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Title: Anarchy Author: Charlotte Wilson Date: 1884 Language: en Topics: introductory, Freedom Source: https://www.panarchy.org/wilson/anarchy.html Notes: Source: Justice, Volume 1, Number 43, 8 November 1884
The word Anarchism is open to such grievous misconstruction from English
readers, who associate it with mere confusion, or, still more
unfortunately, with acts of personal violence and revenge, that, in the
absence of any more competent co-religionist at liberty for the moment
to undertake the task, I would crave your permission to explain what our
creed really is and especially its bearing on social reconstruction.
Anarchy, as your readers are aware, means simply "without a ruler" or
“chief magistrate". Anarchist, therefore, is the name assumed by a
certain school of Socialists, who, in the words of the Declaration of
the Forty-Seven at Lyons, believe that "the time has come to teach the
people to do without government", as well as for teaching them the
advantages of common property. They believe that, in the present stage
of progress, social union can only be stable when it is based upon
absolute economic equality, and perfect individual freedom. They further
believe that the rottenness and injustice of the present constitution of
society is reaching a climax, and that a revolution is inevitable which
shall sweep away privilege, monopoly and authority, with the laws and
institutions which support them, and set free the constructive energies
of the new social ideal already growing up within the outworn formulas
of a past phase of civilisation.
Their conception of the mission of revolution as purely destructive,
leads Anarchists to face the query of the unknown future less in the
form of - What scheme have we to substitute for the status quo? than -
After the annihilation of the oppressive institutions of the present,
what social forces and social conditions will remain, and how are they
likely to be modified and developed?
It is hardly needful to inquire, as some cavillers are fond of doing,
what would happen if civilised men ceased to be social animals and
existed each for himself alone. We do not live together in societies and
mutually yield and accommodate ourselves to one another so as to make a
common existence possible, because we are coerced to do so by certain
laws and institutions. We are drawn together by our social instincts,
and moulded into such harmony as we have at present attained, by the
perpetual action and reaction of the influence we exert over each other,
and by our inherited and acquired habits, sympathies, and beliefs. The
Revolution, in breaking up the stereotyped forms into which some of
these social instincts and beliefs have crystallised, can, in no sense,
destroy the social instincts themselves.
Since the ordered and systematised society of mediaeval Europe was
dissolved by Individualism, these social instincts have made themselves
most powerfully felt in the growth of two vast and ever increasing
forces, i.e., Socialised Production and Public Opinion. Both are the
direct outcome of the influence of personal freedom, and the energy of
individual initiative upon the action of society. Both are amongst the
realities, which Revolution directed against shams and hypocrisy, will
leave unscathed.
The present highly socialised system of production on a large scale,
with its endless division and sub-division of labour, its machinery, its
concentrated masses of human "hands", and its complex industrial
relations, has taught men the enormously increased command over the
forces of nature, which they may obtain by co-operating for existence.
It is, moreover, already practically a system whereby all workers labour
for society as a whole, and, in return, supply their needs from the
general stock of finished products. When the individual monopoly in land
and capital which prevents the workers, firstly, from directing their
own labour and, secondly, from adequately supplying their wants, is
destroyed, the end of social reconstruction must be to enable them to do
both as simply and effectually as possible. Will free co-operation and
free contract enable the workers to carry on production on a scale
adequate to their needs, if they retain the necessary instruments in
their own hands, without any State or Communal organisation and
direction to take the place of monopolists, masters and organisers? We
believe that they will. For a radical change must have come over opinion
as to the nature of property and public duty before the Revolution can
succeed. Proudhon's famous dictum, "Property is theft", is the key to
the equally famous enigma proposed to Socialists by Saint-Simon, when he
wrote, "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his
needs". When the workers clearly understand that in taking possession of
railways and ships, mines and fields, farm buildings and factories, raw
material and machinery, and all else they need for their labour, they
are claiming the right to use freely for the benefit of society, what
social labour has created, or utilised in the past, and that, in return
for their work, they have a just right to take from the finished product
whatever they personally require, the difficulty will be solved and
obstacles in the shape of making necessary changes in the detailed
working of the system of production and its relation to consumption,
will vanish before the ingenuity of the myriad minds vitally concerned
in overcoming them. But until they do realise, that, as long as land and
capital are unappropriated, the workers are free, and that, when these
have a master, the workers also are slaves, no lasting and effectual
improvement can be wrought in their condition. The fatal passion of
acquisitiveness has got such hold upon men's minds, that masterless
things appear now to many of them as monstrous an anomaly as masterless
men did to the country justices of Queen Elizabeth. They devise all
sorts of elaborate schemes for putting the common property of the people
in trust, and appointing administrators to direct its application - a
masterful sort of servants, likely to become worse tyrants than the old
ones. We Anarchists, who desire neither to rule nor to serve, prefer to
trust to the reason of the workers, enlightened by their bitter
experience of past slavery.
Anarchism proposes, therefore,
1. That the usufruct of instruments of production - land included -
should be free to all workers, or groups of workers.
2. That the workers should group themselves, and arrange their work as
their reason and inclination prompt.
3. That the necessary connections between the various industries and
branches of trade, should be managed on the some voluntary principle.
4. That finished goods should be massed in large stores and markets, and
that offices for facilitating the mutual convenience of producers and
consumers (as for example, house builders and carpenters, and house
seekers) should be opened in convenient centres.
5. That each individual should supply his needs therefrom as his
self-knowledge prompts.
This is the theory of laissez faire, modified and extended to meet the
needs of the future, and avoid the injustice of the past. It implies
that the majority of men are capable of acting with some approximation
to effectiveness, if left free to do so, and is based on the assumption
that the individual is the best judge of his own capabilities, and,
further, that self-interest, intelligently followed, tends to promote
the general economic well-being of the community. It differs from the
old system in placing self-interest on the side of just distribution, by
the destruction of private property in the means of production, and thus
does much to neutralise the dangers of Society from natures whose
selfishness is their strongest sentiment. It also allows free play to
those social sympathies, the influence of which in determining conduct
it was one of the chief mistakes of the orthodox economists to ignore.
It assumes that just and generous economic relations are for the
interest of the individual, and that he is capable of being taught so,
if not by science and the teaching of the moralist, then by the stem
lessons of experience. Has not the process of instruction already begun?