Anarchy – Anarchist

The following definition of “anarchy/anarchist,” originally published in the 1930s, is taken from Sebastien Faure’s Encylopédie anarchiste. Faure was an advocate of “anarchist synthesis,” which sought to combine the best elements of anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism and individualist anarchism. The article on “anarchist synthesis” in the Enclyopédie anarchiste was written by Faure’s collaborator, the Russian anarchist, Voline, and is reprinted in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939).

There is not, and there cannot be, a libertarian Creed or Catechism.

That which exists and constitutes what one might call the anarchist doctrine is a cluster of general principles, fundamental conceptions and practical applications regarding which a consensus has been established among individuals whose thought is inimical to Authority and who struggle, collectively or in isolation, against all disciplines and constraints, whether political, economic, intellectual or moral.

At the same time, there may be – and indeed there are – many varieties of anarchist, yet all have a common characteristic that separates them from the rest of humankind. This uniting point is the negation of the principle of Authority in social organizations and the hatred of all constraints that originate in institutions founded on this principle.

Thus, whoever denies Authority and fights against it is an anarchist.

Hierarchy

The following definition of “hierarchy” is taken from Sebastien Faure’s Encyclopédie Anarchiste (Anarchist Encyclopedia), published by installments in the early 1930s. The translation is by Paul Sharkey. As the entry points out, the word “hierarchy” originated in ancient Greece, as does the word “anarchy” (which means without command, or without a ruler). Anarchists continue to battle the authorities in modern Greece, with sometimes tragic consequences, as the police murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos makes clear.

HIERARCHY, noun. (from the Greek hieros, sacred, and arche, command). The order and subordination of sundry ecclesiastical, civil or military authorities.

Hierarchy lies at the root of the whole authority principle. Starting off with the leader and ending with the henchman, through a whole scale of different executive agents; conjuring up a multitude of gradations which, as one rises through them, confers an ever greater measure of authority; splitting the authority of the State to infinity and bestowing a greater power of resistance upon it by virtue of its multiplicity and variety; organizing within the State a graduated scale of sinecures, benefices and privileges; the essence, in fact, of theories of government.

The yearning for prominence, the lust to command and to rule is, sad to say, a passion that still drives quite a few people. The moment an authoritarian regime is established on the ruins of its predecessor, its first care is to shower its supporters with honours, income and positions of command.

One who today is an ordinary citizen dreams of becoming a town councillor; another dreams of a generalship; still another, no more than a workingman, is gnawed by an ambition to become a supervisor or foreman.

Every authoritarian faction — even the so-called workers’ parties — cultivate this hierarchical mind-set. For it is only by planting ambition in men’s hearts that rulers or would-be rulers can pull the wool over their eyes and turn them into playthings.

Anarchists are opposed to all hierarchy, be it moral or material. They counter with respect for the freedom and absolute autonomy of the individual.

And if they think in terms of a Social Context of the future, it is an environment wherein every human being will have rights equal to those of his contemporaries.

We must banish the sentiment of hierarchy from men’s minds and replace it with love of anarchy.

Enrique Roig de San Martin – The Motherland and the Workers (1889)

The Cuban anarchist movement can be traced back to the 1860s, when Proudhon’s mutualist ideas (Anarchism, Volume 1, Selections 12 & 18) were popularized in Cuba by Saturnine Martinez. A variety of mutualist workers’ and mutual aid associations were formed. From these a trade union movement began to develop. By the 1880s, anarchists influenced by the libertarian socialism of the anti-authoritarian sections of the First International (see Volume 1, Chapter 6) and the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region (Volume 1, Selection 36) had taken an active role in the Cuban trade union movement, thanks largely to the work of the weekly anarchist paper, El Productor, edited by Enrique Roig de San Martin (1843-1889). The proto-syndicalist Cuban Workers’ Alliance, inspired by Bakunin’s International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, regarded unions as revolutionary organs of the working class that would seek to abolish capitalism independent of any political party. Anarchists were also involved in the fight against racial discrimination, a significant problem in Cuba as slavery was only officially abolished in 1886. In the following excerpts from El Productor, translated by Paul Sharkey, Roig de San Martin responds to an article in the “liberal” paper, El Pais, calling on the workers to support the cause of Cuban independence.

