Noam Chomsky, 1970
Published in For Reasons of State (1973)
A French writer, sympathetic to
anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that "anarchism has a broad back,
like paper it endures anything" -- including, he noted those whose
acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done
better."1
There have been many styles of thought and action that have been
referred to as "anarchist." It would be hopeless to try to
encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or
ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of
libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guérin
does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its
doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social
change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a
systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards
anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guérins
work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not
a fixed, self-enclosed social system but
rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which,
in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and
governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding
of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only
a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to
become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For
the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but
the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full
development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature
has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this
natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or
political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human
personality become, the more will it become the measure of the
intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown.2
One might ask what value there is in
studying a "definite trend in the historic development of
mankind" that does not articulate a specific and detailed social
theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian,
formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a
complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at
every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of
authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have
been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic
development, but that now contribute to -- rather than alleviate --
material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of
social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a
specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change
should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the
range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching
doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in
order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of
efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires
this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.
Nevertheless, at a particular time there
is every reason to develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a
specific realization of this definite trend in the historic development
of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker,
"the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from
the curse of economic exploitation and political and social
enslavement"; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of
state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather "to
reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and
build it up in the spirit of Socialism."
But only the producers themselves are
fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element
in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs must be the
task of freeing labor from all the fetters which economic exploitation
has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the institutions and
procedure of political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of
free groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned
administration of things in the interest of the community. To prepare
the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal and to
bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern
Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P.
108]
As a socialist, Rocker would take for
granted "that the serious, final, complete liberation of the
workers is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropriation
of capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labor,
including land, by the whole body of the workers."3
As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers'
organizations create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the
future itself" in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in
themselves the structure of the future society -- and he looks forward
to a social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well
as expropriate the expropriators. "What we put in place of the
government is industrial organization."
Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a
Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes
of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the
workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that
is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the
producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants,
and branches of industry are independent members of the general
economic organism and systematically carry on production and the
distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the
basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]
Rocker was writing at a moment when such
ideas had been put into practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish
Revolution. Just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the
anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written:
...in facing the problem of social
transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium,
but must depend on the organization of producers.
We have followed this norm and we find
no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in
order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to
point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an
economic organization, where private property has been abolished and
in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The
suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the
task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution
gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers
organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has
nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the
producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State
would continue.
Our federal council of economy is not
a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power.
It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with
the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a
liaison corps and nothing else.4
Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed
his disagreement with this conception as follows:
The anarchists put the thing upside down.
They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by
doing away with the political organization of the state....But to
destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by
means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its
newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry
out that economic revolution of society without which the whole
victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers
similar to those after the Paris commune.5
In contrast, the anarchists -- most
eloquently Bakunin -- warned of the dangers of the "red
bureaucracy," which would prove to be "the most vile and
terrible lie that our century has created."6
The anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: "Must even the
transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be a
collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a free organization limited
exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political
institutions having disappeared?"7
I do not pretend to know the answers to
this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a
positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will
achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin Buber
put the problem succinctly when he wrote: "One cannot in the nature
of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put
forth leaves."8
The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin
regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx.9
In one form or another, the problem has arisen repeatedly in the century
since, dividing "libertarian" from "authoritarian"
socialists.
Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red
bureaucracy, and their fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would
obviously be a gross error in interpreting the debates of a century ago
to rely on the claims of contemporary social movements as to their
historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism
as "Marxism in practice." Rather, the left-wing critique of
Bolshevism, taking account of the historical circumstances surrounding
the Russian Revolution, is far more to the point.10
The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor
movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in
exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They
became prisoners of their environment and used the international
radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon
became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The
"bourgeois" aspects of the Russian Revolution were now
discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of
international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on
tactical issues.11
If one were to seek a single leading
idea within the anarchist tradition, it should, I believe, be that
expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the Paris Commune, he
identified himself as follows:
I am a fanatic lover of liberty,
considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence,
dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely
formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an
eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the
privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the
individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by
the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois
liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men,
represented by the State which limits the rights of each -- an idea
that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero.
