💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarcho-on-anarchist-organisation.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:24:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: On Anarchist Organisation Author: Anarcho Date: November 16, 2019 Language: en Topics: anarchist organization Source: Retrieved on 24th April 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=1120
“organisation, that is to say, association for a specific purpose and
with the structure and means required to attain it, is a necessary
aspect of social life. A man in isolation cannot even live the life of a
beast […] Having therefore to join with other humans […] he must submit
to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his will (be in
authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests
of the greatest good of all (be an associate). Nobody can escape from
this necessity.”
– Errico Malatesta[1]
The notion that anarchism is inherently against organisation is one much
asserted.
George Woodcock, the ex-anarchist turned anarchism’s self-appointed
historian, proclaimed that “it seems evident that logically pure
anarchism goes against its own nature when it attempts to create
elaborate international or even national organisations, which need a
measure of rigidity and centralisation to survive.” A syndicalist union,
however, needs “relatively stable organisations and succeeds in creating
them precisely because it moves in a world that is only partly governed
by anarchist ideals”. He reflected the opinion of a large band of more
hostile commentators on anarchism who inflict a fundamental
irrationality on anarchists. If “pure” anarchism is against any form of
organisation beyond its “natural unit” of the “loose and flexible
affinity group” then few sensible people would embrace it for neither a
rail network nor a hospital could be reliably run by such a unit.[2]
However, if we accept that anarchists are no different from other social
activists and so fundamentally rational and realistic people as Davide
Turcato persuasively (and correctly!) argues[3] then we need to admit
that anarchist theoreticians and activists would not be advocating an
ideal that could not possibly work. Unsurprisingly, then, we discover
that anarchists – in general – spent some time thinking about
organisation and how they could apply their ideas to the world around
them. This is understandable as anarchists aim to change society for the
better – whether by reform or revolution – and as such sought practical
solutions to the social problems they saw around them. Theory needs to
be reflected in practice and a theory which – by “its own nature” –
precludes practical alternatives to the social ills it is protesting
against would be a waste of time. No anarchist considers their ideas in
such a light.
Anarchism rather than ignoring the need for organisation has always
addressed it. This is because rather than being a peripheral concept,
organisation is fundamentally a core aspect of any ideology as it is
“the point where concepts lose their abstraction” and “are interwoven
with the concrete practices sanctioned or condemned by an ideology.”[4]
What organisational forms an ideology advocates says far more about its
actual core values than the words it uses.
This can be seen from anarchism considered as both a theory and a
movement. It was born in the context of an intellectual inheritance of
liberalism and democracy and a social context of the rise of industrial
capitalism and opposition to it in the shape of the workers’ movement
and socialism. We will show how it built upon the critique of liberalism
pioneered by Jean-Jacque Rousseau and applied it against both
wage-labour (capitalism) and democracy itself. In the process it
developed clear organisational principles to ensure social life could
continue – indeed, flourish – without archy.[5]
While there has been a tendency, started by Paul Eltzbacher and
popularised by Woodcock to view anarchist theorists as being isolated
thinkers, in reality all the major thinkers have been very much part of
their society and its popular movements, seeking to gain influence for
the ideas they have produced to solve its problems.[6]
This applies to the key thinkers associated with the birth and rise of
anarchism as both a named theory and as a movement in the mid- to
late-nineteenth century: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin.
All three, like other lesser known anarchist thinkers and activists,
were embedded in the world they were seeking to transform. They were
aware of the intellectual and social context in which they lived and
critically engaged with both. This can be seen most obviously with
Proudhon’s writings and its well referenced polemics against the
defenders of property, liberal economists and state socialist colleagues
within the French democratic and labour movements but it should also be
clear that Bakunin and Kropotkin, being Russian aristocrats, were
well-versed with the intellectual currents of their times even if their
writings were usually for the readers of anarchist journals.
The main immediate ideological influences on anarchism were liberalism
(as personified by John Locke) and democracy (as personified by
Rousseau). The social context was the failure of the French Revolution
and the rise of industrial capitalism as well as the oppositional
movements each produced: radical republicanism and the labour and
socialist movements, respectively.
Liberalism is usually associated with John Locke who is often presented
as the foundational thinker for modern Western freedoms and democracy.
Yet we cannot understand Locke if he has “modern liberal-democratic
assumptions read into his political thought.”[7] His political theory is
not primarily concerned with defending liberty but rather property and
the power that comes with it.[8] Thus he takes wage-labour as existing
in his “state of nature” and as a self-evident natural order:
“Master and Servant are names as old as History […] a freeman makes
himself a servant to another, by selling him, for a certain time, the
service he undertakes to do, in exchange for wages he is to receive […]
it gives the master but a temporary power over him, and no greater than
what is contained in the Contract between ‘em.”[9]
This produces a situation where “a Master of a Family” rules over others
with “all these subordinate relations of Wife, Children, Servants, and
Slaves” and with “a very distinct and differently limited Power”. He was
at pains to differentiate the power of “a Master over his Servant, a
Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave” from political power.
Thus power from wealth was considered as not an issue beyond ensuring
that it did not take the form of a political power, namely “a Right of
making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less
Penalties”. However as the State existed “for the Regulating and
Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in
the Execution of such Laws”[10], the property owner could expect the
full backing of the state in ensuring his authority was obeyed.
Locke, then, argues that alleged free and equal individuals create
organisations in which the few rule over the many. That is, within the
liberal organisation “subordinate relations” – hierarchy – is the
outcome yet the awkward question remains: “it is hard to see why a free
and equal individual should have sufficient good reason to subordinate
herself to another.”[11]
Locke rose to this challenge with the liberal use of the word consent
and a “just-so” story rooted in what appear reasonable assumptions. The
latter are of note for Locke is keen to base his defence of the
bourgeois order on both labour and common property. Thus land is given
to everyone in common by God while labour “is the unquestionable
property of the labourer”. He uses examples of people who have
“appropriated” the produce of the commons (“the Acorns he pickt up under
an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood”) to the
appropriating the commons themselves. To the objection that
appropriating the commons ends the freedom of others to take its
produce, he suggests “no man but he can have a right to what [his
labour] that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as
good, left in common for others.”[12]
Yet this limitation is quickly overcome[13] by the increased
productivity of the appropriated land which meant “there was still
enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. ”
The “tacit Agreement” to use money “introduced (by Consent) larger
Possessions” which in turn meant “it is plain, that Men have agreed to a
disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having, by a
tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly
possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving
in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up
without injury to any one”[14] Significantly, this inequality of
property exists in the state of nature and precedes the creation of the
state. Equally significantly, Locke justifies appropriation of the world
not in terms of increased liberty for all but rather by the trickle-down
effect of increased wealth produced by that appropriation.
With all the land appropriated and inequality in wealth the norm, any
free agreement between the rich and proletariat would favour the former
and create authoritarian social relationships which Locke took as both
natural and unproblematic for liberty:
“since the Authority of the Rich Proprietor, and the Subjection of the
Needy Beggar, began not from the Possession of the Lord, but the Consent
of the poor Man, who preferr’d being his Subject to starving. And the
Man he thus submits to, can pretend to no more Power over him, than he
has consented to, upon Compact.”[15]
This is part of Locke’s argument against absolute Monarchy and its
ideological justifications, namely that the sovereignty of a Monarchy –
the King’s power of life and death – rested on ownership of the land
(“Private Dominion”). Thus while the property owner had authority over
his wage-worker and tenant as specified in a contract, ownership “could
give him no Sovereignty” understood as being “an Absolute, Arbitrary,
Unlimited, and Unlimitable power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates
of his Children and Subjects”.[16]
Once the worker has consented to being under the authority of the
wealthy then his labour and its product is no longer his own property:
“Thus the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the
Ore I have digg’d in any place, where I have a right to them in common
with others, become my Property.” The workers’ labour is now his
employer’s and “hath fixed my property” in both the product and common
resources worked upon.[17] Thus Locke’s defence of property as resting
on labour becomes the means to derive the worker of the full product of
that labour. This is unsurprising for “the more emphatically labour is
asserted to be a property, the more it is to be understood to be
alienable. For property in the bourgeois sense is not only a right to
enjoy or use; it is a right to dispose of, to exchange, to
alienate.”[18]
Thus liberalism rationalises organisations based on “authority” and
“subjection”, which turns one into the “subject” of another thanks to
property which, lest we forget, “the Preservation” of was the “great and
chief end” for men “uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves
under Government”. Therefore, “Subjects or Foreigners, attempting by
force on the Properties of any People, may be resisted with force”[19]
Government is based on an alienation of the natural liberty of the
property owners into “the Legislature” who could not “think themselves
in a Civil Society” until the government “was placed in collective
Bodies of Men, call them Senate, Parliament, or what you please”[20] and
so Locke’s “liberal state, or the political sphere, stands over and
above, and external to, the world of everyday life.”[21] This collective
body of landlords would rule supreme over the individuals who make it up
“for it would be a direct Contradiction, for any one, to enter into
society with others for the securing and regulating of property […] to
suppose his Land, whose Property is to be regulated by the Laws of the
Society, should be exempt from the Jurisdiction of that Government, to
which he himself, the Proprietor of the Land, is a Subject” After this,
a man “is at liberty to go and incorporate himself into any other
Commonwealth”.[22]
Once the land is appropriated and wealth accumulated in a few hands,
then this few combine to form a political state because the previous
government – a monarchy – no longer acts as an impartial umpire and
takes a self-interested part in the numerous conflicts between property
owners. This turns “the state of nature” into “the state of war” as the
King starts to exercise absolute power over the property owners and
their property. This produces the need to overthrow the monarchy and
create a political power which “turns out to be the majority of the
representatives, and the latter are chosen by the propertied.”[23]
This meant that while the “labouring class is a necessary part of the
nation its members are not in fact full members of the body politic and
have no claim to be so”. Locke considered “all men as members [of civil
society] for the purposes of being ruled and only the men of estate as
members for the purpose of ruling” (or “more accurately, the right to
control any government”). Workers, the actual majority, “were in but of
civil society” and so Locke “would have no difficulty, therefore, in
thinking of the state as a joint-stock company of owners whose majority
of decision binds not only themselves but also their employees.”[24]
In short, Locke “was not a democrat at all.”[25] Needless to say, many
liberal writers have objected to these kinds of arguments and
conclusions and given these conflicting interpretations of Locke and his
democratic credentials (or lack of them), some may consider it
impossible to determine the facts of the matter. Here, however, Locke
himself provides an answer with his The Fundamental Constitutions of
Carolina that postulates rule by wealthy landlords as well as the
introduction of serfdom. Significantly, its preamble is very clear on
who is forming this state and why:
“that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy, we, the lords and
proprietors of the province aforesaid, have agreed to this following
form of government”[26]
Ignoring his “just-so” story of land appropriation, Locke simply
allocated the land to “eight proprietors” who each received “one-fifth
of the whole” in perpetually while “the hereditary nobility” received
another fifth. The parliament would be made up “of the proprietors or
their deputies” and “one freeholder out of every precinct.” The
freeholder members of parliament had to have more than “five hundred
acres of freehold within the precinct for which he is chosen” while the
electorate would be made up of those who have more than “fifty acres of
freehold within the said precinct.”[27]
Compare this to a Commonwealth described in the Second Treatise which
had a “single hereditary Person having the constant, supream, executive
Power”, an “Assembly of Hereditary Nobility” and an “Assembly of
Representatives chosen, pro tempore, by the People”.[28] Where “the
People” being those who matter, the wealthy, for “Locke’s argument says
nothing” about what the character of this majority in the two Treatises
is because he “took for granted” that the “members of the political
community” were “males who own substantial amounts of material property”
and so “politically relevant members of society.”[29]
Given that Locke, in spite of his apparent denunciations of slavery, was
a shareholder in slaving companies, it comes as no surprise that a
freeman “shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves”
while this civil dominion of a master over his slaves was likewise
extended to workers or, more correctly, hereditary serfs (called
leet-men) who were “under the jurisdiction of the respective lord” and
could not leave the land “without licences from his said lord”. Rest
assured, this serfdom is based on consent for an additional article
included in 1670 allowed anyone to voluntarily register himself as a
leet-man.[30]
This serfdom is not inconsistent with Locke’s Treatises on government.
There he noted that by commonwealth he wished “to be understood all
along to mean not a democracy, or any form of government, but any
independent community” while he acknowledged that “men did sell
themselves” into slavery, although he favoured the term “drudgery”.
Slavery, Locke argued, meant a relationship “between a lawful
Conquerour, and a Captive” where the former has the power of life and
death over the latter. Once a “Compact” is agreed between them, “an
agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the
other” meant “Slavery ceases.” As long as the master cannot kill or main
the slave, then it is “plain” that this was “only Drudgery” as “it is
evident” that “the person sold was not under an Absolute, Arbitrary,
Despotical power.”[31]
It should also be noted that Locke invented another story to justify
actual slavery, namely the notion of a “just war.” Like the one to
justify appropriation of land and rationalise master-servant relations,
in this story slavery could be justified when the victors in a war
started by those they have defeated offered the prisoners a choice,
slavery or death: “Slaves who being captives taken in a just War, are by
the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary
Power of their Masters.” This meant that the conqueror “has an Absolute
Power over the Lives of those, who by an Unjust War have forfeited
them,” a power Locke calls “purely Despotical” for “he has an absolute
power over the Lives of those, who putting themselves in a State of War,
have forfeited them.” The slave-owner can murder his slave and this,
too, is ultimately based on consent: “For, whenever he finds the
hardship of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, ’tis in his
Power, be resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death
he desires.”[32]
Just as his just-so story protected his property in land and capital
(and the status and power that went with it), so this just-so story
protected his substantial investments in the slave trade. That no
wealthy man had acquired his property in the manner described was as
irrelevant as the slaves he profited from were not aggressors against
the slavers (quite the reverse). So even absolute chattel slavery, with
the power of life and death, is based on consent – and his investments
safe and ethical.
All this indicates that Locke’s Constitutions of Serfdom was not in
contradiction with the alleged egalitarian and democratic ideas in the
Treatises any more than his spurious hair-splitting over “slavery” and
“drudgery” is no accident. Rather it exposes the core of his ideology as
his works were written to justify and rationalise rule by the wealthy
and provide a veneer of voluntarism for oppressive, authoritarian and
exploitative social relationships.
That Locke himself was a wealthy man hangs heavy over his work as it is
fundamentally a defence for his social position. He attacked both
absolutist monarchy and radical democracy. He justifies a class state
for he takes a class society – his own – for his starting point and,
indeed, eternalises it in “the state of nature”. The Lockean (liberal)
social contract gives “justification to, and is expressly designed to
preserve, the social inequalities of the capitalist market economy”[33]
and the authoritarian social relationships within production these
create, relations which Locke was well aware of. The master-servant
relationship was precisely what his theory of property in the person
sought to justify for a servant’s labour (and liberty) being their
property it could be alienated (sold). Yet, for Locke, both the owning
class and working class benefited from the social contract. The former
saw their property and power protected by a government of their own
class from the whims of Monarchs proclaiming their divine right to rule.
The latter saw the power of their masters reduced to a limited authority
and so could not be killed or maimed on a whim by those who they had
consented to obey. After all, “no rational Creature can be supposed to
change his condition with an intention to be worse”.[34]
In both cases, consent is the means used. This is the hardest worked
concept in Locke’s ideology and is used to justify a multitude of
liberty destroying social relationships: actual slavery, voluntary
slavery, wage-labour, patriarchal marriage. Yet any ambiguities in
Locke’s theoretical work – and any read into the work by later readers
whose liberalism has been modified by other influences – are clarified
when we look at the organisation within which he sought to apply it. A
class state based on wealthy landlords assembling together in a
Parliament to rule themselves and their servants is exposed in his
organisation for Carolina.[35]
Locke’s theory was “no less influential in France than in its native
England”[36] and was likewise utilised to combat absolutist Monarchy.
