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Title: Legal Evolution and Anarchy Author: Elisée Reclus Date: 1878 Language: en Topics: reformism, cooperatives, revolution, anarchism Source: translated on July 2021 from https://books.google.pt/books?id=lKspAAAAYAAJ&dq=elis%C3%A9e%20reclus%20l’%C3%A9volution%20l%C3%A9gale%20et%20l’anarchie&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false][books.google.pt]] and [[http://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article4668 Notes: Translation by João Black. The original publication of "Legal Evolution and Anarchy" [*L'Evolution légale et L'Anarchie*], on the journal *Le Travailleur* (Geneva, 1878), was followed by the interesting debate between Élisée Reclus and Gustav Lefrançais, "*A propos de 'L'Anarchie*' [About "Anarchy"]" which is also translated here.
This booklet is the reproduction, slightly modified, of a letter written
to a companion in exile, a refugee in Buenos Aires. This excellent
friend, Baux, still believed in the virtue of laws to improve men and in
that of representatives to make law triumph. Having written in this
regard to the editors of “Le Travailleur,” a monthly anarchist journal
which appeared in Geneva, he was answered by these few pages which,
since the time of publication, in February 1878, are reprinted today for
the first time.
Friends, the word “Anarchy” scares you. You blame us for using it and
preventing well-meaning but timid people from coming to us. You blame us
above all for having placed ourselves completely outside the State: the
path of legal evolution seems to you by far the safest.
Revolutionary socialism seems daunting to you, because it can lead to
dictatorship; but you have confidence in the movement of [cooperative]
associations and you think that it will be possible to displace capital
in this way. You even hope that the people and the bourgeoisie will
manage to conclude peace, and, in your dreams for the future, you set in
advance on a July 14th, anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the
great feast of the reconciliation of peoples and classes.
Doubtless the word “Anarchy” can frighten those who hold to the derived
meaning of this term and see it only as a synonym of disorder, of
violent and aimless struggles, but are we wrong to hold to the original
meaning of the word, that which all the dictionaries honestly give:
“Absence of government”? It is enough for us not to violate the
language, regretting that it is not richer and does not provide us with
terms that are not vitiated by illogical usage. Moreover, it does not
displease us at all that this word claimed by us stops for a moment
those who are interested in the social problem. In the realm of fable,
all the marvelous gardens, all the fairy palaces are guarded by some
fierce dragon. There is nothing terrible about the dragon that watches
over the threshold of the anarchic palace, it is just a word, but if
there are some who allow themselves to be frightened by it, it would
doubtless be in vain for us to try to hold them back; would men who
shrink from a word ever have the necessary freedom of mind to study the
thing itself? Alas! they will stick to their prejudices, their routine,
their formulas, and will continue to speak of the “social hydra,” in the
chosen terms of the official jargon.
Today’s society, which has reached the borderline of two worlds, so to
speak, is full of the most bizarre contradictions: it is here that
“anarchy” reigns arbitrarily in the sense usually given to the word.
Enter a higher school: the teacher talks about Descartes and tells us
how the great philosopher began by making a “clean sweep” [“table rase”]
of all prejudices, of all received ideas, of all previous systems. He
praises him very much for having had this intellectual vigor; he tells
us that from the time when the audacious word of absolute negation was
pronounced, human thought was emancipated; but this same professor has
only exclamations of horror for all those who would be tempted to
imitate his hero! Following the example of Decartes, who was the first
to dare to call himself an anarchist, we make a clean sweep of the kings
and the institutions that weigh on human societies, we get rid of the
traditional obedience that the morality of the masters has, at all
times, instilled in the servants. However, we will not imitate Descartes
all the way. If he, after having made a clean sweep of God, had not
hastened to put him [God] back in place with all his spiritual and
temporal cortège, if he had not had the prudence to travel in the
opposite direction all the road he had provided, sure they would be
careful not to give him to us as an example. Neither princes nor
republics would have given him asylum, and his name would have remained
that of a cursed man.
