SOCIALISM--ANARCHISM

Proudhon, P.J. (1994) What is Property?, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

· If I had to answer the following question, “What is slavery?” and if I should respond in one word, “It is murder,” my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that the power to deprive a man of his thought, his will, and his personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other question, “What is property?” should I not answer in the same way, “It is theft,” without fearing to be misunderstood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first? 13

· One author teaches that property is a civil right, based on occupation and sanctioned by law; another holds that it is a natural right, arising from our labour; and these doctrines, though they seem opposed, are both encouraged and applauded. I contend that neither occupation nor labour nor law can create property, which is rather an effect without a cause. Am I to be censored for this? 13

· Unfortunately, philosophy will not change the course of events, and destiny will be fulfilled despite prophecy. 14

· “Property is theft!”… What a revolution in human ideas! “Proprietor” and “thief” have always been as contradictory as the beings to which they refer are antagonistic, and all languages have preserved this opposition. On what authority, then, would you attack this universal agreement and make liars of the human race? Who are you to reject the judgement of nations throughout the ages? 14

· Moreover I establish no system. I merely ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, the equality of rights, and the rule of law. Justice, nothing but justice, that is the sum of my argument; I leave to others the task of governing the world. 15

· I do not, I confess, believe in the inertness either of ideas or of forms or laws of understanding; 17

· However, since I do not want to offer here a critique of reason, something that would demand a very long work and be of little interest to the public, I shall accept the hypothesis that our more general and most necessary ideas, such as those of time, space, substance, and cause, exist originally in the mind, or at least are derived immediately from its constitution. 17

· Whatever system we embrace concerning the cause of gravity and the shape of the earth, the physics of the globe does not suffer; and our social economy can take from this neither profit nor damage. But it is in us and through us that the laws of our moral nature operate; now, these laws cannot be executed without our deliberate participation and, consequently, unless we know them. If then our knowledge of Moral laws is false, it is obvious that desiring our own good, we only accomplish evil; if this knowledge is only incomplete, it may suffice for a time our social progress, but in the long run it will lead us down a false road and will finally precipitate us into an abyss of calamities. 19

· …nations arm themselves and slay and exterminate each other, until equilibrium is restored by great depopulation, and peace rises again from the ashes of the combatants. 19

· This principle is the most ancient of all; for it is the essence of revolutions to destroy the most modern principles and to respect the most ancient. 20

· To humanity God is a fact as primitive, an idea as inevitable, a principle as necessary to our understanding as the categorical ideas of cause, substance, time, and space. God is proven to us by our conscience before any inference of our mind, just as the sun is proven to us by the testimony of the senses before all the reasoning of physics. 20

· Anthropomorphism and idolatry were necessary products of the mind in its youth – a theology of children and poetry. 20

· With freedom of religion and the separation of the spiritual form the temporal power, the influence of religious ideas upon the progress of society is purely negative, no law, no political or civil institution being founded on religion. 21

· …the cause of the inequality of conditions among men, of poverty, of universal suffering, and of the troubles of governments can no longer be traced to religion: we must go back further and dig deeper. 21

· Humanity makes continual progress toward truth, and light ever triumphs over darkness. So our disease is not absolutely incurable, and the theory of the theologians is worse than inadequate; it is ridiculous, since it is reducible to this tautology: “Man errs, because he errs.” What one should say, however, is this: “Man errs, because he learns.” Now if man achieves a knowledge of all that he needs to know, there is reason to believe that, ceasing to err, he will cease to suffer. 22

· …that about the most important questions there are almost as many opinions as authors; that we find no two agreeing on the best form of government, the principle of authority, and the nature of right; that all sail haphazardly upon a shoreless and bottomless sea, abandoned to the guidance of their private perceptions, which they modestly take to be right reason. 22

· Justice is the celestial body which governs societies, the pole around which the political world turns, the principle and rule of all transactions. 23

· Justice is not the work of the law: on the contrary, the law is only the declaration and application of what is just in all circumstances were men have relations with one another. If then the idea that we form of justice and right is badly defined, if it is imperfect or even false, it is clear that our legislative applications will be wrong, our institution vicious, our politics erroneous, and as a result there will be disorder and social chaos. 23

· To save this old society it would have been necessary to change the objects of esteem and public veneration and to abolish the rights consecrated by a purely secular justice.

· Idolatry in religion, slavery in the state, and epicureanism in private life – there formed the basis of her institutions : to touch these was to shake society to its foundations and, in modern terms, to open the abyss of revolutions. 24

· Society was saved by its own principles, by a deprivation in religion, and by violation of its most sacred rights. The idea of justice acquired in this revolution spread to an extent that had not before been dreamed of, never to return to its original limits. Before, justice had existed only for the masters, afterwards it began to exist for the slaves as well. 25

· Instead of applying themselves to the practical consequences of the principles of morality and government taught by the Word of God, his followers concerned themselves with speculations about his birth, his origin, his person, and his actions; they discussed his parables; and from the conflict of the most extravagant opinions upon unanswerable questions and texts which no one understood was born theology, which may be defined as the science of the infinitely absurd. 25

· The sovereignty of the nation, or rather of the national majority. 28

· No doubt when a nation passes from the monarchical to the democratic state, there is progress, because in multiplying the sovereigns we increase the chances of substituting reason for will; but in the end there is no revolution in the government because the principle remains the same. Now, we have proof today that with the most perfect democracy we still cannot be free. 28

· Except for the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly the same: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of will, whereas it should be the expression of fact. 29

· JUSTICE, the general, primitive, categorical law of all society. 31

· And since justice is determined especially with regard to government, the condition of persons, and the possession of things, we must ascertain, judging by universal opinion and the progress of the human mind, under what conditions government is just, the condition of citizens is just, and the possession of things is just. Then, eliminating everything which fails to fulfill these conditions, the result will simultaneously show what legitimate government is, what the legitimate condition of citizens is, what the legitimate possession of things is, and finally, as the last result of the analysis, what justice is. 31

· Louis XIV thought that he was right when he said, “The state! I am the state”; and Napoleon regarded it as treason to oppose his will. The idea of justice, then, as applied to sovereignty and government, has not always been what it is today; it has gone on incessantly developing and defining itself by degrees, until it has arrived at its present state. But has it reached its last stage? I think not: seeing that the last we have kept intact, we must, in order to finish the reform in government and consummate the revolution, attack this very institution. 32

· In fact, property being defensible on no ground except that of justice, the idea, or at least the intention, of justice must of necessity underlie all the arguments that have been made in defense of property; 33

· Roman law defined property – jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur – as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law. 35

· According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the Constitution of 93’, property is “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one’s goods, one’s income, and the fruit of one’s labour and industry.” 35

· Code Napoleon, article 544: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided we do not act against the laws and regulations.” 35

· …all recognize in the proprietor an absolute right over things; and as for the restriction imposed by the Code 35

· Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty; every contract, every condition of a contract which aims at the alienation of suspension of liberty, is null: 37

· Liberty is the original condition of man; to renounce liberty is to renounce the quality of man: if we do this, how could we behave as men? 38

· It is the state which through the proportional tax becomes the chief robber and sets the example of systematic pillage; and so it is the state which should be brought to the bar of justice at the head of those horrible brigands, that execrable rabble which it now kills out of professional jealousy. 39

· …the poor and the rich are in a state of mutual distrust and war. But why do they make war? Because of property, so that property has as its necessary correlative the war against property. The liberty and security of the rich do not suffer form the liberty and security of the poor; far from it, they can mutually strengthen and sustain each other. 40

· “In the enjoyment of your own rights do not encroach upon the rights of another.” 40

· The state is not only a borrower, it is the insurer and guardian of property. 41

· …because property, regarded as a right and not being a right, must by right perish; because the force of events, the laws of conscience, and physical and mathematical necessity must in the end destroy this illusion of our minds. To sum up, liberty is an absolute right because it is to man what impenetrability is to matter, a sine qua non of existence; equality is an absolute right because in the eyes of every man his own liberty an life are as precious as another’s. These three rights are absolute, that is, susceptible of neither increase nor diminution because every member of society receives as much as he gives – liberty for liberty, equality for equality, security for security, body for body, soul for soul, in life and in death. 42

· Thus, if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; thus, if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social but antisocial. 42

· Either society must perish, or it must destroy property. 43

· If property is a natural, absolute, imprescriptible, and inalienable right, why, in all ages, has there been so much preoccupation with its origin? 43

· The origin of a natural right: Good God, whoever inquired into the origin of the rights of liberty, security, or equality? They exist on the same basis that we exist; they are born, live, and die with us. 43

· …property, to be just and possible, must have equality for its condition. 43

· The earth is a great theatre, furnished by the Almighty, with perfect wisdom, for the entertainment and employment of all mankind. Here every man has a right to accommodate himself as a spectator and to perform his part as an actor, but without hurt to others. 46

· The right to life implies a right to the means of life, and that rule of justice which demands respect for the life of an innocent rule of justice which demands that he not be deprived of the means of life: these two rights are equally sacred … To prevent the labor of another is the same sort of injustice as putting him in chains or throwing into prison, and it provokes the same resentment. 47

· According to Destutt de Tracy, property is a necessity of our nature. That this necessity involves unpleasant consequences it would be folly to deny , but these consequences are necessary evils which do not invalidate the principle, so that it is as unreasonable to rebel against property because its certain end is death. 47

· But “thine” and “mine” were never invented. 48

· In short thine and mine are signs and expressions of personal, but equal, rights; applied to things outside of us, they indicate possession, function, use, but not property. 48

· …they all have the right to satisfy their needs without regard to the needs of others, and consequently the right to exercise their power over nature, each according to his strength and abilities. This necessarily involves the greatest inequality of wealth. Inequality of conditions, then, is the characteristic feature of estrangement of barbarism, the exact opposite of Rousseau’s system. 48