However, the person who is most associated with French democracy,
Jean-Jacque Rousseau, “denounces the liberal social contract as an
illegitimate fraud”.[37] If Locke proclaimed “we are born Free”[38] then
Rousseau replied that we are “everywhere in chains”[39] and sought to
explain why liberalism produced and justified this.
Critiquing Liberalism’s “just-so” story of state formation, Rousseau
noted how “[a]ll ran headlong to their chains, in the hopes of securing
their liberty” when, in fact, it “bound new fetters on the poor, and
gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural
liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted
clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a
few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour,
slavery, and wretchedness.”[40] The liberal social contract was based on
defending property rather than liberty:
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself
of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him,
was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and
murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have
saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and
crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are
undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all,
and the earth itself to nobody.’”[41]
In contrast to liberalism, Rousseau recognised that the “greatest good
of all” reduces down to “two main subjects, liberty and equality” for
the former “cannot exist without” the latter.[42] He rightly argued that
contracts between the wealthy few and the many poor will always benefit
the former and, for the latter, become little more than the freedom to
pick a master:
“The terms of social compact between these two estates of men may be
summed up in a few words: ‘You have need of me, because I am rich and
you are poor. We will therefore come to an agreement. I will permit you
to have the honour of serving me, on condition that you bestow on me
that little you have left, in return for the pains I shall take to
command you.’”[43]
Thus “laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to
those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is
advantageous to men only when all posses something and none has too
much.” The ideal society was one where “no citizen shall be rich enough
to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself.”[44] In
a passage sadly not included in the final version of the Social
Contract, Rousseau goes to the core problem with liberalism:
“That a rich and powerful man, having acquired immense possessions in
land, should impose laws on those who want to establish themselves
there, and that he should only allow them to do so on condition that
they accept his supreme authority and obey all his wishes; that, I can
still conceive […] Would not this tyrannical act contain a double
usurpation: that on the ownership of the land and that on the liberty of
the inhabitants?”[45]
We cannot really “divest ourselves of our liberty […] just as we
transfer our property from one to another by contracts” for “the
property I alienate becomes quite foreign to me, nor can I suffer from
abuse of it” but it “concerns me that my liberty should not be abused”.
This meant that a contract “binding the one to command and the other to
obey” would be “an odd kind of contract to enter into” and so “to bind
itself to obey a master” would be “illegitimate.” It would be the
“voluntary establishment of tyranny” and so if “the people promises
simply to obey, by that very act dissolves itself and loses what makes
it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a
Sovereign.” In short: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man,
to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”[46]
Political association had to be participatory and so the “people of
England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free
only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are
elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.” The “people, being
subject to the laws, ought to be their author” and so the “problem is to
find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole
common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each,
while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain
as free as before.” Sovereignty, “for the same reason as makes it
inalienable, is indivisible; for will either is, or is not, general; it
is the will either of the body of the people, or only of a part of it.”
Any government “is simply and solely a commission, an employment” and
“mere officials of the Sovereign”.[47]
The proclaimed indivisible nature of sovereignty produced a tendency in
Rousseau’s ideas that subsequently influenced the Jacobin tradition: the
vision of a centralised republic. Local associations were viewed
negatively because “when factions arise […] partial associations are
formed at the expense of the great association” and it was “therefore
essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that
there should be no partial society within the State”. While Rousseau
also suggested that “if there are partial societies, it is best to have
as many as possible and to prevent them from being unequal”, his
preference (and how he was interpreted) was that the citizens should
have “no communication one with another” so that “the grand total of the
small differences would always give the general will, and the decision
would always be good.”[48] Thus democracy favoured a centralised,
unitarian regime.
The democratic critique of liberalism produced both the idea of popular
sovereignty and the importance of equality within society. Rousseau’s
ideas were never implemented during his lifetime and so, unlike Locke
and his Fundamental Constitutions, it is the example of his followers
during the French Revolution we need to turn. This revolution was a
conflict between both the people and the monarchy but also between the
rising bourgeoisie and the toiling masses.[49] It expressed itself in
both popular and representative organisational forms, both of which
could be found in Rousseau. Yet while “the Sections under sans-culotte
control” produced “a vision of a city taken over by workshop
Rousseaus,”[50] power under the Jacobins was increasingly centralised
into fewer and fewer hands – from the electorate into representatives,
from representatives into the government, from the government, finally,
into the hands of Robespierre. Eventually groups such as the sections of
Paris, workers associations or strikes were destroyed as they were
considered “states within the state” for the Republic was called “one
and indivisible” for a reason.[51]
Rousseau presented a critique of inequality but did not fundamentally
criticise property. This is to be expected as he lived before the rise
of industrial capitalism. The economy was based predominantly on peasant
farming and artisan workshops, the authoritarian social relationships
within production associated with wage-labour were not widespread nor of
prime importance in continental Europe. The solution for the domination
of landlords over peasants was clear and, moreover, did not need
question property as such – land reform by breaking up large estates and
parcelling out the land to those who actually work it. The small-scale
of technology meant that most could eventually become artisans working
with their own tools in their own workshop.
The French Revolution raised the issue of artisan organisation in the
shape of guilds and journeymen societies with one building employer
reporting in alarm that the “workers, by an absurd parody of the
government, regard their work as their property, the building site as a
Republic of which they are jointly citizens, and believe in consequence
that it belongs to them to name their own bosses, their inspectors and
arbitrarily to share out the work amongst themselves.”[52] These
perspectives only increased when the industrial revolution transformed
France and artisans became wage-workers. Faced with the obvious
authoritarianism within the factory, these workers sought a solution
appropriate to the changed circumstances they faced.
Unlike peasant farmers, the workplace could not be broken up without
destroying machinery and the advantages it produced alongside
master-servant relations. This reality produced a new perspective in the
new working class and so “Associationism was born during the waves of
strikes and organised protests provoked by the Revolution of 1830” when
“there appeared a workers’ newspaper” which “suggested cooperative
associations as the only way to end capitalist exploitation.” This paper
was produced by printers and entitled l’Artisan, journal de la class
ouvrière and “laid the basis for trade socialism.”[53] It argued as
early as October 1830 that by “utilising the principle of association,
workers could overcome the tyranny of private property and themselves
become associated owners of industrial enterprises.”[54]
While many intellectuals – the so-called utopian socialists like
Saint-Simon and Fourier and their followers – had raised various schemes
for improving society, this was the first example of workers themselves
making practical suggestions for their own liberation. Across France,
many workers started to combine their existing organisations for mutual
support with trade union activity as well as visions of a world without
masters. This process intertwined with existing political Republican
ideas. The radical neo-Jacobin Sociéte des Droits de l’Homme recruited
amongst workers which resulted in a “two-way interchange of ideas” with
that organisation taking up “the ideology of producer associationism
which was becoming central” to artisanal socialism. Louis Blanc was the
most public expression of this process and his “distinctive contribution
was to fuse the associationist idea with the Jacobin-Republican
political tradition”[55] but there were many others who expressed the
associational idea in different forms.[56]
By 1840 there was not only a wide appreciation for the need of some kind
of association to replace capitalism but also extensive workers
organisations across France which aimed to do so. It was in this context
that a working man, a printer by trade, would transform socialist
politics forever by proclaiming himself an anarchist.
Proudhon did not develop his ideas in isolation. Indeed, he did not
invent his preferred term for them – mutualism – as the workers
organisations in Lyon, where he stayed in 1843, had been using it since
the early 1830s. So there is “close similarity between the associational
ideal of Proudhon” and “the program of the Lyon Mutualists” and it is
“likely that Proudhon was able to articulate his positive program more
coherently because of the example of the silk workers of Lyon. The
socialist ideal that he championed was already being realised, to a
certain extent, by such workers.”[57]
This shows the importance of sketching the ideological and social
context within which Proudhon was living when he wrote his seminal What
is Property? in 1840. Indeed, the title of the first work in which a
person self-proclaimed themselves an anarchist is significant. While
there is a tendency (particularly by Marxists and right-wing
“libertarians”) to reduce anarchism to just being anti-state, the
reality is that from the start anarchism has always been critical of
property and capitalism. As Proudhon repeatedly stressed, the critiques
of property and of the state share common features and are interwoven.
They cannot be considered in isolation without destroying the very
notion of anarchism for the fundamental commonality between
organisations anarchists oppose – the state, capitalist firms, marriage,
etc. – is that they are authoritarian and “power and authority corrupt
those who exercise them as much as those who are compelled to submit to
them.”[58]
Moreover, these critiques are relevant with regards to what anarchists
aim for and what they do now to bring that desired future closer. The
logic is simple enough – if you oppose something for specific reasons
then you will not seek to reproduce them in your visions of a better
world nor in the organisations you create to bring that better world
about. So, for example, based on his analysis of how exploitation
occurred under capitalism – how wage-labour allowed the employer to
appropriate the “collective force” produced by his workforce – Proudhon
argued for the necessity of association (“By virtue of the principle of
collective force, workers are the equals and associates of their
leaders”[59]) and socialisation (“All human labour being the result of
collective force, all property becomes, by the same reason, collective
and undivided”[60]) Equally, we would expect thinkers who sought to
transform their world to have a politics that was practical, namely a
theory of organisation that could result in their principles being
applied – “All theory is practical at the same time. What is said in
theory today will be done tomorrow”[61] – and this is what we do find in
the works of Proudhon and those he influenced, not least Bakunin and
Kropotkin.
So analysis, advocacy and activity are interwoven, with the critique of
what exists informing what could be and what could be informing our
struggles of today. Anarchist organisation, in short, reflects anarchist
theory: it is its application.
Like most aspects of anarchism, anarchist organisational theory did not
appear ready made in 1840. While a basic principle was postulated then,
it took over a decade for all its elements to be raised and incorporated
into it. This was for the very good reason that Proudhon had to respond
to current events and so expand his ideas to take them into account.
Initially, Proudhon’s ideas on organisation were made in the context of
economics and his critique of property. While he will forever be linked
with “property is theft” this was just one part of his answer to the
question What is Property?, the other being that “property is
despotism.” Property “violates equality by the rights of exclusion and
increase, and freedom by despotism.” Anarchy was “the absence of a
master, of a sovereign,” while the proprietor was “synonymous” with
“sovereign,” for he “imposes his will as law, and suffers neither
contradiction nor control” and “each proprietor is sovereign lord within
the sphere of his property”.[62] Echoing Rousseau, Proudhon laid down
his position clearly:
“Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty;
every contract, every condition of a contract, which has in view the
alienation or suspension of liberty, is null: the slave, when he plants
his foot upon the soil of liberty, at that moment becomes a free man.
[…] Liberty is the original condition of man; to renounce liberty is to
renounce the nature of man: after that, how could we perform the acts of
man?”[62]
This brings him into conflict with Locke and the liberal tradition.
Rejecting the notion that master-servant contracts were valid, he
dismisses its basis of property in the person in a few telling words:
“To tell a poor man that he has property because he has arms and legs, –
that the hunger from which he suffers, and his power to sleep in the
open air are his property, – is to play with words, and add insult to
injury.” Property, then, is solely material things – land, workplaces,
etc. – and their monopolisation results in authoritarian relationships.
To “recognise the right of territorial property is to give up labour,
since it is to relinquish the means of labour”, which results in the
worker having “sold and surrendered his liberty” to the proprietor. This
alienation of liberty is the means by which exploitation occurs. Whoever
“labours becomes a proprietor” of his product but by that he did “not
mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists)” – and Locke – the
“proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages” but “proprietor of
the value which he creates, and by which the master alone profits.”
Locke is also clearly the target for Proudhon’s comment that “the horse
[…] and ox […] produce with us, but are not associated with us; we take
their product, but do not share it with them. The animals and workers
whom we employ hold the same relation to us.” So for “[w]e who belong to
the proletarian class: property excommunicates us!”[63]
Freedom and property were incompatible and to secure the former for all
we have to seek the “entire abolition” of the latter for “all
accumulated capital being social property, no one can be its exclusive
proprietor” and land is “a common thing”. In short, the means of life
become “a collective property” for while “the right to product is
exclusive”, the “right to means is common.” This meant “equality of
conditions and universal association” was needed for “[f]ree
association, liberty – whose sole function is to maintain equality in
the means of production and equivalence in exchanges – is the only
possible, the only just, the only true form of society.” This meant
industrial democracy as “leaders, instructors, superintendents” must be
“chosen from the workers by the workers themselves.”[64]
Thus use rights replace property rights and so a piece of land or
workplace is “a place possessed, not a place appropriated.” Anarchism is
“association, which is the annihilation of property” for while “the use”
of wealth “may be divided” as “property [it] remains undivided” and so
“the land [is] common property” and capital is “common or collective.”
So “to destroy despotism and the inequality of conditions”, master and
worker must “become associates”.[65]
This position is reflected in his next significant work, 1846’s System
of Economic Contradictions.[66] As before, property “degrades us, by
making us servants and tyrants to one another” for the wage-workers’ lot
was to “work under a master” to whom they had “sold their arms and
parted with their liberty” and so monopoly “must republicanise
itself”.[67] A new economy would be organised on a new basis:
“a commercial society […] should lay down as a principle the right of
any stranger to become a member upon his simple request, and to
straightway enjoy the rights and prerogatives of associates and even
managers […] it is evident that all the tendencies of humanity, both in
its politics and in its civil laws, are towards universalisation […]
towards a complete transformation of the idea of the company as
determined by our statutes […] articles of association […] should
regulate, no longer the contribution of the associates – since each
associate, according to the economic theory, is supposed to possess
absolutely nothing upon his entrance into the company – but the
conditions of labour and exchange, and which should allow access to all
who might present themselves […] In order that association may be real,
he who participates in it must do so […] as an active factor; he must
have a deliberative voice in the council […] everything regarding him,
in short, should be regulated in accordance with equality. But these
conditions are precisely those of the organisation of labour”[68]
Rejecting capitalism and state socialism, this would be “a solution
based upon equality – in other words, the organisation of labour, which
involves the negation of political economy and the end of property.”[69]
This was because, under capitalism, work may be “free. But what freedom,
for heaven’s sake! Freedom for the proletarian is the ability to work,
that is, of being robbed again; or not to work, that is to say to die to
hunger! Freedom only benefits strength: by competition, capital crushes
labour everywhere and converts industry into a vast coalition of
monopolies.”[70]
Politically, Proudhon argued that the state was created to “conduct [an]
offensive and defensive war against the proletariat” and – again against
Locke – wondered “what advantage is it to [the proletarian] that society
has left the state of war to enter the regime of police?” This meant
that “from the moment that the essential conditions of power – that is,
authority, property, hierarchy – are preserved, the suffrage of the
people is nothing but the consent of the people to their oppression” and
so the task of the proletariat was to create “an agricultural and
industrial combination […] by means of which power, today the ruler of
society, shall become its slave” and so “envelop capital and the State
and subjugate them.”[71] Interestingly, he notes in passing the state
“contributes to the general welfare” by “establishing in society an
artificial centralisation, the image and prelude of the future
solidarity of industries”.[72]
Thus by 1847 Proudhon had produced both a critique of capitalism and an
alternative rooted in democratic values: “to unfold the system of
economic contradictions is to lay the foundations of universal
association.”[73] The current State could not be captured nor reformed
as it was an instrument of capital. This meant labour had to organise
itself, and so “we want the organisation of labour by the workers,
without capitalists or masters” along with “government of the people by
the people, without that supernatural person called the prince or the
state” and “guarding of the people by the people, without any other army
than a citizen militia.”[74]
The 1848 revolution thrust the issue of political – social –
organisation to the fore. This lead Proudhon into a direct and sustained
polemic with the Jacobin tradition with its vision of a centralised,
unitary and indivisible democracy and so Rousseau. While previously he
had proclaimed Rousseau “the apostle of liberty and equality,”[75]
Proudhon now appeared not only to attack him but also democracy as such.
