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Title: Revolutionary Studies Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1892 Language: en Topics: revolution Source: Commonweal. London: 1892, from http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=411.
I. The word Revolution is upon all lips and one feels its first
vibrations. And, as always, at the approach of great commotions and
great changes, all who are dissatisfied with the actual regime -- how
small may be their discontent -- hasten to adopt the title of
revolutionaries, hitherto so dangerous, now so simple. They do not cling
to the actual regime; they are ready to try a new one; that suffices for
them.
This affluence, to the ranks of the revolutionaries, of a mass of
malcontents of all shades, creates the force of revolutions and renders
them inevitable. A simple conspiracy in the palace, or of Parliament,
more or less supported by what is called public opinion suffices to
change the men in power, and sometimes the form of government. But a
Revolution, to effect any change whatever in economic order, requires
the agreement of an immense number of wills. Without the agreement, more
or less, active of millions, no revolution is possible. It is necessary
that everywhere, in each hamlet even, there should be men to act in the
destruction of the past; also that other millions remain inactive in the
hope of seeing something arise to improve their future condition.
And it is precisely this vague, undecided, discontent, which is very
often inconscient, surging in the minds of men at the eve of great
events, and that loss of confidence in the existing order, which permits
true revolutionists to accomplish their immense task -- the titanic task
of reconstructing in a few years institutions venerated for centuries.
But this is also the rock upon which most revolutions split and become
exhausted.
When a revolution takes place, overturning the established outlines of
daily life; when all good and bad passions flash out freely and are seen
on the housetops; when weakness and great devotion are side by side,
poltroonery here, heroism there, -- shabby antipathies and personal
intrigues alongside of great self-sacrifice; when in fact the
institutions of the past fall, and new ones are designed with difficulty
in the midst of continual changes, -- when the immense majority of those
who yesterday gloried in the name of revolutionaries hasten to pass into
the ranks of the defenders of order: the general commotion, the
instability of struggling institutions, the insecurity of the morrow,
fatigues them soon. They fear, on the one hand, that the slight
alterations that have been affected should sink in the tempest; and they
do not perceive that the smallest change in economic institutions
implies already a profound modification in all conceptions of society
and that this can only be brought about after much larger changes. And
seeing the counter-revolution approach they hasten to conform to it.
Popular passions, sometimes coarsely expressed, cause them aversion;
still more so the shabby passions of leaders. Soon they have had enough
of the revolution and run to join those who call for rest and peace.
Among such the past recruits its most ardent defenders, all the more so
if they have sustained slight losses. They bate those who endeavor to go
further, and they are so much the more dangerous for being able to seize
upon previous revolutionists, and to put them to the service of the
past.. They dare in a manner in which the reaction would not dare
without them, and they strike precisely those who sap more deeply the
foundations of the ancient institutions and desire to advance afresh
towards the future.
These persons become the Robespierres and the Saint Justs -- who
guillotine the mad ones -- under pretext of saving the revolution, but
in reality to check it.
Friends of revolution cannot be distinguished from its enemies during a
period of struggle. But it is necessary to note that the historians of
the past have done their utmost to throw into chaos all ideas of these
facts.
To consider only the great French revolution. The ideal of some is
Mirabeau, perfectly satisfied holding a portfolio in the constitutional
ministry of Louis XVI. Of others it is Danton the patriot with daring
against Germans but without a trace of daring in economic questions, the
tribune who to resist the invasion, made use of a constitutional king,
of peasants serving bourgeois proprietors, and of stock-jobbing under
landed proprietors, all wonderfully mixed -- with revolutionary talk.
For others it is Robespierre the just, who guillotined revolutionists,
who talked of equality of fortunes and published their atheism, the man
who in the summer of 1793, at the moment the people of Paris suffered
famine, insisted that Jacobins should discuss the advantages of the
English constitution! For others, finally, it is Marat who one day
demanded the heads of two hundred thousand aristocrats but who had not a
single word upon the subject which impassioned two thirds of France
namely the question, to whom should belong the land cultivated by the
peasants. And for several tricksters, last by all, the ideal is the
attorney of the republic who furiously demanded the heads of the
duchesses and their servants -- particularly the servants, because the
duchesses were at Coblentz -- while black dens of traders pillaged
France, starving the workmen and making from what they had stolen from
the duchesses the scandalous fortunes which were seen to appear under
the "Directoire."
As for the great number of revolutionists, they unhappily know only of
the theatrical side of former revolutions as related with forced effect
by historians, and they scarcely suspected the immense work accomplished
in France during the years 1789-93 by millions of obscure persons --
work which caused France to be in 1793 quite a different nation from
what she was four years previously.
It is to assist actual revolutionists in guiding themselves somewhat in
this chaos that we undertake these studies. We wish to demonstrate the
necessity of distinguishing well beforehand those who call themselves
our friends and who will soon be our enemies. We shall try to show to
revolutionists the immense task they have to accomplish, to inform them
of the troubles which will overtake them if they picture to themselves
the next revolution on the model of what historians have told us of past
revolutions. We wish finally to show them what display of energy, what
boldness of thought, what intensely energetic work the revolution will
require from those of its children who desire to give to it from day to
day their life and their strength, much more important for its success
than the rifle shots exchanged at the critical moment.
II. Boldness of thought and example to induce the masses to put into
execution what they dare think -- this is what has been wanting in the
actors in past revolutions. It is still what is likely to be wanting in
the next.
Who has not asked with grief, when studying the revolutions of the past,
"why such effort, such sublime devotion, so much bloodshed and families
in mourning, so much destruction, for such poor results?" This question
constantly turns up in literature, in conservative and in revolutionary
propaganda.
It is partly because we do not make allowance for the immense obstacles
experienced in every revolution from blind or conscient partizans. Their
power is overlooked, as is their stubbornness in becoming turncoats to
save their privileges; we forget their conspiracies and intrigues when
we are no longer face to face with them. We forget, in fine, that
revolutions are made by minorities.
And we forget also that if the revolutionists have generally exhibited
courage and formidable rashness in their acts, they have always failed
in boldness of thought, aim, and conception of the future. They dreamed
of that future as assuming the form of that past against which they
revolted. The past even held them bound in their enthusiasm for their
future.
They dared not strike the decisive blow and kill the ancient regime in
that which created its true strength: its religion, its fortune, its
obedience to law, its centralization, its army, its police, its prisons
and all that sort of thing. They dared not destroy enough to open the
wide gates of a new life, and of that new life their conceptions were so
vague and consequently so timid, so narrow, that they dared not, even in
their dreams, touch the fetishes which they had adored in their past
slavery.
Could we expect great results from a timid brain, even when associated
with an heroic heart?
When we reflect upon the events of the great revolution we cannot avoid
being struck -- as Quinet has so well said -- with the rashness of the
acts of our grandfathers and the timidity of their thoughts.
Proceedings, ultra-revolutionary thoughts, timid and conservative.
Prodigies of bravery and energy, supreme conception of life and its joys
-- and incredible timidity in the conception of the near future. Months
and years elapsed before the people dare touch one of the chimeras which
they surrounded with respect, before they compel their leaders -- the
men whom they venerate and obey -- to make the sacrifice of a single one
of the institutions of the past. This is the distinctive feature of the
revolution. It is the image of the soldier who proves courage and
invincible rashness in capturing a battery from the enemy without daring
to consider beyond the battery, without daring to cast a general glance
at the war.