· Now in order to abolish this equal right to use force and trickery, this equal tight to do evil, the only source of the inequality of benefits and injuries, they began to make compacts either implied or expressed, and established in balance. These agreements and this balance were thus intended to secure to all equal comfort; thus, by the law of contradictions, if isolation is the principle of inequality, society must result in equality. 49

· Thus, if inequality of conditions is a necessary evil, so is isolation; for society and inequality are a contradiction. 49

· Man has powers, virtues, and capacities which have been conferred on him by nature so that he can live, learn, and love. However, he does not own them but has only the use of them, and he can exercise this usufruct only according to the rules of nature. If he were the sovereign master of his faculties, he could avoid hunger and cold; he could eat continually and walk through fire; he could move mountains, walk a hundred leagues in a minute, cure without medicines and by the mere force of his will, and could make himself immortal. 50

· Man is not master of himself and yet wants to be master of everything else. Let him use the wealth of nature, since he can live only by its use; but let him abandon his pretensions to be proprietor and remember that he is so called only metaphorically. 51

· “Property is the right by which a thing is one’s own.” Literally translated: property is the right of property. 51

· These propositions are convertible into a simpler one: all men have an equal right to unequal property. 51

· If the human person is sacred, its whole nature is sacred, and particularly its interior actions, its feelings, its thoughts, its voluntary decisions. From this arises the respect due to philosophy, religion, the arts, industry, commerce, and to all the creations of liberty. I say respect, not simply toleration; for we do not tolerate a right, we respect it. 52

· “God gave the earth to the human race”: why then have I received nothing? 57

· Agriculture was the foundation of territorial possession and the original cause of property. 61

· The right of property was the origin of evil on earth, the first link in the long chain of crimes and miseries which the human race has endured since its birth. The delusion of prescription is the spell cast over minds, the death sentence breathed into consciences to check man’s progress towards truth and to preserve the worship of error. 75

· A farm yields fifty bushels per hectare; the skill and labour of the tenant double this product: this increase is the creation of the tenant. Support the owner, in an unusual act of moderation, does not go so far as to absorb this product by raising the rent but allows the cultivator to enjoy the results of his labour; even then justice is not satisfied. The tenant, by improving the land, has created a new value in the property, and so he has a right to a portion of the property. 86

· “Men who make the earth more fertile are no less useful to their fellow men than those who create new land.” 87

· A force of a thousand men working for twenty days has been paid the same as a force of one working fifty-five years; but this force of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man, working continuously for a million centuries, could not accomplish: is this exchange equitable? Once more, no; for when you have paid all the individual forces, you have still not paid the collective property which you have not acquire and which you enjoy unjustly. 93

· Indeed, if labour is the sole basis of property, I cease to be proprietor of my field as soon as I receive rent for it from another cultivator. 96

· …the absolute value of a thing, then, is its cost in time and expense. 106

· The artist, the scholar, and the poet find their just recompense simply in the fact that society permits them to devote themselves exclusively to science and to art, so that in reality they do not labour for themselves but for society, which creates them and requires of them no other duty. 111

· That, as the traveler does not appropriate the highway which he travels, so the farmer does not appropriate the field which he cultivates; 113

· All industries are united by mutual relations in a single group; all productions perform reciprocal service as ends and means; 115

· Numbers rule the world, mundum regunt numeri. This proverb is as true for the moral and political as for the sidereal and molecular world. The elements of justice are the same as those of algebra; legislation and government are nothing else than the arts of making classifications and balancing powers; and all of jurisprudence is in the rules of arithmetic. 117

· That which is just must be useful; that which is useful must be true; and that is true must be possible deviates also from truth, utility, and justice. In this way we may judge the justice of anything a priori by its possibility, so that if the thing were absolutely impossible, it would be absolutely unjust. 118

· A farmer is a wheat manufacturer who, among other tools which serve him in modifying the material from which he makes the wheat, employs one great tool, which we call a field. If he is not the proprietor of the field, if he is only a tenant, he pays the proprietor for the productive service of this tool. The tenant is reimbursed by the purchaser, the latter by another, until the product reaches the consumer, who reimburses the first payment and all the others by means of which the product has finally come to him. 123

· …possession, without property, is enough to maintain social order. 126

· The republican constitution of 1793, which defined property as “the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour,” is grossly mistaken. It should have said, “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of at will the goods of another, the fruit of his industry and labour of another.” 129

· The proprietor, who is an essentially libidinous animal, without virtue or shame, is not satisfied with a life of order and discipline. He loves property because it enables him to do at leisure what he wants and whenever he wants. Having obtained the means of living, he abandons himself to frivolity and indolence; he enjoys himself, he indulges in various follies, he seeks curiosities and novel sensations. Property, in order to enjoy itself, has to renounce ordinary life and busy itself in luxurious occupations and filthy enjoyments. 132

· Property is impossible because it is homicide. 136

· Property is impossible because with it society devours itself. 140

· Society devours itself: (1) by the violent and periodic sacrifice of labourers, as we have just seen and shall see again, and (2) by the elimination of the producer’s consumption caused by property. These two modes of suicide are at first simultaneous, but soon the first is intensified by the second, famine joining with usury to render labor at once more necessary and more scarce. 142

· By competition I mean not only the rivalry between two businesses of the same kind but the general and simultaneous effort of all kinds of business to get ahead of each other. This effort is today so strong, that the price of merchandise hardly covers the cost of production and distribution, so that, since the wages of all laborers are deducted, nothing remains, not even profit for the capitalist. 147

· …from the point of view of political economy the production of a man, whatever his individual capacity, is never worth more than his labour and that a man’s labour is worth no more than his consumption? 150

· Property is impossible because it is the mother of tyranny. 157

· Government is public economy, the supreme administration of public works and national wealth. Now, the nation is like a vast society in which all the citizens are stockholders. Each one has a deliberative voice in the assembly and, if the shares are equal, has one vote at his disposal. But under the regime of property there is great inequality between the shares of the stockholders, so that one may have several hundred votes, while another has only one. 157

· In a country where property exists, equality of electoral rights is a violation of property. 157

· Property is incompatible with political and civil equality, and so property is impossible. 158

· Since property is the great cause of privilege and despotism, the form of the republican oath should be changed. Instead of saying, “I swear hatred to royalty.” an applicant to a secret society should henceforth say, “I swear hatred to property.” 159

· The head of a manufacturing firm who employs labourers at 3, 5, 10, and 15 francs per day and who keeps 20 francs for his superintendence does not regard his disbursements as losses because he know they will return to him in the form of products. He is a machine that does not work, or which, working for its own pleasure according to its whims, produces nothing. What is it to consume as proprietor? It is to consume without working, to consume without reproducing. 159

· Property is thus inequality of rights; for if it were not inequality of rights, it would be equally of goods and so would not exist. Now, the constitutional Charter guarantees to all equality of rights, and so by the charter property is impossible. 166

· Competition, sometimes called liberty of trade – in a word, property in exchange – will for a long time be the basis of our commercial legislation, which includes, from an economic point of view, all civil laws and all government. What is competition? A duel in a closed field, where right is decided by arms. “Who is the liar, the accused or the accuser?” asked our barbarian ancestors. “Let them fight it out,” replied the still more barbarous judge; “the stronger will gain the right.” Which of us two shall sell spices to our neighbour? “Let each offer them for sale,” cries the economist. “The sharper or the more cunning is the more honest man and the better merchant.” This is just the spirit of the Napoleonic Code. 168

· Property is impossible because it is the negation of equality. 168

· All consumption not reproductive of utility is destruction. Property, whether it consumes, hoards, or capitalizes, is productive of inutility, the cause of sterility and death. 169

· In other words, property is not equal to property: it is a negation, a delusion, NOTHING. 169

· To practice justice is to obey the social instinct; to do an act of justice is to do a social act. 172

· …man is moved by an internal attraction towards his fellow, by a secret sympathy which causes him to love, interact, and sympathize, so that, to resist this attraction, he must pit his will against his nature. 172

· Certain species unite for hunting purposes, seek each other, call each other (a poet would say invite each other) to share their prey; in danger they can be seen aiding, protecting, and warning each other. The elephant knows how to help his companion out of the ditch into which the latter has fallen; cow form a circle, with their horns outward and their calves in the center, in order to repel the attacks of wolves; horses and pigs, respond to a cry of distress from one of their number. What description I might give of their marriages, the tenderness of the males towards the females, and the fidelity of their loves! Let us add, however, to be entirely just, that these touching demonstrations of society, fraternity, and love of neighbor do not prevent the animals form quarrelling, fighting, and tearing with their teeth to obtain their nourishment and their gallantries: the resemblance between them and ourselves is perfect. The social instinct, in man and beast, exists to a greater or lesser degree, but its nature is the same. Man has the greater need of association and employs it more, while the animal is better prepared for isolation. In man social needs are more imperative and complex; in the beast, they seem less profound, less varied, less anxious. In a word society aims, in the case of man, at the preservation of the race and the individual; with the animals more at the preservation of the race. 173

· The social instinct and the moral sense is common to him and the beast; and when he thinks to become godlike by a few acts of charity, justice, and devotion, he does not perceive that in so acting he simply obeys an animal instinct. 173

· Our highest virtues are reduced, in the last analysis, to blind impulses of instinct. 173

· Finally, it is our social instinct on the one hand and our reason on the other hand which make us think that beings like us should take responsibility for their acts. Such is the principle of remorse, of revenge, and of penal justice. 174

· The dissatisfaction we feel after doing wrong, the indignation we feel at the sight of injustice, the idea of deserved punishment and compensation due, are results of reflection and not immediate effects of instinct and emotion. 174

· But first I must prove metaphysically that society, justice, and equality are three equivalent terms, three expressions which mean the same thing and whose mutual conversion is always legitimate. 175

