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``Notes on Anarchism''
in
_For Reasons of State_
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Noam Chomsky, 1970
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Transcribed by rael@ll.mit.edu (Bill Lear)
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 Gu\'erin 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 Gu\'erins 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 Gu\'erin has approached the study of anarchism in _Anarchism_ and
other works.[15] Gu\'erin 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. Gu\'erin 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 Ouvri\`ere_). 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 Gu\'erin 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. Gu\'erin 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.
Gu\'erin 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 _fr\`eres 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.