphs (Marx 1991, 1025–26). Both Marx and Engels wrote about class a lot but often without defining key terms or providing the kind of systematic breakdown of classes that would make their ideas easy to understand. Matters are only made worse by the fact that they use the same word ‘class’ to refer to different things. The result is that even specialists disagree about how Marx and Engels understood class (Draper 1978; Heinrich 2004, 91–92; Ollman 1968; McLellan 1980, 177–82). Given this complexity, what follows is a brief attempt to establish how Marx and Engels defined the proletariat. It is not possible in such a brief account to cover every single source and nuance, but it should at least make their core positions clear.
Marx and Engels generally defined class in terms of a person’s source of income and relationship to the means of production. When discussing class they focused on the social relations that labour was performed within. In February 1844 Marx published a <em>Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction</em> in a journal he edited. This journal was called the <em>Franco-German Yearbooks</em> and only one issue was ever published (McLellan 1973, 98–99). His essay, which was written between late 1843 and early 1844, is the first text where Marx refers to the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change. Although he does not define the proletariat explicitly, he does pick out three key features of this class. Firstly, “the proletariat is only beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the emergent <em>industrial movement</em>. For the proletariat is not formed by <em>natural</em> poverty but by <em>artificially produced</em> poverty” (Marx 1992b, 256) Secondly, “when the proletariat demands the <em>negation of private property</em>, it is only elevating to a <em>principle for society</em> what society has already made a principle <em>for the proletariat</em>, what is embodied in the proletariat, without its consent, as the negative result of society” (ibid). Thirdly, “the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie” (ibid, 255). In other words, the proletariat is a new class that does not own private property, emerges as part of the process of industrialisation, and is in an antagonistic relationship with capitalists, who are the class above it. Marx does not clarify how this new class is distinct from other kinds of worker that existed at the time. It is nonetheless clear that Marx is using the term in a narrower sense than many French socialists. This is for the obvious reason that artisans and peasants were not a new class that emerged during industrialisation.
Marx was not initially consistent with this terminology. On other occasions he followed common usage and referred to any worker as a proletarian, including artisans who owned their own means of production. In August 1844 he used the books of Wilhelm Weitling as evidence that “the German proletariat is the <em>theoretician</em> of the European proletariat” (Marx 1992b, 415). Weitling was a tailor and artisan (Wittke 1950, 6–9, 20–21). A few months later in his 1845 book <em>The Holy Family</em> Marx referred to the artisan and printer Proudhon as a proletarian. He wrote, “not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an <em>ouvrier</em> [worker]. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat” (MECW 4, 41). In his 1847 book the <em>Poverty of Philosophy</em> Marx mentioned “the proletariat of Feudal times” and so appeared to contradict his position that the proletariat is a new class that emerged with the industrial revolution. Marx later made a series of corrections to the book and one of them was replacing this phrase with “the class of workers of Feudal times” (MECW 6, 175, 672-3n71).
Around the same time Engels, who had met Marx but had yet to become his friend (MECW 50, 503), adopted the same narrow definition of the proletariat. Between October and November 1843 he wrote <em>An Outline of a Critique of Political Economy</em>. This essay was sent to Marx some time between late December and early January and was then published in the <em>Franco-German Yearbooks</em><em></em> (Carver 2020, 132). In this essay Engels referred to “the original separation of capital from labour and from the culmination of this separation — the division of mankind into capitalists and workers — a division which daily becomes ever more acute, and which, as we shall see, is <em>bound</em> to deepen” (MECW 3, 430). Engels mentioned the new factory system of industrial production several times but did not go into greater detail and instead promised to cover it at a later date (MECW 3, 420, 424, 442–43). Engels kept this promise and, in February 1844, wrote an essay that described the industrialisation of England during the 18<sup>th</sup> and early 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. The essay was published between August and September<em></em> by the German paper<em></em> <em>Forwards</em>, which was based in Paris and had Marx on its editorial staff<em>.</em> The publication of this essay coincided with Engels ten day visit to Paris, during which he cemented his friendship with Marx and they agreed to work together on future projects (Carver 2020, 145; Jones 2016, 161). In the essay Engels claimed that the industrial revolution led to “the division of society into owners of property and non-owners” (MECW 3, 478). He thought that,
<quote>
the most important effect of the eighteenth century for England was the creation of the proletariat by the industrial revolution. The new industry demanded a constantly available mass of workers for the countless new branches of production, and moreover workers such as had previously not existed. Up to 1780 England had few proletarians, a fact which emerges inevitably from the social condition of the nation as described above. Industry concentrated work in factories and towns; it became impossible to combine manufacturing and agricultural activity, and the new working class was reduced to complete dependence on its labour. What had hitherto been the exception became the rule and spread gradually outside the towns too. Small-scale farming was ousted by the large tenant farmers and thus a new class of agricultural labourers was created. The population of the towns trebled and quadrupled and almost the whole of this increase consisted solely of workers. The expansion of mining likewise required a large number of new workers, and these too lived solely from their daily wage (MECW 3, 487).
</quote>
Engels, like Marx, specified that the proletariat are a new class that does not own private property and emerged during the industrial revolution. He, in addition to this, clarified that the proletariat so understood survive entirely by selling their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. He noted the existence of craftsmen who owned their own means of production but clearly viewed them as distinct from the proletariat (MECW 3, 477–78, 482–83). The central points of this essay were repeated by Engels in the opening chapter of his 1845 book <em>The Condition of the Working Class in England</em> (Engels 1993, 15–30).
In 1847 Engels wrote a very clear and succinct account of what the proletariat is. He claimed that two main class positions were developing under capitalism. These were the “bourgeoisie” who “almost exclusively own all the means of subsistence and the raw materials and instruments (machinery, factories, etc.), needed for the production of these means of subsistence”, and “the class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled therefore to sell their labour to the bourgeois in order to obtain the necessary means of subsistence in exchange. This class is called the class of the proletarians or the proletariat” (MECW 6, 342–43). He defined the proletariat as “that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit derived from any capital” (ibid, 341). Elsewhere he noted that “the proletarian”, in addition to this, “works with instruments of production which belong to someone else” (ibid, 100). This class is framed as being distinct from other kinds of worker that had previously existed, such as journeyman artisans and rural domestic workers, who produced cloth with a spinning wheel and hand loom that they owned themselves. Engels wrote, “the manufactory worker of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries almost everywhere still owned an instrument of production, his loom, the family spinning-wheels, and a little plot of land which he cultivated in his leisure hours. The proletarian has none of these things... The manufactory worker is torn up from his patriarchal relations by large-scale industry, loses the property he still has and thereby only then himself becomes a proletarian” (ibid, 344–45).
Marx and Engels repeated this definition of the proletariat in a more condensed form in the 1848 <em>Manifesto of the Communist Party</em><em></em> (Marx and Engels 1996, 7)<em>.</em> Why did Marx and Engels adopt their narrow definition of the proletariat? With Engels a key factor appears to be his life experiences. In November 1842 he moved to Manchester in order to work as a clerk in the offices of his father’s business, which owned cotton mills where propertyless wage labourers were employed. Whilst living in England, Engels witnessed the effects of industrialisation on society, the plight of factory workers, and the Chartist movements struggle for universal male suffrage. At the same time he met socialists and began reading political economy and economic histories of Britain (Carver 2020, 123–32, 140–41). Historians have proposed various sources of inspiration for Marx, but there is not enough evidence to give any definitive answer. It is likely that Marx heard the word during the meetings of communist artisans that he attended in the summer of 1844 whilst living in Paris (MECW 3, 355). One of the most common suggestions is that Marx read the 1842 book <em>Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France</em> by Lorenz von Stein. It is not known when Marx first read this book. He most likely knew of its existence soon after its publication because it was reviewed by someone else in a paper he wrote for called the <em>Rheinische Zeitung</em>. He first mentions the book by name in <em>The</em> <em>Holy Family</em>, which was written between September and November 1844 (Rubel and Manale 1975, 24; MECW 4, 134). Another likely source of inspiration for Marx is Sismondi. Marx explicitly refers to him in his 1844 Paris notebooks (Marx 1992b, 306, 339) and <em>The Holy Family</em> (MECW 4 , 33). Marx quotes Sismondi saying that, “my objections are not to machines, not to inventions, not to civilisation, but only to <em>the</em> <em>modern organisation of society</em>, which deprives the working man of any property other than his hands, and gives him no guarantee against competition, of which he will inevitably become a victim” (MECW 4, 272).
Over time Marx’s definition of the proletariat became increasingly precise. This went alongside arguing that the proletariat first began to emerge in England during the 16<sup>th</sup> century and so prior to the industrial revolution of the 18<sup>th</sup> (Marx 1990, 877–88, 905–907). In <em>Capital Volume 1</em> he described the proletariat as the class which,
(i) sell their labour power as a commodity on the labour market. A person’s labour power is the mental and physical capabilities they exercise when producing anything. In other words, their ability to labour.
(ii) are a legally free person who can sell their labour power to whoever they want. They are not a slave or a serf and so own or are the proprietor of their own labour power, rather than being the property of someone else. They must, in addition to this, not be bound by guild regulations that seriously restrict if they can work and who they can work for.
(iii) sell their labour power for a limited and definite period of time. If a person sells their labour power once and for all then they are selling themselves and thereby become a slave who is a commodity owned by someone else, rather than a person who is selling a commodity that they own.
(iv) own no means of production (raw materials, instruments of production, etc) such that they cannot survive by producing their own commodities and selling these on the market. They have nothing to sell but their labour power and this is what compels them to seek a buyer of labour power on the market.
(v) sell their labour power to a capitalist, who owns means of production, in exchange for a wage. A worker then uses this wage to buy the necessities of life, such as food, rent, clothes etc, and thereby reproduce themselves and their labour power (Marx 1990, 270–80, 874–76, 1025–31).[1]
Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat is widely misunderstood. Three points of clarification must be made. First, they did not think that proletarians and capitalists were the only classes that existed under really existing capitalism. This misconception stems from a sentence in the <em>Communist Manifesto.</em> They wrote that, “society as a whole is tending to split into two great hostile encampments, into two great classes directly and mutually opposed – bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Marx and Engels 1996, 2). In this sentence Marx and Engels were careful to use the phrase “great classes”, rather than ‘only classes’. A society can have two ‘great classes’, whilst also having several other lesser classes that are not as significant. The fact that Marx thought this is made clear in <em>Capital Volume 3</em>. He explained,
<quote>
the owners of mere labour-power, the owners of capital and the landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent – in other words wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners – form the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production.
It is undeniably in England that this modern society and its economic articulation is most widely and most classically developed. Even here, though, this class articulation does not emerge in pure form. Here, too, middle and transitional levels always conceal the boundaries (although incomparably less so in the countryside than in the towns). We have seen how it is the constant tendency and law of development of the capitalist mode of production to divorce the means of production ever more from labour and to concentrate the fragmented means of production more and more into large groups, i.e. to transform labour into wage-labour and the means of production into capital (Marx 1991, 1025).
</quote>
Marx distinguished between capitalism in its “pure form”, which has three great classes, and really existing capitalist societies like England, which contain far more classes. This was not a one off occurrence. In the early 1860s he wrote in his economic manuscripts that,
<quote>
here we need only consider the forms which capital passes through in the various stages of its development. The real conditions within which the actual process of production takes place are therefore not analysed ... We do not examine the competition of capitals, nor the credit system, nor the actual composition of society, which by no means consists only of two classes, workers and industrial capitalists (MECW 32, 124).
</quote>
Marx, in other words, distinguished between the model that is constructed to analyse reality and reality itself. This model is a simplification that zooms in on certain key features of reality, whilst at the same time ignoring other aspects. This is a necessary aspect of doing social science because reality is an overwhelmingly complex process that is constantly changing. It is not possible to write about everything at once and no single person can learn everything about the real world. A model is good or useful to the extent that it corresponds to the reality that it is describing and can be used to explain it. Marx called this method of research abstraction (Marx 1990, 90, 102). He altered the categories that he used to understand reality depending upon the level of abstraction that his model was operating at. In <em>Capital Volume 3</em> he claimed that he is concerned with explaining “the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production, its ideal average, as it were” and so will not discuss the specifics of “the actual movement of competition” in “the world market” (Marx 1991, 969–70).
On numerous occasions Marx acknowledged that reality is far more complex than the simple two or three great class model he constructed to analyse capitalist society in its pure or average form. In the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> Marx and Engels mentioned “the lower middle classes, small workshop proprietors, merchants and rentiers, tradesmen and yeoman farmers of the present” (Marx and Engels 1996, 8). They later referred to “the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant” in the present tense (ibid, 10). Marx and Engels predicted that, over time, an increasingly large percentage of these classes would be compelled by economic forces to become proletarians. This prediction is not the same thing as claiming that these classes do not exist within actual capitalist societies. They, in addition to this, claimed that,
<quote>
in countries where modern civilization has developed, a new petty-bourgeoisie has formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and always renewing itself as a complement to bourgeois society, but whose members are continually being dumped into the proletariat as a result of competition, who themselves – as modern industry develops – see the time approaching when they will disappear as an independent part of modern society and will be replaced (ibid, 22).
</quote>
Even decades later Marx and Engels did not think that the complete proletarianisation of the labour force had occurred. In <em>Capital Volume One</em> Marx described capitalist society as it existed in England during the 1860s. As part of this he noted the on-going existence of domestic wage labourers who own their own means of production, such as a sewing machine, and are employed by a capitalist who provides them with the necessary raw materials (Marx 1990, 599–604). He also claimed that, according to the 1861 census, there were more servants in England and Wales than those employed in textile factories and mines put together. These servants, who were largely women, were technically paid a wage but this was paid directly to them by those who hired their services. They were therefore distinct from wage labourers who were hired by a capitalist as part of a profit generating business (ibid, 574–75). In 1870 Engels wrote that the urban proletariat “is still far from being the majority of the German people” and exists alongside “the petty bourgeois, the lumpenproletariat of the cities, the small peasants and the agricultural labourers” who belong to “the agricultural proletariat” (MECW 21, 98, 100).
Marx and Engels never provide a systematic definition of the petty-bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeoisie are sometimes referred to as “the small trading class” (MECW 14, 145). It appears to consist of small merchants, shopkeepers, master artisans, and self-employed artisans. These self-employed artisans own their own means of production and use them to produce commodities or services that they sell on the market. They do not employ anyone else as a wage labourer (MECW 6, 79–80, 343; MECW 26, 500; MECW 34, 470–71). In <em>Capital Volume 3</em> Marx defined “small peasant and petty-bourgeois production” as “all forms in which the producer still appears as the owner of his means of production. In the developed capitalist mode of production, the worker is not the owner of his conditions of production, the farm that he cultivates, the raw material he works up, etc” (Marx 1991, 731). In his economic manuscripts from the 1860s Marx described such independent peasant farmers and handicraftsmen as engaging in a pre-capitalist form of production that is mediated through capitalist social relations and thereby altered by them. The result is that self-employed producers are metaphorically cut or split into two: they live as a capitalist who employs themselves as a wage labourer (MECW 34, 141–42). This analysis is clearly borrowed from Adam Smith.
Marx thought that this kind of mediation between different relations of production occured when “a determinate mode of production predominates, although all relations of production have not yet been subjected to it” (ibid, 141. See also ibid, 428). He appears to have had the same view of chattel slavery occurring under really existing capitalist societies, such as the United States. In the <em>Grundrisse</em> Marx wrote that “slavery is possible at individual points within the bourgeois system of production ... because it does not exist at other points; and appears as an anomaly opposite the bourgeois system itself” (Marx 1993, 464). This point is repeated later in the manuscripts. He noted that, “the fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they <em>are</em> capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour” (ibid, 513. See also Marx 1990, 345).
The second clarification is that Marx and Engels did not think that only industrial propertyless wage labourers are proletarians. Engels is very clear that the proletariat also includes propertyless agricultural wage labourers. In February 1845 Engels claimed that in Germany,
<quote>
Our proletariat is numerous and must be so, as we must realise from the most superficial examination of our social situation. It is in the nature of things that there should be a numerous proletariat in the <em>industrial districts</em>. Industry cannot exist without a large number of workers who are wholly at its disposal, work exclusively for it and renounce every other way of making a living. Under conditions of competition, industrial employment makes any other employment impossible. For this reason we find in all industrial districts a proletariat too numerous and too obvious for its existence to be denied.— But in the <em>agricultural districts</em>, on the other hand, many people assert, no proletariat exists. But how is this possible? In areas where big landownership prevails such a proletariat is necessary; the big farms need farm-hands and servant girls and cannot exist without proletarians. In areas where the land has been parcelled out the rise of a propertyless class cannot be avoided either; the estates are divided up to a certain point, then the division comes to an end; and as then only one member of the family can take over the farm the others must, of course, become proletarians, propertyless workers. This dividing up usually proceeds until the farm becomes too small to feed a family and so a class of people comes into existence which, like the small middle class in the towns, is in transition from the possessing to the non-possessing class, and which is prevented by its property from taking up any other occupation, and yet cannot live on it. In this class, too, great poverty prevails (MECW 4, 256–57).
</quote>
Engels made the same point in <em>The Condition of the Working Class in Englan</em><em>d,</em> which featured an entire chapter on what he called “the agricultural proletariat” (Engels 1993, 267–69). He explained that,
<quote>
The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials, will first claim our attention. The production of raw materials and of fuel for manufacture attained importance only in consequence of the industrial change, and engendered a new proletariat, the coal and metal miners. Then, in the third place, manufacture influenced agriculture, and in the fourth, the condition of Ireland; and the fractions of the proletariat belonging to each, will find their place accordingly (Engels 1993, 32).
</quote>
Marx agreed with Engels on this matter. Sometime between April 1874 and January 1875 he referred to the situation where a peasant proprietor becomes a proletarian. He wrote, “the capitalist tenant farmer has ousted the peasants, so that the actual farmer is as much a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as the urban worker” (MECW 24, 518). Marx and Engels were committed to the view that the industrial proletariat had the greatest revolutionary potential but this did not mean that they were the only members of the proletariat (MECW 5, 73–74; MECW 46, 153–54).
The third clarification is that Marx and Engels did not think that only workers who directly gather or produce a physical thing, like miners and assembly line workers, are proletarians. They were aware that other kinds of propertyless wage labourers exist. Marx emphasised the fact that the combination of large-scale production and the capitalist division of labour results in lots of propertyless wage labourers who play a key role in the production of a specific thing but are not direct producers of it. He wrote,
<quote>
With the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, in which many workers cooperate in the production of the same commodity, the direct relations between their labour and the object under production must of course be very diverse. E.g. the assistants in the factory, mentioned earlier, have no direct involvement in the treatment of the raw material. The workers who constitute the overseers of those who are directly concerned with this treatment stand a step further away; the engineer in turn has a different relation and works mainly with his brain alone, etc. But the <em>whole group of these workers</em>, who possess labour capacities of different values, although the total number employed reaches roughly the same level, produce a result which is expressed, from the point of view of the result of the pure labour process, in <em>commodities</em> or in a <em>material product</em>, and all of them together, as a workshop, are the living production machine for these <em>products</em><em></em> (MECW 34, 144).
</quote>
Marx, in addition to this, referred to proletarians who are not involved in the production of physical things. In <em>Capital Volume 2</em> he wrote that, “there are however particular branches of industry in which the product of the production process is not a new objective product, a commodity. The only one of these that is economically important is the communication industry, both the transport industry proper, for moving commodities and people, and the transmission of mere information – letters, telegrams, etc” (Marx 1992a, 134). He then acknowledged the existence of “workers occupied in the transport industry” (ibid, 135. Also see MECW 34, 145–46). Elsewhere he mentioned numerous kinds of worker who generate profits for capitalists by performing services or creating experiences for paying customers. This included waiters, singers, actors, teachers at private schools, and even clowns (MECW 31, 13, 15, 21–22; MECW 34, 139–40, 143–44, 448).
In these passages Marx emphasised the fact that two people can engage in the same kinds of labour but belong to separate classes due to the different social relations that they perform this labour within. He wrote, “these definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised” (MECW 31, 13). A propertyless tailor who makes suits for a capitalist in a clothes factory is a proletarian. An independent tailor who is directly hired by a customer to make a suit is a self-employed worker. This is true even if the customer who pays for the suit happens to be a capitalist. A person can teach a group of children to read in any society with writing. This teacher only becomes a proletarian when they work “for wages in an institution along with others, using his own knowledge to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution” (Marx 1990, 1044). Such a teacher “works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation” (ibid, 644).
*** The Spread of Marx and Engels’ Narrow Definition
Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat did not immediately become popular. The standard broader conception continued to be widely used. For example, in 1852 Blanqui wrote in a letter that in France there were “thirty-two million proletarians without property, or with very little property, and living only by the product of their hands” (Quoted in Spitzer 1957, 101). One reason why the narrow conception of the proletariat did not become dominant is that Marx and Engels were not influential or widely read until decades later. Marx’s 1847 polemical critique of Proudhon, <em>The Poverty of Philosophy</em>, had a print run of only 800 copies and received very little attention (McLellan 1973, 165–66). Even their 1848 <em>Manifest</em><em>o</em> <em>of the Communist Party</em> had a small readership when it was first released and was largely forgotten until it was republished in 1872 with a new preface. The original 1848 edition was published anonymously and only people familiar with the inner workings of the Communist League knew who had written it (Carver 2015, 67–74; Steenson 1991a, 49, 112–13). Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat did not suddenly rise to prominence after the publication of Marx’s magnum opus <em>Capital</em><em>: A Critique of Political Economy</em> in 1867. This is because <em>Capital</em> was hardly a best seller. The first German edition had a print run of 1,000 copies and did not sell out until 1871. The second 1872 edition had a print run of 3,000 copies and this lasted until 1883 (Steenson 1991a, 52). It is sometimes claimed that Marx became famous in 1871 with the publication of his analysis of the Paris Commune, <em>The Civil War in France</em>, which sold at least several thousand copies in a few months<em></em> (Heinrich 2019, 333; McLellan 1973, 400; MECW 22, 666). Although it is true that the pamphlet had a much larger readership than Marx’s previous output, it appeared as an official publication of the International Workingmen’s Association and was signed by every member of the General Council, rather than only Marx. The consequence was that people read Marx without knowing that they were reading him (Steenson 1991a, 113; MECW 22, 309, 355).
Marx and Engels became increasingly influential due to key members of emerging socialist movements and parties disseminating their ideas through the press and printing new editions of their old work, including the <em>C</em><em>ommunist</em> <em>M</em><em>anifesto</em>. This first occurred in Germany and Austria during the 1860s. From the 1880s onwards they were well known throughout European socialist movements (Steenson 1991a, 49–52, 115–21, 161, 165–66, 169–70, 220, 224). A key reason for this growth in influence was Engels’ various attempts to popularise his and Marx’s ideas, such as the 1877–1878 <em>Anti-Dühring</em><em></em> and 1880 <em>Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.</em> This was followed by other influential summaries, such as Kaul Kautsky’s 1887 <em>Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx</em><em></em> (Steenson 1991b, 33–35, 66). This influence culminated in a number of socialist parties adopting Marxist programs, or at least programs influenced by Marxism, during the late 19<sup>th</sup> century. In 1891 the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopted the Erfurt programme, which was primarily written by Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and August Bebel. All three were associates of Marx and Engels. Kautsky even received feedback on the draft from Engels himself (ibid, 98–99). The programme opened with Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat:
<quote>
The economic development of bourgeois society leads by natural necessity to the downfall of small industry, whose foundation is formed by the worker’s private ownership of his means of production. It separates the worker from his means of production and converts him into a propertyless proletarian, while the means of production become the monopoly of a relatively small number of capitalists and large landowners (SPD 1891, 297).
</quote>
Prior to the Russian revolution the SPD was the largest socialist political party in the world. In 1890 it had a membership of around 290,000 and had won 1.4 million votes and thirty five mandates in that year’s elections (Steenson 1991a, 72). The growth of social democracy spread Marx and Engels’ conception of the proletariat but it did not result in it being universally adopted by all socialists. On several occasions anarchist socialists continued to use the broad definition of the proletariat as a catch all term for any worker or wage labourer. This went alongside an awareness that the working classes are not a monolith and can be broken down into various subcategories, such as artisan wage labourers, propertyless wage labourers, peasants, skilled, unskilled and so forth. To give a few examples, in 1873 the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin wrote that, “Italy has a huge proletariat, endowed with an extraordinary degree of native intelligence but largely illiterate and wholly destitute. It consists of 2 or 3 million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some 20 million landless peasants” (Bakunin 1990, 7). In 1926 the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad claimed that capitalist society is split into “two very distinct camps ... the proletariat (in the broadest sense of the word) and the bourgeoisie”. The proletariat so understood included “the urban working class” and “the peasant masses” (Dielo Truda 1926, 195, 199). Other anarchists used the words ‘proletariat’ or ‘working class’ in a narrow sense. In 1938 Rudolf Rocker claimed that during the industrial revolution “a new social class was born, which had no forerunners in history: the modern industrial proletariat”. This class, in contrast to journeymen and master artisans, did not own the “tools of his trade” and “had nothing to dispose of except the labour of their hands” (Rocker 2004, 24–25). Rocker’s narrative is the same as Marx and Engels, which is unsurprising given that he explicitly references both <em>Capital</em> by Marx and <em>The Condition of the Working Class in England</em> by Engels (ibid, 21).
*** The Proletariat in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century
This essay has been concerned with explaining the categories that socialists historically developed to understand the economic classes that exist under capitalism. During the nineteenth century three competing conceptions of the proletariat arose. The word was used to refer to either (a) all workers, including the self-employed (b) all wage labourers, or (c) all wage labourers who own no means of production. The last and most narrow conception was advocated by Marx and Engels and was not initially popular or widely used. Today it has become the dominant conception of the proletariat in socialist discourse. The proletariat so understood is only increasing in size. According to Immanuel Ness “while industrial production contracted in the Global North from 1980 to 2007, production in the South has expanded, and global production as a whole has grown from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion workers – far more working people than at any time in the history of capitalism” (Ness 2016, 9, 14). It is furthermore the case that Marx and Engels never claimed that the proletariat only consisted of industrial workers. Propertyless wage labourers employed in starbucks or video game development are just as much proletarians as those who work in mines and factories. What makes a person a proletarian is not the kind of labour they engage in, such as digging a ditch or doing a powerpoint presentation, but the social relations that they work within (Raekstad 2022, 216).
An understanding of the proletariat as a really existing class should not be gained purely through an examination of what dead men with large beards wrote about it. It is necessary to not only read old theorists but also test their theories against reality. If a model does not correspond to reality or cannot be used to explain it, then we should create new and better models. Reality is always more complicated than the neat models we construct to understand it. The mistake is to ignore reality because it does not align with our model. Although classes can be clearly distinguished from one another at a societal level, the boundaries between classes become fuzzier the more we zoom in. In the 19<sup>th</sup> century a person could be self-employed and a wage labourer at the same time. A farmer could be a peasant proprietor for one season and an urban propertyless wage labourer another. A person could spend their youth working in the city for a wage and then retreat to the countryside when their father dies and they inherit a small plot of land. People could, in other words, belong to multiple classes at the same time and move between classes on a regular or permanent basis. Despite this generalisations can of course be made, but they should be made with care and caution.
A reader might suppose that there is a rigid clear distinction between chattel slaves who pick cotton and legally free wage labourers who work in a cotton mill. Doing so would ignore that it was common for slaves to engage in wage labour (Linden 2008, 23). The labour historian Marcel van der Linden provides one extremely interesting example of this. Simon Gray was a slave in the southern United States. He worked as the chief boatman of the Natchez lumber company from 1845 until 1862. His crew was composed of between ten to twenty men. It included both black slaves and white legally free wage labourers. Some of the slaves were owned by the company. Other slaves were hired as wage labourers via their owner. This included Gray himself. He, in addition to this, employed the white workers, lent them money, sometimes paid their wages, and engaged in a wide variety of managerial tasks. Linden describes this as “a <em>slave</em> who functioned as a <em>manager</em>, <em>free wage laborers</em> who were employed <em>by a slave</em>, and <em>other</em> <em>slaves</em> who had to obey an employer who was himself a slave!” (Linden 2008, 26).
It is furthermore the case that early factories in England relied on a form of labour that could be described as state enforced child servitude. The government involuntarily made poor and orphan children the apprentices of factory owners. The factory owner had full legal authority over the child and it was illegal for the child to run away. These children were not owned as property but they were not strictly speaking legally free wage labourers. Due to state violence they did not choose who they worked for or, indeed, if they worked at all. Whilst at work these children would, at least in some workplaces, be beaten by overseers in order to keep them awake and on task during long shifts (Freeman 2018, 24–25). Marx was aware of this and wrote in <em>Capital Volume One</em> that the rise of “factory production” was built on “child-stealing and child-slavery” (Marx 1990, 922).