Well! in spite of the persecutions which have not failed us, and the
curses with which we have been overwhelmed, from one end of the world to
the other, we, the anarchists, do not believe we have to rebuild the
State of which we have made a “clean sweep.” Besides, as it exists, you
admit that the building is quite ugly in appearance, and you understand
that we are longing to demolish it. We have had enough of these kings
elected by the grace of God or appointed by the will of the people, of
these plenipotentiaries or ministers, responsible or irresponsible; of
these legislators who were granted, either by the prince or by a herd of
electors, their “share of royalty;” of these magistrates who sell to the
highest bidder what they call “justice;” of these priests who,
representing God on earth, promise places in paradise to those who make
themselves their slaves; of these coarse swordsmen who also demand a
blind obedience, an absolute suspension of intelligence and personal
morality, from all those who have the misfortune to follow suit in their
battalions; of these owners or bosses who dispose of the work, and
consequently of the life, of the immense crowd of the weak and the poor.
We have had enough of all the formulas, religious, legal or so-called
moral, which lock us up and keep our minds in bondage, enough of this
horrible routine which is the worst of all governments and the best
obeyed, as recently demonstrated, with a great deal of evidence, by the
philosopher Herbert Spencer.
“But at least will we not be able to transform economic society,
peacefully and as if in silence, by the movement of [cooperative]
associations?” Certainly, the anarchists, more than other men, have to
rely on the force of association, for they expect everything from free
affinities between free personalities; but they do not believe that
workers’ cooperative associations can achieve serious change in society.
The attempts made in this direction are useful experiences, and we
should be happy to have seen them, but they are enough, and we can now
speak out. Society is a whole that we will not succeed in changing by
underpinning it in this way through one of its slightest details. Not to
touch capital, to leave intact all those infinite privileges which
constitute the State, and to imagine that we can insert a new organism
in this whole fatal organism, would be like hoping that it will be
possible for us to make a rose germinate on a poisonous euphorbia.
The history of workers' associations is already long, and we know how,
in such matters, it is even more dangerous to succeed than to succumb. A
failure is one more experience and allows those who have suffered it to
enter into the great current of life and of the Revolution. But success
is fatal! An [cooperative] association that succeeds, that earns money
and becomes proprietor, is obliged to conform with the conditions of
capital, it becomes bourgeois, it discounts bills, pursues its debtors,
has recourse to lawyers, places its values in the bank, speculates on
public funds, accumulates its capital and makes use of it by exploiting
the poor. Having become rich, it joins the great brotherhood of the
privileged; it is nothing more than a financial company, forced to close
itself off from those who bring nothing but their arms. Completely
separated from the people, having become a simple social excrescence, it
constitutes itself as a State: far from supporting the revolution, it
fights it in the extreme; all that was living force in it, when it began
its work, now turns against its old friends, the disinherited and the
revolutionaries; despite all the goodwill of its members, it passes to
the enemy's side: it is nothing but a bunch of traitors. Ah! my friends,
nothing depraves like success! As long as our triumph will not be at the
same time that of all, let us be lucky to never succeed; let us always
be vanquished!
It seems to you possible to achieve the general renewal of society with
the help of the bourgeoisie―the petty bourgeoisie, of course, that whose
immediate interests are the same as those of the workers. This, it seems
to us, is a grave illusion. Let us never rely on any caste, and this one
less than any other, for it believes itself to be born for privilege
and, quite naturally, it espouses the prejudices and passions.
Undoubtedly, the petty bourgeois―like all men―would have a great
advantage in not always having before him the specter of misery;
undoubtedly, he would have in the new society what he lacks today, the
possibility of developing completely and of living without having to beg
for his sustenance; but we take into account a special cause of
demoralization which does not exist in men obliged to work with their
hands, the peasant and the worker. This cause of debasement is contempt
for material labor. By the effect of his education, the bourgeois, petty
or big, believes that he humiliates himself by taking a tool; his
natural ideal is to keep his hands virgin from the taint of work; he is
the slave of his black coat, of certain outward habits which classify
him among the Gentlemen [Messieurs]. There are no humiliations to which
he does not expose himself to keep his caste, no infamy that he does not
do to obtain the favors which should procure him, with the bread, the
right to be among the privileged and the rulers. Parents, teachers,
friends have always shown him this goal as the only one worthy of his
ambition. One cannot imagine the insults that the “supernumerary”
employee must suffer, the abject methods that are demanded of him before
he is allowed into the class of mandarins. Once broken by the narrow
rolling mill he had to slip into, he no longer has a backbone. Do not
expect anything from him, he is no longer a man. Defectors from the
bourgeoisie will come to us, and we hope more and more, but it is
impossible that the caste will help us one day.