However, a close reading shows that Proudhon’s critique of democracy was
that it was not democratic enough and so his negative words should not
make us forget Rousseau’s influence on him.[76]
The earliest weeks of the revolution saw Proudhon produce a pamphlet
entitled Democracy which proclaimed that “problem of the People’s
sovereignty is the fundamental problem of liberty, equality and
fraternity, the first principle of social organisation” but concluded
that democracy “does not answer any of the questions raised by that
idea” and “is the negation of the People’s sovereignty”. This was
because “democracy says that the People reigns and does not govern,
which is to deny the Revolution”, and concludes “the People cannot
govern itself and is forced to hand itself over to representatives”. His
solution to this problem has become a core idea of anarchist
organisation for “we can follow” those we elect “step-by-step in their
legislative acts and their votes” and “make them transmit our arguments”
and when “we are discontented, we will recall and dismiss them.” Thus
the electoral principle needed “the imperative mandate, and permanent
revocability” as its “most immediate and incontestable consequences”.
This should be “the inevitable program of all democracy” but one which
democracy rejects and so it “exists fully only at the moment of
elections” and then it “retreats; it withdraws into itself again and
begins its anti-democratic work. It becomes AUTHORITY.” This meant that
for democracy “the People cannot govern themselves” and so “after
declaring the principle of the People’s sovereignty” it “ends up
declaring the incapacity of the People!” Instead of a democracy
understood in the manner of the Jacobin left, Proudhon suggested in an
anarchy “all citizens […] reign and govern” for they “directly
participate in the legislation and the government as they participate in
the production and circulation of wealth”.[77]
Thus a genuine democracy had to be both participatory and include the
economic realm. Unsurprisingly, then, Proudhon considered his key
economic reform, the Bank of Exchange, as “an essentially republican
institution; it is a paradigmatic example of government of the People by
the People” for “association is universal” with workplaces becoming
“democratically organised workers’ associations” within a “vast
federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the
democratic and social Republic” for “under universal association,
ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social
ownership.” The Bank of Exchange was seen as a means of a wider economic
transformation, as the means of abolishing wage-labour: “all the
workshops are owned by the nation, even though they remain and must
always remain free” for “[b]y virtue of its over-arching mandate, the
Exchange Bank is the organisation of labour’s greatest asset” and so
allow “the new form of society to be defined and created among the
workers.”[78]
Government, in the shape of an executive power with its Presidents and
Ministries would be replaced by the National Assembly “through
organisation of its committees […] exercise[ing] executive power, just
the way it exercises legislative power through its joint deliberations
and votes” while “as a consequence of universal suffrage” there would be
the “implementation of the imperative mandate” otherwise “the people, in
electing representatives, does not appoint mandatories but rather abjure
their sovereignty” which is “assuredly not socialism: it is not even
democracy.” The Assembly would be controlled by the “organisation of
popular societies” as these were “the pivot of democracy, the
cornerstone of republican order” and would “rip the nails and teeth off
state power and hand over the government’s public force to the
citizens.”[79]
With more experience of the workings of the Assembly – he was elected as
a representative in 1848 and remained one until imprisoned for insulting
the President in 1849 – Proudhon came to see the limitations of this
position. Rather than all questions flowing to a single body, the
decentralisation of power also required its decentring. So the question
was “to organise universal suffrage in its plenitude” for each
“function, industrial or otherwise”. Each functional group would elect
its own delegates in its own separate bodies (Proudhon uses the examples
of the church and the army). In this way “the country governs itself
solely by means of its electoral initiative” and “it is no longer
governed” for it “is a matter of the organisation of universal suffrage
in all its forms, of the very structure of Democracy itself.” Instead of
centralising all issues into the hands of one assembly, there would be a
multitude of assemblies each covering a specific social function. For “a
society of free men” is based on the “associating with different groups
according to the nature of their industries or their interests and by
whom neither collective nor individual sovereignty is ever abdicated or
delegated” and so “the Government has ceased to exist as a result of
universal suffrage”. This “truly democratic regime, with its unity at
the bottom and its separation at the top, [is] the reverse of what now
exists” and meant that “centralisation [would] be effected from the
bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre, and that all
functions be independent and govern themselves independently.” He added
to anarchist theory by calling this vision a “revolution from below” for
“from below signifies the people” and “the initiative of the masses”
while “from above” meant “the actions of government”.[80]
Thus anarchist organisation was decentralised, decentred, from the
bottom-up, based on collective decision making with delegates elected,
mandated and subject to recall. He attacked his colleagues on the left
for advocating a democracy in which the sovereign people were ruled by
an elected few. Against Louis Blanc – whose economic ideas he has
previously attacked in 1846 – he argued that the state “is the external
constitution of the social power” and by this “external constitution of
its power and sovereignty, the people does not govern itself; now one
individual, now several, by a title either elective or hereditary, are
charged with governing it, with managing its affairs”. Anarchists,
however, affirm that “the people, that society, that the mass, can and
ought to govern itself by itself” and so “deny government and the State,
because we affirm that which the founders of States have never believed
in, the personality and autonomy of the masses.” Anarchy “maintains
itself without masters and servants” and so when we “deny the State and
the government” we “affirm in the same breath the autonomy of the people
and its majority” for “the only way to organise democratic government is
to abolish government.”[81]
This was needed because the State is “the constitutional silencing of
the people, the legal alienation of its thought and its initiative into
the hands of” the few in which “the people no longer have anything to do
but keep silent and obey”. It is a body “distinct from the people, apart
from and above the people” based on the “alienation of public power for
the profit of a few ambitious men” which “no sooner exists than it
creates an interest of its own, apart from and often contrary to the
interests of the people; because, acting then in that interest, it makes
civil servants its own creatures, from which results nepotism,
corruption, and little by little to the formation of an official tribe,
enemies of labour as well as of liberty”. Anarchy, however, “is the
living society, the people having consciousness of their ideas,
governing themselves as they work, through division of industries and
special delegation of jobs, in short by the egalitarian distribution of
forces.” Universal suffrage “implies the nomination by the people of all
the functionaries without exception, their permanent revocability, and
consequently the government of the people by the people.”[82]
Proudhon turned his polemical skills towards the intellectual father of
the French Left, Rousseau, in 1851’s General Idea of the Revolution. A
superficial reading of that work may cause some to consider the idea
that Proudhon was working in his tradition as paradoxical. Yet Proudhon
favourably quotes Rousseau on “the conditions of the social pact”[83]
before starting his polemic which showed how Rousseau failed to achieve
the task he set himself due to two key issues.
First, Rousseau “speaks of political rights only; it does not mention
economic rights.” By ignoring the economic sphere he ends up creating a
class state in which the Republic “is nothing but the offensive and
defensive alliance of those who possess, against those who do not
possess”, a “coalition of the barons of property, commerce and industry
against the disinherited lower class”.[84]
Second, Rousseau’s political solution – a centralised, unitarian,
indivisible republic – recreates the division between rulers and ruled
which it claims to end. Thus, “having laid down as a principle that the
people are the only sovereign”, Rousseau “quietly abandons and discards
this principle” and so “the citizen has nothing left but the power of
choosing his rulers by a plurality vote”. Echoing Rousseau’s own words
about England, Proudhon proclaimed that France was “a quasi-democratic
Republic” in which citizens “are permitted, every third or fourth year,
to elect, first, the Legislative Power, second, the Executive Power. The
duration of this participation in the Government for the popular
collectivity is brief […] The President and the Representatives, once
elected, are the masters; all the rest obey. They are subjects, to be
governed and to be taxed, without surcease.”[85]
Thus the democratic principle is nullified and the people exercise a
mythical sovereignty rather than a real one.
Against the idea of representative democracy in a one and indivisible
republic, Proudhon advocated a decentralised, federal, participatory
democracy. The “idea of contract excludes that of government” for it is
in “this agreement that liberty and well being increase” as there would
be “[n]o more laws voted by a majority [in a nation], nor even
unanimously; each citizen, each commune or corporation [i.e.,
co-operative], makes its own.”[86] There would be a radical
decentralisation of decision-making into the hands of the people and
their associations:
“Unless democracy is a fraud, and the sovereignty of the People a joke,
it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his industry,
each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory,
is the only natural and legitimate representative of the Sovereign, and
that therefore each locality should act directly and by itself in
administering the interests which it includes, and should exercise full
sovereignty in relation to them. The People is nothing but the organic
union of wills that are individually free, that can and should
voluntarily work together, but abdicate never […] it becomes necessary
for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal
conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism […] they
will themselves be the State; that is to say, in all that concerns their
industrial speciality, they will be the direct, active representative of
the Sovereign.”[87]
Democratic principles must be extended to the economy – including the
workplace – and this, in turn, would eliminate class differences and so
the need for a state. The capitalist workplace involved the worker being
“simply the employee of the proprietor-capitalist-entrepreneur” and so
“subordinated, exploited” in a “permanent condition” of “obedience and
poverty”. So “due to the immorality, tyranny and theft suffered” under
wage-labour, association was needed. The worker must “become an
associate” and “participate in the chances of loss or gain of the
establishment, he will have a voice in the council” and so “resumes his
dignity as a man and citizen” by becoming “a part of the producing
organisation, of which he was before but the slave” just “as, in the
town, he forms a part of the sovereign power”. A workplace with
“subordinates and superiors” and “two industrial castes of masters and
wage-workers” is “repugnant to a free and democratic society” and must
be replaced with one in which “all positions are elective, and the
by-laws subject to the approval of the members.”[88]
This meant that there “will no longer be nationality, no longer
fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only
places of birth. Whatever a man’s race or colour, he is really a native
of the universe; he has citizen’s rights everywhere.”[89] So freedom and
democracy did not end at the workplace door for the political and
economic regimes were linked. As well as meaning association within the
political and economic spheres in a free society, this also showed why
the centralised political structure did not come about by accident. It
was required to ensure bourgeois rule:
“And who benefits from this regime of unity? The people? No, the upper
classes […] Unity […] is quite simply a form of bourgeois exploitation
under the protection of bayonets. Yes, political unity, in the great
States, is bourgeois: the positions which it creates, the intrigues
which it causes, the influences which it cherishes, all that is
bourgeois and goes to the bourgeois.”[90]
The centralised, hierarchical, state is “the cornerstone of bourgeois
despotism and exploitation”[91] for how else can a minority class rule?
So it was no coincidence that “nothing resembles a monarchy more than a
unitarian republic” and “[l]et us not forget that the constitutional,
bourgeois and unitary monarchy, tends, with regard to international
politics, to guarantee from State to State the exploiting classes
against the exploited classes, consequently to form the coalition of
capital against the wage-workers, of whatever language and nationality
they all are.”[92] Thus monarchies and republics were class states, run
by and for dominant minorities regardless of whether elections take
place. This was the function of centralism, hence the need for
federalism:
“In short, whoever says freedom says federation, or says nothing;
“Whoever says republic, says federation, or says nothing;
“Whoever says socialism, says federation, or yet again says
nothing.”[93]
If, in 1847 he suggested the goal of “industrial centralisation,
administrative, without hierarchy,”[94] by the early 1850s he had
embraced the more precise and clearer term federalism as better
expressing his vision. In 1863 he stressed “the idea of an industrial
federation serving as a complement to and ratification of the political
federation” and that his “economic ideas, elaborated for twenty-five
years, can be summarised” as “Agricultural-Industrial Federation” and
his “political views are reduced to a similar formula: Political
Federation or Decentralisation.”[95]
Anarchy, then, was an economic as well as political participatory
democracy – a self-governing society – for “any one-sided conditions” in
which “one part of the citizens should find themselves, by the contract,
subordinated and exploited by the others, it would no longer be a
contract; it would be a fraud”. Politically, “the object of the
Revolution” is “to put paid to all authority and do away with the entire
machinery of government” by “the organisation of universal suffrage” for
“freedom and authority must be equal in every citizen: otherwise, there
would be no equality […] and the sovereignty of the people, vested in a
small number of representatives, would be a fiction.” Economically, just
as citizens could not alienate their liberty to a government, so the
revolution meant that workers would not sell their liberty to a boss so
“[c]apitalist and landlord exploitation [is] stopped everywhere,
wage-labour abolished” by association for “industrial associations” were
“worker republics”.[96]
Individuals would join self-government groups within a “universal
federalism” based on making “the citizens vote by categories of
functions, in accordance with the principle of the collective force” for
“the federative system is the opposite of administrative and
governmental hierarchy or centralisation”. Thus the “groups that
comprise the confederation” would be “self-governing, self-judging and
self-administering in complete sovereignty” and “universal suffrage form
[their] basis” and each “enjoys a right of secession”. This means that
in “a mutualist confederation, the citizen gives up none of his freedom,
as Rousseau requires him to do for the governance of his republic!”[97]
In summary:
“no longer do we have the abstraction of people’s sovereignty as in the
’93 Constitution and the others that followed it, and in Rousseau’s
Social Contract. Instead it becomes an effective sovereignty of the
labouring masses which rule and govern […] the labouring masses are
actually, positively and effectively sovereign: how could they not be
when the economic organism – labour, capital, property and assets –
belongs to them entirely”[98]
Thus the “abolition of man’s exploitation of his fellow-man and
abolition of man’s government of his fellow-man” were “one and the same
proposition” for “what, in politics, goes under the name of Authority is
analogous to and synonymous with what is termed, in political economy,
Property; that these two notions overlap one with the other and are
identical”. The “principle of AUTHORITY [was] articulated through
property and through the State.” and so “an attack upon one is an attack
upon the other.”[99] Association had to replace both.
Before leaving Proudhon to see how his ideas were later developed, it
must be noted that many commentators view him as an opponent to
association, large-scale industry and social ownership. To do so is to
misunderstand his ideas and the context in which he expressed them.
Against those other socialists vying for influence in the French labour
movement, Proudhon was keen to stress that these utopian schemes turned
the “community” into proprietor and so resulted in the oppression and
exploitation of labour just as much as capitalism did.[100] Similarly
with Louis Blanc, who came “under attack by Proudhon for eliminating all
competition, and for fostering state centralisation of initiative and
direction at the expense of local and corporative powers and
intermediate associations. But the term association could also refer to
the mutualist associations that Proudhon favoured, that is, those
initiated and controlled from below.”[101] If Blanc advocated
Association, Proudhon supported associations:
“But there is not one single public function, one single industry in
society; and the question is precisely to know if the public thought or
action can and should be exerted ex æquo, in equal measure and by equal
title, by all the citizens individually and independently of one
another: that is the democratic or anarchic system – or whether that
collective thought and collective action should become the exclusive
attribute of an elite of functionaries, appointed for that purpose by
the people and with respect to whom the people are then no longer
COLLEAGUES, but obedient, passive subjects or instruments.”[102]
Proudhon, then, had an opposition to one centralised Association or
association for its own sake (what Proudhon termed “the principle of
Association”) but he was in favour of workplace associations to replace
wage-labour as well as an “agricultural–industrial federation” in which
associations would “not to absorb one another and merge, but to mutually
guarantee the conditions of prosperity that are common to them”.[103]
Nor was he opposed to large-scale industry for these associations were
advocated precisely to ensure its benefits for workers rather than a few
capitalists.[104] Similarly, the free access to workplaces and land to
abolish wage-labour required Proudhon to advocate their social ownership
precisely to ensure that those who used them controlled them. Thus
possession (or use-rights) were postulated within the context of
collective or undivided ownership by all.[105]
It was in reaction to a specific aspect of Proudhon’s ideas that the
term libertarian (libertaire) was first used in the modern sense. While
denouncing both the state and the capitalist workplace as authoritarian
and seeking to replace both with a federation of self-governing
associations, Proudhon refused to apply his ideas within the family:
there he advocated (and rigorously defended) patriarchy.
Yet, as Carole Pateman reminds us, until “the late nineteenth century
the legal and civil position of a wife resembled that of a slave”. A
slave “had no independent legal existence apart from his master, and
husband and wife became ‘one person,’ the person of the husband.”
Indeed, the law “was based on the assumption that a wife was (like)
property” and only the marriage contract “includes the explicit
commitment to obey.”[106] Other anarchists saw the obvious contradiction
in Proudhon’s position.