The distinction between wage labourers who own means of production and propertyless wage labourers was important in the 19<sup>th</sup> century. Drawing attention to it was necessary when explaining the decline of the hand loom and the rise of the factory in England. But reality was always more complicated than this distinction made it appear. Factory workers could own means of production as well. The German economist August Sartorius von Waltershausen visited the United States in the 1880s. He observed that,
<quote>
Unlike their European counterparts, American factory workers commonly own their own tools. The system used on the other side of the Atlantic is certainly preferable, for, as Studnitz has noted, it means that American workers choose their tools according to their own needs, while European workers are forced to adapt to the tools they are provided with. Tools often constitute a sizable proportion of a worker’s wealth (Waltershausen 1998, 216. Cited by Linden 2008, 25).
</quote>
In the modern world it is still common in certain professions for wage labourers to own their own tools, such as mechanics and chefs. Some companies use a bring your own device policy whereby people use their own personal computer and smartphone for work. When Marx was writing self-employed farmers and artisans were being turned into proletarians. Now corporations are attempting to avoid labour laws by transforming proletarians into self employed independent contractors who own their own means of production but have no job security and are not entitled to minimum wage. The sociologist Bartosz Mika has referred to the modern gig economy as the digital putting out system. During industrialisation merchant capitalists provided domestic craftspeople with raw materials. Now platform apps like uber, deliveroo, and taskrabbit provide service workers with access to consumers. Both forms of work are characterised by a decentralised labour force who are paid per task completed, do their work in isolation from other employees, and are dependent upon a central node for work (Mika 2020).
Capitalism has, in addition to this, created numerous other platforms that make it easier to be self-employed, such as social media, ebay, etsy, patreon, and onlyfans. But low wages and rising costs of living result in numerous proletarians turning to these sites not as their main source of income, but as a supplement to the inadequate wages paid to them by the ruling classes. It is furthermore the case that these self-employed workers are a source of revenue for the websites that they use to earn a living, whether this is directly through fees and advertising or indirectly through content production that ensures the website remains alive. On most websites users, whether they be content creators or viewers, are themselves a product whose personal data is sold to advertisers. In Asia some content creators are even being concentrated inside influencer factories, where they livestream in small cubicles for long hours in order to persuade their viewers to make donations and shop in real time. A large portion of the influencer’s income is then split between the streaming platform they use and the company that owns the influencer factory and micromanages their brand and behavior.
When Marx was writing it was generally correct to say that the proletariat sold their labour to the capitalist class who privately owned the means of production. Today a significant segment of propertyless wage labourers work for the state. Some of these professions can be accurately described as a person working for a state capitalist, such as a for profit energy or transportation company that the state owns the majority of shares in. In 1878 Engels correctly argued that,
<quote>
state-ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces ... The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with (MECW 25, 266).
</quote>
This analysis does not apply to sectors that do not produce a profit and are maintained by a government allocated budget, in particular state run education, welfare, and healthcare systems.
The division of labour has also become more complex under capitalism. In <em>Capital Volume 1</em> Marx pointed out that many capitalists hand “over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function” (Marx 1990, 450). The number of managers, planners, and supervisors, who are wage labourers that have the power to direct and control the labour process, has significantly increased since the 1860s. This has led several modern socialists, such as Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, to view this kind of wage labourer as belonging to a distinct category called the co-coordinator class (Albert and Hahnel 1981, 84, 140–41). They are not capitalists but exercise authority over the proletariat. Tom Wetzel calls this the bureaucratic control class (Wetzel 2022, 11–12). On this model class is determined not only by whether or not a person owns the means of production. It is also determined by their role in the labour process and their powers of decision-making.
*** Conclusion
An analysis of class in the 21<sup>st</sup> century cannot simply repeat the analysis from the 19<sup>th</sup> as if the world is exactly the same. We have to develop our own ideas in response to the economic realities that confront us. Although much has changed since the 19<sup>th</sup> century, the fundamental structure of capitalist society has not. Capitalism is still a class society based on a division between capitalists and wage labourers, rulers and ruled, exploiters and the exploited. In the late 19<sup>th</sup> century anarchist socialist workers argued that the proletariat should abolish itself by overthrowing the ruling classes, expropriating their private property, and smashing the state. On the ruins of the old world the proletariat, alongside all other kinds of worker, would build a stateless, classless, and moneyless society in which the means of production and land are owned in common and society is self-managed via voluntary workplace and community associations. In such a society people would no longer be capitalists or proletarians. They would be human beings who engaged in acts of production and consumption. Workers called this society the free association of free producers (Baker 2023, 28, 79–91). The same language was used by Marx and Engels. They wrote in 1844 that “the proletariat ... is victorious only by abolishing itself” (MECW 4, 36). Although they disagreed with anarchists on revolutionary strategy, they shared a vision of a future society in which, to quote Engels in 1884, production is organised via the “free and equal association of the producers” (MECW 26, 272). Over a century later it remains the case that universal human emancipation requires the self-abolition of the proletariat.
In order to achieve this goal the proletariat needs to unite as a class, form their own organisations, and engage in direct action. One of the most effective kinds of direct action that workers can engage in is strikes. This is because capitalism requires the labour of workers. If nobody works, then business comes to a halt and capitalists cannot earn a profit. This imposes external pressure onto capitalists and gives them a powerful incentive to give into the demands of workers. The essential role of workers in production is both a source of oppression and their collective power to change the world. This is not to say that workplace strikes are the only form of direct action that workers should engage in or that workers should only organise at the point of production. Other forms of direct action and organising are necessary, such as rent strikes, civil disobedience, demonstrations, reading groups, university occupations, and so forth. Social change and the development of an effective mass movement requires both workplace and community organising. To give one example, the emancipation of women can be furthered by the formation of women only consciousness raising groups, cis-men doing their share of house work, reclaim the night marches, networks that help people get illegal abortions, and workplace organising against sexual harassment. The point is only that the ability to engage in class struggle via the collective withdrawal of labour is an important power that the proletariat has due to their location within the structure of capitalist society. This power was used by workers in the past to win better wages, safer working conditions, and shorter working hours. We can do the same and engage in collective direct action in order to improve our lives in the short term and build towards a truly free society in the long term.
Capitalism and the state are of course not the only oppressive structures. We live in a society which is patriarchal, racist, queerphobic and ableist. As a result of this, the working class is not an amorphous blob. It is divided along lines of gender, race, sexuality, and disability. These divisions are not merely the product of the ruling class dividing the working class. They are actively perpetuated by the working class themselves through the process of different working class people oppressing one another, such as working class men abusing working class women or white workers viewing black workers as inferior. Workers cannot unite within an organisation, let alone as a class, if one group of workers is being oppressed by another group of workers. Such behavior leads to workers being hurt and excluded within the very organisations that claim to fight for their emancipation. If we want to create a society in which everyone is free, then we must build organisations that struggle against all forms of oppression simultaneously. We must not tolerate any kind of oppressive behaviour and, at the same time, help other workers unlearn their socialisation into oppressive structures such that they become people who are capable of, and driven to, horizontally associate with others in all aspects of their life. The proletariat must unite as a class, but they must form a unity that is enriched by all the differences within it. We must engage in intersectional class struggle.
One serious barrier to the formation of a mass working class movement is that a large number of wage labourers do not regard themselves as belonging to the same class. Some wage labourers, for example, believe that capitalism is a meritocracy and worship CEOs as heroes and innovators. They have internalised the idea that if they have the right grind set and go monk mode then they too can become a successful entrepreneur. They are not a proletarian, but a capitalist in waiting who happens to be temporarily working for someone else. Workers must counteract these patterns of thinking by deliberately choosing to spread class-consciousness through words and actions. The making of the first self-described modern proletariat in 1830s France was not driven purely by impersonal economic transformations to society. A crucial factor was workers themselves, who had previously been divided into mutually hostile professions and organisations, coming to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct class with shared class interests. The 19<sup>th</sup> century proletariat was made by both the structure of capitalist society and workers themselves. In 1847 Marx wrote that,
<quote>
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests (MECW 6, 211).
</quote>
The proletariat of the 21<sup>st</sup> century must do the same. We have to transform from being just a class in itself and become a class for itself.
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</biblio>
[1] According to Draper, Marx thinks that only propertyless wage labourers who produce surplus value and thereby generate profits for a capitalist are proletarians (Draper 1978, 34). Propertyless wage labourers that do not produce surplus value are therefore not proletarians, such as teachers employed in state funded schools or road construction workers hired directly by the state. The best evidence I have found to support this view is a single sentence in the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> which claims “the proletariat” are “the class of modern workers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (Marx and Engels 1996, 7). For Marx only productive labour, in the sense of labour that produces surplus value, increases capital (Marx 1990, 644). This sentence in the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> could be interpreted as a generalisation, rather than an attempt to establish the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being a proletarian. The pamphlet is after all full of generalisations. Unfortunately Marx’s other statements on the subject are vague and could be interpreted as either saying that the proletariat only includes productive workers or that all propertyless wage labourers who sell their labour power to an employer (rather than selling a labour service directly to a customer) are proletarians irrespective of whether or not they produce surplus value (MECW 34, 444–45). In <em>Capital Volume 3</em> Marx claims that “commercial wage-labourers employed by the merchant capitalist ... do not directly produce surplus-value ” but do ultimately enable their employer to generate a profit. In a footnote Engels refers to such workers as “the commercial proletariat” (Marx 1991, 406–407, 414–15). In the absence of definitive evidence I am agnostic on the matter, but I could have missed an important source or not seen an important detail when reading.
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#title Taking Risks is A Path to Survival
#author Zoë Dodd & Alexander McClelland
#LISTtitle Taking Risks is A Path to Survival
#SORTauthors Zoë Dodd, Alexander McClelland
#SORTtopics drugs, harm reduction
#date October 8, 2017
#source Retrieved on 9/21/2021 from https://hivhepcanarchist.tumblr.com/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-09-22T00:45:29
<right>
<em>Dedicated to Raffi Balian</em>
</right>
Canada is in the midst of a devastating opioid overdose crisis, an unprecedented health emergency. This is an emergency that has been caused and exacerbated by state bureaucracies, hierarchies, and policy and laws that criminalize drugs and the people who use them. The losses are staggering, and the grief is overwhelming. Yet bureaucratic red tape, the ongoing war on drugs and government inaction continues to fuel the fire. And we continue to lose more of our friends and family members.
We are in a position where our only path to survival is to bypass state imposed red tape, rules and regulations. To help our friends, families and ourselves, it is our ethical responsibility to take things into our own hands. We must undermine the barriers enforced by bureaucratic hierarchies. We must take risks, and we must act.
Last year, as part of an ongoing writing project we wrote an article linking anarchist theories to responses to Hepatitis C and HIV. Our goal both with that piece and this one (and more to come) is to help open the imaginations of people working in health responses beyond the current prevailing reality — as governed by corporate neoliberal managerialism. We believe that we have the tools to save lives and bring these diseases to an end, but instead society is organized in ways that allow for millions of people to continue to die. This is also the case with the opioid emergency.
People working within harm reduction to address HIV, Hep C and the opioid emergency often strive for objectives that are already aligned with anarchism, including fighting for equitable access to medical knowledge and life-saving medications, bodily autonomy, participation in decision-making, ensuring interventions are informed by lived experiences and grassroots knowledge, and the right to dignity and social justice for all people. Anarchists also believe in emancipation from oppressive top-down social structures, and instead seek to build communities on trust, mutual aid and self-help. With a ‘do no harm’ philosophy, anarchists believe that action should come from the ground up, and that those most impacted by a specific social issue are the experts and should be allowed to act to address their needs free from constraint.
*** Underground Naloxone Access
In 2010, our friend and colleague Raffi Balian, a long-time leader and worker in the harm reduction movement was at his job at South Riverdale Community Health Centre. A woman overdosed on an opioid she had injected while in the bathroom. South Riverdale had an unofficial Good Samaritan Policy that was shared with people who use drugs at the centre so they would feel safe telling staff if an overdose happened on site. At the time Naloxone was not yet available for use in Toronto — it required a prescription and had not been made accessible through approved state channels. Drug users had known for years that Naloxone was a lifesaver and were distributing it underground. Raffi had some Naloxone in his office that he had picked up at a harm reduction conference, a pre-loaded syringe. He imported it illegally — knowing that the state imposed process to acquire Naloxone was disconnected from the realities on the ground. Raffi knew that bringing Naloxone into Canada would help save lives despite its ‘illegality’. For years Raffi had been encouraging many of his colleagues to bring home Naloxone when we travelled to conferences where people were handing it out, and people did. The life-saving drug was then was shared locally with drug users who needed it. Raffi used that Naloxone on the woman who had overdosed in the bathroom and saved her life. She could have died had Raffi not taken action into his own hands and he did so demonstrating that we could be responding ourselves and we’re equipped to do so.
Raffi also got harm reduction activists from the US to come up and do Naloxone workshops with people who use drugs on how to administer the life-saving drug. Other organizations and workers across Toronto, Ontario and eastern Canada also started taking it upon themselves to acquire Naloxone. A wide network of harm reduction workers and drug users would share the drug across borders and jurisdictions, despite legal barriers. Drug users administered the drug to their friends and families in their homes and communities. It’s hard to estimate how much Naloxone was brought into eastern Canada during that time, but we believe around 8,000- 10,000 vials of Naloxone made it into the hands of people in Toronto and elsewhere, including Montreal, Ottawa, and Grassy Narrows.
Naloxone has been available on the market since the late 1970s but it was only until 2016 that Health Canada dropped the requirement for a prescription, making it more accessible. Had drug users and harm reduction workers waited until it was recently made more widely accessible, it is likely that hundreds of people would have died. Many did and many continue to die while access barriers make Naloxone out of reach.
The example of Naloxone is one where workers with on-the-ground lived experience took risks and acted in the moment to do what is needed to save lives, bypassing official state policies and barriers. For a long time, harm reduction workers have imported supplies across different jurisdictions and provinces, importing from the US. Sometimes workers have taken supplies paid for by one province and given them to workers in other provinces where access is more constrained. These approaches have expanded vital and live saving access to crack pipes, medications, and other drug use and overdose prevention supplies.
*** The Crack Pipe Train
Crack pipes have been paid for by the state in Toronto for many years due to the ground-breaking advocacy efforts of the Safer Crack Use Coalition — a network of drug users and allies which formed in the year 2001 to address service gaps for people who use crack. Until very recently, workers from Toronto would often take large amounts of pipes to Montreal and distribute them to workers in that city, as public health in Montreal was not providing access to the pipes (it began paying for and helping to distribute pipes in 2015). It was known as the crack pipe train. An underground network that ensured drug users could access what they needed to realize good health and avoid Hepatitis C. Along with this underground distribution of supplies were a wide range of workshops and information sharing activities that drug users conducted on their own with each other, while state officials in Montreal did nothing and floundered to find any political will.
*** VANDU
Drug users have been self-organizing to support each other’s health for years. VANDU, the Vancouver Area Drug Users Network is a prime example of this. The network implemented a drug-user run needle exchange, and supervised injection site, which also provided assisted injections, well before the official opening of government sanctioned InSite. Police vilified the network for years and shut down the site, as it was not legally sanctioned. Despite this, the network pushed forward and continued their efforts and ultimately the police apologized. VANDU has been a leading visionary organization in terms of ensuring that the health of drug users is realized, despite how slow officials are to catch up after the fact.
*** Working with Drug Dealers
Another example of anarchist practice in health care is Raffi’s work with high-level drug dealers. He would train the dealers about harm reduction, Naloxone and talk to them about their drug supplies and what they were selling. He would get samples from the dealers and have them tested in a government-funded lab. The lab would let Raffi test the drugs without asking him where they came from. Dealers have the drugs that users need and working with them is an obvious, yet controversial approach. Raffi knew that in working collaboratively with dealers he could help the health and lives of drug users. But dealers are highly stigmatized people, who are the targets of criminalization, who are vilified and almost never conceptualized as caring partners in harm reduction responses. While not necessarily illegal, Raffi was doing work in ways that took risks and did things differently. He took the health of drug users as his priority regardless of social stigma, conceptual barriers, social constraints or the lack of imagination of official government managerial responses.
*** Undermining State Surveillance
Anarchist forms of resistance can be found in many places in harm reduction responses, and another example is when workers resist state imposed surveillance and data collection programs and the widespread implementation of, and documentation in electronic databases. The increase of the use of integrated and cross-institutional databases has meant that state managers have increasingly coerced workers into monitoring the communities they work with — often communities where they share membership. Identifying information that can be connected back to people is supposed to be collected, as well as how many harm reduction supplies people access, naming them for life as a drug user in a state database — a state that criminalizes drugs.
Details contained in these databases such as people’s health history, and drug use are widely available for other healthcare and social workers to see, regardless of if the person provided consent for this information to be shared. Workers have resisted these practices by inputting minimal information, no information at all, or using an anonymous code instead of identifying information. The fear is that this type of information could be used against people, to criminalize them, to create barriers to them accessing quality healthcare and to getting what they need. Viewing people as cases to be managed and counted in databases comes from a hierarchal managerial logic. This logic sees people as numbers and workers as data entry clerks and agents of state surveillance. Where local information is exported to high up decision-makers who believe they are experts on communities that they are not a part of because of what they have collected on them. Resisting this logic is good for our health and brings power back to workers who are the true experts.
*** Rule Breaking as Ethical
If hierarchies were flattened we wouldn’t need to break rules because workers would be trusted as experts and enabled to access the resources they need without requiring the approval from a top-down administrative bureaucracy. Breaking rules is part of resisting the oppressive ways in which our health and social system are currently organized. Anarchism is about resisting hierarchical structures — structures that are bad for our health. Working with an anarchist worldview means we can act to address health crises in our communities from a place of power, knowing that we acting to ensure justice and lives free from coercion and oppression.
Bringing an anarchist political analysis into our work helps us understand why breaking ‘rules’ and taking risks is the only ethical action in the context where our lives are criminalized and friends and families are dying all around us. If people were able to open supervised consumption sites without requiring approval from the Federal government, more of them would have been opened years ago, like with the efforts of VANDU, and we might have a much better handle on the current overdose emergency. If drug users were emancipated from oppressive laws and able to use safe drugs freely and with supports this emergency might never have happened in the first place.
We can do more to consolidate our collective resistance. We refuse to continue to grant power to hierarchical structures and ways of working which lead to the deaths of our friends and families. We refuse to continue to adopt a public health logic which views people as risks and as cases to be managed. We will no longer be managed, monitored, and surveilled. Local forms of knowledge are what are needed to save lives during this unprecedented crisis. Harm reduction was always ground up — acknowledging this and actively talking about this history is part of our resistance.
We have to take risks because we are being swallowed up, because we have no choice but to do so, and because we must take care of each other. We will continue to break ‘rules’ and we will continue to speak openly because this is what we must do when it comes to life and death, when it comes to giving people what they need. Rule breaking and risk taking are ethical actions in an unjust world. Out of the overdose emergency and all this devastating loss there could be an opportunity, a new way to organize. The time is now to be explicit about our resistance. We need to talk openly about the risks we are being driven to take in order to save the lives of our communities. We will no longer be divided under state hierarchies and forced into competition with each other. Working together in active and vocal resistance will make us unstoppable.
----
<em>Many thanks to Kate Mason for her help while we were developing this piece!</em>
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#cover z-d-zoe-dodd-alexander-mcclelland-the-revolution-w-1.jpg
#title The revolution will not be sober
#subtitle The problem with notions of “radical sobriety” & “intoxication culture”
#author Zoë Dodd & Alexander McClelland
#LISTtitle The revolution will not be sober
#SORTauthors Zoë Dodd, Alexander McClelland
#SORTtopics drugs, harm reduction, revolution, sobriety, intoxication culture, radical sobriety
#date July 15, 2016
#source Retrieved on September 21, 2021 from https://hivhepcanarchist.tumblr.com/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-09-22T00:49:15
[[z-d-zoe-dodd-alexander-mcclelland-the-revolution-w-2.jpg f]]
As radicals and writers working on issues of criminalization and drug liberation, we believe that altering the relationships we have with our minds and bodies through substance use is a form of resistance and emancipation. For us, drug liberation is the emancipation of drugs deemed illegal and the people who use them from the control of the state and social structures. In our experience, drug use can facilitate authentic, compassionate, and emotionally bonded social relationships that are not possible otherwise. Drug use can be therapeutic and provide autonomy outside of the pathologizing system of western medicine for coping with trauma and difficult life experiences. Within an economic system that relies on our bodies as a tool of production under a capitalist rationality, getting high can be a tactic for survival, a therapeutic practice, and an active refusal to engage with capitalism.
Maximizing our own pleasure by getting high can be a political imperative when we live in a society that is organized around viewing our bodies and minds as a form of capital. Under a capitalist logic, pleasure as an end unto itself is often viewed as dangerous, selfish, problematic, and destructive. But for thousands of years people have been using all kinds of drugs and substances to alter their relationships with their minds, bodies, with each other, and with their physical environments. Drugs were (and still are) used for ceremonial purposes to expand people’s relationship to land, expand worldviews, and as forms of healing medicine. Drugs have been widely used for years within communities of self-proclaimed queers, dykes, fags, gender radicals, freaks, skids, and punks to fuck with the ways in which society understands how we are supposed to act and be in the world. It is via practices of colonization, the introduction of capitalism, liberal legal frameworks, and the proliferation of western medicine that certain kinds of drug use have been arbitrarily pathologized and highly regulated, producing moralistic notions of illicit drugs, “addiction”, and the “addict”.
Because of our experience as drug users, radicals and writers, as well as our historical and political understanding of drug use, we have been increasingly concerned about the emergence of “radical sobriety” and “intoxication culture” discussions among a range of anarchists and queer activists that have been proliferating online, at conferences, and in social spaces. These discussions are marked by the convergence of certain forms of anarchism, queer identity politics, and addiction recovery language. All wrapped up, this comes to produce a political logic that we believe is disconnected from history, from drug user rights movements, and could result in a form of politics that is potentially damaging to people who use drugs. With our analysis, we want to make it clear that we understand that these issues are deeply personal for some people, and we do not wish to undermine any one person’s experience with substance use and their own autonomy, but rather, we seek to analyze how notions of “radical sobriety” and “intoxication culture” are taken up as a cultural and political project. For clarity, when we reference drugs and substances in this article, we are talking about a wide range of natural and synthetic drugs, including alcohol, which people use for a range of differing reasons.
*** What is “radical sobriety” and “intoxication culture”?
In a politicized context, the concept of “radical sobriety” has come to be a way that some people are engaging with the language of addiction recovery in a range of activist communities. According to the Facebook page for the group <em>Radical Sobriety Montreal</em>, “<em>it’s a grassroots response to the reality of widespread addiction in our communities and our lives</em>”, and “<em>believing that the personal is political, we try to engage with our addictions within the framework of radical political analysis</em>”. As noted on the blog post <em>Radical Sobriety: Situating the Discussion</em>, these groups understand that “<em>sobriety is central to morality</em>”, and this approach to understanding abstinence from substance use is aimed at addressing “<em>inebriation as a root of social problems, especially in a</em> <em>drug culture</em>”. Within a radical sobriety framework, drugs are produced by a capitalist system and are being used as a tool of oppression against a range of communities. Soberness is understood as being closer to our natural human state prior to the emergence of oppressive forms of social organization. Here drugs are understood as producing false experiences, and authenticity in social and political relationships must be brought about through being sober. People from these groups address drug use as providing “<em>an artificially altered state of mind</em>” which produces “<em>numbness to sensations and feelings</em>”.
This politicized recovery framework uses the language of 12-step programs such as Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, which ask members to claim a “ sober addict” identity. But, radical sobriety groups take this further, understanding the “addict” as a static political identity category and mobilize “safer space” language to claim accessibility entitlement to a range of spaces to accommodate their soberness. Claiming the identity of the “ sober addict” for “radical sobriety” people is a political practice to mobilize resistance against “intoxication culture”. Within “radical sobriety” groups, countering the pervasiveness of “intoxication culture” is a political project, as this negative “culture” is understood as oppressing communities and undermining the political aims of the radical left. For these people, “intoxication culture” is understood as a “<em>tool of colonization</em>”, and as driven by patriarchal and heteronormative rape culture. This culture is understood to dominate and promotes drinking and forms of drug use in a range of everyday activities and social spaces, such as at sporting events and dance parties.
In the context of “radical sobriety” discussions, sobriety is, as noted in the presentation <em>Sobriety as Accessibility: Interrogating Intoxication Culture</em>, “<em>considered as a form of accessibility and resistance</em>”. As further explained on the blog post <em>Intoxication Culture is a Bore</em>: “<em>If you believe in accessibility, inclusivity and justice then it is your responsibility as a normative drinker to make space for people who can’t and don’t drink</em>”. The result of claiming addiction as an accessibility issue is that people who are not self-described “addicts”, and whom use substances, are constructed as having a form of privilege that those who are not “addicted” do not have access. The language of accessibility and privilege are mobilized to call claims for safe spaces for the “radically sober”.
Using a monolithic notion of “culture”, this approach also sees “intoxication culture” as producing the “addict”. To reclaim the notion of the “sober addict”, “radical sobriety“ groups use the language of disability rights scholars and activists who understand disability as being produced socially and not as an individual issue. This approach has been very productive for many important and powerful disability rights groups and other accessibility rights groups in focusing attention away from individual and people’s different bodies and abilities, to rather address the barriers in society that produce understandings of ability and disability, and accessibility and inaccessibility. Within a accessibility framework, the political project comes to be organized around calls for social change to enable new ways of accommodating a range of abilities and to enable forms of accessibility, such as making spaces wheelchair accessible or making events pay-what-you-can.
In some of their discussions, “radical sobriety” people also have a somewhat nuanced understanding of the social complexities around substance use, as that was originally developed by people working in harm reduction and drug user rights movements. For example, “radical sobriety” groups will sometimes state that addiction is exacerbated by social issues such as lack of housing and poverty, they critique how western medicine understands the individualization of addiction, they talk about the differential effects of the drug hierarchy based on class, race and gender, and they talk about how people who use drugs are considered disposable in society.
[[z-d-zoe-dodd-alexander-mcclelland-the-revolution-w-1.jpg f]]
But despite possibly good intentions, the problem is that more broadly these “radical sobriety” discussions could cause damage to people who use drugs, including people who use drugs in radical organizing spaces. The problem is that this new discourse is ahistorical and could be furthering moralistic and stigmatizing attitudes and practices. The problem is that there are major flaws in the arguments of “radical sobriety”, which fail to address key political targets and forms of analysis. Thus, instead of uncritically accepting the ideas that it is proposing, we find ourselves with the imperative to interrogate “radical sobriety”.
*** Concerns with the discourse of “radical sobriety and “intoxication culture”
For decades, groups of people who use drugs have been organizing in collectives to address a range of vital issues impacting their lives, such as working to change damaging criminal laws, barriers to healthcare, and to alter the negative social perception of active drugs users. These groups work with an ethic of “nothing about us, without us” and they have radically transformed policies and approaches, such as initiating harm reduction as a widespread non-judgmental approach to support drug users to realize their own health and claim agency over their lives. Based on this movement, other radicals working on issues related to drugs have an imperative to engage with and understand work of drug user organizers (outside of one’s personal drug history and personal needs to be high or remain sober).
Despite coming from the individual perspective of past drug use, the discourse of the “radically sober” fails to account for (and completely negates) the experiences of active drug users and the decades of experience of drug user organizers. For example, for many years, movements of people who drugs, including the International Network of People Who Use Drug (INPUD), the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), L’Association Québécoise pour la promotion de la santé des personnes utilisatrices de drogues (AQPSUD), and the Toronto Drug Users Union (TDUU) have critiqued notions of addiction and have called for an end to the use of the term “addict”. Drug user movements actively call for a shift away from conceptualizing drug use in terms of “addiction”, as this approach has been used to pathologize, medicalize and criminalize drug users. These groups have highlighted that the language of “addiction” does not allow the space for real discussion of the myriad experiences of substance use in people’s lives. This results in a view that understands all drug use as a problem that needs any number of forms of expertise to correct through recovery programs, drug courts, criminal sanctions, and medical rehabilitation.
When engaging with movements of people who use drugs, perspectives on the concept of “addiction” and the political objectives that are needed to achieve emancipation are vastly different than those who engage in “radical sobriety”. In the view of many proponents of recovery, such as people involved in “radical sobriety”, people who are understood to become “addicts” are the product of a dominant culture that promotes popularized forms of drug use. In their view, substance use keeps various marginalized populations oppressed, and emancipation is thus achieved through being sober. But this understanding is divorced from the history of colonization, liberal legal frameworks and medicalization. As many active drug users know, drug use is not inherently connected to “addiction” or problematic use, for example, 80–90% of people who use drugs do not have a problem with their substance use. Ideas about “addiction” being based in science are flawed and has been disproven (read the work of Carl Hart and get back to us) Drug use only became understood as something that is “wrong” when specific frameworks of morality were developed and imposed onto groups of people who used drugs.
Notions of “addiction” and the “addict” have been constructed over time by white, wealthy moral authorities such as religious groups, medical experts, psychologists, politicians, police and criminal justice systems. Mobilizing negative, pathologizing ideas of “addiction” and the “addict” has been part of the projects of colonization and other forms of social control of poor people and people of colour. This kind of pathologizing people has led to the to rise of forms of treatment detention and forced treatment. It is the fear of the “addict” which people use so as to continue to scapegoat and attack. The idea of the highly racialized, classed and gendered “addict” has the ability and power to strip people of all of their other identities and becomes the only focus for understanding the individual. This logic is what forces people on welfare to be drug tested, children to be removed from their homes, and people locked up for what they put in their bodies (despite no harm to anyone else). With this understanding, the “tool of colonization” is not substance use, but rather an oppressive system of laws and institutions organized around controlling and incapacitating groups of people deemed different, specifically those who do not fit within a moral and capitalist logic.
