💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › amedee-dunois-anarchism-organization.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:44:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Anarchism & Organization
Author: Amédée Dunois
Date: 1907
Language: en
Topics: anarchist organization
Source: Retrieved on 14th October 2021 from https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/amedee-dunois-anarchism-organization/
Notes: Introduction by Robert Graham.

Amédée Dunois

Anarchism & Organization

In Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas,

I included excerpts from the historic debate between Errico Malatesta

and Pierre Monatte on revolutionary syndicalism at the 1907

International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. Also debated at the

Congress was the relationship between anarchism and organization. Two of

the most eloquent speakers were the anarcho-syndicalist, Amédée Dunois

(1878–1945), and Malatesta.

At the time of the Congress, Dunois was a member of the French

revolutionary syndicalist organization, the CGT, and a contributor to

Jean Grave’s anarchist communist paper, Les Temps Nouveaux. A mere five

years later, he was to renounce anarchism, joining the French Section of

the Workers’ International (SFIO), the French socialist party affiliated

with the Second International, which was dominated by the Marxist social

democrats Dunois criticizes in his speech (the anarchists had been

excluded from the Second International in 1896 because they refused to

recognize “participation in legislative and parliamentary activity as a

necessary means” for achieving socialism). Unlike the majority of the

SFIO and the other political parties affiliated with the Second

International, Dunois opposed the First World War. After the war, he

helped found the French Communist Party (PCF), which he left in 1927

after it came under the control of Stalinists, rejoining the SFIO in

1930. He remained in France during the Second World War, where he worked

in the Resistance. In 1944, he was captured by the Gestapo, eventually

being sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he perished in

1945, a few months before the war ended.

The translation is by Nestor McNab and is taken from Studies for a

Libertarian Alternative: The International Anarchist Congress,

Amsterdam, 1907, published by the Anarchist Communist Federation in

Italy (Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici – FdCA); paperback edition

available from AK Press.

---

It is not long since our comrades were almost unanimous in their clear

hostility towards any idea of organization. The question we are dealing

with today would, then, have raised endless protests from them, and its

supporters would have been vehemently accused of a hidden agenda and

authoritarianism.

They were times when anarchists, isolated from each other and even more

so from the working class, seemed to have lost all social feeling; in

which anarchists, with their unceasing appeals for the spiritual

liberation of the individual, were seen as the supreme manifestation of

the old individualism of the great bourgeois theoreticians of the past.

Individual actions and individual initiative were thought to suffice for

everything; and they applauded [Ibsen’s play] “An Enemy of the People”

when it declared that a man alone is the most powerful of all. But they

did not think of one thing: that Ibsen’s concept was never that of a

revolutionary, in the sense that we give this word, but of a moralist

primarily concerned with establishing a new moral elite within the very

breast of the old society.

In past years, generally speaking, little attention was paid to studying

the concrete matters of economic life, of the various phenomena of

production and exchange, and some of our people, whose race has not yet

disappeared, went so far as to deny the existence of that basic

phenomenon — the class struggle — to the point of no longer

distinguishing in the present society, in the manner of the pure

democrats, anything except differences of opinion, which anarchist

propaganda had to prepare individuals for, as a way of training them for

theoretical discussion.

In its origins, anarchism was nothing more than a concrete protest

against opportunist tendencies and social democracy’s authoritarian way

of acting; and in this regard it can be said to have carried out a

useful function in the social movement of the past twenty-five years. If

socialism as a whole, as a revolutionary idea, has survived the

progressive bourgeoisification of social democracy, it is undoubtedly

due to the anarchists.

Why have anarchists not been content to support the principle of

socialism and federalism against the bare-faced deviations of the

[social democratic] cavaliers of the conquest of political power? Why

has time brought them to the ambition of re-building a whole new

ideology all over again, faced with parliamentary and reformist

socialism?

We cannot but recognize it: this ideological attempt was not always an

easy one. More often than not we have limited ourselves to consigning to

the flames that which social democracy worshipped, and to worshipping

that which burned. That is how unwittingly and without even realizing

it, so many anarchists were able to lose sight of the essentially

practical and working class nature of socialism in general and anarchism

in particular, neither of which have ever been anything other than the

theoretical expression of the spontaneous resistance of the workers

against the oppression by the bourgeois regime. It happened to the

anarchists as it happened to German philosophical socialism before 1848

— as we can read in the [Marx & Engels’] Communist Manifesto — which

prided itself on being able to remain “in contempt of all class

struggles,” defending “not the interests of the proletariat, but the

interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class,

has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical

fantasy”.

