MODERN ANARCHISM
CHAPTER IV
RUSSIAN INFLUENCES
The Earliest Signs of Anarchist Views in Russia in 1848 — The Political, Economic, Mental, and Social Circumstances of Anarchism in Russia — Michael Bakunin — Biography — Bakunin's Anarchism — Its Philosophic Foundations — Bakunin's Economic Programme — His Views as to the Practicability of his Plans — Sergei Netschajew — The Revolutionary Catechism — The Propaganda of Action — Paul Brousse.
"L'Église et l'État sont Mes deux bêtes noires."—Bakunin.
n Russia traces of Anarchist views are found as far back as the stormy period of 1848-49. The extent of poverty, both mental and material, in the vast dominion of the Czar caused the Russian people to be less ready to accept and propagate political ideals of freedom than to comprehend the Socialist doctrines that were then first springing up in Western Europe. The great movement that seized upon and shook all Central and Western Europe died down in Russia to a few isolated centres of life, and was felt chiefly in secret debating societies which eagerly received and disseminated the writings of Considerant, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Blanc, and Proudhon.
The reading of Proudhon's works was even undertaken as a duty by the most important of these societies, the so-called "Association of Petraschewski." The extent to which his teaching impressed the thoughtful members of this society, which included among others Dostojewski, cannot easily be determined, since the companions of Petraschewski, like the Nihilists of to-day, have always liked to preserve a certain electicism. However, one trace of the influence of Proudhon's doctrines upon its members is distinctly visible. Thus, an associate, Lieutenant Palma of the Guards, had designed a book of laws, in which we are surprised to meet the following passage, quite in the Anarchist vein: "The chief distinctive feature of man is that he is a being endowed with a personality, i. e., with reason and freedom, which is an end in itself, and ought not under any circumstances to be regarded as a means or end for others. From the idea of personality is derived the idea of right. I may do everything that I please, because each of my actions is the result of my reason." Petraschewski himself, in a satirical Dictionary which he published under the pseudonym of Kirilow, praised as one of the merits of early Christianity the abolition of private property and so on. We can easily recognise here the elements of Proudhon's and Stirner's Anarchism.
In spite of the severe prohibitive system that came in force after 1848, the teachings of English and French Socialists penetrated into Russia even in this period, and were disseminated by such eminent men as Tschernichevsky, Dobrolinbow, Herzen, Ogarjow, and others, to wider circles, and again we see that interest is chiefly taken in Proudhon's doctrines. These found their way deep into the heart of the masses, even to the peasants. It must not be forgotten that to the Russian peasants, with their already existing collectivist village communities, Proudhon's ideas were far more easy to understand than an educated Frenchman or German found them. There is probably no country in the world where the principles of "federative Socialism," as taught by Proudhon and later by Bakunin, were better understood than in Russia, and Bakunin even denied the necessity of a Socialist propaganda among Russian peasants, because he said that they already possessed a knowledge of its elements.
The broad, subterranean stream of Nihilism, which, swelling from these small beginnings to a dread power and strength, has undermined both feet of the Colossus of the Russian Empire, disappears here from our view. We can only notice individual men who, separated from the main body of the movement, made ready the path of revolution in their native land while living as voluntary or involuntary exiles in Western Europe. It may appear superfluous to remark upon the important rôle played by Russians on the revolutionary committees of every country. And in no revolutionary movement have they gained such a disastrous influence or played such a leading part as in Anarchism. When, in the sixties, Socialism, with its organisation of the working-class movement, grew up side by side with the revival of political Liberalism, then, too, by a natural law, arose the extreme form of protest against the aggregation of human society by Communism; the Anarchist doctrine naturally rose up from the complete oblivion in which it had lain for ten years. But modern Anarchism celebrated its renascence in a totally different form: times and men had changed; the philosophic period was passed, Stirner was dead, and Proudhon near his end; Russian godfathers stood round the cradle of modern Anarchism. Men of lofty idealism, who, impregnated with Western culture, with bold violence, wished to anticipate by several ages the natural development of mankind, have given up to Anarchy, as the empire of perfect and free personality, their whole heart and mind. But those who gave to this doctrine—justified to some extent, like every other one-sided view, in spite of all its extravagance, contradictions, and inherent impossibility—the sanction of the dagger, the revolver, petroleum, and dynamite, were neither Frenchmen nor Germans, but the half-civilised barbarians of the East.
The older form of Anarchism is marked by that lofty idealism which was the general mental attitude of civilised Western Europe in the first half of this century. The modern Anarchism of Bakunin, Netschajew, Kropotkin, and others, is branded by the semi-civilised culture of Russia, whose only object is the destruction of every existing state of things, and indeed under existing circumstances it cannot be otherwise. Dislike of, and discontent with real or fancied grievances, combined with a stiff-necked, doctrinaire attitude unprepared for any sacrificio del intelletto, may indeed lead the children of Western civilisation to a logical denial of the existing order of society. But from this to the actual overthrow of all existing conditions is a still farther step; and the positive intention of annihilating the infinite mental and material inheritance which is the outcome of civilisation, and which is not even denied by Anarchists themselves, could only be conceived by a few degenerate individuals who could only wish to see themselves vis-à-vis de rien because of their own utter lack of moral, intellectual, or material possessions. Against these individuals there will always be arrayed an overwhelming majority, who are ready to pledge the whole weight of their superiority in culture for these possessions and guarantees of the undeniable progress of mankind.
It is different in Russia. The political and social, the mental and moral conditions of this large but barbarian empire do not afford much opportunity for the growth even of a moderate amount of conservatism. For what can there be to conserve, to maintain, or to improve in those lives that depend on the mere sign of a bloodthirsty and savage despotism, in that society that has hardly raised itself from the primitive tribal level, in those rotten national economics, trade and industry, in a spiritual life groaning under the banner of orthodoxy and an arbitrary police, of popes and Tschinowniks? Must not the only possible way, the inevitable presupposition of any possible improvement be a desire for a total and universal overthrow, a radical annihilation of all these conditions that render life and development impossible? The Russian need not shrink from the thought that all present conditions should be annihilated, for when he looks round about him he finds nothing that his heart would care to preserve; and the higher he ranks in the mental or social sphere, the stronger must this "Nihilist" feeling naturally become. We who are citizens of a State that, with all its faults, is yet richly blessed by civilisation, show our comprehension of these facts by regarding with a milder and more sympathetic glance the acts of a few desperate men in Russia, which we should condemn severely if they occurred under the happier circumstances that surround ourselves. In fact, nothing is more natural—lamentable as it may be—than that, under circumstances such as those of Russia, revolutionary Radicalism should assume this purely negative "Nihilist" and murderously destructive character in the desperate struggle of the individual against a society that is totally degenerate.
"Among us," says Stepniak,[26] "a revolution or even a rising of any importance, such as those in Paris, is absolutely impossible. Our towns contain barely a tenth of the total population, and most of them are merely great villages, miles and miles away one from another. The real towns, such as, e. g., those of from 10,000 or 15,000 inhabitants, contain only 4 or 5 per cent. of the total population—that is, about three or four million people. And the Government which rules over the military contingent of the whole people—that is, over 1,200,000 soldiers—can transform the five or six chief towns, the only places where any movement would be possible, into veritable camps, as is indeed the case. Against such a Government any means are permissible; for it is no longer the guardian of the people's will or even of the will of a majority. It is injustice organised; a citizen need respect it no more than a band of highway robbers. But how can we shake off this Camarilla that shelters itself behind a forest of bayonets? How can we free the country from it? Since it is absolutely impossible to remove this hindrance by force, as in other more fortunate countries, a flank movement was necessary in order to attack this Camarilla before it could make use of its power, which thus was made useless in fruitless positions. Thus Terrorism arose. Nurtured in hatred, suckled by patriotism and hope, it grew up in an electric atmosphere, filled by the enthusiasm that is awakened by a noble deed."
These same features were necessarily assumed in Russia by Anarchist doctrines, which from their very nature found a friendly and (as we have seen) an early reception, and were practically incorporated with Nihilism, but, as must be distinctly noted, without becoming identical with it, or even forming an essential and integral part of it. In fact, we find in avowed Nihilists and Panslavists, such as Herzen, the fundamental Anarchist ideas present just as much as in Bakunin and Kropotkin, whose Anarchism was superior to their Panslavism. In his book, After the Storm (Après la Tempête), composed under the impression made by the disappointed hopes and expectations of 1848, Herzen exclaimed: "Let all the world perish! Long live Chaos and Destruction"; and in a work that appeared almost at the same time, The Republic One and Indivisible, he attacked the Republican form of government as "the last dream of the old world," which yet could not succeed in carrying out the great fundamental law of social justice. Only when this has become really a truth, only when there is an end of men being devoured by men, will humanity, born again, rise free and happy from the ruins of this present cursed social structure: "Spring will come; young, fresh life will blossom on the graves of the races who have died as victims of injustice; nations will rise up full of chaotic but healthy forces. A new volume of the world's history will begin." The share of Nihilism in such ideas cannot be borrowed altogether from Western Anarchism. There was perhaps a mutual interaction of intellectual growth. But one gift Anarchism certainly did receive from Nihilism: "the propaganda of action" does not spring from the logical development of Proudhon's and Stirner's ideas, and cannot be extorted or extracted from it in any way; it is rather the consequence of the mixture of these ideas with Nihilism, a result of Russian conditions. This was the pretty embellishment with which the West received back Anarchism from Russian hands in the era of the sixties and seventies. Bakunin was entrusted with the gloomy mission of handing this gift over to us, and it is noticeable that in Bakunin—as in Nihilism generally—Anarchism by no means takes up that exclusively commanding position as in Proudhon, with whom he yet is so closely connected.
Michael Bakunin was born in 1814 at Torschok in the Russian province of Tver, being a scion of a family of good position belonging to the old nobility. An uncle of Bakunin's was an ambassador under Catherine II., and he was also connected by marriage with Muravieff. He was educated at the College of Cadets in St. Petersburg, and joined the Artillery in 1832 as an ensign. But either, as some say, because he did not get into the Guards, or, as others say, because he could not endure the rough terrorism of military life, he left the army in 1838, and returned first to his father's house, where he devoted himself to scientific studies. In 1841 Bakunin went to Berlin, and next year to Dresden, where he studied philosophy, chiefly Hegel's but was also introduced by Ruge into the German democratic movement. Even at that time he had come to the conclusion (in an essay in the Deutschen Jahrbücher on "The Reaction in Germany") that Democracy must proceed to the denial of everything positive and existing, without regard for consequences. Pursued by Russian agents, he went in 1843 to Paris, and thence to Switzerland, where he became an active member of the Communist-Socialist movement. The Russian Government now refused him permission to stay abroad any longer, and as he did not obey repeated commands to return to his native land, it confiscated his property. From Zürich, Bakunin returned a second time to Paris, and made the acquaintance of Proudhon. If here was laid the foundation for his later Anarchist views, we still find him active in another political direction. In a high-flown speech made at the Polish banquet on the anniversary of the Warsaw Revolution (29th November, 1847), Bakunin recommended the union of Russia and Poland in order to revolutionise the former. The Russian Government thereupon demanded his extradition, and set a price of ten thousand silver roubles on his head. In spite of this, Bakunin escaped safely to Brussels. After the Revolution of February, he returned to Paris, then went in March to Berlin, and in June to attend the Slav Congress in Prague.
The question has not unnaturally been raised, What had Bakunin the cosmopolitan to do at such an institution of national Chauvinism as the Congress? What had the ultra-radical Democrat and sworn enemy of the Czar to do with a congress held by the favour of Nicholas, and visited by orthodox Archimandrites, by the envoys of Slav princes, and privy councillors decorated with Russian orders? When the drama at Prague ended with a sanguinary insurrection and the bombardment of Prague, Bakunin disappeared, only to re-appear again, now in Saxony and now in Thuringia, under all kinds of disguises, and (as those who are well-informed maintain)[27] constantly occupied with the intention of causing a new insurrection at Prague. Here too he was in contradiction with the attitude that he had adopted both before and after this event, for he must have known what a sorry part the Czechs had played and still were playing as regards the Vienna Democracy and the efforts for Hungarian emancipation.
During the insurrection in May, 1849, we find Bakunin in Dresden, as a member of the provisional government, and taking a prominent part in the defence of the city against the Prussian troops. Bakunin here appears as a champion of the very same cause that he had attacked at the Prague Congress. After the fall of Dresden he went with the provisional government to Chemnitz, where on the 10th of May he was captured and condemned to death by martial law. The sentence, however, was not carried out, since Austria had demanded his extradition. Here he was also condemned at Olmutz to be hanged; but Austria handed this offender, who was so much in request, over to Russia, which country also wished to get hold of him. By a remarkable chance, Bakunin escaped the death to which here also he was condemned, by receiving a pardon from the Czar; he was imprisoned first in the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, and then at that of Schlüsselburg; and in 1855, through the exertions of his influential relatives, was banished to Siberia. At that time a report had generally gained credence in Europe, although lacking any foundation, that Bakunin had by no means owed his life, that three countries had already condemned, to the chance favour of a monarch usually far from gracious; and the distrust of the apostle of Revolution was still more greatly increased when, in 1861, he succeeded in escaping from the penal settlement in the Amur district, and returned to Europe via Japan and America. Now the otherwise mysterious success of this escape has been explained. The Governor of the Amur (Muravieff-Amurski) happened to be a cousin of Bakunin's relation, Muravieff, and moreover (according to Bakunin's own statement),[28] a secret adherent of the revolutionary movement. He appears to have lived on a very intimate footing with Bakunin, and granted the exile all kinds of favours and freedom; and thus Bakunin was entrusted with the mission of travelling through Siberia in order to describe its natural resources. While on this journey he succeeded in embarking on a ship in the harbour of Nikolajewsk, and escaping. In 1861 he arrived in England, and settled in London, where he entered into relations with the members of the "International." As to the part that Bakunin played here, as he did later, as an agitator for Anarchist ideas, we will speak later when we come to the history of the spread of Anarchism.