Joseph Déjacque in 1857 extended Proudhon’s ideas to communist-anarchist
conclusions as well as applying them to the family and in the process
coined the word libertarian. It was a case of “plac[ing] the question of
the emancipation of woman in line with the question of the emancipation
of the proletarian” so that both enter “the anarchic-community” in which
“all despotism [is] annihilated, all social inequalities levelled.”
Proudhon did “cry out against the high barons of capital” but “wish[ed]
to rebuild the high barony of the male upon the female vassal” and so
was “a liberal and not a LIBERTARIAN.” The need was to create a “true
anarchy, of absolute freedom, [in which] there would undoubtedly be as
much diversity between beings as there would be people in society,
diversity of age, sex, aptitudes: equality is not uniformity.”[107] The
following year Déjacque used this new synonym for anarchist as the title
for his paper La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social.[108]
Eleven years after Déjacque issued his challenge to Proudhon, André Léo,
a feminist mutualist and future Communard, also pointed out the obvious
contradiction to his French followers and others on the left in her work
La Femme et les mœurs:
“These so-called lovers of liberty, if they are unable to take part in
the direction of the state, at least they will be able to have a little
monarchy for their personal use, each in his own home. When divine right
was shattered, it was so that each male (Proudhonian-type) could have a
piece of it. Order in the family without hierarchy seems impossible to
them – well then, what about in the state?”[109]
Both Déjacque and Léo argued that Proudhon’s Rousseau-derived critique
of wage-labour and the state (including Rousseau’s democracy) was
equally applicable to family relations. Anarchists, to be consistent,
cannot be blind to social (“private”) hierarchies while denouncing
economic and political ones. Given that the rationale for all these
forms of subjection were justified in liberal theory in the same manner
– voluntary or contractual – there was no logical reason to defend
patriarchy any more than any other archy. Unsurprisingly, almost all
subsequent anarchists (including Bakunin and Kropotkin) recognised the
need for consistency and so followed the likes of Déjacque and Léo in
applying Proudhon’s principles against his own contradictory application
just as Proudhon had done to Rousseau.
They also sought to apply their ideas within another area Proudhon
opposed, namely in the union movement. Thus we find Eugène Varlin as
well as “advocat[ing] equal rights for women in opposition” to Proudhon
also arguing that unions and strikes were “necessary to abolish
capitalism.”[110] As well as mitigating capitalist exploitation and
oppression in the here and now, unions had a wider role in “organis[ing]
the production and distribution of products” in the future:
“Unless you want to reduce everything to a centralising and
authoritarian state, which would appoint the directors of mills,
factories, distribution outlets, whose directors would in turn appoint
deputy directors, supervisors, foremen, etc. and thus arrive at a
top-down hierarchical organisation of labour, in which the worker would
be nothing but an unconscious cog, without freedom or initiative; unless
we do, we are forced to admit that the workers themselves must have the
free disposal of their instruments of labour […] Workers societies, in
whatever form they exist at present, already have this immense advantage
of accustoming men to social life, and so preparing them for a wider
social organisation. They accustom them not only to reach an agreement
and understanding, but also to take care of their affairs, to organise,
to discuss, to think about their material and moral interests, and
always from the collective point of view […] trade societies
(resistance, solidarity, union) deserve our encouragement and sympathy,
for they are the natural elements of the social construction of the
future; it is they who can easily become producer associations; it is
they who will be able to operate social tools and organise production
[…] all workers should group themselves into resistance societies by
trade in order to secure the present and prepare for the future.”[111]
This position was held in the libertarian sections of the International
Workers’ Association, which had been founded in 1864 by British trade
unionists and French mutualists. The idea of unions becoming the
economic framework of socialism in chambres de travail (workers
councils) was first raised by mutualist delegates from the Belgium
section at its Brussels conference in 1868 before becoming policy at the
Basle Congress.[112]
When Bakunin joined the International in 1868 he took up and championed
these syndicalist ideas, arguing that it had to “expand and organise
itself […] so that when the Revolution […] breaks out, there will be […]
a serious international organisation of workers’ associations […]
capable of replacing this departing world of States.”[113] Anarchists
would only achieve their goal “by the development and organisation” of
the “social (and, by consequence, anti-political) power of the working
masses.”[115] The “organisation of the trade sections and their
representation in the Chambers of Labour […] bear in themselves the
living seeds of new society which is to replace the old world. They are
creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future
itself.”[114] Thus libertarian socialism was based on federations of
workers’ councils organised at the point of production in the fight
against exploitation and oppression:
“Workers, no longer count on anyone but yourselves […] You bear within
you today all the elements of the power that must renew the world […]
Abstain from all participation in bourgeois radicalism and organise
outside of it the forces of the proletariat. The basis of that
organisation is […] the workshops and the federation of the workshops
[…] and their federation not just nationally, but internationally. The
creation of chambres de travail […] the liquidation of the State and of
bourgeois society […] Anarchy, that it to say the true, the open popular
revolution […] organisation, from top to bottom and from the
circumference to the centre”[115]
An anarchist organisation “must be a people’s movement, organised from
the bottom up by the free, spontaneous action of the masses. There must
be no secret governmentalism, the masses must be informed of everything
[…] All the affairs of the International must be thoroughly and openly
discussed without evasions and circumlocutions.” This is in contrast to
“the principle of authority, that is, the eminently theological,
metaphysical, and political idea that the masses, always incapable of
governing themselves, must at all times submit to the benevolent yoke of
a wisdom and a justice imposed upon them, in some way or other, from
above.”[116]
Like Proudhon, Bakunin contrasted authority with collective
self-government. He argued for “no external legislation and no
authority” and rejected “all legislation, all authority, and all
privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising
from universal suffrage” because “it can turn only to the advantage of a
dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense
majority in subjection to them.” However, he was well aware of the need
for individuals to associate together into groups and make decisions.
This meant how we organised was what mattered for “man in isolation can
have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being
acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man. Liberty is
therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of
exclusion but rather of connection”.[117]
Long before Rosa Luxemburg made the same distinction,[118] Bakunin
contrasted two kinds of discipline, an “authoritarian conception of
discipline” which “signifies despotism on the one hand and blind
automatic submission to authority on the other” and another “not
automatic but voluntary and intelligently understood [which] is, and
will ever be, necessary whenever a greater number of individuals
undertake any kind of collective work or action.” The latter was “simply
the voluntary and considered co-ordination of all individual efforts for
a common purpose” and did not preclude “a natural division of functions
according to the aptitude of each, assessed and judged by the collective
whole” but “no function remains fixed and it will not remain permanently
and irrevocably attached to any one person. Hierarchical order and
promotion do not exist, so that the executive of yesterday can become
the subordinate of tomorrow.” In this way “power, properly speaking, no
longer exists. Power is diffused to the collectivity and becomes the
true expression of the liberty of everyone, the faithful and sincere
realisation of the will of all”.[119]
An anarchist organisation made decisions without giving power to the
few. Anarchists “recognise all natural authority, and all influence of
fact upon us, but none of right; for all authority and all influence of
right, officially imposed upon us, immediately becomes a falsehood and
an oppression.” The “only great and omnipotent authority, at once
natural and rational, the only one we respect, will be that of the
collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and
solidarity and the mutual respect of all its members.” Freedom “is
something very positive, very complex, and above all eminently social,
since it can be realised only by society and only under conditions of
strict equality and solidarity.”[120]
He contrasted this with Marxists who, he argued, were “champions of
order established from the top downwards, always in the name of
universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the masses, for whom they save
the honour and privilege of obeying leaders, elected masters.” The
state, then, was “the minority government, from the top downward, of a
vast quantity of men”[121] while in an anarchy the “whole people govern”
and so “there will be no one to be governed. It means that there will be
no government, no State.”[122] Therefore anarchists do “not accept, even
in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent
assemblies, provisional governments or so-called revolutionary
dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere,
honest and real in the hands of the masses, and that when it is
concentrated in those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and
immediately becomes reaction.”[123]
Thus, like Proudhon, Bakunin contrasted collective decision making with
representative government. The latter – whether within the groups at the
base of a society or at the top – empowered the few at the expense of
the many.
This is reflected on Bakunin’s discussion of union bureaucracy and how
to combat it. In the Geneva section of the International, the
construction workers’ section “simply left all decision-making to their
committees […] In this manner power gravitated to the committees, and by
a species of fiction characteristic of all governments the committees
substituted their own will and their own ideas for that of the
membership.” The union “sections could only defend their rights and
their autonomy in only one way: the workers called general membership
meetings. Nothing arouses the antipathy of the committees more than
these popular assemblies […] In these great meetings of the sections,
the items on the agenda was amply discussed and the most progressive
opinion prevailed.” In addition, delegates elected by the membership had
to fulfil “their obligations to their respective sections” by “reporting
regularly to the membership the proposals made and how they voted” and
“asking for further instructions (plus instant recall of unsatisfactory
delegates).”[124]
In short, to “contract a relationship of voluntary servitude” was
inconsistent with anarchist principles as “the freedom of every
individual is inalienable” and so associations could have no other
footing “but the utmost equality and reciprocity.”[125] Like Proudhon,
Bakunin saw the need for directly democratic – self-managed –
associations for the capitalist workplace created “master and slave”
relationships for “the worker sells his person and his liberty for a
given time.”[126] The workplace had to be a free association of
individuals who organise their joint work as equals and so he was
“convinced that the co-operative will be the preponderant form of social
organisation in the future, in every branch of labour and science.”[127]
This implied socialisation of property so that the “land belongs to only
those who cultivate it with their own hands; to the agricultural
communes. The capital and all the tools of production belong to the
workers; to the workers’ associations.” By being “converted into
collective property of the whole of society” it would be “utilised only
by the workers, i.e., by their agricultural and industrial
associations.”[128] He extended this into a vision of social revolution
in the traditional rather than reformist sense that Proudhon had used:
“the revolution must set out from the first radically and totally to
destroy the State and all State institutions […] confiscation of all
productive capital and means of production on behalf of workers’
associations, who are to put them to collective use […] the federative
Alliance of all working men’s associations […] will constitute the
Commune. […] The Commune will be organised by the standing federation of
the Barricades and by the creation of a Revolutionary Communal Council
composed of one or two delegates from each barricade, one to each street
or district, vested with plenary but accountable and removable mandates
[…] all provinces, communes and associations […] first reorganising on
revolutionary lines and then sending their representatives to an agreed
meeting-place, these too vested with similar mandates to constitute the
federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces in the name
of the same principles and to organise a revolutionary force capable of
defeating reaction. […] There can no longer be any successful political
or national revolution unless the political revolution is transformed
into social revolution, and unless national revolution, precisely
because of its radically socialist, anti-State character, becomes
universal revolution […] created by the people, and supreme control must
always belong to the people organised into a free federation of
agricultural and industrial associations […] organised from the bottom
upwards by means of revolutionary delegation”[129]
A free society would be based on federations of community and workplace
assemblies, initially locally in the Commune and then ever wider in
regions, nationally and, ultimately, internationally – all based on
decision making from the bottom-up with all delegates elected, mandated
and recallable. This would ensure that society would be “reconstituted
on the basis of liberty, henceforward to be the sole determinant of its
organisation, both political and economic. Order in society must be the
outcome of the greatest possible development of all local, collective
and individual liberties” to ensure that the “political and economic
organisation of society must therefore not flow downwards, from high to
low, and outwards, from centre to circumference, as it does today on the
principle of unity and enforced centralisation, but upwards and inwards,
on the principle of free association and free federation.”[130]
It is useful to note that, in stark contrast to those who (like Marx and
Lenin) assert that Bakunin, like all anarchists, thought an ideal
socialist society would spring-up overnight, Bakunin himself explicitly
stated that he did “not say” that the peasants and workers, “freely
organised from the bottom up, will miraculously create an ideal
organisation, conforming in all respects to our dreams. But […] that
what they construct will be living and vibrant, a thousand times better
and more just than any existing organisation,” be “open to revolutionary
propaganda” and so “will develop and perfect itself through free
experimentation” with the “development of each commune” taking as “its
point of departure the actual condition of its civilisation.”[131]
Bakunin, then, urged a socialism from below by means of a “popular
revolution” which would “create its own organisation from the bottom
upwards and from the circumference inwards, in accordance with the
principle of liberty, and not from the top downwards and from the centre
outwards, as in the way of all authority.”[132]
As with Bakunin, Kropotkin aimed for a society “wherein nobody should be
compelled to sell his labour (and consequently, to a certain degree, his
personality) to those who intend to exploit him” and sought “to create
among the working classes the union structures that might some day
replace the bosses and take into their own hands the production and
management of every industry.”[133] He dismissed the “Economists [who]
represented as a state of freedom the forced contract agreed by the
worker under the threat of hunger with the boss”[134] for capitalism
produced hierarchical relationships:
“In today’s society, where no one is allowed to use the field, the
factory, the instruments of labour, unless he acknowledges himself the
inferior, the subject of some Sir – servitude, submission, lack of
freedom, the practice of the whip are imposed by the very form of
society.”[135]
Returning repeatedly to the French Revolution, Kropotkin noted that
while it had “proclaimed the sovereignty of the people” it “by an
inconsistency” also “proclaimed, not a permanent sovereignty, but an
intermittent one, to be exercised at certain intervals only, for the
nomination of deputies supposed to represent the people”. It was “absurd
to take a certain number of men from out the mass, and to entrust them
with the management of all public affairs”. The state “is the power of
the bureaucracy”[136] for the “pyramidal ladder that makes the essence
of the State” means “the existence of a power placed above society” but
also the “concentration of many functions in the life of societies in
the hands of a few” and this resulted in “thousands of functionaries”
(“most of them corruptible”) to “read, classify, evaluate” on numerous
issues, great and small.[137] Worse, if “an all-powerful centralised
Government” – as in state socialism – tries to manage production as well
its other tasks then it “develops such a formidable bureaucracy” which
proves “absolutely incapable of doing that through its functionaries, no
matter how countless they may be”.[138]
The State, then, was “developed during the history of human societies”
to “subjugate the masses to minorities” and dismissed the arguments of
the politicians who “described as a state of freedom the present
situation in which the citizen becomes a serf and a taxpayer of the
State.” Referencing Proudhon’s debate with Louis Blanc, he argued that
the state “is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian – or it ceases to
be the State.”[139] This meant that both the Liberal and Democratic
States were class regimes, and as regards the latter “the Jacobin club
was the bulwark of the bourgeoisie coming to power against the
egalitarian tendencies of the people. […] the ideal of the Jacobin State
[…] had been designed from the viewpoint of the bourgeois, in direct
opposition to the egalitarian and communist tendencies of the people
which had arisen during the Revolution.”[140] A State was needed because
of the class interests of the few who owned and ruled society:
“To attack the central power, to strip it of its prerogatives, to
decentralise, to dissolve authority, would have been to abandon to the
people the control of its affairs, to run the risk of a truly popular
revolution. That is why the bourgeoisie sought to reinforce the central
government even more, to invest it with powers of which the king himself
would never have dreamt, to concentrate everything in its hands, to
subordinate to it the whole of France from one end to another – and then
to make sure of it all through the National Assembly.”[141]
The “people does not govern itself” and so Kropotkin’s aim was “economic
equality” in which “free and equal citizens, not about to abdicate their
rights to the care of the few, will seek some new form of organisation
that allows them to manage their affairs for themselves”. He pointed to
the sections of the French Revolution as popular institutions “not
separated from the people” and “remained of the people, and this is what
made the revolutionary power of these organisations.” Rather than
nominating representatives and disbanding, the sections “remained and
organised themselves, on their own initiative, as permanent organs of
the municipal administration” and “were practising what was described
later on as Direct Self-Government”. These were “the principles of
anarchism” and they “had their origin, not in theoretic speculations,
but in the deeds of the Great French Revolution” for the Commune “was
not to be a governed State, but a people governing itself directly ―
when possible ― without intermediaries, without masters.”[142]
A similar organisation would exist on the economic field, based on the
“expropriation pure and simple of the present holders of the large
landed estates, of the instruments of labour, and of capital of every