Drug users rights organizations understand that we need liberation from oppressive structures, which act to classify, control, and criminalize people who use drugs. Here it is not about focusing on an individuals right to sobriety, but rather on the end to the war on drugs through the repeal of criminal laws, rejection of western medical categories, and the reform of notions of recovery.
Through continuing to mobilize notions of “addiction” and “addict”, as well as not engaging with or accounting for the legacy of activism by drug user rights movements, so-called radicals in the “radical sobriety” movement could be unwittingly promoting the aims of the ongoing colonial project and furthering a pathologizing logic which results in criminalizing people who use drugs and denying them agency over their lives. These are major concerns for those working in activist communities, especially for those who are working to address issues of damaging laws, prisons, mass incarceration, criminalization, health-care access, and forms of social marginalization that are driven by pathologizing attitudes towards people who use drugs.
*** Identity politics and the “sober addict”
We keep seeing more and more claims for accessibility for activist and social spaces for people who claim “radical sobriety” as an identity, and we feel concerned. These claims come in the form of Facebook posts to event organizers asking for events to be made accessible for sober people, workshops at anarchist and radical events, zines and blogs. Identity categories are not inherently natural, and they are not static. They can be fluid, develop over time, and can also be produced through a range of forms of domination. It can be claimed that people making arguments against forms of identity politics are trying to negate the experiences of people who take on certain identities. In our case, we must stress that this could not be further from the truth. We are not against anyone’s personal imperative to stake claim on an identity, and we have also used identity categories to make political claims in our activist work. But, in this context, we do question the outcome of using this kind of politic. The problem is that in some cases identity politics can result in a sole focus on the maintenance of identity formations rather than on broader forms of emancipation.
Within “radical sobriety” the “sober addict” has become a static identity category that then becomes part of a place for one to talk about personal issues of accessibility and other people’s privilege who are using drugs. But as we have stated, mobilizing notions of the “addict” marginalizes people who are active drug users. “Radical sobriety” people position the “sober addict” as emancipated, but also continually oppressed within the “intoxication culture”. The “sober addict” then needs to be accommodated as a rights and social justice issue. Other people’s drug use is a privilege and needs to be checked. This sets up a dualism where accessibility is only articulated in relation to the “radically sober” person, and where accessibility for people who are active drug users is rarely considered. The focus becomes not on talking about liberation from the various forms of marginalization that have created precarity in the lives of people who use drugs, or on the conditions that have produced notions of “addiction”, but rather, the focus is attuned to maintaining the oppressed identity of the “sober addict” who is entitled to forms of accommodation, such as making social spaces or events sober, or to have specific spaces for sober people at events.
A longstanding critique of identity-based strategies is that they have the potential to produce an “essential” experience of identities that can erase other experience in the process. Also, with identity politics, confessions of individual difference and call-outs about privilege can become the political project themselves. For example, the statement “I am ________ and I am a sober addict” actually does nothing to dismantle the systems of oppression surrounding people who use drugs or other forms of power and privilege. Here being “oppressed” holds a certain cultural and social capital for people in particular activist contexts. People thus aspire to be oppressed, where the goal is <em>not</em> an end to oppression, but rather to be as oppressed as possible. This political project can miss a broader critique of history, economy and society, as political targets. This approach to activism has been widely critiqued as promoting neoliberal aims through its endless attention to the individualist liberal notions of human rights.
Also, in this context, the monolithic notion of “intoxication culture” as promoted by “radical sobriety” people poses a problem. There are many cultures for which using forms of drugs are traditional, sacred, and a regular part of people’s daily lives. We need to understand the plurality of cultures. Culture is not homogeneous. Prescribing moral frameworks onto cultures to define if they are good or bad based on how people use drugs within them can employ a racist, classist and colonizing logic. We need to accept that a wide range of people from diverse communities use recreational drugs for a range of reasons. Buying into the notion of the “addict” buys into oppressive models and allows no room and space for people who want to engage in substance use in different ways.
People need a range of spaces to exist in. We are not opposed to sober spaces, and we are not opposed to people creating their own spaces to accommodate what they need. We are not interested in is that kind of dichotomous way of understanding activism. Buying into the moralistic frameworks designed to marginalize and oppress people who actively use drugs will never be a radical act. Anti-drug sentiments have been used historically to exclude active drug users from a range of activist movements. This is why we find the “radical sobriety” discourse so concerning. We are concerned about people who use drugs feeling unwelcome in activist organizing and social spaces. Active drug users are often highly marginalized from activist communities and radical social spaces because they make people feel uncomfortable. We need a more emancipatory framework that can support a range of people’s needs without creating dividing lines and claiming identities that result in othering and marginalization.
*** Recovery as a form of oppression
“Radical sobriety” discussions are organized around the basic principles of mainstream prohibitionist recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and other 12-step programs. “Radical sobriety” discussions, while having some critiques of these approaches, also adopt the primary approach of these interventions which understand addiction as a disease that needs to be corrected solely through individual intervention. To believe that “addiction” is a disease is also to believe that “addiction” is a life-long “problem”. A focus on the individual failing of certain people results in a corrective logic that is aimed at fixing or forcing that person to change to better fit into society. This is an idea that we know to be a myth, a myth that obscures how notions of “addiction” and “dependency” come to be constructed. This is a widely popular and very damaging misconception, which continues to fuel prohibitionist policies and the drug war.
A society based on capitalism generates enormous wealth and at the same time breaks down every traditional form of social cohesion, creates dislocation, and social isolation, poverty and also pathologizes notions of “dependency”. The idea of “dependency” is a construct born out of liberal individualism, where every person is an island, and the ideal is the autonomous rational subject. When the reality is that dependency is “normal” or rather is constitutive of what it is to be human. We all depend on others and things, and only exist in relation to others and things.
Defining an individual as the problem, as an “addict” with a disease that has no self-control has allowed communities and governments to get off the hook for taking care of each other. Recovery programs are not designed to help aspects of society change to address forms of oppression and violence, which could drive people to use drugs in ways that they may feel are problematic. Within a capitalist framework, beyond Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, many recovery programs generate a massive amount of wealth for certain groups of people. But generally, individualized recovery programs are the only models out there. While some of these options provide a sense of community and solidarity for people, the foundation of recovery programs continues to drive a pathologizing logic that needs to be challenged.
*** Drug use can be a radical act
“Radical sobriety” people have named our experiences while high as “inauthentic”. This naming of others experiences employs a colonizing and paternalistic logic, and the same kind of moralism that leads to criminalization and pathologization. Notions of the “right” way to be and the “wrong” way to be are what drive practices of exclusion targeting people who actively use drugs. Shouldn’t promoting personal autonomy and self-determination be central to our commitment to working to change society for the better? Shouldn’t radicals allow people to claim their own experiences for themselves? Shouldn’t radicals understand that people must be allowed agency over their own bodies; to ingest what they want, when they want? If so, then why engage with systems that prescribe forms of morality over others? Certain kinds of radical political organizers do turn towards forms of morality politics. We have seen this happen to radical movements that moralize bodies — from women’s temperance movements to anti-pornography feminism in the 80’s to sex work abolitionists of today. But morality politics is always a tool of the conservative right, and can never be successfully used by the radical left as these approaches produce the conditions of their own demise. They produce the possibility of cooptation by liberal moderates, and exploitation of their morality by the conservative right — who truly have the authority over cultures of morality, and have the greatest experience in mobilizing morality for their own political gains. Further moralizing forms of drug use will only result in more danger and insecurity in our lives.
There are no doubts that drug control policies have also been mobilized as a tool of oppression. But we must understand these issues are not inherent in the drugs themselves, it is a broader system of oppression which needs to be dismantled and this includes the liberation of drugs (i.e. the removal of laws and forms of morality which result in the social exclusion of people who actively use drugs). We can’t rely on oppressive institutions to define our activist work. We need to build our own ways, through creating circles of care and new forms of harm reduction support for those who need it. We need to create space for people to come together to foster new forms of healing and social connection.
We need to bring pleasure back in to discussion of drug use. We know that our experiences while high are authentic, real and have been powerful. Altering reality can bring beauty, magic, transcendence and new understandings to our daily lives. Radicals of all sorts have used drugs to enable themselves to question how things are organized and to be critical of the world around them. People politically organize in many kinds of spaces including bars, workplaces, parties, and community spaces while intoxicated. Organizing does not happen through one homogeneous experience. Intoxication does not negate the nature of people’s ability to be authentic, to go in the world, be a good organizer, or get shit done.
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<strong>Thank you</strong> to wonderful Eliot Ross Albers, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Nora Butler Burke, Liam Michaud, Zachary Grant and Kate Mason for your thoughtful and invaluable support and feedback during the development of this article.
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#cover z-s-zoe-samudzi-and-william-c-anderson-as-black-as-1.jpg
#title As Black as Resistance
#subtitle Finding the Conditions for Liberation
#author Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson
#SORTauthors Zoé Samudzi, William C. Anderson, Mariame Kaba
#SORTtopics Black Anarchism, AK Press
#date 2018
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-05-30T08:17:00
#notes Published by [[https://www.akpress.org/as-black-as-resistance.html][AK Press]].
** <em>Foreword</em> by Mariame Kaba
<em>As Black as Resistance</em> is a searing indictment of the U.S. settler colonial project and a call to action to save ourselves from the forces of oppression and tyranny. The philosophy of the book might well be summarized as “we’re all we’ve got.” This book appears in a chaotic time when the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, when climate change is causing mass devastation, when fascism appears resurgent, and when the ever-expanding carceral state is criminalizing and prematurely killing millions. In this context, William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi insist that our current political moment demands that we reject liberalism and embrace a more radical program to transform our conditions. They argue persuasively that grounding ourselves in the Black radical tradition offers the best path forward toward freedom and liberation.
In 1970, artist and activist Ossie Davis penned a preface for a reprint of the 1951 <em>We Charge Genocide</em> petition to the United Nations that contended with the historical debasement of Black people in the United States:
We say again, now: We will submit no further to the brutal indignities being practiced against us; we will not be intimidated, and most certainly not eliminated. We claim the ancient right of all peoples, not only to survive unhindered, but also to participate as equals in man’s inheritance here on earth. We fight to preserve ourselves, to see that the treasured ways of our life-in-common are not destroyed by brutal men or heedless institutions.[1]
Davis stresses, like Anderson and Samudzi do, that Black people have been consistently subjected to inordinate violence, considered disposable and easily killable. In the late nineteenth century, a remark was attributed to a southern police chief who suggested that there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger.”[2] White supremacy has always held Black life cheap. Davis’s words embody defiance and so do those written by Anderson and Samudzi. Just as Davis claims an inherent right to self-defense, <em>As Black as Resistance</em> highlights a long tradition in Black communities by people like Robert F. Williams, who invoked the right to armed self-defense.
In 1955, Williams joined the NAACP in his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina, after having served in the U.S. Marine Corps. He quickly became president of the chapter and rebuilt it to include many veterans, farmers, and working-class people. In 1956, the Monroe NAACP started a campaign to integrate the only swimming pool in the city. It had been built with federal funds, yet blacks were barred from access. City officials not only refused to let blacks swim in the pool, they also turned down requests to build a pool that they could use. Williams and the Monroe NAACP took the city to court. This engendered massive backlash from the local white community, including members of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK held rallies, drove around Black neighborhoods intimidating residents, and fired guns at people out of moving cars.
When ministers asked local politicians to intervene to prevent the KKK from driving through Black neighborhoods and terrorizing residents, they were told that the Klan had “as much constitutional right to organize as the NAACP.” Williams and the NAACP petitioned the governor and even President Eisenhower for support and assistance. They received no help.
Williams and other members of the NAACP decided then that it was time to take matters into their own hands. If the government would not protect their communities, then they would arm themselves. The Monroe NAACP applied for and received a charter from the National Rifle Association. By the end of one year, their NRA club had over sixty members.
During the summer of 1957, an armed motorcade of Klan members got into a firefight with Williams and other NAACP members. The Klan had opened fire on the home of the Monroe NAACP vice president, Dr. Albert E. Perry. Williams and his colleagues successfully turned the Klan motorcade back. The incident would make national news and begin to bring more attention to Williams. In his book <em>Negroes with Guns</em>, he clearly lays out his rationale for advocating armed self-defense:
The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor’s conscience. Social change in something as fundamental as racist oppression involves violence. You cannot have progress here without violence and upheaval, because it’s a struggle for survival for one and a struggle for liberation for the other. Always the powers in command are ruthless and unmerciful in defending their position and their privileges. This is not an abstract rule to be meditated upon by Americans. This is a truth that was revealed at the birth of America, and has continued to be revealed many times in our history. The principle of self-defense is an American tradition that began at Lexington and Concord.[3]
Williams was an inspiration to Huey P. Newton who cofounded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 about a decade after Williams had assumed control over the Monroe NAACP. The Black Panther Party is invoked in <em>As Black as Resistance</em>, and we have a lot to learn from it. While liberals celebrate nonviolent resistance, we can’t forget that many Black radicals have advocated the use of violence in response to being attacked. As we struggle against a renewed fascism today, we continue to wrestle with these issues raised in the book.
As an abolitionist, the Black anarchism espoused by Anderson and Samudzi resonates with me. Abolishing the prison industrial complex (PIC) is not just about ending prisons but also about creating an alternative system of governance that is not based on domination, hierarchy, and control. In that respect, abolitionism and anarchism are positive rather than negative projects. They do not signal the absence of prisons or governments but the creation of different forms of sociality, governance, and accountability that are not statist and carceral.
In this respect, this work echoes the practices of anarcha-indigenism that differentiate inclusive models of indigenous nationhood based on inclusivity, horizontality, and interrelatedness from nation-states based on borders, exclusivity, domination, and control. Thus, the politics of abolition require us to see, as Angela Davis notes in <em>Are Prisons Obsolete?</em>, that prisons cannot be abolished without a complete restructuring of society. Abolitionism is sometimes disassociated from the larger political vision from which it emerges. However, the politics expressed in <em>As</em> <em>Black as Resistance</em> invite us not to simply critique prisons or the state but to imagine and then build alternative forms of governance that are life-giving. It is a book brimming with urgency and one that boldly confronts the injustices of our past and present. It is a book that reminds us of our power to collectively make transformative changes that will improve the lives of the many over the few. It is a book of revolutionary hope that pierces the despair and fear of our current political moment.
** Acknowledgments
Any attempt at a complete list of names to acknowledge would surely result in failure, so I won’t even attempt that which I know will end incomplete. Instead I would like to mention why I’m thankful for the people closest to me. There are some who truly know who I am, and it isn’t necessarily measured by time, proximity, or even blood. It’s measured by sincerity and understanding.
Conversations brought this work together and drive much of my writing. Those of you who have cared enough to listen to my ideas and my rants over the phone and through texts are in my writing and close to my heart. You’ve heard me cleaning; you’ve heard me cooking; you’ve heard me running errands; but most importantly, you’ve heard me while I toil over how to convey what I feel needs to be written. You know I try to write what needs to be written, and this book by Zoé and me is definitely a huge part of that.
As of late I’ve truly begun to see just how much family influences who we are as people, specifically the ancestors we never knew. So I would like to thank the activists, writers, and fighters who came before me on both sides of my family. I know I would not be who I am nor would I be here at all if it weren’t for you. I’m so grateful to my loving parents (especially my late mother, Janice, who was as close to perfection as a mother could be) for encouraging and influencing me. I’m appreciative of my dear sister Ashley, her husband Anthony, and their family for their love and support. I appreciate all of my nieces and my nephew who I know love me and who I love so dearly.
My friend and co-author Zoé, I appreciate you so much for agreeing to this journey and I have love for who you are. Your mind and your contributions to this book are great things the world needs to know about. Let’s keep working towards the liberation we know people deserve.
Generally, thank you to everyone who has read my writing and who has pushed me and urged me to continue when I wasn’t always sure of myself. Thank you to the great editors and writers I read who have helped me feel inspired. And, my goodness, a grand thank you to the other artists: the musicians, poets, painters, dancers, and so on who keep me alive through their work. Thank you to the organizers and teachers who showed me what it means to care. I would also like to thank my enemies and adversaries as well. I appreciate y’all for teaching me so much about myself and what I hope to be in this life.
Today feels clear to me. So many things that were supposed to happen and should happen in the future have come to me like a subtle wind nudging me forward. I’m thankful.
William C. Anderson
First and foremost, my deepest gratitude is owed to Black women. Each and every day, I am nurtured intellectually and made whole emotionally by the labor and care that the Black women pour into the world; I feel indebted to that labor because I am sustained by that labor. While individual scholars and thinkers may not be explicitly cited, their frameworks and analyses and insights comprise the core of my own work. Just as it is vital for me to acknowledge the Black feminist canon, I must also acknowledge the critical and generative work of Black leftists, particularly Black anarchists. Regardless of sectarian difference, I am indebted to the countless conversations I’ve had and all measures of generous support I’ve received and inspiration I’ve gleaned from so many friends and comrades whose urgent liberatory missions I share. And thank you endlessly to the scores of friends who’ve taught me and fed me and shared with me and held me and soothed me and encouraged me; thank you to my dearest friend, Antoinette Myers, in particular, for never letting me quit.
I can’t begin to articulate my gratitude to all my family. Thank you to my mum and dad for instilling within me an intense curiosity and a thirst to wonder and learn and write and read and do more. Thank you to my brother and sister-in-law for always giving me a safe supportive space to work or escape from my work. Thank you to my new nephew, Ariko, who’s made me the happiest <em>tete</em> in the world: for teaching me so much about what it means to love unconditionally and how to channel a fierce love into my work and everything else I do. Thank you to my <em>sekuru</em>, a freedom fighter, who still teaches me what it means to think and speak like and be a revolutionary. My deepest gratitude, as always and in everything I do, is owed to my ancestors whose knowledge I am grateful for and whose anticolonial resistance I hope to embody in all I do.
I am grateful to Jerome Roos for giving us the space in <em>ROAR Magazine</em> that eventually led to this book. Thank you also to the team at AK Press for making this entire process so manageable; thank you Andrew for coaxing out the words and ideas that existed just under the surface but weren’t always readily available.
Thank you, of course, to William. Thank you for extending to me an almost otherworldly patience, thank you for trusting me to co-author your first book. Thank you always for the intense care and thoughtfulness you put into your work, and the care you have for those around you and have always extended to me without hesitation. I so deeply appreciate you.
Thank you to everyone I’ll never meet or who I’ve not yet met, but who share in a vision of Black liberation. This book is for me and the people I love, and this book is for you too. This book is for everyone.
<em>Pamberi ne hondo! Pamberi ne c</em><em>himurenga</em>!
Zoé Samudzi
** Black in Anarchy
The United States has experienced cycles of tyranny since its inception. For some, the United States represents <em>only</em> this experience. A disillusioned liberal establishment has begun to worry that this country might be losing its democracy. However, the democracy some fear to lose was never achieved for many of us in the first place. The ability to participate in U.S. society has been an ongoing struggle for the descendants of the colonized, enslaved, immigrants, and asylum seekers. The U.S. empire has caused trauma endlessly from the first moment it existed. Frederick Douglass asserted:
What, to the American slave, is your 4<sup>th</sup> of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.[4]
We must we expand the scope of Douglass’s question beyond celebrations of national independence. We who rightly take issue with the national project must also ask: Is the American Revolution the singular, purposefully romanticized tale of wealthy landowners refusing taxation and splitting from the British crown? Or is there another potential American revolution that has yet to occur?
It is deeply ironic that we are taught the glories of the U.S. birth through revolutionary resistance to the British empire but told today we must not resist, must not be revolutionary, and need to resolve differences through “reasoned dialogue” and civic engagement. Equating a revolt to escape unfair monarchical taxes to real revolution is a perversion of the concept of “revolution” itself. How revolutionary were men who saw no problems with enslavement and citizenship based on white manhood and land ownership? This “revolution” served white supremacist patriotism and the suppression of dissent. Revolt is at the foundation of the United States, yet now patience and cooperation are presented as the only acceptable ways to address inequity. The very ideals at the foundation of the state are denounced while the state itself monopolizes the right to “legitimate” revolutionary change (just as it monopolizes the right to “legitimate” uses of force and self-defense). After all, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that <em>whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness</em>” [our emphasis].
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Black people entered this settler colony through transatlantic kidnapping, chattel trade (being bought and sold as property), and forced servitude. Indigenous genocide and land expropriation (and enclosure) are intrinsic to American settlement.[5] And the use of Black labor was responsible for settler agricultural expansion and the growth of the southern agrarian economy. Once successfully cleared and claimed by white settlers, “[Native] land would be mixed with Black labor to produce cotton, the white gold of the Deep South.”[6] It is through the institution of slavery that Black people entered the American social contract. Slavery—forced servitude—was imposed upon Black people throughout the United States, and blackness thus became a marker of that enslavement that would continue even after slavery’s demise. Race in the United States evolved not only as a social identity, but also as a property relation, which was codified in the American legal system and within the social contract itself.[7] Inherent to liberal social contract values is the simultaneous maintenance of white supremacy’s capital interests, signified by anti-Indigenous and anti-Black exclusions,[8] and the purported values of equality: liberalism pays lip service to egalitarianism while complementing and structurally lending itself to fascistic logics and political encroachments.[9] “Societal fascism” describes the process and political logics of state formation wherein entire populations are excluded or ejected from the social contract. They are pre-contractually excluded because they have never been a part of a given social contract and never will be, or they are ejected from a contract they were previously a part of and are only able to enjoy conditional inclusion at best. This differs from the political fascism represented, for example, by the regimes of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, and others. It nevertheless lends itself to the formation of a political system easily susceptible to authoritarianism because it is grounded in inequity and inequality, and marked by political mechanisms and a popular consensus that allow rights and liberties to legally be taken away in the event that individuals and communities are ejected from the social contract.[10]
Black Americans are residents of a settler colony, not truly citizens of the United States. Despite a constitution laden with European Enlightenment values and a document of independence declaring certain inalienable rights, Black existence was legally that of private property until postbellum emancipation. The Black American condition today is an evolved condition directly connected to this history of slavery,[11] and that will continue to be the case as long as the United States remains as an ongoing settler project. Nothing short of a complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists can or will disrupt this.
As Hortense Spillers makes explicit in her influential work, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Story,” blackness was indelibly marked and transformed through the transatlantic slave trade. European colonialism and the process of African enslavement—both as a profit-maximizing economic institution and a dehumanizing institution—can be regarded as “high crimes against the <em>flesh</em>, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding.”[12] Crimes against the flesh are not simply crimes against the corporeal self: the wounded flesh, rather, was the personhood and social position of the African. The wounding is the process of blackening through subjugation, a wound from which Black people and blackness writ large have yet to recover. Recovery, a positive reassertion of identity, is impossible. We are Black because we are oppressed by the state; we are oppressed by the state because we are Black.[13] Black existence within the social contract is existence within a heavily regulated state, a state in which our emancipation from enslavement was not a singular event or a moment of true actualization of freedom but rather a state-sanctioned transition from forced servitude to anti-Black subjection and exclusion.[14] We are carriers of the coveted blue passport still trapped in a zone of [citizen] nonbeing, a zone where we are not fully disappeared and eliminated but where we are still denied the opportunity and ability to self-determine: a state of precarity that only allows for the conditional survival of particular bodies in particular ways.[15] Frantz Fanon writes:
The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. <em>The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity</em>. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.... <em>This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species</em>. [our emphases][16]
Within this zone, blackness is constantly under surveillance. This is not simply an allusion to the state’s literal surveillance projects (like COINTELPRO, the covert FBI program that destroyed so many mid-twentieth-century Black radical efforts).[17] We refer rather to settler colonial arrangements in anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity that co-create the framework for state racial formations.[18] The mechanisms comprising anti-Black surveillance were foundational to post-9/11 “War on Terror” securitization of Muslim, immigrant, and refugee communities across the United States. These suspensions of rights and civil liberties in favor of order are not new. They are rather being explicitly applied to another racialized group both domestically and in U.S. foreign policy. Where Islamism constitutes the enemy abroad, blackness is the perpetual enemy at home. Islamophobic and anti-Black logics become complementary (and also inextricably linked where the first Muslims in the United States were enslaved West Africans). What is citizenship within a social contract where our Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial can be suspended in the event of our completely legal (but extrajudicial) murder by police?
Black liberation poses an existential threat to white supremacy because the existence of free Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state. The United States cannot exist without Black subjection, and, in this way, articulated racial formations revolve in large part around anti-Black regulations. It is impossible to reform the system of racial capitalism. Those who believe in and operate according to the laws of white supremacy are not solely white people, though beneficiaries are largely and most visibly white. The supporters of this system include an internally oppressed multiracial coalition.
There are many politicians and state operatives of color, Black and otherwise, working for white supremacy. Diversity in the seats of power will not solve our problems. Simply because someone shares race, gender, or another aspect of identity does not guarantee loyalty or that they will act in the best interests of Black communities. We adopt a self-sacrificial politic in expressing openness or friendliness to the state because some of its functionaries look like us. U.S. political systems were not designed to meet our needs, and sweetening our concerns with rhetorics of “diversity” and “inclusion” will merely enable nominal representation (or a mitigation of material harms in some cases) as opposed to liberation in any real sense.
Because white supremacists helming the state understand the liberatory potential of Black radicalism, these energies have been co-opted into safer and more respectable means of effecting change. Black America has become effectively trapped in the never-ending cycle of partisan politics: between the actively antagonistic Grand Old Party and the Democratic Party that exploits Black loyalty but offers few paths for any substantial improvement of the Black condition. The U.S. political cycle and the inner workings of the election process clearly leave much to be desired. The people inside this hopeless maze of civic duty often feel so uninspired that they remove themselves from the process, choosing not to vote or otherwise engage in elections. This decision is not a failure of the people who choose not to participate but a failure of the system itself.
Whether most citizens can explain why the Electoral College system has been a failure (or why it works) is of no consequence. Low voter turnout shows that participation feels like an empty gesture, and it is just that to a large extent, especially when political outcomes are manipulated by mass voter disenfranchisement, redistricting, and a system of indirect representation and democracy. The Electoral College system is not a reliable vehicle for change, certainly not for much needed social transformation. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a popular vote count for president would have made states that predominantly relied on slavery much less likely to win national elections. The Electoral College, which was based on population, was seen as leveling the playing field. Subsequently each state’s decision to cast electoral votes has been in the hands of the electors, who are not bound to vote the way the public did in the states they represent. The convention decided to count each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human, and this dehumanizing convenience became known as the “Three-fifths Compromise.”
This history of the Electoral College inheres in what takes place during national elections today. A candidate can be elected president of the United States despite another candidate receiving more votes overall. This was the case with George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and then Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. States with more electors have unequal power in a national election, which often feels far more like a calculated game than a democratic process serving to meet constituents’ needs. Furthermore, electors—those who selected to make up the Electoral College—are not bound by law to vote for the candidate a state’s voters have chosen. Our votes are symbolic, and the process doesn’t necessarily result in victory for the people’s choice. It doesn’t even guarantee the commitment of the electors.
Under the current system, in which the Democratic and Republican Party are each invested, political discourse is constantly being pulled to the right. Liberals position themselves as the “lesser of two evils” against the Republicans in every election, banking on their electability as the arguably better choice while consistently failing to offer protective and supportive policies to counter Republican ones. This clearly demonstrates that the liberal establishment knows that this system is disempowering. It continues to encourage people to happily and willingly engage in the system while it effectively self-sabotages at each opportunity.
When we allow the Democratic Party leaders to position the party as the moral authority against a worse party, we risk condoning all of what the “less evil” candidate represents. We participate in and perpetuate this cycle of disempowerment. The Democratic Party has grown increasingly conservative over the years due to this policy of compromise and lesser evilism. The party shifts to the right because it doesn’t seek to portray itself as real opposition but only an easy and un-alienating alternative. The liberal class and establishment party politics here are partially responsible for the continued shift to the right, not only in this country but also globally. U.S. politics are exported throughout the West and influence the climates of other countries that are susceptible to U.S. foreign policy’s powerful influence. This is one of the many reasons a true Left and a real opposition in this country is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the Right will continue to grow in its systemic influence, and authoritarianism will naturally grow stronger, both within the government and outside of it. Because there is not a unified Left in this country, the work of the scattered leftists is imperative. If we do not build that functionally cohesive Left (or at least pragmatically recognize the necessity for inter-sectarian work), the rights of all people oppressed by capitalist white supremacy will inevitably continue to erode.