When the Revolution broke out in Poland in 1863, Bakunin was one of the leaders of the expedition of Polish and Russian emigrants that was planned in Stockholm, and which was to revolutionise Russia from the Baltic coast. When this attempt also failed, he stayed sometimes in Russia and sometimes in Italy, devoting himself to Socialist agitation, and being always on every favourable opportunity active either as an apostle of Anarchist doctrine or as an agitator in the preparations and mise-en-scène of a revolution. We shall speak of this later. The last years of his life were spent alternately in Geneva, Locarno, and Bern, where he died on July 1, 1878, at the hospital, after refusing all nourishment, and thus hastening his end.
The Anarchist epoch of his life is included mainly in the last ten years of his career, so fertile in mistakes and changes of opinion. Anarchism owes its renascence to his active agitation, regardless of all consequences; and even in his writings the thinker lags far behind the agitator. Bakunin at best could only be called the theorist of action; his activity as an author was limited to scattered articles in journals and a few (mostly fragmentary) pamphlets. He was right in his answer to those critics who reproached him with this: "My life itself is but a fragment." Where could he have found in his life-long wanderings the peaceful leisure in which to develop his thoughts quietly or to express them in a work such as Proudhon's Justice or Stirner's Einziger? Besides, he lacked the gift of mental depth and firmly grounded knowledge. His style possesses something of his fluency as a demagogue, but his procedure in science reminds of the soaring dialectics of the revolutionary orator, full of repetitions, and attractive rather than convincing. In his case a pose always takes the place of an argument.
It is said that during the period of his association with the "International" Bakunin had had the intention of setting forth his ideas in two large works, one of which would have been a criticism of the existing arrangements of the State, property, and religion, while the other would have treated of the problems of the European nations, especially the Slavs, and have shown their solution by social revolution and anarchy. But, of course, these two works were never written, and there remain to us only some remnants of numerous fragmentary and formless manuscripts, originating in the period of 1863-73. Among these is a Catechism of Modern Freemasonry, the Revolutionary Catechisms, not to be compared with the later catechism of Netschajew, which was wrongly ascribed to Bakunin; also the wordy essay on Federation, Socialism, and Anti-theology, which as a proposal designed for the central committee of the League of Freedom and Peace at Geneva, but never published, presents a short reprint of Proudhon's Justice; and lastly, a fragment published in 1882 by C. Cafiero and Elisée Reclus, after his manuscript, Dieu et l'État, which seems intended to lay a philosophic foundation for Bakunin's Anarchism.
This fragment, in which Bakunin follows the lead of the great materialists and Darwinians, begins with Hegelianism. Man (it says) is of animal origin; all development proceeds from the "animal nature" of man, and strives to reach the negation of this, or humanity. "Animality" is the starting-point; "humanity," its opposite, is the goal of development. The first human being, the pitheco-anthropus, distinguished itself, according to Bakunin, from other apes, by two gifts: the capacity for thinking, and, thereby, for raising itself. Bakunin, therefore, distinguishes three elements in all life: (1) animality; (2) thought; and (3) rising. To the first corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, freedom. After establishing these peculiar categories, Bakunin never troubles about them again throughout his book, and does not know what use to make of them; they were nothing but a pretty philosophic pose, sand thrown in one's eyes. He goes farther, and declares next that he intends to penetrate into the reason "of the idealism of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, and [sic!] Stuart Mill." Again we hear nothing more throughout this fragmentary work of the thus announced refutation of Mill's idealism. It is limited to giving a rather shallow reproduction of Proudhon's contrast between religion and revolution.
"The idea of God," says Bakunin, "implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive denial of human freedom, and leads necessarily to the enslaving of humanity, both in theory and practice.... The freedom of man consists solely in following natural laws, because he has recognised them himself as such, and not because they are imposed upon him from without by the will of another, whether divine or human, collective or individual.... We reject all legislation, every authority, and every privileged, recognised official and legal influence, even if it has proceeded from the exercise of universal suffrage, since it could only benefit a ruling and exploiting minority against the interests of the great enslaved majority." And so forth.
Here already, in this partial repetition of Proudhon's views, we see Bakunin go far beyond Proudhon in an essential point, the question of universal suffrage. Proudhon had already perceived in "the organisation of universal suffrage" the only possible means of realising his views. Bakunin rejects this view, and, as will be shown later, this question formed the chief stumbling-block in his differences with the "International." But in a much more important and decisive point Bakunin goes farther than Proudhon, or rather sinks behind him.
Proudhon always based all his hopes on the diffusion of knowledge; the demo-cracy was to be changed into a demo-pædy, and thus gradually led up to Anarchy of its own accord. Bakunin anathematises knowledge just as much as religion; for it also enslaves men. "What I preach," he says in the book quoted, "is to a certain extent the revolt of life against knowledge, or rather against the domination of knowledge, not in order to do away with knowledge—that would be a crime of high treason against humanity (læsæ humanitatis)—but in order to bring it back to its place so surely that it would never leave it again.... The only vocation of knowledge is to illuminate our path; life alone, in its full activity, can create, when freed from all fetters of dominion and doctrine." He also thinks that knowledge should become the common possession of all, but to the question as to whether men should, until this takes place, follow the directions of knowledge, he answers at once, "No, not at all."
In these two divergences from Proudhon lies the essential difference between the modern and the older Anarchism. Bakunin rejects the proposal to bring about Anarchy gradually by a process of political transformation by means of the use of universal suffrage, equally with the gradual education of mankind up to this form of society by knowledge. Not by evolution, but by revolt, revolution, and similar means is Anarchy to be installed to-day—Anarchy in the sense of the setting free of all those elements which we now include under the name of evil qualities, and the annihilation of all that is termed "public order." Everything else will look after itself.
Bakunin wisely did not enter into descriptions of the future: "All talk about the future is criminal, for it hinders pure destruction, and steers the course of revolution." His views as to the nearest goal, after general expropriation and the annihilation of all powers, are almost exclusively derived from Proudhon's, and at most go beyond them only in so far as Bakunin does not recognise as obligatory that coalescence of "productive" groups into a higher collective entity, which Proudhon regarded as an organic society, but merely allows them to remain as groups. If several such local groups wish to unite into a larger association, this might be done, but no compulsion must thereby be exercised upon individuals. The influence of Stirner, with whom Bakunin was acquainted before 1840, must account for this. We recognise Bakunin's theory best and most authentically from the following extract, in which he comprises it in the programme of the "Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste" of Geneva,[29] founded by himself. It runs thus:
1. The alliance professes atheism; it aims at the abolition of religious services; the replacement of belief by knowledge, and divine by human justice; and the abolition of marriage as a political, religious, judicial, and civic arrangement.
2. Before all it aims at the definite and complete abolition of all classes, and the political, economic, and social equality of the individual, of either sex; and to attain this end it demands, before all, the abolition of inheritance, in order that for the future usufruct may depend on what each produces, and that, in accordance with the decision of the last Congress of Workmen at Brussels [in 1868], the land, the instruments of production, as well as all other capital, can only be used by the workers, i. e., by the agricultural and industrial communities.
3. It demands for all children of both sexes, from their birth onwards, equality of the means of development, education, and instruction in all stages of knowledge, industry, and art, with the general object that this equality, at first only economic and social, will ultimately result in producing more and more a greater natural equality of individuals, by causing to disappear all those artificial inequalities which are the historic products of a social organisation which is as false as it is unjust.
4. As an enemy of all despotism, recognising no other form of policy than Republicanism, and rejecting unconditionally every reactionary alliance, it rejects all political action that does not aim directly and immediately at the triumph of the cause of labour against capital.
5. It recognises that all existing political States, having authority, by gradually confining themselves to merely administrative functions of the public service in their respective countries, will be immerged into the universal union of free associations, both agricultural and industrial.
6. Since the social question can only be solved, definitely and effectively, on the basis of the universal and international solidarity of the workmen of all countries, the alliance rejects any policy founded on so-called patriotism and the rivalry of nations.
7. It desires the universal association of all local associations by means of freedom.[30] The question as to how this Anarchist condition of society, which Bakunin himself described as "amorphism," was to be brought about has been answered in no dubious fashion by Bakunin and his adherents in deeds of violence, such as that attempted by the leader himself in the Lyons riot of 1870 and the occurrences in Spain in 1873.[31] Bakunin tried to deceive himself into thinking that he deplored the violence that was sometimes necessary, and wrapped himself in the protecting cloak of the believer in evolution, who would wake up some fine morning and find that Anarchy had become an accomplished fact. By passive resistance in politics and economics, by complete abstention from politics, and by a "universal strike," Anarchy would suddenly come into being of itself. At the proper time all the workmen of every industry of a country, or indeed of the whole world, would stop work, and thereby, in at most a month, would compel the "possessing" classes either to enter voluntarily into a new form of social order, or else to fire upon the workmen, and thus give them the right to defend themselves, and at this opportunity to upset entirely the whole of the old order of society. Again we see that force is the ultimate resort; nor could it be otherwise after Bakunin had uncompromisingly rejected every attempt to arrive gradually at his ideal end by means of political and intellectual progress. In the Letter to a Frenchman he confesses the true character of the revolution which he advocates:
"Of course matters will not be settled quite peacefully at first," he says; "there will be battles; public order, the sacred arche of the bourgeois, will be disturbed, and the first facts that will emerge from such a state of affairs can only end in what people like to call a civil war. For the rest, do not be afraid that the peasants will mutually devour each other; even if they attempt to do so at first, it will not be long before they are convinced of the obvious impossibility of continuing in this way, and then we may be certain that they will attempt to unite among themselves, to agree and to organise. The need of food and of feeding their families, and (as a consequence of this) of protecting their houses, family, and their own life against unforeseen attacks—all this will compel them to enter upon the path of mutual adjustment. Nor need we believe, either, that in this adjustment, that has been come to without any public guardianship of the State, the strongest and richest will exert a preponderating influence by the mere force of circumstances. The wealth of the rich will cease to be a power as soon as it is no longer secured by legal arrangements. As to the strongest and most cunning, they will be rendered harmless by the collective power of the multitude of small and very small peasants: so, too, in the case of the rural proletariat, who are to-day merely a multitude given over to dumb misery, but who will be provided by the revolutionary movement with an irresistible power. I do not assert that the rural districts that will thus have to reorganise themselves from top to bottom will create all at once an ideal organisation which will in all respects correspond to our dreams. But of this I am convinced, that it will be a living organisation, and, as such, a thousand times superior to that which now exists. Besides, this new organisation, since it is always open to the propaganda of the towns, and can no longer be fettered and so to speak petrified by the legal sanctions of the State, will advance freely and develop and improve itself, in ways that are uncertain, yet always with life and freedom, and never merely by decrees and laws, till it reaches a standpoint that is as rational as we could possibly hope at the present day."
Bakunin has expressly excepted secret societies and plots from the means of bringing about this revolution. But this did not hinder him from becoming himself, as occasion suited, the head of a secret society, formed according to all the rules of the conspirator's art.
Fundamentally opposed as our minds must be to men like Proudhon and Stirner, we yet readily recognise in them their undoubted personal talents, both of mind, spirit, and character, and, above all, have never questioned their good faith. But we cannot speak thus of Bakunin. In all the changes and chances of a life that was singularly rich in change, there were far too many dark points, to which evil report had ample opportunity to attach itself. We do not see in Bakunin that proletarian in wooden sabots and blouse, with the eager thirst for knowledge and keen desire to raise himself, who dreams as he works before the compositor's frame of a juster order of things in this world, yet more for others than for himself, and would like to arrange society itself laboriously in a well-ordered compositor's case; nor do we see in Bakunin that plain German schoolmaster who would people society with mere sons of Prometheus, while he himself totters starving to the grave; who dedicates his gospel of a doctrine that would overthrow the world from pole to pole "to his Darling, Marie Donhardt," as though it were a tender love-song. Bakunin remains to us for ever as the commercial traveller of eternal revolution in a magnificent pose, and from the red cloak so picturesquely cast around him peeps out unpleasantly the dagger of Caserio.
We cannot leave Bakunin without a passing mention of his favourite pupil Sergei Netschajew,[32] although he was still less of a pure Anarchist than Bakunin, and can still less easily be separated from Russian Nihilism.
But a picture of this pair of twin brothers will show us better than long essays how much of the total phenomenon of modern Anarchism is a product of Western hyper-philosophy, and how much is an inheritance of Russian Nihilism. Sergei Netschajew, the apostle and saint of Nihilist poesy, was born at St. Petersburg in 1846, the son of a court official, and in time became teacher at a parish school in his native town. In 1865 he went to Moscow, where he became associated with the students of the Academy of Agriculture, and founded a secret society that called itself "The People's Tribunal," and formed ostensibly the "Russian Branch of the International Workers' Union." Both in St. Petersburg and elsewhere he appeared as the founder of such branch societies, attached to the Bakuninist section of the "International," and chiefly recruited from the ranks of youthful students. In a pamphlet issued later (1869), in conjunction with his master, Bakunin, called Words Addressed to Students, he exhorted the students not to trouble about this "empty knowledge" in whose name it was meant to bind their hands, but to leave the University and go among the people.[33] The Russian people, he said, were now in the same condition as in the time of Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, when Stenka Razin, a robber chieftain, placed himself at the head of a terrible insurrection. The young people who now leave their place in society and lead the life of the people would form an invincible, collective Stenka Razin, who would put themselves at the head of the fight for emancipation, and carry it through successfully. For this purpose they should not merely turn to the peasants and make them revolt, but also call in the help of robbers. "Robbery," he said, "was one of the most honourable forms of Russian national life." The robber is a hero, the protector and avenger of the people, the irreconcilable enemy of the State, and of all civic and social order founded by the State, who fights to the death against all this civilisation of officials, nobles, priests, and the crown. The Russian robber is the true and only revolutionary, the revolutionary sans phrase, without rhetoric derived from books, indefatigable, irreconcilable, and in action irresistible, a social revolutionary of the people, not a political revolutionary of the classes.