kind, and by the seizure of all such capital by the cultivators, the
workers’ organisations, and the agricultural and municipal communes. The
task of expropriation must be carried out by the workers themselves in
the towns and the countryside.” The workers “ought to be the real
managers of industries” and “the importance of th[e] labour movement for
the coming revolution” is that these “agglomerations of wealth
producers” will “reorganise production on new social bases. They will
[…] organise the life of the nation and the use which it will make of
the hitherto accumulated riches and means of production. They – the
labourers, grouped together – not the politicians.”[143]
These social and economic self-managed assemblies would then federate
with others, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally:
“Our needs are in fact so various, and they emerge with such rapidity,
that soon a single federation will not be sufficient to satisfy them
all. The Commune will then feel the need to contract other alliances, to
enter into other federations. Belonging to one group for the acquisition
of food supplies, it will have to join a second group to obtain other
goods, such as metals, and then a third and a fourth group for textiles
and works of art […] the federations of Communes, if they were to follow
their free development, would very soon start to mingle and intersect,
and in this way form a network […] the Commune […] no longer means a
territorial agglomeration; it is rather a generic name, a synonym for
the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The
social Commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity. Each
group in the Commune will necessarily be drawn towards similar groups in
other communes; they will come together and the links that federate them
will be as solid as those that attach them to their fellow citizens, and
in this way there will emerge a Commune of interests whose members are
scattered in a thousand towns and villages.”[144]
This diversity of groupings, federations, links and contracts means that
a free society would by decentralised and decentred, with questions no
longer channelled into one body. This would allow genuine delegation to
develop:
“The question of true delegation versus representation can be better
understood if one imagines a hundred or two hundred men, who meet each
day in their work and share common concerns, who know each other
thoroughly, who have discussed every aspect of the question that
concerns them and have reached a decision. They then choose someone and
send him to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind on
this particular issue. On such an occasion the choice is made with full
knowledge of the question, and everyone knows what is expected of his
delegate. The delegate is not authorised to do more than explain to
other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their
conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an
understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his
mandatories can accept or refuse.”[145]
Groups raised “questions and discussed them first themselves” and “sent
delegates – not rulers” – to congresses who “returned with no laws in
their pockets, but with proposals of agreements.”[146] This “free
agreement, by exchange of letters and proposals, by congresses at which
delegates met to discuss certain special subjects […] is a new principle
that differs completely from all governmental principle, monarchical or
republican, absolute or parliamentarian.”[147]
This would produce “an interwoven network, composed of an infinite
variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local,
regional, national and international – temporary or more or less
permanent – for all possible purposes.”[148] The Commune “will know that
it cannot admit any higher authority; above it there can only be the
interests of the Federation, freely accepted by itself as well as the
other communes […] the Commune will be absolutely free to adopt all the
institutions it wishes and to make all the reforms and revolutions it
finds necessary […] The Commune will know that it must break the State
and replace it by the Federation.”[149] Anarchism now had its full
social organisation on all three levels – economic, social and personal:
“The idea of independent Communes for the territorial organisation, and
of federations of Trade Unions for the organisation of men in accordance
with their different functions, gave a concrete conception of society
regenerated by a social revolution. There remained only to add to these
two modes of organisation a third […] the thousands upon thousands of
free combines and societies growing up everywhere for the satisfaction
of all possible and imaginable needs, economic, sanitary, and
educational; for mutual protection, for the propaganda of ideas, for
art, for amusement, and so on.”[150]
Socialism “will therefore have to find its own form of political
relations” as it “cannot utilise the old political forms”. In “one way
or another it will have to become more popular, closer to the assembly
[forum], than representative government. It must be less dependent on
representation, and become more self-government, more government of each
by themselves.”[151] This was needed because the State was no neutral
structure:
“Developed in the course of history to establish and maintain the
monopoly of land ownership in favour of one class – which, for that
reason, became the ruling class par excellence – what means can the
State provide to abolish this monopoly that the working class could not
find in its own strength and groups? Then perfected during the course of
the nineteenth century to ensure the monopoly of industrial property,
trade, and banking to new enriched classes, to which the State was
supplying ‘arms’ cheaply by stripping the land from the village communes
and crushing the cultivators by tax – what advantages could the State
provide for abolishing these same privileges? Could its governmental
machine, developed for the creation and upholding of these privileges,
now be used to abolish them? Would not the new function require new
organs? And these new organs would they not have to be created by the
workers themselves, in their unions, their federations, completely
outside the State?”[152]
In short, the revolution would see “the commune, independent of the
State, abolishing in itself the representative system” while the
“workers’ organisations” seize “the instruments of labour” and land. So
instead of a society “based on the subjugation of the people to rulers,
be they usurpatory, hereditary or elected, anarchists work for the
realisation of a society based on the mutual agreement” for they “deny
every form of hierarchical organisation”.[153] Thus the aim was to
produce a society where people were genuinely free rather than simply
free to pick their masters:
“We finally realise now that without communism man will never be able to
reach that full development of individuality which is, perhaps, the most
powerful desire of every thinking being.”[154]
Anarchy, though, was not for the future. Anarchists “work so that the
masses of workers of the soil and of [the] factory endeavour to form
organisations” based “not in pyramidal hierarchy, not in the orders of
the central committee” but rather “in the free group, federative, from
the simple to the complex.”[155] The struggle against exploitation and
oppression was the means by which anarchism was created, for “to make
revolution, the mass of workers must organise themselves, and resistance
and the strike are excellent means by which workers can organise.” What
was needed was “to build resistance associations” and “fight against the
exploiters, to unify the workers’ organisations of each town and trade
and to put them in contact with those of other towns, to federate across
France, to federate across borders, internationally”.[156]
Let Bakunin, Kropotkin – myths aside – saw that a social revolution “is
not the work of one day. It means a whole period, mostly lasting for
several years, during which the country is in a state of effervescence;
when thousands of formerly indifferent spectators take a lively part in
public affairs”. For “this immense problem – the reorganisation of
production, redistribution of wealth and exchange, according to the new
principles – cannot be solved by parliamentary commissions nor by any
kind of government. It must be a natural growth resulting from the
combined efforts of all interested in it” and “must grow naturally,
proceeding from the simplest up to complex federations, and it cannot be
something schemed by a few men and ordered from above.”[157]
Our discussion of the origins of anarchist organisation has shown its
influences – ideological and practical – and its characteristics.
Anarchists since the first self-proclaimed anarchist text, What is
Property?, had already answered Engels’ question of “how do these people
propose to operate a factory, run a railway, or steer a ship without one
will that decides in the last resort, without unified direction”?[158]
Anarchism was born precisely to answer it and did so with a single word:
association.[159]
Anarchists have always recognised that freedom is a product of
interaction between people and it is how we associate which determines
whether we are free or not. While anarchism’s perspective is social,
Engels’ is fundamentally liberal as it sees isolation as true freedom
(“each gives up some of his autonomy”[160]) and so confuses agreement
with authority, co-operation with coercion.
The real question is simple: is an association based on the
self-government of its members or do a few decide for all? So to qualify
as libertarian an organisation must be based on certain core
principles[161] that ensure that liberty is not reduced to simply
picking masters:
Taking each in turn, we can sketch the principles of anarchist
organisation which “has sought to change relationships between people,
and that will one day transform them, both those that are established
between people living under a single roof and those that may be
established in international associations.”[162]
An organisation that is not voluntary would hardly be free. So free
association requires that individuals decide for themselves which groups
to join. Yet it is more than that for “to promise to obey is to deny or
to limit, to a greater or lesser degree, individuals’ freedom and
equality and their ability to exercise these capacities [of independent
judgement and rational deliberation]. To promise to obey is to state,
that in certain areas, the person making the promise is no longer free
to exercise her capacities and decide upon her own actions, and is no
longer equal, but subordinate.”[163] Being free to join a group that is
internally hierarchical is simply picking masters and this means that
groups have to be democratic so that those subject to decisions make
them. Thus anarchist organisation is rooted in “the possibility of
calling the general assembly whenever it was wanted by the members of
the section and of discussing everything in the general assembly”.[164]
This means freedom does not end at the workplace door or with a marriage
ceremony. As Proudhon noted, under capitalism workers may ostensibly
sell just their labour but in reality they sell their liberty as well
for the reasons Pateman summarises:
“Capacities or labour power cannot be used without the worker using his
will, his understanding and experience, to put them into effect. The use
of labour power requires the presence of its ‘owner’ […] the worker
labours as demanded. The employment contract must, therefore, create a
relationship of command and obedience between employer and worker […] In
short, the contract in which the worker allegedly sells his labour power
is a contract in which, since he cannot be separated from his
capacities, he sells command over the use of his body and himself. To
obtain the right to use another is to be a (civil) master. To sell
command over the use of oneself for a specified period [...] is to be an
unfree labourer. The characteristics of this condition are captured in
the term wage slave.”[165]
Wage-labour is not consistent with anarchism for, least we forget, “a
corporation, factory or business is the economic equivalent of fascism:
decisions and control are strictly top-down.”[166] This means that
“staying free is, for the working man who has to sell his labour, an
impossibility” and so a free economy existed only when “associations of
men and women who would work on the land, in the factories, in the
mines, and so on, became themselves the managers of production.”[167]
In short, “neither a commercial, nor an industrial, nor an agricultural
association can be conceived of in the absence of equality”.[168] The
anarchist critique of property rests on its core principles of liberty
and equality and is reflected in its organisational principles. Yet
while democratic, anarchist organisations have to be egalitarian as well
for simply electing a few who govern the rest reintroduces hierarchies,
albeit elected ones, and least we forget government is the “delegation
of power, that is, the abdication of the initiative and sovereignty of
every one into the hands of the few” and should not be confused with
administration, which “signifies delegation of work.”[169] This means
“organising society, not from above downwards, but on a basis of
equality, without authority, from the simple to the complex”.[170] If an
organisation is not centralised and top-down then it is not a state. So
anarchism’s anti-state position, like its anti-property one, is a
socialist critique driven by its egalitarian core principle:
“we are the most logical and most complete socialists, since we demand
for every person not just his entire measure of the wealth of society
but also his portion of social power, which is to say, the real ability
to make his influence felt, along with that of everybody else, in the
administration of public affairs.”[171]
Anarchists have tended to call this self-management rather than
democratic precisely because democracy has, in practice, meant electing
a government rather than a group of people governing themselves. This
does not preclude the need to “allocate a given task to others” in the
shape of committees but it is a case of group members “not abdicating
their own sovereignty” by “turning some into directors and chiefs”.[172]
These would be agents of the group rather than their masters for these
committees would be “always under the direct control of the population”
and express the “decisions taken at popular assemblies”[173] – subject
to election, mandating and recall, like all delegates. How much an
individual participates within an association is up to each person but
the option to take part is always there.
Just as individuals associate within groups, so groups will need to
co-ordinate their activities (“collective beings are as much realities
as individual ones are”[174]) by the same kind of horizontal links that
exist within an association. This federalist structure is made up of
delegates “elected by each section or federation”, “duty-bound to enact
the wishes of their mandatories” and “liable to be recalled at any
point.”[175] Decisions, then, are co-ordinated by means of elected,
mandated and recallable delegates rather than representatives. This
would, by definition, be a decentralised organisation for power remains
at the base in the individuals who associate together into groups rather
than at the top in the hands of a few representatives and the
bureaucracies needed to support them:
“True progress lies in the direction of decentralisation, both
territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local
and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the
compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the
periphery […] through the organisation in every township or commune of
the local groups of producers and consumers, as also the regional, and
eventually the international, federations of these groups.”[176]
It would also be decentred, with decisions made by those affected rather
than every decision being channelled into the hands of a single
organisation, whether locally or nationally, which decides upon
everything – regardless of its (lack of) competency to discuss and
decide upon the issue. Federalism, then, is based on both decentralising
and decentring decision making back into the hands of all affected by
the decisions made.
Groups and federations exist for clear reasons and self-manage the
activities they exist to achieve and so the permanence or otherwise of
specific groups or agreements is very much dependent on the functional
needs of the situation or the participants and so cannot be formalised
by a hard or fast rule. Some agreements will be fleeting (to provide
specific goods or services) and other more-or-less permanent (to provide
healthcare or run a railway network). The key is that the federation
lasts as long as is required, that association is produced by objective
needs and does not exist for its own sake. This does not preclude
general gatherings at specific times or in response to specific events
or needs, just that there will be a multitude of groups and federations
alongside these.
This brings us to another issue, namely size. While some suggest that
anarchism inherently supports small-scale groups or industry this is not
the case. It recognises that size is driven by the objective needs of a
functional task. A workplace is as big as its output requires (“oceanic
steamers cannot be built in village factories”[177]) while a commune can
be a village, a town or a city. While large organisations would – as is
the case now – be sub-divided internally into functional groups, this
does not change the fact that anarchists have always incorporated the
fact of, and need for, large-scale organisation and industry. Indeed,
federalism is advocated precisely to co-ordinate, plan and provide
services judged by those who need them to be better done together.
What level a specific industry or service should be co-ordinated at will
vary depending on what it is so no hard and fast rule can be formulated
but the basic principle is that groups “unite with each other in a
mutual and equal way, for one or more specific tasks, whose
responsibility specially and exclusively falls to the delegates of the
federation” Thus it is a case of “the initiative of communes and
departments as to works that operate within their jurisdiction” plus
“the initiative of the workers companies as to carrying the works out”
for the “direct, sovereign initiative of localities, in arranging for
public works that belong to them, is a consequence of the democratic
principle and the free contract”.[178] In contrast to Marxists who have
traditionally fetishised large-scale industry, planning and organisation
at the expense of common-sense, anarchists advocate appropriate levels
of all these within a federal structure which is the only form flexible
enough to take into account all the differing objective requirements and
needs of a complex world.
In short, self-governing individuals join self-governing groups that, in
turn, join self-governing federations. Individuals are free in-so-far as
the associations they join are participatory and without hierarchy:
“The essential principle of anarchism is that mankind has reached a
stage of development at which it is possible to abolish the old
relationship of master-man (capitalist-proletarian) and substitute a
relationship of egalitarian co-operation. This principle is based, not
only on ethical ground, but also on economic grounds.”[179]
This self-managed society was termed by Proudhon a “Labour
Democracy”[180] to clearly differentiate it from existing – bourgeois –
forms of democracy.
Rather than constantly governed by the few – whether that few is the
elected of the majority matters little – individuals within an
association will participate in decisions and will sometimes be in the
majority, sometimes not, in numerous groups and federations. The
“necessity of division and association of labour” means “I take and I
give – such is human life. Each is an authoritative leader and in turn
is led by others. Accordingly there is no fixed and constant authority,
but continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary
authority and subordination.”[181] No one’s permanent position would be
one of subjection as under statism and capitalism.
Anarchists do not think that there will be unanimity within each group
for “variety, conflict even, is life” while “uniformity is death.”[182]
In disagreements, the minority has a choice – agree with the majority,
decide to leave the association or practice civil disobedience to
convince the majority of the errors of their way. Which option is best
depends on the nature of the decision and the group. Similarly, the
majority has the right to expel a minority (free association means the
freedom not to associate) which is acting in anti-social ways or not
keeping their word and so threatening a joint activity:
“Let us take a group of volunteers, combining for some particular
enterprise. Having its success at heart, they all work with a will, save
one of the associates, who is frequently absent from his post. Must they
on his account dissolve the group, elect a president to impose fines, or
maybe distribute markers for work done, as is customary in the Academy?