Because we are “levelers”. For us, castes must disappear like the State,
of which it is only a miniature, with traditional inequalities as well
as legal inequalities; and it is not by political alliances, by works of
detail [œuvres de détail], by attempts at partial improvement that we
believe we can advance the day of the future Revolution. It is better to
walk directly towards our goal than to follow roundabout paths that
would make us lose sight of the point to be reached. By remaining
sincerely anarchists, enemies of the State in all its forms, we have the
advantage of not deceiving anyone, and especially of not deceiving
ourselves. We will not, under the pretext of realizing a small part of
our program, even with the sorrow of violating another part, be tempted
to address power or try to take our part in it too. We will spare
ourselves the scandal of those palinodes made by so many ambitious
people and skeptics, which trouble the people’s conscience so deeply.
And nevertheless, if we were to join the State cadres, such scandals
would be inevitable. As soon as the revolutionary has “arrived”, as soon
as he has established himself in a governmental niche, he naturally
ceases to be a revolutionary in order to become a conservative; this is
inexorable. From a defender of the oppressed, he in turn turns into an
oppressor; after having excited the people, he works to emasculate it.
We do not have to cite proper names here: contemporary history cries
them out. But how could it be otherwise? It is the place that makes the
man; it is the whole machine that gives the cogs their various
functions, and they have to adapt to them. As a famous diplomat, Robert
Walpole, said long ago: “The interests of the rulers are always
absolutely contrary to those of the ruled.” Whoever becomes ruler
becomes consequently an enemy of the people.
If we want to remain useful to our cause, that of the oppressed and the
vanquished, then let us care not to break ranks. Let us at no price
separate ourselves from our comrades, even under the pretext of serving
them; let our grouping always be spontaneous, our discipline always
voluntary. Let every man of honor go on strike as soon as it comes to
titles, power, delegation for him which places him above others and
gives him a share of irresponsibility. Thus the revolutionary forces
will no longer be divided and the people will no longer have to
constantly send leaders to power to be oppressed by them―isn't this the
story symbolized by the rock of Sisyphus, falling back on those who
rolled it with great difficulty to the top of the mountain?
As for men base enough to need a master, let them seek one! For a long
time, alas, they will not lack. It is with government as with religion.
You meet thousands of men who say to you with an important air: “If all
were like me, we certainly wouldn't need a government, but we need it
for the people. Likewise, I could do without religion, but we need it
for women and children.” And this is how governments and religion are
made to last. As for us, greatly appreciating freedom for ourselves, we
equally appreciate it for others; we do not want masters, nor do we want
others to be enslaved to us. Whatever the partisans of the State may
say, we know that the solidarity of interests, and the infinite
advantages of a life at once free and common, will suffice to maintain
the social organism. Only, it will not be constantly troubled by the
whims of rulers who chase the peoples of here and there like miserable
herds.
Certainly, our illusion would be great if, in our enthusiastic zeal, we
relied on a sudden evolution of men in the direction of anarchy. We know
that their education of prejudices and lies will keep them in servitude
for a long time yet. What will be the “spiral” of civilization that they
will have to climb before finally understanding that they can do without
edges or chains? We don't know, but judging by the present, it will be a
long way.
While priests and teachers work together for the general stupidity,
while kings, generals, officials and policemen, capitalists and bosses
do their best work of war and enslavement, those whom the people acclaim
as their defenders promise them also to govern them, to constitute a
“strong power,” to defend the sacred interests of religion and property.
