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Title: Without Amoralization, No Anarchization
Author: E. Armand
Date: March 27, 1926
Language: en
Topics: moralism, nihilism, individualist anarchism, Libertarian Labyrinth
Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-20, from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/featured-articles/emile-armand-without-amoralization-no-anarchization-1926/
Notes: E. Armand, “Without Amoralization, No Anarchization,” L’Insurgé 2 no. 47 (March 27, 1926): 1; 2 no. 48 (April 3, 1926): 2. [Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

E. Armand

Without Amoralization, No Anarchization

I

At times Liberty takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she

hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to

crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her

degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in her

time of her beauty and her glory.

Macaulay: Essay on Milton.

The men of order, those we call “honest folk,” demand nothing but

gunfire and shellfire.

Renan: Nouvelles lettres intimes.

I read and hear it claimed that anarchism is beset by a crisis. This is

not precisely correct. In truth, there is a conflict between the static

and dynamic conceptions of anarchism, between those who want to

gregarize and stabilize anarchism and those who want the revolutionary,

individualist spirit to remain and simmer permanently within anarchism.

At base, it is more a question of two methods than of two ideas. It

would be extraordinary if a competition did not exist between them. It

is precisely because they compete that, far from being stagnant,

anarchism asserts itself, develops, expands and surpasses the narrowness

of a church or a party.

The organizers of traditional anarchism have long attempted not only to

create an orthodox anarchism, “ne varietur,” but to stabilize the

anarchist idea by integrating them into the general aspirations of

humanity. To cite one name among those of the thinkers who have lent the

support of their talent to that effort, I would name Kropotkin. Let one

read carefully Mutual Aid, Modern Science and Anarchy or the Ethics,

where are summarized very quickly the aim of the author of the Words of

a Rebel: to demonstrate to his readers that the principal demands of

anarchism are in agreement with the needs, knowledge, experiences and

facts of human evolution, of the history of living organisms. If we

believe Kropotkin on the matter—and if I have understood him clearly—all

the observations, all the events in the history of living beings tend to

the establishment of a social system of morals, to such an extent that

nature itself could no longer be considered amoral. We see where this is

going: anarchist communism, as Kropotkin and his friends or disciples

understand it, arises naturally from the aspiration of humanity for a

state of things better than those presently existing.

I do not want to sift the Kropokinian idea through a close critique and

entirely empty—in order to account for its value as a factor in

individual evolution—the content of the three elements on which

Kropotkin built the system of morals: mutual aid, justice and the spirit

of sacrifice. Nor do I want to dwell on the mystical and too often

metaphysical character of the Kropokinian Ethics, to show that

scientific culture and language is not always enough to prevent us from

taking pure phantoms for beings of flesh and bone. As an anarchist

individualist, an anarchist associationist, I understand that we make

use of our own sensibilities to create a line of individual conduct; I

understand that we associate with individuals endowed with approximately

similar sensibilities, that we then act according to a group guidelines.

But to set up the manner of behaving of one individual or group as a

universal, absolute morality, that is what does not appear anarchist to

me, that is what I rise again.

Let us suppose that Kropotkin had succeeded in persuading all the

anarchists that anarchist communism was the form of economic system

toward which humanity tended in its aspirations and dreams of a better

future. There we would have it: anarchism stabilized, crystallized,

petrified.

That is to say, it would no longer exist, dynamically speaking.

Indeed, the day when it is accepted that there is only one single

anarchist moral system, only one unique line of anarchist conduct, it

will follow that anyone who decide against or places themselves outside

these guidelines or this moral system could no longer be considered

anarchist. At that moment, Anarchism would have no reason to envy Church

and State: it would have its moral system, one and indivisible, its

sacrosanct, stagnant morality. There would exist an anarchist morality

of the sort of which Boyer spoke the other day in the issue of the Ecole

émancipée where he proposed a “proletarian morality” for the approval of

the pedagogues supporting the C. G. T. U.

I cannot understand how thinkers like Kropotkin have not realized that

by seeking to establish a single anarchist moral system, they would

return to exclusivism, to statism. In order for Anarchism not to be

transformed into a tool for social or moral conservation, it is

obviously necessary that all the ethics, all the antiauthoritarian means

of living life compete within it.

In anarchy, there are as many “moralities” as there are anarchists,

taken individually, or groups or associations of anarchists. Thus, in

anarchy, one is amoral, or put another way: every moral system presented

as anarchist is only so relative to the unity or the group that proposes

or practices it. there is no absolute anarchist morality, so no one can

logically say that it summarizes or incorporated the demands, the

desiderata, the relations of all the anarchists.

The anarchist work cannot consist of moralizing anarchism, but of

amoralizing it, of destroying among the anarchists the final remnants of

exclusivism and statism, which can still lie dormant in the spirit of

their relations between individualities or associations. My or our line

of conduct only have value for me or our group or our association—or

again for all those to whom it gives satisfaction, among those who

already carry its seeds, to whom I have had to explain it, to whom we

propose it so they can find what they seek, perhaps without really

knowing it. My “morals,” our “morals,” are only valid for those,

individually or collectively, to whom they are suited, not for everyone

and not for others.