Some might hope that tyrannical political trends that come with the aforementioned shift to the right can be useful to the Left as a mobilizing and organizing impetus. One might think that in a country with as much comfort as the United States, the mild to severe discomfort brought on by increasingly authoritarian discourses and policy might inspire people to fight harder. But attempting to coax people from their relative comfort zones and into the streets is difficult. U.S. empire was an affront to humanity long before this political moment, and the problems we face today have existed for generations. Though we are admittedly not yet able to fully articulate or agree upon what it may look like, we ultimately work toward total and complete freedom—we do not just the hope for it, we strive to realize it in any way that we can—and this cannot come from idealistic (and ultimately empty) representations of political heroes and saviors. Our ideas of what freedom and liberation mean to us must rest on something sturdier than the shoulders of charismatic and seemingly progressive politicians. We must define those for ourselves. We should not wait for the magic words we want to hear come out of someone else’s mouth when we can designate, dictate, and deliver change ourselves. We should not sit back and wait for politicians to grant us our humanity, a humanity that has always existed and it should not be left to elections, political terms, or waiting periods to determine whether or not we will see it actualized.
Legendary singer Nina Simone once described freedom as “no fear,” a description that undoubtedly resonates with many. What does fear have to do with freedom? We know that when we and our communities and families are not guaranteed our humanity and the circumstances we need to flourish, we are often afraid, even terrified. To be <em>without</em> that fear could truly be gratifying, even liberatory. Fear pervades so many aspects of our everyday lives as Black people: the fear of eviction, of police, of airport security, immigration enforcement, and illnesses we simply cannot afford to suffer. Uncertainty and the fear of being unsafe and not having the resources necessary to survive can consume us, leaving no time to work for the world we truly want to see: we become more consumed in work to stabilize ourselves and our communities rather than spending more time and resources on generative and rehabilitating work.
A question arises from all of this: which fear is greater, the fear of the pain we know or the pain we do not? Surely many would choose the latter as greater because a familiar pain seems more bearable. But our pain threshold is being pushed to its limits in a hamster wheel that seems to be spinning faster. We cannot even really claim the fear we know because this seems to be growing increasingly urgent. That leaves us with a suggestion brought on by circumstance: to overcome our fears, if we should choose, in pursuit of something better. This is obviously easier said than done. Defiance is scary, but we seem continuously headed in the wrong direction. What if we change course and embrace the unknown despite our fear? That would require a collective courage we have yet to draw upon en masse.
** What Lands on Us
Through enslavement in the Americas and histories of indigeneity and migration on the African continent, Black identity is in many ways inextricably linked to land. Most African people can be understood as being indigenous to Africa to the extent that their origins are exclusively from the African continent. “Indigenous,” however, is usually applied to members of groups and communities comprising nations within (and predating) larger nation-states, and lands of indigenous nations do not correspond to lands enclosed by international borders. Indigenous communities in Africa include the Twa people scattered across the African Great Lakes, Zambia, and western Uganda; the Maasai and Samburu peoples of Kenya and Tanzania; the Nuba people of Sudan; the Khoikhoi (or Khoi) and the San of southern and southeastern Africa; and the Dogon of Mali and Burkina Faso, and many others. As these different peoples experience marginalization from the state, many have sought to establish their sovereignty and protect their individual and collective rights through state mechanisms, transnational bodies (e.g., the African Union’s African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee), and international means (e.g., the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples).
Prior to the disruption and erosion of African societal structures through colonial incorporation into global capitalism, many of the continent’s societies revolved around land-based and pastoral communalism—they were collectively oriented and based on the idea of community ownership.[19] Through the forced extraction of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, blackness has come to symbolize a kind of rootlessness. This mass kidnapping and genocidal trafficking forced the reconstruction of enslaved peoples’ ethnic and cultural identities outside of the lands from which they were stolen. To ensure a cohesive, unified anticolonial struggle and liberation, ethnic identities were de-prioritized in favor of newly rendered national identities. The establishment of a British settler colony in what is now Zimbabwe, for example, saw the consolidation of and drawing of colonial boundaries around Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which were declared British protectorates in 1891. One function of these borders unforeseen by colonizers was unifying national identity around which indigenous peoples within those boundaries could unite. In the words of nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo, following the delineation of boundaries previously disputed and defined “only by [indigenous] custom,” there was “no reason why all of us should not unite and develop an unquestioned national identity.” In 1977, soon-to-be Zimbabwean prime minister (and later president) Robert Mugabe articulated a similar sentiment, though from a different ethnic position than Nkomo, a Ndebele, naturalizing an essential Shona quality within an apparently historically existent Shona nation. Zimbabwean national identity, however, has never been unquestioned or uncontested, and class, gender, urban-rural divisions and competition, and ethnopolitics continue to fragment notions of “national unity” and shape the contours of national politics. Though formation differed depending on the state and the colonial processes within it and the constructed myth of national identity, a “pre-existing unified ideological or political subject that could quickly be mobilized against colonial rule” prevailed in Zimbabwe and in other African states.[20]
Much of the identity production of Black people in the United States, both from descendants of enslaved Africans (African Americans) and otherwise, has stemmed from a sense of yearning: an attempt to reconcile a diasporic self with roots and a sense of African groundedness, a sense of home space. Certain strains of Black nationalist thought and politics historically (and even presently) have called for Black people in America to go “back to Africa.” This nationalism, driven by logics of land-based reparations for expropriated labor in the United States and abduction from the continent, voids the sovereignty of African states. Black nationalism in the United States can sometimes entail these quasi-settler claims to land, whether through Black Zionist traditions or land-based reparations claims entailing the establishment of a Black nation within former Confederate states. Black Zionism evoked the Exodus story of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage from Egypt and into the Promised Land, a clear analogy to the Black diaspora’s potential liberation from the subjugation of American white supremacy. Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” politics, for example, emulated the Zionist concept of <em>aliyah</em>, the return immigration of Jewish refugees in the diaspora to Israel. While a tenet of Zionism, it was not established as large-scale until the late nineteenth century and then, on an even greater scale, after Israel’s creation in 1948. By contrast, Palestinian refugees displaced by the Nakba (1948) or Six-Day War (1967) are not afforded the right of return granted to them under international law.[21] Founded in 1968, the secessionist Republic of New Afrika was an organization and social movement founded on the basis of three major goals. Leaders sought the creation of an independent Black nation in the southeastern states (the former Confederate States of America), a nation that would include Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana; $7 billion in financial reparations to Black American descendants of enslaved people; and a nationwide referendum for all African-Americans to vote on whether or not they wished to remain U.S. citizens. More controversial than Black secessionism itself is the question of the fate of the Native American communities in those states. Where would their struggle for liberation and autonomous nationhood fit within the Republic of New Afrika framework? Would their sovereignty be erased and subsumed?
“Settler colonialism” refers to the process through which an external force colonizes a space through the establishment of permanent settlements “with the aim of permanently securing their hold on specific locales” through a claim of “special sovereign charge” or dominion over a space.[22] The kind of colonialism that marked the majority of the world was one that necessitated the existence of indigenous communities for a labor force, among other things. By contrast, settler colonialism is a far more invasive mode of colonialism that is marked by the “dispensability” of indigenous communities. It is a “project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement,” driven by a ruling logic of a “sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population.”[23] Settler “invasion is a structure not an event,” Patrick Wolfe critically notes. Examples of settler colonies include the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Israel. The creation of each of these states was predicated upon the displacement and <em>removal</em> of longstanding native communities that existed within the borders of the nation-states. Because Africans were forcibly removed from the continent and trafficked to the United States and did not largely participate in the European process of domination (with, of course, notable exception made for the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, African American army regiments that participated in the Indian Wars), Black people cannot be considered as settlers in the United States. Though we may participate in ongoing settler processes and ultimately benefit from the elimination of Indigenous people and the expropriation of their land, we are not settlers. But championing the creation of a Black majoritarian nation-state, where the fate of Indigenous people is ambiguous at best, is an idea rooted in settler logic. Is settler adjacency what a truly intersectional framework and multifaceted approach to Black liberation entails? If we use the creation of the state of Israel as an example, the ultimate reparation for historical violence is the opportunity to become a colonizer and gain proximity to (or entrance into) whiteness. Although popularly positioned as a kind of reparation for the mass murder of millions of Jewish people in the German Holocaust, the creation of Israel was as an act of European antisemitism in the eyes of some, including Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé. The establishment of a Jewish homeland meant that antagonistic Western governments—states such as the United States and Allied Powers that were aware of the genocidal violence of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution[24] but stood idly by and even sought to appease the Nazi government—would not have to receive as many Jewish refugees. Mirroring this in the United States, white supremacists have historically supported the separatist politics of the Nation of Islam. They have seen Black separatism as analogous to the white nationalist “self-determining politic” of the white majoritarian United States.[25] Of course, these logics of racial self-determination do not operate the same in reverse. Their endorsement of Black separatism is not support for Black liberation but rather an understanding that the self-segregation of the Black community means less labor will be needed to remove racial impurity (non-whiteness) in the actualization of their fully white ethno-state. Richard Spencer recently articulated his identity as a self-proclaimed “white Zionist,” stating: “I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”[26] This represents the shared logics of colonization (see, for example, the way that the white Ashkenazi Jewish minority comprise Israel’s power structure) and an ideological alignment between Zionism and U.S. white nationalism. Israeli state politics revolve, ultimately, around the removal and subjugation of the Palestinian people, beginning with the Nakba. The continuation of settler colonial development in Israel has translated into land expropriation, housing demolition, construction of settlements (contravening international law), ghettoization, and disproportionate state violence against Palestinians. In <em>Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation</em>, Robin D.G. Kelley describes the ways in which this liberatory thought is “not only a narrative of slavery, emancipation, and renewal, but with a language to critique America’s racist state since the biblical Israel represented a new beginning.” Unfortunately, though, much of Black Zionist thought re-creates the logic of settler colonial entitlements rather than building an incisive and critical foundation upon which to critique settler colonialism and build/repair Afro-diasporic relationships outside of that model. If land-based reparations were to be actualized for Black people in the United States, models for land-based liberation that are not both mindful and critical of settler colonialism would perpetuate the expropriation of land from Indigenous communities still fighting to assert their sovereignties. Black American land politics cannot simply be built on top of centuries-old exterminatory settler logic of Indigenous removal and genocide. Rather, the actualization of truly liberated land can only come about through dialogue and co-conspiratorial work with Native communities and a shared understanding of land use outside of capitalistic models of ownership.
Black land politics are also crucial in understanding the threats posed by climate change resulting from capitalism’s ethos of growth for the sake of growth and extraction for the sake of accumulation. The incessant need to extract resources is not limited to the United States or to capitalism, though the United States leads this particular fray. There is nothing too sacred to be consumed or too rare to leave untouched. The natural world is being treated as an infinite pool of supplies, as if its resources were immediately replaceable and the degradation reversible. In the meantime, the reigning capitalists have already begun searching for new lands to retreat to and colonize because even they know that their economic system is headed toward destruction. This will occur first in the Global South. Resources will be expended until there is nothing left to take.
Freshwater shortages, deforestation, and dangerous expansion of industry threaten food supplies the world over. Inevitably, resource scarcity and the demise of agriculture will lead to conflicts of increasing scale. When all is said and done, we cannot eat diamonds, gold, coltan, or oil. Competition over remaining resources is already causing conflicts, which, given their locations in the Global South, are infuriatingly treated by many people as natural or “inherent” to the populations residing in these regions. The planet cannot sustain a violent system relentlessly demanding more and more consumption. Claudia von Werlhof notes:
Under our system, anything subject to natural limitations appears as inherently scarce. Capital is insatiable. It needs more than nature has; it needs infinitely more. Hence, anything subject to natural limitations, “scarce” in the system’s terms and, moreover, anything which is an indispensable precondition as a means of production for further production, must—in an economic system such as ours—not only be under some kind of control but be brought under <em>monopolistic</em> control.[27]
Those of us who are treated as natural commodities, particularly Black people (and more particularly the wombs of cisgender Black women), must see our inextricable link to the environment. Land-based politics grounded in a sustained and nurturing relationship with the natural world and in protecting nature is a means of protecting ourselves. If humanity continues on its trajectory of environmental degradation, the destruction of countless animal species, including our own, is inevitable.
Afro-descended people have historically been compared to simians.[28] One can identify the very Black lament that we have been “treated like animals,” whether in the cages of the carceral state or within white supremacist America writ large. We are commodified and transformed into something over which white supremacy is able to assert authority and claim ownership. In the not-too-distant past, zoos sometimes displayed African people as if they were something less than human, if not less than animal, if not <em>less than both</em>. Displayed as a kind of social and biological oddity, Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, was purchased from slave traders and eventually displayed in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.[29] We still do not fit the white human default projected into our psyches through the news, public education, pop culture, and virtually all other media we digest within white supremacist society. Climate change and its ravages are not waiting for us to fix our patterns of destructive behavior. We are the only ones who can stop our own causal actions, and this will require more than just words. The responsibility for reversing the harm humans have caused to the environment does not rest with the oppressed peoples of the world who have contributed to it least. Yet the responsible parties refuse to mobilize resources to mitigate the havoc they have wreaked. With that said, our work to end the deterioration of nature must be understood as a necessary and inseparable component of a global anticapitalist movement. What we have come to know as “environmentalism” in the United States and the Western world is entrenched in the saviorism inherent to whiteness, but the most critical environmental politics and frontline resisters to climate change emerge from communities in the Global South, particularly indigenous communities.
These communities in the Global South and those most oppressed in the Global North have become the primary victims of climate change. In line with oppressive victim-blaming, Western capitalists blame environmental problems on “overpopulation” and resource consumption by poor Black and Brown people. Rather than re-evaluating the pace of resource extraction and unsustainable environmental practices, they resort to the sinister logic of Malthusianism.[30] In the name of “family planning” and “empowering Third World women,” environmentalists often seek to curb the growing populations of the Global South, despite clear evidence that industrialized Western states are largely responsible for global environmental damage. In <em>Ecofeminism</em>, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva assert,
That industrialization, technological progress and the affluent life-style of the developed nations have precipitated the acceleration of environmental degradation worldwide can no longer be ignored. The main threats are: 1) degradation of land (for example, desertification, salination, loss of arable land); 2) deforestation, mainly of tropical forests; 3) climate change, due to the destruction of the ozone layer; and 4) global warming, due mainly to increasing rates of carbon dioxide and other gaseous emissions. But instead of looking into the root causes of these threats which it is feared are approaching catastrophic thresholds, they are today almost universally attributed to a single cause: population growth. Not only the affluent North and dominant political and economic interests but UN organizations also subscribe to this view.[31]
The culturally imperialist and patriarchal view Mies and Shiva describe asserts itself in the lives of the people already subjugated globally by the whims of capital. By furthering the intention of a racialized domination of women and their bodies, capitalist systems are able to maintain white supremacist patriarchy for their own social, political, and economic gain while also evading responsibility for the harm they cause. Mies and Shiva continue:
Population growth is not a cause of the environmental crisis but one aspect of it, and both are related to resource alienation and destruction of livelihoods, first by colonialism and then continued by Northern-imposed models of maldevelopment.... What is also ignored in this “carrying capacity” discourse is the history of colonial intervention into people’s reproductive behavior. This intervention was initially motivated, as in Europe, by the need for more disposable labour, labour freed from subsistence activities and forced to work productively on plantations, farms, roads, in mines and so on for the benefit of foreign capital.[32]
Mies and Shiva determine that “it might then well be more fruitful to directly address the roots of the problem: the exploitative world market system which produces poverty. Giving people rights and access to resources so that they can generate sustainable livelihoods is the only solution to environmental destruction and the population growth that accompanies it.”[33] When we think of the hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and all the different forces of nature that have destroyed our communities and taken people’s lives, we should be inspired to counter <em>all</em> racial capitalist forces that exacerbate natural disaster, from climate change to the racist nature of emergency response. In <em>Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability</em>, Henry Giroux describes the moral failure of the George W. Bush administration in responding to the hurricane’s aftermath. He notes how the botched relief effort prolonged the suffering of already vulnerable New Orleans residents and made evident the clear prioritization of certain human lives over others and how the city became a “petri dish for the forces of neoliberalism.”[34] From the images of survival theft (or “looting”) and Black abandonment in the Superdome to the presence of Blackwater contractors providing property protection to the wealthy residents who were able to evacuate, the new era of disposability was made chillingly apparent. Giroux writes,
As Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated, the decline of the social state along with the rise of massive inequality increasingly bar whole populations from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic, who are increasingly rendered disposable, and left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or human-made disasters. This last challenge is difficult, for here we must connect the painful dots between the crisis in the Gulf Coast and that “other” Gulf crisis in the Middle East; we must connect the dots between images of US soldiers standing next to tortured Iraqis forced to assume the additional indignity of a dog leash to images of bloated bodies floating in the toxic waters that overwhelmed New Orleans city streets after five long days of punctuated government indifference to the suffering of some of its citizen populations.[35]
This system was not designed <em>for</em> us, it was built <em>on top</em> of us. Our destruction is built into it, but our liberation can be built from its downfall. It is here that finding the resilience of anticapitalist politics in ourselves and applying them to nature and the environment will guide us <em>naturally.</em> We are not in need of a perfect sectarian model of how to accomplish the building of new anticapitalist communities. That much will be worked out on individual bases according to when, where, and who is building. What we need now is to educate ourselves and our communities to the point that this common goal is understood.
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Saidiya Hartman writes in “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum”: “Better the fields and the shotgun houses and the dusty towns and the interminable cycle of credit and debt, better this than black anarchy.”[36] The slum, the ghetto, the reservation, the internment camp, and other classed and racialized zones of nonbeing have all been used as spaces within which nonwhite life has been relegated and regulated within American necropolitical structures. “Necropolitics” describes the capacity of the state to dictate who lives and who dies: who is understood as having a right or claim to life and who is relegated to inhumanity and social death. Achille Mbembe asks: “But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?”[37] Every space inhabited by blackness, particularly Black people living on society’s margins, is a space to which Black life is relegated to die, a space that is visible but is impossible to understand and even offensive to the sensibilities of white people. Urban spaces previously deemed “dangerous” and “unlivable” by white people have suddenly become desirable through urbanization, movement within and between cities, and the continuation of settler enclosure. As a result, these spaces are undergoing cataclysmic changes. Waves of gentrification are displacing Black people from these spaces and into more affordable areas. Black working-class existence is becoming increasingly suburbanized, and this can be attributed at least in part to “broader indirect process[es] caused by exclusionary mechanisms such as the decreasing accessibility and affordability of inner-urban neighborhoods”—that is, gentrification.[38] The violence of gentrification mimics other violent displacements of capitalism. It is not a new form of colonization but rather a continuation of settler colonial dispossession in an urban setting. With raced and classed demographic shifts in urban spaces, there is an accompanying shift in the nature of policing as the state seeks to protect incoming residents who tend to be of higher socioeconomic status than those comprising long-existing communities. Neighborly tensions are buffered by the state. The San Francisco–based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project used 311 calls (for nonemergency services) as one means of measuring these interactions within San Francisco neighborhoods. A study it conducted indicates a steep increase in 311 calls between 2009 and 2014, particularly in the city’s most heavily gentrified areas.[39] According to the study, over half of all 311 calls were about public passageway cleaning or graffiti. “Of the more than one million 311 calls, 402,184 were about street and sidewalk cleaning, 109,999 were for graffiti on public property and 94,619 for graffiti on private property.”[40] There are distinct relationships between gentrification and social cleansing: clear correlations between the entry of new residents into urban spaces and corresponding politics of the pricing out and displacement of long-existing residents and communities and the removal of undesirable aesthetics and behaviors (through, for example, imposed restrictions on loitering and noise).[41] While it is impossible to know exactly who is making calls and about what, from well-documented patterns of gentrification and the frequently hostile relationships between new residents and long-time residents we can reasonably infer that many of these calls about are made by these relatively affluent new residents offended by the visual “blight” of homelessness/houselessness and vandalism (though much of the “urban graffiti,” in fact, consists of both new and long-standing mural projects). These calls comprise what is referred to as order-maintaining policing, “the intervention and suppression of behavior that threatens to be offensive, that threatens to disturb the public peace, or that comes from conflicts among individuals that are public in nature.” According to the “broken windows” theory of policing, first introduced by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982,
At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.[42]
These literally and figuratively broken windows signal the impending breakdown of a community in question: that “a stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.”[43] Never mind that the abandonment of buildings and the degradation of urban infrastructure is frequently a result of municipal neglect or the migration or shutdown of urban industries. According to “broken windows” logic, it is necessary to maintain order through a hyper-surveillance and regulation of seemingly deteriorating areas, which just so happen to be predominately poorer communities and communities of color. Order is accordingly “maintained” by arresting criminals, though this often translates into the state arresting and filling jails and prisons with low-level nonviolent offenders and punishing people for their poverty and precarity. Homelessness is criminalized through laws prohibiting loitering or sitting, eating, sleeping, or panhandling in public spaces.White supremacist hierarchies have long established notions of “order,” “humanity,” and “citizenship.” The formation of the system of mass incarceration saw the maintenance of the system of Black slavery despite formal emancipation in 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution declares, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The critical point, of course, is the permission of slavery as punishment for a crime. The state is constitutionally permitted to use incarcerated people for labor approximate to slavery, which drives the criminalization of nonwhite and economically disenfranchised people as so-called threats to public safety. Within these racialized hierarchies criminality is “marked with the same coding as slave captivity, such that, in essence, blackness is enveloped in such distinctions.”[44] Through the inextricable linkage of racialized deviance to Black servitude, whiteness becomes “deputized against those who do not magnetize bullets.”[45] White people are not simply those the state protects and serves: white people are themselves a part of the policing structure, and the notion of public safety cannot be separated from this deep complicity and investment in this form of state violence. This punitive approach to policing and “public protection” is a precedent that long predates the Clinton administration’s euphemistic “tough on crime” policy framework, a social cleansing framework built on the targeting—the re-enslavement—of Black offenders. There is little empirical research indicating the efficacy of broken windows policing, but there is increasing research pointing to the spuriousness of the theory, namely in its conflation of causation and correlation by linking disordered public spaces and the existence of crime.[46] On the relationship between policing patterns and societally held racist biases about criminality, Dorothy Roberts writes:
<em>One of the main tests in American culture for distinguishing law-abiding from lawless people is their race. Many, if not most, Americans believe that Black people are “prone to violence” and make race-based assessments of the danger posed by strangers they encounter</em> [our emphasis]. The myth of Black criminality is part of a belief system deeply embedded in American culture that is premised on the superiority of whites and inferiority of Blacks. Psychological studies show a substantially greater rate of error in cross-racial identifications when the witness is white and the suspect is Black. White witnesses disproportionately misidentify Blacks because they expect to see Black criminals.[47]
To understand geographies of white supremacy—to understand how white supremacy organizes itself across space and through time—is to understand race and the process through which abstract notions of difference are made material. Anti-blackness is not simply ideological or a personally held opinion about the inferiority of Black people. It is also structural processes through which resources are unevenly distributed, which in turn informs the material realities of Black communities, often those of deprivation. These spatial stratifications inevitably affect health, as lack of access to high-quality foods drives incidences of nutrition-related illness like Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and malnourishment, and a lack of access to medical care has led to an increase in Black maternal and infant mortality rates. Stratification also affects educational outcomes and physical safety (due to the nature of policing). A notion of effective Black resistance must revolve at least partly around strategies such as resource pooling and community defense, given the state’s refusal to provide adequate resources to Black people. To collectively respond to these geographies of white supremacy effectively requires us first to understand ongoing processes of settler colonial displacement through gentrification and racial capitalism’s hoarding and inequitable distribution of resources. This allows us to understand community health and its relationship to local environmental conditions (shaped by political decisions), changing demographics, and so on. Developing this wide analysis, particularly in understanding how local politics are inextricably linked to global processes, allows us to connect with other struggles and potential allies across class, ethnicity, and other lines of identity. Attempting to reclaim and repurpose the settler state will not lead to liberation, and it will not provide the kind of urgent material relief so many people desperately need, though electing empathetic officials sometimes can arguably mitigate against harm. Only through a material disruption of these geographies, through the cultivation of Black autonomy, can Black liberation begin to be actualized.
** Grounds to Defend On
Self-defense is of the utmost importance in the United States. If you can’t afford to run from what’s threatening you and are interested in continuing your existence, you should learn to fight where you stand. It’s something that has consistently defined the United States long after the Revolutionary War. The concept of resisting tyrannical government through arms is ingrained in consciousness across the Americas. Nations birthed through fighting and revolutions against colonial empires glorify their histories of resistance and defense. The United States is no exception and certainly praises this aspect of its history. But the history of rebellion against the U.S. project itself is often glossed over as if an inconvenience to the supposed freedoms we enjoy today. Those of us who believe in human rights and equality have to imagine resistance beyond just words, symbolism, and attitudes. Resistance should also carry a realistic outlook that includes a self-defense strategy. History has regularly given us guidelines for doing so.
Consideration and understanding of individual and community self-defense is mandatory for the movements we hope to build and maintain. In this white supremacist society, movements that challenge the status quo are often violently dismissed. Though Black-led resistance has been very effective in challenging and changing conditions, Black people have often paid with our lives. Whenever there is a dominant system that enables or privileges certain groups over others, violence against those considered lesser is increasingly justified by that system, especially against those defying that system. White supremacy has dehumanized Black people to such an extent that killing Black people is not only widely socially acceptable but also a necessary function of anti-Black subjection. Any Black movement that plans on maintaining itself should be prepared to defend itself if and when necessary.
Our opposition should reflect the earliest moments of Native resistance to European settler conquest; the uprisings of enslaved Africans from plantations to Maroons; the Black Power revolutionary movement; and Black gangs that were born of necessity and are often far better organized than those who denounce them would ever give them credit for. The lessons of the past are here for us, should we choose to accept them and build from what they have to offer. The study of the armed struggle of Native people is foundational in creating a sustainable self-defense movement against white supremacist capitalism and those it enables today. Understanding what worked and what did not can be helpful. The past shows that we should be constantly prepared for infinite varieties of conflict.
Self-defense is not violence, it is a means of survival. It cannot be equated with oppression and assault by the powerful structures that thrive because of everyday violence. This is not a sectarian attempt to co-opt death and destruction for our own means, nor is it an attempt to attain power like that which oppresses. Rather it is an understanding of power, privilege, and history. By starting from the moments people first expressed their objection to the U.S. project and working our way through history into the present, we can begin to understand our need for an opposition that embraces and promotes a healthy philosophy of self-defense.
Our resistance against systemic oppression is not new. Rebellions against white supremacist capitalism have happened across racial lines, and Black people have taken part in them from the moment when enslaved Africans arrived on American shores (and even on the ships that transported them across the Atlantic Ocean). These early rejections of white supremacist capitalism set the precedent for many movements to come, including many of the ones we see today that are arguably much less confrontational.
Black resistance across the Americas has laid the foundations for many of the progressive developments in the nations of the Western Hemisphere, from the establishment of the Haitian Republic to the Black movements that would embrace self-defense in the ways that we can appreciate today. Much of the legislation we value, like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, arose from the state’s concessions to the civil rights movement and other Black resistance efforts at the time. What many would call “freedoms” in a society that is <em>not</em> free are actually cherished but weakening policies relied upon by oppressed people throughout the nation. Policies and laws, which are not permanently secured, helped bring about some progress in areas like education, labor, entertainment, and many aspects of daily life. The desegregation of public spaces and facilities is one such example. These reforms were admissions of guilt for systemic inequality based on race, gender, ethnicity, and other identities. It is important to realize that without Black resistance such progressive developments would never have occurred.
It is true that Black people have been involved in U.S. expansion, usually by force or coercion. However, Black people have always fought against state power too. Interracial coalitions across the United States have relied on Black people. Black and Native coalitions preceded the Revolutionary War and carried common interests so plain that racial boundaries were often broken to reject not only settler interests but also sometimes British interests.[48] Maroons, for example, were communities made up of predominantly enslaved Africans and Indigenous people across the Americas. For centuries, these communities thrived as hubs of resistance, and sometimes they even attracted some white people who understood their marginalization at the hands of the powerful forces battling over their capitalistic and colonial interests. Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion is perhaps considered an anomaly during formative years in the nation’s political landscape, but many similar uprisings are not as well known. In the same area where Nat Turner’s rebellion took place—Southampton County, Virginia—in the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, a series of conspiracies and insurrections against slavery took place between 1790 and 1810. These uprisings were a “product of over 150 years of autonomous activity by slaves, servants, fugitives, and Natives in the area,” Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford write in <em>Dixie Be Damned</em>, and “this period of rebellion forever changed the scope of insurrectionary activity under slavery.”[49] Not long after Turner’s rebellion, enslaved Africans and Native people in Florida engaged in what is arguably the most successful slave rebellion in American history. The launch of the Second Seminole War would provide the foundation for the first emancipation proclamation, decades before Abraham Lincoln’s. Led by the likes of John Horse, Osceola, Wild Cat, and King Phillip, Natives, Blacks, and Black Natives fought valiantly alongside one another against the full, unleashed force of the U.S. military. The Black Seminole contingent of this rebellion was complex. Some of the Black people fighting had been enslaved by white owners, while others had been enslaved by Seminoles or had lived with them. No form of slavery is redeemable or justifiable, but Seminoles offered enslaved Africans more rights and sometimes integration into the tribe, and they would fight alongside one another against white conquest and enslavement. The fierce fighting of those dubbed “Indian-negroes” is well documented in U.S. history. In 1837 U.S. Army general Thomas Jesup wrote, “The two races are rapidly approximating; they are identified in interests and feelings.... Should the Indians remain in this territory, the Negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway Negroes from the adjacent states; and should they remove, the fastnesses of the country would be immediately occupied by negroes.”[50]
In 1836, when General Jesup had realized that he could not effectively defeat this uprising, he had declared, “This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.”[51] And with that, Jesup issued the first emancipation proclamation, which stated that “All Negroes the prop-erty of the Seminole ... who ... delivered themselves up to the Commanding Officer of the Troops should be free.”[52] This first and largely unrecognized proclamation of Black emancipation was secured through armed struggle and an unrelenting multiyear battle for Blacks’ right to self-determination. Slave owners who had hoped the military would return those who had escaped with the Seminoles were forced to accept defeat. While this led to momentary optimism on behalf of some Black Seminoles and further compromises around Black and Native emancipation and self-determination, promises made by the state were later reversed or broken, as most agreements with Black and Indigenous communities historically have been. After years of fighting and then engaging in the politics of their day, arguably reformist, they decided to take their fate into their own hands. Black Seminole leader John Horse worked with the state in an effort to appease his adversaries through service, policy change, and negotiation. When he was captured in 1838, he agreed to relocate some of his people in exchange for peace. That relocation compromise would be filled with broken promises. After John Horse worked as a guide and negotiator for the U.S. Army, he saw that the hopes of his people were not being realized through moderate methods. His unsuccessful petitioning for the government to treat the Black Seminoles better was not the end of the matter. The Black Seminole communities were ultimately forced to simultaneously fight and flee, with many settling in Texas, Mexico, and even parts of the Bahamas, among other places. Their communities still exist and serve as examples of ongoing Black resistance.