Have we not seen a so-called republican Assembly vote with a unanimous
voice thanksgivings to the “noble army” which had just “saved society”
by machine-gunning thirty-five thousand prisoners, by cutting the
throats of women and children? Do we not see another Assembly, even more
republican, give proof of “wisdom and good political sense” by leaving
the prisons and the penal colonies full of republicans, and by seizing
every opportunity to pay court to the sovereigns of the world? All our
legislators, formerly fierce club members, have changed into as many
marquises!
Be that as it may, and whether years, decades or centuries separate us
from the definitive revolution, we work with no less confidence on the
endeavor we have undertaken, studying contemporary history with
interest, but without taking a part in it that could make us traitors to
our convictions. “Let the dead bury their dead”; let the candidates for
power boast about their panaceas of governmental improvement and let us
direct all our efforts to augmenting the elements of an egalitarian and
free society that already exist, albeit isolated and fragmentary. The
work we are pursuing is not chimerical, for on a thousand points at once
we can already see it being prepared, just as in a chemical solution a
thousand small crystals are formed here and there, before the whole mass
is transformed. This whole lot of associations which are springing up
everywhere, agricultural, industrial, commercial, scientific, literary,
artistic, are they not proof of the change that is taking place in
people’s minds and which is turning them more and more towards working
together? The contempt into which the old formulas of official religion
and morality fall, the progress of free thought, do they not testify to
a growing self-worth in individuals? The number of refractory socialists
living as equals, without a chief who gives them the watchword, without
a law that blocks them, with no other bond of cohesion than the feeling
of a common duty, mutual affection and esteem, is it not increasing day
by day? Finally, among the recent events, are there not some which seem
to presage a whole new future? It is not appropriate for us to boast
about the Paris Commune, since we took part in it; but is not history
already being made, and does it not show that in this vast effervescence
a whole new order of things was fermenting, of which neither king, nor
priests, nor policemen, nor bosses would have been the masters? And over
there, in Russia, how great is the spectacle of those young men and
those heroines who leave aside position, fortune, and the infinite
enjoyments of life in sciences and arts, to become part of the people,
to live with them their miserable existence, then finish their career of
devotion in prisons or mines! It is to bring together all these
scattered elements of the great future society that we must devote our
forces.
The festive day you are waiting for will come; but it will not only aim
to celebrate the federation of peoples without kings; it will also
glorify the union of men, now free, living without masters, and
fulfilling the prophecy of our great ancestor Rabelais: “Do what thou
will!” ["Fais ce que veux"]
Elisée Reclus.
issue 2, February-March 1878]
Dear citizens and friends,
I read and reread the article by citizen Elisée Reclus on "Legal
Evolution and Anarchy" and, I won't hide it, anti-anarchist that I am, I
was at first dazzled by it.
If we were to live in the eternal ideal, nothing could be more splendid,
more broadly conceived, than the letter from our friend to Baux, of
Buenos-Ayres.
How, indeed, can one not agree with him on the contempt that must be
inspired in us by the petty procedures so much advocated by the
bourgeois republicans and even by the makers of socialism, as intended
to facilitate the emancipation of the workers, when these procedures can
only annoy any revolutionary initiative?
How not to agree with the man who demonstrates in such a luminous and
peremptory way all that is false and demoralizing in this “Legal
Evolution,” by means of which some of us still like to suppose that the
State, falling from the hands of the bourgeoisie into those of the
proletariat, could thus become the supreme organizer of the social
Revolution?
Finally, how clear and unanswerable is the criticism of the citizen
Elisée Reclus, making us feel the dangers, for the economic emancipation
of all, of the success of cooperative associations, creating, by their
very success, new obstacles to this emancipation!
However, although I agree with him and with you all on these various
points, more than ever I reject the title of anarchist to content myself
with that of anti-authoritarian.
And first of all, whatever citizen Reclus may say, I persist in thinking
that, despite all philological explanations, anarchy remaining for the
great generality synonymous with disorder, it is useless to waste time
trying to redress public opinion in this regard.
“Ah! for the love of Greek, do we have to kiss?”
Then, is it really just the fear of being misunderstood for a word, that
makes me address to you the objections that the article in question
raises in my mind?
Frankly, it's not just the word that offends me. The “dragon that
watches the threshold of the anarchic palace” is much more evil, in my
opinion, than our friend supposes.
