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Title: Kropotkin to Alexander Berkman, November 20, 1908 Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: November 20, 1908. Language: en Topics: letter, The Blast Source: http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=459 Notes: re: Blast
Personal; not for print
Viola. Muswill Hill Row
London, N.
Dear Berkman
You are quite right in taking a hopeful view of the progress of our
ideas in America. It would have been far greater, I am sure, if the
American anarchists had succeeded in merging themselves into the mass of
the workingmen. So long as they remain a knot, a handful,
aristocratically keeping apart from the mass of the working men -- they
may display the most heroic devotion to the cause of labor -- as you
did.
Dear, good friend -- their efforts will remain fruitless and their
teachings will appeal more to the intellectual bourgeois who rebels
against certain restraints in Art, in relations between man and woman,
than to the worker. They will remain the same bourgeois and will do nill
to remove the the oppresion of the rich upon the poor, of the owner on
the proletarian, the Ruler upon the Ruled one.
I was lately in Paris, and on all sides I heard and saw that, at last,
the work that we began only as a handful only in 1878 is bearing fruit.
The mass, the great mass -- those who made the revolution -- those who
are the only ones to make them -- the workers -- begin to display in
their deepest layers that feeling of discontent and restlessness which
is a true sign of some great movement coming.
And when I asked, Where is the comrade I knew in 1886? Where this other?
This third? Where all of them? -- The reply was invariably the same,
"but it is he, who is the moving soul of the revolutionary fraction of
the carpenters; he -- of the joiners; they -- of all that movement, that
thou hast seen, Peter, the other day at the Toulouse congress," And so
and so of Lyons? So and So of Vienne? of Montceau-les-Mines? "These ones
died in exile, These ones (the few) have retired; but all those who
still live are men still -- all are in the labor movement and stir its
lowest layers.
Some of our comrades who work in the labor organization, of course, will
turn bureaucrats. Some already are, and we combat them openly and
frankly in the Temps Nouveaux and the Réveile-Risveglio of Geneva.
But the great number are there, working, stirring, after having
abandoned the "groups" where they were invaded by all sorts of middle
class tramps who came to express there the most "terrific" paradoxes,
only better to sell afterwards -- most of them -- their pen, their
bureaucratic talents, their passive obedience to the middle classes.
It is the Classes which made the Revolutions -- not the Individuals.
Nay, even the really revolutionary-minded individuals, if they remain
isolated, turn toward this Individual. But Anarchism of the bourgoise
which is nothing but the epicureans let go of the economists, spiced
with a few "terrific" phrases of Nihilism -- good to frighten the
Philistines, -- which it would really be time to leave to the
Nitzeche'ists, the German Slav'ists, and all the familiar
arch-Philistine "ists."
I write at high pressure speed and jot down these remarks -- not for
print but for you personally, dear old Berkman.
Answering your question about the Mother Earth Lecture Series -- I have
not yet finished my book on the Great French Revolution though I hope to
send to the printer tomorrow the revised first proofs of the last
sheets. The book grew to 720-750 pages. But it will give matter for
discussion. The views I have are different from the orthodox ones, and
the book will be, I suppose, violently attacked. The "historians" -- the
men of the trade -- will surely attack it on matters of detail: they
don't like Cossack intruders. But -- let it be. The real revolutionist
will find in this many, many years' work matters enough for reflection
(and research if he likes research and can afford to do it), and sad
reflection, too, when he comes thinking, let us say, of the Russian
Revolution, or the coming revolutions everywhere.
Where are we in the coming struggles? Personal heroism to any amount.
Christian Saints could envy it.-- So great, so widespread it was. But
where is the hero and the masses? The hero mostly does not know them --
they hardly understand him. And the town-hero will not know the country
masses which he leaves to the parliamentary agitators -- to be put
asleep by them by doses and doses of Duma-opium. But enough, dear
friend.
You ask me to write something special for your series. It is impossible.
I must terminate works already began, works in hand, and they will be
bigger works.
Translate for Tempes Nouveau, if you find something interesting.
Much brotherly love,
Peter Kropotkin