This frequently overlooked history illustrates some lessons of revolution, repression, and reform. The Black Seminole movements necessarily adjusting to change and state response embodies the anarchism of blackness. The Black Seminoles’ repression by the U.S. government and their alienation from certain segments of the Seminole nation demanded that they adapt to reality. In the same way, Black people today are subject to persistent repression and often are alienated from the movements of people of color who are not Black. The Black Seminoles fought, resisted, and retreated when necessary because any attempts at accommodation failed to benefit them in the end. Their statelessness and often deferred, if not excluded, tribal status among the Seminoles locates them in the vortex that is the Black condition, and their unique fight for self-determination highlights the intricacies of Black struggle.
Now caught up in the dialogue of liberalism, many activist communities have largely been lacking a coherent conversation about self-defense. In the liberal history of the civil rights movement, “nonviolence” and Martin Luther King Jr. are the centerpiece, and this is held up as the right way to go about seeking social change. This has manifest frequently during rebellions (derisively called “riots”), often in response to incidents of state violence or extrajudicial killings. From Baltimore to Ferguson, Los Angeles, and wherever there is a Black uprising, the state and its allies attempt to subdue Black people by invoking nonviolence and King, who is conveniently remembered for his civil disobedience but not for his armed guards or gun ownership.
King, Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, and countless other Black leaders employed self-defense in theory as well as praxis to get us to this point. Many of us may relate to the words of the NAACP cofounder Du Bois’s response to the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906:
I revered life. I have never killed a bird nor shot a rabbit. I never liked fishing and always let others kill even the chickens which I ate. Nearly all my schoolmates in the South carried pistols. I never owned one. I could never conceive myself killing a human being. But in 1906 I rushed back from Alabama to Atlanta where my wife and six-year old child were living. A mob had raged for days killing Negroes. I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot. If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass. They did not come.[53]
Legendary civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was an outspoken advocate of peaceful methods of resistance. Her emphasis on love and morality is far more well known than her thoughts about the possibility of conflict with white supremacists. Hamer once said that hatred “makes us sick and weak,” but her politics of love did not contradict her embrace of self-defense. She stated, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”[54] Hamer and Du Bois are just two examples of Black people who have historically walked the imagined line between promoting self-defense and what we’ve come to know as nonviolence. Martin Luther King’s own writings seem to affirm this balance:
Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed has never been condemned.... When the Negro uses force in self-defense he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects. When he seeks to initiate violence, he provokes questions about the necessity for it, and inevitably is blamed for its consequences. It is unfortunately true that however the Negro acts, his struggle will not be free of violence initiated by his enemies, and he will need ample courage and willingness to sacrifice to defeat this manifestation of violence.[55]
The United States has not been bombed, destabilized, and wrecked—as have the nations whose resources it plunders. It enjoys a relative peace of sorts, absent outright war or bloody conflict that we see around the world. The violence of the state is deeply entrenched within institutions and made invisible by those institutions well enough to deceive many into believing that the life we’re familiar with is acceptable. Many may feel that the apparent and relative peace of a system is comfortable, safe enough to not demand fighting for anything better despite the violence and death built into the system. But the reality of fascist white supremacist violence tells us something very different. We should prepare for individual and collective self-defense, since our turbulent history in the United States warns us this will be needed. Even the most nonconfrontational and compassionate among us should understand that conflict has defined the U.S. project from its inception, through genocidal, xenophobic, and anti-Black violence.
Liberal appropriation and misreading of history attempt to implement respectability politics as defining Black resistance. But it is a myth that our enemies will love us or value us more as people if our appearance and behavior are more respectable—that is, dictated by white (supremacist) liberal sensibilities. This is so common that some young contemporary activists assert that “we are not our grandparents”—as if our grandparents were timid, fearful, and nonconfrontational (so often they were very much the opposite).[56] No honest telling of history will reveal a complacent Black population that passively took whatever violence was inflicted on them. Even in the face of oppressive law enforcement, a constant for Black people historically, respectability has never deterred self-defense. Ida B. Wells once wrote: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”[57]
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Most of the imagined and circumstantial retelling of the civil rights movement can easily be debunked. Even the nonviolent civil disobediences were far more disruptive and confrontational than public imagination often allows them to be. In his landmark book <em>Negroes with Guns</em>, North Carolina NAACP organizer Robert F. Williams challenged the concept and practice of passive nonviolence, which was popular among activists like himself at the time. His work would later influence Huey P. Newton, who would become a founding member of the Black Panther Party along with Bobby Seale. Williams wrote, “The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor’s conscience. Social change in something as fundamental as racist oppression involves violence. You cannot have progress here without violence and upheaval, because it’s a struggle for survival for one and a struggle for liberation for the other. Always the powers in command are ruthless and unmerciful in defending their position and their privileges. This is not an abstract rule to be meditated upon by Americans.”[58]
While we may choose not to limit or misrepresent the diversity of our struggle by explicitly naming ourselves as “anarchists,” we should nevertheless cultivate an internationalist framework and draw inspiration from movements for sovereignty and autonomy both domestically and globally. Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin explains:
Two features of a new mass movement must be the intention of creating dual power institutions to challenge the state, along with the ability to have a grassroots autonomist movement that can take advantage of a pre-revolutionary situation to go all the way. Dual power means that you organize a number of collectives and communes in cities and town[s] all over North America, which are, in fact, liberated zones, outside of the control of the government. Autonomy means that the movement must be truly independent and a free association of all those united around common goals, rather than membership as the result of some oath or other pressure.[59]
This model of organizing shies away from hierarchies, cultism, and performative militancy; it prioritizes people over cults of personality and traditional models of leadership that are highly centralized. Ervin also writes:
As Blacks and other oppressed peoples of color, we are living through some of the most perilous times in both American and world history. The white empire is declining, but in its desperation to cling to power, we face police murder and brutality, mass imprisonment of youth of color, racial profiling, degrading poverty and unemployment, repressive anti-terrorist legislation and new wars of conquest and yet we do not hear the voices of organized peoples of color in their millions in North America. Instead, we are part of “someone else’s agenda” or “someone else’s political organization,” but it is time now to build our own and speak for ourselves. We must not only demand our “rights” in a Western capitalist society, but fight to build a new world.[60]
It is not sufficient to simply center blackness in our understanding of resistance to subjugation. We must also explicitly name different gendered and sexual identities within blackness. Any truly liberatory politics must speak to the unique needs and vulnerability of Black women and girls, particularly Black queer and transgender women and girls. There are ongoing murders of Black trans women across the country (and trans women around the world) because women’s safety is a non-priority of the state and because patriarchal gender structures are ultimately grounded in transmisogyny.[61] Black women are also being hunted, but this hunting season (unlike the open season on Black men) is grossly under-addressed because of the frequent de-gendering of antiracist politics, the invisibilization of Black women through diversity language like “women and people of color” that overlooks the intersections of race and gender, the erasure of Black women within “women of color,” and understandings of how state violence against Black people focuses on the humiliation and emasculation and almost sole targeting of cisgender black men. A politic of self-defense cannot ignore the intersections of white supremacist state violence and its manifestations of intra-communal violence against Black women (trans and cis), as well as other members of the Black community who are marginalized beyond their blackness.
Black feminism says that the forces of sexism and (trans)misogyny, classism, and racism are inextricably linked in a mutually constitutive web of oppressions and domination.[62] Within this tradition, of course, is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality,”[63] building from the intellectual legacy of Black lesbian feminists and even nineteenth-century Black feminist works such as writings by Anna Julia Cooper.[64] Black feminism too grounds political understandings (and anticapitalist critiques) in embodied knowledge and lived experiences, and it also has the potential to present non-essentialized and non-biologized critiques of the position of Black womanhood within history, a kind of useful historical revisionism highlighting racial capitalism’s violence against Black women and Black nationalism’s frequent exclusion of them. Black feminism responds to the racist exclusion of Black women from “women’s issues”—safety, deservedness, agency and autonomy, and classed oppression. Understanding Black women’s subjugation by the state means understanding raced and gendered labor extraction, and Black feminism is useful for understanding the functioning of capitalism and for undermining the legitimacy of this anti-Black settler state.
Understanding Black women’s subjugation means understanding the ways that Black women’s labor was central to the development of the capitalist state and the American slaveocracy. Sarah Haley’s <em>No Mercy Here</em> narrates how gendered anti-blackness formed the cornerstone of Jim Crow modernity, which then paved the way for the contemporary system of mass incarceration that we have today. Haley’s book compares the hyper-imprisonability of black women’s gender deviance and the redeemability of white femininity and shows how these constructs were made material through judicial sentencing that enforced Black women’s subjection. Black women were understood to be as strong as men and were used frequently for manual labor in the fields, whereas white women were only employed in fields as punishment for particularly bad behavior. Haley writes that in 1893, “Black men were 1.4 times more likely than white men to be arrested in Atlanta, while Black women were 6.4 times more likely than white women to be arrested.” That year, “Black male youth were three times more likely to be arrested than young white males while young Black girls were nineteen times more likely to be arrested than their white female counter parts.”[65] The normativity and virtuosity of white women is made concrete through the deliberate singling out and punishment of Black women and girls. It is also through the tripled labor (domestic, industrial, and sexual—euphemistically called “social reproduction”—labor as Black women’s bodies become playthings for white prison guards) and the male-approximate punishment of the chain gang that Black women were further and further excluded from womanhood. White women ultimately became exempted from chain gang labor, the only demographic to be protected from carceral punishment in this way, codifying a race-gender structure revolving around the protection of white womanhood and rooted in anti-Black criminalizations.
When we look at contemporary antiracist politics, Black humanity and personhood continue to be filtered and evaluated through the white liberal imagination. In “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety” Jackie Wang asserts a frame for understanding Black personhood and victimization. A notion of innocence is a precondition for launching antiracist support campaigns, she says, and such campaigns arise only when Black people are able to pass tests of moral purity.[66] So we can, for example, largely agree that Tamir Rice was egregiously victimized because he was a child. The outpouring of empathy was due to his youth (as was the corroboration of his claim to innocence via surveillance footage), the same as with Aiyana Stanley-Jones. But Mike Brown failed the test because he may have committed strongarm robbery (despite robbery not being a capital offense), and Darren Wilson’s testimony added to the process of what Frank B. Wilderson III refers to as “niggerization.”[67]
Similarly, we did not see an outpouring of empathy and support for CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after killing an attacker who violently confronted her with racist and transmisogynistic language and smashed a drink against her face, clearly a case of self-defense. She accepted a plea bargain of forty-one months in prison in June 2012 and served nineteen months in two different men’s facilities before being released in January 2014. Given the epidemic of assault and murder of Black trans women, was her defensive violence not warranted? What makes her less “innocent” than, for example, Marissa Alexander, who fired a warning shot after her husband attacked and threatened to kill her? There was far more outcry about the gendered implications of women invoking “Stand Your Ground” laws than about the perfectly reasonable use of violence in response to the assault of a Black trans woman, perhaps because in the case of Alexander, white liberals (particularly white feminists) were able to apply the carceral feminist logic of protecting the world from scary racialized men that sits at the root of so many implicitly racialized anti–domestic violence and intimate partner violence interventions. (It is important for us to note our steadfast support of both women, and the contrast of their cases was not intended to indicate our personal perceptions of one woman being “more innocent” or “more deserving” of support than the other, but rather the disparate nature of public solidarity given their specific contexts.)
Where so many antiracist logics—even ones emerging from radical spaces—appeal to innocence, we continue to rely on the logic of the white imagination and draw upon exceptional cases to buttress our arguments. But ultimately, in doing so, we inadvertently affirm illegitimate modes of governance and social regulation in an ultimately illegitimate state.[68] Reliance upon empathy fails to produce politics that unequivocally affirm black humanity. In doling out our own judgments of innocence, we fail to articulate the state’s relationship to (and production of) blackness. “Innocence” defenses can only be flawed because the disciplinary systems erected around us—the ghetto, the plantation, the prison, the colony—define us solely through our criminality, deviance, and an ongoing existence as both capital and a heavily subsidized labor force for the state. The issue is not to improve our ability to convincingly argue the innocence of brutalized and slain Black individuals immortalized through hashtags. We occupy a criminal subject position that cannot be shifted by appeals to white emotion. The state does not simply produce anti-Black systems, it <em>is</em> anti-blackness.
Wang further discusses “zones of intelligibility,” spaces of being and residing that are understandable to white people. Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, she writes, were both murdered in places intelligible to white imaginations, a gated community and a public transportation station, respectively. Still, violence has occurred in “alternate universes”—the slave ship, the hood, prisons, and anywhere in public but at the hands of the state. What happens when Blacks possess an unintelligible identity? We are forced to perform the dehumanizing mental gymnastics of appealing to white notions of innocence and perfect victimhood. Affirming the legitimacy of self-defense is a refusal to entertain the idea that Black people have only a conditional right to life. It is the embrace of a legacy of community self-determination by any means necessary.
Like the abusive entity that it is, white supremacist oppression conditions those it oppresses to tolerate violence for the educational purposes of <em>all</em> its white beneficiaries. Through dialogue and discussion, protest and pain, and brutality and death, those oppressed by white supremacy are supposed to work to educate their oppressors on how not to oppress them: to risk death in order to show our oppressors we are not deserving of their violence. Invoking many Black leaders of the past who have been redefined by white imaginations, white liberal politics suggests that we should be brutalized and possibly killed as martyrs for our cause as well as for the betterment of white America. White supremacist logic has been so convincing that we oppressed people have largely come to believe that self-defense itself is violence. Even more unsettling is the fact that many oppressed people get caught up in white centrist politics as a means of liberation, as if anyone or anything that oppresses us will guide us to rid ourselves of oppression.
Centrist politics look for a reasonable middle between fascistic domination and resistance against it. This liberal accommodationism relies on the illusion of two logical sides. Violent conflicts are reduced to mere disagreements, as if one side’s dehumanization of another is just a difference of opinion. Oppression becomes softened, in discussions at least, by the farcical centrist propaganda that it should be negotiated rather than abolished. With this in mind, we must clarify that violence against us is intolerable under any circumstance. But just as violence against us is intolerable, so is violence against women, gender non-conforming people, and queer and trans people within our communities. It’s not that the misleading narratives of “Black on Black crime” justify the violence against us from outside our community, but by protecting those who are most vulnerable within our communities we will be strengthening our defense against <em>any</em> outside aggressions.
Black women are doubly and uniquely exploited on the basis of both their blackness and their womanhood. The enslavement that concretized the conditions of the anarchistic nature of blackness in the United States sometimes runs parallel to other oppressions and sometimes intersects with them. Black women’s enslavement and underpaid and undervalued productive and reproductive labor highlight the abusive exploitation of white supremacist capitalism that reigns over us. Through patriarchal domination, women are understood not as complete humans but as part of nature, reduced solely to assigned gender roles like domestic labor as well as the ability to produce and rear children. At the same time, women’s ability to bear and produce children is discounted as natural in the sense that it is stripped of its labor value and the resources that it produces: the workforce, representing both labor and potential capital itself. Giving birth is “going into labor,” but it is not a paid job because it is understood as the natural responsibility of women. In <em>Women: The Last Colony</em>, Maria Mies writes, “One of the greatest obstacles to women’s liberation is that activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions, comparable to those of other mammals, and lying outside the sphere of conscious human influence.”[69]
The American ethno-state has been and continues to be lauded by white supremacists as a model for its exclusion of nonwhites.[70] This is partly why we argue that Black people are non-citizens in the United States, even though most of us were born here and our families have existed here for generations. Our hyper-exploitability is linked to our societal location as the descendants of slaves in the “aftermath” of a chattel trade that has not yet ended. Blackness and the oppressive efforts to undo Black humanity link us as a people to slavery, and blackness is in turn seen as the essence of enslaveability. Our labor and our beings are seen as “nature,” “objects to be appropriated, exploited, and destroyed.”[71] This view of blackness positions Black people as being a supposedly endless resource, the same way capitalism treats commodifiable natural resources like wood or water. Claudia von Werlhof makes another intricate connection in the description of women as nature:
Women have been assigned to “nature” precisely because they have been deprived of their nature, because, un-naturally, they are not permitted to control their natural capabilities. The universal drive to turn women into “nature” is the absolute economic precondition of our present-day mode of production as distinct from its predecessors. The diverse forms of patriarchal control over women seen in preceding systems, such as exchange and theft of women, marriage regulations and kinship systems, never attained the intensity, extremes and absoluteness of those operating at present, leaving aside a moment of its global extension—a fact unaltered by any seeming “emancipation.”[72]
The anarchistic nature of blackness created by white supremacist oppression positions us as things that are exploitable, commodifiable, and enslaveable. By understanding how oppression works to make us less human, if human at all, we can begin to understand certain forms of disorder within our communities. Violence against the most vulnerable in our communities and poverty (lack of resources) are problems that stem from the dominant white belief that Black people <em>are</em> a resource and not people with human rights. With the repression of Black social movements, the likes of gangs and other black organizations that are considered illegitimate grew into what are largely designated problems in our communities today. In “Blackstone Rangers,” Gwendolyn Brooks writes:
There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.
...................
Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.[73]
Whether or not we accept it, Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans, like the gangs Brooks describes, have largely existed as a nation on no map. Eugene Hairston and Jeff Fort were founding members of the Blackstone Rangers, a gang formed in Chicago in the late 1950s. The Blackstone Rangers (also known as Black P. Stone Nation or BPSN) are an example of the complex history of many gangs in this country. The group looked very different at its founding than it looks today. They once secured funding from the government in the form of an almost million-dollar grant via the Woodlawn Organization to do community work on Chicago’s South Side.[74] By using the existing gang structure of the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples (now Black Disciples), the hope was to provide employment preparation and motivational services to those targeted. Due to mismanagement, that never happened. The Blackstone Rangers’ roots also lie in a Black nationalistic message not unlike like that of the Black Panther Party.
Many gangs, like the Black P. Stones, the Black Guerrilla Family, and the Crips, can trace their history in this way, and these histories directly relate to the necessity of self-defense and community control. If not for the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, how would today’s activists understand and conceptualize self-defense? Despite the movement’s inspiring history, these politics are often romanticized and overly, if not impractically, emphasized by many Black nationalists today. The Black Panthers should be appreciated as well as problematized; they should be studied instead of just badly mimicked for the sake of militancy. Any ideology of self-defense must have the will, desire, and support of the communities we claim to represent.
The Black Panther Party’s origins trace back to Lowndes County, Alabama, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) work registering Black voters. Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael), who popularized the phrase “Black Power,” did some of his most well-known work in Lowndes County. Despite being the overwhelming majority in the county, Black residents were completely under the thumb of ruling whites. For easy identification on voter registration cards, SNCC developed a black panther logo. This logo originally belonged to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, but it was later adapted by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense when a Lowndes County pamphlet wound up in the hands of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland. But the logo and the Black Power message were not all that would inspire them.
Obviously, the white minority in Lowndes County was not happy about the community organizing and mobilization of Black voters. They worked hard to threaten and intimidate the community that was trying to secure representation. Much like today, police could not be depended on to protect Black people, and so movement leaders in Lowndes armed themselves however they could and however they deemed necessary: they carried weapons while they canvassed and organized.[75] Guns were not in short supply because the Black community was already armed, and community members provided them with additional arms. The presence of guns in this regard underscores the history of Black self-defense as well as the local communities’ willingness to engage in self-defense. “There was no need for suicidal displays of bravado because everyone in the black community knew of their commitment to armed self-defense.”[76] They actively defended themselves against attacks by whites while establishing their own political power, demonstrating their dedication to the cause of universal Black suffrage.
The self-defense organizing in Selma was not limited to one particular entity or group, and it focused on necessity rather than showy militancy. When our forebears began to arm themselves, it wasn’t necessarily because they believed in the Founding Fathers’ promise of the “right to bear arms.” Rather, the only thing white America had ever promised Black America was violence. Guns were a way to possibly protect oneself from that violence. But the promise of the “right to bear arms,” like the rest of the U.S. Constitution, does not functionally apply to anyone who is not a white man, just as the original definition of citizenship did not apply to anyone other than white landowning men. Black people’s “right” to anything in the United States is an abstraction: the founders denied Black people, free or enslaved, the right to own or attain guns. All these years later, over a century after emancipation, Black people are still not guaranteed safety even through legal means of gun ownership. We are still killed for carrying guns that are acquired in accordance with law because blackness itself a threat and Black people are more likely to be extrajudicially killed for even being imagined to have a gun, whether permitted by law or not.
When the Black Panthers asserted in their Ten-Point Program their right to bear arms, they did so using the words of the U.S. Constitution. Point seven states: “We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.” In a critique of the New Black Panther Party, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a former Black Panther himself, denounces “romantic urban guerrillaism, which appeared at the period of the deterioration of the BPP in the mid-1970s.” Ervin laments forms of vanguardism like small group terror and adventurism, saying they should be “avoided at all costs” because “too many militants were killed, arrested and exiled in the previous Panther formations to let a new movement think it can posture around with guns as a studio prop.”[77]
Ervin’s condemnation of irresponsible posturing leads us to better understand why contemporary self-defense politics must be meaningful. To the best of our ability, we should ensure our contemporary political formations are not just new iterations of the past. The Panthers were infiltrated and destroyed by government forces like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a covert operation that harmed and killed many throughout the Black community, among others. If our organizations are to provide societal and community value, we cannot aspire to form a mass movement of would-be martyrs that romanticize revolutionary armed struggle without having any weaponry, gun politics, or even skills with firearms.
Gun control is often a reaction to the threat posed by insurrectionary blackness. Hopes to stop the Black Panthers’ efforts to organize armed community self-defense were the basis for the Mulford Act, a 1967 California firearms law criminalizing the open carrying of loaded firearms and passed in explicit response to their armed neighborhood patrols. The turbulent summer of 1967, when rebellions shook Detroit and Newark, led Congress to propose new gun restrictions after armed Black people resisted the police and National Guard who were attempting to implement martial law. It was no surprise when the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed, considering these events and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the sixties (the latter two killed in the same year as the act’s passage). It is arguable that each of those assassinations occurred as a result of public perceptions about each respective targeted person’s relationship to Black struggles of the 1960s. The Kennedy brothers were and still often are seen as symbols of white liberal sympathy to Black civil rights, and King, of course, was a prominent movement leader. Their deaths would ultimately become part of the reasoning used in regulating firearms in a way that did not improve the lives of Black people or even make us safer. Despite the repeatedly demonstrated threat posed by armed white men, the fear of Black people and Black armed insurrection was a primary driver of gun control, not the desire to protect. Contemporary discourses about gun control cannot ignore the inherently racialized and reactionary nature of the state’s attempts to regulate arms.
Guns are dangerous commodities that wreak havoc around the globe every day. They bring chaos and harm to many of our neighborhoods and communities. Although we invoke historical narratives of armed Black self-defense, we cannot ignore the almost inextricable links between gun violence and domestic and intimate partner violence, most notably against women. The weapons, however, are tools, just like many of the other commodities that drive oppression and destabilization around the world, and the conversation around gun control cannot simply be limited to partisan binaries supporting or opposing the ability to access firearms. Rather, these conversations should be grounded in far wider social discussions of hegemonic masculinity, the violent nature of white political expression, centuries of anti-Black racial violence, the delegitimization of Black community self-defense against state violence, the definition of “violence” itself, the undue political influence of the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, violence against women, and so on. The debate on whether we choose to use guns as tools for our self-defense is reasonable to have in our community, but our adversaries have already expressed lack of interest in such a dialogue or debate. While the risk of trying to engage enemies in civility is indeed a necessary part of any movement, so too is a willingness to fight if and when necessary.
To accept the false retellings of history regarding the U.S. project is to believe that genocide, enslavement, and innumerable racialized brutalities were missteps in a historical moral arc toward progress and justice. Patriotism is ultimately self-destructive for Black people; patriotism necessarily comes at the expense of Black people. To be committed to a national project without any commitment from the state to reciprocate our needs for human rights means to labor against centuries of Black struggle. When we acknowledge the blackness of resistance, we acknowledge that “what happens to blacks indicates the truth (rather than the totality) of the system,” as Jared Sexton notes. “Every analysis that attempts to account for the vicissitudes of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state without centering Black existence within its framework—which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents—is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation.”[78]
Our self-defense understanding must account for the history of resistance in this country that has been so largely Black-led while also making the most of our history as diverse people. No one need be ignored, dismissed, or overlooked for their contributions. No matter what community or region we are from, no what color our skin, the struggle of Black people in the United States can inspire without being commodified by other movements. Black resistance and meaningful self-defense organizing opportunities are all around us. But the organizing we need to counter white supremacist capitalism has to be sincere and serious in a world that overemphasizes symbolic victories. Our liberation will feature the most disenfranchised among us overcoming the burdens of oppression.
Gang members, incarcerated people, the formerly incarcerated, and those cast away by society must be included and defended in our communities. They have been swallowed up by the reductive good-versus-bad binary constructed by white supremacist demands for perfect victimhood. The state intends to portray all of those who oppose it as criminals, thugs, and gangsters; other labels too are used, often ones associated with blackness regardless of actual ethnicity. When we allow these definitions of disposability, we support the state’s necropolitical agenda, which dictates that the murder of certain people is unjust while the murder of others is acceptable or normal. The state does not—rather, it should not—have the right to kill anyone, armed or unarmed, whether perceived to be “guilty” or “innocent,” and reproducing state definitions of guilt and justice places all marginalized communities at risk. Blackness is clearly seen as inherently criminal and guilty. Such logic rationalizes the killing of Black people by police, vigilantes, and others in response to the imagined existential threat posed to whiteness.
Those who have been cast away by society, who are despised even among our respective oppressed peoples, understand conflict perhaps better than any of us. The outcasts must be politicized once again, just like many gangs, inmates, and subjected Black people were politicized at the root of their organizations during the Black Power and civil rights movements. Here, the OG’s, generals, and established members must use their credibility to make the needed transformations. Meanwhile those becoming politicized should become so in a way that is respectful and reflective of their knowledge and experiences. In this way, our movement efforts could be much more inclusive.
Precautionary self-defense goes far beyond traditional models of preparation. We live in a world where warfare and conflict have moved on technological fronts. Self-defense also means defending our right to privacy online and offline, and information security (also known as InfoSec) must be a priority. The Black community has an especially intimate relationship to being surveilled, experimented on, and treated as foreigners inside “our own country.”
When Black people resist repression, the state acts against any uprising (and even a peaceful politics of autonomy and self-sufficiency) like it would against a foreign enemy. Take, for example, the 1921 massacre in the Greenwood community (also known as Black Wall Street) of Tulsa, Oklahoma. There police worked in concert with white mobs, one illustration of state repression in the long history of the state’s collaboration with white vigilantism. The Greenwood community was bombed with airplanes and shot at with machine guns (these technologies were fairly new at the time). The anarchistic and noncitizen nature of blackness positions us as foreign invaders and threats to white order.[79] Enslaveability—the foundation of perpetual Black subordination and the essence of white supremacist capitalism’s intention for Black people—transforms our respective neighborhoods into war zones. In the age of drones and lethal robotics, future violence against Black people will be increasingly nonhuman. That is to say, all of the oppressive mechanisms we fight against are being shaped, installed, and programmed into the entrails of robots designed for police work. It is of the utmost importance that we understand that robots designed and programmed in a white supremacist society will carry the logics of white supremacy. We must be prepared to defend ourselves against the likes of any threat, human or nonhuman. Just like the dogs that have been sicced on Black people for quite some time, newly developed technologies will be used against us as “enemies of the state.”