This was the programme of the society called "The People's Tribunal," as it was that of Nihilism generally, and, transferred from this into Western conditions, became the active programme of the "propaganda of action." At the same time as the Words, there were circulating in the circles influenced by Netschajew other writings, either written exclusively by himself or in conjunction with Bakunin, such as the Formula of the Revolutionary Question, the Principles of Revolution, the Publications of the People's Tribunal,—all of which preached "total destruction" and Anarchism. The opponents of the Bakuninists maintain that the only purpose of these writings was, by their bloodthirsty tone, to compromise genuine revolutionaries, and give the police a weapon against them. But the whole spirit of Bakunin is expressed in the revolutionary Catechism,[34] first made accessible to the public in the trial of Netschajew. It was formerly thought that Bakunin was the author, but now it is pretty well agreed that it was Netschajew.
The catechism, a condensation of revolutionary fanaticism, commands the revolutionary to break with all that is dear to him, and, troubling nought about law or morality, family or State, joy or sorrow, to devote himself wholly to his task of total bouleversement. "If he continues to live in this world, it is only in order to annihilate it all the more surely. A revolutionary despises everything doctrinaire, and renounces the science and knowledge of this world in order to leave it to future generations; he knows but one science: that of destruction. For that, and that only, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, and even medicine. For the same purpose he studies day and night living science—men, their character, positions, and all the conditions of the existing social order in all imaginary spheres. The object remains always the same: the quickest and most effective way possible of destroying the existing order" (§§ 2, 3). "For him exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction, the reward of revolution. Day and night he must have but one thought—inexorable destruction" (§ 6). "For the purpose of irrevocable destruction a revolutionary can, and may, often live in the midst of society and appear to have the most complete indifference as to his surroundings. A revolutionary may penetrate everywhere, into high society, among the nobility, among shopkeepers, into the military, official, or literary world, into the 'third section' [the secret police], and even into the Imperial palace" (§ 14). The catechism divides society into several categories: those in the first of these categories are condemned to death without delay. "In the first place we must put out of the world those who stand most in the way of the revolutionary organisation and its work" (§ 16). The members of the second category are to be allowed to live "provisionally," in order that, "by a series of abominable deeds they may drive the people into unceasing revolt" (§ 17). The third class, the rich and influential, must be exploited for the sake of the revolution, and made to become "our slaves." With the fourth class, Liberals of various shades of opinion, arrangements must be made on the basis of their programme, they must be initiated and compromised, and made use of for the perturbation of the State. The fifth class, the doctrinaires, must be urged forward; while the sixth and most important class consists of the women, for making use of whom for the purposes of the revolution Netschajew gives explicit directions. It is the tactics of the Jesuits in all their details that are here recommended for the inauguration of the most moral ordering of the universe. The last section of the catechism, which treats of the duty of the People's Tribunal Society towards the people, reads: "The Society has no other purpose but the complete emancipation and happiness of the people, i. e., of hardworking humanity. But proceeding from the conviction that this emancipation and this happiness can only be reached by means of an all-destroying popular revolution, the Society will use every effort and every means to heighten and increase the evils and sorrows which at length will wear out the patience of the people and encourage an insurrection en masse. By a popular revolution the Society does not mean a movement regulated according to the classic patterns of the West, which is always restrained in face of property and of the traditional social order of so-called civilisation and morality, and which has hitherto been limited merely to exchanging one form of politics for another, and at most to founding a so-called revolutionary State. The only revolution that can do any good to the people is that which utterly annihilates every political idea. With this end in view, the People's Tribunal has no intention of imposing on the people an organisation coming from above. The future organisation will, without doubt, proceed from the movement and life of the people; but that is the business of future generations. Our task is terrible, inexorable, and universal destruction."
The views thus expressed are quite in harmony with what Netschajew has written about revolutionary action in the writings mentioned above. "Words," he exclaims, "have no value for us, unless followed at once by action. But all is not action that is so-called: for example, the modest and too-cautious organisation of secret societies without external announcements to outsiders is in our eyes merely ridiculous and intolerable child's-play. By external announcements we mean a series of actions that positively destroy something—a person, a cause, a condition that hinders the emancipation of the people. Without sparing our lives, we must break into the life of the people with a series of rash, even senseless, actions, and inspire them with a belief in their powers, awake them, unite them, and lead them on to the triumph of their cause."
The tendency which here develops into the recommendation of violence should be carefully noticed; outrage is no longer recommended, because the purposes of revolution can be served thereby directly, but indirectly, as a kind of sanguinary advertisement to the indolent masses, who would thus have their attention drawn to the theory by such terrible events. That is the diabolical basis of the "propaganda of action," which was defined by another follower of Bakunin—Paul Brousse, the man of the Jura Federation (see the chapter on "The Spread of Anarchy"). "Deeds," says Brousse, "are talked of on all sides; the indifferent masses inquire about their origin, and thus pay attention to the new doctrine, and discuss it. Let men once get as far as this, and it is not hard to win over many of them." Therefore he recommended revolution and outrage, not in order to upset existing society thereby, but for the purpose of the "propaganda." Brousse only had to borrow the thought, as we see, from Netschajew; and it is not difficult to say whence the latter got it. The opinion which ascribes the authorship of the Catechism of Revolution, and of the other writings above mentioned not to Netschajew but to Bakunin himself, has perhaps some foundation. But it matters little who is the author of these works. Netschajew is thoroughly imbued with his master's spirit, and he might even say to him (p. 115):
". . . What thou hast thought in thy mind That I do, that I perform.
And e'en though years may pass away I never rest, until to fact Is changed the word that thou did'st say, 'T is thine to think and mine to act.
Thou art the judge, the headsman I; And as a servant I obey; The sentence which thou dost imply, E'en though unjust, I never stay.
In ancient Rome, a lictor dark An axe before the consul bore; Thou hast a lictor too, but mark! The axe comes after, not before.
I am thy lictor; and alway With bare, bright axe behind thee tread; I am the deed, be what it may, Begotten from thy thought unsaid."
In the year 1869 a sudden end was put to Netschajew's activity in Russia. Among his most trusted friends in Moscow was a certain Iwanow, one of the most respected and influential members of the secret society. Iwanow himself lived in ascetic seclusion, and in his leisure time gave the peasants instruction gratis, establishing classes of poor students, and so forth. He was a fanatic in his belief in the social revolution. He had also established cheap eating-houses for poor students, and one day these were closed by the police, and their founder vanished, because Netschajew had placarded revolutionary appeals in them. In despair at this, Iwanow wished to retire from the secret society. Netschajew, believing that he might betray its secrets, enticed Iwanow one evening into a remote garden, and with the help of two fellow-conspirators, Pryow and Nicolajew, shot him, and threw the corpse into a pond. He then fled, and arrived safely in Switzerland, where, in conjunction with Bakunin, he produced the literary efforts referred to above. Soon, however, he quarrelled with Bakunin, owing to certain sharp practices of which he was guilty, went to London, edited a paper called The Commonwealth (Die Giemeinde), in which he bitterly attacked his former master, and at last, in 1872, was handed over to Russia at the request of the Russian Government. Since then nothing more was heard of him; Netschajew disappeared, like the demon in a pantomime, "down below."
CHAPTER V
PETER KROPOTKIN AND HIS SCHOOL
Biography — Kropotkin's Main Views — Anarchist Communism and the "Economics of the Heap" (tas) — Kropotkin's Relation to the Propaganda of Action — Elisée Reclus: his Character and Anarchist Writings — Jean Grave — Daniel Saurin's Order through Anarchy — Louise Michel and G. Eliévant — A. Hamon and the Psychology of Anarchism — Charles Malato and other French Writers on Anarchist Communism — The Italians: Cafiero, Merlino, and Malatesta.
"Seek not to found your comfort and freedom on the servitude of another; so long as you rule others, you will never be free yourself. Increase your power of production by studying nature; your powers will grow a thousandfold, if you put them at the service of Humanity. Free the individual: for without the freedom of the individual, it is impossible for society to become free. If you wish to emancipate yourselves, set not your hope on any help from this life or the next: help yourselves! Next you must free yourselves from all your religious and political prejudices. Be free men and trust the nature of a free man: all his faults proceed from the power which he exercises over his own kind or under which he groans."—P. Kropotkin.
ne more Russian, a déclassé, as Bakunin was, has exercised considerable influence on the development of modern Anarchism; and, in fact, although he has introduced but few new doctrines into it, has made, in the truest sense, a school of his own. Kropotkin, is regarded everywhere as the father of "Anarchist Communism," which is, to some extent, directly opposed both to the collectivist and evolutionist Anarchism of Proudhon and to the other philosophic and individual Anarchism of Stirner. In future we must carefully discriminate between these two directions of individual and communal Anarchism; moreover they are sharply distinguished not only in their intellectual but also their actual form. The former tendency seems more adapted to the Teutonic races in Germany, England, and America, whilst the Anarchists of the Romance nations, but especially the French, are devoted to the latter—the communist doctrine of Kropotkin.
Peter Alexandriewitsch Kropotkin is a descendant of the royal house of the Ruriks, and it used to be said in jest in the revolutionary circles of St. Petersburg that he had more right to the Russian throne than the Czar Alexander II., who was only a German. Born at Moscow in 1842, he was first a page at court, then an officer in the Amur Cossacks, and next, Chamberlain to the Czarina. In this atmosphere grew up the man who is now developing a perfectly feverish activity not only in the realm of intellect and science, but also in propaganda of the most destructive character. Prince Kropotkin studied mathematics in his youth at the High School, and during his extensive travels, which led him to Siberia and even to China, acquired a great knowledge of geography. The dreaded Anarchist is and has always been active as a writer of geographical and geological works, and enjoys a considerable reputation in these sciences, apart from his activity as a Socialist teacher and agitator. During a journey to Switzerland and Belgium in the year 1872, Prince Kropotkin became more closely connected with the "International," and especially with men of Bakunin's school; and so shortly as a year later we find him in his native land compromised and arrested because of Nihilist intrigues. He spent three years as a prisoner in the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, where, however, he was allowed to pursue his scientific studies.[35] In the year 1876 he succeeded in escaping from there and reaching Switzerland. Here Kropotkin devoted himself to a feverish activity in the service of the new doctrines by which he is known. In Geneva he immediately joined the leaders of the Anarchist agitation known as the "Jurassic Union" (see the chapter on the "Spread of Anarchy"), founded the paper Révolt, and greatly assisted in extending the Union so widely in Switzerland and the South of France. After a short stay in England we find him at the beginning of the eighties in France, busy here and there with the founding of "groups," delivery of lectures, and so forth. In the sensational Anarchist trial at Lyons in 1883 he was also involved, and was condemned to five years' imprisonment upon his own confession of having been the "intellectual instigator" of the bloody demonstrations and riots at Montceau-les-Mines and Lyons in 1882. Kropotkin was, however, set free after only three years' imprisonment, and betook himself to London, where he has lived till recently.[36] But the more watchful supervision of Anarchists that has been exercised since the murder of President Sadi Carnot, appears to have disgusted him with London, for his present place of abode is not known.
Kropotkin's Anarchism rests upon the most scientific and humane foundations, and yet assumes the most unscientific and brutal forms. To him the Anarchist theory appears to be nothing but a necessary adaptation of social science to that modern tendency in all other sciences which, leaving on one side abstract and collective generality, turn to the individual, as, e. g., the cellular theory, the study of molecular forces, and so on. Just as all great discoveries of modern science have proceeded by rejecting the unfruitful deductive method and beginning to build up from below, so also, Kropotkin maintains, society must be built up afresh by realising all power, all reality, all purpose in individuals, and can only arise again new-born synthetically, from the free grouping of these individuals. With unconscious self-irony, Kropotkin remarks that he would like to call this system the "synthetic," if Herbert Spencer had not already applied that name "to another system." Anyone who would conclude from this that the learned prince would build up scientifically a well-founded system, as his earlier predecessors tried to do, would be mistaken. With a few exceptions, Kropotkin has only published short works, though certainly numerous, in which he uses epithets rather than arguments, and those in an intentionally trivial tone; indeed he sometimes mocks at the "wise and learned theorists," and regards one deed as worth more than a thousand books.[37] The same internal contrast is seen in him in another direction. He is apparently a philanthropist of the purest water, wishing to see the foundation of an universal brotherhood of humanity, based upon what he regards as the innate feeling of solidarity in man; we seem to see in this Proudhon's "justice," Comte's "love," in short, the moral order of the world, however materialist Kropotkin may be in action, and however much he may deny all moral element therein. But how does he mean to bring about this moral order? By any means that is suitable, even by the sanguinary "propaganda of action," and finally by the re-establishment of the actual conditions of the primeval ape-man, or tribal life on the level of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.
For Kropotkin Anarchy consists in (1) the liberation of the producer from the yoke of capital, in production in common, and the free enjoyment of all products of common work; (2) in freedom from any yoke of government, in the free development of individuals in groups, of groups in federations, in free organisation rising from the simple to the complex according to men's needs and mutual endeavours; and (3) in liberation from religious morality, and a free morality without duty or sanctions proceeding and becoming customary from the life of the community itself.[38]
The postulate of the abolition of the authority of the State is the well-known, old stock proposal of the Anarchists. But it is noticeable that Kropotkin attacks the State among other things, because it does not carry out the maxim of laisser faire so often imposed upon it by another party. Kropotkin thinks that the State acts rather on the principle of not laisser faire, and is always intervening in favour of the exploiter as against the exploited (Les Temps Nouveaux, p. 46). The State is accordingly a purely civic idea (l'idée bourgeoise), utterly rotten and decaying, only held together by the plague of laws. All law and dominion, including parliamentary government, must therefore be put aside, and be replaced by the "system of no government" and free arrangement (la libre entente). Kropotkin sees everywhere already, even at present in public, and especially in economic life, germs of this free understanding or entente, in which government never intervenes; what, for example, in isolated cases two railway companies do in making a free arrangement about fares and time-tables, is to be the universal form of society.