· God should deprive us of prudence, if it is to serve as the instrument of our egoism. 176

· …within universal society there exist for each of us as many particular societies as there are individuals and because by the principle of sociability itself we are bound to fulfill the obligations which these impose upon us according to their proximity. 179

· If we trace the development of the moral sense in individuals and the progress of laws in nations, we shall be convinced that the ideas of justice and legislative perfection are everywhere in direct proportion to intelligence. The notion of the just, which philosophers have thought to be simple, is thus in reality, complex. It is produced by the social instinct on the one hand and the idea of equality of merit on the other, just as the notion of guilt is produced by the feeling that justice has been violated and by the idea of free choice. 180

· …instinct is not modified by knowledge of its nature; and the facts of society which we have thus far observed are sociability on the level of animals. We know what justice, or sociability conceived in terms of equality, is; but we still have found nothing that separates us from the animals. 180

· We are all born poets, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, artisans, or farmers, but we are not born equally endowed; and between one man and another in society, or between one faculty and another in the same individual, the difference is infinite. This difference of degree in the same faculties, this predominance of talent for certain tasks is , as we have said, the very foundation of our society. Intelligence and natural genius have been distributed by nature so economically and yet so abundantly that the social organism never has to fear either a surplus or a scarcity. 181

· It is not the same with societies of animals. In every species the aptitudes of individuals, though very limited, are equal in number and, when not the result of instinct, in intensity. Each one can do what the others do, and do it as well, to find food, avoid enemies, burrow in the earth, build a nest, etc. None of them, when free and healthy, expects or requires the aid of its neighbour, which, for its part, gets along equally well by itself. 181

· …conjugal association is a closer relation than fraternal association and because the life of our neighbour is not something that belongs to us. 184

· …is the shepherd said to be just to his sheep and his dogs? No; and if he saw fit to shear as much wool from a lamb six months old as from a ram of tow years, or if he required as much work from a young dog as from an old one, it would not be said that he was unjust but that he was mad, because between man and beast there is no society, though there may be affection. 185

· The depth and variety of the questions which it embraces are infinite. 188

· When property is abolished, what will be the form of society? Will it be communism? 189

· Since property is not our natural condition, how was it established? Why has the social instinct, so sure among the animals, failed in man? Why is man, who was born for society, still not associated? 189

· Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In property the inequality of conditions is the result of force, under whatever name it is disguised – physical and mental force, force of events, chance, fortune, force of accumulate property, etc. In communism the inequality comes form making mediocrity of talent and achievement equal to excellence. 197

· Man is very willing to submit to the law of duty, to serve his country, and to oblige his friends; but he wants to labour how, when, and as much as he pleases. He wants to dispose of his own time, to be ruled only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreations, and his discipline; to serve as a result of reason, not command, and to sacrifice himself through egoism, not slavish obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, noblest inclinations, and deepest feelings. 197

· Thus, communism violates the autonomy of the conscience and equality: the first, by compromising the spontaneity of mind and heart, free will in thought and action; and the second, by rewarding equally labour and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue. For the rest, if property is impossible because of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the desire to avoid effort. 197

· Anarchy, the absence of a master, of a sovereign, such is the form of government to which we are approaching every day and which our inveterate habit of taking man for our rule and his will of law leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of chaos. 209

· Communism seeks equality and law. Property, born of the sovereignty of the reason and the sense of personal merit, wishes above all things independence and proportionality. But communism, taking uniformity for law and leveling for equality, becomes tyrannical and unjust. Property, by despotism and encroachments, soon shows itself oppressive and unsociable. What communism and property wan is good, but what each produces is bad. And why? Because each is exclusive; each disregards two elements of society. Communism rejects independence and proportionality; property satisfies neither equality nor law. Now, if we imagine a society based upon these four principles – equality, law, independence, and proportionality – we find:

1. That equality, consisting only of equality of conditions, that is, of means, and not in equality of well-being, which it is the business of the labourers to achieve for themselves when given equal means, in no way violates justice and equity.

2. That law, resulting from the knowledge of facts and so based on necessity itself, never clashes with independence.

3. That the respective independence of individuals, or the autonomy of the private reason, originating in the difference in talents and capacities, can exist without danger within the limit of the law.

4. That proportionality, being admitted only in the sphere of intelligence and sentiment and not of physical things, may be observed without violation justice or social equality. 212

5. This third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property, we shall call LIBERTY. 212

· Liberty is equality because liberty exists only in the social state and because without equality there is no society. Liberty is anarchy because it does not admit the government of the will butt only the authority of the law, that is, of necessity. Liberty is infinite variety because it respects all wills within the limits of the law. Liberty is proportionality because it allows the greatest latitude to the ambition for merit and the emulation of glory. 212

· Sociability in man, which becomes justice through reflection, equity through the arrangement of capacities, and having liberty for its formula, is the true foundation of morality, the principle and rule of all our actions. This is the universal motor which philosophy seeks, which religion fortifies, which egotism supplants, and which pure reason never can supply. 212

· Conjugal fidelity is justice; adultery is high treason against society.

· To ensure equality between men, and peace among nations, there must be agriculture and industry and a distribution of the centers of education, business, and storage according to the climate and the geographical position of the country, the nature of the products, the character and natural talents of the inhabitants, etc., in proportions so just, so wise, and so well combined that of population, consumption, and products. There begins the science of public and private right and true political economy. 214

· Individual possession is the condition of social life; five thousand years of property demonstrate this. Property is the suicide of society. Possession is within right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize the law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil form the face of the earth. 215

Buber, M. (1970) Paths of Utopia, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

• [Proudhon] “These theoreticians are Utopians; they are driven to seek science in their own heads, because things are not yet so far advanced that they need only give an account of what is happening under their eyes and make themselves its instruments.” The criticism of existing conditions on which the systems are built is recognized as valuable explanatory material; on the other hand all their positive recommendations are condemned to lose all practical value and theoretical justification in the course of historical development. 2
• But if socialism is to emerge from the blind-alley into which it has strayed, among other things the catchword “Utopian” must be cracked open and examined for its true content. 6
• Such pictures are generally called fantasy-pictures, but that tells us little enough. This “fantasy” does not float vaguely in the air, it is not driven hither and thither buy the wind of caprice, it centers with architectonic firmness on something primary and original which it is its density to build; and this primary thing is a wish. 7
• The vision of rightness in Revelation is realized in the picture of a perfect time—as messianic eschatology; the vision of rightness in the Ideal is realized in the picture of a perfect space—as Utopia. The first necessarily goes beyond the social and borders on the creational, the cosmic; the second necessarily remains bounded by the circumference of society, even if the picture it presents sometimes implies an inner transformation of man. Eschatology means perfection of creation; Utopia the unfolding of the possibilities, latent in mankind’s communal life, of a “right” order. 8
• But only with the modern social systems did there arise this fierce interplay of doctrine and action, planning and experiment. 9
• Uniformity as a means is to change miraculously into multiplicity as an end… 13

• [Kropotkin] The fullest development of individuality "will combine with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees and for all possible; an association that is always changing, that bears in itself the elements of its own duration, that takes on the forms which best correspond at any given moment to the manifold strivings for all." 13
• Victor Hugo called Utopia “the truth of tomorrow." 15
• I have pointed out that in “utopian” socialism there is an organically constructive and organically purposive or planning element which aims at a restructuring of society, and moreover not at one that shall come to fruition in an indefinite future after the “withering away” of the proletarian dictatorship, but beginning here and now in the given conditions of the present. 16

• Here Saint-Simon comes very near to the idea of social re-structuring. What he lacks is the conception of genuine organic social unit out of which this re-structuring can be built; the idea of “industrial associations” does not provide what is required. Saint-Simon divined the significance of the small social unit for the rebuilding of society, but did not recognize it for what it was. 18

• [Fourier] "Only free and voluntary association can solve the great organic problem of the future—the problem of organizing a new order, an order which individualism will combine spontaneously with collectivism." 19

• The interconnection between the units has no place in his system, each unit is a world on its own and always the same world; but of the attraction which rules the universe we hear nothing as between these units, they do not fuse together into associations, into higher units, indeed they cannot do so because they are not, like individuals, diversified, they do not complement one another and cannot therefore form a harmony. 20

• In other words, it is a common housekeeping in which personal possessions can stand side by side with common ones, save that through the building of a common economy (quite otherwise than in the scheme of Fourier) only a narrow margin is set between differences in personal possessions and that, as a result of mutuality, of “mutual give and take, there arises that very condition which is here termed mutual possession and enjoyment”, i.e. the appropriate participation of all members in one another. 22
• [Owen] "Men have not yet been trained in principles that will permit them to act in union, except to defend themselves or to destroy others…A necessity, however, equally powerful, will now compel men to be trained to act together to create and conserve." 22

• Owen’s answer, on the other hand, affirms that the transformation of society must be accomplished in its total structure as well as in each of its cells: only a just ordering if the individual units can establish a just order in the totality. 23

• [Owen] "The transformation of Society must be accomplished in its total structure as well as in each of its cells: only a just ordering of the individual units can establish a just order in the totality. This is the foundation of socialism." 24
• [Proudhon] "I have no system, I will have none and I will expressly repudiate the suggestion. The system of humanity, wherever it be, will only be known when humanity is at an end…My business is to find out the way humanity is going, and if I can, prepare it." 24