We do not need an army, leaders, or advanced weaponry to organize ourselves in our respective localities. We need self-determined people willing to work together in their communities. Ultimately, state oppression is not just a mechanical function, it’s also an admission that united fronts among us are really a threat. We all wish that the issues we face could be resolved peaceably, but as George Jackson wrote: “Patience has its limits. Take it too far, & it’s cowardice.”[80] What are we still waiting for that we cannot begin to define and seize for ourselves? Pseudo-optimistic hopes of reform feel numbing, and stagnation is no longer tolerable.
The work of building a sustained movement dedicated to defending ourselves is all about love. We have tolerated abuse for far too long, and now, if we must share a house with our abuser, we should be prepared to defend ourselves. There’s no justification for the brutality we experience at the hands of white supremacist capitalism and all the forms of oppression that come with it. What we must come to understand is that a willingness to defend ourselves and our communities is rooted in politics of collective care. Rather than seeking vengeance and aiming to harm oppressors, our desire to defend ourselves should be rooted in our love for one another. We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for.
** From Here on Out
In a capitalist society, capital is produced, circulated, accumulated, hoarded, and exchanged through a variety of complex mechanisms. These mechanisms are studied by intellectuals and critical theorists and often articulated in complicated ways that are difficult to grasp. Yet when it comes to the examination of social movements, the influence of money is often overlooked. The existence of corporate interests, philanthropic funders, and elite capital makes co-optation both alluring and almost inevitable. This dilemma facing any burgeoning Black protest movement affects the potential for sustained grassroots political work and movement-building. Over the past three decades, money and funding have become increasingly central to the Black-led movement against anti-Black state violence. In the eyes of liberal funders, sympathetic celebrities, and well-intentioned middle-class people, a donation is an easy way to support the cause. The energy of an uprising can thus be diluted into a mere charity endeavor. Who ultimately stands to gain from this?
After Trayvon Martin was murdered and protests erupted around the country, many people looked for a way to lend support. Trayvon galvanized and became the face of a protest movement against racism and anti-Black violence that has dramatically altered U.S. political culture. Martin’s image became a commodity—T-shirts, hoodies, and other items declaring “Justice for Trayvon” proliferated—and some even saw the purchase of products like Skittles or Arizona Iced Tea (which Trayvon was holding when he was on his way home prior to being murdered) as acts of solidarity. The makers of Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea stayed mum about this, playing it safe by simply issuing condolences to the Martin family. Solidarity was also expressed through countless hashtag declarations that others too were Trayvon, that they felt anger and sorrow in the face of racial terror and vigilante violence. But these expressions, especially from non-Black people, meant little. Anti-Black violence is so pervasive because there is an unequal distribution of vulnerability and victimization (even within the Black community).
Following this tragedy and countless other incidents of anti-Black violence, it became clear—if it wasn’t already—that T-shirt slogans and consumption-based politics were vastly insufficient responses. Relying too heavily on these forms of protest may make people feel like they’ve done something, but it directs energies away from the fight for transformative change. Even boycotts—such one against the city of Cleveland following the non-indictment of the police officers who killed Tamir Rice—are far from an effective response despite their historic usefulness at times. People’s attention is drawn away as they respond to yet another incident of violence elsewhere.
For some time, financial interests have attempted to direct the priorities of Black protest movements and popular mobilizations. With foundation grants, however, come rules and constraints. Movements mutate into nonprofits, and activists become professionals, celebrities, and executive directors. Individuals come to represent causes that affect millions to the point that individuals’ own visibility and profile rival and even eclipse the cause. Confrontational and power-contesting grassroots politics are contained, controlled, and redefined. This is the soft power of corporate capitalism and specifically of the nonprofit industrial complex, defined by Dylan Rodriguez as “the set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements, since about the mid-1970s.”[81] Though posing as humanitarian or even relatively radical in nature, this complex is inextricably linked to the anti-Black carceral system and complements it. It is through the philanthropic championing of “the movement’s more moderate and explicitly reformist elements” (for example, anticapitalist economic justice politics being watered down to ideas of Black capitalism sold as economic self-determination) that liberatory and revolutionary visions are destroyed.[82] Compromising and neutralizing political movements is inherent to the complex’s very function.
The logic behind “if you can’t beat them, join them” is specious. Instead it is evident that disruptive Black-led movements can be tamed with money from funders who don’t truly have our best interests in mind as well as support from political institutions. The nonprofit industrial complex and liberal power structures find and reward the writers, activists, and so-called leaders (selected on our behalf) who least threaten the status quo. When movements become tax-deductible and antiracist politics are reduced to a “Donate Here” button or a T-shirt, what is there for those wielding oppressive power to really be worried about?
Scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor highlights the history of funding as a method for containing Black cultural and political movements before the civil rights movement. Taylor notes the ways elite funding sources frequently overdetermine the decision-making processes of Black progressive organizations. In her words: “Perhaps the largest issue with the foundations and funders is that these organizations also attempt to politically shape the direction of the organizations they fund.... Ultimately, funders and other philanthropic organizations help to narrow the scope of organizing to changing ‘policy’ and other measures within the existing system.”[83] Foundation money disciplines movements in practices of “professionalization,” which lead folks to emphasize and prioritize careerism and the expectation that political struggle should be externally funded.
Our movements and our work need to avoid neoliberal enticements to corporatize or commoditize or otherwise become caught in the gears of capitalist accommodationism. The problems faced by oppressed people in the United States are tragedies, not an economic and political opportunity for otherwise negligent parties and organizations. What we know about the nonprofit world and the liberal approach to activism is that it can completely detract from the sincerity of movements. Petitions, donate buttons, letters, hashtags, phone calls, and marches are surely ways to raise awareness and consciousness, but when these methods are used as the primary or even sole means of combating U.S. authoritarianism, we should begin to see them as more than just counterproductive. They can foster complacency and even serve as deterrents themselves, where mere awareness (or “awakening”) is seen as a sociopolitical victory and end in itself. Liberal activism drives the creation and maintenance of what one could describe as <em>microwaveable movements</em>, political mobilizations created to respond to problems but not actually fix them. Rather than reject capitalism, they embrace it through the murky morality of “conscious consumerism,” which lulls us into falsely believing that purchasing a product is a systems-shifting action. Though it may make us feel better to purchase products from a company that has publicly declared that Black lives matter or donates a part of their proceeds to community organizations, it changes nothing. Likewise reliance on corporate and foundational support only nurtures political dependency and does not push Black people toward liberation and self-sufficiency. (Google’s nonprofit arm has donated over $32 million to racial justice organizations since 2015, but the company has notably participated in the displacement of Black communities through gentrification.)
This is not to suggest that donors have never played a positive role in movement-building or that economic hardship is desirable for organizers. People have been increasingly using online platforms to collectivize resources or crowdfund disaster relief efforts, bail funds, and other forms of support for victims of violence or people experiencing financial hardship. But, fundamentally, how does a movement protect itself from co-option by individuals and institutions eternally endowed with the structural capacity and mandate to divert political energy and direction? This question must frame much of our future work and be centered in Black movement debates. We must ask ourselves if the chapter in our history in which we were bought and sold by capitalism is one we want to continue writing and living. The questions of what needs to be accomplished and how to move forward are complex. Creating priorities for people who come from a range of diverse backgrounds but share commonalities based on only certain parts of our identities (sometimes reducible only to skin color) is incredibly difficult. Territorial and sectarian bickering actively hinders our pathways to freedom. We want liberation, but finding what liberation truly entails means thoroughly interrogating the past, understanding how that past has enabled this present, and then imagining and beginning to actualize a future in meaningful material ways. That future must be increasingly absent of the things threatening us most in this present. Envisioning Black liberation is necessarily the act of creating a new world. As Black as resistance is and has been, there is far too much revolutionary history to be watered down.
The United States is in for a rude awakening. A system whose contours were created and shaped through terrible brutalities can only be denounced and rejected. We must overcome the system that is in place, not only for ourselves but also for the sake of the entire world, whose fate, through the globalization of capitalism, is inextricably entangled with that of the United States. The nationalism-rooted logic that drives so much of today’s activism is counterproductive in our movements. We cannot have notions of liberation predicated on positively reclaiming the “real” American values that supposedly include “liberty and justice for all,” and we cannot allow the state to misleadingly manipulate and exploit potentially liberatory endeavors. The country that we truly love or want to love does not exist yet, and what Black people generally articulate as a love of “our” country is not a love of the state. The rights that we cherish have come as a result of militant liberation work. They are a product of Black resistance and Indigenous rebellion, of colored defiance. It will surely continue to be this way because our survival has always hinged upon our people’s willingness to counter the onslaught against us.
What we believe and who we are is so much more than the identities imposed upon us, first by European empires and then within the U.S. nation-state. Our self-determination does not depend on the stability and continued existence of what we have been deluded into believing is a “free country.” Black liberation must mean the end of the United States as we understand it because this country’s existence is dependent on the production of anti-blackness to function as it does. The central question about Black liberation is not whether our claims to freedom are legitimate. As Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin says, we “have the moral and political right to rebel.”[84] The questions are when and how this collective effort will happen.
We must remember that material change-making need not necessarily be dramatic, and the expectation of change as solely sudden and cataclysmic is unreasonable. Building a new and innovative Left should be a primary concern, but it is important to remain free from the constraints of Left sectarian dogma, cults of personality, and selfish jostling to be recognized as “movement leaders.” We can organize humbly and horizontally and resist the stratification of more easily destructible movements past, and we do not need leaders in any classical sense. While infighting and schisms that plagued movements of the past provide useful examples to avoid, past successes also need to be examined without romanticizing them. If our only purpose is to mimic the revolutionaries of previous generations rather than to improve upon their theory and methods, then we risk repeating their errors and reproducing their harms. Some may argue that the need for a more singular and centralized movement is rooted. But we have seen how mass movements have been splintered and destroyed by the state’s targeting and elimination of movement leaders. We have also seen (and continue to see) the elitism, community disconnect, and pandering to systems of power that come with individuals positioning and communicating themselves as movement leaders. Given the almost innate corruptibility of movement leadership in these ways, it is worth earnestly interrogating whether we need these conventional structures at all and, if so, how we could benefit from more horizontal and autonomous organizing.
Commentary about the anarchistic nature of blackness is not necessarily advocacy for anarchist politics or ideology. Rather it describes a condition that might lend itself to a form of organization reflecting that tendency. Blackness itself is anarchistic as a result of Black exclusion from the social contract (and thus non-assimilation into the state). This existence and a reflexive understanding of our existence within a color-based caste system can predispose us to be more readily primed for radical politics, which include anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas. Why not directly challenge the authority of oppressive political institutions when our social placement primes us to do so? “Anarchism” is a misnomer, really, to describe a set of politics that challenges the necessity of systems and structures that we presume to be necessarily like the state itself, with hierarchical and authoritarian governance. “Anarchy” is not synonymous with “chaos,” and chaos is not an inevitability in a society that’s supposed to value egalitarianism and therefore should reject the imposition of stratified social organization. The idea of creating a liberatory society outside of the confines of the U.S. nation-state is so abstract that many people presume chaos. Even some Black Americans feel that our ancestors’ precolonial existence—a non-state existence prior to the European drawing of borders—was some sort or chaos or anarchy or even a more primitive means of organization. We can attribute that much to Eurocentric revisionist history and our own internationalization of that white supremacist miseducation. Any chaos attributed to African nations was largely a result not of self-organization but of colonial plunder and exploitation.
It would serve well to examine the history of trying to instill in Black people a fear of radical politics. One need only to look to the history of the “outside agitator” as a tool for dissuading Black people from interracial coalitions and left politics. During the civil rights movement, white anti-segregationists who organized voter registration drives in the South were described by conservative politicians as “agitators” for disrupting the relative peace of Jim Crow racism. In contemporary activism, the suggestion that Black Lives Matter or other Black-led racial justice organizations are engineered by George Soros is a dismissive antisemitic insinuation that Jewish people are puppeteers funding Black organizing as a part of a so-called global takeover.[85] The idea of “Jewish communists” sowing seeds of racial unrest was also a part of reactionary white discourse during the Freedom Rides of 1961, which suggested Jewish outsiders were somehow responsible for manipulating and coordinating the bus rides. If or when Black people are radicalized in mass, if uprisings turn into sustained resistance against the state, the results would be or will be transformative. This is not to impose a special responsibility for Black people to actualize freedom for everyone else (as is the subtextual commentary in liberal declarations that “Black women will save us” given their consistent progressive or practical voting decisions). Instead it suggests that Black people’s place in the fight against white supremacist capitalism is unique since so much of structural violence entails anti-blackness. Failing to recognize this undermines the potential and efficacy of any widespread interracial coalitions (e.g., historical groups like the Chicago-founded Rainbow Coalition, which included the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican leftist group, and the Young Patriots, an organization of white working-class leftists).[86]
Blackness is the anti-state just as the state is anti-Black. The oppression of Black people ought not to inspire the modification of this existing state or the aspiration to create a purportedly better state. Somehow during the formation of the U.S. settler project, anti-Black violence became a nod to the supposed beauty of the empire. Since the death of Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre (and thus the first martyr of the American Revolution), Black sacrifice for the nation has been turned into a weapon against us for the benefit of the state. As opposed to recognizing Black Americans as a group of people upon whose suffering the state is constructed, we too often understand the acquisition of Black rights and the eventual inclusion (assimilation) of Black people into the social contract as a reason to continue our fight within state apparatuses. The myth of the arc of social progress flies in the face of the reality that our rights are being actively rolled back and continuously denied. Understanding the anarchistic condition of blackness and the <em>impossibility</em> of its assimilation into the U.S. social contract, however, could be empowering. It is not up to us to castigate anyone who is or isn’t empowered by our particular set of worldviews. We do not label anyone’s philosophy right or wrong unless it reproduces or perpetuates existing oppressions. We simply hope to observe and analyze and express our concerns, rooted in the desire to achieve liberation for all Black people around the world.
<br>
As the authors of this book, we represent different aspects of blackness in this country, one of us as a descendant of enslaved Africans and the other as a child of Zimbabwean immigrants. We came together in the hopes of fulfilling something much bigger than ourselves, to offer a framework for understanding the Black condition in the United States and to challenge an increasingly standardized reaction to oppression. This imperfect yet heartfelt undertaking was intimidating, given all that we know needs to be accomplished and how much we <em>don’t</em> know about how to define completion, an arrival at the destination where we wish to go. It is possible that a people’s liberation is a perpetual project and must consistently be renewed and updated. Embracing Nina Simone’s definition of freedom as the absence of fear, we strive to overcome our own fears to offer our understanding of structural violence, ways of subverting these systems, and ways to imagine new ones.
For many people, the difficult and enduring questions about racial capitalism and white supremacy can be overwhelming. People may ask for answers as though there are distinct formulas for overcoming each form of systemic oppression. The truth is almost reductively simple. The solution to capitalism is anticapitalism. The solution to white supremacy is the active rejection of it and the dual affirmation of Indigenous sovereignty and Black humanity. We must reject the violent machinations of the settler state (e.g., mass incarceration, treaty violations, transmisogyny, and so on). Any solution to the centuries of injustices and brutality waged against us requires a long struggle, and a crucial part of that struggle is precision in identifying our position as oppressed people and the structures that produce and maintain anti-blackness. Political education that thoroughly indicts racial capitalism and its supporting systems slowly increases consensus around our oppression. With this the chances increase for effective diverse actions necessary for liberation.
Removing oppression, not reforming it, demands the creation and radicalization of new dissidents. It is an exercise in imagining new communities. Our identities will be reflected in our willingness to nurture and channel the angst, anger, dissatisfaction, and resentment felt by Black people toward institutions of injustice. Channeling collective racial trauma into world-imagining energy and analysis is one of the ways we express care for our fellow Black people and our desire to improve their conditions. Non-participation in the systems that harm us is not a choice for many of us, but we can learn to undermine them when opportunities present themselves. Meaningful steps toward liberation do not have to be dramatic. Steve Biko’s assertion that “the most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” encourages us to create new ways of understanding oppression so that we may effectively challenge it and re-create ourselves at every opportunity.
The ability to thrive as people is something beautiful, and we cannot allow ourselves to be disposed by being misused in this stale U.S. project of empire. Instead, we should be radically defining what will bring about our freedom from our unacceptable conditions. Until then rebellion will continually bring us closer to where we should rightfully be. When the work of our struggle settles beyond the turbulent waves of our current predicament, what lies in our depths can grow as a foundation to create a world free of oppressive violence, fear, and perpetual disruption.
[1] William L Patterson, <em>We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People</em> (New York City: International Publishers, 1970), v.
[2] Manfred Berg, <em>Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America</em> (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 116.
[3] Robert F. Williams, <em>Negroes with Guns</em> (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 72.
Chapter One
[4] From Frederick Douglass speech, Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852, at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” History Is a Weapon, www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html.
[5] “Enclosure” here refers to the process of privatizing and territorializing for settler use Indigenous land that had been held and used as public commons. Enclosure requires the clearance of land, and this occurred through forced removal of Native peoples by the U.S. government. One famous example is the 1830 Indian Removal Act, signed by Andrew Jackson, which led to the forced relocation of Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole people, commonly known as the “Trail of Tears,” from the southeastern United States. This process is the entry point for a Marxian analysis of primitive accumulation, which enables broader capitalistic hoarding of resources and capital, private ownership, and inequity.
[6] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” <em>Journal of Genocide Research</em> 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
[7] Cheryl L. Harris. “Whiteness as Property,” <em>Harvard Law Review</em> 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–1791.
[8] Charles Mills’s <em>The Racial Contract</em> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) characterizes this social contract as “not a contract between everybody (‘we the people’), but between people who count, the people who really are people (‘we the white people),” 3. Racism is not an aberration of a foundationally equal social contract, but the result of the stratification built into it: “From the inception, then, race is in no way an ‘afterthought,’ a ‘deviation,’ from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but rather a central shaping constituent of those ideals,” 14.
[9] Alexander Reid Ross’s <em>Against the Fascist Creep</em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017) provides a useful analysis of ideologies and conditions that enable the “fascist creep.”
[10] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Nuestra America: Reinventing a Subaltern Paradigm of Recognition and Redistribution.” <em>Theory, Culture & Society</em> 18, nos. 2–3 (2001): 185–217.
[11] See Saidiya Hartman’s <em>Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route</em> (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007) for a Black feminist genealogy and transatlantic analysis of the afterlife of slavery.
[12] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Story,” <em>Diacritics</em> 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.
[13] This is an adaption of the tautology within colonial logic as articulated in Frank Wilderson III’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” (<em>Social Identities</em> 2003) (and previously by Frantz Fanon in <em>Wretched of the Earth</em>): “The most ridiculous question a black person can ask a cop is, ‘why did you shoot me?’ How does one account for the gratuitous? The cop is at a disadvantage: ‘I shot you because you are black; you are black because I shot you.’”
[14] Saidiya V. Hartman, <em>Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America</em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[15] Isabell Lorey, <em>State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious</em> (London: Verso Books, 2015).
[16] Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” Chapter 1 in <em>Wretched of the Earth</em>, (New York City: Grove Press, 1963).
[17] The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO, began in 1956 with a mission to target, infiltrate, and destroy individuals and groups deemed subversive by the government. This included anti–Vietnam War organizers; communist and socialist groups; ethnic and race-based liberation groups like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the American Indian Movement; and individuals linked to the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, who was murdered during a COINTELPRO joint operation with the Chicago Police Department in 1969.
[18] Simone Browne’s <em>Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness</em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) is a striking interrogation of this process-phenomenon.
Chapter Two
[19] See Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariwey’s <em>African Anarchism: The History of a Movement</em> (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1997) for a useful description of African socio-economic transitions and integration into global capitalist systems. The word “communalism” is not used with any intent to idealize or homogenize the array of different precolonial social and political organizations on the continent. While these horizontal structures were common, hierarchies and inequities were also frequent within them (often along the lines of gender and sexual identities).
[20] Brian Raftopoulos and A. S. Mlambo, eds., “Introduction: The Hard Road to Becoming National,” in <em>Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008</em> (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009), xvii–xix.
[21] “Nakba” refers to the mass exodus and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 following the creation of the state of Israel that same year. In his book <em>Palestine ... It Is Something Colonial</em>, Hatem Bazian describes the expulsion as “‘<em>an original Zionist sin</em>’ that planned and saw to it the expulsion and dispossession of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants and forced them into refugee camps and permanent Diaspora.” In <em>The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine</em> (London: Oneworld Publications, 2006), Ilan Pappé describes the Nakba as a part of “the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to have an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine”: it was an implementation of “the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine” that left more than half of the country’s native population (nearly 800,000 people) displaced. Needless to say, the fact that the word “nakba” means “disaster” or “catastrophe” is tragically apt.
[22] Lorenzo Veracini, <em>Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview</em> (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3.
[23] Patrick Wolfe, <em>Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event</em> (London: Cassell, 1999), 163.
[24] On December 10, 1942, a report called “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland” published by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs-in exile was presented to United Nations member-states. The sixteen-page report provided details “concern[ed] the mass extermination of Jews in Polish territories occupied by Germany.”
[25] “Self-determining” in the context of white nationalism is placed in scare quotes because the need for white liberation and self-determination within global white supremacy is spurious.
[26] “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Tells Israelis that Jews Are ‘Over-represented,’” <em>Times of Israel</em>, August 17, 2017, www.timesofisrael.com/white-nationalist-richard-spencer-tells-israelis-that-jews-are-over-represented.
[27] Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof, <em>Women: The Last Colony</em> (London: Zed Books, 1988), 101.
[28] The Negro-simian analogy is a staple of scientific racist rhetoric. In <em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em> (1785) Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? <em>Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man</em><em>?</em>” [our emphasis].
[29] Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, <em>Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo</em> (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992), 172–175.
[30] The Malthusian trap, as offered by Thomas Malthus, states that while new technologies will improve the global standard of living, increased access to resources will be a boon to population growth and the eventual overpopulation will lead to a net shortage of resources. The response to this concern of overpopulation, namely in response to individuals perceived to be consuming more than their “fair share” of resources (e.g., people dependent upon charity, poor and disabled people, and nonwhite people), is generally policy to ensure non-growth or a population plateau. Historically these solutions have frequently included sterilization (as manifested through global health or domestic policy) or other ways of incentivizing individuals—always poor and nonwhite—to have fewer children.
[31] Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, <em>Ecofeminism</em> (London: Zed Books, 2014), 277.
[32] Ibid., 285.
[33] Ibid.
[34] The excerpt from Giroux’s <em>Stormy Weather</em> was reprinted in a <em>Truthout</em> article from September 8, 2015 entitled “Revisiting Katrina: Racist Violence and the Politics of Disposability,” [[http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32629-revisiting-hurricane-katrina-racist-violence-and-the-politics-of-disposability][www.truth-out.org]].
[35] Henry A. Giroux, “Revisiting Katrina.”
[36] Saidiya Hartman, “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” <em>Brick</em>, July 28, 2017, [[https://brickmag.com/the-terrible-beauty-of-the-slum][brickmag.com]].
[37] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” <em>Public Culture</em> 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
[38] Cody Hochstenbach and Sako Musterd, “Gentrification and the Suburbanization of Urban Poverty: Changing Urban Geographies through Boom and Bust Periods,” <em>Urban Geography</em> (2016): 1–28.
[39] “311 Reports in SF by Neighborhood 2008–2016,” Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, www.antievictionmappingproject.net/311.html.
[40] Adam Hudson. “How Punitive and Racist Policing Enforces Gentrification in San Francisco.” <em>Truthout</em>, April 24, 2017, www.truth-out.org/news/item/30392-how-punitive-and-racist-policing-enforces-gentrification-in-san-francisco.
[41] Black churches have frequently been targeted during gentrification processes, and, because these churches have been historical centerpieces of Black communities, these interactions have indelible effects on how new community relations are formed. In 2015, for example, Oakland’s Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a predominately Black church that has been in its neighborhood for sixty-five years, was slapped with over $3,500 in fines. It was served an advisory letter by the City of Oakland because the neighboring residents filed noise complaints claiming that the overly loud choir practice “may constitute a public nuisance due to its impact to the use and quiet enjoyment of the surrounding community’s property.” Per the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California at Berkeley, that particular church sits in an area that has been rapidly gentrifying (characterized by residential displacement, the influx of new residents, and skyrocketing rent costs and housing prices) over the past decade.
[42] George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” <em>Atlantic</em>, March 1982, 29–38.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, <em>Burn Down the American Plantation: Call for a Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement</em> (Combustion Books, 2017), 6.
[45] Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” <em>Social Justice</em> 30, no. 2 (2003): 18–27.
[46] See Sampson and Raudenbush’s “Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.” <em>American Journal of Sociology</em> 105, no.3 (November 1999), Harcourt and Ludwig’s “Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” <em>University of Chicago Law Review</em> 73 (2006), and Hinkle and Yang’s “A New Look into Broken Windows: What Shapes Individuals’ Perceptions of Social Disorder?” <em>Journal of Criminal Justice</em> Vol. 42, no. 1 (2014): 26–35, for just three different debunkings of Kelling and Wilson’s “broken windows” thesis of social disorder.
[47] Dorothy E. Roberts. “Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order-Maintaining Police,” <em>Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology</em> 89, no. 3 (1999): 775–836.
Chapter Three
[48] Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, <em>Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South</em> (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 21.
[49] Ibid., 17.
[50] Quoted in Adam Wasserman, <em>A People’s History of Florida 1513–1876: How Africans, Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the Sunshine State</em> (Oakland Park, FL: A. Wasserman, 2009), 205, 206.
[51] Ibid., 183.
[52] Ibid., 222.
[53] W.E.B. Du Bois, <em>The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century</em> (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1968), 286.
[54] Charles E. Cobb Jr., <em>This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible</em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2015), 124.
[55] Martin Luther King Jr., <em>A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.</em> (New York City: Harper Collins, 1990), 33.
[56] In 2016, on social media, ads surfaced for a T-shirt with a message on it that read “<em>Dear Racism, I’m not my grandparents. Sincerely, These Hands.</em>” The T-shirt raised ire among many for blatantly disregarding the history of self-defense in the Black community, while some chose to defend the message, believing it to be accurate.
[57] Ida B. Wells, <em>Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases</em> (Auckland, New Zealand: Floating Press, 2014), 36.
[58] Williams, <em>Negroes with</em> <em>Guns</em>, 72.
[59] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, <em>Anarchism and the Black Revolution</em>, Anarchist Library, 1993. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lorenzo-kom-boa-ervin-anarchism-and-the-black-revolution#toc33][theanarchistlibrary.org]].
[60] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, <em>Anarchism and the Black Revolution</em> (Denver: P&L Printing, 2011), 104.
[61] We understand patriarchy as ultimately revolving around transmisogyny because, through the deliberate mis-gendering of trans women and the invalidation of their womanhood, transmisogyny serves as a correction for manhood and masculinity. Through this violent structural understanding, trans women are perceived through violent tropes, which ultimately justifies the violence and exclusion they experience (in, for example, trans-exclusionary feminist spaces that perceive trans women as somehow “appropriating” or attempting to enter spaces to violate “real” women). This gendered violence, of course, is compounded by raced and classed identities and locations. It is unsurprising that the majority of trans women of color that have been killed in 2017 have been black trans women. On media depictions of trans women, Julia Serano writes about “deceptive” and “pathetic” archetypes in <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em> (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2007).
[62] Patricia Hill Collins. <em>Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment</em> (New York: Routledge, 2000).
[63] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” <em>Stanford Law Review</em> 43, no. 6 (Jul., 1991): 1241–1229.
[64] Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” See also: Barbara Smith’s edited anthology <em>Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology</em> (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983); <em>All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave</em> by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982); Audre Lorde’s <em>Sister Outsider</em> (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984); and <em>Women, Race, and Class</em> (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) for pre-Crenshaw classic Black feminist works that share in this framework.
[65] Sarah Haley, <em>No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity</em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 30.
[66] Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety,” <em>LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism</em> 1 (2012): 145–171.
[67] Frank B. Wilderson III, “Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of American Freedom,” <em>Theatre Survey</em> 50, no. 1 (2009): 123. In Cornel West, “Niggerization,” <em>Atlantic</em>, November 2007, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/niggerization/306285, West describes “niggerization” as “neither simply the dishonoring and devaluing of black people nor solely the economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement of them. It is also the wholesale attempt to impede democratization—to turn potential citizens into intimidated, fearful, and helpless subjects.”
[68] On defense campaigns and abolitionist organizing, Mariame Kaba writes: “Of course, defense campaigns are most effective as abolitionist strategies when they are framed in a way that speaks to the need to abolish prisons in general. The campaign cannot be framed by a message such as: ‘This is the one person who shouldn’t be in prison, but everyone else should be.’ Rather, individual cases should be framed as emblematic of the conditions faced by thousands or millions who should also be free.” (“Free Us All,” <em>New Inquiry</em>, May 8, 2017, [[https://thenewinquiry.com/free-us-all][thenewinquiry.com]]).
[69] Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and von Werlhof, <em>Women: The Last C</em><em>olony</em>, 74.
