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Title: Individualism in Anarchism Author: Errico Malatesta Date: 1897 Language: en Topics: anarchism, individualism Source: *Complete Works of Errico Malatesta*, Volume III, ed. Davide Turcato Notes: Translated by Paul Sharkey. This is a series of two articles originally published as “L’Individualismo nell’Anarchismo” in L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 6 (April 18, 1897), and “Ancora sull’Individualismo,” L’Agitatore Socialista Anarchico (April 25, 1897), single issue, replacement for no. 7 of L’Agitatore.
We do not intend in this article to speak of those who, in calling
themselves individualists, see that as justification for any repugnant
action, and who have about as much to do with anarchism as the police do
with the public order they boast to protect, or as the bourgeois do with
the principles of morality and justice with which they sometimes try to
defend their murderous privileges.
Neither is it our intention to speak of those comrades who style
themselves “individualists about the means” and who, in the struggle we
are fighting today, prefer or exclusively countenance individual action,
either because they deem it more effective, or as a precaution, or again
because they fear that any organization, any collective agreement, would
curtail their freedom. We shall deal with that, which is partly a
tactical issue and partly a question of principles, when we deal with
the matter of organization.
Right now we want to say something about individualism as a philosophy,
as a general appreciation of the nature of human societies and of the
relations between individuals and groups, insofar as it is professed
(sometimes virtually unwittingly) by a segment of our comrades.
There are those who call themselves individualists with the
understanding that the individual is entitled to a complete physical,
moral, and intellectual development and that he ought to find society a
help, rather than a hindrance, in achieving the greatest possible
happiness. But in that sense we are all individualists and it would be
merely a matter of using one more word; and we do not use the word only
because, having a range of other significations, it would only generate
confusion. Not only are we anarchists or socialists of every persuasion
individualists in the aforementioned sense, but so is everybody else, of
whatever school or party; since the individual is the only sentient,
conscious being, and every time that we speak of enjoyment or suffering,
freedom or slavery, rights, duties, justice, etc., all we ever have, all
we ever can have in mind is living individuals.
Sometimes, therefore, it is just a straightforward question of words and
there would be no point making a great deal out of it. But often there
is a real and significant difference in ideas between those who
subscribe to individualism and those who shun it; and it is important to
set it out, because there are serious practical consequences flowing
from this, even though the ultimate purposes of both groups may be the
same. Not that there is any reason to look at one another askance and
treat one another as adversaries, especially since, the moment that
anarchists have tried to dabble in “philosophy,” such a muddle of ideas
and words has arisen as to make it often impossible to make head or tail
of whether or not we agree. But as a matter of urgency we need to
explain ourselves properly, if for no other reason than to rid ourselves
once and for all of such abstract notions that consume the entire
activity of certain comrades to the serious detriment of real propaganda
work.
Scrutinizing everything that has been said and written by the
individualist anarchists, we detect the coexistence of two underlying
and mutually contradictory notions, which lots of them do not state
explicitly, but which, in some form or another, keep cropping up—often,
too, in the thinking of many anarchists who are not inclined to describe
themselves as individualists.
The first of these consists of seeing society as an aggregate of
autonomous individuals, entire unto themselves and capable of doing for
themselves, who have no reason to be together other than their own
advantage and who might part ways once they find that the benefits that
society has to offer are not worth the sacrifices in personal freedom
that it demands. In short, they look upon human society as a sort of
trading company that leaves, or should leave, each shareholder free to
join or to pull out as he sees fit. Today, they say, since a handful of
individuals have bagged all the natural or man-made wealth, all the rest
are duty bound to abide by the rules enforced by society or by those who
prevail within society. But if the land, if the instruments of labor
were freely available to all, and if the people were not thrust into
slavery by the organized might of one class, nobody would have any
reason to remain within society if his interests were otherwise. And
since, once man’s material needs have been met, his over-riding need is
for freedom, any form of coexistence that requires even the slightest
sacrifice of the individual will is to be shunned. Do what thou wilt,
taken in the narrowest and most absolute sense of the phrase, is the
supreme principle, the only rule governing behavior.
Then again, assuming the existence of autonomous individuals with
absolute, unbounded freedom, it follows that as soon as there is a clash
of interests and as soon as wishes vary, strife ensues. In that strife
some will be victors and some will be vanquished, and so we are back to
the oppression and exploitation meant to be banished.
Thus the individualist anarchists, second to none in their burning
desire for the good of all, needed a way of more or less logically
reconciling the permanent good of everybody and the principle of
undiluted freedom of the individual. And they came up with it by
espousing another principle: that of harmony by natural law.
Do what thou wilt: but the fact is, they say, that, unsolicited and
naturally, you will want only that which cannot infringe the equal
rights of others to do as they wish.