The unarmed people attack the thick walls and cannon of the Bastille;
the women run to Versailles and bring back a prisoner; everywhere, in
each little town men armed with the clubs seize the municipalities
without caring if they are hanged the next day by the municipality or
"returned to legality." A crowd of people over-run the Tuileries and
capture the king and crown him -- with cap of liberty, and two months
later, defying the Swiss guard and the national bourgeois guard, they
take the Tuileries by assault; ignoring the convention the obscure
people take upon themselves the massacres of September. The republic,
without armies, undermined by the royalists at home, resist the
allied-powers. Danton demands boldness as the supreme means of saving
the revolution. The scaffolds of the convention, the drownings in the
Vendee, the death-carts even, do not stop these revolutionists in their
revolutionary proceedings, yet throughout this grandiose drama it is
timidity of thought, not boldness of conception, which hovers over all.
Mediocrity of thought destroys noble efforts, grand passions, and
immense devotions.
Then when royalty became nothing more than a memory and was obeyed only
by a few Swiss -- Danton, Robespierre and even the Cordeliers, feared
the republic more than they feared the king. Not until France was
invaded by foreigners, managed and commanded in point of fact from the
Tuileries, did they dare to think that France could dispense with a
crowned sham.
When the clergy covered the whole of France with its vast conspiracy
against the new regime, when that conspiracy included two thirds of the
population, the revolutionists surrounded the church with their respect;
they took it under the protection of the revolution, and shortly they
guillotine the Anarchists who dare to insult the Catholic worship.
It is evident that in regard to economic questions their timidity is
greater still said even more odious. The feudal system had ceased, the
lord of the manor, hunted by the peasants, had gone over the frontier;
the seignoral forests had been pillaged and the game exterminated;
feudal quit-rents were no longer paid. But the leaders of the
revolution, even in the convention, struggled to preserve the last wreck
of the feudal rule to transmit it to the next century. And when the
brilliant Girondins or the austere Robespierre heard the words equality
of fortune, they trembled at the simple idea that private property would
no longer be respected by the people. Because -- (they had owned some in
the past) -- the state is based upon private ownership of property.
The leaders it is true are more backward than the people. The people are
ahead of them in respect of emancipation from the past -- they go
further than the leaders. But their vision is so vague, so obscure, so
wavering! In the heart of the people, even, ideas are so divided that
this vagueness and hesitation spreads to the chiefs of the revolution.
The butcher Legendre who led the people in the attack upon the Tuileries
on 20. June dare not even dream of dethroning the king -- tightly the
people might hold the king under their pikes, they dare not push the
point a little further and have done with royalty.
And later when the Baboeuf conspiracy was discovered the Montagnards are
taken by surprise. They have beard of vague popular aspirations towards
Socialist equality, but they are quite thunderstruck at finding a
program. Their thought bad never dared go so far. But the people, none
the more, did not know how to put their hopes into form.
The same happens in 1848.
After all the Socialist Propaganda of 15 years, after Fourier and Cabet,
after all that was said at a thousand meetings and printed in hundreds
of pamphlets in favor of Communism -- of the right to life and happiness
-- the revolutionists, that is to say those who believed themselves to
be and passed for such, and even the most advanced of these, are ready
to shoot anyone who should speak of Communism. All they dare think is
Republican Democracy, that is association upheld by the State; and they
leave to a Bonaparte exploiter the vague aspirations of the people, from
which he makes himself a throne.
Repetition of the scene in 1871. These revolutionary heroes who are not
stopped in their revolt by a hundred thousand men have not one single
revolutionary thought. They know nothing but previous revolutions --
they believe only in turning against the old government the same weapons
which it had used against its adversaries. But they could not bring
forth any true Revolutionary Idea. They did not even know how to
dispense with the policemen of the empire, its courts martial, and its
tinsel. They dreamed of the Commune, reproducing in miniature the State
which they overthrew; and while ideas of equality worked confusedly in
the minds of the people they only dreamed of equality in submitting to
their dictation. Had not Marat dreamed, before them, and Marx the modern
God of the Socialists, had he not also preached popular dictation!
In short, no new idea, none of the thoughts which revolutionize the old
world, sprang up in these minds, so revolutionary in their acts, so
timid in their ideas, kneaded as they are into the models of the past,
against which they declared war.
Are we better placed today, at the eve of the next revolution! Have we
the boldness of thought and the force of the initiative which make
revolutions! In face of this past against which we rebel, in face of its
submissiveness, of its authoritative organization, its hypocrisy, its
lies, have we the revolutionary thought which will know how to disown
this past, not alone in its entirety, but in all its daily
manifestations. Shall we know how to take the ax, not only to actual
institutions but to the ideas even which preside in their development!
Are we Revolutionists in word, in our thoughts as much as in our methods
and, our acts! Will our revolutionary energy come to the service of a
revolutionary ideal?
We will inquire into this in the next article.
III. Are we prepared to face the Revolution which approaches? Shall we
have the audacity of thought which our fathers lacked, to frankly decide
the immense economic, politic, and moral problems in face of which
history has placed us? These were the questions which we put at the
close of the preceding article.
It is certain that many things contribute to give to the men of our
century a boldness of thought which was wanting in our grandfathers.
The great discoveries of natural science in which our generation has
assisted or taken part is a fact to give thought a daring without
precedent. Entire sciences created but yesterday have just opened to us
immense horizons which our fathers could not perceive. The unity of
physical force explaining the whole of the phenomena of nature including
the physical life of animals and man, is a fact to permit us to have
bold conceptions of the whole of natural phenomena.
The criticism of religions is made with a depth and sometimes a boldness
hitherto unknown and impossible. All the scaffolding of venerated
prejudices concerning the divine origin of human institutions and the
so-called laws of providence which served to explain and to perpetuate
slavery -- all that scaffolding has fallen, under the criticism of
science. And that criticism has already penetrated to the depths of the
masses.
Man has been able to understand his place in nature. He has been able to
perceive that he, himself, has made his institutions and that he alone
can re-make them.
Besides which, the idea of stability which was hitherto attached to
everything which man saw in nature, is broken down, destroyed and put to
naught! Everything changes in nature, everything is incessantly
modified: systems, wages, planets, climates, varieties of plants and
animals, the human species. Why should human institutions perpetuate
themselves!
Nothing remains, everything modifies itself, from the rock which appears
to us immovable and the continent which we call "terra firms," to the
inhabitants, their manners, their customs, their ideas.
What we see around us is only a passing phenomenon which ought to modify
itself, because immobility would be death. These are the conceptions to
which modern science accustoms us.
But this conception dates almost from yesterday. [François] Arago is
almost our contemporary. And yet when he spoke one day of continents
which sometimes arose out of the seas and were sometimes submerged by
the waves, a learned friend made this remark "But your continents
spring, up then like mushrooms," so much was the idea of immobility, of
stability in nature, rooted in the mind at this epoch, to-day continual
change, evolution, is one of the most popular terms.
And we now begin to understand, however vaguely, that revolution is only
an essential part of evolution, that no evolution is accomplished in
nature without revolutions. Periods of -very slow changes are succeeded
by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for
evolution as the slow, changes which prepare them and succeed them.