In this society the feeling of solidarity alone, which Kropotkin assumes as a sort of à priori axiom of society, will determine men's actions: "Each must retain the right of acting as he thinks best, and the right of society to punish any one for a social action in any way must be denied...." "We are not afraid of doing without judges and their verdicts," says he, in La Morale Anarchiste. "With Guyon we renounce each and every approval of morality or any duties to morality. We do not shrink from saying: Do what pleases you! Act as you think fit! for we are convinced that the great majority of mankind, in proportion to their enlightenment and to the completeness with which they throw off their present fetters, will always act in a manner beneficial to society—just as we are certain that some day or other a child will walk upon its two feet and not on all fours, because it is born of parents that belong to the genus homo." But the comparison is incorrect. There are, as a matter of fact, degenerate children of human kind who, deprived of all understanding, creep on all fours quite unconcernedly. Equally insufficient is another proof adduced by Kropotkin, who is a great friend of animals, from the animal world. Looking around among animals, he finds in them also an innate feeling of sympathy with their own species, expressed in mutual assistance in time of need or danger. By this he wishes to prove that men likewise would act in the same way to their fellow-men merely from the feeling of solidarity, and without laws or government. Elsewhere certainly, in a later work, he has to confess that there are among men an enormous number of individuals who do not understand that the welfare of the individual is identical with that of the race. But supposing that man were exactly like the animals, then—speaking in Kropotkin's manner—he would stand no higher in morality than they. But then do we really find that, in the animal world, the number of cases in which they act from a feeling of solidarity is greater than those in which they simply make use of brute force or blind want of forethought, and have animals the sense to do away with organised solidarity, the State, in order to replace it by something unorganised and consequently less valuable?
But Prince Kropotkin, who appears to be such a stern materialist, is a very enthusiast, who gives way to utter self-deception as to human nature. "We do not want to be governed!" he says; "and do we not thereby declare that we ourselves wish to rule no one? We do not wish to be deceived; we always would hear nothing but the truth. Do we not declare by this that we ourselves wish to deceive no one, and that we promise to speak always the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?" Who can fail to recognise here the exact opposite to the real facts of the case? The Anarchists, and especially those who acknowledge Kropotkin as their highest "authority," do not wish force used against them, yet use it themselves; they do not wish to be killed, and yet kill others. Can there be a stronger refutation of Anarchist morality?
Kropotkin has finally broken with the Communism of Proudhon, and placed Anarchist Communism in its stead. Proudhon, and, to a certain extent, Bakunin also—who always called himself a Collectivist, and repelled the charge of Communism[39]—certainly attacked property as rente or profit derived from the appropriation of the forces of nature; but they have also not only not denied the right to individual possession of property, but even sought to make it general. Everyone should become a possessor of property; only land and the means of labour, which must be accessible to all, may not be appropriated; they are collective property, and are applied to employment in a proportion equal to the quotient of the amount of land at disposal, or the means of production on the one hand and the number of members of free "groups" on the other. We have already seen to what a complicated organisation of economic life this led in the case of Proudhon's theory; but he did not entrust the maintenance of this economic order to the strong hand of the State, but believed that life, when once brought into equilibrium or "balance," could never fall away from it again. We will not repeat here what an illusion is contained in this. Collectivism left to itself must degenerate again at once into a state of economic inequality, and accordingly those Collectivists who make the maintenance of economic equilibrium the business of the State, possess at least the merit of consistency. But then the very foundation idea of Anarchism is hereby lost.
This irreconcilable contradiction between Anarchism and Collectivism decided Kropotkin to give up the latter entirely, and to set up in its stead Anarchist Communism, thus attaching himself to the lines already indicated by Hess and Grün. He criticised unsparingly (in La Conquête du Pain and Le Salariat) every system of reward or wages, whether based on Saint-Simon's principle of "To each according to his capacity, and to every capacity according to its results"; or on Proudhon's rule, "to each according to his powers, to each according to his needs." With the reward of labour he rejects the period of labour, possession even in the form of Collective possession, and also the payment of labour (les bons du travail), equally with other forms of property, capital, or exploitation. He even attacks the theory of the full result of labour that ought to accrue to every labourer, this most stalwart hobby-horse of Socialism. "It would mean the annihilation of the race," he says, "if the mother would not sacrifice her life to save the life of her children; if man would not give where he could expect no recompense."
Kropotkin's motto, that has been so eagerly accepted by the Anarchists of Romance nationality, is on the contrary: "Everything belongs to all," tout est à tous; i. e., no one is any longer a possessor; if after the Revolution all goods and property were expropriated and given back to the community, then everybody would take what he pleased, according to his needs. Anyone might just as well appropriate the land as another object or commodity. "Heap together all the means of life, and let them be divided according to each man's need," he cries[40]; "let each choose freely from this heap everything of which there is a superfluity, and let only those commodities be divided of which there might be some lack. That is a solution of the problem according to the wish of the people." Again, "free choice from the heap in all means of life that are abundant, proper division (rationement) of all those things the production of which is limited; division according to needs, with special regard to children, old people, and the weak generally. The enjoyment of all this not in a social feeding-institution (dans la marmite sociale), but at home in the family circle with our friends, according to the taste of the individual, that is the ideal of the masses, whose mouthpiece we are."
It is interesting to see how all attempts to do away with individual property come back again at once in thought to that same property, and in opposition Proudhon might on this basis write a very pretty retort to What is Property? Kropotkin wishes first of all a general expropriation, and then each person is to have what he likes. But what is the use of an expropriation, which only means one thing, if a division to all is to follow it? Would it not be simpler as the inauguration of Anarchist Communism, to do away with the guarantee of property at once, and then to watch quietly and see how individuals deprived each other of their possessions? The result would be just the same, but there is a well-understood contradiction in first declaring all property as a common possession—in which the reality of society which Kropotkin denies is thereby recognised—and then giving to each person the right to dispose as he pleases of everything. Stirner was at least logical when he declared: "All belongs to me!" As a matter of fact the statements, "All belongs to me," "All belongs to all," "Nothing belongs to me," and "Nothing belongs to all," are perfectly identical. The difference between all these conceptions of property according to the principles of individualist or Communist Anarchism, and the relations of property as they exist to-day, merely reduces itself to this, that with us the State affords the guarantee of property, while Anarchy, at most, places the guarantee of it in free association or agreement, proceeding from a "group" or a "union of egotists." Here we come face to face with the purely formal question of whether right is derived from convention or compulsion; but as regards individual property as such no alteration is thereby made.
But Kropotkin's "economics of the heap" (la mise au tas, la prise au tas) has another fault besides this matter of logic. Its talented inventor proceeds from two assumptions, which characterise him as a Utopian of the first water; on the one hand the old and incorrect assumption of the inexhaustible productivity of the earth, and on the other the assumption of the innate solidarity of mankind.
Kropotkin maintains that production now already outweighs consumption, and that the former is growing with unsuspected rapidity together with scientific insight into the methods of production and with freedom of production. A piece of land which to-day is cultivated by ten persons, and feeds one hundred, would with rational cultivation feed one thousand people, and with the general employment of machinery would only require five persons to cultivate it. In fact, diminution of labour, with increase of production under rational cultivation, is perhaps the quintessence of Kropotkin's argument. Men will then quickly leave the less productive countries to settle in the most suitable and most productive districts, and from these they will extract with proportionately little labour a never-ending superfluity, so that the economic arrangement proposed by Kropotkin will become not only possible, but there will even be too much to distribute. Here again we have the Land of Idleness in the disguise of science, the millennium of the revolution. Let us listen to the description of this return to Paradise in Kropotkin's own words:
"The workers will [after the Revolution] go away from the city and return to the country. With the help of machinery which will enable the weakest among us to support it, they will introduce the revolution into the methods of cultivation, as they had previously with the ideas and conditions, of those who were before but slaves. Here hundreds of acres will be covered with glass houses, and men and women will tend with gentle hands the young plants. Elsewhere hundreds of acres will be cleared and broken up by machinery worked by steam, improved by manures and enriched by phosphates. Laughing troops of workers will in due time cover these fields with seeds, guided in their work and in their experiments by those who understand agriculture, but all of them continually animated by the powerful and practical spirit of a people that has waked up from a long sleep and sees before it the happiness of all, that light-house of humanity shedding its rays afar. And in two or three months an early harvest will relieve their most pressing needs, and provide with food a people who after centuries of silent hope will at last be able to satisfy its hunger or eat as its appetite desires. Meanwhile the popular genius, the genius of a people that is rising and knows its own requirements, will seek new means of production which only need the test of experiment in order to come into general use. Attempts will be made to concentrate light, that well-known factor in agriculture, which in the latitude of Yakutsk ripens barley in forty-five days, and to produce it artificially, and with light rival heat in promoting the growth of plants. Some genius of the future will invent an instrument to guide the rays of the sun, and compel them to do work without it being necessary to seek in the depths of the earth for the heat contained in coal. Efforts will be made to water the ground with solutions of minute organisms—an idea of yesterday that will make it possible to introduce into the ground the little living cells that are necessary for plants in order to feed the young roots, and to decompose the component parts of the earth, and make them fit to be assimilated." Kropotkin adds, rendering criticism unnecessary: "We shall make experiments, but we need go no farther, for we should enter upon the realms of romance."
We need not now consider whether the statement that production is already surpassing the capacity of consumption is really quite true; the vast majority of economists is of a different opinion. But even if it were so, and if production should further increase, Kropotkin himself admits that the necessary presupposition of abundant production is rational cultivation. But the first condition of such rational agriculture is fixed organisation. This condition is to-day fulfilled; but in Kropotkin's scheme there would only be cultivation by robbery, and that invariably leads at last to want, and a lack of production. Kropotkin has seen this himself, for otherwise his proposal to distribute those products, the growth of which is limited, and of which there might be a lack, would be most superfluous; for in the land of lotus-eaters there is no want.
This admission that such a case might happen is, however, not only a relapse from the promised land of the future into the sober reality of to-day, but it is the negation of Anarchy. Where is the line to be drawn between the superfluous and the non-superfluous? Who is to draw it, and still more, who would recognise it? Who will undertake the distribution, and who will respect it? Every form of authority is abolished, and no one is pledged to anything. What if I simply refuse to recognise the limits made by the Commission of Distribution or to obey their decisions? Will anyone compel me? In that case Anarchy would be a fraud; but if I am allowed to do as I like, distribution is impossible and Communism a fraud.
From this dilemma Kropotkin has endeavoured to extricate himself, in the fashion of certain celebrated examples, by invoking a deus ex machina. Comte called it love, Proudhon justice, and Kropotkin calls it "the solidarity of the human race,"—three different words, but they imply one and the same thing: the moral order of the universe—a dogma which anyone may believe or not, as he likes. Kropotkin assures us that, when once the great revolution has taken place, human solidarity will arise like a phœnix from the smoking ashes of the old order. We do not consider ourselves better or worse than other men, but we doubt very seriously whether we ourselves, if confronted on the one hand by want, and on the other by Kropotkin's famous "heap of commodities," would give up the chief necessaries of life (and it is these in which want must first be felt, just because they are the most necessary) merely out of a feeling of solidarity with a man who next moment, if he is stronger than I, might turn me out of my house, kill me, or part with my books or pictures as if they were his own, with impunity. This sort of Communism would only be possible under the rule of a despotic authority, such as the social-democratic State of the future must inevitably possess; but it would never be possible for a libre entente of perfectly free individuals; "free" men in the Anarchist sense will never let themselves be made equal and never have done so.
But Kropotkin thinks otherwise. He goes back to those dear, good, and too happy savages of Rousseau, and tells us[41] that primitive peoples, so long as they submit to no authority but live in Anarchy, lead a most enviably happy life. "Apart from the occurrences of natural forces, such as sudden changes of weather, earthquakes, frost, etc., and apart from war and accidents, primitive races lead a rich and full life out of their own resources, following their own wishes, at the cost of the minimum of labour. Read the descriptions left by the great voyagers of early centuries, read certain modern records of travel, and you will see that where society has not yet sunk under the yoke of priests and warriors, plenty prevails among savages. Like gregarious birds they spend the morning in common labour; in the evening they rest in common and enjoy themselves. They have none of the troubles of life known to the proletariat in the great centres of industry of our time. Misery only overtakes them when they fall under the yoke of some form of authority."
Here we have the golden age existing before any form of society, just as previously we heard the description of a golden age after the fall of forms of society, and that the misery of this "cursed civilisation" can only be removed by doing away with such a society and returning again to the same primitive condition. It is the same old tale of the "social-contract" theory to which our Anarchists one and all invariably recur after manifold scientific toil and trouble. In fact this primitive paradise described by Kropotkin is just as much a figment of his imagination as the Anarchist paradise of the future. He speaks of early travellers. Now, as regards the ethnographic observations of old travellers, they are a very doubtful source of information. Formerly it was frequently declared off-hand that this or that people had no idea of religion or lived in Anarchy. The reason was that travellers completely underrated primitive forms in comparison with their own preconceived religious or political ideas and regarded them as naught. Exact observations have shown that a complete lack of all religious conceptions is as rare in primitive races as complete lack of all social organisation or form of authority. Kropotkin unfortunately does not mention the "certain new travellers" in whose books he has read those descriptions of the happy state of primitive peoples produced by Anarchy. As far as we know, Anarchy in the proper sense can only be stated of a very small number of races like the Tierra del Fuegans, the Eskimos, etc.; but the life of these people is, to their disadvantage, exceedingly different from the fancied paradise of Kropotkin. If we read the unanimous descriptions given by Fitzroy, Darwin, Topinard, and others about the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, we shall very quickly abjure our belief—if we ever held it—that they lead such an Eden-like existence as Kropotkin's Anarchist savages. We find, rather, misery and hunger as permanent conditions, that appear here as consequences of Anarchy, and the blame cannot be laid entirely upon the lack of fertility of the soil. Narborough[42] says of the Tierra del Fuegans: "If any desire for civilisation arose, the forests that cover the country would not be an obstacle thereto, for in many parts there appear open, grassy spots, which are frequently regarded by seamen as the remnants of attempts at agriculture by the Spaniards." But in general the statements of all travellers and ethnographers agree in showing that the existence of these so-called "savages" is a continual and bitter struggle against nature and against each other for the barest necessaries of life, and that if hunger is not a constant guest, their mode of living is a very irregular alternation between surfeit and prolonged fast. How difficult it is to rear children among these primitive people and even among others more advanced in civilisation is proved by the terrible custom, common to all parts of the globe, of infanticide, which has no other object than artificial selection for breeding in view of the harsh conditions of existence. Persons who are regarded by the community only as mouths to feed and not as actual workers, the old and weak, are simply killed off by many races—even by those who, in other respects, do not stand upon a low level; and the murder of the parents and the aged appears to be as widespread among primitive races as infanticide. But these are facts which not only contradict the Anarchist assumption of a golden age of Anarchy, but still more contradict that of an innate feeling of solidarity in the human race.