It is evident that neither the one nor the other will be done, but that
some day the comrade who imperils their enterprise will be told:
‘Friend, we should like to work with you; but as you are often absent
from your post, and you do your work negligently, we must part. Go and
find other comrades who will put up with your indifference!’ […] A
certain standard of public morals is maintained in the same way.”[183]
None of this assumes that the majority has the right to rule the
minority just that, in general, members who join a group do so
understanding the decision making process within the association and can
leave if they no longer agree with specific decisions of the
majority.[184] Thus we have majority decision making but not majority
government for the minority can leave and join or form other
associations. While anarchists “have the special mission of being
vigilant custodians of freedom, against all aspirants to power and
against the possible tyranny of the majority,”[185] the case for anarchy
– self-management – is not that the majority is always right but that no
minority (even an elected one) can be trusted not to prefer its own
advantage if given power:
“the present capitalist, authoritarian system is absolutely
inappropriate to a society of men so improvident, so rapacious, so
egotistic, and so slavish as they are now. Therefore, when we hear men
saying that the Anarchists imagine men much better than they really are,
we merely wonder how intelligent people can repeat that nonsense. Do we
not say continually that the only means of rendering men less rapacious
and egotistic, less ambitious and less slavish at the same time, is to
eliminate those conditions which favour the growth of egotism and
rapacity, of slavishness and ambition? The only difference between us
and those who make the above objection is this: We do not, like them,
exaggerate the inferior instincts of the masses, and do not complacently
shut our eyes to the same bad instincts in the upper classes. We
maintain that both rulers and ruled are spoiled by authority; both
exploiters and exploited are spoiled by exploitation; while our
opponents seem to admit that there is a kind of salt of the earth – the
rulers, the employers, the leaders ― who, happily enough, prevent those
bad men – the ruled, the exploited, the led – from becoming still worse
than they are.
“There is the difference, and a very important one. We admit the
imperfections of human nature, but we make no exception for the rulers.
They make it, although sometimes unconsciously, and because we make no
such exception, they say that we are dreamers, ‘unpractical men.’”[186]
The aim of anarchism is to eliminate permanent relations of
subordination, in other words hierarchy. This is achieved by collective
decision making (self-management) and socialisation (abolition of
private property). It does not postulate the notion of everyone always
seeing their ideas implemented within every freely joined association
they are part of. This would be near impossible, unless the person is
the dictator of the group and so violates the freedom of the others.
The key is that internally the associations are as free as they were to
join and so no one alienates or denies their liberty in order to become
part of them. Thus the newcomer to an anarchist workplace has the same
rights as existing members while the capitalist firm can only be joined
if the potential worker agrees to obey the property-owner: the
servant-master relationships inherent in the latter are abolished in the
former. It also shows how other, more obviously, core principles are
expressed – thus liberty is protected by means of equality which is
achieved by the abolition of property.
This raises the issue of minorities and majorities. Anarchists are well
aware that majorities can be unimaginative and oppressive, that social
progress is a product of energetic minorities – sometimes even
individuals – who push the accepted norms, challenge the status quo, and
so on. Emma Goldman put it well in her article “Minorities and
Majorities”:
“Not because I do not feel with the oppressed, the disinherited of the
earth; not because I do not know the shame, the horror, the indignity of
the lives the people lead, do I repudiate the majority as a creative
force for good. Oh, no, no! But because I know so well that as a compact
mass it has never stood for justice or equality. It has suppressed the
human voice, subdued the human spirit, chained the human body. As a mass
its aim has always been to make life uniform, grey, and monotonous as
the desert. As a mass it will always be the annihilator of
individuality, of free initiative, of originality.”[187]
This was why she, like most other anarchists, supported syndicalism and
other mass movements based on direct action, to encourage what Kropotkin
called the “spirit of revolt” and break the mental chains which secure
those of economic and political inequality.[188] However, the issue
remains – would a self-managed socialist society ensure freedom for all,
for minorities along with majorities? Would social pressure be
oppressive, would the associations become bureaucratic due to
administrative routine?
This is no idle point and many sympathetic to anarchism, including
George Orwell and Ursula le Guin, made this point.[189] Yet anarchist
thinkers have long recognised the issue. Kropotkin, for example, noted
in the conclusion of Mutual Aid the importance of minority action to
shatter social forms which have become set in their ways:
“It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may
represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one
aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current,
powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other
current – the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts
to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and
spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident
function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become
crystallised, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the
State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the
self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.”[190]
The importance of revolutionary minorities, then, does not end with the
creation of anarchy.[191] Thus the majority will be subject to the
influence of minorities within associations and the federal structure of
anarchy ensures experimentation due to the diversity it inherently
allows:
“The principle of political centralism is openly opposed to all laws of
social progress and of natural evolution. It lies in the nature of
things that every cultural advance is first achieved within a small
group and only gradually finds adoption by society as a whole.
Therefore, political decentralisation is the best guaranty for the
unrestricted possibilities of new experiments. For such an environment
each community is given the opportunity to carry through the things
which it is capable of accomplishing itself without imposing them on
others. Practical experimentation is the parent of every development in
society. So long as each district is capable of effecting the changes
within its own sphere which its citizens deem necessary, the example of
each becomes a fructifying influence on the other parts of the community
since they will have the chance to weigh the advantages accruing from
them without being forced to adopt them if they are not convinced of
their usefulness. The result is that progressive communities serve the
others as models, a result justified by the natural evolution of
things.”[192]
Diversity, disagreement, is reflected in anarchist organisational theory
for anarchists are well aware of the importance of individual and
minority freedom within the wider context of social self-management. The
idea that full, unanimous agreement (“consensus”) is needed is not part
of the anarchist tradition.[193] While anarchists recognise that
consensus may be suitable for some groups – most obviously, the family
and circles of friends – it would not be so for most others,
particularly those associated with waging the class struggle or the
post-revolutionary organising of industry on a large-scale. Yet, the
danger which consensus seeks to eliminate (while exaggerating it) – that
minorities are subject to the oppressive will of the majority – is
minimised within anarchist organisations. Participation within a
multitude of associations means that no one will be a minority all the
time whether in a specific group or in life as a whole.
In addition, with the means of life socialised, individuals and groups
have the real freedom to leave groupings and form new ones for they have
the resources available. Thus, if you are permanently in a minority then
you can leave an association far more easily than under capitalism – you
do not have to pay for or gain the permission of others to utilise
unused resources to do so. As Kropotkin argued:
“in a communist society which recognises the right of everyone, on an
egalitarian basis, to all the instruments of labour and to all the means
of existence that society possesses, the only men on their knees in
front of others are those who are by their nature voluntary serfs. Each
being equal to everyone else as far as the right to well-being is
concerned, he does not have to kneel before the will and arrogance of
others and so secures equality in all personal relationships with his
co-members. […] communism […] guarantees the most freedom for the
individual – provided that the guiding idea of the commune is
egalitarian Freedom, the absence of authority, Anarchy.”[194]
Thus there is substantial freedom for individuals and minorities to not
only live their own lives as they see fit but also to push society
forward, to ensure social progress. While under authoritarian systems
like capitalism “progress” is usually imposed by minorities for their
own advantage (such as higher profits or power) at the expense of the
many, with any wider gains purely coincidental, in an anarchist society
progress would be achieved by the possibility to experiment and the
knowledge that the benefits of change would be shared by all. Few would
object to changes which improve their life – particularly if they see
pioneers reaping the benefits of applying the new ways.
Any discussion of the dynamic between minorities and majorities must
note that this works both ways – groups can expel individuals who
systematically undermine decisions reached by the organisation. Just as
majorities can be oppressive, so can minorities. An anarchist society
would seek to defend itself against those seeking power, whether
economic, political or social – a point worth stressing as some seem to
believe, as Malatesta so elegantly put it, “that anarchists, in the name
of their principles, would wish to see that strange freedom respected
which violates and destroys the freedom and life of others. They seem
almost to believe that after having brought down government and private
property we would allow both to be quietly built up again, because of
respect for the freedom of those who might feel the need to be rulers
and property owners. A truly curious way of interpreting our
ideas.”[195] In other words:
“Our Revolution […] is […] a fact consisting of the aggregate of
individual victories over the resistance of every individual who has
stood in the way of Liberty. Under these circumstances it is obvious
that any visible reprisal [of authority] could and would be met by a
resumption of the same revolutionary action on the part of the
individuals or groups affected, and the maintenance of a state of
Anarchy in this manner would be far easier than the gaining of a state
of Anarchy by the same methods and in the face of hitherto unshaken
organised opposition. […] the gradual and temporarily imperceptible
regeneration of the old evils […] must eventually become perceptible to
those affected by them, who cannot fail to become aware that in such or
such a quarter they are excluded from the liberty they enjoy elsewhere,
that such or such a person is drawing from society all that he can, and
monopolising from others as much as possible. They have it in their
power to apply a prompt check by boycotting such a person and refusing
to help him with their labour or to willingly supply him with any
articles in their possession. They have it in their power to exert
pressure upon him […] to use force against him. They have these powers
individually as well as collectively. Being either past rebels who have
been inspired with the spirit of liberty, or else habituated to enjoy
freedom from their infancy, they are hardly likely to rest passive in
view of what they feel to be a wrong. […] And at the worst, it can
hardly be supposed that the abuse would grow to be a general system like
that which exists at present, without having already provoked a severe
struggle.”[196]
Anarchist organisational theory, in short, has always built into
libertarian systems safeguards against irremovable imperfections –
safeguards such as federalism, election, mandates, recall,
socialisation. In this way, both minorities and majorities have freedom
and so social progress is ensured based upon the natural give and take
of group life. Anarchism, then, does not deny the potential dangers of
majority decision-making and the possible bureaucratic degeneration of
even the best organisation but it seeks to minimise them by means of
bottom-up structures and the role of vigilant individuals and active
minorities in challenging social crystallisation.[197]
This discussion of majorities and minorities points to a paradox of
individualism. In order to always see your ideas implemented you either
have to abolish all groups (including the family) or be a dictator (or
owner, the terms being synonymous). The first option is impossible while
the second is hardly libertarian. Most individualists, however, opt for
the second option but obscure what is little more than voluntary
dictatorship under – like Locke – much talk of “consent” and “property
in the person”. It is to these we now turn in order to show the
contradictions of this position as well as the dangers of ideology.
Many anarchists are sympathetic to the saying – popularised if not
invented by the Situationists – that the difference between theory and
ideology is that the former is when you have ideas and the latter is
when ideas have you. As such, anarchists tend to suggest that anarchism
is not an ideology but rather a theory. The dangers of ideology can best
be seen by comparing libertarian theory with the ideology that is called
“libertarianism” by its proponents.
We need to clarify an obvious objection: how can anarchists – who have
been calling themselves libertarian since 1857 – be against
“libertarianism”? Simply because the advocates of “libertarianism” did
not let their ideological support for absolute property rights stop them
knowingly stealing the name from those who invented and used it. As
Murray Rothbard, one of the founders of “Libertarianism”, recalled:
“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence [in 1950s America]
is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a
crucial word from the enemy […] ‘Libertarians’ […] had long been simply
a polite word for left-wing [sic!] anarchists, that is for anti-private
property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But
now we had taken it over”[198]
Given this quite brazen – and ideology contradicting! – act of theft, it
is understandable that anarchists are somewhat less than sympathetic to
“libertarianism”. This is confirmed by the self-contradictory and
liberty-denying conclusions that its advocates reach. Ignoring what
drove the creation of anarchism, “libertarianism” seeks to return to the
authoritarianism of classical liberalism and, inevitably, to the
contradictions Rousseau had exposed. Thus we find Rothbard proclaiming
that the state “arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate
decision-making power, over a given territorial area” before, buried in
the chapter’s end notes, quietly admitting that “[o]bviously, in a free
society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just
property, Jones over his, etc.”[199] Needless to say, Rothbard does not
mention the obvious issue – they like the State have “ultimate
decision-making power” over those who use that property as well. Unlike
Robert Nozick who was more open:
“if one starts a private town, on land whose acquisition did not and
does not violate the Lockean proviso [of non-aggression], persons who
chose to move there or later remain there would have no right to a say
in how the town was run, unless it was granted to them by the decision
procedures for the town which the owner had established.”[200]
While some would argue that it “would be logically inconsistent for an
ideology to defend individual choice and to deny people the vote”[201],
for “libertarianism” the opposite is the case – individual choice is the
means by which people are subjected to authoritarian (indeed,
dictatorial) social relationships in the name of “liberty”. Yet the
glaring contradictions – “libertarians” advocating dictatorship, a
definition of the state (evil) identical to property (good) – are all
too clear and already denounced by anarchists in the critique of
liberalism they extended from Rousseau into property itself. Rothbard,
ironically, shows the validity of the anarchist position while haplessly
trying to defend his own:
“If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is
proper for it to make rules for everyone who presumes to live in that
area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because
there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the
entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave
its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who
sets down rules for people living on his property.”[202]
The question now becomes one not of liberty within an association but
whether those who hold power (“sets down rules”) do so legitimately or
not and this relates to property rights. Rothbard argues that the state
does not “justly” own its territory and asserts that his “homesteading
theory” of the creation of private property “suffices to demolish any
such pretensions by the State apparatus” and so the problem with the
state is that it “claims and exercises a compulsory monopoly of defence
and ultimate decision-making over an area larger than an individual’s
justly-acquired property.”[203] Yet private property has never been
acquired in the form Rothbard (repeating Locke) suggested but has been
bound-up with state and private coercion – assuming his theory was
robust, which it is not. He attempts to eliminate the clear difficulties
he faces by liberal (pun intended) use of “adding mythical and imaginary
happenings to make up for the ‘reality gaps’”[204] combined with the
hope that he found people “simple enough to believe him” (to requote
Rousseau).
Ignoring Rothbard’s “immaculate conception of property” as being as
unrelated to reality as Locke’s social contract theory of the state, the
question arises why current and future generations should be
dispossessed from liberty because property is monopolised by the few.
While he denounced social contract theories of the state as invalid
because “no past generation can bind later generations”[205] he fails to
see he is doing exactly that with his support of private property:
current and future generations of humanity must be – to use Proudhon’s
word – excommunicated from liberty by proprietor hierarchy.
One of the many reasons why the state has intervened in society – and
why liberalism has evolved away from its classical form – is because
people recognised both the contradiction between proclaiming liberty in
the abstract while denying it in practice and the obvious injustices
that the private hierarchies associated with property can produce.[206]
Ironically, Rothbard himself shows that this is the case when he
utilised a hypothetical example of a country whose King, threatened by a
rising “libertarian” movement, responses by “employ[ing] a cunning
stratagem,” namely he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but
just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of
his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather
than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can “regulate the lives of
all the people who presume to live on” his property as he sees fit.
Rothbard then admits people would be “living under a regime no less
despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps,
indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for
themselves the libertarians’ very principle of the absolute right of
private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to
claim before.”[209]
While Rothbard rejects this “cunning stratagem” he failed to note how
this argument undermines his own claims that capitalism is the only
system which is based upon and fosters liberty. As he himself argues,
not only does the property owner have the same monopoly of power over a
given area as the state, it is more despotic as it is based on the
“absolute right of private property”. Indeed, he states that the theory
that the state owns its territory “makes the State, as well as the King
in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord, who at least theoretically owned
all the land in his domain”[207] without noticing that this makes the
capitalist or landlord a feudal overlord within “libertarianism.”
The one remaining defence of “libertarianism” is that these absolutist
social relationships are fine because they are voluntary in nature: no
one forces someone to work for a specific employer and everyone has the
possibility of becoming an employer or landlord. That some may become a
proprietor is true but that does not address the issue – are people to
be free or not. It is a strange ideology that proclaims itself
liberty-loving yet embraces factory feudalism and office oligarchy.
The context in which people make their decisions is important.
Anarchists have long argued that, as a class, workers have little choice
but to “consent” to capitalist hierarchy as the alternative is either
dire poverty or starvation. “Libertarianism” dismisses this by denying
that there is such a thing as economic power.[208] It is easy to refute
such claims by turning to Rothbard’s arguments about the abolition of
slavery and serfdom in the 19^(th) century:
“The bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had
worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their
former oppressors. With economic power thus remaining in their hands,
the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what
were now free tenants or farm labourers. The serfs and slaves had tasted
freedom, but had been cruelly derived of its fruits.”[209]
So if “market forces” (“voluntary exchanges”) result in the few owning
most of the property then this is unproblematic and raises no questions
about the (lack of) liberty of the working class but if people are
placed in exactly the same situation as a result of coercion then it is
a case of “economic power” and “masters”.