Life is a continual development, and the plant, the animal, the
individual, the society which sticks fast, and remains in the same
state, will perish and die. This is the mother-idea of modern
philosophy, and we may judge from it how much encouragement we have for
daring sufficient to change everything.
And beside all this, consider the rapidity of the conquests of the human
mind during this century, behold in it -- Boldness!
"DARE!" Such is the order of the day in modern mechanical art. Dare to
conceive an arch of 650 yards span, thrown across an arm of the sea at a
height of 110 yards -- and you will succeed, as they have succeeded on
the Firth of Forth. Dare to conceive a tower 325 yards high and you will
have it. Dare to cut through Suez or Panama, to unite France and England
by a tunnel, to bore the Alps. Dare to start a "cockle-shell" of 200
tons with a wide expanse of sail and you will cross the Atlantic in a
fortnight by no other force than the wind. Dare to compress steam
fourfold, dare to put an explosive under the piston of your motor; fear
nothing. Dare to throw the human voice from Paris to London and you will
transmit the feeble vibrations of the human voice across the twenty
miles of the Channel.
All the history of modern mechanism is only a series of variations of
the words of Danton De Vaudace et encore de Vaudace (Dare and always
dare.)
And this daring has already invaded literature, art, the drama and
music. Dare to speak, to write, to paint, to compose, as the heart bids
you; and if you have thought knowledge and talent, you will be listened
to and understood, whatever be the novelty of style.
All this gives to our century and its revolution immense advantages. All
this stimulates audacity of thought in the revolutionist.
But unfortunately the same daring has failed, up to now, in the domain
of politics and social economy. Here, in ideas as in application,
timidity reigns supreme.
It is true that in all the course of the century, political history has
had to record defeats only. Victories, gained here and there, have even
all the character of defeats.
When one remembers all the heroism displayed before 1848 by Italian,
Hungarian, Polish and Irish patriots to acquire national independence,
and that it is proved that it all ended in defeat -- one finds nothing
of encouragement.
When one sees how the independence of Italy and Hungary was finally
acquired one blushes for the patriots for concessions to imperialism,
shameless speculation, and retrograde movements by which their ideal was
realized.
Hecatombs of victims in June 1848 and in May 1871, Militarism in
Germany, Reaction in France under the Empire, fruitless efforts of the
Russian youth -- all these are not facts to arouse and sustain audacity.
The century does not count one single fact like the Independence of the
United States, which gave to the French revolutionist the example of a
revolution crowned with success, and increased by distance.
And when we dream of the grandiose promises made by the International at
its commencement, of the hopes which it aroused in the hearts of the
workers -- and that it resulted in the debasement of the Partis Ouvriers
(Labor parties) who are proud of being its successors -- we can
understand the despair that reaches the workman's heart that he loses
faith in the future, that he ends by demanding some trifling
ameliorations instead of taking his freedom.
And yet, nothing is more erroneous than that manner of view spread and
maintained by those disgusted by politics. For as soon as we think of
the causes of the want of success and the defeats of our century we
perceive at once that what has led to defeat is that no one dared
advance; they always had their eyes turned backwards.
Even at the time the revolutionary fever seized the people. They did not
seek their ideal in the future. They sought it in the past.
Instead of dreaming of a new revolution they sighed for those of the
past. In 1793 they dreamed of establishing a Rome or an ancient Sparta.
In 1848 they wished to re-commence at 1792. In 1848 they admired in
secret the Jacobins of 1793. The German revolutionist of our days dreams
of reproducing 1848, and the executive committee of Petersburg take
Blanqui and Barbes for their ideal.
Even in constructing an Utopia of future life, none dare break through
the laws of antiquity. Ancient Rome presses with all its weight on our
century.
While the engineer, the scholar and the artist boldly throw the past
overboard -- the politician and the economist seek their inspirations in
the past.
Where, in fact, would be the engineer's art if he sought his elements in
ancient art. Should we have surpassed the bridges and aqueducts of the
Romans if engineers had not availed themselves of new forces and new
materials placed at their service to arrive at new conceptions. Without
availing themselves of new forces the engineers of the Forth bridge
would only have conceived a Cyclopean masonry to block up an arm of the
sea and to produce an arch which would have surpassed the Roman arches
only in its dimensions. Without daring they would not have opened a new
era of architecture by devising to throw across an arm of the sea two
Eiffel towers, 300 meters each, laid horizontally, each fixed at its
base and joining at their summits.
And what would the science of the evolution of plants and animals have
done if Wallace and Darwin had not insisted on overturning the facts and
ideas of old books. These pioneers understood that a new science
required new observations, and they went to Nature to question her and
draw out her secrets; they went to find new bases for new deductions.
Now, this is not what is done in the domain of politics and economics;
it is this which explains the timidity of conceptions and consequently
the defeats of our century.
We shall not construct a new society by looking backwards. We shall only
do so by studying, as Proudhon, has already advised, the tendencies of
society to-day and so forecasting the society of tomorrow.
The only basis upon which it is possible to construct the society of the
future is the new conceptions which germinate in men's minds. And these
alone can give the revolutionist, aided by his revolutionary fire, the
boldness of thought necessary for the success of the Revolution.
IV. When we glance at the mass of Revolutionists, Marxists,
Possibilists, Blanquist, or even bourgeois -- because everyone partakes
in the revolution which is now growing; when we see that the same
parties (who answer, each, to certain manners of thinking, and not to
personal differences, as is sometimes said) are found in each nation,
under other names, but with the same distinctive characteristics; and
when we analyze their principles, their aims and their methods -- we
find with dismay that they are all looking backward; that none dare face
the future, and that each of these parties has but one idea -- to
reproduce Louis Blanc or Blanqui, Robespierre or Marat; they are all
strong on the question of government, but equally powerless to bring
forth a single idea capable of revolutionizing the world.
All dream of dictatorship: the dictatorship of the Proletariat, said
Marx, -- that is to say "of Tribunes, of ourselves," say the majority of
the Blanquists and Possibilists, which comes to the same thing.
All dream of the revolution as the legal massacre of their enemies; of
the revolutionary tribunal, the public prosecutor, the guillotine, and
their own employes-the hangman and the jailer.
All dream of acquiring power in an omnipotent, omniscient State,
treating the nation as its subjects, governing the subjects, by
thousands and millions of functionaries who have received the authority
of the State. Louis the sixteenth and Robespierre, Napoleon and Gambetta
dreamed of nothing more than Government.
All dream of representative government as crowning the edifice which is
to succeed the revolution after a period of dictatorship.
All preach obedience to the law made by dictators.
All have only one dream, that of Robespierre: to massacre whosoever dare
think otherwise than the chiefs of power. The Anarchist revolutionist
and the reactionary would have to perish if he dare think and act
contrary to their wishes.
All wish, under one form or another the maintenance of property, whether
private or administered by the State, and the right of using and abusing
it; of payment by results; of charity organized by the State. All dream,
in fine, of killing all initiative of individuals and the people. "To
think," they say, "is a science, an art which is not made for the
people." If, at a later stage, it should be permitted for the people to
express themselves and try solutions which have not been discussed by
our high priests. Marx and Blanqui have thought enough for our century
as Rousseau did for the eighteenth, and that 'Which has not been
foreseen by a schoolmaster will not have any reason to exist.'
This is the dream of 99 per cent of those who usurp the name of
revolutionists. The Jacobin tradition stifles them, as the monarchial
tradition stifled the Jacobins of 1793.