A further remark remains to be made as to Kropotkin's attitude toward the "propaganda of action." It is often said that he rejects it. But that is quite contrary to the facts. In his Psychology of Revolution (L'Esprit de Révolte, p. 7) he takes up quite a decisive attitude in reply to the question how words must be translated into deeds: "The answer is easy," says he; "it is action, the continual, incessantly renewed action of the minority that will produce this transformation. Courage, devotion, self-sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, subjection, and terror. What forms is action to take? Any form—as different as are circumstances, means, and temperaments. Sometimes arousing sorrow, sometimes scorn, but always bold; sometimes isolated, sometimes in common, it despises no means ready to hand, it neglects no opportunity of public life to propagate discontent, and to clothe it in words, to arouse hatred against the exploiter, to make the ruling powers ridiculous, to show their weakness, and ever to excite audacity, the spirit of revolt, by the preaching of example. If a feeling of revolution awakes in a country, and the spirit of open revolt is already sufficiently alive among the masses to break out in tumultuous disorders in the streets, émeutes and risings,—then it is 'action' alone by which the minority can create this feeling of independence and that atmosphere of audacity without which no revolution can be completed. Men of courage who do not stop at words but seek to transform them into deeds, pure characters for whom the action and the idea are inseparable, who prefer prison, exile, or death, rather than a life not in accordance with their principles, fearless men, who know what must be risked in order to win success,—those are the devoted outposts who begin the battle long before the masses are sufficiently moved to unfurl the standard of insurrection, and to march sword in hand to the conquest of their rights. Amid complaints, speeches, theoretical discussions, an act of personal or general revolt takes place. It cannot be otherwise than that the great mass at first remains indifferent; those especially who admire the courage of the person or group that took the initiative will apparently follow the wise and prudent in hastening to describe this act as folly, and in speaking of the fools and hot-headed people who compromise everything. These wise and prudent ones had fully calculated that their party, if it slowly pursued its objects, would perhaps have conquered the world in one, two, or three centuries, and now the unforeseen intrudes! The unforeseen is that which was not foreseen by the wise and prudent. But those who know history and can lay claim to any well-ordered reasoning power, however small, know quite well that a theoretical propaganda of revolution must necessarily be translated into action long before theorists have decided that the time for it has come. None the less the theorists are enraged with the 'fools' and excommunicate and ban them. But the fools find sympathy, the mass of the people secretly applaud their boldness, and they find imitators. In proportion as the first of them fill the prisons, others come forward to continue their work. The acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, increase. Indifference becomes impossible. Those who at first only asked what on earth the fools meant, are compelled to take them seriously, to discuss their ideas, and to take sides for or against. By acts which are done under the notice of the people, the new idea communicates itself to men's minds and finds adherents. One such act makes in a few days more proselytes than thousands of books."
This is precisely the view of the followers of Bakunin, only obscured and founded on a psychological basis.
Kropotkin forms the centre of a large number of Anarchist authors, who are working at the development or the popularising of Anarchist theory on the same lines as he is doing. From the mass of unimportant writers two rise up prominently, both essentially differing one from the other, Elisée Reclus, the savant, and Jean Grave, editor of the Révolte.
Jean Jacques Elisée Reclus[43] was born on March 15, 1830, at Ste. Foy la Grande, in the Gironde, the son of a Protestant minister. He was the eldest but one of twelve children, and early became acquainted with want and distress, a circumstance which, in conjunction with his warm and affectionate heart, sufficiently explains his later social views. Educated in Rhenish Prussia, he attended the Protestant Faculty at Montauban, in Southern France, and then the University of Berlin, where he studied geography under Ritter. At present Reclus is regarded as one of the best geographers, and is the author of the famous and much admired Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, in nineteen volumes, and of the great popular physical geography La Terre, which has also been translated into German. His student life and also his stay at Berlin coincided with the stormy period of the Revolution of 1848, and Reclus eagerly accepted the views of the political and social Radicalism of that day. The coup d'état of December 2, 1851, compelled him to leave France; he fled to England, visited Ireland, and then from 1852 to 1857 travelled in the United States, North America, Central America, and Colombia. Returning to Paris, he devoted himself to a scientific arrangement of his studies during his travels, but at the same time took a more and more active part in the social and political movements of the day. Thus he was one of the first authors in France who eagerly supported the war of the Northern States of America for freedom, and defended Lincoln. When the American Minister in Paris wished to express his recognition to the savant, then living in extremely modest circumstances, by the present of a considerable sum of money, Reclus angrily rejected it. During the siege of Paris in 1870, Elisée Reclus joined the National Guard, and was one of the crew of the balloon under Nadar who endeavoured to convey news outside Paris. As a member of the International Association of Workmen, he published in the Cri du Peuple, at the time of the outbreak of the 18th March, 1871, a hostile manifesto against the Government at Versailles. Still belonging to the National Guard, which had now risen, he took part in a reconnaissance on the plateau of Chatillon, in which he was taken prisoner on the 5th of April. After seven months' imprisonment in Brest, during which he taught his fellow-prisoners mathematics, the court-martial in St. Germain condemned him, on 16th November, 1871, to be transported. This sentence caused a great outcry in scientific circles, and from different quarters, especially from eminent English statesmen and men of letters, among them being Darwin, Wallace, and Lord Amberley, the President of the French Republic was urged to mitigate his punishment. Accordingly, Thiers commuted the sentence of transportation on 4th January, 1872, to one of simple banishment. Reclus then proceeded to Lugano, but soon afterwards lost his young wife there, whom he loved passionately, and who had followed him into banishment. Later on he went to Switzerland, where he settled at Clarens, near Montreux, on the Lake of Geneva, and devoted himself again to Communist and geographical studies. In 1879, Reclus returned to Paris, was appointed in 1892 Professor of Geography at Brussels, but in 1893 was again deprived of his post on account of Anarchist outrages, in which he was quite unjustly supposed to be implicated. The students thereupon left the university, and founded a free university, in which Reclus is at present a professor.
Elisée Reclus's Anarchism is explained externally not only by his intimate friendship with Kropotkin, but still more from his connexion with an "Anarchist family," for his brother, the eminent anthropologist Elié, and several of his nephews as well as their wives are devoted adherents of Anarchism. But while the younger members of the Reclus family are more closely connected with the "propaganda of action" (the engineer Paul Reclus was accused of being an accomplice of Vaillant), the older members, especially Elisée, are learned dreamers who have nothing in common with the folly of the dynamitard. "The idea of Anarchism is beautiful, is great," says Elisée, "but these miscreants sully our teaching: he who calls himself an Anarchist should be one of a good and gentle sort. It is a mistake to believe that the Anarchist idea can be promoted by acts of barbarity." And in the preface to the last volume of his Universal Geography he says of his travels: "I have everywhere found myself at home, in my own country, among men, my brothers. I have never allowed myself to be carried away by sentiment, except that of sympathy and respect for all the inhabitants of the one great Fatherland. On this round earth that revolves so rapidly in space, a grain of sand amid infinity, is it worth while for us to hate one another?"
Reclus has no special doctrine, but shares generally the views of his friend Kropotkin, although his greater scientific insight on many points leads him to incline rather to the Collectivism of Proudhon and Bakunin. The "economy of the heap" (tas) appears to Reclus, at any rate in the province of agriculture, to be unworkable. He prefers a distribution of land among individuals, family groups, and communities, according to the proposition of individual and collective power of labour. "The moment a piece of landed property surpasses the limits which can be properly cultivated, the holder should have no right to claim the surplus for himself; it will fall to the share of another worker." The Russian mir is always before his thoughts as the patron of peasant organisation. Nothing is more remarkable than the affection of the Anarchist followers of Proudhon and Bakunin for the Russian mir system. It would be a meritorious piece of sociological work to show the fundamental errors which underlie the agricultural systems that have been tried and have failed in modern attempts to revive them. The endeavour to revive them is now so general that it is no longer to be wondered at that we see those who are apparently most extreme, and even Anarchists, following the same reactionary stream as the Socialist Catholics and their followers. The folly of their proceedings is best seen in those people who angrily reject a revival of the guilds, but by no means object to the revival of the old village communism, which implies a far earlier stage of development. We are, however, digressing, but must add one further remark. The Anarchists are accustomed to say that their free economic organisation will quite absorb and devour politics, authority, and government, so that nothing of them remains; while, on the other hand, they represent the mir as the pattern of such an organisation. But how comes it that, in the very country where the mir, this "just" village communism, exists, in Russia itself, on the one hand famine is never absent,[44] and on the other the Czar's bureaucracy and Cossack tyranny flourish so exceedingly, and that the peasant population itself is the most powerful support of the arbitrary rule of their "Little Father," the Czar?
It might seem surprising that a savant of Reclus's calibre does not himself perceive a refutation that is so obvious. But Reclus is a type: who does not know the figure—even here not seldom seen—of the earnest savant, full of the purest love and devotion for mankind, who dabbles in politics in his leisure hours? It is as if in this time of leisure his spirit seeks to free itself from the severe discipline of his professional life. The man who, in his capacity as a doctor, a geographer, or physicist, would never allow subjective influences to trouble his method, deals with politics quite apart, as if there were not also a science of politics that, like any other science, regards freedom from the subjective standpoint, or from love and hatred as the first condition of the validity of its propositions. Reclus, the celebrated geographer, goes so far, as a politician, as to deny the value of political economy and to assert that every workman knows more, and is better acquainted with social laws, than the learned economist.
On the other hand, it is just this circumstance that gives this aged savant an importance in Anarchist theory, to which the originality and the teaching of his Anarchist writings could give him no claim. The pamphlet Evolution and Revolution is nothing but a rechauffé of the well-known commonplaces of Anarchism; but the noble personality of Reclus that stands out before us at every sentence, the honourable intention, the high moral desire, the inspired hope which make even the errors of opponents so touching, give the little book the same importance for his followers as the Contrat Social once possessed, and makes his decoction the quintessence of Anarchist thought, in its noblest, purest, and also—as a consequence—its most nebulous form.
A man of quite a different stamp is Jean Grave, the soul of the chief Anarchist organ, the Parisian Révolte, which originated from the earlier paper, the Révolte of Kropotkin, which appeared previously in Geneva, and was suppressed there in 1885. Among the multitude of déclassés who gave up their millions, their rank, and their estates in order to preach Anarchy, Grave has been, since Proudhon, the only member of the proletariat who has made any important contributions to the theoretical edifice of the new doctrine. He was first a cobbler and then a printer, before becoming editor of the Parisian weekly journal.
Grave is the Netschajew of Kropotkin. In the year 1883 he published, under the name of Jehan Levagre, a production entitled Publication du Groupe de se et 43e Arrondissements, wherein he maintained the thesis that public propaganda must serve the secret "propaganda of action" as a means of defence; it must offer it the means of action, namely, men, money, and influence; and especially must contribute to place these actions in the right light by commenting upon them. That is also the method in which Grave edits the Révolte. He is every inch the man of action, both in his journal and in his other writings, most of all in his book La Société Mourante et l'Anarchie (printed in London; the original edition is suppressed in France), which in 1894 brought upon its author a sentence of two years' imprisonment on account of its provocative tone. On the other hand, in his latest work, La Société au Lendemain de la Révolution (3d ed., Paris, 1893), Grave endeavours not only to write as a theorist, but has even sketched a definite picture of the Anarchist paradise. Adorned with the exterior drapery of the modern doctrine of descent and by the influence of H. Spencer, who has been totally misunderstood by Grave as by all other Anarchists, the teaching of Kropotkin here meets us without essential addition, but clear and precise. Grave only admits an organisation in the society of the future in the sense of a friendly agreement, formed by the identity of interests among individuals who group themselves together for the common execution of some task. These societies, which are formed and dissolved again merely according to the needs of the moment, are the alpha and omega of social organisation. From the group will proceed the production of shoes and the construction of further railways; there may be co-operation of groups, but no centralisation in the shape of commissions, delegations, or similar "parasitic" institutions. The ticklish question of the position of children under Anarchy is solved (with the resolute optimism peculiar to Grave) by a libre entente. Naturally there can be no right to any child, since there will be at most merely a "family group," and not a family. Those who wish to nurse and look after their children can, of course, do so; and those who do not wish to, can probably find some enthusiast who will with pleasure relieve them of the burden of humanity to which they have certainly given life, but which concerns them no more from the moment when the umbilical cord between mother and child is severed. Of course there can be no talk of education under Anarchy, because education and discipline presuppose authority; and therefore education will be a matter of "individual initiative." On the other hand, education will flourish luxuriantly because every one will perceive its value; and so on.
The internal contradiction of Anarchism is nowhere so clearly seen as when it is a question of children, who form the most important group of "the weak." We have already touched upon this in connection with Stirner's union of egoists. But the more one attempts to understand this state of society in detail, the more violent becomes the contradiction between its supposed purpose and its actual consequences. For what purpose are we to overthrow the present order of society, and make any other form of society resting upon authority impossible? Is it in order to make the oppression of the weak by the strong, of minorities by majorities, of one man by another, impossible; to give each individual his full "integral" freedom? And what, as a matter of fact, would be the consequences of Anarchy? Imagine wanton, idle mothers, without conscience and seeking only enjoyment—and Grave admits that such exist to-day, and that in a future society they cannot be compelled to support their children,—imagine that such persons are set free from the duty of caring for their own offspring, of suckling and attending to them, and that it is to be left to mere chance and the "enthusiasm" of others, whether a child gets milk, or even is fed and cared for. How many children would perish? How many "weaker ones" would fall victims to the brutality of the stronger in the valuation of their individuality? We cannot be deceived with the "innate harmony or solidarity, justice or love of mankind," or whatever other name may be given to this figment of the imagination; still less with the Land of Indolence, overflowing with plenty, promised by Kropotkin and his followers. Both of these suppositions must first of all be proved actually to exist; at present they are only maintained obstinately because, as a matter of fact, they cannot be proved.