The Motherland and the Workers

It is not because we are “faint of heart”, not because we are “hot-headed” nor “for reasons of a personal nature, even though we be the sons of this land”, that we shy away from “defending [Cuba's] dignity and grandeur”.

El Pais should know that in acting as we do we are prompted solely by the dictates of honest conscience.

This land it has fallen to our lot to be born in holds great, very great attractions for us, but at the same time we have paid fervent tribute… to “her dignity and greatness.” In our hearts, knowledge that the greatness of a country resides in the greatness of its inhabitants has caused us to amend our opinion of the defence of our own “dignity and grandeur”.

The continual growling from an empty belly, the heart-rending sight of children starving and naked and the wretched spectre of a weak and bloodless spouse: this is the picture that has presented itself to our eyes every time that we have tried to improve our comrades’ circumstances.

In vain, staking all on the wings of chimerical dreams, have we asked the art of politics in which part of its repertoire lurks the solution to the economic strife that tyrannizes us. To no avail, for the only reply we have ever had is silence.

What is more, much more, some bamboozler has stepped forward to reply, with the timidity of one who knows that he is uttering an untruth: “You ignoramuses, Politics will help you bring down the prices of consumer goods, which is tantamount to your receiving a pay raise which must leave you better off than you are at the moment.”

But this is just so much sophistry. It is not the case that lower prices for consumer goods are equivalent to a raise in pay, for the latter is always tied to the former, rising and falling as the cost of living rises or falls.

On which point we have in our possession conclusive statistics and studies that leave no room for doubt. The fact is that it could scarcely be otherwise, since elevating the labouring folk to comfortable circumstances would be tantamount to the ruling classes cutting their own throats.

Inevitably, therefore, we are trapped for all eternity in a vicious circle, as long as it is left to politics to iron out the vagaries of fortune and the manner in which we operate.

But, taking it for granted that this is the argument, and granting that we were to achieve a hike in pay some day, albeit even indirectly, through politics, should that be the be-all and end-all of our aspirations?

Certainly not.

Being wage-earners, dependent upon a wage, our “dignity and grandeur” must be at the mercy of those who live off our sweat; and — at least insofar as we understand the meaning of the word — it is not dignified for our exertions to be directed towards the maintenance of an order that keeps us in degradation.

Which is why we want no truck with politics, why we urge our comrades to keep clear of it as much as they are able and to form an essentially workers’ party, committed solely and exclusively to the championing of their own interests.

But what about the homeland! …Ah, the homeland! The “dignity and grandeur” of the land that gave you birth!

But what do we mean when we speak of the grandeur of the homeland? Do we mean her independence! Precisely! Except that this, like everything else in politics is simply an abuse of words.

Does the independence of our homeland consist of her having a government of her own, her not being answerable to any other nations, etc., etc., even though her sons be subjected to the most degrading slavery? Can the homeland exist without her sons? Or can a “dignified, great”, happy and independent homeland include children who are slaves?

We cannot accept this interpretation.

We hold that the homeland is made up of her sons, and that there is no freedom for the homeland if some of her children are still slaves; it is of little consequence whether the slave-master is a foreigner or a fellow citizen; the result is the same. Slavery! Some may say: Where is the slavery? Has that stigma not been erased from our foreheads once and for all?

Sure. No longer will you find among us a slave with a branded skin, his flesh continually torn by the weighted tails of a brutal whip wielded by dull-witted overseers, the degraded henchmen of the ambitions of the mighty.

But that does not mean that slavery has been ended; very far from it; it is as powerful and as vigorous as ever, except that it has changed its form. Is that not what the “Regulation and Charter for the Organization of Domestic Service on this Island” represents?