[70] In <em>Mein Kampf</em>, Adolf Hitler wrote that the United States was the “one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done.” Hitler’s praise of the U.S. genocidal conquest and oppression of nonwhites continues to inspire and animate white supremacists to this day.
[71] Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and von Werlhof, <em>Women: The Last Co</em><em>lony</em>, 97.
[72] Ibid., 103.
[73] Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers,” in <em>The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-century American Poetry</em>, ed. Rita Dove (New York: New York, 2011), 186.
[74] James Alan McPherson, “Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers (I),” <em>Atlantic</em>, May 1969, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/05/chicagos-blackstone-rangers-i/305741.
[75] Hasan Kwame Jeffries, <em>Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt</em> (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 102.
[76] Ibid., 103.
[77] Ervin, <em>Anarchism and the Black Revolu</em><em>tion</em>, 134.
[78] Jared Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control,” in <em>Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy</em>, ed. Joy James (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 212.
[79] It was reported by the <em>Guardian</em> that troops deployed to Ferguson, Missouri, during the protests after the killing of Michael Brown “used highly militarized language such as ‘enemy forces’ and ‘adversaries’ to refer to citizen demonstrators.” Joanna Walters, “Troops Referred to Ferguson Protestors as ‘Enemy Forces,’ Emails Show,” <em>Guardian</em>, April 17, 2015.
[80] George Jackson, <em>Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson</em> (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994), 61.
Chapter Four
[81] Dylan Rodriguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in <em>The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex</em>, ed. INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2007). Reprinted online at [[http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/dylan-rodriguez-the-political-logic-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/][sfonline.barnard.edu]].
[82] Ibid.
[83] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, <em>From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation</em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 179.
[84] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, “Black People Have a Right to Rebel,” <em>Libcom.org</em>, July 29, 2005, [[https://libcom.org/library/black-people-right-rebel-ervin][libcom.org]].
[85] The canard of a global Jewish conspiracy is rooted in <em>The Protocols of the Elders of Zion</em>, an antisemitic text created in tsarist Russia in 1903. It described an alleged meeting attended by Jewish leaders (the “Elders of Zion”) conspiring to take over the world. The text has twenty-four different protocols about different methods of conquest, propaganda, and control of the press, and control of financial systems that mirror contemporary tropes about Jewish control of banks and the media. Adolf Hitler endorsed these protocols in the early 1920s, and they became a part of Nazi propaganda against Jewish communities in Germany and across Europe.
[86] Amy Sonnie and James Tracy’s <em>Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times</em> (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2011) traces the history of interracial coalitions throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Among the groups highlighted in this work are the aforementioned Rainbow Coalition, as well as Rising Up Angry, the October 4<sup>th</sup> Organization, White Lightning, JOIN Community Union, and others that organized around shared ideological positions and resource provision in impoverished urban and rural areas.
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#title Fuck leftist westplaining
#author Zosia Brom
#date March 4<sup>th</sup>, 2022
#source Retrieved on 13<sup>th</sup> February 2023 from [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/][freedomnews.org.uk]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-02-13T13:24:35
#topics eastern europe, the West, critique of the left, xenophobia, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO
Earlier this week, the Polish parliamentary progressive left party, Razem, issued a statement in which they announce that they are cutting ties with two European organisations: Progressive International and DiEM25.
“The Russian aggression in Ukraine demands a lot of work from us and- unfortunately- explaining of many issues to the west European left,” Razem states on their socials, “Yesterday, our National Council decided to leave Progressive International and DiEM25. Why? For reasons incomprehensible to us, both movements did not unequivocally condemn the imperialist and aggressive actions of the Russian Federation and did not unequivocally support the sovereignty of Ukraine, dangerously relativising this war.”
I support this very polite and carefully worded statement, but this is Freedom so let me deliver this message by Razem differently: Fuck.You. Or, at the very least, Shut.The.Fuck.Up.
This text isn’t specifically about the Western anarchists. Despite an odd “Ukraine’s Nazi army” here and there, I think the anarchists are not too bad on the issues of Russian imperialism: both presently and historically. Some more work needs doing for sure but, especially compared to some other parts of the UK, and wider, Western left, I give my anarchist comrades a B minus here. You still know fuck-all about Eastern Europe and the only word in the relevant languages you are familiar with is “kurwa”, but at least most of you are not struggling to establish who is the baddie in the current situation. Now, you pathetic tankies and other cranks, it’s your attention we wish to have for the next few paragraphs.
This text isn’t exclusively about the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine either as much as it is about a much wider trend in Western leftism. You can apply the points raised below not only to the discourse around Eastern Europe and the so-called post-Soviet world. Similar themes were, disgracefully, displayed in the leftist discussion around the Syrian War, for example. Large parts of the left, supported by their glorious leader Jeremy Corbyn, struggled to identify who is in charge of the vast majority of the war crimes committed in Syria (Spoilers: it was, ofc, Assad supported by Putin). But, while back in the day I partook in some Syria solidarity actions, I also do not think it is my place to speak about this conflict. There are better people to do this, and if they are so inclined then I can say: be my guest.
This text was written with consultations with other Eastern European comrades. I am signing it with my name, mainly so you can then give me the joy of an accusation of myself being CIA-funded or something, but be informed that many East Europe leftists are on the same page here, and we have been discussing it for a while now.
This text will be a bit chaotic and I request you put up with this. Like most Eastern Europeans, I have spent the past week or so living in some kind of haze, where news cycles really last 24hrs, there is no sleep, and your phone rings constantly. Some of my friends, those from Central and Eastern Europe mostly, want to share their worries, they are organising support networks, collecting money, publishing How-To-Flee-Ukraine guides in multiple languages, cooking, driving scared and exhausted people to their temporary accommodation. Many, rightfully, share their disgust in the differences in how the Polish state and society (and wider, European states and societies) approach another “refugee crisis” just a bit further north, on the Belarusian parts of the Polish border, or the “refugee crisis” in other parts of Europe. Some are facing the very real possibility of finding themselves in combat soon. Some worry about their family currently in a war zone, some are in this war zone themselves. All are angry. All are sad to the point you are unlikely to understand.
While you are exchanging hot takes on Twitter, we are busy.
Every day, I wake up and the first thought in my head is: the Russian Army is invading Ukraine. After a few days of a sluggish parade, it looks like they are now seriously aiming at Kyiv. I have never thought I will be coming up with such sentences in a present tense. It is terrifying. You, the Westerners, will never get it. Partially because most of yous have a completely different experience of history, and it is that of living your life in a dominating country. Partially because you can’t be arsed to listen, and you never were. It is just simply inconvenient for you to give an idea that won’t fit to your already established view of the World a thought, and let’s face it, deep down most of you think that your ideas and your concepts are better, and more legit. Western exceptionalism is a worm in your brain, a worm you pretend to escape, only to parade your yankee, Queen of England ignorance around. You are better and more legit. You have better insights. You are used to being listened to. You not gonna use Google translate, because how come things are not in English, the terror!
But the Westerners call too, so I do my best explain the basic stuff I grew up with and some of the stuff that was passed on to me by the generations of trauma. Or what is the correct pronunciation of Kharkiv. Or, the worst: they want to explain to me how this is a NATO created conflict, or, if they happen to feel more generous, they come up with some kind of “both sides to blame” rhetoric. Look, Ukrainians are waving national flags, FASCISTS! If we could erase and dismiss your entire regions as easily as you do ours we absolutely would, sadly the internet is once again, also pretty much controlled by your lot. Well done – direct action right now would be log off, at least our timelines would be polluted less.
Your lack of knowledge on the issues of Russia and the rest of the world formerly behind the Iron Curtain is, frankly, astonishing, surprising and the lack of curiosity – shameful. In London and the wider UK, you got comrades coming from all these countries that joined the EU since 2004 and apparently you have never bothered to even attempt to understand what we are about. We were good for some things, mainly, in the leftist reflection of the mainstream trope of a “Polish builder” or “Lithuanian cleaner” (good, hard-working, simple people), we were good for more hands-on stuff. But never good enough for actually having opinions: apparently even about the stuff we grew up with. The unique version of Orientalism that you hold towards us, seeing as either simpletons, or racist, primitive, but honourable – you know exactly what we mean, admit it.
I came to the UK in 2004: 18 years ago. Culturally, it was and still is a very bizarre experience and maybe one day I will write another rant about it. One of the aspects of it is the tolerance, or simply embracement, of the Soviet imagery and sentiments (the sentiments and imagery, let me point out, that do not belong to you). At some point, you guys made Red London, a Stalinist page, the most popular leftist FB page in the country. You tolerate giant portraits of Stalin and Mao on Mayday marches, and fucking hell, in 2017 you tolerated the flag of something called Syrian Social Nationalist Party being sported on Mayday march in London, despite it looking fascist AF even without any knowledge on Syria.
To you it’s all a joke to put on a mug or your other merch. Fuck you.
You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of “anti-imperialist” hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond. Similarily, in your heads, NATO and other Western organisations are always on the wrong side, and always perpetrators of everything bad in this world. You could, ofc, google it, but who would bother if you have such intellectual figures as Noam Chomsky with his disgraceful, relativising stances to tell you what to think.
In the weeks coming to the Russian invasion, the Westerners contributed a fair few texts to Freedom and in them, they tried to push this narrative. I rejected them all as they were dishonest and frankly gaslight-y. In response, one of you, someone I published before, got back to me, asking “where have you been in the past 20 years?” and “‘Being Polish’ is no kind of response at all”. Ofc, in their mind, “being British” is enough to have strong opinions on the issues affecting other nations, and other people’s borders. As we know, it usually ends really well when British people do this, innit.
So, let me tell you a few things about Eastern Europeans and NATO and Russia.
We see NATO in a completely different, and I dare say much more nuanced way. We are not fans of it, and we can agree with you on many, many reasons to criticise it. But when you say “Fuck NATO” or “End NATO expansion”, what I hear is that you do not care about the safety and wellbeing of my Eastern European friends, family and comrades. You are happy to put my mum at risk for cheap political points you would not even be able to act on, you bastards!
When you talk about “expansion”, with everything this word implies, really, you are referring to this process in which Eastern Europe, for the reason of other countries making decisions over our heads in 1945, quite literally tip-toed around Russia petitioning it to allow us do what we wanted to do. Eventually, this resulted in Russia signing something called the <em>Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.</em> This happened in May 1997 and Russia, finally, agreed to what you are now calling “expansion” provided that certain conditions are met. These conditions effectively made us second-class members of NATO, but hey ho, that is all we could get and we went for it. Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, the Baltic countries followed in 2004. And for now, I want them to stay there, and it doesn’t have much to do with politics tbh. It is a self-preservation instinct, but this is another thing you will just not get. You talk more about “NATO expansion” than you talk about the fact that you are the funding members of it.
Further, you talk about how you desire to stop “NATO expansion” but you don’t really mention what, exactly, would be a viable alternative to it. This is not acceptable at all, it just shows your privilege of growing up in a country where your life story was not littered with, how exciting, tantrums and aggressions of various scales of this great, unpredictable force that assumes it can throw its way anywhere where there is no NATO. So tell me, how exactly will you assure our safety? What is this NATO alternative you are advocating for? Have you considered asking us what we think of it? Or did you just decide, as you did many times in your history, and to many other countries you felt superior towards, that it will be you, and your leaders, who will be setting the cards on the table, and we just need to submit? Did you already take out your ruler to make straight lines on the map, except that this time it will be the map of the place where I grew up?
And this is beyond Personal is Political – what is most enraging is that the people doing the Westplaining are absolutely the same ones that will cry over Trump over Twitter, but will not lift a finger to get his yilk out! You are not some soldiers, you are cowards! And when you are a coward, the only self-respect you may have is some moral virtue, or superiority. It may get you followers, but it costs lives, it costs faith, it costs political disorientation, it reproduces docility. Antifascism is protecting people from individuals with structural power. Right now that is Putin. If you are protecting his hegemony over his vast and increasing empire, if you are What Abouting into helplessness, you are part of the aggressor. So pick up a weapon, or organise a fundraiser, or welcome a refugee, but even more preferably at this point – shut the fuuuuck up. Log out, touch grass, leave this war with people that actually know what they’re fighting for. You’re fighting for likes – it’s humiliating – to the left in general, and to future generations who will be left demoralised, rather than inspired to fight for a world sans dictators. Yes, your leaders are some of them, so take care of taking them down. Sadly we seldom even trust the leaders you’d put in their place. This is the level of faith that you’re losing. Look in the mirror, destroy the imperialist exceptionalist cop inside your head. Good luck.
Or, at the very least, learn how to pronounce our names properly. JFC.
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#title Radical Left, I’m Breaking Up With You
#author Zündlumpen
#LISTtitle Radical Left, I’m Breaking Up With You
#SORTauthors Zündlumpen, Anonymous
#SORTtopics anarchy, leftism, post-left, anti-politics
#date February 25, 2020
#source https://zuendlumpen.noblogs.org/post/2021/02/07/irrlichter/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-30T17:50:21
#notes This writing appeared in the German anarchist journal <em>Zündlumpen</em>, or <em>Ignition Rags</em>. Translated by Maelstrom in 2021.
After several years as an anarchist in the radical left, because I thought that I would find people there who would share my ideas (which in some cases also happened), today I am at a point where I ask, how I could ever believe that anarchy and the radical left are somehow compatible. The fact that I succumbed to this error is also due to the natural participation of many anarchist people in the radical left movement and the naturalness with which anarchy is understood as part of left ideologies (perhaps reinforced by the protection of the constitution, which both — the radical left movement and anarchism — classifies it as “left-wing extremist”). Here, completely contrary ideas come together under the concept of the radical left. Authoritarian communists from the DKP, the FDJ or the MLPD, the party Die Linke[1] and its many sub- and youth organizations and foundations, more autonomous communist groups and libertarian communists, autonomous and post-autonomous groups and anarchists, all these people and ideas are summarized under the term “the radical left” or “the radical left movement”. So for many left-wing radical people on the radical left, anarchy is somehow part of it, even if it is ridiculed by many as naive and lacking in theory, and only has to admit (although by no means everyone who feels they belong to the radical left movement) that its criticism of authoritarianism might not be completely wrong after all. However, one sighs, shaking his head, would people who were exclusively interested in anarchy do not see that the anarchist theory does not encompass the complexity of the world, which can be seen from the fact that anarchists cannot produce a Bible like Marx’s <em>Capital</em> and do not have complicated writing intellectual authorities, who would help shape the academic discourse and would enjoy prestige in the university landscape. Apart from the fact that there are unfortunately already people who think they can make their contribution to anarchy by climbing the career ladder in the academic world while researching anarchy, it is, of course, clear that anarchists with their distrust of authorities of all kinds and their hatred of state and non-state institutions as well as the teaching industry and the trust in their own judgment and their ability to speak for themselves and only for themselves, cannot produce any such publications or theories. Anarchy is often (depending on the individual only to a certain extent) defamed, but at the same time ostensibly integrated. Spicing communism with anarchist elements is believed by many to be the most fruitful combination of the two. Anarchist ideas are falsified beyond recognition, with the exception of extra-parliamentary opposition, registered demonstrations and rallies, demands on the state, projects funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, fixed groups, Plena with a speech leader and speech list, capitalist publishers, symbolic acts such as igniting a Bengalo[2] at a demo, etc. — the whole boring repertoire of left activism — also for people who consider themselves anarchist to become the epitome of anarchist rebellion.
While many may occasionally criticize authoritarian structures within the radical left, they still believe that they basically share the same ideas. For years I believed that too, but recently I have become more and more aware that we simply have absolutely nothing in common. As the name of the radical left already suggests, it is located far to the left within a parliamentary (party) system and sees itself as an extra-parliamentary opposition. This means that people decide to stand up for their positions outside of parliament and sometimes — within a certain framework — to go beyond the limits of the legal and thus force changes within the system. For many, this does not exclude cooperation with political parties and their various sub-organizations. Of course, that still means wanting to participate in the parliamentary process, just outside the parliaments. Extra-parliamentary is not anti-parliamentary. It does not mean a radical rejection of the state and rule in general. To be “left” only makes sense in the context of a parliamentary understanding. Of course, a term is just a term, and many people who feel they belong to the radical left clearly see themselves as anarchists and reject state and rule. In addition, the radical left (as opposed to the democratic left) basically has the desire to change or even overturn the currently prevailing system. However, since the basis of the radical left is communist in nature, most of them are united by the vision of a new, “fairer” social order, which, depending on people and ideas, is diffuse to very concrete and differently authoritarian, but rarely includes a rejection of any order. In addition, many are (for the time being) satisfied with standing up for reforms or with partial struggles or probably also hope that such partial struggle movements will eventually result in a “revolutionary mass” that will shake the current system.
But can’t anarchism still be part of the radical left because of that? In asking myself this question, I find it worthwhile to reflect on how communism and anarchy — the ideas that are at the base of the radical left — differ. And that is clearly the attitude towards rule and state. Anarchism clearly rejects both, while communism finds both acceptable as means to an end. “The radical left” in contrast to communism is the more diffuse, less uniform, less authoritarian development of classical authoritarian communism, with more diversity, more different opinions, due to the experience with the real socialist regimes as well as democratic and anarchist influences, a less concrete plan than that of the old classical communist cadres. However, the basis of the radical left remains communism, even if for most of them with significantly less authoritarian ideas.
For me, however, anarchy cannot be part of the radical left, because for me anarchy means rejecting and attacking rule in any form. This also means seeing the state and all of its organs and institutions as my enemies. For me, it also means to refuse the political game in its entirety. I do not want to speak for others or advocate for the rights of a group, nor for rights in general, since the judicial system and its whole ideology is domineering. I don’t make alliances, I don’t found a group or a party, I don’t submit to any ideology or leaders, I don’t negotiate, I don’t compromise, I don’t present myself as the avant-garde or an alternative. I’m fighting for my freedom and I’m looking for accomplices that I can conspire with. I don’t want a new social order, because the idea of a social order is already authoritarian, but I want to free myself from any order and morality that restricts my actions. For me, that also means absolute uncompromisingness with regard to my anti-domination ideas. But this is not compatible with the radical left, which in large parts has no clear hostility to rule, and in some cases even welcomes rule if it is exercised by the “right” people. To see myself as part of the radical left or to locate myself accordingly or to participate means for me to give up this uncompromising attitude. It means that I mediate that anarchism and authoritarian ideas — and this also includes standing up for or against individual laws or entering into alliances with democratic or other non-domineering people — are compatible. This fundamentally contradicts the anarchist idea — and thus turns it into a hollow phrase that no longer has any content. I am not at all a fan of adorning oneself with any identity or of giving myself any fancy name and especially of submitting to a group ideology, nevertheless, I get suspicious when people have reservations about the concept of anarchism or anarchy and prefer to stay within the radical ones. Locating the left as the supposedly “looser” affiliation, because for me anarchism or anarchy means nothing more than the radical rejection of rule in any form, in contrast to the term radical left, for me that can only mean that this person is not fundamentally hostile to rule. But we certainly do not share a consensus, not even minimally, with regard to our ideas.
What good is it for me to see anarchy as part of the radical left? Why is there such an umbrella term at all that combines so many different ideas under one general name? Anarchism and communism have a long history in common. From anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism to platformism, many people have tried to combine anarchism and communism. But from the beginning, there were always anarchists who could not discover anything in common with the communists. Those who saw their individual freedom threatened by the authoritarian ideas of communism and corresponding anarchist actors and who have not yet seen themselves as part of the left-wing radical or communist “movement.” Communism as well as the communist variants of anarchism always require a “mass”, that is, a large number of people come together in order to act together with a goal and to force changes through their masses. How do you achieve such greatness, especially when the golden days of mass organizations are over? In any case, it seems to bring together practically all possible ideas under the term “radical left”. Those who follow the discourses within the radical left at least a little will probably not be able to avoid hearing the calls for unity and the warning of division over and over again. Allegedly they all have the same goal and you don’t have to get into each other’s hair over any little thing. How many times have I heard this call when I or others criticized something. Be it a criticism of Rote Hilfe, orthodox Marxists, anti-Semitism, or authoritarian behavior, especially when this criticism was also expressed in a journalistic way, I heard that one could lead such disputes “internally”, but not externally and that people still have to show solidarity with everyone. Especially in times of a shift to the right, it is currently said, for example, that all “progressive” or “emancipatory” forces should stick together. Already a clever move to first include anarchists in the universe of the radical left, in order to then counter criticism with the accusation of division and to admonish conformist behavior because only in the mass and in unity are people strong. Otherwise, one would play the “counterrevolutionary”, the “fascist” forces, or currently the AfD in the cards. A trick that communists used in revolutionary Russia from 1917 to 1921 or in Spain in 1937 and which has worked wonderfully to this day. Those who rely on countervailing power need unity and mass. Who, as I and how I understand anarchism, fights every power and stands only for himself, as an individual, distrusting any mass, any unity and despising the suffocation of substantive criticism with the help of rhetorical tricks and opposes the political game that is playing neither right nor left authoritarian assholes into the hands, but fights no matter where the political wind blows from, for their own freedom. This is one of the reasons why I am so vehemently opposed to assigning anarchy to the radical left. Because I see how people try to silence me and my criticism, admonish me to make political calculations, to use me for themselves and their ideas that are not mine. I see that people with whom I have nothing in common who represent authoritarian ideas think that WE would be on the same side of a united front. I see that many are not interested in a serious discussion about ideas, but just want to emerge from a debate as winners, just want to distinguish themselves, want to gain authority. I see all of these dynamics paralyze and stifle how people try to silence me and my criticism, admonish me to political calculation, to use me for themselves and their ideas that are not mine.
That is why I declare my break with the radical left! May she perish because of her united front mentality and her sympathy for communism and politics in general!
[1] “The Left,” referencing left-wing political parties.
[2] A German firework or flare.
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#title Will-O'-The-Wisps
#subtitle about my dissatisfaction with some tendencies and perspectives in the anti-civilizational debate
#author Zündlumpen
#LISTtitle Will-O'-The-Wisps
#SORTauthors Zündlumpen
#SORTtopics anti-civ, post-civ, post-left, civilization, anarcho-primitivism, critique, Zündlumpen, Ignition Rags
#date February 7, 2021
#source https://zuendlumpen.noblogs.org/post/2021/02/07/irrlichter/
#lang en
#notes This writing appeared in the German anarchist journal <em>Zündlumpen</em>, or <em>Ignition Rags</em>. Translated by Maelstrom in 2021.
<em>In the twilight, I stand on the edge of a gigantic bog. I cannot see what lies on the other side, behind me stretches the backdrop of the techno-industrial civilization with its factories, roads, rails, radio masts, and, above all, its cornfields, commercial forests, and meadows of fodder clover monitored and controlled by drones. But why look back? The much more relevant question is: How do I get through this bog? I've heard countless stories from people who tried before me to cross this moor to escape civilization from behind. There were those who decided to drain part of the moor in order to live there beyond the realms of civilization. They dug drainage ditches and built a monastery on this piece of land. But before they could feel the cold stone walls of this monastery as restrictive, they found themselves - as if by magic, didn't they? - in the midst of the civilized world again. It had simply expanded to the land that the drainage ditches had made and taken possession of it. And a short time later there was nothing to remind you that this piece of land had been outside the walls of civilization just a short time ago. But it is hardly worth talking about these people. At most as a short anecdote. Instead, I want to turn my gaze to those who have dared to venture out on the secret paths through the moor. On the dangerous and dark paths on which one is easily tempted to follow the glow of a tiny light that all too often has turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp. And when I tell the stories of those who are said to have lost their way, it is not to rise above them, but rather to help myself choose my own paths through this moor.</em>
*** <strong>I</strong>
I recently read a pamphlet with the rather programmatic title "[[https://bildungsbande.blackblogs.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1215/2020/11/de_AnarchismusVSprimitivismus.pdf][Anarchism vs. Primitivsm]],” a translation of a text by Brian Oliver Sheppard from 2003. Not Sheppard's only text on "primitivism" and also not Sheppard's only text with such a programmatic title. Before it was all of anarchism, which Sheppard argued against primitivism, Bakunin had to serve the same purpose. In an effusion with the almost equally epic title as that of a pop culture trash film called "Cowboys vs. Aliens", namely "Bakunin vs. the Primitivists" from the year 2000. I thought about writing a reply to Brian Oliver Sheppard's text not because I am a supporter of the "primitivism" he criticizes (whatever that is supposed to be according to his definition), but because his criticism does not actually criticize "primitivism", but rather any anti-civilizational thinking. But in the end, a text that works on such criticism is perhaps not worth the paper on which it is written. Why enter a debate in which everything is lumped together from the start? A debate in which "primitivism" appears mainly as a counter-construction to the syndicalism advocated by Sheppard. A debate in which it seems to be less about dealing with certain positions and discussing them, but rather about forming fronts (the "anarchists" on the one hand and the "primitivists" on the other) and delegitimizing certain positions on the basis of as polarizing as possible - often out of context - quotations. No, this debate will get me nowhere and probably no one else either. And yet it often seems to be debates of this kind that - not only - prevail in the German-speaking context when anti-civilizational perspectives are discussed.
In my assessment, all these debates, which for obvious reasons choose "primitivism" as the enemy, are so uninteresting for the (further) development of anti-civilizational positions because behind them there is a dogmatic pro-civilizationism that accordingly adopts rubs the (at least as perceived) dogmatic anti-civilizational positions. Sheppard's text is no exception. At the beginning of his article, he begins with a collection of quotes - supposedly representative of primitivism - discussing the effects of the introduction of electricity in different regions. It seems to him that the view that electricity is not exactly found to be positive is so strange and absurd that the only argument he tries to support his contradicting point of view is to use the "lack of electricity" as "Characteristics of Poverty“ and consequently to imply that everyone who sees electricity differently must support poverty - a term that only makes sense in the context of property and, above all, in the generally comparable context of civilization. If Sheppard does not seem to be interested in elaborating an alternative criticism of civilization and - in this example - electricity, but instead a more or less formulated criticism of electricity - even though he falsifies the lines of argument at best - simply an endorsement of electricity as an achievement, as progress, so to speak - to what extent can his attitude then be understood as anti-civilizational at all? Which he probably wouldn't say himself at all. But even further, when Sheppard in the introduction of his text quotes the anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff, who cannot bear the fact that someone “always went barefoot, [ate] raw food, mostly nuts and raisins, and [refused] a tractor because he was against machines and did not want to abuse horses [and] thus [himself] [digging up] the earth "and accordingly comes to the conclusion that" such self-proclaimed anarchists are really 'ox-cart anarchists' [ were] who opposed the organization and wanted to return to a simple life.” Can one even speak of dealing with an anarchist text here? Certainly one can understand that one or the other a certain frustration builds up again and again about the fact that others are not following their own analyzes or not sharing the same path that one believes will lead to revolution or elimination that might lead to dominion or wherever. But if someone "opposes the organization" and you do it with such harsh words - and of course I am not concerned with the words themselves…
*** <strong>II</strong>
What can (historical) science tell me about the pre-civilizing or also extra-civilizing life of people? Personally, I take the view of Fredy Perlman that the story, his story, always was that of Leviathan, is and will have been. Historiography always tries to abstract a narrative that is always told from a certain perspective and usually also at most from a handful of people and derive general validities from it. This not only denies the individuals about whom a narrative is about - a process in which Leviathan always comes in handy - but also implies, among other things, which stories are (can) be told and which are not.
I want to illustrate this with a number of examples: If one looks at Leviathan's recent history, of which there are quite a number of contemporary written records from several individuals, let's say, for example, the era of National Socialism, an epoch that was just 75 years ago and yet we will fail to tell the stories of so many people ... But there are diaries, files, eyewitness reports, and much more, some may object. Sure, but whose diaries are our priority today? Who dared to keep a diary anyway? For who was it materially possible - for example because they had access to paper and ink, or because they could write at all - to keep a diary? Who hasn't burned their diaries out of fear at some point? Who hasn't lost them on the run? Whose diaries ended up in archives, whose diaries were disposed of by a relative after their death, who had any relatives who could have looked after their estate? And the files? What should a file say about a person? She alone is a testimony of a man's administration. To believe that something else could be gained from it seems to me naive at best, and at worst to be an endorsement of the state logic of people as entities to be administered. And the eyewitness accounts? What if there weren't any witnesses? What if none of the eyewitnesses survived? What if the eyewitnesses persistently keep silent?
Other examples that are similarly obvious would be the Soviet Russian era, the Inquisition, the colonization of America, etc. But even if these examples show particularly clearly that it is ultimately the Leviathan's stories that can (still) be told today, even if one may occasionally tell them in a critical tone, the following applies to every epoch in which people lived whose stories historians will not tell. Be it because they don't want it or because they can't.