Such is the danger of ideology that it allows someone to write a book
that actually refutes its own arguments.
It also shows the importance of organisation to a political theory.
Anarchism by placing liberty as a priority principle took it seriously
and organised the concepts it had inherited from previous ideologies in
such a manner that it also took organisation seriously. It recognised
the obvious contradiction in defining (or, more correctly, limiting)
liberty to just consent and, with Rousseau, opposed the liberal attempt
to decontest the notion by pointing to its practice. That Nozick can ask
whether “a free system would allow [the individual] to sell himself into
slavery” and answer “I believe that it would”[210] shows the correctness
of anarchism in this.
The apparent paradox of why an ideology self-proclaimed as “libertarian”
is not particularly interested in liberty and justifies numerous
obviously authoritarian social relations (up to and including voluntary
slavery and dictatorship) is not a paradox at all. Contract in the
liberal sense “always generates political right in the form of relations
of domination and subordination” and so rather than “undermining
subordination, contract theorists justified modern civil
subjection.”[211] Once it is realised that its core principle is
property rather than liberty then it is logical to rename it something
more accurate: propertarianism.
This may seem counter-intuitive or contradictory but it is not: it is
the aim of the whole ideological tradition. Locke was not seeking to
undermine traditional hierarchies (beyond absolute monarchy) but rather
to reinforce them. He did so by a “just-so” story whose desired
conclusions – his favoured socio-economic system, the one he benefited
from – are reached by what appear reasonable steps. And here we have the
crux of the matter for in Locke’s “just-so” story the state does
rightfully own its property for it is a joint-stock corporation formed
by landlords (servants are in civil society but not of civil society and
have no say, just as employees are part of a company but its owners run
it). Rothbard refuses to take this final step but gives no reason to
reject this final chapter of the same fictional story. For we must never
forget that this is what this ideology is based upon – a “just-so”
story. Locke, Nozick and Rothbard seek to defend the inequalities of
capitalism by convincing us to believe his story and ignore history –
not to mention the evidence of unfreedom before our eyes.
The farcical self-contradictions that Rothbard repeatedly gets himself
into shows why “every society declines the moment it falls into the
hands of the ideologists”[212]. At its worse, ideology allows its
believers to not only ignore – even justify – social injustice but also
to contradict their stated aspirations and abuse logic. While it may be
argued that it is only by using ideology as a concept that we can expose
this kind of contradiction, the fundamental problem is that it is
ideology which blinds Rothbard and Nozick to the obvious, namely that
the state and private property produce identical social relationships
and “if you have unbridled capitalism, you will have all kinds of
authority: you will have extreme authority.”[213]
The contradictions of propertarianism also shows that historical
understanding and context is important. It does not afford “a typical
example of a gravitational shift within conventional ideologies that
obscures an ideology’s foundational principles by reorganising the core
units.” As Locke shows, this is not the case and rather than “crowding
out or demoting other liberal core concepts,”[214] propertarianism sees
itself as clearing it of that which has no place in it.
While it may be true that “private property migrated within liberal
ideology from a core position to a more marginal one” this is due to the
rise of subsequent theories which critiqued it (most notably democracy).
This means that propertarianism is a reaction to liberal-democratic
ideology and the erosion of property rights and power it implies. It is
simply not the case that propertarians “overemphasize individual liberty
at the expense of other liberal values” because they do not “expand the
liberty theme” at all but rather aim to restrict it – for the many. This
can be seen by the awkward fact that while neo-liberalism may have “a
built in reluctance to contemplate state regulation as a possible cure
to social evils”[215] but this does not apply when it comes to, say,
organised labour when State power is regularly invoked.[216]
This means that propertarianism is not “a strange hybrid” which is “also
carved out of conservativism” with the aim of “the sanctioning of
existing economic inequalities”[217] for classical liberalism’s goal was
precisely to sanction the economic inequalities of the developing
capitalist economy and to firmly secure (conserve!) the market-driven
master-servant relationships which were replacing more traditional ones.
That other self-described liberals, are horrified by it is down to the
evolution of liberalism and its embrace of ideas from other traditions,
namely democracy and socialism.
Regardless of propertarian claims, it is as not a simple fact of nature
that the propertyless must serve those with property – it is a product
of specific, human created, social institutions which produce specific
hierarchical social relationships and these can and must be ended to
achieve freedom for all rather than a few. The struggle to end them is
the link between the present and the future, from here to there.
Thus anarchist organisation is not something for the future, it must be
applied now. It is only by applying libertarian ideas today, in our
daily lives and struggles, that we become capable of being free.
Anarchists “are convinced that one learns through struggle, and that
once one begins to enjoy a little freedom one ends by wanting it
all”[218] and so “by degrees, the revolutionary education of the people”
is “accomplished by the revolution itself.”[219] Struggle against social
hierarchies, whether public or private, political or economic, is the
means to transform both individuals and society:
“Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action.
Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the
result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men
must be changed, and to transform men, society must be changed.
“Poverty brutalises man, and to abolish poverty men must have a social
conscience and determination. Slavery teaches men to be slaves, and to
free oneself from slavery there is a need for men who aspire to liberty
[…] Governments accustom people to submit to the Law and to believe that
Law is essential to society; and to abolish government men must be
convinced of the uselessness and the harmfulness of government.
“How does one escape from this vicious circle?
“Fortunately existing society has not been created by the inspired will
of a dominating class, which has succeeded in reducing all its subjects
to passive and unconscious instruments of its interests. It is the
result of a thousand internecine struggles of a thousand human and
natural factors […] From this the possibility of progress […] We must
take advantage of all the means, all the possibilities and the
opportunities that the present environment allows us to act on our
fellow men and to develop their consciences and their demands […] to
claim and to impose those major social transformations which are
possible and which effectively serve to open the way to further advances
later […] We must seek to get all the people, or different sections of
the people, to make demands, and impose itself and take for itself all
the improvements and freedoms it desires as and when it reaches the
state of wanting them, and the power to demand them […] we must push the
people to want always more and to increase its pressures, until it has
achieved complete emancipation.”[220]
In short, as Bakunin stressed, there is “but a single path, that of
emancipation through practical action” which “has only one meaning. It
means workers’ solidarity in their struggle against the bosses. It means
trades-unions, organisation, and the federation of resistance
funds.”[224] The struggle against hierarchy is the means to achieve
anarchy, for by challenging hierarchy we both create the structures
which will replace it and get used to managing our own affairs without
masters. As George Barrett put it:
“The Anarchist’s argument is that government fulfils no useful purpose.
Most of what it does is mischievous, and the rest could be done better
without its interference. It is the headquarters of the profit-makers,
the rent-takers, and of all those who take from but who do not give to
society. When this class is abolished by the people so organising
themselves that they will run the factories and use the land for the
benefit of their free communities, i.e., for their own benefit, then the
Government must also be swept away, since its purpose will be gone. The
only thing then that will be put in the place of government will be the
free organisations of the workers. When Tyranny is abolished Liberty
remains, just as when disease is eradicated health remains.”[221]
So, “[t]o make a revolution it is not, however, enough that there should
be […] risings […] It is necessary that after the risings there should
be left something new in the institutions, which would permit new forms
of life to be elaborated and established.”[222] Struggle is the means by
which the new social organism is created.
It is easy to see how union and strike assemblies and committees can
become the structures by which workers run their workplaces. Indeed, how
else could it occur? Thus “the weapon of the future will be the general
strike” and “it must be the strike which will stay in the factory, not
go out,” which “will guard the machines and allow no scab to touch
them,” which “will organise, not to inflict deprivation on itself, but
on the enemy,” which “will take over industry and operate it for the
workers, not for franchise holder, stockholders, and
officeholders”.[223] So the need, as Kropotkin summarised, is to
“constitute a formidable workers’ force that might impose its will on
the managers of industry and extract from them, first, improved working
conditions – better pay, reductions in working hours, healthier
factories, less dangerous machinery, and so on – but also, – ultimately,
wrest the very organisation of industry from their hands. […] unions
[are] more than merely a tool for bettering wages. They must, of
necessity, become bodies that would, one day, take the entire
organisation of each branch of industry into their hands.”[224] In this
he was repeating the ideas raised in the first International and
championed by the likes of Bakunin and Varlin.
Thus strikes “trains the participants for a common management of affairs
and for distribution of responsibilities, distinguishes the people most
talented and devoted to a common cause, and finally, forces the others
to get to know these people and strengthens their influence.”[225] Trade
unions were “natural organs for the direct struggle with capital and for
the organisation of the future order,”[226] a position echoed by others
who “recognise[d] in the Trades Unions the embryonic group of the future
‘free society.’ Every Trades Union is […] an autonomous commune in the
process of incubation” which as well as fighting capitalism “will yet
take its place by superseding it under the system of universal free
co-operation.”[227]
These unions – the people in their workplaces assembled and federated –
would be the means to first challenge Capital and then destroy it.
Likewise with community organisations, with Kropotkin pointing to the
“sections” of the French Revolution as the means by which “Revolution
began by creating the Commune […] and through this institution it gained
[…] immense power.” The “masses, accustoming themselves to act without
receiving orders from the national representatives” and “[b]y acting in
this way – and the libertarians would no doubt do the same today – the
districts of Paris laid the foundations of a new, free, social
organisation.”[228]
These sections – the people in their communities assembled and federated
– would be the means to first challenge the State and then destroy it.
In this way workplaces and communities would govern themselves,
federating with others to manage their common interests. Thus,
“Anarchism is not […] a theory of the future to be realised by divine
inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly
creating new conditions.” It “stands for the spirit of revolt” and this
– the class struggle, the struggle against political, economic and
social hierarchy – is based on and encourages “defiance and resistance”
and these “necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage.” It
breaks the mental chains hierarchy forges within us all and fuels the
spark of liberty which always remains even in the most tyrannical
system. This is why “[d]irect action against the authority in the
[work]shop, direct action against the authority of the law, of direct
action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is
the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”[229] If, as Bakunin
rightly argued, trade unions created the living seeds of (libertarian)
socialism within capitalism, then the class struggle ensures they
blossom.
In this way we create the means by which anarchy becomes a possibility
for, as Proudhon argued during the 1848 Revolution, if “a body
representative of the proletariat be formed […] in opposition to the
bourgeoisie’s representation” then “a new society [is] founded in the
heart of the old society.”[230] The structure of the new society is not
only formed within the shell of the old, as the famous words from the
Industrial Workers of the World’s preamble puts it, we are transformed
as we fight it. In short: “Only freedom or the struggle for freedom can
be the school for freedom.”[231]
Organisation is a fundamental aspect of any theory simply because it is
how its core principles are applied. If an ideology places organisation
to the periphery then it suggests that its adherents are not
particularly bothered by their stated core principles for it implies an
indifference to whether they are achieved in practice.
This can be seen from propertarianism and its return to classical
liberalism in protest to the attempts by many liberal thinkers to grasp
the obvious contradictions between their stated aspiration to liberty
and the various authoritarian social relationships that can happily
coexist with consent. Yet this transformation of mainstream liberalism
due to the influence of democratic, socialist and labourist ideas and
movements should not blind us to the authoritarian social relationships
which liberalism was created to justify and defend.
Anarchism is part of the reaction to liberalism and its production of
both “industrial servitude” and “obedient subjects to a central
authority.”[232] Liberalism “is primarily about a way of creating social
relations constituted by subordination, not about exchange.” Indeed,
“contract doctrine has proclaimed that subjection to a master – a boss,
a husband – is freedom” and is a “theoretical strategy that justifies
subjection by presenting it as freedom” and has “turned a subversive
proposition” that we are born free and equal “into a defence of civil
subjection” for “the employment contract (like the marriage contract) is
not an exchange; both contracts create social relations that endure over
time – social relations of subordination.”[233] Democracy recognised the
problem but its solution failed – it created a new class state, albeit
with a different basis and rationalisation.
Like democratic theory, anarchism saw its task as seeking a form of
organisation within which freedom was protected and so critiqued both
democracy and property. In contrast to the stereotype of anarchism as an
impractical dream without an understanding of the complexities of the
modern world, anarchists have spent considerable time discussing how to
best organise to meet social needs in a world marked by large-scale
industry and ever wider personal and social interactions while ensuring
individual and social freedom. This was achieved by extending
democracy’s critique liberalism to democracy itself and extending it to
the economic and social realms.
This was why Proudhon quoted Rousseau approvingly on the nature of the
social contract while denouncing how far in reality he was from it and
showing what was needed to achieve it. So if, in an “embryonic” form,
“universal suffrage provides” us “with the complete system of future
society” anarchists recognise that “[i]f it is reduced to the people
nominating a few hundred deputies” (i.e., a government) then “social
sovereignty becomes a mere fiction and the Revolution is strangled at
birth.”[234] Anarchist opposition to Rousseau is driven not by a
rejection of democracy but rather a desire to see a genuine one
created.[235] Woodcock was wrong both logically and historically to
proclaim that “the ideal of anarchism, far from being democracy carried
to its logical end, is much nearer to aristocracy universalised and
purified.”[236]
Anarchism recognises that there are many types of organisation – there
are those which are forced upon you and those which you freely join as
well as those which are authoritarian (run from the top-down) and those
which are libertarian (run from the bottom-up). Genuine liberty
necessitates groups that are free to join and are libertarian internally
as voluntary archy is not compatible with an-archy. Anarchist
organisational principles are core ones because they intersect with
other core concepts – not least (the critiques of) property and state –
as they express them:
“All depends on the fundamental ideas by which we wish to association.
It is not […] association which brings about slavery; it is the ideas of
individual freedom which we bring into the association which determine
its more or less libertarian character. […] The cohabitation of two
individuals in the same house can lead to the enslavement of one to the
will of the other as it can bring freedom for both. […] Likewise for any
association, however large or small it may be. Likewise for any social
institution.”[237]
Anarchism values individual liberty but sees it a product of social
interaction and so embraces the necessity of equality (self-management)
within groups to ensure it remains meaningful. This, in turn, means
embracing a critique of property to ensure that those who join a
workplace are associates rather than master and servants. Finally, if
self-management is applicable within the workplace then it is also
applicable for all social and private associations. The anarchist
critique of hierarchy – whether the state, capital, patriarchy, racism
or homophobia – is rooted in an awareness that “far from creating
authority, organisation is the only cure for it and the only means
whereby each of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part
in collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of
leaders.”[238]
[62] Property, 132–5.
[115] Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973),
Arthur Lehning (ed.), 197–8.
[209] Rothbard, 54.
[224] Bakunin, The Basic Bakunin, 102–3.
[1] Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (London: Freedom Press, 1993),
Vernon Richards (ed.), 84–5.
[2] George Woodock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and
Movements (England: Penguin Books, 1986), 226–7.
[3] David Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s
Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press,
2015).
[4] Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 62.
[5] For a similar analysis see Robert Graham’s “The Role of Contract in
anarchist theory” in For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice
(London: Routledge, 1989), David Goodway (ed.). For a useful exploration
of the same issues from a non-anarchist perspective which draws similar
conclusions see David P. Ellerman , Property and Contract in Economics:
The Case for Economic Democracy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
[6] Iain McKay, “Sages and Movements: An Incomplete Peter Kropotkin
Bibliography”, Anarchist Studies 22:1.
[7]
C. B Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194.
[8] For a wider analysis of liberalism along the lines explored here see
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London/New York: Verso,
2011).
[9] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), Peter Laslett (ed.), Second Treatise, section
85 (322).
[10] Second Treatise, sections 86, 2, 3 (323, 268).
[11] Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 40.
[12] Second Treatise, sections 27, 28, 27 (288).
[13] Macpherson, 203–20; Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political
Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1985), 66–7.
[14] Second Treatise, sections 33, 36, 50 (291, 293, 302).
[15] First Treatise, section 43 (170–1).
[16] First Treatise, sections 43, 9 (171, 148).