Article 16 of the aforesaid Regulation reads as follows:

“No servant may absent himself from his residence on any personal errand, without the corresponding leave from his master, on pain of a one peso fine.”

And Article 21 of the Regulation reads:

“Should a servant be without employment for more than one month, he shall be deemed dismissed from service; and, should he fail to furnish due evidence that he is plying another trade, or has other means of sustenance, he shall be deemed a vagrant.”

Lest this article drag on too long, we shall refrain from offering comment and urge El Pais to do so in our place, since it has so far said not one word on this score, such is its liberality! The remainder of the Regulation is of the same ilk.

Besides all this, we understand perfectly well the reason behind politics as far as certain classes of society are concerned. By whichever means they think easiest, each of them searches for a way of living independently; and so we find the capitalist dabbling in conservative politics, just as those with enough wit to sparkle and shine dabble in liberal politics, both feeling like slaves in a set-up that is ill-suited to their aspirations.

But let us leave them to it, for when all is said and done it is up to them to turn situations to their advantage.

As for ourselves, we will be the slaves — as ever — no matter what political system is put in place.

We workers cannot nor should we be anything other than socialists, for socialism these days is the only thing standing up to the bourgeois rule that has us enslaved.

Talking to us of homeland and freedom is a waste of time unless they start by guaranteeing our independence as individuals; we are not about to redeem the homeland while we are all left slaves.

The measure of the homeland’s independence can be gauged by the amount of independence enjoyed by her children, and, as we have already said, there can be no free homeland while her children are slaves.

Enrique Roig de San Martin

El Productor, (Havana) 12 May 1889

Anarchism Volume 2: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977)

I have finally sent to my publisher the manuscript for Volume 2 of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Originally subtitled “From Apocalypse to Utopia,” Black Rose Books has chosen the more prosaic and self-explanatory subtitle, The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977). Volume 2 begins with a chapter on war resistance, anti-militarism and the emergence of new anarchist perspectives from people like Herbert Read, Marie Louise Berneri, Paul Goodman, Alex Comfort and Dwight Macdonald. It concludes with a chapter on sexual revolution, with selections from Marie Louise Berneri on Wilhelm Reich, Daniel Guerin and Paul Goodman on gay liberation, and Penny Kornegger and Carol Ehrlich on anarchist feminism. What I have tried to document in Volume 2 is the remarkable resurgence of anarchist ideas after the Second World War, despite that devasting conflict and the defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Other topics covered in Volume 2 include art and anarchy, libertarian education, workers’ self-management, direct action and the new pacificism, science and technology, utopia, techno-bureaucracy and the rise of the “new class,” non-hierarchical organization, ecology, creating a libertarian counter-culture and resisting the nation state. Davide Turcato has kindly agreed to revise his paper, “Making Sense of Anarchism,” to serve as the introduction. I have reproduced the Preface and Table of Contents below:

ANARCHISM: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF LIBERTARIAN IDEAS

VOLUME TWO: THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW ANARCHISM (1939-1977)

PREFACE

This is the second volume of what is now projected to be a three volume anthology of anarchist writings from ancient China to the present day. Volume 1, subtitled From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), begins with a Chinese Daoist text, “Neither Lord Nor Subject,” from around 300 CE, and concludes with the positive accomplishments and defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War (1936-1939). That defeat has sometimes been portrayed as the end of anarchism both as a living body of thought and as a movement. What I hope to show in this second volume, which covers the period roughly from 1939 to 1977, is the falsity of such a portrayal. Even before the remarkable resurgence of anarchistic movements and ideas during the 1960s, anarchism had begun to move in new and exciting directions, albeit without the mass base of support it had enjoyed previously in such varied places and times as France during its revolutionary upheavals in 1789, 1848 and 1871, in the development of revolutionary working class movements in Europe and Latin America, in liberation movements in Japan, Korea and China, and in the Russian Revolution and civil war, particularly in Ukraine.