No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name,
liberty that consists in the full development of all the material,
intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty
that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the
laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded
as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside
legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming
the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being -- they
do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our
freedom.12
These ideas grew out of the
Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on
Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action,
Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom
is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift
to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of
industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it
is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical
humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals
that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social
order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical
liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life,
capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for
example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State
Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic
of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly,
though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond
recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism.
Humboldt's vision of a society in which
social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labor is freely
undertaken suggests the early Marx., with his discussion of the
"alienation of labor when work is external to the worker...not part
of his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but
denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally
debased," alienated labor that "casts some of the workers back
into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines," thus
depriving man of his "species character" of "free
conscious activity" and "productive life." Similarly,
Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who needs his
fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the real constructive
effort to create the social texture of future human relations."13
It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state
intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions
about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On
the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor,
competitiveness, the ideology of "possessive individualism" --
all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism
is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the
Enlightenment.
Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism
as "the confluence of the two great currents which during and since
the French revolution have found such characteristic expression in the
intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism." The
classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of
capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in
that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man." But
anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." It
insists that "socialism will be free or it will not be at all.
In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification
for the existence of anarchism."14
From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian
wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has
approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other
works.15
Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every anarchist
is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an
anarchist." Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist
manifesto" of 1865, the program of his projected international
revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must
be, to begin with, a socialist.
A consistent anarchist must oppose
private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which
is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that
labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.
As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will
"become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in
life,"16
an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need
rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one
may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of
wage-labor itself."17
A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the
stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for
developing production
mutilate the worker into a fragment of a
human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine,
make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed;
estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process
in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into
it as an independent power...18
Marx saw this not as an inevitable
concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist
relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to
"replace the detail-worker of today...reduced to a mere fragment of
a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of
labours...to whom the different social functions...are but so many modes
of giving free scope to his own natural powers."19
The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social
categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor
state" or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since
capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a
specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather
than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but
not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those
who make man an instrument to serve their ends, overlooking his
individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase.
Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under
capitalism, to create "free associations of free producers"
that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the
organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations
would serve as "a practical school of anarchism."20
If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often
quoted phrase, merely a form of "theft" -- "the
exploitation of the weak by the strong"21
-- control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how
benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under
which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in
life. Both, then, must be overcome.
In his attack on the right of private or
bureaucratic control over the means of production,, the anarchist takes
his stand with those who struggle to bring about "the third and
last emancipatory phase of history," the first having made serfs
out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the
third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that
places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary
associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).22
The imminent danger to "civilization" was noted by de
Tocqueville, also in 1848:
As long as the right of property was the
origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended --
or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society
while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the
brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail
it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as the last
undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left
standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a
different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the
working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true
that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions
properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from
being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by
little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not
merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a
government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?23
The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the
silence, and proceeded
to abolish property, the basis of all
civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that
class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the
few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to
make individual property a truth by transforming the means of
production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and
exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.24
The Commune, of course, was drowned in
blood. The nature of the "civilization" that the workers of
Paris sought to overcome in their attack on "the very foundations
of society itself" was revealed, once again, when the troops of the
Versailles government reconquered Paris from its population. As Marx
wrote, bitterly but accurately:
The civilization and justice of bourgeois
order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of
that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and
justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the
infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that
civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators....The
bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the
wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the
destruction of brick and mortar. [Ibid., pp. 74, 77]
Despite the violent destruction of the
Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris opens a new era, "that of the
definitive and complete emancipation of the popular masses and their
future true solidarity, across and despite state boundaries...the next
revolution of man, international in solidarity, will be the resurrection
of Paris" -- a revolution that the world still awaits.
The consistent anarchist, then, should
be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only
oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the
appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also
insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite
force acting in the name of the proletariat. He will, in short, oppose
the organization of production by the
Government. It means State-socialism, the command of the State
officials over production and the command of managers, scientists,
shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is
liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be
reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for
the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being
master over production.
These remarks are taken from "Five
Theses on the Class Struggle" by the left-wing Marxist Anton
Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of the council
communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist
currents.
As a further illustration, consider the
following characterization of "revolutionary Socialism":
The revolutionary Socialist denies that
State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic
despotism. We have seen why the State cannot democratically control
industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by
the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial
administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an
industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial
character. Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries
of society will be directly represented in the local and central
councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such
delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and
conversant with the needs of the community. When the central
administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every
phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or
geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative
committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to
the other will be the social revolution. The political State
throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling
classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government of
industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former
meant the economic and political subjection of the many; the latter
will mean the economic freedom of all -- it will be, therefore, a true
democracy.
