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Title: Anarchists … and proudly so Author: Amedeo Bertolo Date: October 1972 Language: en Topics: anarchist movement Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://autonomies.org/2020/10/amedeo-bertolo-a-life-in-anarchy/ Notes: A text published in “A rivista anarchica”, nº 15, October 1972
In a well known reactionary rag Corrierre della Sera, the equally well
known hack journalist Indro Montanelli (I apologise for the double
reference), in concluding his unexpected historical-literary-sentimental
article about the centenary of the Rimini Conference[1], wrote that, if
anything still exists of “the romantic, of the poetic, of the genuine”
in the Italian socialist movement, this is due to some vestige that
survives its original anarchist nature.
This is a statement that appeals to our sentimental vanity, but which,
despite it expressing a modicum of truth, is fundamentally mystifying.
It is true that the choice of anarchism, which is a global choice, also
implies in large measure (and this much more than with other merely
political choices) existential aspects. Only we, anarchists, know how
much of the “poetic” (that is, of the search for beauty, for harmony in
inter-human relations), of the “romantic” (that is, of the sentimental,
of the emotional), of the “genuine” (which goes beyond the immediate
interests of the individual or of class) can be found in our initial
choice. It is certainly a great deal. More than we wish to admit because
of a certain pudicity, a radical aversion to sentimental rhetoric and a
well founded mistrust of the “irrational”. These however are not the
characteristic features of anarchism. These are the common features of
so many human and political choices. Even the old monarchist woman who,
upon dying, left four pennies to Umberto di Savoia, saved with great
effort from her miserable pension, has something of the romantic, the
genuine and, in a certain sense, the poetic.
It is not the passionate and disinterested adherence of so many
militants famous and obscure that distinguishes anarchism (and of which
anarchism does not possess any great wealth) from other social doctrines
and, in particular, from authoritarian socialism, but an ensemble of
original scientific hypotheses and proposals of struggle; hypotheses
deepened, corrected and enriched.
Anarchism is, at the same time, a social science and a revolutionary
project. On the one hand, it is a system of interpretive hypotheses
about society and history (or about social changes); a system of
analyses which, starting from the recognition of social ills, emphasises
the nature of exploitation and oppression, of injustice and inequality,
either according to historical evolution, or by identifying their
causes. On the other hand, it is also (and above all) a revolutionary
project, that is, an organised desire to transform social reality,
substituting the hierarchical logic of the powerful (bosses, kings,
generals, bishops, presidents, other bureaucrats …) by the egalitarian
and libertarian tendency of the dominated classes (proletarians, slaves,
serfs and peasants, subjects, citizens …); an organised desire based on
operative strategic and tactical choices, derived from scientific
hypotheses assumed as fundamental.
If it is from this desire that the possibility of passing from the
observation of reality to its practical transformation derives, it is
from the validation of the social science employed for the “project”
that the possibility of making the means adequate to the ends arises, of
obtaining results in conformity with the objectives laid out.
The validation of the hypotheses in the field of the social sciences are
not verified in a “laboratory” (unless in circumscribed aspects and in
experiences limited in time and space and with results which are more
indicative than definitive), but in the “future”, that is, in the
confirmation of predictions, in posterior historical verification.
A hundred years have already passed since the anti-authoritarians of the
First International (founders of the anarchist movement) enunciated a
few basic scientific hypotheses, first in an intuitive and schematic
manner, then, with time, in a more complete and articulated form and, in
my opinion, these were a hundred years of overwhelming confirmation of
their validity and also the condemnation of the alternative
authoritarian hypotheses. One hundred years of social struggles,
tumults, revolts, revolutions, experiences, sacrifices, realisations,
disillusionment, blood, Spain, Russia, parliamentarianism, proletarian
dictatorship … which have duly verified the anarchist predictions and
refuted the Marxist’s, which verified the anti-authoritarian socialist
project and put the lie to the authoritarian’s.
Evident proofs, if only one wants to see; demonstrations woven with
facts (and what facts!) and not with mere words; proofs of the fact that
if anything scientific, rational, sensible is to be found in socialism,
then it lies with anarchism.