When the Second World War began in 1939, the world’s various anarchist movements were in eclipse, suppressed by Fascist, Communist, military and other government forces (Selections 2, 3 & 5). Even in those countries where a modicum of freedom of expression was tolerated, wartime censorship and persecution of anarchists for their anti-militarist activities made it difficult for anarchists to communicate and to organize. Nevertheless, anarchists in England and North America were able to continue publishing, and in the process began a transformation in anarchist ideas that has continued to the present day. In England, people like Herbert Read (Selections 1, 19 & 36), Marie Louise Berneri (Selections 4, 15 & 75), Alex Comfort (Selections 12 & 20), Ethel Mannin (Selection 14), and George Woodcock (Selection 69) wrote not only on more typical anarchist themes such as anti-militarism, war resistance, the State and revolution, but also about spontaneity, creativity, art, freedom of expression, technology, sexuality, utopia and personal liberation, themes that were again to come to the fore in the 1960s. In North America, Paul Goodman (Selections 17 & 37) and Dwight Macdonald (Selection 13) pursued similar lines of enquiry, arguing against hierarchical organization, mass society, consumer culture and technological domination. In Israel, Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer’s friend and literary executor, sought to revive the “utopian” tradition in socialist thought exemplified by Landauer, Fourier, Proudhon and Kropotkin (Selection 16).

In Europe anarchists opposed both Fascism and Stalinist Communism, with predictable results. Many perished in concentration camps, others were imprisoned or died fighting in France, Italy, Spain and later in Eastern Europe, particularly in Bulgaria (Selection 7). As the Second World War came to a close, the anarchists sought to regroup but were relatively isolated as a result of their refusal to support either post-war imperialist power bloc, following Marie Louise Berneri’s dictum, “Neither East Nor West!” (Selections 6, 8 & 10). In Asia, the pre-war anarchist movements in Japan, China and Korea (Selection 9) never really recovered, but in India Gandhi’s movement for nonviolent revolution was continued by people like Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan (Selection 32), who advocated decentralized, relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian village communities based on human-scale technology, a vision similar to the communitarian anarchism of Kropotkin, Landauer, the “pure anarchists” of pre-war Japan and post-war anarchists like Paul Goodman.

Anarchism enjoyed a resurgence in the arts, with surrealists such as André Breton (Selection 23) and the Automatistes in Quebec (Selection 22) coming out in favour of “resplendent anarchy.” In New York, Julian Beck, Judith Malina and the Living Theatre (Selection 24) pioneered new approaches to performance art, seeking to break down the barriers between artist, performer and audience in a manner consonant with anarchist ideals. Anarchists emphasized the need and value of living anarchistically in an authoritarian world, giving rise to communalist experiments and projects that sought to transform both the individual participants and the larger societies in which they lived. A decade before small-scale communes became popular among disaffected youth in the 1960s, David Dellinger (Selection 40) was writing about them in the anarchist paper, Resistance, edited by David Thoreau Wieck, which sought to expand the various spheres of freedom in existing society as part of a broader project of social transformation (Selection 39).

These new developments in anarchist theory and practice were not welcomed by all anarchists. Some anarchists, such as the Impulso group in Italy, continued to look to the working class as the agent of revolutionary change and denounced anarchist advocates of personal liberation and cultural change as “pseudo-revolutionaries” (Selection 38). Whether advocates of revolutionary class struggle or more piecemeal social change, anarchists opposed post-war European colonialism (Selections 28, 29 & 31) and sought to turn opposition to war, conscription and nuclear weapons into opposition to capitalism and the nation-state through direct action and mass disobedience (Selections 30, 31, 33 & 34). Echoing Bakunin’s critique a century earlier, Alex Comfort exposed the relationship between authoritarian power structures and criminality (Selection 26) and Geoffrey Ostergaard discussed the rise to power of the middle class intellectuals through the process of “managerial revolution” (Selection 27). This critique of the “new class” and their role in the rise of the “techno-bureaucracy” was to be considerably expanded in the subsequent analyses of Louis Mercier Vega (Selection 66), Nico Berti (Selection 67) and Noam Chomsky (Selection 68).