• “All principles,” writes Proudhon in his posthumous work Casarism and Christianity, “are contemporaneous in history as they are in reason.” It is only that they have different strengths in relation to one another at different epochs. 26
• “The prime cause of all the disorders that visit society,” says Proudhon, “of the oppression of the citizens and the decay of nations, lies in the single and hierarchical centralization of authority…. 27
• First: so long as society was richly structured, so long as it was it was built up of manifold communities and communal units, all strong in vitality, the State was a wall narrowing one’s outlook and restricting life could furnish and grow. But to the extent that the structure grew impoverished the wall became a prison. 27
• What he opposes to the State is not the individual as such but the individual in organic connection with his group, the group being a voluntary association of individuals. 28
• But already he knows that “through monopoly mankind has taken possession of globe, and through association it will become its real master.” 27

• [Proudhon] "The amorphous basis of elections aims at nothing less than to abolish political life in towns, communes and departments, and through this destruction of all municipal and regional autonomy to arrest the development of universal suffrage. In such circumstances the body of the nation is but an agglomeration of molecules, a heap of dust animated from without by a subordinating, centralist idea. In our search for unity, unity itself has been sacrificed." 29
• [Gierke] "Only free association can create communities in which economic freedom persists. For those organisms which spring from individual initiative and from the creative powers of their members enhance the life of each individual member simultaneously with the newly established life of the whole." 30

• In the communist system common ownership is to bring about the end of all property, personal as well as parochial and communal; universal association is to absorb all special associations, and collective freedom is to devour all corporative, regional and private freedoms. 31
• The life of a society finds fulfillment in the combination of persons into groups, of groups into associations. “Just as a number of people by their common exertions give rise to a collective strength which is superior in quality and intensity to the sum of their respective strengths, so a number of workgroups associated in a relationship of mutual exchange will generate a potency of a higher order,” which can be regarded specifically as “the social potential”. Mutualism—the building up of an economy on reciprocity of service, and federation—the building up of political order on the brotherhood of groups—are only two aspects of the same structure. “Through the grouping of individual strengths and interdependence of brotherhood of man can be constituted from various peoples, as a federation of federations." 33
• But the conception of and demand for a public system in which the individual ca belong to himself, feel his worth and his life, a system that takes account of him as an individual, does not just float about in the boundless realm of abstraction—it is bound to the facts and tendencies of our social reality. In the modern constitutional State “[Proudhon] the various groups need no direction in a great many of their activities; they are quite capable of governing themselves with no other inspiration than conscience and reason.” 33

• Just as a number of people by their common exertions give rise to a collective strength which is superior in quality and intensity to the sum of their respective strengths, so a number of work-groups associated in a relationship of mutual exchange will generate a potency of a higher order, which can be regarded specifically as the social potential. 33

• [Proudhon] "Through the grouping of individual strengths and the interdependence of the groups the whole nation will become a body." 37
• [Kropotkin] "The State is an historical growth that slowly and gradually, at certain epochs in the life and history of all peoples, displaces the free confederation of tribes, communities, tribal groups, villages and producers’ guilds and gives minorities terrible support in enslaving the masses—and this historical growth and all that derives from it is the thing we are fighting against." 38

• Here probably under the influence Gierke, who called the two opposing principles domination and free association, there is a hint, bound up with Kropotkin’s forces persists inside the social movement itself: between the centralist and the federalist forms of socialism. 39
• Those for whom the important thing is not so much the security of individuals (for which purpose the Leviathan is deemed indispensable) as the preservation of the substance of community, the renewal of communal life in the life mankind—centralism. 40
• Kropotkin realized very clearly that, as Proudhon had already indicated, a socialistic community could only be built on the basis of a double intercommunal bond, namely the federation of regional communes and trade communes variously intercrossing and supporting one another. 42
• "We remark in the civilized nations," he [Kropotkin] writes in his autobiography, "the germ of a new social form which will supplant the old. ... This society will be composed of a number of societies banded together for everything that demands a common effort: federations of producers for all kinds of production, of Societies for consumption; federations of such Societies alone and federations of Societies and production groups, finally more extensive groups facing a whole country or even several countries and composed of persons who will work in common for the satisfaction of those economic, spiritual, and artistic needs which are not limited to a definite territory. All these groups will unite their efforts through mutual agreements. ... Personal initiative will be encouraged and every tendency to uniformity and centralization combated. Moreover this society will not ossify into fixed and immovable forms, it will transform itself incessantly, for it will be a living organism continually in development." 42

• [Kropotkin] "What is aspired to is the fullest development of individuality combined with the highest development of free association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees and for all conceivable purposes: an ever-changing association bearing in itself the elements of its own duration and taking on the forms which at any moment best correspond to the manifold endeavors of all." 43
• [Kropotkin] "Socialism will have to find its own form of political relationships…In one way or another it will be more of the people; will have to be closer to the forum than parliamentary government is. It will have to depend less on representation, more on self-government." 43
• [Proudhon] "Anarchy is a form of government or constitution in which the principle of authority, police institutions, restrictive and repressive measures, bureaucracy, taxation, etc., are reduced to their simplest terms." 43

• [Proudhon] “We were obliged to use revolutionary action as a means of social reform.” But he divined the tragedy of revolutions and came to feel it more and more deeply in the course of disappointing experiences. Their tragedy is that as regards their positive goal they will always result in the exact opposite of what the most honest and passionate revolutionaries strive for, unless and until his has so far taken shape before the revolution that revolutionary act has only to wrest the space for it in which it can develop unimpeded. 44

• [Kropotkin] "That a decisive transformation of the social order as a whole cannot ensue without revolution is self-evident." 44

• Like Bakunin, Kropotkin misses the all important fact that, in the social as opposed to political sphere, revolution is not so much a creative as a delivering force whose function is to set free and authenticate—i.e. that it can only perfect, set free, and lend the stamp of authority to something that has already been foreshadowed in the womb of the pre-revolutionary society; that, as regards social evolution, the hour of revolution is not an hour of begetting but an hour of birth—provided there was a begetting beforehand. 45
• He [Kropotkin] stresses the fact “every socialistic attempt to alter the present relations between capital and labor will come to grief if it disregards the trend towards integration”; but he also stresses that the future he whishes to see “is already possible, already realizable”. From there it is only a step to demanding that an immediate beginning be made with restructuring of a society—but that step is decisive. 45
• [Kropotkin] “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” 46
• [Landauer] “One day it will be realized that socialism is not the invention of anything new but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has gown.” 46

• [Landauer] "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently." 46
• [Landauer] "One day it will be realized that socialism is not the invention of anything new but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown." 46
• [Landauer] "Socialism is possible and impossible at all times; it is possible when the right people are there to will and do it; it is impossible when people either don’t will it or supposedly will it, but are not capable of doing it." 47

• But what is also important is that for Landauer the setting up of society” outside” and “alongside” the State is essentially “a discovery of something actually present, something that has grown.” 48
• [Landauer] “Such is the task of socialists and of the movements they have started among the peoples: to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may merge and grow into the light.” 48

• [Landauer] "Socialism cannot be established in the abstract, but only in a concrete multiplicity that is one with the harmony of the peoples." 49
• [Landauer] "Nothing but the rebirth of all peoples out of the spirit of regional community can bring salvation." 49

• In the unexpected and the not to be expected; and, so far as we can, to lie and act accordingly at all times. “We know absolutely no details,” says Landauer in 1907, “about our immediate way; it may lead over Russia, it may lead over through the movements and struggles of the day, but over things unknown, deeply buried, and sudden.” 50
• This can be said of Landauer too. What he has in mind is ultimately a revolutionary conservation: a revolutionary selection of those elements worthy to be conserved and fit for the renovation of social being. 50
• Although Utopia is prodigally beautiful—not so much in what it says as in how it says it—the end which revolution actually attains is not so very different from what went before.” 51

• [Landauer] "We are seized by the spirit, not of revolution, but of regeneration." 51
• [Landauer] "It will be recognized sooner or later that, as the greatest of all socialists—Proudhon—has declared in incomparable words, albeit forgotten today, social revolution bears no resemblance to political revolution; that although it cannot come alive and remain living without a good deal of the latter it is nevertheless a peaceful structure, an organizing of new spirit for new spirit and nothing else." 52
• [Landauer] "The workers must first create, on the basis of their common spirit—which is the capital of socialism—as much socialist reality, and exemplify it, as is possible at any time in proportion to their numbers and their energy." 55
• [Landauer] "Socialism can never be anything absolute. It is the continual becoming of human community in mankind, adapted and proportioned to whatever can be willed and done in the conditions given." 56

• [Landauer] “Everywhere, wherever culture and freedom are to dwell institution, the various bonds of order must complement one another, and the fixity of the whole must bear in itself the principle of dissolution…. In an age of true culture the order of private property, for instance, will bear in itself, as a revolutionary, dissolvent and re-ordering principle, the institution of seisachtheia or year of Junilee.” 56
• [Landauer] “No final security measures should be taken to establish the millennium or eternity, but only a great balancing of forces, and the resolve periodically to renew the balance.” 56

• [Landauer] "Revolution must become the accessory of our social order, the cornerstone of our constitution." 57

• Movements wanted to begin with the creation of social reality, without which no amount of thinkering with legal relationships can ever lead to socialism. 58

• [William King] "The great socialist reality will be reached through the creation of small socialist realities which keep on expanding and confederating continually." 64

• His [Kropotkin's] starting-point is the technological necessity for large-scale concerns: “We must inaugurate a system of large-scale concerns for agriculture by linking them up with association and common ownership,” and he wants if possible to transplant industry to the country and “wed industrial work to agricultural”. Here, too, Kropotkin’s idea of a “division of labor in time," of the union of agriculture, industry and handicraft in a modern village-community, is anticipated. 69

• The prime conditions for a genuine society can be summed up as follows: it is not an aggregate of essentially unrelated individuals, for such an aggregate can only be held together by a “political”, i.e. a coercive principle of government; it must be built up of little societies on the basis of communal life and of the associations of these societies; and the mutual relations of the societies and their associations must be determined to the greatest possible extent by the social principle—the principle of inner cohesion, collaboration, and mutual stimulation. 80
• What is essential is the growth of the genuine society itself, partly from already existing societies to be renewed in form and meaning, partly from societies to be built anew. 80
• Without the actual restructuring of society the change of order is only a façade. 81