In short, citizen Reclus's article rests on the ideal, that is to say on
a conception outside of real life and its needs. Its main purpose is to
inspire revolutionaries with the desire to carry out the famous “do what
you will” with which it ends. And that is indeed how true anarchists
understand it.―Those who go all the way.
They only understand the Social Revolution as an economic situation
guaranteeing the individual such a sum of freedom that he can work when
he pleases; do whatever he will with the material; also dispose of his
product as he pleases, even to the point that he can destroy it at his
whim. Finally, they aspire to a social state such that any pact, any
agreement, being considered as an alienation of the freedom of the
contracting parties, will no longer have a reason to exist, and also
such that any organization will disappear which, under the current name
of public services, makes up for the insufficiency of the individual, to
guarantee him, not only the satisfaction of his most immediate needs,
but of those which the development of his faculties creates for him
every day.
Undoubtedly, citizen Reclus may not share this way of thinking of the
consistent anarchists, he, whose whole life certainly has been a
continual homage paid to the principle of conscious solidarity, towards
the realization of that which the socialists aspire. But what does it
matter, if the logic of the conception necessarily leads to it those who
want to translate it into facts?
“Do what you will,” such is really the goal pursued by any true
anarchist.
Certainly, if one supposes the thing as realizable and especially if one
can demonstrate the possibility of it―because supposition alone would
not be enough―I do not see indeed why one should be frightened by the
“monster”―but here is precisely where the question lies.
Now, without speaking of the discoveries of physiology, demonstrating,
it is said, that freedom does not exist for man any more than for any
other animal―which, moreover, I am not qualified either to affirm or to
combat―now, I say, how can one claim to demonstrate that the individual
will become free to produce as he pleases and to do with his product
what he wishes, in the presence of the contrary affirmations which
emerge at every moment from the observation of facts, concerning
solidarity in the various series of the economic order?
I say individual, on this occasion, so that it is clearly understood
that it is a question, not of a type or of the species considered in the
collectivity, but indeed (by reason of the very theory of anarchy) of
each of the individuals that make up the entire species.
For it seems to me, in this respect, that the socialists, more than
anyone, must undermine this psychic entity called man, for the benefit
of which, under the pretext of a very questionable progress, the rights
of the individual have been constantly sacrificed.
But, for this very reason, it is necessary to take into account the
economic conditions which the guarantee and satisfaction of these rights
depend on.
And it is precisely in the analysis of these conditions that we find the
best criticism of the purely abstract character of the anarchist
conception.
There is indeed no product, however simple its elements, which has not
required the cooperation of collective efforts. Now, which of the
authors of this product could claim to destroy, by his own whim or his
own interest, the result obtained by his collaborators?
And, if one agrees that such a claim would be unjust, then what becomes
of anarchy?
“But,” it will be answered, “it is not a question of man as we know him
today, and whose faculties, overexcited by antagonistic interests or
unhealthy fantasies, are constantly out of balance. We have in view, on
the contrary, the individual transformed in such a way, by a rational
education, that he can conceive of the satisfaction of what is proper to
him only in the guarantee of collective and solidarized interests.”
So be it. But then your individual, thus transformed, will not do what
he wants, but only what reason has made him conceive as strictly
conforming to his better balanced needs.
On the other hand, the individual, by the very fact of the integral
development to which he aspires and to which he is entitled, will see
the sum of his needs increase each day, without the normal duration of
his existence increasing in proportion. He will increasingly feel the
need to supplement duration with a new power of production which he can
only find in the collective force itself and, there again, the great law
of solidarity will make him understand, better than Christianity, the
henceforth indisputable justice of this maxim: “He who does not work
must not eat.”
In this case, what has the anarchist ideal to do with the terrible
social problem whose solution imposes itself on our minds?
Was it then a pure ideal conception which raised the sublime storm of
1871? Was it for a simple intellectual speculation that those thousands
of brave and worthy hearts ceased to beat, before their time, whom
thought they saw, in the new advent of the Republic, the end of their
miseries and above all the possibility of better days for their
children?
Was it only for love of the ideal that our friend, he, the scholar, had
taken up the gun and fought in the ranks of the federates of the
Commune?
