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Title: What is an Anarchist? Author: Émile Armand Date: 1925 Language: en Topics: individualist Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/armand/1925/what-anarchist.htm][www.marxists.org]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3778, retrieved on July 14, 2020. Notes: Source: Brochure Mensuelle no 26, February 1925;Translated by Mitchell Abidor
A chaos of beings, of acts and ideas; a disordered, bitter, merciless
struggle; a perpetual lie, a blindly spinning wheel, one day placing
someone at the pinnacle, and the next day crushing him: these are just a
few of the images that depict current society, if it were possible for
it to be depicted. The brush of the greatest of painters and the pen of
the greatest of writers would splinter like glass if we were to employ
them to express even a distant echo of the tumult and melee that the is
depicted by the clash of appetites, aspirations, hatreds and devotions
that collide and mix together the different categories among which men
are parceled out.
Who will ever precisely express the unfinished battle between private
interests and collective needs? The sentiments of individuals and the
logic of generalities? All of this makes up current society, and none of
this suffices to describe it. A minority which possesses the faculty to
produce and consume and the possibility to parasitically exist in a
thousand different forms: fixed and movable property, capital as tools
or as funds, capital as teaching and capital as education.
Facing it an immense majority, which possesses nothing but its arms or
brains or other productive organs which it is forced to rent, lease, or
prostitute, not only in order to procure what it needs so as not to die
of hunger, but also to permit a small number of holders of the power or
property or exchange values to live more or less in luxury at its
expense. A mass, rich and poor, slaves of immemorial, hereditary
prejudices, some because this is in their interest, the others because
they are sunk in ignorance or don’t want to escape it. A multitude whose
cult is that of money and the prototype of the rich man, the rule of the
mediocre incapable of both great vices and great virtues. And the mass
of degenerates on high and down low, without profound aspirations,
without any other goal than that of arriving at a position of enjoyment
and ease, even if it means crushing, if necessary, the friends of
yesterday, become the downtrodden of today.
A provisional state that ceaselessly threatens to transform itself into
a definitive one, and a definitive state that threatens to never be
anything but provisional. Lives that give the lie to espoused
convictions, and convictions that serve as a springboard for crooked
ambitions. Free thinkers who show themselves to be more clericalist than
the clerical, and believers who show themselves to be coarse
materialists. The superficial individual who wants pass for profound and
the profound individual who doesn’t succeed in being taken seriously. No
one would deny that this is a portrait of society, and no thinking
person would fail to see that this painting does not even begin to
depict reality. Why? Because there is a mask placed before every face;
because no one a care to be, because all aspire only to seem. To seem:
this is the supreme ideal, and if we so avidly desire ease and wealth,
it is in order to seem, since only money now allows one to make an
impression.
This mania, this passion, this race for appearances, for what can
procure them, devours both the rich man and the vagabond, the most
erudite and the illiterate. The worker who curses his foreman wishes to
become one in turn; the merchant who evaluates his commercial honor to
be of an unequalled price doesn’t hesitate to carry out dishonorable
deals; the small shop owner, member of patriotic and nationalist
electoral committees, hastens to transmit his orders to foreign
manufacturers as soon as he finds this profitable. The socialist lawyer,
advocate of the poverty-stricken proletariat herded into the malodorous
parts of the city, passes his vacations in a chateaux or resides in the
wealthy neighborhoods of the city, where fresh air is abundant. The free
thinker still willingly marries in church, and often has his children
baptized there. The religious man doesn’t dare express his ideas, since
ridiculing religion is the done thing. Where is sincerity to be found?
The gangrene has spread everywhere. We find it in the family, where
often father, mother, and children hate and deceive each other while
saying that they love each other, while leading each other to believe
that they feel affection for each other. We see it at work in the
couple, where the husband and wife not meant for each other betray each
other, not daring to break the ties that bind them. It is there for all
to see in groups, where each seeks to supplant his neighbor in the
esteem of the president, the secretary, or the treasurer, while waiting
to assume their place when they no longer need them. It abounds in the
acts of devotion, in public doings, in private conversations, in
official harangues. To seem! To seem! To seem pure, disinterested, and
generous, while at the same time we consider purity, disinterest, and
generosity as vain foolishness; to seem moral, honest, and virtuous when
probity, virtue, and morality are the least concerns of those who
profess them.
Where can one find a person who escapes corruption, who consents not to
seem?
We don’t claim to ever have met such a one. We note that sincere,
eminently sincere individuals are rare. We affirm that the number of
human beings who work disinterestedly is quite limited. Right or wrong,
I have more respect for the individual who cynically admits to wanting
to enjoy life by profiting from others than for the liberal and
philanthropic bourgeois whose lips resound with grandiose words, but
whose fortune is built on the concealed exploitation of the unfortunate.
It will be objected that we are allowing ourselves to be led by our
indignation. That in the first place nothing proves that our anger and
invectives are not also a way of seeming. Be aware: what you will find
here are observations, opinions, theses: it will be left to the reader
to determine what they are worth. The pages that follow are not marked
with the seal of infallibility. We don’t seek to convert anyone to our
point of view. Our goal is to make those who browse these pages reflect,
with the right to accept or reject that which is not in accord with
their own convictions.
It will be objected that this is dealing with the question at too high a
level, or from a metaphysical point of view; that we must descend to the
level of concrete reality. The reality is this: that current society is
the result of a long historical process, perhaps still just beginning;
that humanity — or the different humanities — are simply at the point of
seeking or preparing their way, that they are groping and stumbling;
that they lose their way, find it again, advance, retreat, lose their
way; that they are at times shaken to their foundation by certain
crises, dragged along, cast on destiny’s road and then slow down or
march in place; that by scratching the polish, the varnish the surface
of contemporary civilizations we would lay bare the stammering, the
childishness, and the superstitions of the prehistoric. Who denies this?
We accept that all these things render the “human problem” singularly
complex.
Finally, it will be objected that it is folly to seek to discover, to
establish the responsibility of the individual; that he is submerged,
absorbed in his environment; that his ideas reflect the ideas and his
acts the acts of those around him; that it can’t be otherwise, and if
from top to bottom of the social ladder it is “seeming” and not “being”
that is the aspiration, the fault is that of the current stage of
general evolution and not of the individual, the member of society,
minuscule atom lost in a formidable aggregate.
We answer honestly that we don’t intend to write for all the beings who
make up society. Let us be understood: we address ourselves to those who
think or are in the process of thinking, to those who have grown
impatient from waiting for the mass, who can’t or won’t think; to those
who can’t adapt to appearances and who the current stage of society
doesn’t satisfy. We write for the curious, for thinkers, for the
critical — for those who aren’t content with formulas or empty
solutions.
It’s either the one or the other: either there’s nothing else to be done
than to allow the inevitable evolution to run its course, to cowardly
bow before circumstances, to passively witness the parade of events and
admit that, while waiting for something better, all is for the best in
the best of societies. Our theses and opinions will not interest those
who share this way of seeing things. Alternatively, without arming
yourself with an exaggerated optimism, you can step off the main roads,
withdraw to a great height, question yourself, look into yourself for
the roots of our own malaise. We address ourselves to those not
satisfied with the current society, to those who are thirsty for real
life, for real activity and find only the artificial and the unreal
around them. There are those who are thirsty for harmony and ask
themselves why disorder and fratricidal struggles abound around them...
Let us conclude: the sprit that reflects and attentively considers men
and things encounters in the complex of things we call society a nearly
insurmountable barrier to truly free, independent, individual life. This
is enough for him to qualify it as evil, and for him to wish for its
disappearance.