This programmatic statement appears in
William Paul's The State, its Origins and Functions,
written in early 1917 -- shortly before Lenin's State and
Revolution, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul
was a member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later
one of the founders of the British Communist Party.25
His critique of state socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of
the anarchists in its principle that since state ownership and
management will lead to bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution
must replace it by the industrial organization of society with direct
workers' control. Many similar statements can be cited.
What is far more important is that these
ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action, for
example in Germany and Italy after World War I and in Spain (not only in
the agricultural countryside, but also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936.
One might argue that some form of council communism is the natural form
of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the
intuitive understanding that democracy is severely limited when the
industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether
of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard" party, or a
state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination
the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin
and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to
develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer will
remain "a fragment of a human being," degraded, a tool in the
productive process directed from above.
The phrase "spontaneous
revolutionary action" can be misleading. The anarchosyndicalists,
at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers'
organizations must create "not only the ideas but also the facts of
the future itself" in the prerevolutionary period. The
accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were
based on the patient work of many years of organization and education,
one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The
resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa
Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the
revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan
(see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the social and economic
organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes
"The Spanish revolution was relatively mature in the minds of
libertarian thinkers, as in the popular consciousness." And
workers' organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and
the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when,
with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social
revolution. In his introduction to a collection of documents on
collectivization in Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:
For many years, the anarchists and the
syndicalists of Spain considered their supreme task to be the social
transformation of the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and
groups, in their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of
the social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic
fashion.26
All of this lies behind the spontaneous
achievements, the constructive work of the Spanish Revolution.
The ideas of libertarian socialism, in
the sense described, have been submerged in the industrial societies of
the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state
socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized character in
the United States, for reasons that are not obscure).27
But there has been a rekindling of interest in the past few years. The
theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of
a radical French workers' group (Informations Correspondance Ouvrière).
The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a
paper by Walter Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers'
Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The workers' control
movement has become a significant force in England in the past few
years. It has organized several conferences and has produced a
substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active adherents
representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The
Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union, for example, has
adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic
industries under "workers' control at all levels."28
On the Continent, there are similar developments. May 1968 of course
accelerated the growing interest in council communism and related ideas
in France and Germany, as it did in England.
Given the highly conservative cast of
our highly ideological society, it is not too surprising that the United
States has been relatively untouched by these developments. But that too
may change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it possible
to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the present wave of
repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more
suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been accomplished in the
past decade, then the problem of how to organize industrial society on
truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in
the community, should become a dominant intellectual issue for those who
are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass
movement for libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed
to action.
In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin
predicted that one element in the social revolution will be "that
intelligent and truly noble part of youth which, though belonging by
birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and ardent
aspirations, adopts the cause of the people." Perhaps in the rise
of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a
fulfillment of this prophecy.
Daniel Guérin has undertaken what
he has described as a "process of rehabilitation" of
anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that "the
constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may,
when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to
undertake a new departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism."29
From the "broad back" of anarchism he has selected for more
intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as
libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework
accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions
that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin
is concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the
spontaneous actions of popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned
with social as well as intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts
to draw from the constructive achievements of the past lessons that will
enrich the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to
understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to
study the history of anarchism.
Guérin describes the anarchism of
the nineteenth century as essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth
century, for the anarchists, has been a time of "revolutionary
practice."30
Anarchism reflects that judgment. His interpretation of
anarchism consciously points toward the future. Arthur Rosenberg once
pointed out that popular revolutions characteristically seek to replace
"a feudal or centralized authority ruling by force" with some
form of communal system which "implies the destruction and
disappearance of the old form of State." Such a system will be
either socialist or an "extreme form of democracy...[which is] the
preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be
realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual
freedom." This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the
anarchists.31
This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing
tendency towards centralization in economic and political life.
A century ago Marx wrote that the
workers of Paris "felt there was but one alternative -- the
Commune, or the empire -- under whatever name it might reappear."
The empire had ruined them economically
by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial
swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially
accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant
expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically,
it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their
Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the frères
Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen
by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one
equivalent for the ruins it made -- the disappearance of the empire.32
The miserable Second Empire "was
the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had
already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of
ruling the nation."