Herbert Read continued to advocate libertarian education through art (Selection 36), and Holley Cantine discussed the perversion of art and play in capitalist societies (Selection 21). The anarchist architect, Giancarlo de Carlo, emphasized the necessary role of the people themselves in rebuilding and designing their communities, and the uses of such direct action tactics as squatting and rent strikes in obtaining affordable housing (Selection 18).

To the surprise of many, including some anarchists, these various currents in anarchist thought resurfaced in the 1960s, when various movements, from the anti-war movements, to the student movements, the nascent ecology movement and movements for sexual, female, black and gay liberation, began to coalesce into new, broad based movements for social change that challenged the very basis of contemporary society. Murray Bookchin, drawing on the work of Herbert Read, argued for the necessary connection between anarchy and ecology (Selection 48). The Provos in Holland challenged the complacency, consumerism and regimentation of modern society using creative forms of direct action, such as placing free white bicycles around Amsterdam to undermine automobile culture (Selection 50). Daniel Guérin (Selection 49), Jacobo Prince (Selection 52), Diego Abad de Santillan (Selection 53), Nicolas Walter (Selection 54) and Noam Chomsky (Selection 55) brought to the attention of a new generation the positive accomplishments and living legacy of the historic anarchist movement. Some members of that new generation, such as the Cohn-Bendit brothers in France, translated these ideas into action during the May-June 1968 events in France, when a series of student strikes and workplace occupations almost brought down the government (Selection 51).

The May-June 1968 events in France revived interest in workers’ self-management, or “autogestion,” which Guérin traced back to Proudhon (Selection 49), and which various anarchists, particularly anarcho-syndicalists, had continued to advocate, some favouring factory councils or committees (Selection 59), others a combination of industrial, trade union, communal and regional organization (Selections 58, 60 & 61). Both Murray Bookchin (Selection 62) and Colin Ward (Selection 63) have sought to go beyond these “forms of freedom,” to embrace more expansive concepts of nonhierarchical community in which each person, regardless of his or her specific role (or lack thereof) in the production process, exercises effective control over his or her daily life.

The role of the state in the rise of hierarchical society and in the decline of communal self-regulation and mutual aid are considered by the anthropologist, Pierre Clastres (Selection 64), and by Michael Taylor (Selection 65). George Benello describes the “wasteland culture” that arises from our technological and organizational imperatives (Selection 44). George Woodcock discusses the role of the technology of time-keeping in the regimentation of society (Selection 69), and Paul Feyerabend launches a whole-scale attack on scientific reason and the hegemony of science in modern societies (Selection 71). Paul Goodman (Selection 70) and Ivan Illich (Selection 73) develop some criteria for evaluating technology, and Murray Bookchin sets forth his concept of “eco-technology,” or “libertarian technics,” in the context of his vision of an ecological society (Selection 74).

Volume 2 ends with a chapter on sexual and social revolution, beginning with Marie Louise Berneri’s early analysis of Wilhelm Reich (Selection 75), whose ideas were extended by Daniel Guérin in his writings on gay liberation (Selection 76). Guérin sees social and sexual liberation as necessary to each other and as part of a broader process of liberatory social transformation. Paul Goodman discusses the “politics of being queer” (Selection 77), while Penny Kornegger (Selection 78) and Carol Ehrlich (Selection 79) connect the anarchist critique of domination to feminist critiques of male domination and heterosexuality.

Each chapter ends with a brief note relating the material in Volume 2 to the material that will be included in Volume 3 of this anthology, which will cover the period from 1974 to the present day.

Although I have striven to include in this anthology material going beyond the standard scope of other anthologies of anarchist writings, my focus has been on the origin and development of anarchist ideas. This anthology was never intended to be a documentary history of the various anarchist movements around the world, an altogether different and gargantuan project. Anarchists have participated in and written about many events that are not specifically addressed in this anthology, but I hope that the ideas conveyed in the selections that I have included also convey the richness and diversity of anarchist thought, and suggest how anarchists would respond to any number of topics and issues.