Likewise, if you attend a meeting of workmen who have received a
so-called revolutionary education, but who have no idea of Anarchist
propaganda, and if you ask them "What is to be done during the
revolution? How many replies will you receive some what as follows: "To
take possession of the houses of the wealthy; to burn the waste paper of
the banks, the ministers and the counting houses of the bourgeois; to
destroy the prisons; to distribute food and to hand over a spade to
every policeman and banker, and so forth."
How many so-called revolutionists dare publish these ideas without first
referring to their leaders! There will be only one thing upon which all
will speak at the first onset. This will be the massacre of the "enemies
of the revolution" and he who promises to massacre most will be
acknowledged on the spot as a true revolutionist none the less for being
as timid as a babe in speaking of the smallest measures which make
revolutions. Food for powder yesterday, food for powder tomorrow -- the
people need not go beyond this, all the rest will be thought out in high
places.
We have previously said that when a people avenge themselves upon those
who have oppressed them so long no one has the right to intervene and
say what they should do. He alone, who himself has suffered. All that
the people have suffered has the right to intercede with them on such an
occasion.
He alone who has heard his children cry from hunger and seen them die of
starvation, he who has slept under bridges and submitted to all the
pangs, all the humiliation of misery, who has tramped the roads with out
lodgings or food or rambled hungry in the snow during a Bourbaki
retreat, while gentlemen slept in hotels -- such a one, alone, has the
right of pitying popular vengeance and interceding therein, -- he the
outcast of yesterday, -- in favor with his oppressors -- and then!
Have not the people been taught vengeance for thousands of years? Has it
not been made a sacred right, blessed by religion, and imposed by law --
a goddess who in mutilating the body of the malefactor "reestablishes
justice by outraging him." Has not everyone approved vengeance by legal
assassination, and paid the hangman and the jailer.
Again, he alone would have full right to speak who has the courage,
under the present system, to smash the head of the executioner and the
judge in broad daylight on the scene of execution. More who have not
done so have simply to keep silence, it is as much do they ought to dare
to speak of pity. Because in their fearful days -- like the days of
September, those days of massacre -- it is their education which speaks,
it is their principle of legal vengeance which is but in practice, it is
their contempt of human life that bears fruit.
It is a thousand years of Christian and Roman teaching, a thousand years
of misery -- the whole period of history -- which speaks in these days.
The rebel against all history has alone the right to protest against
these terrible days.
But quite otherwise is the error which denies its vindictive character,
which sets itself up as a State principle strutting in revolutionary
garments. It is that done which is dear to the Jacobin. Because he knows
that popular fury will subside with the first victims and soon gives
place to pity. He also requires pity to fill the gap of revolutionary
thought, legal terror, as incarnation of the revolution.
To massacre the bourgeois is always easier said than done.
Because, alas, they are the majority of the nation-without offense to
the boobys who expect to see such a concentration of capital that,
according to their opinion, it will belong to none other than the
proletarian masses governed by half a dozen bourgeois. How many are
there in France, bourgeois and wage receivers?
In counting all the wage receivers including the salaried functionaries
and lackeys, the salaried swells of the large warehouses and banks, the
uniformed swells of the railways -- all the clique in fact of salaried
persons more Bourgeois than the most arrant bourgeois -- the census of
1881 only finds, all told, seven millions but of 37 millions of
inhabitants. With their families they make less than 10 millions. And
the remainder, perhaps 17 millions, are bourgeois with their families,
those who possess, those who live by the work of others. If we deduct
five millions of peasant proprietors, there will still remain twelve
millions of bourgeois without counting their valets who live upon the
labor of others.
Twelve millions in France, about fifteen millions in England*- the
Jacobins intend to massacre the lot?
Marat demanded two hundred thousands aristocrat's heads; later it
appears he spoke of half a million. But he was then only taking account
of the past, he did not wish to strike at more than the aristocrats. How
many heads do the modern Jacobins demand? And yet Thiers who set himself
up for the massacre of the masses on principle only succeeded in
destroying 30,000 Parisians!
Thus it is seen Jacobinism reduces itself to absurdity.
"But we need not kill all the bourgeois," it is customary to reply. "A
few hundred thousand will suffice to reduce the others to inactivity.
Terror will drive them into the earth."
Well, this reasoning proves one thing, it is that, thanks to the fables
set up by the Jacobins, the people have learned nothing of their own
history.
In the first place, it is when the Jacobin revolution was already dead
for want of daring to go further, then, when it drove the people, that
the reign of Terror was inaugurated, and it was precisely under the
Terror that the disappointed little dandies took up the methods of brute
force to proclaim the counter revolution which has already established
in three fourths of France.
Edgar Quinet has explained it. It was because democracy did not wish to
work by Terror. In order to learn how to use Terror with such results as
the Catholic church and kings have obtained, democracy would have to
learn from Louis the Ninth, John the Terrible and the Czars of Russia.
Democracy thought this a trifle too much; the people remained harmless
even while they danced the Carmagnole round heads fixed upon pikes.
Kings and Czars do not in the least think it too much. They strike a
blow and make others tremble for fear of worse... They do not promenade,
their victims in the street; they stifle them in prisons. Alexander the
third, when ascending the throne, chose five victims, one a woman, and
had them hanged. And then he regretted having had them hanged in a
public place, which has enabled Vereschaguine to immortalize them under
a curtain. The remainder ate imprisoned at Schlusselbourg and so well
imprisoned that for ten years no word or sign of life has come from
them. He knows that the terror of the unknown acts more strongly upon
minds than death in broad daylight in a public place.
Well, Quinet is a thousand times right when he says the people will
never know how to manage such terror as this. It disgusts the people.
And yet it is asserted that the people terrorize. They have pity on the
victims, they are too sincere not to become soon disgusted. The public
prosecutor, the death-cart filled with victims, the guillotine, soon
inspire disgust. It is soon perceived that this terror prepares what it
should prepare -- Dictatorship -- and the guillotine is abandoned.
The people do not reign by terror. Invented to forge chains, terror
covered by legality forges chains for the people.
The Jacobin program reduces itself to this: Extermination impossible,
uselessness of legal terror.
In order to conquer, something more than guillotines are required. It is
the revolutionary idea, the truly wide revolutionary conception, which
reduces its enemies to impotence by paralyzing all the instruments by
which they have governed hitherto.
Very sad would be the future of the revolution if it could only triumph
by terror. Happily it has other means otherwise powerful, and we will
state them.
V. We have already said that the massacre of the bourgeois as a means to
secure the triumph of the Revolution is a senseless dream. Their number
even is opposed to it; because, over and above the millions who ought to
disappear according to the hypothesis of modern Marats, there would
still be millions of half-bourgeois 'workmen who would fain succeed
them. In effect these only ask to be allowed to become capitalists in
their turn, and would aim to become such if class interests were
attacked in their results and not in their causes. And as for organized
and legalized Terror, it serves no other end, we have said, than to
forge chains for the people. It kills individual initiative, which is
the soul of revolutions; it perpetuates the idea of obedience to a
strong government. It prepares the dictatorship which throttles the
revolutionary tribunal and knows how to manage it with craft and
prudence, in its own interest.
Terror, the arm of government serves, above all, the governing classes;
it prepares the ground for the less scrupulous of them.
The Terror of Robespierre necessarily ended in that of Tallien, and this
in the dictatorship of Bonaparte. Robespierre hatched Napoleon.