Nature and life speak another language, perhaps more sorrowful and more convincing. The appeals to Darwin and Büchner are, in the language of Darwinism, the society of to-day, and any other form of society based upon the principle of the State implies a softening of the struggle for existence by artificial selection; but Anarchy would be natural selection, and thus would be a step lower in development. The return to primitive stages, which have long since been passed through, would be the external form in which this fact would appear; thus, for example, the conditions described by Grave in "the sexual group" would mean a return to the times and conditions which, in all races of a primitive type living in total or partial Anarchy, have led to the dreadful custom of murdering children and old people. But this would mean a return to artificial selection in its most primitive and sanguinary form. Anarchists want us to undergo once again all the errors, terrors, and madness associated with the results won by human culture; and that there will not be even a respectable minority prepared to do. But they wish to do it in order to introduce "happiness for all" (le bonheur de l'humanité), to change the "struggle for existence" into a general "struggle with nature," as all Anarchists from Proudhon to Grave have dreamed; and in this lies the incomprehensible and ineffable contradiction.
More original than Reclus and Grave, if only after the fashion of the eclectic who can quicken the various ancient and modern elements of thought into a new spirit, is Daniel Saurin, who, in his work on Order through Anarchy (L' Ordre par l'Anarchie, Paris, 1893), tries to find a philosophic foundation for Anarchism. For Saurin, humanity is something substantial and real, not that tohuwabohn from which even Reclus cannot rescue Kropotkin's "economics of the heap." According to Saurin the normal man combines two elements: a constant something that is permanent throughout the centuries, and, surpassing space and time, comes back again in all nations and persons; and a variable. The first is "man," the latter the individual. The human average (le minimum humain) appears in the bodily, moral, and mental equality of men; the individual is determined by the relation of these constants to an environment (milieu). Above the individual stands Man, and Man includes all individuals in himself. The laws of each individual are thus the laws of humanity; the law of society resides in ourselves; to recognise the essential conditions of our being is to recognise the essential form of society; to realise them, to be what man is, is to respect the reality of others, is to be "sociable." The most perfect form of society, therefore, is found in the fullest freedom of the ego; for this no human laws are needed. "To what purpose is it to re-enact natural laws and to wish to confirm their powerful commands by the ridiculous sanctions of men? Our obedience to them can add nothing to them; without our knowing or wishing it, we must obey them. Anarchy is thus not lack of order but the most natural order.... From the real society which binds us individuals together springs the universal law, the irrevocable moral order, to which each existence is bound and which it follows, without thereby belying the principle of Anarchy; for Anarchy cannot possibly be a mere unconditioned loosing of all bonds, the unreal absolute.... Man is higher than the individual; at least he stands before the individual, and in him is the passing of phenomena. Thus, also, morals must come before sociology, and form the foundation of a society which seeks to be permanent."
Here, post tot discrimina rerum, we have again the moral order of the universe, to which we may apply the words of a celebrated Englishman, who said of certain moralists: "It would be thought absurd to say the planets must move in circles because the circle is the most perfect figure, and yet the dogmas of certain politicians are just as absurd as this assertion."
As the caricature of the social revolutionist in petticoats, Louise Michel[45] has, perhaps wrongly, obtained a kind of celebrity as a type. Her memoirs show her, as Zetkin proves, as a noble, self-sacrificing, unselfish, and mild character. "Like all sharply-defined characters, Louise Michel suffers from the defects of her qualities. She is courageous to the point of aimless recklessness, so full of character that she might be termed obstinate; sympathetic and soft-hearted to the verge of sentimentality. Her idealism often loses itself in the misty regions of indistinctness, and borders on mysticism; her kindness degenerates into weakness, her trustfulness into credulity. But all these faults cannot weaken the general impression of this pure and noble character; on the contrary, they are the shadows which show up the lights more clearly and distinctly. Her Anarchism, Socialism, or whatever else it may be called, has nothing in common with modern scientific Socialism, except its unsparing criticism of the modern form of society and its persistent attempt to transform it and to produce a state of things more suitable to modern conditions. But her criticism finds support in quite different arguments; an idealist lack of clearness enfolds the end to be attained, and still more the means to it. She knows historical facts well enough, but lacks insight into the historical process of development; and still less does she possess a clear comprehension of economic relationships. To her a social transformation is not the natural and necessary product of historical and economic development, but the demand made by a passionate feeling of justice, a categorical imperative. If Louise Michel had lived in the middle ages, she would, without doubt, have been the foundress of a new religious order; as a child of the nineteenth century, as an atheist, who cannot postpone the redress of injustice into another life, she became a social revolutionary."
Her career shows the unselfishness and self-sacrifice with which Louise Michel carried out her ideas. She was born in 1836 at the French castle of Broncourt; she calls herself "a bastard"; her mother was a simple peasant girl, an orphan without either brothers or sisters, brought up in the castle, and seduced by the son of its owner. The young man's parents decided that Louise and her mother should remain in the castle, as an act of justice, not of kindness. After the death of her grandparents Louise left the castle with her mother in 1850, passed her examination as a teacher, and, as she would not take the oath necessary for holding office in Napoleonic France, she opened a "free school," i. e., a private school in a little village. In 1856 she came to Paris as assistant teacher in another private school, lived in extreme poverty, took a most active part in the struggles of the Commune in May, 1871, was taken prisoner and was to have been shot, but was condemned in December, 1871, to be transported to New Caledonia, whence she returned in 1880, in consequence of the general amnesty then given. She took part in editing Anarchist journals, and was condemned in 1886 to five years' imprisonment "for incitement to plunder." After three years she was pardoned by the President, but "she regarded this as a disgraceful insult," against which she protested violently, and absolutely refused to accept it, so that she had to be turned out of prison by force. Since then she has lived in London, where she acts as head of the "Réveil International des Femmes," an organisation possessing a journal and preaching an exceedingly confused and old-maidish form of female emancipation.
Around these figures of modern French Anarchism are grouped a number of theorists of inferior rank, partly belonging to the literary aftergrowth and Bohemia, partly learned persons, contributors to the Révolté, the Père Peinard, the Revue Anarchiste, the L'en Dehors, and other Anarchist prints in Paris,[46] mostly of a very ephemeral character.
Thus we have G. Eliévant, who wrote a declaration of Anarchist principles (Déclarations, Paris, 1893), in consequence of a charge made against him in 1893 in connection with the dynamite robbery at Soisy-sous-Etiolles, a book regarded by the Anarchists as one of the standard works of their literature. A. Hamon, a learned sociologist, has written a pamphlet, Les Hommes et les Théories de l'Anarchie (Paris, 1893), which has enjoyed a wide circulation; and is preparing a large Psychology of Anarchists, of which he has already published a short summary (see Dubois, u. s., pp. 207-243). Hamon, in order to gain a knowledge empirically of the assumptions of psychology, has set on foot an inquiry (enquête), and put to several Anarchists the question, how and why they have become Anarchists. An examination of the confessions thus obtained showed that the chief peculiarity of the Anarchist mind is the inclination to revolt, which displays itself in the most various forms, such as a desire for opposition, criticism, and love of modernity (philoneismus); and that this tendency is combined with a remarkable love of freedom and strongly developed individuality. "The Anarchist must be free: he hates laws and authority"—all three traits unite in one; but Hamon's investigations completely confirm our assertion, that Anarchism is principally an emphasising of the sentiment of individuality and freedom, and cannot be explained sufficiently—perhaps not at all—by mere pauperism; in other words, Anarchism is not an economic but a political question. But to this predisposition to individualism, says Hamon, there must be united, in order to produce an Anarchist, also a strongly developed sentiment of Altruism, a fanatical love of humanity, a strong sense of justice, and finally, a keen faculty for logic. We do not wish to deny this; but we have seen that Cosmopolitanism, an over-excited sense of justice, and a certain tendency to dialectic jeux d'esprit, has been a common quality of all the doctrines we have hitherto described.
Charles Malato (de Corné), of the old Italian nobility, the son of a Communist, with whom he went to New Caledonia, is one of the chief literary representatives and more eager supporters of the propaganda of Anarchism in Paris. Besides a Philosophy of Anarchy, a book called Révolution Chrétienne et Révolution Sociale, and the widely circulated pamphlet, Les Travailleurs des Villes aux Travailleurs des campagnes (issued anonymously in 1888, and recently again at Lyons in 1893), he has written a long-winded diary, De la Commune à l'Anarchie (Paris, 1894), a kind of family history of Anarchism in Paris, its press, its groups, and its representatives, from doctrinaires like Grave and Kropotkin to the men of action like Pini, Ravachol, and Vaillant.
Other names of some note in the Anarchist world are Zo d'Axa (his real name is Galland), the former editor of L'en Dehors, a literary adventurer who has wandered into the camp of every party; Sebastian Faure, the father of the Père Peinard and author of Le Manchinisme et ses Conséquences; Bernard Lazare, Octave Mirbeau, François Guy, author of Les Préjugés et l'Anarchie (Béziers, 1888); Emil Darnaud, author of La Société Future (1890), Mendiants et Vagabonds, une Revolution à Foix, and others. The programme of these men is almost without exception that of Kropotkin, which they water down and popularise in numerous newspaper articles and pamphlets. Some of them, like Faure and Duprat, are decidedly men of action; others, like Saurin and Mirbeau, condemn bombs as the most sanguinary of all forms of authority.
France does not to-day possess any representatives of individualist Anarchism. An isolated adherent of the Anarchist Collectivism of Proudhon is Adolphe Bonthons, for some time business manager of an Anarchist paper in Lyons, showing himself an eager Collectivist and opponent of rent and profit in many writings (e. g., Menace à la Bourgeoisie, Lyons, 1882, and La Répartition des Produits du Travail, 1881; of Garin, Die Anarchisten, p. 94), and demanding quite in the style of the Anarchist agitator the absolute abolition of all authority. To-day Bonthons is quite behind the times, and does not himself regard himself as an Anarchist.
Finally, we note as eager defenders of Anarchist Communism the Italians Carlo Cafiero, the former friend of Bakunin, who devoted the whole of his great wealth to the Anarchist cause; Merlino, and Malatesta[47]—all of them men of action of the most reckless character, who have become acquainted with the prisons of many lands, and still wander through life as homeless revolutionaries.
CHAPTER VI
GERMANY, ENGLAND, AND AMERICA
Individualist and Communist Anarchism — Arthur Mülberger — Theodor Hertzka's Freeland — Eugen Dühring's "Anticratism" — Moritz von Egidy's "United Christendom" — John Henry Mackay — Nietzsche and Anarchism — Johann Most — Auberon Herbert's "Voluntary State" — R. B. Tucker.
here is a well-marked geographical division, not only in the Anarchism of agitation, but also in Anarchist theory. The Anarchist Communism, to which the "propaganda of action" is allied, appears to be almost exclusively confined to the Romance peoples, the French, Spaniards, and Italians; while the Teutonic nations appear to incline more towards individualist Anarchism. If this geographical division is not quite exact, it must be remembered that these views themselves are not so clearly separated, and that the ideas of Proudhon rarely develop into pure Individualism as proclaimed by Stirner. The external distinction between Individualists and Communists is certainly marked most clearly by the condemnation of the foolish propaganda of action of the former; and in order to prevent the disagreeable confusion of their views with the perpetrators of bomb outrages, the theorists of Germany and England give their systems more harmless names, such as Free Land, Anticratism, United Christianity, Voluntarism, and so on. It is perhaps owing to this circumstance that States which supervise mental movements in the minds of their citizens so closely, so anxiously, as do Austria and Germany, allow the extension of the theoretical propaganda of a movement which is only distinguished from the doctrines of Kropotkin, as explained above, by a difference in formulating the common axiom on which they are based.
In the beginning of the seventies there appeared in Germany an eager worshipper of Proudhon, named Arthur Mülberger, born in 1847, who has practised since 1873 as a physician, and lately as medical officer in Crailsheim, and who has explained with great clearness separate portions of Proudhon's teaching in various articles in magazines and reviews.[48] Mülberger's writings have certainly chiefly an historical value; but he is one of the few who have not merely written about and criticised Proudhon, but have thoroughly studied him. He is accordingly, in spite of his somewhat partisan attitude as a supporter of Proudhon, certainly his most trustworthy and faithful interpreter.
Of all modern phenomena, which, according to Proudhon's assumption that complete economic freedom must absorb all political authority, should introduce Anarchy by means of economic institutions, the most important is undoubtedly the so-called "Free Land" movement, whose "father" is Theodor Hertzka. Born on the 13th July, 1845, at Buda Pesth, Hertzka studied law, but afterwards turned to journalism, in which he gained the reputation of the most brilliant journalist in Vienna. In the seventies he was editor of the Neue Freie Presse, and in 1880 he founded the Vienna Allgemeine Zeitung; but since 1889 he has been editor of the Zeitschrift für Staatsund Volkwirthschaft. His book Freeland, a picture of the society of the future (Freiland, ein Sociales Zukunftsbild), which appeared in 1889, had an extraordinary success, and produced a movement for the realisation of the demands and ideas therein expressed. The expedition which was sent out to "Freeland," after years of agitation, prepared at great expense and watched with the eager curiosity of all Europe, appears to-day, however—as was hardly to be wondered at—to have failed.
"Freeland," as depicted by Hertzka in his social romance, is a community founded upon the principle of unlimited publicity combined with unlimited freedom. Everyone throughout "Freeland" must be able to know at any time what commodities are in greater or less demand, and what branches of work produce greater or less profit. Thus in "Freeland" everybody has the right and the power to apply himself, as far as he is capable, to those forms of production that are at any time most profitable. A careful department of statistics publishes in an easily read and rapid form every movement of production and consumption, and thus the movement of prices in all commodities is quickly brought to everyone's notice. But in order that everyone may undertake that branch of production most suitable and profitable to him, from the information thus obtained, the necessary means of production, including the forces of nature, are freely at the disposal of all, without interest, but a repayment has to be made out of the result of production.