Since the publication of Volume 1 in 2005, I have set up a web blog to provide additional commentary and selections that have not been included in the published volumes: www.robertgraham.wordpress.com. Readers are invited to contact me there with any comments or suggestions that they may have.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: Davide Turcato: Making Sense of Anarchism (2008)

CHAPTER 1: ANTI-MILITARISM, WAR & REVOLUTION

1. Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940)

2. Emma Goldman: The Individual, Society and the State (1940)

3. The Romande Anarchist Federation: Coming to Grips with War (1939)

4. Marie Louise Berneri: Constructive Policy versus Destructive War (1940-43)

5. Jean Sauliere, Voline et al: Appeal to all Workers (1943)

6. Italian Anarchist Federation: Act for Yourselves (1945)

7. Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto (1945)

8. French Anarchist Federation: The Issues of the Day (1945)

9. Korean Anarchist Manifesto (1948)

10. International Anarchist Manifesto (1948)

11. Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line (1945)

12. Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946)

13. Dwight Macdonald: The Root is Man (1946)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 2: THE WILL TO DREAM

14. Ethel Mannin: The Will to Dream (1944)

15. Marie Louis Berneri: Journey Through Utopia (1949)

16. Martin Buber: Paths in Utopia (1949)

17. Paul & Percival Goodman: Communitas (1947)

18. Giancarlo de Carlo: Rebuilding Community (1948)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 3: ART AND FREEDOM

19. Herbert Read: The Freedom of the Artist (1943)

20. Alex Comfort: Art and Social Responsibility (1946)

21. Holley Cantine: Art: Play and its Perversions (1947)

22. Paul-Émile Borduas: Global Refusal (1948)

23. André Breton: The Black Mirror of Anarchism (1952)

24. Julian Beck: Storming the Barricades (1964)

25. Living Theatre Declaration (1970)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 4: RESISTING THE NATION STATE

26. Alex Comfort: Authority and Delinquency (1950)

27. Geoffrey Ostergaard: The Managerial Revolution (1954)

28. Mohamed Saïl: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951)

29. Maurice Fayolle: From Tunis to Casablanca (1954)

30. André Prudhommeaux: The Libertarians and Politics (1954)

31. Noir et Rouge: Refusing the Nation-State (1957-62)

32. Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan: From Socialism to Sarvodaya (1957)

33. Vernon Richards: Banning the Bomb (1958-59)

34. Nicolas Walter: Direct Action and the New Pacifism (1962)

35. Paul Goodman: “Getting into Power” (1962)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 5: CREATING A COUNTER-CULTURE

36. Herbert Read: Anarchism and Education (1944-47)

37. Paul Goodman: A Public Dream of Universal Disaster (1950)

38. L’Impulso: Resistance or Revolution (1950)

39. David Thoreau Wieck: The Realization of Freedom (1953)

40. David Dellinger: Communalism (1954)

41. A.J. Baker: Anarchism without Ends (1960)

42. Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (1961)

43. Nicolas Walter: Anarchism and Religion (1991)

44. C. George Benello: Wasteland Culture (1967)

45. Louis Mercier Vega: Yesterday’s Societies and Today’s (1970)

46. Joel Spring: Liberating Education (1975)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 6: RESURGENT ANARCHISM

47. Lain Diez: Towards a Systemization of Anarchist Thought (1964)

48. Murray Bookchin: Ecology and Anarchy (1965)

49. Daniel Guérin: Anarchism Reconsidered (1965-66)

50. The Provos: PROVOcation (1966)

51. The Cohn-Bendit Brothers: It is for Yourself that You Make the Revolution (1968)

52. Jacobo Prince: Fighting for Freedom (1969)

53. Diego Abad de Santillán: Anarchism Without Adjectives (1969)

54. Nicolas Walter: About Anarchism (1969)

55. Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970)