To overcome the bourgeoisie something totally different from brute force
is required, other elements than those which it has so well learned to
manage. This is why it is necessary first to see what creates its force
and to oppose to it a superior force.
What is it that has allowed the middle classes, in effect, to juggle all
the revolutions since the fifteenth century, to profit by them, to
enthrall and enlarge their domination on a solid bases other than the
respect for religious superstition -- or of the rights -- of birth of
the aristocracy?
It is the State. It is the continual growth and enlargement of the
functions of the State, based upon that foundation much more solid than
religion and birth-right -- the Law. And so long as the state lasts, so
long as the law remains sacred in the eyes of the people, so long as
future revolutions work for the maintenance and enlargement of the
functions of the state and the law -- the bourgeois will be sure to
conserve power and dominate the masses.
Lawyers make the State omnipotent, it is the origin of the
middle-classes, and further, it is the omnipotent State which
constitutes the actual strength of the bourgeoisie. By the Law and the
State they have become possesed of Capital, and have constituted their
authority. By the Law and the State they maintain it. By the Law and the
State they even promise to cure the evils which make society blush.
In fact, so long as the affairs of the country are entrusted to a few
persons, and these affairs have the inextricable complexity which they
have today -- the bourgeois can sleep in peace. It is they who, adopting
the Roman tradition of the omnipotent state, have created, constituted
and elaborated this mechanism: it is they who were its support
throughout history. They study it in their colleges and universities;
they maintain it in their courts of law, they teach it at school, they
propagate and inculcate it -- by speech and pen.
Their minds are so much accustomed to State tradition that they never
give it up in their dreams of the future. Their utopias even bear its
seal. They cannot conceive anything beyond the principles of Roman law
concerning the State and property; and if they meet with institutions
developed beyond these conceptions, whether in the life of French
peasants or elsewhere, they destroy them rather than acknowledge them.
Thus the Jacobins continued Turgot's work of destruction concerning the
popular institutions of France. Turgot abolished village councils
finding them too tumultuous and "disorderly," the Jacobins abolished
communities of families-the "compound families" which had escaped the
Roman-ax -- they gave the death blow. to communal possession of the
land; they made Draconian laws against coalitions of workmen and their
strikes; they preferred to drown the Vendeeans by thousands rather than
give themselves the trouble to understand their popular institutions.
And the modern Jacobins, on finding the commune and federation of tribes
among the Kabyles, preferred to destroy these institutions by their
tribunals rather than forfeit their conceptions of property and Roman
hierarchy.
The English bourgeois have done the same in India.
Also from the day when the great Revolution of the last century embraced
in its turn the Roman doctrine of the omnipotent State, sentimentalized
by Rousseau and represented by him with the label of Roman Catholic
Equality and Fraternity, from the day when it took for its base of
Social organization, property and electoral government, -- it was to the
grandsons of the lawyers of the 17th century, to the middle classes,
that the task fell of organizing and governing France according to its
principles. The people had nothing to do with it, creative force was in
quite another direction.
And if, unhappily, at the time of the next revolution, the people once
more, do not understand that its historic mission is to break up the
State, created by the codes of Justinian and the edict of the Pope; if
they allow themselves once more to be dazzled by conceptions of Roman
law, of state and property (that for which the State-Socialists labor so
hard) -- then they may again abandon the care of that organization to
those who are its true historical representatives -- the bourgeois.
If people do not understand that the true work of a popular revolution
is to destroy the State, which is necessarily hierarchical, to endeavor
to replace it by the free understanding of individuals and of groups in
free and temporary federation (always with a determined aim), if they do
not understand the necessity of abolishing property and the right to
acquire property, to sweep away elected government which has substituted
itself for the free consent of all; if the people renounce the
traditions of the liberty of the individual, of voluntary groupment and
of voluntary rules of conduct; if they remain passive if not consenting
to the abandonment of these traditions which have been the essence of
all preceding popular movements and of all the institutions of popular
creation; if they give up all these traditions and adopt that of
imperial and universal Rome, then they will do no more for the
Revolution; they should leave everything to the middle classes, ending
by asking for a few concessions. Because the conception of a State is
absolutely foreign to revolution; happily revolution understands nothing
of state-craft, it does not know how to use it. It remains the people;
it remains imbued with conceptions of what is called the common right --
conceptions based upon ideas of reciprocal justice between individuals,
upon real facts, while the right of the State is based sometimes upon
metaphysics, sometimes on fictions, sometimes on interpretation of words
created at Rome and at Byzantium during a period of decomposition, to
justify the exploitation and suppression of popular rights.
The people have tried at different times to become an influence in the
State, to control it, to be served by it. They have never succeeded.
It always ended in the abandonment of this mechanism of hierarchy and
laws to others than the people: to the sovereign after the revolutions
of the sixteenth century; to the bourgeois after those of the
seventeenth in England and eighteenth in France.
The middle classes, on the contrary, are absolutely identified with the
right of States. It is the State that gives it its power. It is the
State that gives it that unity of thought which strikes us at every
moment.
In practice, a Ferry may detest a Clemenceau; a Floquet a Freycinet, a
Ferry may meditate schemes to snatch the presidency from Grevy or
Carnot; the pope and his clergy may bate the whole set and cut the
ground from under their feet; the Boulangist may include in his hatreds
the clergy, the pope, Ferry and Clemenceau. All this may be, and is. But
something superior to these enmities unites all, from the rattle-brain
of the Boulevards to the honeyed Carnot, from the minister to the last
teacher in secular or religious school. This is the worship of
authority.
They cannot conceive society without a strong and acknowledged
government. Without centralization, without a hierarchy radiating from
Paris or from Berlin as far as the most remote game-keeper, and ruling
the most distant hamlet by orders from the capital, they would think
everything was dropping to pieces. Without a code -- the creation alike
of the Montagnards of the Convention and of the princes of the Empire --
they can see nothing but assassins, incendiaries, cut-throats in the
streets. Without property guaranteed by the code they see nothing but
deserted fields and ruined cities. Without an army, brutalized, to the
point of blindly obeying its officers, they imagine the country the prey
of invaders; and without judges, surrounded with the respect of the
corpus dei, the stay of the middle ages, they perceive only the war of
each against all. The minister and the pope, the gamekeeper and
school-master are absolutely agreed on these points, and it is this
which makes their common power.
They do not in the least ignore the perpetual robbery of civil and
military officials. But it matters little, they say, these are only
personal accidents, and so long as ministers exist, the stock-exchange
and the country will not be in danger. They know that elections are
managed with money, glasses of beer, and free festivities, and that in
Parliament votes are bought by places and concessions of plunder. What
matters? The law passed by the chosen of the people will be treated by
them as sacred. They will elude it, they will violate it if it galls
them, but they will make impassioned speeches on its "divine character."
The chief of the executive power and the chief of the opposition can
mutually insult each other in Parliament, but, the battle of words over
they surround each other with respect; they are two chiefs, two
necessary functionaries in the State. And if the public prosecutor and
the advocate insult each other in the presence of the accused, and in
moderate language, treat each other as liars and cheats -- when the
speeches are over they shake hands and compliment each other on their
exciting perorations. This is not hypocrisy, it is business.