Each has a right to the full return from his labour; this is obtained by free association of the workers. The entrance into each association is free to everyone, and anyone can leave any association at any time. Each member has a right to a share in the net product of the association corresponding to the work done by him. The work done is reckoned for each member in proportion to the number of hours worked. The work done by the freely elected and responsible managers or directors is reckoned, by means of free agreement made with each member of the union, as equal to a certain number of hours' work per day. The profit made by the community is reckoned up at the close of each working year, and after deduction for repayment of capital, and the taxes payable to the "Freeland" commonwealth, is divided amongst its members. The members, in case of the failure or liquidation of the association, are liable for its debts in proportion to their share of the profits. This liability for the debts of the association corresponds, in case of dissolution, to the claim of the guarantor members on the property available. The highest authority of the association is the General Assembly, in which every member possesses the same voting power, active and passive. The conduct of the business of the company is placed in the hands of a directorate, chosen by the General Assembly for a certain period, whose appointment is, however, revocable at any time. Besides this the General Assembly elects every year an overseer who has to watch over the conduct of the directors. There are neither masters nor servants; only free workers; there are also no proprietors, only employers of the capital of the association. The forms of capital necessary for production are therefore as free from owners as is the land.
The most extensive publicity of all business proceedings is the prime supposition for the proper working of this organisation, which can only exist by the removal of all hindrances to the free activity of the individual will guided by enlightened self-interest. There can and need be no business secrets; on the contrary, it is the highest interest of all to see that everyone's capacity for work is directed to where it will produce the best results. The working-statements of the producers are therefore published; the purchase and sale of all imaginable products and commodities of "Freeland" trade takes place in large warehouses, managed and supervised for the benefit of the community.
The highest authority in "Freeland" is at the same time the banker of the whole population. Not merely every association, but every person has his account in the books of the Central Bank, which looks after all payments inwards as well as all money paid out from the greatest to the smallest by means of a comprehensive clearing system.
All the expenditure of the community is defrayed by all in common, and by each person singly, exactly in proportion to its income; for which purpose the Central Bank debits each with his share in the total.
The chief item in the budget of "Freeland" expenditure is "maintenance"; which includes everything spent on account of persons incapacitated for work or excused from it, and who therefore have a right to free support, such as all women, children, sick persons, defectives, and men over sixty years of age. On the other hand, justice, police, military, and finance arrangements cost nothing in "Freeland." There are no paid judges or police officials, still fewer soldiers, and the taxes, as seen above, come in of their own accord. There is not even a code of criminal or civil law. For the settlement of any disputes that may arise, arbitrators are chosen, who make their decisions verbally, and from whom there is an appeal to the Board of Arbitrators. But they have practically nothing to do, for there is neither robbery nor theft in "Freeland"; since "men who are normal in mind and morals cannot possibly commit any violences against other people in a community in which all proper interests of each member are equally regarded." Criminals are therefore treated as people who are suffering from mental or moral disease.
We need not point out that we here have to deal with an attempt to revive Proudhon's thoughts and plans, and that our criticisms on these apply equally to Freeland. If to-day extravagant praise is lavished on Hertzka's originality, that only proves that people who criticise and condemn Proudhon so readily have not read him; and even when Archdukes give the "Freeland" project their moral and financial support, that only proves again how little, even now, the real meaning of Anarchism is understood, and how slavishly people submit to words.
Eugen Dühring has raved against "the State founded on force" as often as against Anarchism, in his various writings; he has as often pronounced a scornful judgment upon the literary connections of Anarchism as he has sought to ally himself with the so-called "honourable" Anarchists in his little paper (The Modern Spirit—Der Moderen Völkergeist, in Berlin) that is apparently brought out for the sake of a Dühring cult. There appears at least to be a contradiction between the theory of Anarchism and Dühring's Anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Dühring undoubtedly belongs to the Anarchists, and has never very seriously defended himself against this charge. His haughty and biassed criticisms of Proudhon, Stirner, and Kropotkin (he excepts only Bakunin, the enemy of the "Hebrew" Marx) are sufficiently explained by his own unexampled weakness and love of belittling others, without seeking any further motives; "it must be night where his own stars shine"; and as his followers have generally read nothing else beside his lucubrations, it is very easy to explain the great influence which Dühring exercises at present upon the youth of Germany, and why he is regarded by some people as the only man of genius since Socrates, and as a man of the most unparalleled originality, which he is not, by a long way.
However much Dühring may belittle Proudhon, he is himself, at least as a social politician, and certainly as an economist, merely a weak dilution of Proudhon. In The Modern Spirit Proudhon's Anarchism was recently credited with the intention of abolishing not only all government, but all organisation. Dühring, it was said, had reduced this mistaken view to its proper origin, and in place of Anarchism had set up "Anticratism," which does not intend to overthrow direction and organisation, but merely to abolish all unjust force, "the State founded on force." We who know Proudhon, know that what is here ascribed to Dühring is exactly what Proudhon taught as "no-government" (An-arche); and there was nothing left to the great Dühring but to bluff his half-fledged scholars with a new word that means nothing more or less than Anarchy. That which is Dühring's own, namely, the so-called "theory of force," has not an origin of any great profundity. He takes as the elements of society two human beings—not at all the sexual pair—but the celebrated "two men" of Herr Dühring, one of whom oppresses the other, uses force to him, and makes him work for him. These "two men" explain, for him, all economic functions and social problems; the origin of social distinctions, of political privileges, of property, capital, betterment, exploitation, and so on. By these two famous men he lets himself be guided directly into Proudhon's path. "Wealth," declares Dühring, "is mastery over men and things." Proudhon would never have been so silly—although Dühring means the same as he does—as to call wealth the mastery over men and things, and Engel formulates the proposition more correctly as: "Wealth is the mastery over men, by means of mastery over things"; although this deserves the name of a definition neither in the logical nor economic sense. But Dühring uses his ambiguous proposition in order to be able to represent riches on the one hand as being something quite justifiable and praiseworthy (the mastery over things), and on the other as robbery (mastery over men), as "property due to force." Here we have a miserable degradation and commonplace expression of the antimony of Proudhon: "Property is theft," and "Property is liberty." We also find Proudhon, again distorted, in Dühring's statement that the time spent in work by various workers, whether they be navvies or sculptors, is of equal value.
The "personalist Sociality" of Dühring, as its creator terms it elsewhere, is the conception of arrangements and organisations by means of which every individual person may satisfy all the necessities and luxuries of life, from the lowest to the highest, through the mutual working together and combination with every other individual. This personalist Sociality is, of course, anti-monarchical, and opposed to all privileges of position and birth; it is also "anti-religionist," for it recognises no authorities that are beyond control, except only conformity to nature. It starts from the actual condition of the individual; but this can only be known by its actions, and is not determined by birth. As regards public affairs, positions that are technically prominent should be given by universal, direct, and equal suffrage to persons who have shown by their actions that they possess the necessary qualifications for them. As regards the anti-religious element, which in Dühring's case really implies Anti-Semitism, the place of all religion and everything religious is taken by Dühring's philosophy of actuality or being. Among the just claims of the individual person Dühring reckons not only bodily freedom and immunity from injury, but also immunity from economic injury. Just as on the one hand every kind of slavery or limitation by united action or social forms must be unhesitatingly rejected, so, on the other hand, unlimited power of disposal over the means of production and natural capital must be limited by suitable public laws in such a way that no one can be excluded from the means supplied by nature, and reduced to a condition of starvation. The right to labour, as well as freedom of choice in labour, must everywhere be maintained.
The economic corner-stones of personalist Sociality are, as Dühring's follower, Emil Döle,[49] explains, "metallic currency as the foundation of all economic relationships, and individual property, especially capital, as the necessary and inviolable foundation for every condition that is not based on robbery and violence. The logic and necessity of any form of society rests on private property, and that is also the basis of Dühring's system; but his reforms are directed to rejecting the ingredients of injustice, robbery, and violence towards persons that are commingled with these fundamental forms. To bring this about, the principle under which the merely economic mechanics of values have free play must be rejected; and instead of it, the original personal and political rights of men must be recognised. Dühring therefore regards a general association of workers as far more essential than strikes, and would wish political means (in the narrower sense of politics) brought once more into the foreground, and extended much farther than before. He certainly rejects the trickery of Parliament, but not a representation of the working classes seriously meant and honourably carried out. He also does not yield to that logic of wretchedness which expects every reform to arise from ever-increasing misery, but takes into account material and mental progress and the condition of the masses."
In all this it is easy to recognise Proudhon's views; even sometimes his theory of property. And even if their views are not alike formally, and Dühring does not quite understand Proudhon's "Mutualism," yet he ought to have regarded the French social reformer somewhat less condescendingly and confusedly. But he has also had a very low opinion of Stirner; yet, however persistently he and his followers may deny it, Dühring's "Personalism" is not only exactly the same as Stirner's "individual" (Einziger), but Dühring himself is the most repellent illustration of the egoist-individual of Stirner. Both Stirner and Proudhon have assumed as the necessary pre-supposition of the abolition of government, individuals who are able to govern themselves, i. e., moral individuals, which means "persons."
When, finally, Dühring apparently seeks to limit the Anarchist phrase of the abolition of all government, by saying that Anticratism is the denial of all unrighteous exercise of force and usurpation of authority, this is palpable fencing. Dühring would tell the masses which form of force is right and which wrong; which should be maintained, and which not; and the masses will hasten to follow his dictates. Dühring, the great opponent of all metaphysics and a priori conceptions, at once sets up, just like Jean Jacques Rousseau, "the modern Hebrew," an absolute concept "justice," and transforms the world according to it. Who can help laughing at this?
Dühring has tried to reconcile his prejudice against the Jews with the foregoing doctrine, by distinguishing nations from the standpoint of personalism, and regarding the existence of higher races side by side with lower races as a hindrance—indeed the most serious hindrance—to the realisation of "personalist Sociality."
"Nothing is easier than to make a wise grimace."
Perhaps the most peculiar of the circle of theoretical Anarchists is Herr von Egidy. If Dühring has succeeded in enlivening Anarchism by an admixture of Anti-Jewish persecution, Herr von Egidy has accomplished the far greater success of enlivening Anarchism with a new religious cult, called "United Christianity," added to the spirit of Prussian militarism and squiredom. When the new Apostle stood as a candidate for the Reichstag in 1893, supporting his new Christianity and the military programme rejected by the dissolved Parliament, he was able to secure 3000 votes. This is a piece of statistics that shows the confusion of ideas existing in so-called intelligence.
Moritz von Egidy[50] was born at Mainz on 29th August, 1847, served in the Prussian army, and reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Afterwards he exchanged his military command for an apostleship, after gaining knowledge by private study. His Christianity is a religion without dogma or confession, a lucus a non lucendo, but deserves respect as a social phenomenon in view of conditions in Germany.
The "United Christendom" is to be the union of all men in the idea of time and applied Christianity, in the sense of a humanity that approaches more nearly to God. The new religion only values and lays stress on life, on "morality lived"; doctrine and dogma must be laid aside; and thus Von Egidy arrives at the remarkable paradox of "a religion without dogma or confession." The purpose of religion is practical, and in dogmas he sees forms, among which each individual may choose for himself, forms which (according to the main principle of development which he places in the forefront of all his arguments) are in a state of continual flux and change. What religion has to offer is to be expressed not in dogmas, but only in points of view; not in institutions, but in directions for guidance. For this purpose it is not necessary that Egidy's disciples should form themselves into a church, for that even contradicts the spirit of this religion; their master rather tells them "to organise nothing, to actualise nothing." Not parties, nor unions, but only persons and actions, is what he wants, and these will each in his own way lead men into the earthly paradise of which Egidy speaks with truly prophetic confidence.
The State, as we now know it, is for Egidy, who goes to work very cautiously, no more and no less than a link in the eternal chain of development; a stage, beyond which he looks into a divinely appointed kingdom of the future, that will no longer rest upon the pillars of force and fear, which "contradict the consciousness of God, wherein there will be no difference between governed and government." He quickly disposes of the objection that men are not fit for such an ideal State. "Once we have created conditions in accordance with the divine will, the men for them will be there. If there was a paradise for the first primitive man, why should there not be one for civilised man of to-day? We only need to create it for ourselves; and once we have gained entrance to it we shall not be driven out of it a second time—we have had our warning. Of course the 'old Adam' must be left outside." Of course! But Egidy forgets in the ardour of inspiration that it is not so easy to leave the old Adam outside, and that his assumption of a primitive paradise for mankind, for the homme sauvage of the "social contract," directly contradicts the theory of evolution which he has just unhesitatingly accepted. He also contradicts himself when he at first maintains that the "conditions in accordance with the divine will" will produce men fitted for them, and afterwards says: "Do not let us trouble about programmes and systems, or modes of execution; only get the right men, and we need not trouble ourselves about how to realise our proposals."
As may be seen, his "United Christianity" not only has a Socialist side, but it is sheer Socialism, the main basis of which is moral and intellectual self-consciousness. Egidy has certainly not drawn up a definite programme, and could not draw it up; "since we are all at the present moment, without exception, undergoing a thorough transformation of 'the inner man,' it is more reasonable to defer single efforts till the general consciousness has become enlightened on essential points." Egidy can thus only open up "points of view" on the social question, leaving everything else to the individual and to natural evolution. Hence a definite social doctrine is excluded.
Thus, upon the question of property, he says that property is "not so much the source as the logical consequence of the immature ideas of human rights and duties which we still hold. With the progressive transformation of our ideas generally, with the adoption of a totally different view of life, with the dawn of a new view of the world, our conceptions of property will also alter; not sooner, but surely. This new view of life will give a direction and aim to our endeavours for improvement. The new treatment of the question of property, however, will only be one of the results of the general new tendencies. Certainly it will be one of the most important; but we do not need beforehand to recognise any one of the manifold tendencies indicated as a binding law; just as we may generally take what is called Socialism into consideration, as soon as it is offered to us on a firmly defined form, but never accept it without further demur as a new law.