Thus, many of our people came back curiously towards idealism on the one

hand and individualism on the other. And there was renewed interest in

the old 1848 themes of justice, liberty, brotherhood and the

emancipatory omnipotence of the Idea of the world. At the same time the

Individual was exalted, in the English manner, against the State and any

form of organization came, more or less openly, to be viewed as a form

of oppression and mental exploitation.

Certainly, this state of mind was never absolutely unanimous. But that

does not take away from the fact that it is responsible, for the most

part, for the absence of an organized, coherent anarchist movement. The

exaggerated fear of alienating our own free wills at the hands of some

new collective body stopped us above all from uniting.

It is true that there existed among us “social study groups”, but we

know how ephemeral and precarious they were: born out of individual

caprice, these groups were destined to disappear with it; those who made

them up did not feel united enough, and the first difficulty they

encountered caused them to split up. Furthermore, these groups do not

seem to have ever had a clear notion of their goal. Now, the goal of an

organization is at one and the same time thought and action. In my

experience, however, those groups did not act at all: they disputed. And

many reproached them for building all those little chapels, those

talking shops.

What lies at the root of the fact that anarchist opinion now seems to be

changing with regard to the question of organization?

There are two reasons for this:

The first is the example from abroad. There are small permanent

organizations in England, Holland, Germany, Bohemia, Romandie and Italy

which have been operating for several years now, without the anarchist

idea having visibly suffered for this. It is true that in France we do

not have a great deal of information on the constitution and life of

these organizations; it would be desirable to investigate this.

The second cause is much more important. It consists of the decisive

evolution that the minds and practical habits of anarchists have been

undergoing more or less everywhere for the last seven years or so, which

has led them to join the workers’ movement actively and participate in

the people’s lives.

In a word, we have overcome the gap between the pure idea, which can so

easily turn into dogma, and real life.

The basic result of this has been that we have become less and less

interested in the sociological abstractions of yore and more and more

interested in the practical movement, in action. Proof is the great

importance that revolutionary syndicalism and anti-militarism, for

example, have acquired for us in recent years.

Another result of our participation in the movement, also very

important, has been that theoretical anarchism itself has gradually

sharpened itself and become alive through contact with real life, that

eternal fountain of thought. Anarchism in our eyes is no longer a

general conception of the world, an ideal for existence, a rebellion of

the spirit against everything that is foul, impure and beastly in life;

it is also and above all a revolutionary theory, a concrete programme of

destruction and social re-organization. Revolutionary anarchism — and I

emphasize the word “revolutionary” — essentially seeks to participate in

the spontaneous movement of the masses, working towards what Kropotkin

so neatly called the “Conquest of Bread” [Volume One, Selection 33].

Now, it is only from the point of view of revolutionary anarchism that

the question of anarchist organization can be dealt with.

The enemies of organization today are of two sorts.

Firstly, there are those who are obstinately and systematically hostile

to any sort of organization. They are the individualists. There can be

found among them the idea popularized by Rousseau that society is evil,

that it is always a limitation on the independence of the individual.

The smallest amount of society possible, or no society at all: that is

their dream, an absurd dream, a romantic dream that brings us back to

the strangest follies of Rousseau’s literature.

Do we need to say and to demonstrate that anarchism is not

individualism, then? Historically speaking, anarchism was born, through

the development of socialism, in the congresses of the International, in

other words, from the workers’ movement itself [Volume One, Chapters 5 &

6]. And in fact, logically, anarchy means society organized without

political authority. I said organized. On this point all the anarchists

— Proudhon, Bakunin, those of the Jura Federation, Kropotkin — are in

agreement. Far from treating organization and government as equal,

Proudhon never ceased to emphasize their incompatibility: “The producer

is incompatible with government,” he says in the General Idea of the

Revolution in the 19^(th) Century, “organization is opposed to

government” [Volume One, Selection 12].

Even Marx himself, whose disciples now seek to hide the anarchist side

to his doctrine, defined anarchy thus: “All Socialists understand by

Anarchy the following: that once the goal of the proletarian movement —

the abolition of classes — is reached, the power of the State — which

serves to maintain the large producing majority under the yoke of a

small exploiting minority — disappears and the functions of government

are transformed into simple administrative functions”. In other words,

anarchy is not the negation of organization but only of the governing

function of the power of the State.