In other words, we relativize what we call ethics, morals or rule of

conduct according to individual temperament, to instinctive or natural

affinities that lead human unities to act in isolation or to association

for specific ends and for a desired time. We do not modify our means of

conducting ourselves relative to an injunction or imperative superior or

external to the isolate or associate. We declare ourselves amoral with

regard to all morals drawn from religion, science, sociality and even

nature itself that stand in the way of our aspirations, desires or

appetites. Being anti-authoritarians, we refuse, of course, and in every

case, with respect to ourselves, to have recourse to violence or to any

form of governmental or statist coercion in order to satisfy our desires

or gratify our passions.

⁂

It is because the present anarchist mentality is saturated with

petit-bourgeoisism—it will be necessary to return to the question—that

so many anarchists are so slow to understand that the collective or

individual amoralization of the social milieu is a powerful factor in

anarchization. The more the human milieu is amoralized, the more the

guardians of religious or secular morality, those who want to keep human

societies within uniform rule of conduct or absolute moral systems, feel

their usefulness diminish. The more amoralization saturates the

relations among men, the more the idea that an imposed, common moral

system is necessary to living happily disappears; we feel the need for

moral instructors less and less. Unconsciously, a new basis for ethical

relations between isolated individuals and associates appears: it is the

unity or association that sets out the rule of conduct to be maintained

in order to reach the maximum of sociability, a sociability that in no

way answers to a moral conception of good and evil, to a transcendent a

priori, but is based on the self-interested observation that no one is,

can or wants to be an object of consumption for me except to the extent

that I am or can or want to be such for them.

I have, the other day, touched very rapidly upon one point on which it

is appropriate to insist, warmongers, the marshals of domination, the

grand masters of exploitation and the blackmailers [maitres-chanteurs]

of politics are glorifiers of public or private virtues, lay moralizers,

defenders of religion and wholesome traditions. When the global butchery

of 1914-1918 broke out, it was under their flags that the honest,

puritanical, moral anarchist theorists, communists and individualists

alike, came to line up; how could all of these factions not have made a

united front? They were all partisans of a unique, common, universal

moral system; the wolves do not eat each other.

II

The Larousse dictionary defines the word morality as: the relation of an

act, of the sentiments of a person, with the rule of morals. From this

comes the expression “certificate of morality,” to designate an official

confirmation of a clean criminal record. Each time that I hear morality

spoken of in a publication that calls itself anarchist, to whatever

degree, there comes to my mind, unbidden, the idea of a “certificate of

good behavior,” delivered by the police chief of the district.

As I wrote in the last issue, the word morality would never have

appeared in the anarchist or anarchist-friendly journals if the

anarchist movement had not been swamped with people coming from

bourgeois backgrounds, who have brought with them the notion that it is

important to conform, in matters of morals, to the established rules.

An experience that is already great, a familiarity that does not date

from yesterday, has shown me that a great number of people who declare

themselves theoretically as advocates of anarchism have been seduced

particularly by the teachings of Rousseau, humanitarianism, and the

revolutionary aspiration to egalitarianism revealed by the writings of

certain anarchist dogmatists. From that comes an all too obvious

tendency to make pronouncements on the acts and movements of comrades,

valuations and judgments like those issued by the representatives of

bourgeois society and those chiefs of police who deliver certificates of

good behavior.

When, in 1900, I entered into contact with the anarchists, I came from a

Christian milieu; many times, I have been stupefied by comparing the

materialist declarations of certain anarchist theorists with the

judgments they passed on the conduct of comrades who had taken seriously

formulas like “no gods, no masters” or “with neither faith nor law,”

which makes concrete, in a brief and clear form, the whole individual

anarchist idea of life. I could not understand how, after having battled

the law and the prophets, both religious and secular, they could bring,

with regard to certain kinds of individual behavior, condemnations that

would not have been disapproved of by the judges in the criminal court.

As I did not consider propaganda a profession and did not wish to make a

vocation of it, I would have long since dumped these respectable folks,

and that would have saved me some unpleasantness, if afterwards I had

not been convinced that these judgments simply reflected the bourgeois

education (primary and secondary) received by these theorists, of which

they have never wished or been able to rid themselves. Later,

fortunately, I met real anarchists, liberated and freed from the

education of the schools, who avoided, in general, bringing judgment on

the actions of their comrades. When they ventured to express an opinion

on their manner of conducting themselves, they did so in relation to the

anarchist conception of life and not some standard of morality

established by the supporters of bourgeois society.

I meet old compagnons who tell me that they have withdrawn from the

movement because of the disillusionment they have experienced, meeting

too many anarchist theorists with bourgeois inclinations. Where they

hoped to meet men who had abandoned social prejudices and moral

preconceptions, they found only minds, so spineless as to be ridiculous,

whose ethical mentality differed in no way from that of their porter and

their housekeeper.

Not that, forced by circumstances, the anarchist individualists do not

disguise themselves, but in the manner of the Calabrian brigand, who

disguises himself as a carabineer in order to rob a stage-coach. Every

concession that the anarchist individualist makes to the social milieu,

every concession that seem to make to the State, they make amends by

undermining the notion of the necessary power, by demonstrating to all

those with whom they come into contact that there is no need for morals

and moralists, for imposed, obligatory leaders and magistrates, in order

to fulfill the organic individual functions and for humans to get along.

But where is the giant who will get on with the task of amoralizing and

immoralizing the anarchist men and women, of making them catalysts of

the amoralization and immoralization of the human milieu? For it is only

then, O anarchy, that your advent could foreseen.