In the bottom of his heart the prosecutor admires the advocate; they see
in each other something superior to their personalities: two
functionaries, two representatives of Justice, of Government, of the
State. All their education has prepared them for these views which
permit the stifling of their humane sentiments under legal formulas. The
people will never reach this perfection, and it were better they should
never wish to try.
A common adoration, a common worship unites all the middle classes, all
the exploiters. The chief of the State and the leader of the opposition,
the pope and the bourgeois atheist adore equally the same god, and this
god of authority resides in the inmost recesses of their brain. This is
why they remain united in spite of their differences. The head of the
State does not separate himself from the leader of the opposition, nor
the prosecutor from the counsel until the one puts into doubt the
institution of parliament or the other treats the tribunal as a true
Nihilist would, that is to say, to deny its right of existence. Then,
but then only they are implacable. And if the bourgeois throughout
Europe have so cordially bated the workmen of the Commune of Paris -- it
is because they believed they saw in them true revolutionists ready to
throw overboard the State, property, and representative government
It is easy to understand what a power this common worship of govern ment
gives to the bourgeoisie. Although it may be decayed in three quarters
of its representatives, yet it has a good quarter of persons who hold
firmly the flag of State. Second only to business, they address
themselves to the task, as well by their religion as by desire for
power, and work without ceasing to affirm and propagate this worship.
Quite an immense literature, all the schools without exception, all the
press, are at their service and in their youth above all they work
without relapse to combat all attempts to break up the conception of
State Legality. And when trouble arises -- all, the feeble as well as
the strong, rally to this flag. They know that they will reign and go
long as that flag waves. They understand also how absurd it would be to
place the revolution under this flag, to try to lead the people against
all tradition to accept this same principle, which is that of domination
and exploitation. Authority is their flag, and so long as the people
have not another flag which shall be the expression of its tendencies to
Anarchist Communism, opposed to laws and State-craft, anti Imperial in a
word, -- shall be compelled to allow ourselves to be led and dominated
by others.
It is here above all that the revolutionist should have boldness of
thought. He ought to have audacity to break entirely from the universal
imperial tradition, he needs the courage to tell himself that the People
must elaborate all organization of communities upon bases of real
justice, such as the comprehension of common popular rights.
VI. The abolition of the State is, we say, the task imposed upon the
revolutionist -- to him, at least, who has boldness of thought, without
which no revolution can be made. In this task he has opposed to him, all
the traditions of the middle classes. But he has with him all the
evolution of humanity -- which imposes upon us at the historic moment
the business of setting ourselves free from a form of association
rendered, perhaps, necessary by the ignorance of times past but become
hostile henceforth to all ulterior progress.
Yet, the abolition of the State would remain a vain expression if the
causes which to-day tend to produce misery continue to operate; these
causes are, the wealth of powerful persons, the capital of exploitation.
The State is created by the impoverishment of the masses. It has always
been necessary that one part of society should fall into misery in
consequence of migrations, invasions, plagues, or famines, so that
others may become rich and acquire authority which henceforth increases
and renders the means of existence of the masses more and more
precarious.
Political domination cannot therefore be abolished without abolishing
the causes of the impoverishment and misery of the masses.
For this -- we have many times said -- we see only one means.
It is, in the first place, to assure the existence and even the comfort
of all, and to organize a method of producing which will insure comfort.
With our present means of production it is more, than possible, it is
easy. It is to accept what results from all modern economic evolution;
that is to say to conceive our entire society as a whole which produces
wealth without it being possible to determine the proportion which
accrues to each in that production. It is to organize a communistic
society -- not for the consideration of absolute justice, but because it
has become impossible to determine the share of the individual in that
which is no longer an individual work.
Thus we see that the problem which presents itself before the
revolutionist is immense. It will not be worked out by simple negations,
the abolition of serfdom for example or renouncing the supremacy of the
pope. It requires the opening of a new page of universal history, the
elaboration of an entirely new order of things -- based no longer on the
solidarity of the tribe or of the village community or the city but on
the solidarity and equality of all. The attempts of limited solidarity
whether by the ties of parentage or by territorial limitations having
failed we are led to work at the building up of a society widely
different from that which served to maintain the societies of the middle
ages and of antiquity.
The problem to be resolved has certainly not the simplicity under which
it has so often been presented. To change the men in power and for each
man to return to his workshop to resume the work of yesterday, to put
into circulation manufactures and to exchange them against other
manufactures -- that would not suffice; it would not be final, since the
present system of production is quite as false in the aims which it
pursues, as in the means which it employs.
Created to maintain poverty it would not know how to assure plenty and
it is plenty that the masses demand since they have understood their
productive power. Elaborated with intent to hold the masses in a state
bordering on misery, with the specter of hunger always ready to compel
man to sell his strength to the holders of land, capital and power --
how could the present organization of production give well being?
Constructed with the view of enslaving the workers, made to exploit the
peasant for the benefit of the factory employee, the miner for the
profit of the engineer, the artisan for the profit of the artist and so
forth, while the civilized countries exploit the countries backward in
civilization -- how could agriculture and industry such as they are
to-day assure equality.
The whole character of agriculture, industry, and work needs to be
entirely changed, when society shall have arrived at the conclusion that
the land, the machine and the warehouse should be the fields of
application of work having for its object the well-being of all. Before
returning to the daily routine it would be necessary to know if the
factory were necessary, to know if the field ought to be sub-divided or
not, if its cultivation ought to be done as by barbarians fifteen
hundred years ago or if it ought to be done with view of obtaining the
greatest quantity of produce necessary for man!
This is quite a period of transformations to traverse; a revolution to
extend to the warehouse, the field, the cottage, the town house; to
small tools as to fixed machinery; in the groupment of cultivators as in
the groupment of workers in manufactures and the economic produce among
all who work.
And it is necessary that everyone should live during this period of
transformation, that everyone should feel more at ease than in the past.
When the inhabitants of the communes of the twelfth century undertook to
found, in the revolted cities, a new society, free from the lord of the
manor, they began by entering into a pact of solidarity extending to all
the inhabitants. The rebels of the communes swore mutual support; they
made what were called agreements of the communes.
It is by a pact of the same kind that the social revolution should
commence. A pact for life in common -- not for death. A pact of
solidarity to consider all the inheritance of the past as a common
possession, a pact to divide according to principles of equality all
that could serve to get over the crisis; food-stores-habitations, tools,
machines, knowledge and power -- a pact of solidarity for the
consumption of products, as well as for the use of the means of
production.
Strong in their conjurations, the bourgeois of the twelfth century set
themselves to organize their societies of crafts-guilds and succeeded in
guaranteeing a certain well-being to the citizens. Strong in this pact
of solidarity which will have bound the entire society to got over happy
times - -or difficult-to share in victories or defeats, the revolution
could then undertake in full assurance the immense work of the
reorganization of production which it would have before it. But it would
have to conclude this pact if it meant to live.
And in its new work, which ought to be a constructive work, the masses
of the people ought to depend first of all on their own strength, on
their initiative and their genius, because all the education of the
classes is done in the absolutely opposite way.
The problem is immense; but it is not in seeking to lessen it in advance
that the people will find the necessary strength to settle it. It is on
the contrary, by regarding it in all its greatness, it is carrying one's
inspiration to the difficulties of the situation that one will find the
genius necessary to conquer.
All the really great progress of humanity, all the truly great actions
of the people are done in this way, and it is in the conception of an
the grandeur of its task that the revolution will use its strength.