[17] Second Treatise, section 28 (289).
[18] Macpherson, 214–5.
[19] Second Treatise, sections 124, 231 (418, 550–1).
[20] Second Treatise, section 94 (329–30).
[21] Pateman, Problem, 71.
[22] Second Treatise, sections 120, 121 (348, 349).
[23] Pateman, Problem, 67, 72.
[24] Macpherson, 221–2, 248–9, 227, 251.
[25] Macpherson, 196.
[26] John Locke, Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), Mark Goldie (ed.), 161–2.
[27] Locke, Political, 162, 174–5.
[28] Second Treatise, section 213 (408).
[29] Pateman, Problem, 71–2.
[30] Political Essays, 180, 166.
[31] Second Treatise, sections 133, 24 (355, 284–5).
[32] Second Treatise, sections 85, 178, 180, 23 (322–3, 387, 388, 284).
[33] Pateman, Problem, 68.
[34] Second Treatise, section 131 (353).
[35] Rudolf Rocker’s notion that anarchism is “socialism vitalised by
liberalism” and “the synthesis of liberalism and socialism” therefore
misreads liberalism. He is right to highlight the authoritarian
tendencies of Rousseau but completely ignores those of Locke. While he
notes that “deficiencies in [Locke’s] political program” were “enhanced
by the economic inequalities in society”, Rocker fails to mention that
Locke sought to protect these as his ideas assumed “victorious
capitalism” in the state of nature and that the liberal regime was rule
by the wealthy over the rest. (Nationalism and Culture [Minnesota:
Michael E. Coughlin, 1978], 142, 238).
[36] William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The language of
labor from the old regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 120.
[37] Pateman, Problem, 142.
[38] Second Treatise, section 61 (308).
[39] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London:
Everyman, 1996), 181.
[40] Rousseau, 99.
[41] Rousseau, 84.
[42] Rousseau, 225.
[43] Rousseau, 162.
[44] Rousseau, 199, 225.
[45] Rousseau, 316.
[46] Rousseau, 105, 269, 104, 200, 186.
[47] Rousseau, 266, 212, 191, 201, 230.
[48] Rousseau, 203–4.
[49] Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793 (London:
Orbach and Chambers Ltd, 1971); Daniel Guérin, Class struggle in the
First French Republic: bourgeois and bras nus, 1793–1795 (London: Pluto
Press, 1977).
[50] Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in
France and Britain during the French Revolution (London: Edward Arnold,
1981), 25.
[51] Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchy (Edinburgh: AK Press,
2018), 270.
[52] quoted by Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class
(Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992) I: 24–25.
[53] Bernard H. Moss, The Origins of the French Labour Movement
1830–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley/Los
Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1980), 32–3.
[54] Sewell, 202.
[55] Magraw, 55, 72.
[56]
K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French
Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
127–140.
[57] Vincent, 164.
[58] Michael Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (New York: The
Free Press, 1953), G.P. Maximov (ed.), 249.
[59] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques ou
Philosophie de la misère (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846) I: 377.
[60] Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology
(Edinburgh/Chico: AK Press, 2011), Iain McKay (ed.), 137.
[61] Peter Kropotkin, Le Révolté, 8 July 1882.
[62] Property, 92.
[63] Property, 95, 106, 117, 114, 129, 104. It should be noted that
Proudhon takes for granted Adam Smith’s assertion that the “produce of
labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.” (An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1976], Volume 1, 72). Needless to say, he had no
time for arguments by any economist on why this was not applicable under
capitalism.
[64] Property, 91. 118, 105, 137, 112, 109, 137, 119. Proudhon appears
to have first used the term “industrial democracy” in 1852 when he noted
“an unavoidable transition to industrial democracy”. (La Révolution
sociale démontrée par le coup d’État du 2 décembre [Antony:
Tops-Trinquier, 2013], 156). Later the same decade saw him argue that
“an industrial democracy must follow industrial feudalism” for “Workers’
Associations are the locus of a new principle and model of production”
(Property, 610, 616)
[65] Property, 93, 148, 153, 150.
[66] This work has been misrepresented by some, particularly by Marx in
his The Poverty of Philosophy. Most obviously, Proudhon did not advocate
“labour notes” regardless of Marx’s assertions – see my “Proudhon’s
Constituted Value and the Myth of Labour Notes,” Anarchist Studies 25: 1
(Summer 2017) and “The Poverty of (Marx’s) Philosophy,”
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 70 (Summer 2017).
[67] Property, 248, 212, 255.
[68] Property, 213–5. See Vincent’s excellent discussion (154–6).
[69] Property, 202.
[70] Système II: 519.
[71] Property, 223, 222, 223, 225, 226.
[72] Système I: 288.
[73] Property, 179.
[74] Besancon municipal library, MS 2881 f. 30v.
[75] Property, 179, 147.
[76] Aaron Noland, “Proudhon and Rousseau,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 28:1 (Jan-Mar 1967).
[77] Property, 260, 261, 267, 273, 277–8, 280.
[78] Property, 287–9, 377–8, 296–7.
[79] Property, 378–9, 407.
[80] Property, 439–41, 461, 446–7, 398.
[81] Property, 482–5.
[82] “Regarding Louis Blanc – The Present Utility and Future Possibility
of the State”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 66 (Winter 2016).
[83] Property, 565.
[84] Property, 566.
[85] Property, 566, 573.
[86] Property, 562–3, 591. By corporation Proudhon, like many socialists
at the time in France, meant organisations of worker-run co-operatives.
This federation of co-operatives in a given industry should not be
confused with modern corporations (i.e., stock issuing companies) which
Proudhon opposed as being basically identical to state-communist
associations.
[87] Property, 595–6.
[88] Property, 583–6.
[89] Property, 597.
[90] La fédération et l’unité en Italie (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), 27–8
[91] La fédération, 33.
[92] Du principe fédératif (Antony: Tops-Trinquier, 2013), 125, 163.
[93] Du principe fédératif, 122.
[94] Besancon municipal library, MS 2881 f. 30v.
[95] Property, 712, 714.
[96] Property, 563, 502, 596, 780.
[97] Property, 677, 698, 716, 763, 762.
[98] Property, 760–1.
[99] Property, 503–6.
[100] Property, 132.
[101] Vincent, 224–5.
[102] Proudhon, Regarding, 29.
[103] Proudhon, Property, 711–3.
[104] Vincent, 156.
[105] Iain McKay, “Proudhon, Property & Possession”, Anarcho-Syndicalist
Review 66 (Winter 2016).
[106] Pateman, Sexual, 119, 122, 181.
[107] Joseph Déjacque, “On the Male and Female Human-Being”,
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 71–72 (Fall 2017).
[108] Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press,
1995), 75–6. Use of libertarian became more commonplace in the 1880s and
1895 saw leading anarchists Sébastien Faure and Louise Michel publish La
Libertaire in France. (Nettlau, 145, 162). Soon after libertarian was
used as an alternative for anarchist internationally, see my “160 Years
of Libertarian,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 71–72 (Fall 2017).
[109] quoted by Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in
the Paris Commune (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004), 40.
[110] Robert Graham, We do not Fear Anarchy, we invoke it: The First
International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement
(Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015), 77, 128.
[111] Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies,” La Marseillaise, 11 March
1870, from “Precursors of Syndicalism I,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 75
(Winter 2019).
[112] Graham, 92, 109–111, 118–120.
[113] The Basic Bakunin (Buffalo, NY: Promethus Books, 1994), Robert M.
Cutler (ed.), 110.
[114] Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), Sam
Dolgoff (ed.), 255.
[115] “Letter to Albert Richard”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 62 (Summer
2014).
[116] Bakunin on Anarchism, 408, 142.
[117] Selected, 131, 135, 147.
[118] “Organisational Question of Social Democracy,” Rosa Luxemburg
Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), Mary-Alice Waters (ed.),
119–20.
[119] Bakunin, Anarchism, 414–5.
[120] Philosophy, 241, 255, 268.
[121] Selected, 237–8, 265.
[122] Philosophy, 287.
[123] Selected, 237
[124] Bakunin, Anarchism, 246–7
[125] Selected, 147, 68
[126] Philosophy, 187
[127] Basic, 153
[128] Bakunin, Anarchism, 247, 427
[129] Selected, 170–2.
[130] Selected, 65.
[131] Bakunin, Anarchism, 207.
[132] Selected, 170.
[133] Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology
(Edinburgh/Oakland/Baltimore: AK Press, 2014), Iain McKay (ed.), 203,
385
[134] Modern, 223.
[135] Modern, 226.
[136] Direct, 120–1, 464
[137] Modern, 275, 234, 269.
[138] Direct, 490.
[139] Modern, 273, 223, 227.
[140] Modern, 364–6.
[141] Words of a Rebel (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 143.
[142] Direct, 225, 228, 419–25.
[143] Direct, 500, 680, 344.
[144] Words, 87–9.
[145] Words, 133.
[146] Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (New
York: Dover Press, 2002), Roger N. Baldwin (ed.), 68.
[147] Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 117–21.
[148] Kropotkin, Anarchism, 284. Also see Direct, 229.
[149] Words, 83.
[150] Direct, 188; Also see Direct, 105, 598–9.
[151] Modern, 187.
[152] Modern, 164.
[153] Direct, 504, 500, 131, 475
[154] Modern, 227.
[155] Modern, 367.
[156] Direct, 309.
[157] Direct, 535.
[158] Marx-Engels Collected Works 44: 307.
[159] Interestingly, Errico Malatesta speculated in 1924 that
“associationist” could be used as an alternative to communist by
anarchists as that term was falling into “disrepute as a result of
Russian ‘communist’ despotism.” (The Anarchist Revolution [London:
Freedom Press, 1995], Vernon Richards [ed.], 20).
[160] Engels, 307.
[161] Colin Ward produces similar criteria in “Anarchism as a Theory of
Organisation”, Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader
(Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press: 2011).
[162] Kropotkin, Direct, 199.
[163] Pateman, Problem, 19.
[164] Kropotkin, Direct, 426.
[165] Pateman, Sexual, 150–1.
[166] Noam Chomsky, Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda
(Monroe/Edinburgh: Common Courage Press/AK Press, 1993), 127.
[167] Kropotkin, Direct, 160, 187.
[168] Proudhon, Property, 129.
[169] Malatesta, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader
(Edinburgh/Oakland, AK Press, 2014), Davide Turcato (ed.), 136.
[170] Kropotkin, Direct, 201.
[171] Malatesta and Hamon, No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of
Anarchism (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005), Daniel Guérin (ed.) ,
370.
[172] Malatesta, Method, 214.
[173] Malatesta, Life, 175, 129.
[174] Proudhon, Property, 655.
[175] Malatesta, Method, 63.
[176] Kropotkin, Direct, 165.
[177] Kropotkin, Direct, 665. As Proudhon put it: “Large industry and
high culture come to us by big monopoly and big property: it is
necessary in the future to make them rise from the [workers]
association.” (quoted by Vincent, 156).
[178] Proudhon, Property, 969, 594–5.
[179] Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: essays in politics (London: Faber
and Faber Ltd, 1954), 92.
[180] Property, 724.
[181] Bakunin, Political, 353–4.
[182] Kropotkin, Anarchism, 143.
[183] Kropotkin, Conquest, 137–8.
[184] Malatesta, Method, 488–9.
[185] Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 161.
[186] Kropotkin, Direct, 609.
[187] Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (London:
Wildwood House, 1979), Alix Kates Shulman (ed.), 85.
[188] Goldman, 75–6, 87–100.
[189] Orwell in the essay “Politics vs. Literature – An examination of
Gulliver’s Travels” (1946) and le Guin in her classic Science-Fiction
novel The Dispossessed (1974).
[190] Kropotkin, Direct, 368. Also see Direct, 613–6.
[191] See Kropotkin’s discussion of “Revolutionary Minorities” in Words
of a Rebel.
[192] Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and
Radical Thought in America (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee,
1949), 16–7.
[193] Neither Proudhon nor Bakunin mentioned consensus (in the sense of
unanimous decisions), while Malatesta explicitly and repeated defended
majority decision making. Kropotkin mentioned it a few times, usually in
relation to the peasant villages of his native Russia and once in
relation to the Medieval Commune but also noted that the minority “ended
up accepting with good grace, even if only on trial, the view that
gained support of the greater number.” (Words, 139) It only became
associated with anarchism during the 1960s and the influence of radical
pacifists (often coming from Quaker and other radical religious
traditions) within the peace and other movements.
[194] Modern, 226.
[195] Anarchy (London: Freedom Press, 2001), 42–3.
[196] Kropotkin, Direct, .614. This obviously applies to those who seek
to exclude others from socially used resources. So regarding those who
spuriously invoke “freedom” to justify hierarchies (for example,
discrimination against people of certain skin colours or sexuality from
restaurants), this would not be tolerated in a free society. While
bigots, like all possessors, would be able to control who they invite to
their homes (as it is personally used), socially used resources (such as
a restaurant) would be available to all and any individual or group
acting in such a manner would face the solidarity and direct action of
the wider society. With no State to call upon to enforce such claims,
freedom for all rather than a few would soon prevail.
[197] This is a theme of Ursula Le Guin’s classical Science Fiction
novel The Dispossessed (1974), which addresses the issue well and shows
the importance of individual and minority “self-assertion” against
“crystallised” social structures even in an Anarchy, see my “Ursula Le
Guin and Utopia,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 73 (Spring 2018).
[198] The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von
Mises Institute, 207), 83.
[199] The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,
1982), 170, 173.
[200] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: B. Blackwell,
1974), 270.
[201] Freeden, 55.
[202] Rothbard, 170.
[203] Rothbard, 171, 173.
[204] Freeden, 106.
[205] Rothbard, 145.
[206] This tendency should not blind us to the reality that the State
has always interfered far more in the interests of the wealthy. That
intervention occasionally occurs with a wider remit is due to popular
pressure and because “government cannot want society to break up, for it
would mean that it and the dominant class would be deprived of sources
of exploitation; nor can it leave society to maintain itself without
official intervention, for then people would soon realise that
government serves only to defend property owners […] and they would
hasten to rid themselves of both.” (Malatesta, Anarchy, 25)
[207] Rothbard, 171.
[208] Rothbard, 221–2.
[209] Rothbard, 74.
[210] Nozick, 371.
[211] Pateman, Sexual, 8, 40.
[212] Proudhon, Système I: 75.
[213] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New
York: The New Press, 2002), Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel (eds.),
200.
[214] Freeden, 95.
[215] Freeden, 61, 64, 95.
[216] This applied to propertarianism as well, for many of its leading
lights embraced fascism as a temporary bulwark against the labour
movement and socialism (see my “Propertarianism and Fascism,”
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 75 [Winter 2019]).
[217] Freeden, 95.
[218] Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 195.
[219] Kropotkin, Great French Revolution, 241.
[220] Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 188–9.
[221] “Objections to Anarchism,” Our Masters are Helpless: The Essays of
George Barrett (London: Freedom Press: 2019), Iain McKay (ed.), 71.
[222] Kropotkin, Great French Revolution, 180.
[223] Voltairine de Cleyre, “A Study of the General Strike in
Philadelphia”, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth
(Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001), Peter Glassgold (ed.), 311.
[224] Kropotkin, Direct Struggle, 384–5.
[225] Kropotkin, “Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the
Ideal of a Future System?,” Selected Writings on Anarchism and
Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), Martin A. Miller (ed.), 113.
[226] Kropotkin, Direct, 476.
[227] Albert Parsons, “The International,” The Alarm, 4 April 1885, from
“Precursors of Syndicalism II,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 76 (Summer
2019).
[228] Kropotkin, Direct Struggle, 419, 421, 423.
[229] Goldman, 74, 76–7.
[230] Proudhon, Property, 321.
[231] Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 59.
[232] Kropotkin, Anarchism, 137.
[233] Pateman, Sexual, 40, 146, 39, 148.
[234] Proudhon, Property, 29.
[235] Read, 130–2.
[236] Woodcock, Anarchism, 31.
[237] Kropotkin, Modern, 226.
[238] Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 86.