Among the scientific hypotheses of the pioneers of anarchism, I want to
emphasise one that I consider fundamental and from which, in my opinion,
almost all of the others or even all of them may be derived: that of
authority. Against the Marxist economic hypothesis, which, by
generalising a historically limited form, wished to attribute to the
private ownership of the means of production the cause of privileges and
exploitation, the anti-authoritarians opposed the sociological
hypothesis of the unequal and hierarchical distribution of power as the
source of social inequality.
From the Marxist hypothesis was born a revolutionary project which
exhausted the essence of the revolution in the abolition of private
property (having the abolition of “super-structural” inequalities
deriving automatically from this) and which employed authoritarian means
to do so (Party, State, etc.). From the anarchist hypothesis was born a
revolutionary project which brought together the socialisation of the
means of production with the destruction of authority in its most
complete and modern social form – the State – and which used libertarian
organisational and operational instruments (mutual agreement,
federation, etc.) in a scientific coherence between means and ends.
Against the distinction between rich and poor, between property owners
and the propertyless, the anarchists preferred and, sometimes, even
placed first (when they considered economic inequality a particular
aspect of social inequality and, in a certain initial historical phase,
a phenomena emanating from political power) the distinction between
those who govern and the governed, between those who command and those
who must obey.
The anarchist sociological hypothesis contained, in its essence,
necessary and fecund developments which could go in a thousand
directions, enriching the cultural patrimony of the anarchist movement
and of humanity as a whole (thanks also to the direct and indirect
influences on “progressive” thinkers and “reformers” of the system).
Acute criticisms of coercive institutions, pedagogy, religion and the
church, the administration of “justice”, sexual repression, the
patriarchal family are thereby developed, along with proposals to
integrate the city and the countryside, manual and intellectual work …
In many the work and practice of many psychiatrists, pedagogues,
sexologists, vanguard urbanists today can be found the libertarian
inspiration (though diluted in such a way as to lose its character as a
rupture with contemporary forms of power) of that explosive and
extremely fertile anti-authoritarian hypothesis.
In the more strictly political field, from that hypothesis were born
ways about how to destroy power (to be distributed among all by means of
a decentralised, federalist organisation, based more on agreements than
laws, more on consensuses than on coercion) and predictions about the
failure of “State socialism”.
The anarchist sociological hypothesis about the nature of social
inequality is a hypothesis which today, at the distance of a hundred
years, finds scientific confirmation in its capacity to comprehend and
interpret social-economic realities and changing forms of exploitation,
whether in the so-called socialist countries, or in the neo, late,
post-capitalist countries (according to the preferred terminology) of
the West, whereas the Marxist hypothesis explains nothing before systems
where private property no longer exists (USSR, etc.) and where power and
the privileges inherent therein were substituted by the control
exercised in private companies and the state apparatus by
techno-bureaucrats.
In effect, the anarchist sociological hypothesis is a global scientific
hypothesis, applicable always and everywhere, from the tribe to the
super-State, from the pastoral to the post-industrial economy, while the
Marxist hypothesis is only applicable (and with some reservations) to
classical capitalist society. Accordingly, the nature of classes and
class conflict can be reasonably explained, in their current reality and
generalised scientifically, by making exclusive reference to the
anarchist hypothesis.
Let us consider, almost haphazardly, a Marxist sociologist, the Pole
Stanislaw Ossowski, moderately heretical, and the social-democrat Ralf
Dahrendorf, a German sociologist and EEC technocrat.[2] The first writes
in Struttura di classe e coscienza sociale that: “The insufficiency of
the Marxist-Leninist conception of class for the analysis of the social
structure of countries with nationalised means of production was
revealed, on the one hand, in the Stalinist conception of
non-antagonistic classes and, on the other hand, in the discussions
about systems of privilege of specific groups of the populations of
these countries. But, even in relation to the capitalist countries, the
Marxist criterion of class ceased in part to be adequate […]. A
conception of class from the 19^(th) century, whether in the Marxist or
liberal interpretation, lost in many respects its actuality in the
modern world […]. Where political power can, in an open and effective
way, change the class structure, where the determining privileges for
social positioning, among which the privilege of a greater participation
in profit, are conferred by the decisions of political power, where a
considerable part, or even the greater part, of the population is framed
by hierarchical bureaucratic-type stratification, the 19^(th) century
concept of class becomes to a certain extent a greater or lesser
anachronism.”