No, anarchism is not individualist, but basically federalist. Federalism

is essential to anarchism: it is in fact the very essence of anarchism.

I would happily define anarchism as complete federalism, the universal

extension of the idea of the free contract.

After all, I cannot see how an anarchist organization could damage the

individual development of its members. No one would be forced to join,

just as no one would be forced to leave once they had joined. So what is

an anarchist federation? Several comrades from a particular region,

Romandie for example, having established the impotence of isolated

forces, of piecemeal action, agree one fine day to remain in continuing

contact with each other, to unite their forces with the aim of working

to spread communist, anarchist and revolutionary ideas and of

participating in public events through their collective action. Do they

thus create a new entity whose designated prey is the individual? By no

means. They very simply, and for a precise goal, band together their

ideas, their will and their forces, and from the resulting collective

potentiality, each gains some advantage.

But we also have, as I said earlier, another sort of adversary. They are

those who, despite being supporters of workers’ organizations founded on

an identity of interests, prove to be hostile — or at least indifferent

— to any organization based on an identity of aspirations, feelings and

principles; they are, in a word, the [pure] syndicalists.

Let us examine their objections. The existence in France of a workers’

movement with a revolutionary and almost anarchist outlook is, in that

country, currently the greatest obstacle that any attempt at anarchist

organization risks foundering on — I do not wish to say being wrecked

on. And this important historical fact imposes certain precautions on

us, which do not affect, in my opinion, our comrades in other countries.

The workers’ movement today, the syndicalists observe, offers anarchists

an almost unlimited field of action. Whereas idea-based groups, little

sanctuaries into which only the initiated may enter, cannot hope to grow

indefinitely, the workers’ organization, on the other hand, is a widely

accessible association; it is not a temple whose doors are closed, but a

public arena, a forum open to all workers without distinction of sex,

race or ideology, and therefore perfectly adapted to encompassing the

whole proletariat within its flexible and mobile ranks.

Now, the syndicalists continue, it is there in the workers’ unions that

anarchists must be. The workers’ union is the living bud of the future

society; it is the former which will pave the way for the latter. The

error is made in staying within one’s own four walls, among the other

initiates, chewing the same questions of doctrine over and over again,

always moving within the same circle of ideas. We must not, under any

pretext, separate ourselves form the people, for no matter how backward

and limited the people may be, it is they, and not the ideologue, who

are the indispensable driving force of every social revolution. Do we

perhaps, like the social democrats, have any interests we wish to

promote other than those of the great working mass? Party, sect or

factional interests? Is it up to the people to come to us or is it we

who must go to them, living their lives, earning their trust and

stimulating them with both our words and our example into resistance,

rebellion, revolution?

This is how the syndicalists talk. But I do not see how their objections

have any value against our project to organize ourselves. On the

contrary. I see clearly that if they had any value, it would also be

against anarchism itself, as a doctrine that seeks to be distinct from

syndicalism and refuses to allow itself to become absorbed into it.

Organized or not, anarchists (by which I mean those of our tendency, who

do not arbitrarily separate anarchism from the proletariat) do not by

any means expect that they are entitled to act in the role of ‘supreme

saviours”, as the song goes. We willingly assign pride of place in the

field of action to the workers’ movement, convinced as we have been for

so long that the emancipation of the workers will be at the hands of

those concerned or it will not be.

In other words, in our opinion the syndicate must not just have a purely

corporative, trade function as the Guesdist socialists intend it, and

with them some anarchists who cling to now outdated formulae. The time

for pure corporativism is ended: this is a fact that could in principle

be contrary to previous concepts, but which must be accepted with all

its consequences. Yes, the corporative spirit is tending more and more

towards becoming an anomaly, an anachronism, and is making room for the

spirit of class. And this, mark my words, is not thanks to Griffuelhes,

nor to Pouget — it is a result of action. In fact it is the needs of

action that have obliged syndicalism to lift up its head and widen its

conceptions. Nowadays the workers’ union is on the road to becoming for

proletarians what the State is for the bourgeoisie: the political

institution par excellence; an essential instrument in the struggle

against capital, a weapon of defence or attack according to the

situation.