"Instead of the words 'equality' and 'freedom,' I say 'self-reliance' and 'independence.' They express better that which concerns the individual; and they also avoid the objection of being 'impossible.' That even self-reliance and independence may experience a certain limitation from the demands of our life in common one with another, I know quite well; but they do not mislead us beforehand to the same erroneous ideas and especially not to the same demands, so impossible of fulfilment, as the word equality. The highest attainable is always merely that we create for the individual equal, i. e., equally good, conditions of existence. But owing to the inequality of individuals similar conditions do not always produce by any means the same result of well-being; the utilisation of the conditions is a matter for the individual, and is unequal. Thus we should have to arrange these conditions as unequal for each individual in order to give all individuals really equal conditions of existence. Apart from the fundamental impossibility in our human imperfection, of doing absolute justice to these requirements, the equality thus restored would the very next moment be impaired in a thousand different directions."
Egidy is a pure Anarchist, perhaps the purest of all, but he is certainly not the wisest. "The greatest fault in Anarchism," he says, "in the eyes of the opponent whom it has to overcome, is its name. This, however, is not quite fair to the representatives of these ideas; for why must everything have a name, and why must names be sought which annihilate what at present exists, instead of choosing names which indicate the highest connotation of meanings so far recognised? Why say, 'without government'? Why not rather, 'self-discipline, self-government'? Discipline and government mean things of great value; without which we could not imagine human existence. The only question is, who exercises government over us, and who wields the rod of discipline: whether it is others or we ourselves?" To be sure, he draws a distinction between "Anarchists of Blood" and "noble Anarchists"; he condemns the former and associates himself with the latter. But that does not hinder this remarkable man from having a Bismarckian patriotism, sullen prejudices against the Jews, and, above all, incomprehensible zeal on behalf of Prussian Militarism and Monarchy.
"The monarchical idea in itself," says this most remarkable of all Anarchists, "by no means contradicts the idea of the self-reliance and independence of the individual. The prince will not be lacking in the comprehension necessary for a redrafting of the monarchical idea to suit the people when they have attained their majority. The prince belongs to the people; the prince the foremost of the people; the prince in direct intercourse with the people. The prince neither absolute ruler nor constitutional regent; but the prince a personality, an ego; with a right to execute his will as equal as that of any one of the people. No confused responsibility of ministers thrust in between people and prince. There is no 'crown' as a conception; there is only a living wearer of the crown—the king, the prince—as responsible head of the people. The present servants of the crown become commissioners of the people." Compare these expressions with Proudhon's attitude in regard to the dynastic question described above, and consider, in order to do justice to each, that Egidy as well as Proudhon had in view when speaking a monarch who knew how to surround himself at least with the appearance of "social imperialism." If, indeed, Egidy were one day to be disillusioned by his "social prince," just as Proudhon was by his monarch, yet it should not be forgotten that the "social prince" might also likewise be greatly disillusioned some day as to the loyalty of Egidy's followers.
Germany possesses an honest and upright Anarchist of a strongly individualist tendency in the naturalised Scot, John Henry Mackay, who was born at Greenock on 6th February, 1864. In Mackay we find again one of those numerous persons who have descended from that sphere of society where want and distress are only known by name, into the habitations of human pity, and have risen from these upon the wings of poetic fancy and warmheartedness into the "regions where the happy gods do dwell," and where Anarchy does not need to be brought into being. Mackay is of an essentially artistic nature; like Cafiero, he is also a millionaire, which means a completely independent man. Both these circumstances are needed to explain his individualist Anarchism. His novel, which created some sensation, entitled The Anarchist: A Picture of Society at the Close of the Nineteenth Century,[51] which appeared in 1891, is a pendant to Theodor Hertzka's novel, Freeland, to which it is also not inferior in genuinely artistic effects, as e. g., the development of the character of Auban, an egoist of Stirner's kind, and in touching description, as that of poverty in Whitechapel. The book does not contain any new ideas: but is nevertheless important as making a thorough and clear distinction between individualist and communist Anarchism; while, on the other hand, the glaring colouring of the descriptions of misery possesses a certain provocative energy which the author certainly did not intend, for he rejects the "propaganda of action."
It is only to be expected as a matter of course that in Germany as in France, that literary Bohemia, certain "advanced minds" should prefer to give themselves out as Anarchists and Individualists, as Einzige; but it must not therefore be concluded that it is our duty to concern ourselves with writers such as Pudor, Bruno Wille, and others. We might indeed utter a warning against extending too widely the boundaries of Anarchist theory, and thus obliterating them altogether. In our opinion it is quite incorrect to regard as a theoretical Anarchist every author who, like Nietzsche,[52] preached a purely philosophic individualism or egotism, without ever having given a thought to the reformation of society. To what does this lead? Some even include Ibsen among theoretical Anarchists because in a letter to Brandes he exclaims: "The State is the curse of the individual. The State must go. I will take part in this revolution. Let us undermine the idea of the State; let us set up free will and affinity of spirit as the only conditions for any union: that is the beginning of a freedom that is worth something." Such expressions may certainly show Ibsen's Anarchist tendencies, but they by no means elevate him to the position of a teacher; for that position one might sooner quote one of his own most powerful characters, Brand, that modern Faust after the style of Stirner. But Brand is a gloomy figure, who would not make many converts to individualism.
We may here cursorily notice the position of Johann Most in the theory of Anarchism, although this man, fateful and gloomy as has been his rôle in the history of Anarchist action, can hardly be taken into account as a theorist, and, moreover,—which is more important,—he is not even a pure Anarchist. Johann Most forms the link between social Democracy, to which he formerly attached himself, and Anarchism, to which he now devotes his baleful talents. But, as a matter of fact, Most goes no farther than ancient and modern followers of Babœuf have gone at all times; the "decision of society" is the authoritative boundary which separates him from the communist Anarchists.
Land and all movable and immovable capital should, in his opinion, be the property of the whole of society,—here we perceive a very conservative notion as compared with Kropotkin,—but should be given up for the use of the single groups of producers, which may be formed by free agreement (libre entente) among themselves. The products of industry should remain the property of those organisations whose work and creation they are, thus becoming collective property. To determine value and price, bureaux of experts should be formed by society—an arrangement which Grave considers highly reactionary, because implying authority,—and these bureaux are to calculate how much work is represented in each community, and what is its value on this basis. The price thus determined cannot be altered, because consumers will also form free groups, for the purpose of buying, just as the producers did. Other free groups will look after the bringing up of children. Marriage becomes a free contract between man and woman, and can be entered into or dissolved at pleasure. There are no laws, but only a "decision of society" in each case.
If with these views Most must be regarded among Anarchist theorists—if he is an Anarchist at all—as a representative of extreme Conservatism, yet, on the other hand, there is not the slightest doubt that he must be looked upon as the theorist of force, the apostle of the most violent propaganda of action. In his notorious journal, Freiheit (Freedom), as well as in numberless pamphlets, Johann Most has drawn up an inexhaustible compendium for "the men of action." The little groups, which are to-day characteristic of Anarchism, are his idea, and his, too, are the tactics of bomb-throwing. In the pamphlet[53] on the scientific art of revolutionary warfare and dynamiters, he explains exactly where bombs should be placed in churches, palaces, ballrooms, and festive gatherings. Never more than one Anarchist should take charge of the attempt, so that in case of discovery the Anarchist party may suffer as little harm as possible. The book contains also a complete dictionary of poisons, and preference is given to.... Poison should be employed against politicians, traitors, and spies. Freedom, his journal, is distinguished from the rest of the Anarchist press—which is mostly merely doctrinaire—by its constant provocation to a war of classes, to murder and incendiarism. "Extirpate the miserable brood!" says Freedom, speaking of owners of property—"extirpate the wretches! Thus runs the refrain of a revolutionary song of the working classes, and this will be the exclamation of the executive of a victorious proletariate army when the battle has been won. For at the critical moment the executioner's block must ever be before the eyes of the revolutionary. Either he is cutting off the heads of his enemies or his own is being cut off. Science gives us means which make it possible to accomplish the wholesale destruction of these beasts quietly and deliberately." Elsewhere he says, "Those of the reptile brood who are not put to the sword remain as a thorn in the flesh of the new society; hence it would be both foolish and criminal not to annihilate utterly this race of parasites," and so forth.
These are only a few specimens of the jargon of "Anarchism of action," of which Johann Most is the classic representative; we shall refer elsewhere to his varied activity as such.
Most, whose special Anarchist influence is exercised on English soil, is also the link between German and English Anarchism.
England possesses a theorist of a higher type in Auberon Herbert, who, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, is a scion of a noble house. Herbert began as a representative of Democracy in the seventies, and to-day edits in London a paper called The Free Life, in which he preaches an individualist Anarchism of his own, or, as he himself calls it, "Voluntarism." He does not wish constituted society, as such, to be abolished; his "voluntary State" is distinguished from the present compulsory State in that it is absolutely free to any individual to enter or leave the State as he wishes.
"I demand," says Herbert,[54] "that the individual should be self-owner, the actual owner of his bodily and mental capacities, and in consequence owner of all that he can acquire by these capacities, only assuming that he treats his fellow-men as his equals and as owners of their own capacities."
"If thus the individual is legally master of himself and legally owner of all that he has won by the aid of his own capabilities, then we must further conclude that the individual as such has the right to defend what is his own, even by force against force (understanding by force those forms of deception which are in reality only an equivalent of force); and since he now has this right of defence by force, he can transfer it to a corporation and to men who undertake to watch over the practical application of this right on his behalf; which corporation may be denoted by the practical term of 'State.' The State is rightfully born, only if the individuals have the choice of handing over to it their right of defence, and that no individual is compelled to take part in it when once formed, or to maintain it. When we consider that every force must be set in action for some definite purpose, the State or the sphere of society's force must be organised; yet every individual must retain his natural right of deciding for himself whether he will join the State and maintain it or not. If then the State is legitimate as an agreement to defend one's self-ownership against all attacks, there are sufficient reasons for creating such an organisation and placing the exercise of the forces mentioned in its hands, instead of keeping them in our hands as individuals.... I fully admit that the right of exercising force in self-defence belongs to the individual and is transferred by him to the State; but the moral pressure on the individual to transfer this right is overwhelming. Who of us would care to be judge and executioner at once in one's own person? Who would wish to exercise Lynch law?[55] What is to be gained thereby? It is not a question of right, for, as we have seen, the individual, who may exercise force in self-defence, can also transfer this exercise of his power, and if he can do this legally, is it not a hundred times better if he also does so actually? I willingly admit that, when it is solely a question of a group, even the group, as the source of law, may, if it wishes, organise its own defence, and isolate itself from the general organisation of other groups. But I do not admit that the group can also separate itself, when the question directly concerns other groups besides itself. I would not, for example, allow a group the right to conduct its sewers to a certain point in a stream, because this directly affects the interests of other groups at other points of the stream. The first group must come to an understanding with the other groups concerned; in other words, it must enter into a common organisation with other groups. Or again: group A decides to punish those who instigate to murder, while group B is of opinion that one need not trouble about words, but only about deeds. Such a difference of views and procedure is unimportant, so long as the members of group A merely associate with one another; but suppose a member of group B were to incite a person to murder a member of group A, it is clear that we should be confronted by a civil war between the two groups the moment that group A seeks to seize and punish the instigator. It also happens that in all cases where force has to be exercised against persons outside their own group as well as in it, some organisation must exist between the groups—a State—in order to determine the conditions under which force can be exercised.... For these reasons I consider pure Anarchy an impossibility; it rests upon a misunderstanding, and is founded upon the mingling of two things which are by nature entirely different.... Anarchy is the rule of an individual over himself; but the actions of an individual in self-defence, however just they may be, are not founded entirely upon self-ownership, but are of a mixed nature, since they include rule over one's self and over others. The object of Anarchy is self-government, but we exceed the sphere of self-government as soon as we stretch out our hand to exercise force. The error which pure Anarchists commit lies in the fact that they apply the ideas of self-government, self-ownership, or freedom to force. Between actions of freedom and actions involving force a line must necessarily be drawn, which separates them for ever. As far as concerns a question of free will, e. g., the posting of letters, arrangements for education, all contracts of labour and capital, we can dispense with any authority; we can be Anarchists, because in these cases it is not necessary for me or for you to exercise or to undergo compulsion. We may leave the group whose actions we do not approve of, we may stand alone as individuals, we may follow exclusively the law of our nature; but the moment we proceed to measures of defence, to actions implying limitation or discipline, to actions which encroach upon the self-ownership of others, the whole state of things is altered. The moment force has to be exercised, an apparatus of force must be set up; if we wish to exercise force, it must be publicly proclaimed, and we must publicly agree upon what conditions it is to be applied; it must be surrounded by guarantees and so on. Force and the unconditional freedom of the individual, or Anarchy, are incompatible ideas, and therefore I am a Voluntarist, not an Anarchist—a Voluntarist in all questions where Voluntarism is admissible; but I return into the State when by the nature of things some organisation is necessary."
Practically Auberon Herbert's distinction of terms is merely playing with words; for the "voluntary State," which I can leave at any moment, from which I can withdraw my financial support if I do not approve of its actions, is Proudhon's federation of groups in its strictest form; perhaps it is even the practical outcome of Stirner's Union of Egoists; at any rate Herbert, like Stirner, prefers the unconditional acceptance of the principle of laisser faire, without reaching it, like Proudhon, by means of the thorny circumlocution of a complicated organisation of work. Carried into practice, Voluntarism would be as like Anarchism as two peas. None the less we must not undervalue the theoretical progress shown in the distinction quoted above. Herbert approaches within a hair's-breadth of the standpoint of Sociology, and what separates him from it is not so much the logical accentuation of the social-contract theory as the indirect assumption of it.
In America we find views similar to Auberon Herbert's.
The traces of Anarchist ideas in the United States go back as far as the fifties. Joseph Dejacque, an adherent of Proudhon, and compromised politically in 1848, edited in New York, from 1858-61, a paper, Le Libertaire, in which he at first preached the collective Anarchism of his master, but later—though long before Kropotkin—drifted into communist Anarchism.
Side by side there also arose, almost, as it seems, independently of Europe, an individualist school, the origin of which goes back somewhere to the beginning of the century. Here the ideas of a free society, such as Thompson had imagined and taught, found rapid and willing acceptance, and were expanded, by men like Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner, and others, to the idea of "individual sovereignty," which to-day possesses its most important champion in R. B. Tucker, the editor of the journal, Liberty, in Boston, and which approaches most closely to Herbert's idea of the "voluntary State."