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Title: Notes on Anarchism
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: 1970
Language: en
Topics: philosophy
Source: Retrieved on July 29, 2009 from http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19611
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. Transcribed by Bill Lear.

Noam Chomsky

Notes on Anarchism

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.

Bibliography

Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx.

London: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Bakunin, Michael. Bakunin on Anarchy. Edited and translated by Sam

Dolgoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

— . American Power and the New Mandarins. New York: Pantheon Books,

1969.

— . At War with Asia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

Collectivisations: L’Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole.

2^(nd) ed. Toulouse: Editions C.N.T., 1965. First edition, Barcelona,

1937.

Daniels, Robert Vincent. “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).

Guérin, Daniel. Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire. Paris: Librairie

Marcel Rivière, 1959.

— . Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, translated by Mary Klopper.

New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

— . Pour un marxisme libertaire. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.

— , ed. Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

Jackson, J. Hampden. Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism. New York:

Collier Books, 1962.

Joll, James. The Anarchists. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.

Kendall, Walter. The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900 — 1921.

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Kidron, Michael Western Capitalism Since the War. London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson, 1968.

Mattick, Paul. Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy. Extending

Horizons Series. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

— . “Workers’ Control.” In The New Left: A Collection of Essays,

edited by Priscilla Long. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France, 1871. New York: International

Publishers, 1941.

Pelloutier, Fernand. “L’Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers.” Les

Temps nouveaux, 1895. Reprinted in Ni Dieu, ni Maître, edited by Daniel

Guérin. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

Richards, Vernon. Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1936 — 1939).

Enlarged ed. London: Freedom Press, 1972.

Rocker, Rudolf. Anarchosyndicalism. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

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Years’ Plan. Translated by Ian F. Morrow. New York: Russell & Russell,

1965.

Santillan, Diego Abad de. After the Revolution. New York: Greenberg

Publishers, 1937.

Scanlon, Hugh. The Way Forward for Workers’ Control. Institute for

Workers’ Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1, Nottingham, England, 1968.

Tucker, Robert C. The Marxian Revolutionary Idea. New York: W. W.

Norton & Co., 1969.

[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.