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Title: In Praise of Chaos
Author: Enzo Martucci
Language: en
Topics: individualist anarchism, egoist 
Source: Retrieved on February 9 2013 from http://acephalist.org/in-praise-of-chaos/
Notes: Translated from the Italian by Stephen Marletta This article first appeared in Minus One: An Individualist Anarchist Review, #26

Enzo Martucci

In Praise of Chaos

Your text In Praise of Chaos, by Enzo Martucci

Libertarian communism is also known, particularly in Latin countries, by

the name of “anarchist communism.” It is not. On the contrary, the two

words are a contradiction in terms.

Communism signifieds a social condition in which the menas of production

and all material goods belong to the mass of the people who identify

themselves with the totality or majority of society. Everyone has their

goods disposed of according to the way decided by those who govern and

whose law all must obey.

Anarchy signifies the absence of government: that is to say, a state of

things in which the individual is not held in obedience to anyone, lives

as he pleases, and is limited only by the extent of his power. He uses

moral and material goods in the particular manner he prefers without

having to get the approval of his fellows.

One hypothesis has it that the universal realization of anarchy would

return man to nature. It would create an equilibrium- however unstable —

between individuals who- urged on by the free life, the need to survive,

and strengthened by struggle — would be able to contain each other and

live without government.

Communism, on the other hand, even if it is not authoritarian and

Marxist, but libertarian and Kropotkinist, would be a society in which

the legislative and executive power would be exercised either by

acephalous mass assemblies (Populism) or by delegates elected by the

masses (democracy). Both would mean that the individual would always be

governed by the many. And this would be a government worse than any

other, whether by one or a few, because the mass is stupid, ferocious,

tyrannical, and worse than the lowest individual.

How could libertarian communism be brought about? It could be by means

of absolute conformism to the industrial-machinist society that man has

already achieved. This would reduce all to a mechanical equality,

felling, thinking, and acting identically — in this way making control

and repression by the State unnecessary. Then there would be a

standardized anarchy.

Or it could be by means of a new organization: individuals united by

categories into federations, the federations into communes, the communes

into regions, the regions into nations, the nations into the

International. At the head of each a directive council invested with the

authority and power to make itself respected by any individual

dissenting from the decision of the majority. Hence, a State that would

not call itself a State, but would be one nonetheless complete with a

hierarchy, laws, and police.

And also with prisons. Malatesta wrote in his essay “Anarchy” that

prison-hospitals would exist in which delinquents, considered as insane,

would be “confined and cured”.

I remember that in a polemic I had with him in Umanita Nova in 1922, he

wrote: “martucci, in the name of the sacred rights of the individual,

does not want that there remains the possibility of harming a ferocious

assassin or a ravisher of children.”

I replied that the assassin and the ravisher could be left free in a

remote district or on an uninhabited island, but not made to suffer

imprisonment which would be un-anarchist. In my book The Banner of the

Anti-Christ, I wrote:

The pretense of curing, rectifying, or correcting is extremely odious

because it compels an individual who wants to remain as he is to become

what he is not and does not want to be.

Take a type like Octave Mirbeau’s Clara (see his Garden of Torture),

tell her that she must undergo a cure to destroy her perverse and

abnormal tendencies which are a danger to herself and to others. Clara

would replay that she does not want to be cured, that she intends to

stay as she is, risking every danger, because the satisfaction of her

erotic desires, excited by the smell of blood and the sight of cruelty,

gives her a satisfaction so acute, and emotion so strong, which would be

impossible if she was changed into a normal woman and restricted to the

usual insipid lusts.

Nor are normal individuals basically good, as libertarian communists

like to believe. Man by nature is a skinful of diverse instincts and

opposing tendencies, both good and bad, and such he will remain in any

kind of environment or society.

Libertarian communism is no more that a system of federalism and like

all social systems would oppress the individual with moral and judicial

restraints. Only the superficiality of a Proudhon could give such a

system the name of “anarchy” which, on the contrary, means the negation

of all government by ideas or by men.

Anarchists are opposed to authority both from below and from above. They

do not demand power for the masses, but seek to destroy all power and to

decompose tgese nasses into individuals who are masters of theier own

lives. Therefore anarchists are the most decisive enemies of all types

of communism and those who profess to be communists or socialist cannot

possibly be anarchists.

Anarchy is the aggregation of innumerable and varied forms of life lived

in solitude or in free association . It is the totality of experiences

of individual anarchists trying to find new ways of non-gregarious

living. It is the contemporary and polychromatic presence of every

diverse mode of realization used by free individuals capable of

defending their own. It is the spontaneous development of natural

beings.

In it one will find that everything is equivalence and equilibrium:

conflict and agreement, the brute and the genius, the solitary and the

promiscuous — all will have the same value. One can designate opposites

with the same word: “altus” can be top or bottom, height or depth.

In substance anarchy would mean the victory of polymorphism, which is

opposed to the monism of all social systems, including libertarian

communism.

Some maintain that in the absence of government or law we would have to

complete triumph of bellum omnium contra omnos:the war of each against

all. They are mistaken.

In a free world there would always be struggle, which is indestructible

becasue it is natural. But it would be a struggle between the

approximately equal forces of men strengthened by naturalism.

During a long polemic he had with me between 1948 and 1950, Mario

Mariani tried to demonstrate that in a condition of anarcy war among man

would increase: “If today a man has no fear of attacking his fellow and

the policeman who stands behind him, he will certainly have no fear if I

eliminate the policeman. Algebraically speaking, if A has no fear of B

despite C, he will have even less fear if B is alone.”

My reply was: Today A has no fear of B despite C because he knows that

both lack decision and force. B relinquishes them because he relies on C

to defend him. And C protects him not because he has any lively feeling

or strong interest, but only because it is his trade. Therefore he does

not inspire much fear. Hundreds of police in Paris failed to capture

Jules Bonnot, the illegalist, alive and had to launch an attack on his

house in order to kill him. It is true that behind this protection there

is the apparatus of social repression with formidable means at its

disposal, but today’s delinquent underrates the collective’s

organization and always hopes to escape it or avoid detection.

Again, if A finds B as resolute as he, then their forces will be

equivalent. The case is clear and does not allow illusion. At that

moment, the dispute between them will be resolved.

Anarchy, then, is neither continual warfare which would weary everyone,

nor social harmony which would weaken everyone if it were possible

(which it is not, due to the diversity of individual types and their

conflicting needs and aspirations).

If history is not an infinite process, as I firmly believe, than when it

exhausts its cycle it will disappear opening the way to anarchy.

If, on the other hand, history endures, then anarchism will remain —

that is, eternal revolt of the individual against a stifling society.

Thus proving the immortality of that “tendency to chaos” that the lawyer

d’Anto finds so deplorable, but which is to me worthy of every praise.

Between association and organization there is the same difference as

between a free union and marriage. The first I can dissolve when I wish,

the second I cannot dissolve or dissolve only under conditions and with

certain permissions.

It is not by organizing into parties and syndicates that one struggles

for anarchy, nor by mass action which, as has been shown, overthrows one

barracks only to create another. It is by the revolt of individuals

alone or in small groups, who oppose society, impede its functioning and

cause its disintegration.

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