• [Marx, Critical Glosses, 1844] "Revolution as such—the overthrow of existing power and the dissolution of the old conditions—is a political act. But without Revolution socialism cannot carry on. Socialism needs this political act in so far as it needs destruction and dissolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its ultimate purpose, its soul emerges, socialism will throw the political husk away." 82
• Marx’s dialectical formulation leaves no doubt as to what the sequence of events actually is in his opinion: first the political act of social revolution will annihilate not merely the Class State, but the State as a power-formation altogether, whereas the political revolution was the very thing that “constituted the state as a public concern, that is, as the real State.” On the other hand, “the organizing activity” will begin, i.e. the reconstruction of society, only after the complete overthrow of existing power—whatever organizing activity preceded the Revolution was only organization for the struggle. From this we can see with the greatest clarity what it is that connects Mar with “utopian” socialism: the will to supersede the political principle by the social principle, and what divides him from it: his opinion that this supersession can be effected by exclusively political means—hence by way of sheer suicide, so to speak, on the part of political principle. 83
• [Marx] “The working-class will, in the course of its development (dans le cours de son development), replace the old bourgeois society by an association which will exclude classes and their antagonisms, and there will no longer be nay political power in its proper in its proper sense, since political power is nothing but the official sum of antagonisms obtaining in bourgeois society.” 83
• Let us leave aside for the moment the question which obviously never entered into Marx’s field of version, namely, whether in those circumstances the proletariat would really be the “last” class, with whose accession to power class-rule would collapse altogether, that is, whether a new social differentiation would not arise within the victorious proletariat itself, one which, even though the class-designation might not apply, might very well lead to a new system of domination. 83
• But the thing that concern s us most of all is this: so long, in such a State or States, as this fixed point of view prevails, and prevails with all the technique and instruments of power at the disposal of our age, how can that spontaneity, that free social form-seeking and form-giving, that unfettered power of social experimentation and decision so indispensable to the realization of social and the emergence of a socialist form of society—how can they possibly get to work? By omitting to draw a clear line of demarcation between power in its proper and improper senses Marx opens the door to type of political principle which, in his opinion, does not and cannot exist: a type which is not the expression and elaboration of power-tendencies and power-struggles not characterized by class, on the part of groups and individuals. Political power in the improper sense would accordingly be “the official sum of antagonisms” either within the proletarian class itself or, more precisely, within the nation in which “class-rule has been abolished”. 84
• The federalism of Proudhon he is attacking has not slightest wish to split everything up into communes, it only wants to confer relatively extensive autonomy on the existing communes and combine them in units, whose own combination would represent a more organic from of community than the existing State. 86
• The decentralization, however, would not be a fragmentation but a reconstitution of national unity on an organic basis, and would mean a reactivating of the nation’s forces and therefore of a the national organism as a whole. 87
• A federalism of communes and Co-operatives—for that is precisely what this picture sketches—is thus acknowledged by Marx as genuine communism. 87
• [Engels, 1873] "Had the autonomists been content to say that the social organization of the future would admit authority only within the bounds unavoidably set by the conditions of production themselves, then we could have agreed with them.” 88
• [Marx] “The analysis given in my capital offers, therefore, no reasons either for or against the viability of the village commune; however, the special study I have devoted to it and the material for which I have sought in the original sources convince me that the commune is the mainstay of social regeneration in Russia, but that, if it is to function as such, one must first of all eliminate the injurious influences which work upon it from all sides, and then source for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development.” 93

• The socialist idea points of necessity, even in Marx and Lenin, to the organic construction of a new society out of little societies inwardly bound together by common life and common work, and their associations. But neither in Marx nor Lenin does the idea give rise to any clear and consistent frame of reference for action. In both cases (Marx and Lenin) the decentralist element of restructure is displaced by the centralist element of revolutionary politics; in other words, there is the tendency to perpetuate centralist revolutionary politics at the cost of the decentralist needs of a nascent socialist community. 99
• The upshot of all this was that there was no trace in the new State-order of any agency aiming at the liquidation of State centralism and accumulation of power. Lenin once remarked in 1918, “What socialism will be we just don’t know. When has any state begun to wither away.” And in history there is indeed no example, however small, to which one could refer. To achieve this for the first time in the world’s history one would have needed to set about it with a tremendously vital and idealistic store of decentralizing energy. No such thing happened. 101

• But for Marx of 1871 with his enthusiasm for the Commune it was certain that a decentralization would simultaneously be preparing itself in the midst of the centralism necessary for revolutionary action; and when Engels called the nationalization of the means of production an abolition of the State “as State”; he meant the all-important process that would be worked out to the full immediately after the completion of the revolutionary act. 103
• The spiritual fathers of the Commune had just that ideal aiming at decentralization which Marx and Engels did not have, and the leaders of the Revolution of 1871 tried, albeit with inadequate powers, to begin the realization of that ideal in the midst of revolution. 104
• Power indicates only under the stress of counter-power. 104

• Freedom, socially speaking, means above all freedom for community, a community free and independent of State compulsion. 104

• To be sure, Lenin sees this factory discipline only as “ a necessary stage in the radical purging of society”; he thinks that it will pass as soon as “everybody has learnt to manage society’s production by himself”, for from this moment the need for any government whatever will begin to disappear. 105
• The point is not that there should be only managers and no managed any more—that is more utopian than any Utopia—but that management should remain management and not become rulership, or more precisely, that it should not appropriate to itself more rulership than conditions at any time make absolutely necessary. 105
• The fact that (as Arthur Rosenberg rightly stresses in connection with Kropotkin and Landauer) whenever, in history, the masses endeavored to overthrow a feudal or a centralist power-apparatus it always ended in these same Commune-like experiments, was either unknown to him [Lenin] or did not interest him; still less did he grapple with the fact (although he once spoke of Soviets being “in their social and political character” identical with the State of Commune) that in all these experiments social decentralization was linked up with political decentralization, if in differing degrees. For him, the only decisive lesson of history was conviction that hitherto humanity has not brought forth a higher and better type of government than the Councils. Therefore the Councils had to “take the whole of life into their own hands.” 108

• [Lenin] "We must be centralists, yet there will be moments when our main task will shift to the provinces because revolutionary action requires it; we must leave the maximum of initiatives to individual localities." 109

• And doubtless in the field of economics so vitally important for any final remodeling of society Lenin saw strict centralism as the goal. 110
• [Summarizing Lenin] Private ownership of land is to be abolished not to build up Socialism but simply and solely because the majority of the people want it; and the Councils are necessary not to serve as cells of the new society but to execute the measures demanded by the majority. 111
• [Lenin] “Had the creative folk-power of the revolutionary classes (this latter term goes beyond Martov’s words and gives them a Bolshevist twist) not produced the Councils, the proletarian revolution in Russia would have been a hopeless affair.” Here the conception of Councils as an instrument for “dividing the revolution forwards” struck its most powerful historical note. 112
• [Lenin] “The Councils,” Lenin continues, “can only really develop, only display their talents and capabilities to the full, after the seizure of supreme power, for otherwise they have nothing to do, otherwise they are either simple germ-cells (and one cannot be a germ-cell for too long) or a plaything.” 113
• That the Councils might not merely exist for the sake of evolution, but that—and this in a far more profound and primary sense—the revolution might exist for the sake of Councils, was something that simply never occurred to him. From this point of view—by which I mean not Lenin as a person but the sort of mentality that found an arch-exemplar in him—it is easy to understand why the Councils petered out both as a reality and as an idea. 113
• But obviously Lenin had no inkling that such “concentrations” bear a socialist, socially formative character only when they arise spontaneously, from below upwards, when they are not concentrations at all but associations, not a centralist process but a federalist one. 114

• Always in history there exist, even if in varying degrees of strength, centralist and decentralist trends of development side by side; and it is vital importance in the long run for which of the two the conscious will, together with whatever power it may have acquired at the time, elects. 115
• It is clear that Lenin has no thought of limiting the centralist principle; for his revolutionary-political point of view he only tolerates a federalist reality so long as it resolves itself into centralism. 116

• Although in respect of this task Lenin pointed out that the withering away of the state would be accomplished by way of a development whose duration could not as yet be measured nor its manner imagined. 117
• [Lenin] "Under Soviet power Co-operative capitalism, as distinct from private capitalism, creates a variant of state capitalism and is as such advantageous and useful to us at present." 121
• “It is,” Lenin says, “not yet the actual building of the socialist society, but it contains everything necessary and sufficient for building of this society.” Yes, he goes even further: the Co-operative has become for him not merely the pre-condition of social building but the very core of it. 122
• But the affinity is only apparent. Even now Lenin was not thinking for a moment of co-operative as spontaneous, independent formation growing dynamically and a law unto itself. What he was now dreaming of, after all his grievous efforts to weld the people into a uniform whole that would follow him with utter devotion, after all his disappointments over “ bureaucratic excrescences”, with the mark of illness on him and near to death—was to unite two things which cannot be united, the all-overshadowing State and the full-blooded co-operative. 123
• Lenin’s final idea was so to extend the co-operative in scope and so to unify it in structure that it would only differ from the state functionally but coincide with it materially. That is the squaring of the circle. 124

• [Lenin] "You cannot create collective economies by force. That would be stupid and reactionary. It would be the greatest folly to try to introduce collective cultivation of the land by decree." 126

• Land cultivation, he said, would only be regarded as socialized when all the agricultural Artels had been replaced by State Collectives, when land, means of production and livestock belonged to the State. 128
• It is more--it is the picture of State that has devoured society altogether. 128