Dahrendorf writes in Classi e conflitto di classe nella societĂ
industriale that: “Classes and class conflict always subsist when
authority is distributed in an unequal way, according to social
position. It may seem of little importance to say that in the
communities of post-capitalist society there is an unequal distribution
of power; on the contrary, this affirmation serves to sustain the
applicability of the theory of classes.”
This is why, a hundred years latter, the hypotheses and project of
Bakunin, Malatesta, Cafiero and of the other pioneers of anarchism are
still the project and the hypotheses upon which the anarchist movement
obstinately moves: the obstinacy of reason and not of sentiment. This is
why, at a hundred years distance, the fundamental contradiction between
anarchists and Marxists, between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians,
is more than ever valid and irremediable (unless by dialectical
artifices), not by fidelity to a confrontation between persons (Bakunin
and Marx), but by fidelity to a fundamental choice which has shown
itself to be factually correct. This was a choice that became a practice
of struggle and of organisation for hundreds of thousands of militants
and sympathisers, a choice that went from being a popular intuition to a
scientific intuition (let us not forget that Bakunin himself said that
he learned anarchism with the workers and artisans of the Swiss Jura)
and which revealed itself to be a “living” truth in the life and
militancy of workers, peasants, artisans, masons, miners, in the
revolutionary epics and in the anonymous daily activities of the
diffusion of ideas and of agitation, in the factories, schools, prisons,
in exile, in city squares, in clandestinity, in military barracks, in
the countryside, in avenging gestures and in the humanity of the
gestures of daily life, in explosive revolts and in the efforts at
education and self-education … No social movement saw so much
creativity, so much revolutionary imagination, such a variety of means
(in the unity between means and methods): from syndicalism to avenging
or protesting assassination (and not terrorist), from pedagogical
engagement to agitation of the masses, from propaganda to the founding
of experimental communities, from insurrection to non-violence …
The hundred years lived by the Italian and international anarchist
movement of the Rimini Conference and of the Saint-Imier Congress to
today have imparted to us an invaluable patrimony of thought and
experience, an ethical-scientific patrimony unique in its coherence and
extension in the history of human emancipation. (This is not an
inheritance thanks to which one can live from the rent or profits, or,
worse, thanks to which one survives while eagerly exhausting it, but a
capital, forgive me the metaphor, to invest in action, in struggle, in
study).
The hundred years lived by the anarchist movement were a hundred years
of defeats, of bloody repression, of mistakes, but also, and above all,
a hundred years of exemplary confirmation of the capacity of anarchism,
with a series of extremely harsh tests before which it is already almost
a victory to have survived as a movement and as a system of thought.
If, essentially, anarchist social science and the anarchist project are
more than ever valid, they also most certainly display, in their
development, a poverty and a lag which penalise anarchism; something
which can only be overcome in thought and action. But without guilt
complexes, because the anarchist movement did what it could, immersed in
struggles and acting against repression, without means, without
professionals of political thought and without complexes of inferiority.
Despite all of the academics’ contempt (which is the contempt for or
fear of all that which is simple because it is true), that science and
that project reached the highest point ever attained, until today, by
the movement of human emancipation over the course of its millennial
history of efforts and failures, of attempts and defeats.
For all of this, and even though the anarchist movement is today fragile
and contradictory, still recuperating from a crisis that almost saw it
disappear from social struggles, and even though the anarchist movement
is today, in some of its characteristics, at the same time senile and
infantile, let us be anarchists and, damn it, proudly so.
[1] The Rimini Conference took place between the 4^(th) and 6^(th) of
August of 1872, with the presence of representatives from the 21
sections of the Italian Federation of the First International, dominated
by the anti-authoritarian current associated with the ideas of Bakunin.
[T.N.]
[2] “European Economic Community” is the former name of the current
European Union. [T.N.]