And the further back an epoch is, or the less it has been handed down, the fewer stories can be told from it that are not Leviathan. Archeology, for example, often draws its findings from grave goods. I may be forgiven - or resented - my amateurish presentation and possibly also my "ignorance" in this regard - but I do not think that one can conclude from the fact that arrowheads were found in a grave, for example, that the Buried comes from a warrior culture. Sure, maybe these arrowheads were once buried with the corpse as grave goods and were meant to express something that can be described as warrior culture. Or maybe the person in the grave was simply shot with multiple arrows and at the funeral, nobody bothered to remove the arrows - or just the tips - beforehand. Perhaps the arrowheads were also placed in the grave, but more because the person buried in his community was more of a nerd who had a gun or arrowhead obsession and these were his favorites. Or you put them in the grave because you thought that someday some grave robbers would come along and make some speculations and then you thought it was just funny to let them ponder on arrowheads. Or, or, or. In short: don't historians often simply project what they know from their epoch - or sometimes any longings - into other epochs? And not just the historians. Isn't it the whole of history/archeology/anthropology that can only make statements about its subject against the background of its own epoch?
*** <strong>III</strong>
In the search for the origins of civilization, as well as in the search for examples of a life liberated from it, the attention of many anti-civilizational debates is directed to so-called primitive communities, i.e. communities outside civilization - and also to those that existed before their emergence, as well as those who were able to oppose their grip on their margins up to today or into the last centuries. It is above all the sources of science from which the stories about various primitive societies are drawn, especially the disciplines of archeology and anthropology. But with the stories, another concept of science seems to have found its way into their interpretation: the need to systematize these stories, to bring them into harmony with one another and in the process to create a universal narrative of the primitive, which is often even called must serve as a template for its own utopia of a coexistence liberated from civilization.
I have already stated that, in my opinion, such a process constitutes Leviathan history. Here I would like to shed light on another effect that seems closely related to this process, but develops its own dynamic: the emergence of a utopia (and ideology?) Of a uniform, "primitive" way of life, which becomes the blueprint of every thought game of a non-civilized life and as such seems to favor tendencies towards organized transformation rather than chaotic destruction.
At the beginning of this process, there is the eradication of the uniqueness of every (primitive) community and every (primitive) individual. Perhaps this is because the term <em>primitive</em> itself was initially coined by civilized people as a counter-construction and with the term, possibly more of this original concept of thought found its way into the thinking of the enemies of civilization than one would like. In any case, this term unites the most diverse communities and individuals whose way of life could hardly be more different. What seems to serve a certain (albeit abstracting and scientific) purpose in the search for commonalities between those who lead a life that did not produce any civilizing institutions, loses it for good when asked about a positive outline of a non-civilized life.
Not only that, for example, in an environment in which almost every big game has been exterminated or the remaining herds - at least without civilizational management - are on the verge of extinction, the customs of "primitive" hunter communities even in the face of one in ruins lying civilization are of relatively little use. With the uniformity of these customs often invoked today, I also seem to run the risk of adopting customs distilled from a completely abstracted, economized [1] perspective, which - in this way, robbed of their connections, for example, a spiritual connection to nature, etc. - would never work anyway. But if this model of the "primitive" is not able to give me anything for my own life, why should I orientate myself towards it? Why systematize it and reconcile the unique, different stories from far apart regions as well as ages?
Sometimes such an attempt at systematization seems to me to be a kind of scientific neurosis. No wonder, like many others, I am used to generalizing stories that give me something and occasionally catch myself presenting contradicting stories almost obsessively to myself as implausible. I think beyond what one can perhaps learn about oneself in the process, there is no particular problem in such a purely individual systematization. Occasionally, especially in scientific analyzes and debates that rely particularly heavily on them, it seems to me that there is a little more lurking behind such a systematization. Wherever suggestions are made as to how we could systematically "restore" the whole world to a state that resembles the "original" state that (idealized) "primitive" societies would have found, there, in my opinion, a certain one begins To develop the logic of civilization, namely that of the complete organization of the whole world and its orientation towards a unified goal. And even if the currently emerging, planned reorganization of the world through the "green wing" of capital certainly looks very different from what some proponents of a reformist "primitivization" of society may have imagined, it seems the resemblance to be somehow striking to me.
Such tendencies seem to me to be based primarily on the fact that stories about primitive societies are systematized and woven into a primitive ideal, which in turn is supposed to serve as a blueprint for a post-civilized world. Instead of aligning my actions with such an ideal, it seems more sensible to me to start from my own condition, my individual possibilities and longings. Instead of measuring my actions by the extent to which they contribute to an (eternally) future ideal, I want to passionately pursue my longings, freed from the fetters of my domestication, in the here and now, want to destroy what restricts me in them and possibly also this or that remnant benefit civilization. Not in the form, of course, that follows the dictates of civilization itself and reproduces it, but always with a view to preserving or restoring my freedom and that of others and to destroy hierarchies and oppression.
*** <strong>IV</strong>
For many anti-civilizational critics, the notion that the system is collapsing has been one of the cornerstones of their analysis for years. And in view of nuclear waste, arsenals that could destroy the earth several times, dwindling arable land, oil reserves, rainforests, and rising CO2, who can blame them for predicting a collapse of the system. By the way, they are by no means alone. Even system-supporting institutions such as the Club of Rome have been marketing the idea of an approaching apocalypse through the limits of growth for decades with some success. And in fact, the ideas of collapse of some anti-civilization critics hardly differ in detail from those of these doomsday prophets on behalf of "green" capital. Who has copied from whom can often no longer be fully explained today, but one thing is certain: The doomsday prophets of capital do not look forward to the collapse they have systematized in joyful anticipation, but rather deal with the techno-industrial system during this to keep decay alive. Their assessments have been considered for years at international military security summits and serve as a blueprint for new counterinsurgency strategies.
All of this can certainly not be blamed for anti-civilizational collapse ideas. On the contrary: While the oracles of civilization and capital have advised governments, companies, and other civilizational warlords for decades on how to prepare for such a collapse - by the way, the most recent of these campaigns, the so-called <em>Global Reset</em> or <em>Great Reset</em> are interpreted in this way - the anti-civilizing seers of this collapse have remained astonishingly passive. If you disregard mostly institutionalized and often commercially marketed survival courses, the strategies for acting in such a collapse seem astonishingly hollowed out to me. Those who otherwise criticize the hoarding of food as a basic condition for the emergence of civilization develop surprisingly often, who suspects it, the hoarding of food as the most important perspective with regard to such a collapse. I don't want to be misunderstood here: Especially within nature, which is rugged by civilization, survival in the event of a collapse of civilization and its food production only appears possible thanks to food supplies. Accordingly, my criticism is not directed against the creation of food supplies per se, but rather against the fact that such a project quickly becomes the only perspective that lets any active attack on civilization die out in the here and now.
Because even if a discussion about strategies in such a collapse scenario certainly has its value, above all I have the feeling that too narrow a focus on a collapse is nothing more than a driver of passivity. Anyone who always aligns their own actions with what may happen in the future is pledging their own life in the present to this future. When I try to imagine what it must be like to wait for decades for civilization to finally collapse and then finally to lead a life according to my own desires, the only keyword that comes to mind is unsatisfactory! And the most important question seems to be there: Why wait? As a declared enemy, why should I wait in civilization until it one day (perhaps) abolishes itself because it collapses? Wouldn't it be much more satisfying, much less passive, and much more compatible with living my desires if I instead looked for ways to destroy civilization? And does a destroyed civilization increase the chance of a life beyond civilization immensely in comparison to a collapsed civilization that previously completely exploited or destroyed all "resources", that is, all nature?
Regardless of the fact that I want to live now and do not want to direct all my hopes for a life according to my own longings towards an indefinite future that I can hardly influence, a collapse of civilization actually seems relatively unlikely to me. On the one hand, it can almost always be said of the collapsed civilizations of the past that they were devoured by another, expanding civilization instead of simply falling apart. On the other hand, it can be observed, especially in the last few decades, that the apparatus that perhaps "Western civilization" could be called, is making enormous efforts to prevent a collapse due to limited resources. And by that, I don't just mean the ludicrous notions of expansion into the vastness of space that are being pursued more vigorously than ever before. I also mean what an economic and scientific elite is currently selling as the "pandemic opportunity": the organized reduction of resource consumption through the mere administration of people in the future while at the same time restricting what has been euphemistically termed "freedoms" up to now and their pacification with the help of technology.
Either way: Anyone who puts all their hopes on the fact that the techno-industrial system will collapse on its own in the near (or distant) future seems, in my opinion, to tend to take on the role of a passive observer and thereby deprive oneself of one's own scope of action. Instead of shifting my longings into the future in this way, I want to live them now. Instead of waiting for a system to collapse and preparing for the brutal war for survival that follows - in which the most destructive weapons are still in the hands of my enemies (military, cops, politicians, etc.), it seems to me much more interesting to look for ways to sabotage and attack the techno-industrial system here and now, so that it ultimately collapses less than is destroyed to its foundations by a voluntary act.
*** <strong>V</strong>
One of the greatest successes of the idea of (linear) time must be accounted for that progressiveness and progressivity, in common parlance, stands for a development that is viewed as positive, while regression and regressivity denotes a development that is viewed more negatively. You want to move forward, step by step towards a goal. A step backwards? A disaster! To stand still? Waste of time. One step aside? Unthinkable. Progress or regression, there doesn't seem to be anything else. And where his entire history is arranged on a timeline that brings events, which at times could hardly have less to do with each other, in a common chronology, which in turn in the various schools of thought of progress (capitalism, Marxism, liberalism, etc.) be interpreted that progress is not only the only possible, historical-materialistic direction, but that its whole history has inevitably moved towards precisely this moment of the present, then the only non-progressive way out seems to be the hamster wheel of Time to bring it to a standstill, only to then turn it backwards one revolution at a time.
But whether progress or regression, whether I turn the hamster wheel forwards or backwards, in any case a certain idea of temporality seems to hold me captive and (at least in my mind) to determine in advance what my life and its circumstances should look like. And it is by no means a coincidence that, regardless of where I might like to move on this timeline, turning the clock hands backwards or forwards is not just an effort that requires enormous force, such as can only be mobilized by the institutions of civilization , but also accordingly not only my life, but that of everyone within civilization. One could - and should even - describe the act of turning the clock (no matter whether forwards or backwards) as an act of civilization, because it would be nothing more than the organization of (human) living beings in an artificial, in itself lifeless monster, that through them brought to life, would set the clock hands in motion and thereby determine the course of all humanity, civilization, the earth (the universe?).
The concept of time that is widespread today as an independent, absolute, universal, strictly linear institution developed parallel to the emergence of modern science and the so-called "industrial revolution" [2], which also ran parallel to it. Not only Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and many other early exponents of this development had an obsession with time. Their current spiritual successors also maintain an almost obsessive relationship with this institution. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, a global leader in degrading people to robots in his company's logistics centers (something that recalls certain statements made by the forefathers of modern science), is currently building a pilgrimage site for contemporary believers in a mountain in West Texas: a gigantic clock that will measure time for the next 10,000 years. His main motivation for this project may surprise one or the other: “As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems. We're likely to need more long-term thinking."[3] The clock is a symbol of long-term planning, or in other words: temporality and long-term planning/organization as one of the fundamental dimensions of civilization.
Where the transhumanist and technology enthusiast Jeff Bezos undoubtedly means advanced planning and technological development, retrograde planning and technological re-development hardly seem to mean anything else. Technically, only a minimal change is required, such as adding or removing a gear to make a clock run backwards instead of forwards. But what would that change? Today, the watch synchronizes the civilizing efforts of an army of slave workers, meticulously and to the second from the wrist of its owner or, more recently, from the inside of their smartphones. To take possession of this instrument and from now on let time run backwards in an attempt to organize civilization away seems to me to be following a fundamental misinterpretation of this process. Isn't it the synchronization itself that defines civilization, less the direction in which it takes place? De-synchronization, on the other hand, appears to me only through the total abandonment of a certain course, through the complete destruction of the synchronization mechanisms of the temporal and the resulting chaotic and consequently by no means absolute or universal course of time - if one can then still speak of temporality at all - to be possible.
***
<em>These fragments of a critique of some widespread aspects of anti-civilizational thought in no way open up a new way out. Rather, they can be understood as a (albeit superficial) commentary on existing approaches and thus as a starting point for a renewed debate about strategies, analysis, and perspectives that may still be held.</em>
[1] A somewhat amusing example: Recently someone told me about an ERoI (Energy Return on Investment) from hunter/gatherer communities and that this is very high compared to civilized societies. I still have to smile a bit about that today. Not because that may not be true from a (today's) economic perspective, but rather because I have to imagine how one tries to explain to a member of such a hunter/gatherer community that one is because of their way of life I admire this high ERoI and (presumably) will encounter no understanding at all. In fact, it cannot be said that the person who told me about this ERoI would consider an (abstract or specific) "primitive" way of life in purely economic terms; investigated "primitive" societies and yet it seems to me to be the expression of a perspective that must have already eliminated all individuality, as well as all unique characteristics of a community, in order to be able to reach such a statement at all.
[2] An interesting treatise on this development of time can be found, for example, in John Zerzan: The Unease of Time.
[3] Direct quote: "The way I see it, people are now technologically advanced enough not only to perform extraordinary miracles, but also to cause problems on a civilizational scale. So we have to think long-term."
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#title Reflections of a Proud Anarchist Ex-Whore
#author Zuni
#date December 17, 2022
#source ‘Cum Rag’ issue 1. <[[https://www.vixen.org.au/the-cum-rag][vixen.org.au/the-cum-rag]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-02-04T00:10:16
#topics sex work, Australia, sex workers, sex worker organizations, sexual liberation, total liberation, anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, social war,
#notes <em>This is a transcribed & slightly edited version of an audio segment that was part of the radio program Music for the Global Intifada’s special episode commemorating the June 2<sup>nd</sup> International Whores Day that aired on Melbourne’s / Narrm’s community radio station 3CR in 2020. In December 2022, this essay appeared in print for the first time in the inaugral edition of ‘Cum Rag’, a Sex Worker zine produced by Sex Workers in so-called Australia & published by Vixen, the Victorian peer Sex Worker organization.</em>
When I was a girl I wanted to grow up to be a prostitute. I bet you’re thinking bullshit, no one grows up wanting to be a prostitute. I didn’t in primary school, but about two years into high school I did. By then I’d started to become more consciously aware of the disgust I held for most of society. I felt like I just didn’t fit in. I mean school, just for starters — it felt like I was being groomed for a life to accept the authority of petty tyrants enforcing arbitrary rules that made little sense. I was a vegetarian and into animal liberation and I couldn’t make sense of how my parents and peers, who claimed to love animals, were just fine with industrialized animal torture. The sexism, it was a complete onslaught, everywhere, everyday. In the home, on the TV, on the way to the shops. The blatant racism, racism had barely begun to be thought of something that needed to be questioned back then in early 80s white, suburban Australia. All this small-mindedness laid out ahead of me like a road into a preordained banality featuring death by a thousand cuts to the soul, if the boredom and tedium didn’t kill me first.
When I was fourteen we lived around the corner from an upmarket brothel. I’d see the women enter and leave and they looked so glamourous and self-possessed, they seemed to me to be living the perfect kind of fuck-you lives. By then I had begun to be sexually active and getting paid for sex seemed like a smart thing. Around the same time, my sister and I were walking down the street and this random man offered us $50 (which was quite a sum back then) if we could stand on him while he just laid there on the nature strip completely impervious to all the cars going past. The condition of payment was that we both had to stand on him for five full seconds without falling off. This was a bit of a lightning bolt. I mean who doesn’t want easy money?, and if men are this desperate and easy to please, get out the proverbial pen and sign me up! Needless to say, upper-echelon brothels weren’t my destiny. As my tastes refined over time, I found myself drawn to the tawdry glamour of the less salubrious establishments and houses off ill-repute. The kind of places other people would walk by and wonder what kind of people could possibly work there, these were the places that made me intensely curious and sought initiation into. Working on the street was intimidating at first, but like all first times, once you transgress a boundary and you really push yourself outside of your comfort zone, that transgression can feel incredibly liberating. I worked in brothels and seedy strip-joints in the Cross, resplendent with their garish kitsch decor. I got a kick out of the high strangeness of peep shows and eventually settled into BDSM houses with interiors designed to intimidate even the most seasoned punters.
I never worked terribly hard, in fact I worked the bare minimum I could get away with. I don’t think I was ever particularly good at it either. I kept my heroin habit to a minimum, in line with my ethos to work as little as possible. It was (relatively) easy money and being a junkie whore was exactly what I wanted to be. And it was FUN. I had so much fun at that time in my life and it gave me the luxury of time for all my other pursuits that I was interested in. So much of my life was like a party, squatting with friends, building community, learning more about living outside the system, making art and making mischief. It also afforded me the opportunity to take courses in subjects that interested me. However, like anything else, if you do it long enough it develops into a tedium. It’s in my past now. I’m older and my health is poor but those choices I made, to do sex work, made me who I am now — a proud, unrepentant, ex-junkie whore who is still at war with almost every value this hypocritical capitalist society espouses. It’s hugely shaped my identity as an Anarchist. My Anarchism embraces social war, unlike the male-dominated workerist-anarchist strains espoused by the largely socially conservative, moralizing and respectability-seeking types that are so common within the Anarchist landscape in this country...the type that see their role as a worker as their primary function in society and view the challenging of capitalistic patriarchal social norms as an irrelevant distraction from seizing the means of production. Or the reformists who mimic NGO culture and it’s attendant dependence on respectability and it’s reliance on clout-chasing social media personalities who themselves live well within the margins. Why can’t we have it all. Yes, fuck capitalism, but also fuck the capitalist’s social cultural policing that inevitably becomes so ingrained as to morph into the proverbial cop that lives rent-free inside your head.
I’m proud that I stood firmly in that space in which reviled women (and people of other genders) stand. I’ve always despised work culture — the ludicrous professionalism assigned to tasks with all their attendant hierarchies. All the petty competitiveness along with the absurd class judgements over what one does. So, it was my good fortune to largely escape all that nonsense for most of my working life and to have colleagues that stood alongside me outside of respectable society. A refrain I’ve heard some Sex Worker activists say is that of course no one grows up wanting to be a sex worker, well that doesn’t speak for my experience. In fact much of what many Sex Worker activists say doesn’t resonate with me, especially when it comes to making Sex Work respectable. I’m all for decrim of course, the less cops and courts you have to deal with the better. However, increasingly Sex Work orgs are seeking to destigmatize Sex Work, so much so that Sex Work is now as respectable as say a professional masseuse or a therapist is. I get that stigma causes great harm to people. However, personally I’m just not ready to let go of prostitution’s glorious outsider status just yet. Investing yourself in mainstream society and it’s values causes it’s own great harm too. It’s a fraught issue I know. Also, call me weird, but winning the right to pay tax is not my idea of liberation. Some of us want to live on the margins. How can Sex Workers continue to evolve politically to oppose this capitalist, patriarchal, colonial, fucked-up system we’re living under if their primary concern is being socially accepted by that very same system? How can Sex Worker orgs funded by governments in affluent countries keep, nurture and reflect these impulses within their communities while also satisfying the demands of their funders? I’m convinced that this must be possible, though not without a high degree of conscious awareness, determination and finesse at straddling both these opposing forces. Sex Workers do not all share the same voice. It’s up to those in Sex Worker orgs to not allow the voices of radically political whores (the very same radicalism that defines our organizing history) to be subsumed under the goals and myopic-inducing bureaucracy that are driven by government funders.
As a proud, ex-whore, I implore younger Sex Workers to reject the building of social capital, embrace your rejection of mainstream society, radicalize yourselves as fully as you can, question all the political and social values we’ve been indoctrinated into, read politically radical texts, learn from radical history, get together with your friends, fellow outcasts and comrades and make trouble, cause mischief and go fuck shit up. Be proud to be a card-carrying member of society’s beautiful and courageous rejects. Be proud that whores have historically embraced all the other radical movements around them and have led the charge for not only sexual liberation but TOTAL liberation. For it’s on the margins of society where we not only love, dance and fight, but this is our true power — living on the margins. The most effective enemies of the State are those with nothing left to lose. And once we lose it all we have the whole world to gain.
— Zuni
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#title Architecture is a Political Act
#author Zvonimir Kontrec
#LISTtitle Architecture is a Political Act
#SORTauthors Zvonimir Kontrec
#SORTtopics architecture
#date 2005
#source Translated and Retrieved on 2022-01-08 from http://www.stocitas.org/arhitektura%20je%20politicka%20izjava.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-01-08T18:15:15
In discussions about art, architecture is often avoided, especially architecture that appears after the start of the 20th century. As hard as it is for people to grasp abstract art as "Real art" while the painting of Mona Lisa occupies the spot of art in their consciousness, it is so much harder for them to recognise art in contemporary architecture when the three-dimensional abstract painting becomes their home, to find art in entirely imagined city quarters or whole cities. Of course architecture has a unique position among the arts because by its nature it is most often more tied to the material than the transcendent. Nevertheless, in order for it to materialize from the construction of an individual building to determining the interrelationship of the settlement, it must be preceded by a creative act. However it is, architecture is always geared towards society, its end user. If we imagine the living conditions of 19th century cities, the unhealthy and dysfunctional layout of rooms in blocks, congestion of the city through excessive construction in a relentless race for a greater exploitation of land, it is not hard to imagine that in such a period the advent of functionalist architecture was a political act, as was, for example, the raising of monumental buildings that serve to emphasise authority, albeit with the opposite meaning
Prior to the advent of Situationist theory architecture wasn't of particular interest to anarchist thinkers and neither was anarchism to architects. (Though the creator of the term postmodern architecture Charles Jencks, obviously acquainted with the anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin, in the 70s claims that one reason for the success of the great architects Aalto and Le Corbusier was also in a peculiar mutualist organisation of their studios although he himself presumes that they weren't acquainted with anarchism). When Kropotkin speaks of art he asserts the art of the cathedral as an expression of the collective spirit, while Reed denies it 60 years later asserting that the artistic prowess of medieval cathedrals is first and foremost a creative expression of one person, the creator of the plans to build the cathedral, so in line with that he doubts the possibility of artistic value that comes about as a result of the work of multiple planners, emphasising the individual creative act as the measure of true art.
Nevertheless the late 50s and 60s were the years in which the advent of Situationist theory moves revolution into everyday life which is in principle the space in which architecture operates, with which the communication between anarchism and architecture begins. For the Situationists modern capitalism is the primary power which transforms all social life into spectacle, and the planning of cities is one of the weapons of the capitalist state...they wanted to realise a base for experimental life through the alternative use of cities which emphasised the feelings of free play and the system of activity in art, architecture, film, literature to, in the end, free people from work and all systems of societal oppression. In the beginning they imagined unitary urbanism, which opposed specialised functions, and appeared as a result of a modernist outlook on the city as a machine, so they look at the city as a set of feelings through which we experience it. Guy Debord and Asger Jorn recommended connecting parts of Paris, which are considered to have preserved the intensity of ambience, through a network of roads through which people will “Wander” without a goal to experience the feeling of free play. The situationists suggested new uses of existing objects to free people from their symbolic meanings, for example, abandonment and partial demolition of churches, destruction of graveyards, moving of art pieces from museums and their redistribution to bars. After 1960, the situationists abandoned all urbanism as bourgeois.
Within the Situationist movement were also the works of the Dutchman Constant Nieuwenhuys who developed the social and architectural program "New Babylon" within which the "Ludic society" through play and art frees itself from the automation of productive labour of "Utilitarian" society. He's inspired by the Roma camps and the nomadic way of life and suggests connecting networks and sectors which would enable the circulation of nomads. Materials should enable the change and flexibility of internal spaces. Movement in New Babylon is imagined as moving within a labyrinth through which people would be freed from their usual experience of time and space and would create the possibility to create their own experience of time and space. He imagined sectors of living which would stand 15-20 meters above the ground so that the surface of the Earth could be used for agriculture, parks, reserves of natural resources, and the complete automation of production centers. He again imagines residential spaces as labyrinths with great numbers of spaces with irregular angles with many stairs, unnecessary angles, and open spaces. He imagines special premises for echoes, cinema screenings, a room for contemplation, for rest, for erotic games, all to create possibilities for the free play of the senses.
At the same time some other movements are appearing that promote utopian views on architecture, for example, the very well known British group Archigram, which, despite starting off from a somewhat similar political milieu, though with a stronger influence from American pop culture, fails in giving a strong conception of a society for which that architecture is aimed at.
In the 70s the term anarchitecture is born, it was related to the works of a group of artists gathered around Gordon Matta-Clark. Matta-Clark studied architecture in New York in a recognised study, after his studies he moved to the artistic neighborhood SoHo and began dealing with conceptual art, connecting it to architecture. Unlike other architects, he thought he couldn't give to society by building new structures because he himself cannot change his surroundings in a way to encourage any serious change. His idea was expressed as a process of destruction, and not structuring, that's why he focuses on existing structures in abandoned parts of the city. He made incisions on the buildings and by doing so revealed new vistas and passages. As objects of his work he chose archetypal building types; for example, if it was a rental building in a ghetto, tearing down the walls symbolised the destruction of interpersonal and class barriers which imprison the poor. In his works "Splitting" and "Bingo" he takes typical buildings from the suburbs which symbolise the "Self-imprisonment" of the upper socio-economic class. Breaking down these building types tended towards a freer and more open society. His most notorious, and at the same time the strongest work is "Window Blow-Out" (1976). Borrowing an air rifle from the painter Dennis Oppenheim he blew out the windows at the building of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, and then replaced them with photos of broken buildings in the South Bronx. His stance was that architects aren't interested enough in collapsing buildings, that is, that they're only interested in them as structures to be removed so that they can be replaced with objects that soon begin the cycle anew. He thought that contemporary architecture doesn't satisfy human needs, but instead creates dehumanised situations.
After these events in architecture, a new movement called "Deconstructivism" appeared (the works most well known to the public being the works of Frank Gehry, the Museum at Bilbao and the Dancing House in Prague). Even though these architects cite anarchism as their inspiration (alongside chaos theory and similar ideas) this isn't about the movement as much as it's about aesthetic inspiration.
Towards the end of the century situationist theories are again actualising through the appearance of new theories about consumerism, the theories of Hakim Bey on autonomous zones, and the appearance of the world wide web also brings with it new ideas on architecture, but also actualises views on its political role. It's becoming trendy to deal with the difficulties of the virtual space and new media without understanding how this strengthens the powers of that media to the extent that it begins changing our understanding of spaces and slowly separates us from physical reality. Paul Virilio suggests architecture, dance and theater as forms of resistance, which, through the material world of touches and movements, distances us from the powers of media and its manipulations.
"Culture jamming" starts appearing in connection to architecture. Groups like the Space Hijackers or Team7 are turned towards creative usage of spaces which seek to lessen the authority of architecture. Team7 for example, in one of their rebellious "constructions" on the university building of Arlington, Texas, using signs and orange nets such as those on construction sites, they successfully direct people into entering and leaving the building through a window on the second floor. As a rule, their structures end their lives after a few hours when confused citizens call the police.
Also interesting is the establishment of a "true democracy", in which the citizens, working together with the architects, seek to actively cooperate towards reconstructing their immediate surroundings, stated a group of three architects and an artist - MUF. In an initiative titled "The Can Do Scarmen Trust Initiative" tried in 1998 in Birmingham, local residents alone pointed out problems and would then work out a strategy alongside the architect, such as, for example, when a local youngster pointed to the disconnect of the place where the youth gathers together, and together with the architect worked out a plan for their spatial and functional connection. During the reconstruction of the Camden street in London, the architects created a program on the basis of the wishes of the people who used that street, residents, shop owners, passer-by and tourists, and also organized workshops for children in the local primary school.
Perhaps the most interesting person that deals with experimental architecture today is Lebbeus Woods. He's one of the rare architects of today who understands the inherent politicisation of architecture, and even writes about it in his books "Architecture is a Political Act", and the bilingual English-Croatian "War and Architecture" dedicated to the ruins of Sarajevo and Vukovar and the architectural questions which those events create. He speaks of the anarchitecture free of hierarchies in which people live wherever, and however they want. And in harmony with that he projects "Solohouses" in which live individuals who choose to live in solitude in a technological surrounding which enables isolation from other people, but also from one's own internal world. On the other side he creates proposals for free zones which should encourage interaction between free individuals. Other than for Berlin and Paris, he also created a proposal for a free zone in Zagreb, in which he seeks to disrupt the rigid structure of the city by envisioning movable constructions put down by helicopters, encouraging the freeing of people from rigid attitudes on the city and comments: "One doesn't walk on his toes on the execution ground of democracy". It should be said that he doesn't make concrete drawings, but instead sketches his visions that should serve other people as stimulus for elaboration. Even when it comes to models he lets the people creating the model do it at their own discretion. In 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo he stayed inside the city working on breaking the cultural embargo and giving suggestions on what he called "Radical Reconstruction". He believes that it's wrong to satisfy the wishes for the city to look the same as before the destruction, considering that the city changed both politically and demographically. He envisions reconstruction in three phases which preserve the traces of its destruction to varying degrees and calls them injection, scab, and scar. Also interesting are his encounters with film corporations. He was called on to work on the scenography for the film Alien III, but quickly left, unable to stand the spirit of profiteering and safe decisions. In 1995 in the film 12 Monkeys he recognised the copying of his published works. For the scene in which they torture Bruce Willis in the "interrogation room" (Woods' neo-mechanical room) he says, is the perfect example of the misuse of ideas within the framework of corporate logic.
He perhaps best describes his works with the statement "Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms".
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