• [Pierre Leroux] "If you have no will for human association I tell you that you are exposing civilization to the fate of dying in fearful agony." 128

• “What,” asked the great sociologist Marx Weber in 1918, “will that ‘association’ look like of which the Communist Manifesto speaks? What term-cells of that kind of organization has Socialism in particular to offer if ever it gets a real chance to seize power and rule as it will?” 128

• In the evolution of mankind hitherto this is the line that predominates: the forming and reforming of communities on the basis of growing personal independence, their mutual recognition and collaboration on that basis. 130

• Society’s assimilation in the State was accelerated by the fact that, as a result of modern industrial development and its ordered chaos, involving the struggle of all against all for access to raw materials and for a larger share of the world-market, there grew up, in place of the old struggles between States, struggles between whole societies. 131
• In the monstrous confusion of modern life, only thinly disguised by the reliable functioning of the economic and State-apparatus, the individual clings desperately to the collectivity. The little society in which he was embedded cannot help him; only the great collectivities, so he thinks, can do that, and he is all too willing to let himself be deprived of personal responsibility: he only wants to obey. And the most valuable of all gods—the life between man and man—gets lost in the process; the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of man hires itself out as a functionary. The personal human being cases to the living member of a social body and becomes a cog in the “collective” machine. Just as his degenerate technology is causing him to lose the feel of community—just when he is so full of the illusion of living in the perfect devotion to his community. 132
• We must begin, obviously, with the establishment of a vital peace, which will deprive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle. And this primary objective cannot in its turn be reached by any devices of political organization, but the only by the resolute will of al peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together. 132

• At this point we are threatened by a danger greater than all the previous ones: the danger of a gigantic centralization of power covering the whole planet and devouring all free community. 132

• But the more a human group lets itself be represented in the management of its common affairs, and the more it lets itself be represented from outside, the less communal life there is in it and the more impoverished it becomes as a community. For community—not the primitive sort, but the sort possible and appropriate to modern man—declares itself primarily in the common, and without this it cannot exist. 133
• ...it too, should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all time: always it must be the moment’s answer to be the moment’s question, and nothing more. 134

• The realization of community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all time: always it must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s question, and nothing more. 134
• In the happiest instances common affairs were deliberated and decided not through representatives but in gatherings in the market-place; and the unity that was felt in public permeated all personal contacts. 135

• All this, I may be told, has gone irrevocably and forever. The modern city has no agora and the modern man has no time for negotiations of which his elected representatives can very well relieve him. The pressure of numbers and the forms of organization have destroyed any real togetherness. Work forges other personal links than does leisure, sport again others than politics, the day is cleanly divided and the soul too. 136
• There is still the family, of course, which as a domestic community, seems to demand and guarantee a modicum of communal life; but it too will either emerge from crisis in which it is involved, as an association for a common purposes, or else it will perish. 136
• Faced with this medley of correct premises and absurd conclusions I declare in favor of a rebirth of commune. A rebirth—not a bringing back. It cannot in fact be brought back, although I sometimes think that every touch of hopeful neighborliness in the apartment-house, every wave of warmer comradeship in the hulls and “knock-offs” that occur even in the most perfectly “rationalized” factory, means an addition to the world’s community-content; and although a rightly constituted village commune sometimes strikes me as being a more real thing than a parliament; but it cannot be brought back. 136
• An organic commonwealth—and only such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of men—will never build itself up out of individuals but only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities. 136
• By the new communes—they might equally well be called the new Co-operatives—I mean the subjects of a changed economy: the collectives into whose hands the control of means of production is to pass. 137
• The relationship between centralism ad decentralization is a problem which, as we have seen, cannot be approached in principle, but, like everything to do with the relationship between idea and reality, only with great spiritual tact, with the constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportion between them. 137
• There will have to be a system of representation, too, in the sort of social pattern I have in mind; but it will not, as now, be composed of the pseudo-representatives of amorphous masses of electors but of representatives well tested in the life and work of the communes. The represented will not, as they are to-day, be bound to their representatives by some windy abstraction, by the mere phraseology of a party-program, but concretely, through common action and a common experience. 137

• The essential thing is that the process of community-building shall run all through the relations of the communes with one another. Only a community of communities merits the title of Commonwealth. 137

• Just as I do not believe in Marx’s “gestation” of the new form, so I do not believe either in Bakunin’s virgin-birth from the womb of Revolution. But I do believe in the meeting of idea and fate in the creative hour. 138
• Exercising control over the machines and, with their help, over the whole society, Capitalism wants to deal with individuals; and the modern State aids and abets it by progressively dispossessing groups of their autonomy. 139

• The era of advanced Capitalism has broken down the structure of society. The society which preceded it was composed of different societies; it was complex, and pluralistic in structure. 139

• The socialistic task can only be accomplished to the degree of production and uniting production and consumption the various forms of production and uniting production and consumption, exerts a structural influence on the amorphous urban society. The influence will only make itself felt to the full if, and to the extent that, further technological developments facilitate and actually require the decentralization of industry; but even now a pervasive force is talent in the modern communal village, and it may spread to the towns. It must be emphasized again that the tendency we are dealing with is constructive and topical: it would be romantic and utopian to want to destroy the machines, but it is constructive and topical to try to transform the town organically in the closest possible alliance gate composed of smaller units. Indeed, many countries to-day show significant beginnings in this respect. 141
• A real community need not consist of people who are perpetually together; but it must consist of people who, precisely because they are comrades, have mutual access to one another and are ready for one another. 145

Woodcock, G. (1962) Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, Meridian Books.

§ All anarchists deny authority; many of them fight against it can reasonably be called anarchists. Historically, anarchism is a doctrine which poses a criticism of existing society; a view of a desirable future society… 9

§ Anarchism, historically speaking, is concerned mainly with man in his relation to society. Its ultimate aim is always social changes; its present attitude is always one of social condemnation, even though it may proceed from an individualist view of man’s nature; its method is always that of social rebellion, violent or otherwise. 9

§ Anarcobs, the original Greek word, means merely “without a ruler,” and thus anarchy itself can clearly be used in a general context to mean either diction of being un-ruled because rule is unnecessary for the preservation of order. 10

§ A system of social thought, aiming at fundamental changes in the structure of society and particularly—for this is the common element uniting all its forms—at the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of nongovernmental co-operation between free individuals. 13

§ Godwin sought to bring change through discussion and proliferation of co-operative organizations; Krohe felt it occurred inevitably during revolutions and that revolutions were unavoidable stages in human progress; even Bakunin, though he fought on many barricades and extolled the bloodthirstiness of peasant risings, had also times of doubt, when he would remark, in the tones of saddened idealism; 15

§ ...the basic ideas of anarchism, with their stress of freedom and spontaneity, preclude the possibility of rigid organization, and particularly of anything in the nature of a party constructed for the purpose of seizing and holding power. 18

§ [Kropotkin] Evolution never advances so slowly and evenly as have been asserted. Evolution and revolution alternate, and the revolution--that is, the times of accelerated evolution--belong to the unity of nature as much as do the times when evolution takes place more slowly. 19

§ He [Proudhon] seeks to rebuild society, not to abolish it, and he envisages the world of the future as a great federation of communes and workers' cooperatives, based economically on a pattern of individuals and small groups possessing (not owning) their means of production, and bound by contracts of exchange and mutual credit which will assure to each individual the product of his own labor. 20

§ The pacifist anarchist have accepted the principle of resistance and even revolutionary action, provided it does not incur violence, which they see as a form of power and therefore non-anarchist in nature. 21

§ [Proudhon] "An integral part of a collective existence, man feels his dignity at the same time in himself and in others, and thus carries in his heart the principle of a morality superior to himself. The principle does not come to him from the outside; it is secreted within him, it is immanent. It constitutes his essence, the essence of society itself. It is the true form of the human spirit, a form which takes shape and grows toward perfection only by the relationship that every day gives birth to social life. Justice, in other words, exists in us like love, like notions of beauty, of utility, of truth, like all or powers and faculties." 22-23

§ [Kropotkin] "The anarchists conceive a society in which al the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society, and by a sum of social customs and habits--not petrified by law, routine, or superstition, but continually developing and continually readjusted, in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals. No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallization and immobility, but a continual evolution–such as we see in Nature." 23

§ It also makes them reject not merely the authoritarian communism of Marx, with its emphasis on a dictatorship of the proletariat to impose equality by external force, but also the various pre-Marxist Utopian socialisms. In fact the very idea of Utopia repels most anarchists, because it is a rigid mental construction which, successfully imposed, would prove as stultifying as any existing state to the free development of those subjected to it. 24

§ The Marxist rejects the primitive as representing a stage in social evolution already past; for him , tribesmen, small craftsmen, all belong the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy on the scrape heap of history. 26

§ The anarchists, on the other hand, have placed great hopes in the peasant. He is near to the earth, near to nature, and therefore more "anarchic” in his reaction. 26

§ The anarchist does not merely feel anger against the wealthy; he feels anger against wealth itself, and in his eyes the rich man is as much a victim of his luxury as the poor man of his destitution. 28

§ Pauperism is destitution; Poverty is the state in which a man gains by is work enough for his needs, and this condition Proudhon praises in lyrical terms as the ideal human state, in which we are most free, in which, being masters of our senses and our appetites, we are fast able to spiritualize our lives. 28

§ To the anarchist, despite the scientific determinism that at times has inconsistently found its way into his teachings, no specific event is inevitable, and certainly no specific event in human society. 30

§ The bitterest battles between anarchists and Marxists were fought over the question of whether an egalitarian society could be created by workers” political parties aiming at seizure of the state machine. 31