Is it not then imperative that the revolutionist should be alive to the
task which confronts him? Should he shut his eyes to its difficulties?
Should he not seek to confront them?
VII. It was by making a compact against all masters, a compact to
guarantee liberty to all and a certain well-being, that the revolted
citizens commenced in the twelfth century. It will also be by a compact
to guarantee food and liberty to all that the Social Revolution should
begin. Because all, without any exception, seeking how to gain the
revolution, will give their first thoughts to providing food, shelter,
and clothing for the inhabitants of the city or the open country, -- and
in this single fact of general solidarity, the Revolution will find
forces which have been wanting in preceding revolutions.
But for this end it is necessary to renounce the errors of the old
political economy of the bourgeois. It will be necessary to be rid
forever of wages under all possible forms and to regard society as a
grand total, organized to produce the greatest possible result of
well-being, with the smallest loss of human strength. It will be
necessary to accustom oneself to consider personal remuneration of
services as an impossibility, as an attempt which failed in the past, as
an encumbrance in the future, if it should continue to exist.
And it will be necessary to be rid of the principle of authority, of the
concentration of functions which are the essence of the present society,
and this not only in principle but even in the smallest application.
Such being the problem it will be very, unfortunate if the revolted
workmen have illusions as to its simplicity or if they do not seek
forthwith to take account of the methods by which they intend to resolve
it.
The "upper classes" are a force not only because they possess wealth but
above all because they have profited by the leisure which gives them
opportunity to instruct themselves in the art of governing and to
elaborate a science which serves to justify domination. They know what
they want, they know what is necessary to maintain their ideal of
society; and so long as the workman himself does not know what he should
know and does not understand how to gain this knowledge, it is likely
that he will remain the slave of such as know.
It would certainly be absurd to wish to elaborate, in imagination, a
society such as would result from a revolution. It would be Bysantinism
to wrangle about the means of providing for the needs of future society,
or to organize certain details of public life. The novels which are
produced concerning the future are only destined to direct ideas
somewhat, to demonstrate the possibility of a society without masters,
to ascertain if the ideal can be applied without striking against
insurmountable obstacles. Fiction remains fiction. But there are always
certain great principles upon which it is necessary to come to
agreement, before constructing anything whatever.
The bourgeois of 1789 knew perfectly well how vain it would be to
discuss the details of the parliamentary government of which they
dreamed; but they dreamed of a government, and this government
necessarily became representative. More than that, it necessarily became
very much centralized, having for its organs in the provinces a
hierarchy of functionaries equally with quite a series of little
governments in the municipalities, also elected. They knew perfectly
well that in their idea of society private property would of necessity
be beyond discussion, and that the so-called liberty of contract would
be proclaimed as a fundamental principle of organization. And what is
more, the better disposed of them believed in fact that this principle
would really result in a regeneration of society and become a source of
betterment for all.
They were the more accommodating as to details, as to be firm, upon
essential principles, that they could in one or two years totally
reorganize France according to their ideal and give her a civil code
(usurpated later by Napoleon), a code which was afterwards copied
everywhere by the European middle classes when they came to power.
They worked at this with a marvelous unanimity. And if afterwards
terrible struggles arose in the Convention it was because the people,
seeing themselves deceived in their aspirations, came with fresh demands
which their leaders did not even understand, or sought in vain to
reconcile with, the middle class revolution.
The middle classes knew what they wanted; they had contemplated it for a
long time past. For long years they had fostered an ideal of government,
and when the people protested they caused them to work out the
realization of their ideal in conceding several secondary considerations
upon certain points, such as the abolition of feudal rights and equality
before the law.
Without confusing themselves with details, the bourgeois had
established, long before the revolution the principal lines of the
future. Can we say as much of the workers?
Unfortunately no. In all modern Socialism, and above all in its moderate
section, we see a pronounced tendency not to search into the principles
of society which they desire to redeem from the revolution. This
explains itself. For "moderates" to speak of revolution is to compromise
themselves, and they foresee that if they trace for workmen a simple
plan of reforms they will lose their most ardent partizans. Also they
prefer to treat with scom those who speak of a future society or seek to
define the work of the revolution. This will be seen hereafter, they
will choose the best men and these will do everything for the best! This
is their reply.
And as for the Anarchists, the fear of seeing themselves divided upon
questions of future society, and of paralyzing the revolutionary
enthusiasm operates in a similar way; they prefer generally, among
workers, to defer to some future time discussions which they wrongly
call theoretical, and forget that perhaps in one or two years they may
be called upon to give their advice upon all questions of organization
of society, from the working of baker's ovens, to those of the schools
'in' which the defense of territory is considered, and of which they
have not even the knowledge of the ancient models which inspired the
bourgeois revolutionists of the last century.
We are asked to consider revolution as a great holiday in which
everything will arrange itself for the best. But in reality the day when
the ancient institutions crash, the day in which all that immense
machine -- which, for good or evil,. supplies all the daily wants of
such great numbers--shall cease to act, it will be most necessary that
the people themselves charge themselves with reorganizing the
broken-down machine. It will be different from 1848, when the Republican
leaders in Paris had "Nothing more to do than issue orders, copies of
the old republican stereotyped orders, known by heart for
years-Lamartine and Ledru Rollin working 24 hours with the pen."
But what say these orders? They only repent sonorous phrases invented in
the time of the republican clubs, and they do not all treat of the
essence of the daily life of the nation. Since the provisional
government of 1848 touched neither property, wages, nor exploitation, it
could very well end with sounding phrases, giving orders to do, in a
word, what had been done in the state departments. It need only change
the phraseology. And yet nothing but such work, almost mechanical,
absorbed all the strength of the new-cowers.
For us, revolutionists, who understand that the people will have to eat
and to sustain their children first of all, the task will be entirely
different and otherwise difficult one. Is there enough flour! Will it
come to the baker's ovens! And how shall we secure the due arrival of
meat and vegetables? Has everyone a lodging? Does clothing fail -- and
so on. This is what will preoccupy us.
But all this requires immense work -- ferocious work, that is the
word-for those who have the success of the revolution at heart. "Others
have had the fever a week, or six weeks," said an old Conventioner in
his memoirs, "We have had it for four years without interruption." And
it is undermined by this fever, in the midst of hostility and trouble --
for there will be these also -- that the revolutionist will have to
work. He will have to act. But how shall he act if be knows not from
long time past what idea shall guide him, what great principles of
organization, according with him, answer to the requirements of the
people, its vague desires, its undecided will.
And will they still dare to say that there is no need of all this, that
everything will arrange itself left alone! More intelligent than this,
the bourgeois already study the means of managing the revolution, of
juggling it, of turning it into a direction in which it will miscarry.
The Revolution will not be a holiday, then will be work for the
enfranchisement of all; but in order to accomplish that enfranchisement
the revolutionist will have to employ a boldness of thought, an energy
of action, an eagerness for work of which people have given no proof in
previous revolutions, but of which the forerunners began to be
delineated in the last days of the Commune of Paris and in the first
days of the Great Strike at the London Docks.
VIII. But where shall we take this boldness of thought, this energy in
work of organization when the people have it not? Do you not admit
yourselves -- they will say to us -- that if the force of attack does
not fail the people, boldness of thought and eagerness for
reconstruction have too often failed them?