A friend writes: “Our freedom, unfolding through the complete range of
human faculties, will never trespass against the freedom of others. Just
as the stars, gravitating around their own centers follow special
trajectories, so men may follow their own line of freedom without ever
overlapping and without descending into chaos.” And others, substituting
physiology for astrology, speak of a “sympathetic agglomeration of cells
in plants and animals”; and still others of the formation of crystals
and so on, through the entire gamut of the natural sciences. No one
seems to remember, even though these may be encountered in nature,
misshapen or failed crystals, the struggle for survival, cosmic
catastrophes, diseases, abortions, and the entire endless parade of
disasters and hurts.
Disharmony and conflict of interests are the result of existing
institutions. Destroy the State: respect complete freedom of trade, of
banking, of minting; let title to ownership of the land be bound by the
obligation to cultivate or otherwise work it in person; let us have
free, completely free competition—say the individualist anarchists of
Tucker’s school—and peace will prevail in the world. Economic rent,
which is to say the difference in value, in terms of productivity and
position, of the various tracts of land will vanish naturally and
competition will lead naturally to the wisest use of nature’s blessings
for the benefit of all. [1]
Destroy the State and private property, say the individualist anarchists
of the communist school (and there is such a thing, despite the seeming
contradiction in terms)—and everything will go well: everybody will
agree naturally; everybody will work because work is a physiological
need; production will always and naturally meet consumer demand and
there will be no need for either rules or agreements because… with
everybody doing as he pleases, it will turn out that, quite unknowingly
and unintentionally, he will have done precisely what the rest wanted
him to.
So, delving right to the very bottom of things, it turns out that
individualist anarchism is nothing but a sort of harmonism and
providentialism.
In our view, the underlying principles of individualism are entirely
wrong.
The individual human being is not a being independent of society, but is
rather the product of it. But for society, he would never have been able
to hoist himself out of the realms of brutish animality and become truly
human, and, outside of society, could not help but slide more or less
quickly back into primitive animality.
When Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People,
irked at not being understood and followed by the public, exclaimed “The
strongest man is he who stands most alone,” he just made a downright
blunder, even though he has been taken as anarchist whereas he was
merely an aristocrat. If he knew more than the rest and was capable of
more than the rest, that was because, more than the rest, he had lived a
life in intellectual communication with men present and past, because,
more than the rest, he had reaped the benefits of society—and thus, owed
society a greater debt.
In society a man may be free or a slave, happy or unhappy, but in
society he must remain because that is the context of his being a man.
Therefore, instead of aspiring to some notional and impossible autonomy,
he should look for the basis of his freedom and happiness in the
agreement with his fellow men, joining with the rest to adjust those
social institutions that do not suit him.
Likewise, the belief in some natural law, whereby harmony is
automatically established between men without any need for them to take
conscious, deliberate action, is hollow and utterly refuted by the
facts.
Even if the State and private property were to be done away with,
harmony does not come to pass automatically, as if Nature busies herself
with men’s blessings and misfortunes, but rather requires that men
themselves create it.
But if we are to make ourselves understood, we shall have to speak of
this at some length… and our readers are already whining about our
articles being unduly lengthy.
Another time, then.
We said in the previous issue that harmonism—the faith in a natural law
that makes all things automatically accommodate themselves to one
another for the best—underpinned the thinking of the individualists and
was the only way of reconciling their warm and heartfelt craving for the
good of all with their ideal of a society in which each person enjoys
absolute freedom without any need to enter into compacts or reach
compromises with others.
To tell the truth, an element of harmonism, or, to put it another way,
of optimistic fatalism, can be traced in every anarchist and maybe in
every modern socialist from the most widely differing schools. The
causes behind this are various and conflicting: to some degree, the
survival of the religious ideas according to which the world was made
and laid out for the benefit of men; to some extent, the influence of
economists who strove to justify the bourgeoisie’s privileges in terms
of some alleged harmony of interests; to some extent, the almost
exclusive popularity to which the natural sciences had risen; plus the
desire to make matters look beautiful and easy, for propaganda purposes,
and the convenience of being able to skip over difficulties without
having to tackle and resolve them. And individualists are just to be
blamed, or praised, for having drawn the logical conclusions of
everybody’s mistake.
But the fact that pretty much everybody erred is no reason to persist in
the error.
The so-called harmony that is to be found in nature signifies only this:
the very existence of something means that the conditions necessary and
sufficient for it to exist have been in place. But nature has no
purpose, or at any rate, none of men’s purposes; she cares nothing for
the deaths, hurts, and sufferings of human beings and these may very
well serve as components of her “harmony.” The cat eating the mouse is a
natural phenomenon and thus perfectly in harmony with the cosmic order;
but if we could ask the mice, we might well find that such harmony is
much too jarring for their liking. It is a law of nature that living
beings must eat and therefore the numbers and strength of the living are
limited by the quantum of foods suited to each species; but nature
indifferently enforces her limits by means of disasters, deaths by
starvation, and degeneracy. And an infinite number of examples could be
cited.
In order to argue that nature is superior to art, Charles Fourier
employs an odd comparison that has, through repetition, become a
classic. [2] Fill a vase with pebbles of various colors, give them a
shake, then pour them out on to a table, and you will have a combination
of colors more beautiful than any painter could have devised. And that
may well be the case… but you certainly won’t get Titian’s Madonna; you
won’t get what you would like, even if it were something ugly; this is
the key point.