§ Sharing metaphorically Christ’s contention that one cannot cast out devils by Beelzebub, the anarchists regard all institutions and parties based on the idea of regulating social change by government action and man-made laws as counterrevolutionary. In proof of this argument, they point to the fact that all revolutions carried out by political means have ended in dictatorships; the resort to coercion has transformed them and betrayed the revolutionary ideal. It is for this reason that the anarchists not only reject political action as such, but also attack reformism–the idea that society can be changed by piecemeal measures–and deny the theory of a transitional period between the capitalist state and the anarchic society. 31

§ from the general strike and resistance to military service to the formation of co-operative communities and credit unions–which aim to dissolve the existing order and either prepare for the social revolution or make sure that once it has begun it may not proceed in an authoritarian course. 32

§ For what unities and characterizes all the various tactics advocated by the anarchists, however they may differ on points of violence and non-violence, mass action and individual action, is the fast that they are based on direct individual decisions. The individual takes part voluntarily in a general strikes; of his own free will he becomes a member of community, or refuses military service, or takes part in an insurrection. No coercion or delegation of responsibility occurs; the individual comes or goes, acts or declines to act, as he sees fit. 32

§ Individuals, in fact, will federate themselves into communes and working associations, just as these will be federated into regional units, and overriding authorities will be replaced by coordinating secretariats. In this organic network of balancing interests, based on the natural urge of mutual aid, the artificial patterns of coercion will become unnecessary. 33

§ No conception of anarchism is further from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme from of democracy. Democracy advocates the sovereignty of the people. Anarchism advocates the sovereignty of the person. This means that automatically the anarchists deny many of the forms and viewpoints of democracy. Parliamentary institutions are rejected because they mean that the individual abdicates his sovereignty by handing it over to a representative; once he has done this, decisions may be reached in his name over which he has no longer any control. This is why anarchists regard voting as an act that betrays freedom, both symbolically and actually “ Universal Suffrage is the Counter- Revolution.” cried Proudhon, and none of his successors has contradicted him. 33

§ Particularly, the anarchist rejects the right of majority to inflict its will on the minority. Right lies not in numbers, but in reason... 34

§ ...though rebellion and the desire for freedom are both ancient elements in human society, they change their forms in accordance with changing historical situation. If , for example, we consider such great typical rebels of classical antiquity as Brutus and Spartacus, we realize that each of these men stove sincerely for his own idea of liberty, yet neither Brutus, fighting for the interests of a patrician oligarchy against the threat of dictatorship, nor Sparatacus, seeking to liberate the slaves so that they could take up again their broken lives in their own countries, would have shared or understood the particular conceptions of economic equality and classless liberty which the nineteenth-century anarchist developed in reaction against an increasingly centralized ad mechanize capitalist state. 39

§ The core attitudes can certainly be found echoing back through history at least to the ancient Greeks. But anarchism as a developed, articulate, and clearly identifiable trend only in the modern era of conscious social and political revolutions. 39

§ [Jefferson] "The influence over government must be shared among the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates in the ultimate authority , the government will be safe; because the corrupting of the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth." 50

§ [Thomas Paine] "Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last is a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer , or are exposed to the same miseries by a government our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise." 51

§ [Thomas Paine] "Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of men It existed prior to government and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government." 51-2

§ Here we have the point of view that we have already seen characterizing the typical anarchist; he stands in an evil, government primitive innocence and forward to a future whose civilized simplicity will rebuild the Golden Age of liberty. In temperament and ideals Paine came very near to the anarchists; only his lack of optimism in the immediately foreseeable future prevented him from becoming one of them. 52

§ To die placing liberty above law is the death of an anarchist 57

§ It meant, whenever he referred to it, the disorder that results from the breakdown of government without the general acceptance of a “consistent and digested view of political justice.” Like subsequent liberation thinkers, Godewin saw society as a naturally developing phenomenon which can operate in complete freedom from government, but he did not share the fifth of his successors in the spontaneous instincts of the untutored people. In this sense he remained a man of the Enlightenment; education was his real key to liberation, and he feared that without it man’s "ungoverned passions will often not stop at equality but incite them to grasp at power.” 61

§ He put forward his own conception of a simplified and decentralized society with a dwindling minimum of authority, based on a voluntary sharing of material goods. 61

§ [Godwin] "With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to dissolution of political government, of that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its substance, and no otherwise to be removed than by its utter annihilation!" 62

§ [Godwin] “The vices of the young spring not from nature , who is equally the kind and blameless mother of all her children; they derive from the defects of education.” 63

§ Godwin denied the validity of all government. They maintained that the religious man had no business with the same stat; Godwin envisaged a network of independent parishes, without rulers, as the ideal basic structure for a liberation society. Finally, the Sandemanians believed in community of property as a desirable ideal and taught tat it was sinful to save money, since a surplus should be distributed to those who needed it; it appears to have been a practice in Sandemanian congregations for poor members to supported by their relatively better-off co-religionists. 66

§ Godwin claims, that keeps error so long alive in the world, for, like all anarchists, he believes that, left to itself, the human mind will naturally tend to detect error and to approach steadily nearer to truth. 74

§ Godwin was one of the first to describe clearly the intimate link between property and power which has made the anarchists enemies of capitalism as well as of the state. 75

§ The purpose of the society is to do for its members "everything that can contribute to their welfare. But the nature of their welfare is defined by the nature of understanding, supplies incitements to virtue, fills us with a generous conscience of our independence and carefully removes whatever can impede our exertions.” 76

§ [Godwin] "Democracy restores to man a consciousness of his value, teaches him by the removal o authority and oppression to listen only to the removal o authority an oppression to listen only to the dictates of reason, gives him confidence to treat other men as his fellow beings, and induces him to regard them no longer as enemies against whom to be upon his guard, but as brethren whom it becomes him as assist." 81

§ Such a system, Godwin contends, would also remove the principal causes of crimes, which arises mainly from “ one man’s possessing in abundance that of which another man is destitute.” 87

§ “Each man would be united to his neighbor in love and mutual kindness a thousand times more than now; but each man would think and judge for himself.” 88

§ In contrast to Godwin’s stress on reason, Stirner speaks for the will and the instincts, and he seeks to cut through all the structures of myth and philosophy, all the artificial constructions of human thought, to the elemental self. He denies the reality of such abstract and generalized concepts as Man and Humanity; the human individual is the only thing of which we have certain knowledge, and each individual is the only thing of which we have certain knowledge, and each individual is unique. It is this uniqueness that every man must cultivate; the ego is the only law, and no obligations exist to any code, creed or conception outside it. 100

§ Even freedom, the great goal of most anarchists, is, in Stirner’s view, surpassed by uniqueness or “ownness.” 100

§ [Stirner] "One becomes free from much, not from everything. Inwardly one may be free in spite of the condition of slavery one may be free in spite of the condition of slavery, although, too, it is again only from some things, not from everything; but from the whip, the domineering temper, etc., of the master one does not as a slave become free. “ Freedom lives only in the realm of dreams!” Ownness, on the contrary, is my whole being and existence, it is myself. I am free from what I am rid of, owner of what I have in my power or what I control. My own I am at all times and under all circumstances, if I know how to possess myself and do not throw myself away on others. To be free is something that I cannot truly will, because I cannot make it, cannot create it; I can only wish it and aspire towards it, for it remains an ideal, a spook. The fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh every moment. But I my own I remain." 101

§ The state, whether despotic or democratic, is the negation of individual will. It is based on the relationship of collective man; moreover, its very systems of legislation and law enforcement result in stabilization, a freezing of action and opinion, which the man who wishes to possess himself in uniqueness cannot tolerate. Therefore the struggle between the egoist and the state is inevitable. 101

§ [Stirner] "For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude, lock up, or banish him; if all had, they would do away with the state. The state is not thinkable without lordship and servitude; for the state must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the “will of the State.”... The own will in me is the state’s destroyer; it is therefore branched by the state as “ self-will.” Own will and the state are powers in deadly hostility, between which no “ eternal peace” is possible." 101

§ [Stirner] "I do not demand any right; therefore I need not recognize any either. What I can get by force I get by force and what I do not get by force I have no right to , nor do I give myself airs; or consolation, with talk of my impresciptible right .... Entitled or unentitled–that does not concern me; if I am only powerful, I am empowered of myself, and need no other empowering or entitling." 102

§ Each man defines by force his own uniqueness, but having attained the self-realization of true egoism he does not need to be burdened wit more possessions than he requires, and he recognizes that to rule over others would destroy his own independence. 102

§ In Stirner’s world there will be neither masters nor servants, but only egoists, and the very fact of the withdrawal of each man into his uniqueness will prevent rather than foster conflict. 102

§ [Proudhon] “My conscience is mine, my justice is mine, and my freedom is a sovereign freedom. 106

§ For Proudhon, who valued individual freedom so much that he distrusted the very word” association,”became the direct ancestor of the organized anarchist movement, which gave is beliefs collective expression and force, 107

§ ...as Elie Halevy once remarked, he–and not Marx–was “ the real inspirer of French socialism,” or, as least, of Fence socialism as it existed up to the 1930's. He was not the only lonely social philosopher to become the forerunner of mass movements that would rise after his death–Marx, of course, was another–but he was almost certainly the only avowed individualist to whom this has happened. 107

§ If we define Stirner as an egoistic individualist, we must regard Proudhon as a social individualist. To Stirner the individual is all, and society his enemy. To Proudhon the individual is both the starting point and ultimate goal of our endeavors, but society provides the matrix–the serial order as he would call it. 107

§ The relationship between man and society is thus a delicate equilibrium, and society must not become a monolithic totality in which individual differences are melted and merged into uniformity. Yet at the same time it ca never be merely a collection of collective force and a collective character which are distinct from those of its members. This idea of emergent collective force or consciousness brings Proudhon into the central stream of anarchism considered as a doctrine which sees individual freedom rooted deeply in the natural processes out of which society itself evolves. 108