We admit it entirely. But we do not forget the part of the men of
initiative that we shall now speak in closing our studies.
Initiative, free individual initiative, and the possibility of each
making use of that force at the time of popular uprisings, that is what
has always made the irresistible power of revelations. It is this power
which has made their grandeur, which has enabled them to march to the
front, and which historians, always supporting authority, have taken
great care to misrepresent. And upon this force we still count to
undertake and accomplish the immense work of the social revolution.
If revolutions have accomplished something in the past, it is entirely
due to men and women of initiative, to the obscure persons springing out
of the crowd not fearing to assume, face to face with their brethren and
the future, the responsibility of acts considered madly rash by the
timid.
The great mass decides with difficulty to undertake anything which has
not had a precedent in the past. We see this every day. If routine
encrusts us with its mold at every step, it is because men fail to break
with the traditions of the past and to boldly advance into the unknown.
But if an idea start in some brain, although vague, confused, yet
incapable of translating itself into reality, and if a man of initiative
arises and sets himself resolutely to work, he is immediately followed
if his work responds to these vague aspirations. And even when worn out
by fatigue, he retires, his work, understood and approved is continued
by thousands of imitators of whom he dared not even suppose the
existence. This is the history of all the life of humanity -- which
everyone can prove for himself by his own experiences. And it is only
those who have acted in opposition to the wishes and needs of humanity
who have found themselves despised and abandoned by their
contemporaries. Unhappily the men of initiative are rare in every day
life. But they arise in numbers at revolutionary epochs and it is they,
in reality, who do the enduring work of revolutions. In these are our
hope and confidence in the next revolution. If only they have, a just
and therefore wide conception of the future, if they have audacity of
thought, and do not seek to revive a dead past, if a sublime ideal
inspires them they will be followed. Never, at any epoch of its
existence, has humanity felt the need of a grand inspiration so much as
at this moment after having experienced a century of bourgeois
corruption.
In these conditions, there is no need to fear for their work from
enemies paralyzed by the decomposition which surrounds them.
But the envy of the oppressed themselves? Has it not often been
remarked, and rightly, that envy is the stumbling block of democracies!
That if the worker submits patiently to the arrogance of a masters in a
frock coat, he regards with an envious eye the personal influence of a
fellow workman. We do not deny the fact; nor do we shirk the conclusion
of the argument, otherwise very correct, that envy always born in the
conscience of a fellow workman, once having acquired influence, he will
employ it to betray his fellow-workmen of yesterday, and that the sole
means of paralyzing envy and treachery would be to forbid a comrade, as
a bourgeois, the possibility of increasing the authority so as to become
masters.
All that is right; but there is more. We all, with our authoritative
education, when we see an influence arise, we only think of reducing it
by annihilating it, and we forget that there are other means, infinitely
more efficacious of paralyzing influences which are harmful or tend to
become so. It is that of finding a better way of acting.
In a servile society this course is impossible and, children of a
servile society, we do not even think of it. A king becomes unbearable;
what means have we of getting rid of him if not by killing him! A
minister who oppresses us, what is to be done, if not to seek a
candidate to replace him and when a chosen of the people disgusts us we
seek another to compete against him. This goes thus; but should it
always be so?
What could the Conventionist do in the presence of king who disputed
their power if not guillotine him, and what could the representatives of
"La Montagne" do in the presence of other representatives invested with
equal power, if it was not to send them in their turn to the
executioner.
Well, this situation of the past remains with us still, while the only
truly efficacious means of paralyzing a harmful initiative is to take,
oneself, the initiative of acting in a better direction.
Thus when we hear revolutionists concur with the idea of stabbing or
shooting the governors who could take authority during the revolution we
are seized with terror in thinking that the forces of true
revolutionists could waste themselves in struggles which would be, in
effect, only struggles for or against the individuals who assumed
authority. To make war upon them is to recognize the necessity of having
other men possessing the same authority.
In 1871 one sees already in Paris a vague presentiment of a better means
of agitating. The revolutionists among the people appeared to understand
that the Council of the Commune ought to be considered a useless show, a
tribute paid to the traditions of the past; that the people not only
should not disarm, but that they should maintain concurrently with the
Council, their intimate Organization, their federated groups, and that
from these groups and not from the Hotel deVille should spring the
necessary measures for the triumph of the revolution.
Unhappily a certain modesty of the popular revolutionists supported by
authoritative prejudices, still very much persisted in at this period,
prevented these federated groups from totally ignoring the Council and
acting as if it had not existed at all.
We shall not be able to prevent the return of these attempts at
revolutionary government at the time of the next revolution. Let us
understand, at least, that the most efficacious method of annulling
their authority is not to plot "Coups d'Etat " which would only bring
back power under another form ending in dictatorship, but to constitute
in the people themselves a force powerful in its action and in the
revolutionary deeds which it will have accomplished, ignoring power,
under whatever name, and increasing always by its revolutionary
initiative its revolutionary ardor, and its work of demolition and of
reorganization.
A people who know how to organize the accumulation of wealth and its
reproduction in the interest of the whole of society, no longer need to
be governed. A people who will itself be the armed force of the country,
and who will know how to give to armed citizens the necessary cohesion
and unity of action will no longer need to be commanded. A people who
will organize their railways, their commerce, their schools, can no
longer be administered. Finally a people who know how to organize
arbitraters to settle little disputes and of which each individual will
consider it his duty to prevent a schemer from oppressing a weak citizen
without waiting for the providential interference of the policeman will
have no need for galley-sergeants, nor judges, nor jailers.
In the revolutions of the past the people took upon themselves the work
of demolition; as for that of reorganization, they left it to the
bourgeois. "Better versed than we in the art of governing, come sirs,
organize us, order our work, so that we do not die of hunger, prevent us
from devouring each other, punish and pardon according to the laws which
you have made for us poor spirited persons." And the middle classes knew
how to profit by the invitation.
Well, the task which will present itself at the next upraising of the
people will be to seize upon this function which has formerly been
abandoned to the bourgeois. It will be to destroy, to organize at the
same time as to destroy. To accomplish this task we shall need all the
initiative power of all men of courage; of all their audacity of thought
freed from the nightmares of the past, of all their energy; and we will
take care not to paralyze the initiative of the most resolute among us
-- we will simply redouble initiative if that of others fails, if it
becomes dull, if it takes a wrong direction. Boldness of thought, a
distinct and wide conception of all that is desired, constructive force
arising from the people in proportion as the negation of authority
dawns; and finally -- the initiative of all in the work of
reconstruction -- this will give to the revolution the Power required to
conquer.
It is precisely these forces which the active propaganda of Anarchists
as well as the philosophy of Anarchy tend to develop. Against discipline
-- the anchor of the safety of authority they oppose the full initiative
of one and all. Against the weak conceptions of little reforms, extolled
by the bourgeoisie they oppose the large and grand conception of
revolution which alone can give the necessary inspiration. And to those
who would like to see the people end in the policy of a pack of hounds
attacking the government of the day, but always held back at times by
the whip, we say: The part of the people in the revolution ought to be
positive at the same time that it is destructive. Because this alone can
succeed in organizing society on the bases of equality and liberty for
all. To remit this care to others would be to betray the cause of the
Revolution.
according to the census of 1881 number about four fifths of the
population. We don't believe in massacring the bourgeois, it is not
necessary, but there is no need to exaggerate their numbers.