Our task as anarchists, the most advanced, the boldest and the most

uninhibited sector of the militant proletariat, is to stay constantly by

its side, to fight the same battle among its ranks, to defend it against

itself, not necessarily the least dangerous enemy. In other words, we

want to provide this enormous moving mass that is the modern

proletariat, I will not say with a philosophy and an ideal, something

that could seem presumptuous, but with a goal and the means of action.

Far be it from us therefore the inept idea of wanting to isolate

ourselves from the proletariat; that would be, we know only too well, to

reduce ourselves to the impotence of proud ideologies, of abstractions

empty of any ideal. Organized or not organized, then, the anarchists

will remain true to their role of educators, stimulators and guides of

the working masses. And if we are today of a mind to associate into

groups in neighbourhoods, towns, regions or countries, and to federate

these groups, it is above all in order to give our union action greater

strength and continuity.

What is most often missing in those of us who fight within the world of

labour, is the feeling of being supported. Social democratic

syndicalists have behind them the constant organized power of the party

from which they sometimes receive their watchwords and at all times

their inspiration. Anarchist syndicalists on the other hand are

abandoned unto themselves and, outside the union, do not have any real

links between them or to their other comrades; they do not feel any

support behind them and they receive no help. So, we wish to create this

link, to provide this constant support; and I am personally convinced

that our union activities cannot but benefit both in energy and in

intelligence. And the stronger we are — and we will only become strong

by organizing ourselves — the stronger will be the flow of ideas that we

can send through the workers’ movement, which will thus become slowly

impregnated with the anarchist spirit.

But will these groups of anarchist workers, which we would hope to see

created in the near future, have no other role than to influence the

great proletarian masses indirectly, by means of a militant elite, to

drive them systematically into heroic resolutions, in a word to prepare

the popular revolt? Will our groups have to limit themselves to

perfecting the education of militants, to keep the revolutionary fever

alive in them, to allow them to meet each other, to exchange ideas, to

help each other at any time?

In other words, will they have their own action to carry out directly?

I believe so.

The social revolution, whether one imagines it in the guise of a general

strike or an armed insurrection, can only be the work of the masses who

must benefit from it. But every mass movement is accompanied by acts

whose very nature — dare I say, whose technical nature — implies that

they be carried out by a small number of people, the most perspicacious

and daring sector of the mass movement. During the revolutionary period,

in each neighbourhood, in each town, in each province, our anarchist

groups will form many small fighting organizations, who will take those

special, delicate measures which the large mass is almost always unable

to do. It is clear that the groups should even now study and establish

these insurrectional measures so as not to be, as has often happened,

surprised by events.

Now for the principal, regular, continuous aim of our groups. It is (you

will by now have guessed) anarchist propaganda. Yes, we will organize

ourselves above all to spread our theoretical ideas, our methods of

direct action and universal federalism.

Until today our propaganda has been made only or almost only on an

individual basis. Individual propaganda has given notable results, above

all in the heroic times when anarchists were compensating for the large

number they needed with a fever of proselytism that recalled the

primitive Christians. But is this continuing to happen? Experience

obliges me to confess that it is not.

It seems that anarchism has been going through a sort of crisis in

recent years, at least in France. The causes of this are clearly many

and complex. It is not my task here to establish what they are, but I do

wonder if the total lack of agreement and organization is not one of the

causes of this crisis.

There are many anarchists in France. They are much divided on the

question of theory, but even more so on practice. Everyone acts in his

own way whenever he wants; in this way the individual efforts are

dispersed and often exhausted, simply wasted. Anarchists can be found in

more or less every sphere of action: in the workers’ unions, in the

anti-militarist movement, among anti-clericalist free thinkers, in the

popular universities, and so on, and so forth. What we are missing is a

specifically anarchist movement, which can gather to it, on the economic

and workers’ ground that is ours, all those forces that have been

fighting in isolation up till now.

This specifically anarchist movement will spontaneously arise from our

groups and from the federation of these groups. The might of joint

action, of concerted action, will undoubtedly create it. I do not need

to add that this organization will by no means expect to encompass all

the picturesquely dispersed elements who describe themselves as

followers of the anarchist ideal; there are, after all, those who would

be totally inadmissible. It would be sufficient for the anarchist

organization to group together, around a programme of concrete,

practical action, all the comrades who accept our principles and who

want to work with us, according to our methods.

Let me make it clear that I do not wish to go into specifics here. I am

not dealing with the theoretical side of the organization. The name,

form and programme of the organization to be created will be established

separately and after reflection by the supporters of this organization.