A communistic workshop, opened in Paris in 1885 by a number of anarchistic tailors whom a strike had left without employment, was closed at the end of a year; but whether by reason of internal disagreements or by reason of the intrigues of interested employers it is not easy, from the evidence, to determine. The product was divided equally among all the members of the association,—the unskilled, the sick, the aged, and the impotent included.
The anarchist Commune de Montreuil (said to be the original of the phalanstère of Descaves’ and Donnay’s highly successful play, La Clairière) was established in 1892 at Montreuil-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. A workshop was rented in which the members spent all the time they could spare from their regular employments in working for the benefit of those who might be in need, and Saturday lectures were given. The plans involved, further, hiring a piece of ground to be cultivated for a similar purpose in a similar fashion, a gradual cessation of working for employers as occasion permitted and results warranted, a school for children, and a library for adults. These plans were frustrated, not by the petty rivalries of the women (as in the Descaves-Donnay play), but by the dissolution of the Commune by the government as a part of the wholesale anarchist repressions of 1893-94. Some of the original members of the Commune de Montreuil have since banded themselves together for an exchange of services with the idea of habituating themselves to make and utilise products “without commercial exchange, representative value, or appraisal”; but the exchangers remain in their respective homes.
At Angers, in the Maine-et-Loire, a department remote from Paris, a number of anarchist workingmen pledged themselves some time since to divide their wages at the end of each week “in order to equalise the conditions of existence.”
It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever from experiments that are so partial as these and that have been conducted under such unfavourable conditions.
In the two great modern industrial reform movements—trade-unionism and co-operation—the anarchist finds other fields for the propagande par l’exemple.
He is bound to look askance at trade-unions, and, if a purist, to hold himself aloof from them, because by the very fact of trying to raise wages they recognise the legitimacy of the wage system, and because they often resort to politics, and implore the intervention of parliament to gain their ends.
“The unions are wheels in the capitalistic machine because they are placed—if only temporarily—under the conditions of the capitalistic system,” says one. “To accept discussion with one’s exploiters is to confess their right to exploitation,” says another. “The raison d’être of the union is to negotiate with the employers, to quibble over the greater or less degree of exploitation; while an anarchist should aim only at the destruction of this exploitation,” says still another.
Regarding the efficiency of trade-unions as a means of permanently bettering the conditions of the working classes, to say nothing of insuring their emancipation, the anarchist has no illusions. On the contrary, he does them scanter justice than even the capitalist, who, however he may antagonise them, at least pays them the sincere compliment of fearing them. The anarchist has not a particle of faith in trade-unionism as such. He is more orthodox than the most orthodox of economists as to the iron law of wages (la loi d’airain des salaires), the inexorableness of the operation of supply and demand, and the impotence of strikes. He maintains stoutly that a so-called trade-union victory can, in the nature of the case, be only the semblance of a victory, since gains cannot be defended, since an increase in wages cannot be maintained, against an unfavourable market, and since, even if it could be maintained, it would be counterbalanced in the long run by the increased cost of living consequent thereon. Whoever would oppose the trade-union theory and practice will find in the anarchist writings and speeches the completest possible arsenal of weapons ready forged to his hand. No apologist for things as they are can have exposed more relentlessly than he the financial foolishness of fighting millions of dollars with hundreds of dollars, and of pitting the danger of actual starvation against the relatively insignificant danger of decreased profits,—of combating strength with weakness, in a word, on the former’s chosen ground.
Nevertheless, the anarchist recognises that the trade-union is a natural grouping of the proletariat; that it was the first important grouping to acknowledge, by acts, the irrepressible conflict between capital and labour, the first to boldly lift and wave the standard of industrial revolt, the first to shift the attempt at enfranchisement from the political to the economic ground, and the first to appreciate the advantages of internationalism; that it is the best considerable example thus far of solidarity in action, the most favourable soil for anarchistic good seed—particularly the good seed of the propagande par l’exemple—within present reach, the most favourable ground for disputing the future with the socialists, and an excellent weapon of offence and defence. And he approves of strikes, with all their demonstrable financial futility, because they keep to the fore the idea of revolt, and because—a sort of left-handed reason—every unsuccessful strike is an argument in his favour, inasmuch as it shows the emptiness of partial measures that do not reach the cause.
Besides, he discerns a trend his way in the growing trade-union advocacy of the “universal strike” (grève universelle or grève générale) which he regards as but another name for the revolution.