The fact is that the mysterious law by which nature, as providential
provider, would arrange things to suit men’s tastes is a nonsense
contradicted by all the evidence and it cannot withstand a moment’s
scrutiny. Fatalism may still be conceivable, no matter how much it
contradicts all the motives that drive us; but optimistic fatalism, an
intelligent Fate concerned with the happiness of human generations, is
downright inconceivable!
And why would any such law of harmony have dallied for so many myriad
centuries just to take effect once we proclaim anarchy?
The State and private property are definitely the greatest causes of
social antagonisms today: but those institutions cannot have been
brought to life by some miraculous suspension of the laws of nature, and
must be the effects of pre-existing antagonisms. If destroyed, they
would grow back, unless men make provisions for a different way of
settling the conflicts that produced them once already.
And conflicts of interest and of passions exist and always will; for,
even if the existing conflicts could be sufficiently removed that
automatic agreement could arise, others would crop up at every new idea
germinating in a human brain. Indeed, how can we imagine that when some
new wish emerges in a man, the minds of his fellows alter immediately
and in such a way as to dispose them to welcome his wish? How can we
believe that every new notion is going to be promptly welcomed by
everybody else? And will every new idea be right? Will nobody ever make
a mistake any more? Or is it the supposition that the environment will
have become so unvarying that it will suppress any initial difference
between men and ensure that they will all simultaneously develop with
mathematical identity? Then again, such a deadly uniformity would still
need to be the deliberate construct of men, because nature, left to
herself, is forever bringing forth new varieties!
We must not make do with empty verbiage. When it is said that “the
liberty of one is not bounded but complemented by the liberty of
others,” that is an affirmation of a sublime ideal, perhaps the most
perfect ideal that can be assigned to social evolution. But if the
intention is to assert a positive, actual fact, or one that would come
to be by simply destroying the present institutions, that is just
plainly mistaking objective reality for the ideals generated in our
minds. Leaving aside the oppression that we as proletarians and as the
ruled undergo, there are so many things that we might like to do but
don’t, lest they displease and inconvenience others! We may voluntarily
desist and indeed take pleasure from making sacrifices for the
community; yet we would be happier if the others had different tastes
and needs, ones that might allow us to do whatever we want. That goes to
show that our liberty is time and time again bounded by the liberty of
others.
And we refer not solely to “tastes and fancies” that are respectable, to
be sure, but that are of secondary importance. Conflicts come about
naturally when it comes to satisfying primal needs too, and it is up to
men to do away with them or solve them for the greatest good of all. One
might have a hankering or a need to eat some food that one can only get
by depriving someone else of it, or of filling a position already
occupied by somebody else, etc., etc. Provision can be made for every
sort of foodstuff to be made available or for everyone to be
accommodated, but make provision we must.
To claim that, naturally and without agreement, the desired stuff will
be produced and one’s surroundings will be exactly as one wishes them to
be, lays the groundwork for terrible disappointments. In practical
terms, it means refraining from doing and thereby placing oneself in the
position of having to put up with whatever others will do.
The same goes for work in general. Everyone is to work, they say,
because work is necessary for health and there is the organic need to
deploy one’s faculties; and that is true. What is not true, though, is
that the need for such an exercise will exactly match men’s need for
products, and will spontaneously adapt to the conditions determined by
the instrument of production. If everyone were to believe that simply in
doing what he likes best he is doing all he must, since everything will
work fine anyway, then lots of necessary chores would certainly not be
done, because no one likes to do them, and many other chores would not
be done because, in order for them to get done, a number of men would
have to reach agreements and abide by them.
It is true that the soil can abundantly feed its inhabitants and work
can be so organized as to be a pleasure or, at worst, a mild exertion
that everybody would readily perform; but it needs organizing. The
belief that, with everybody working away randomly, when and how he sees
fit, regardless of what others are doing and without coordinating his
own activity or subordinating it to the collective endeavor, come the
year’s end we will discover that so much grain and such-and-such a
number of machines have been produced, so many shoes and so many
artichokes produced, enough to provide for everyone’s needs… is
tantamount to placing oneself in God’s hands.
To conclude: man needs to live in society, and in order to live there he
has to come to agreement with other men and cooperate with them. Either
that cooperation will be achieved voluntarily, through free agreements,
and will work to everybody’s benefit; or it will be achieved through
force, through the imposition of a few, and it will be exploited for the
private benefit of whoever will have imposed it. Free and willing
cooperation for the good of all is Anarchy. Enforced cooperation,
chiefly for the benefit of certain given classes, is the authoritarian
regime.
[1] The American anarchist Benjamin Tucker (1843–1939) set out his
thinking mainly in the pages of the review Liberty, which he edited from
1881 until 1908, and from which he published the 1893 book entitled
Instead of a Book. (Turcato)
[2] French socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) strove to devise a
systematic doctrine of “universal harmony,” which would allegedly arise
from the unfettered release of human passions. (Turcato)