§ [Proudhon] "Justice is the central star which governs society, the pole around which the political world revolves, the principle and regular of all transactions. Nothing takes place between men save in the name of right, nothing without the invocation of justice." 109

§ In my father’s house we breakfasted on maize porridge; as mid-day we ate potatoes; in the evening bacon soup, and that every day of the week. And despite the economists who praise the English diet, we, with that vegetarian feeding, were fat and strong. Do you know why? Because we breathed the air of our fields and lived from the produce of our won cultivation. 110

§ ...by disputing the transaction of Eighth Commandant, which he [Proudhon] interprets as meaning, not “Thou shalt not steal,” but “ Thou shalt not lay anything aside for thyself,” he mounts as a clear attack on the institution of property, and supports it with a categorical assertion that “equality of conditions is...the aim of society.” Finally, he declares that “property is the last of the false gods.” 112

§ [Proudhon] "If I were asked to answer the question: What is slavery?” and I should answer in one word, “Murder!,” argument would be understood at once. No further argument would be needed to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, to this other question: “What is property?” may I not likewise answer, ”Theft”?" 113

§ [Proudhon] "Now this reproductive leaven–this eternal germ of life, this preparation of the land manufacture of implements for production--constitutes the debt of the capitalist to producer, which he never pays; and it is this fraudulent denial which causes the poverty of the laborer, the luxury of illness, and the inequality of conditions. This it is, above all things, which has been fitly named the exploitation of man by man." 114

§ Marx clearly regarded him as possible convert to his own schemes for an international revolutionary organization, but evidently did not take into account the fact that Proudhon was not in the least interested in an association for political propaganda of the kind planned by the German socialists, but envisaged instead an association for the encouragement of economic action and co-operation. 119

§ I have also some observations to make on this phrase of your letter: at the moment of action. Perhaps you retain the opinion that no reform is at present possible without a soup-de-main, without what was formerly called a revolution and is really nothing but a shock. That opinion, which I understand, which I excuse and would willingly discuss, having myself shared it for a long time, my most recent studies have made me completely abandon. I believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, I brief, a contradiction. I myself put the problem in this way: to bring about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the wealth was withdrawn from society by another economic combination. 121

§ [Proudhon] "The essential contradiction of our ideas, bring realized by work and expressed in society wit a gigantic power, makes al things happen in the reverse way to that in which they should, and gives society the aspect of a tapestry seen the wrong way round." 121

§ This dynamic equation he finds in mutualism, a concept that includes such familiar Proudhonian elements as the dissolution f government... 122

§ [Proudhon] “God is necessary to reason but rejected by reason.” 123

§ Meanwhile, Proudhon was maturing his plans for the People’s Bank. This was to be an institution for fostering the exchange of products between workers, based on labor checks, and for providing credit with a nominal interest rate to cover the cost of administration. Proudon believed it possible to create by these means a network of independent craftsmen and peasants and of associations of workers who would contract out of the capitalist system and eventually achieve what Proudhon always hoped–despite the frequent violence of his expression–would be a peaceful transformation of society. 129

§ The edifice can be built, Proudhon contends, by means of Association, but he is careful to point out that by this he does not mea a rigid or Utopian organization. Association, considered as an end in itself, is dangerous to freedom, but considered as a means to a greater end, the liberation of individual men, it can be beneficial. 133

§ [Proudhon] "In place of laws, we will put contacts; no more laws voted by the majority or even unanimously. Each citizen, each town , each industrial union will make its own laws. In place of political powers we will put economic forces... In place of standing armies, we will put industrial associations. In place of police we will put identity of interests. In place of political centralization, we will put economic centralization." 135-6

§ Law courts will be replaced by arbitration, national bureaucracies will be replaced by decentralized direct administration, and large industrial or transport undertakings will be managed by associations of workers; education will be managed by associations of workers; education will be controlled by parents and teachers; and academic training will be replaced by integrated education with” instruction...inseparable from professional education.” 135

§ Equality--as Proudhon has already argued--is to be attained by the practice of mutualist association and the conomic reorganization of society. 136

§ The salvation of workers, in other words, is the task of the workers themselves. 142

§ [Bakunin] "Let us put our trust in he eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." 151

§ [Weitling] “The perfect society has no government, but only an administration, no law, but only obligations, no punishments, but means of correction.” 151

§ [Bakunin] Universal peace will be impossible (he declared), so long as the present centralized states exist. We must desire their destruction in order that, on the ruins of these forced unions organized from above by right of authority and conquest, there may raise free unions organized from below by the free federations of communes into provinces, of provinces into nations, and of nations into United States of Europe. 163

§ [Bakunin] To organize society in such a fashion that every individual, man or woman, coming into life, shall find as nearly as possible equal means for the development of his or her different faculties and for their utilization by his or her labor; to organize a society which, rendering for every individual, whoever he may be, the exploitation of anybody else impossible, permits each t participate in social wealth–which , in reality, is never produced otherwise than by labor–only in so far as be has contributed to produce it by his own labor. 164

§ [Bakunin] "In (the Alliance) desires above all the definitive and entire abolition of classes and the political, economic, and social equalization of the two sexes, and , to arrive at this end, it demands first of all the abolition of the right of inheritance, so that in the future each man’s enjoyment shall be equal to his production, and so that, in conformity wit the decision taken by the most recent congress of workers in Brussels, the land and the instruments of work, like a other capital, may be utilized only by the agricultural and industrial workers." 166

§ Until the advent of the anarchist communists this was to remain, broadly speaking, the program of anarchist movement. 166

§ Marx was a centralist, Bakunin a federalist; Marx advocated political action for the workers and planned to conquer the state; Bakunin opposed political action and sought to destroy the state. Marx stood for what we now call nationalization of the means of production; Bakunin stood for worker’s control. The conflict really centered, as it has done ever since between anarchists and Marxists, on the question of the transitional period between existing and future social orders. The Marxists paid tribute to the anarchist ideal by agreeing that the ultimate end of socialism and communism must be that withering away of the state, but they contended that during the period of transaction the state must remain in the from of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Bakunin, who had now abandoned his ideas of revolutionary dictatorship, demanded the abolition of the state at the earliest possible moment, even at the risk of temporary chaos, which he regarded as less dangerous than the evils from which no form of government could escape. 171

§ ...now onward social idealism was to remain the dominant factor in his life, and science was to become the servant rather than the equal of his revolutionary aims. 193

§ [Kropotkin] "I gradually began to realize that anarchism represents more than a mere mode of action and a mere conception of a free society; that it is part of philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectical methods which have been employed in sciences dealing with men. I saw it must be treated by the basis of function applied to human institutions." 197

§ The desire to link theory with practice is evident in almost al Kropotkin’s contributions to Le Revolte. 200

§ Gradualism is fatal, for al aspects of social and economic life are so closely interconnected that nothing less than a complete and immediate transformation of society will provide an effective guarantee against a retrogression of kind that has followed every past revolution. 201

§ [Kropotkin] "When these days shall come–and it is for you to hasten their coming –when a whole region, where great towns with their suburbs shall shake off their rules, our work is clear; all equipment must return to the community, the social means held by individuals must be restored to their true owners, everybody, so that each may have his full share in consumption, that production may continue in everything that is necessary ad useful, and that social life, far from being interrupted, may be resumed with the greatest energy." 201

§ Economically the commune will find expression in the free availability of goods an services to all who need them, and here, in this emphasis on need rather than work as the criterion of distribution, we come to the point that differentiates Kropokin from Bakunin the collectivist and Proudhon the mutualist, both of whom envisaged systems of distribution directly related to the individual worker’s labor time. Kropotkin, in other words, is an anarchist communist; for him the wage system, in any of its forms, even if it is administered by Banks of the People or by workers’ associations through labor checks, is merely another from of compulsion. In a voluntary society it has no longer any place. 202

§ [Kropotkin] All things are for all men, since a men have need of them, since a men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone’s part in the production of the world’s wealth...If the man and the woman bear their fair share of the work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure their well-being. 204

§ More and more he stressed the evolutionary aspect of social change, relating it to peaceful developments in society rather than to abrupt revolutionary upheavals; less and less he advocated violent methods, and as early as 1891 he suggested in one of his speeches that anarchism might come” by the ripening of public opinion and with the least possible amount of disturbance.” 211

§ To the end of his life he remained convinced of the evils of capitalism and government, of the need for a change that would transform the whole of society and create a free communism in place of s system dominated politically by the state and economically by the wage system. 212

§ Though in his later years Darwin acknowledged that co-operation within species should not be ignored as a factor in evolution, the idea of conflict remained a much stronger element in his conception of evolutionary process. 213

§ “I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones.” 227

§ Linked with this search for the natural life is the urge toward universal brotherhood which projects a dream Tolstoy had shared with his brothers early in childhood, when they believed that their own close circle could be extended indefinitely into the fraternity of all mankind. 230

§ Central to Tolstoy’s social doctrine is his rejection of the state, but equally important is his denial of property. 232

§ But the most important single Tolstoyan covert was undoubtedly Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s achievement of awakening the Indian people and leading them through an almost bloodless national revolution against foreign rule lies only on the periphery of our subject, but at this point it is worth remembering that Gandhi was influenced by several of the great libertarian thinkers. His nonviolent technique was developed largely under the influence of Thoreau as well as of Tolstoy, and he was encouraged in his idea of a country of village communes by an assiduous reading of Kropotkin. 234

§ ...that the moral strength of a single man who insists on being free is greater than that of a multitude of silent slaves. 235

§ Anarchists have been especially conscious of this duality of universal man and particular man, and much of their thought has been devoted to seeking a balance between the claims of general human solidarity and those of the free individual. In particular they have sought to reconcile internationalist ideal–the idea of a world without frontiers or barriers of race--with a stubborn insistence on local autonomy and personal spontaneity. 239