It is not very difficult to rephrase
these remarks so that they become appropriate to the imperial systems of
1970. The problem of "freeing man from the curse of economic
exploitation and political and social enslavement" remains the
problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the
revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an
inspiration and guide.
Transcribed by Bill
Lear
Notes
This essay is a revised version of the
introduction to Daniel Guérin's Anarchism: From Theory to
Practice. In a slightly different version, it appeared in the New
York Review of Books, May 21, 1970.
1 Octave
Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 145-6.
2 Rudolf
Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 31.
3 Cited
by Rocker, ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the
next sentence are from Michael Bakunin, "The Program of the
Alliance," in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on
Anarchy, p. 255.
4 Diego
Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, p. 86. In the last
chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun, he
expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved along
these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in Spain,
see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. 1, and
references cited there; the important study by Broué and Témime
has since been translated into English. Several other important studies
have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz, L'Autogestion
dans l'Espagne révolutionaire (Paris: Editions Bélibaste,
1971); César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnols et le
pouvoir, 1868-1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston
Leval, Espagne libertaire, 1936-1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la
Révolution espagnole (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971).
See also Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution,
enlarged 1972 edition.
5 Cited
by Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, in his
discussion of Marxism and anarchism.
6
Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel Guérin,
Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, p. 119.
7 Fernand
Pelloutier, cited in Joll, Anarchists. The source is
"L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers," Les Temps
nouveaux, 1895. The full text appears in Daniel Guérin,
ed., Ni Dieu, ni Maître, an excellent historical
anthology of anarchism.
8 Martin
Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 127.
9
"No state, however democratic," Bakunin wrote, "not even
the reddest republic -- can ever give the people what they really want,
i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs
from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above,
because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr.
Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a
privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they
know what the people need and want better than do the people
themselves...." "But the people will feel no better if the
stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the people's stick'
" (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin
on Anarchy, p. 338) -- "the people's stick" being the
democratic Republic.
Marx, of course, saw the matter
differently.
For discussion of the impact of the
Paris Commune on this dispute, see Daniel Guérin's comments in Ni
Dieu, ni Maître; these also appear, slightly extended, in
his Pour un marxisme libertaire. See also note 24.
10 On
Lenin's "intellectual deviation" to the left during 1917, see
Robert Vincent Daniels, "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in
the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology," American
Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).
11 Paul
Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 295.
12
Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état,"
reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître.
Bakunin's final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition
of freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the
rationalist and romantic traditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics
and Language and Mind.
13
Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx,
p. 142, referring to comments in The Holy Family. Avineri
states that within the socialist movement only the Israeli kibbutzim
"have perceived that the modes and forms of present social
organization will determine the structure of future society." This,
however, was a characteristic position of anarchosyndicalism, as noted
earlier.
14
Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.
15 See
Guérin's works cited earlier.
16 Karl
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.
17 Karl
Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie,
cited by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this
connection, see also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control," in
Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left; and Avineri, Social
and Political Thought of Marx.
18 Karl
Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly
emphasizes that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a "frustrated
producer" than a "dissatisfied consumer" (The
Marxian Revolutionary Idea). This more radical critique of
capitalist relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the
libertarian thought of the Enlightenment.
19
Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political
Thought of Marx, p. 83.
20
Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme."
21
"Qu'est-ce que la propriété?" The phrase
"property is theft" displeased Marx, who saw in its use a
logical problem, theft presupposing the legitimate existence of
property. See Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.
22
Cited in Buber's Paths in Utopia, p. 19.
23
Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European
Socialism, p. 60.
24 Karl
Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 24. Avineri observes that
this and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer pointedly to
intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his considered
assessment was more critical than in this address.
25 For
some background, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in
Britain.
26 Collectivisations:
L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole, p. 8.
27 For
discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael
Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War. See also
discussion and references cited in my At War With Asia,
chap. 1, pp. 23-6.
28 See
Hugh Scanlon, The Way Forward for Workers' Control. Scanlon
is the president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade unions. The
institute was established as a result of the sixth Conference on
Workers' Control, March 1968, and serves as a center for disseminating
information and encouraging research.
29 Guérin,
Ni Dieu, ni Maître, introduction.
30 Ibid.
31
Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88.
32
Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62-3.
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