“Let the dead bury their dead,” said citizen Élisée Reclus.
All this, in my opinion, still smells too much like Christianity, an
extra-human doctrine with which we must break forever. What is true, the
reason why the workers of all countries tend to organize the great
definitive uprising, is precisely that they want to put an end to all
social constitutions based on abstractions, all ending in their
enslavement. It is because they want the three phenomena of life,
production, circulation, and consumption to be realized, not only among
a few, but among all, and to the extent that the complete development of
the faculties of each will entail.
No doubt we agree on this point: that any authoritarian organization,
that is to say one resulting from a will other than that of the
interested parties, must be recognized as powerless to create this new
economic situation, the very negation of the principle of authority, of
any reason of State [raison d’État].
This is also why the expression anti-authoritarian seems to me to better
characterize the goal really pursued by the revolutionary socialists.
Anarchy, on the contrary, leading logically to the entirely ideal
pursuit of “do what you will,” could well, against the will of its
partisans, quite simply bring us back, by the exaltation of
individualism, to the motto so dear to the bourgeois: “Glory to the
strongest and most skilful!”
Dear companion,
Thank you for writing to me. You are thus giving me the opportunity to
explain in a few words one side of the question that I had left in the
shade, not foreseeing that there might exist the slightest doubt in the
minds in this regard.
It is useless to revisit the discussion of the words anarchy and
anarchists. These terms seem good to me, because they have the advantage
of being consistent with etymology and logic, and even more, because
they shake a little, from its usual torpor, the intelligence of those
who hear them for the first time. But even if those criticisms were to
be founded, it would be too late now to uphold them. Now friends and
foes know us as anarchists, and I fear the “anti-authoritarians” are
very likely to be confused with us.
Now we come to the capital objection of your letter. Here it is:
Consistent anarchists have no idea of solidarity. They can “do whatever
they will with the material,” “dispose of their products as they
please,” “destroy them at their whim,” and even “destroy the whole
organization of public services which makes up for the insufficiency of
the individual.”
These criticisms would be just if the anarchists were not at the same
time collectivists, and would not seize every opportunity to fight
private property. Now, if the whole earth becomes for humanity a field
of collective work, if each product is the result of the efforts of all,
how can the isolated individual claim the right to destroy any part of
the social wealth [l’avoir social]? And if, by scientific arrangement of
collective property, we transform nature into an immense organism placed
at the disposal of man, and vibrating at his slightest will, how can we
be accused of disturbing “public services?”
The freedom of the individual, the solidary well-being of humanity,
these are the two goals that we pursue and which must serve one another
as means of achievement. Without the complete freedom of man, that is to
say without the integral development and the regular play of all his
forces, the disorder persists in the social body and the Revolution
remains the necessary fact; without the regular functioning of society
as a whole, the individual can only suffer, live in misery, ignorance
and vice. Thus in the human body the normal play of the cell and the
general health of the being absolutely depend on each other. In this
dualism the individual and society harmonize and merge.
Is this ideal, or even “Christianity,” as you say? We believe, on the
contrary, that it is science. And it is also to scientific methods, to
observation and experiment, that we will resort to study the normal
conditions of the grouping of men. Sociology is nothing other than this
study, and it has already made two essential facts beyond doubt for us:
on the one hand, that man, solidary of all other men, perishes by
isolation; on the other hand, that all social progress is accomplished
by the energy [ressort] of individual wills. These are scientific
“laws,” very different from those external laws imposed on us by the
State, and against which we are in permanent revolt. It is to conform
with the first of these laws recognized by our reason that we are
collectivists; we are anarchists to conform with the second. Could it be
otherwise and do these laws not show themselves to us with the evidence
of a mathematical solution?
We will often have the opportunity to deal with these questions in Le
Travailleur. But don't you agree with us, since you also want any
society to be based “on the free will of the interested parties and
against the authority of any outside group constituting the State”?
Apart from the free will which you admit like me, apart from the
solidarity which I recognize like you, is there any other principle,
unless it is the miracle as Christians want it, or the authority,
another form of whim, as “men of government” want it?
Élisée RECLUS.