56. Robert Paul Wolff: In Defence of Anarchism (1970)

57. Paul Goodman: Freedom and Autonomy (1972)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 7: FORMS OF FREEDOM

58. Philip Sansom: Syndicalism Restated (1951)

59. Benjamin Péret: The Factory Committee (1952)

60. Comunidad del Sur: The Production of Self-Management (1969)

61. Maurice Joyeaux: Self-Management, Syndicalism and Factory Councils (1973)

62. Murray Bookchin: The Forms of Freedom (1968)

63. Colin Ward: Anarchy as a Theory of Organization (1966-1973)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 8: SOCIETY AGAINST STATE

64. Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State (1974)

65. Michael Taylor: Anarchy, the State and Cooperation (1976)

66. Louis Mercier Vega: The Modern State (1970)

67. Nico Berti: The New Masters (1976)

68. Noam Chomsky: Intellectuals and the State (1977)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 9: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

69. George Woodcock: The Tyranny of the Clock (1944)

70. Paul Goodman: Science and Technology (1960)

71. Paul Feyerabend: Against Method (1975)

72. Richard Kostelanetz: Technoanarchism (1968)

73. Ivan Illich: Political Inversion (1976)

74. Murray Bookchin: Ecotechnology and Ecocommunities (1976-82)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

CHAPTER 10: SEXUAL REVOLUTION

75. Marie Louise Berneri: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution (1945)

76. Daniel Guérin: Sexual Liberation

77. Paul Goodman: The Politics of Being Queer (1969)

78. Peggy Kornegger: Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (1975)

79. Carol Ehrlich: Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism (1977)

The Anarchist Current: Prologue to Volume 3

Index

Camillo Berneri – Against the Racist Delirium

Camillo Berneri (1897-1937) was an Italian anarchist forced into exile in 1926 as a result of his anti-fascist activities. A professor of literature and philosophy, he refused to take an oath of allegiance to Mussolini and to join the Fascist “syndicate,” a state controlled corporate organization (not to be confused with the revolutionary trade union organizations of the anarcho-syndicalists, such as the Union Sindicale Italiano (USI) – Italian Syndicalist Union). Berneri moved from country to country, being refused refugee status and often expelled. He was a prolific writer active in the international anarchist and anti-fascist movements. English translations of some of his writings can be found at: http://struggle.ws/berneri.html. When the Revolution and Civil War broke out in Spain in July 1936, Berneri went there to continue the fight against fascism, only to be murdered (probably by Stalinist agents, but possibly by Italian Fascists) during the May Days in Barcelona in 1937. Berneri was an eloquent critic of anarchist collaboration with the Republican government in Spain. In the following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey, Berneri dissects the vicious and absurd Nazi (“National Socialist”) doctrines of racial purity and superiority that were coming to ascendancy in Germany and other European countries. Originally published as El Delirio Racista, Ediciones Iman, Buenos Aires, February 1935. The anarcho-syndicalist, Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958), develops a more extensive anarchist critique of nationalism, racism and power in his book, Nationalism and Culture (Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937; reprinted by Black Rose Books), excerpted in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selection 121. Berneri’s daughter, Marie Louise Berneri, was also very active in the international anarchist movement. Selections from her writings will be included in Volume 2 of the Anarchism anthology.

THE RACIST DELIRIUM

Fascism, the triumph of the irrational, has taken the most discredited myths of pre-scientific ethnology to its bosom. One of the theorists of Hitlerism (assuming that it can be regarded as a body of doctrine), Ernest Krieck, in his book National Political Education (page 17), proclaims the need to subject science to National Socialist politics, thereby giving science the kiss of death.
“The age of ‘pure reason’, of ‘science for the sake of science’, of ‘disinterested science’, is over. Any science that has an active contribution to make towards a broad objective becomes political, and thus, like politics, has its principles and its accomplishments alike, imbued with racism, nationalism and National Socialism.”
On 11 May 1933, while carrying out sentence passed on 20,000 impounded books in Berlin, Goebbels announced: “Intellectualism has had its day.”
It is absolutely plain from the racist delirium (an out-and-out collective psychosis) that Hitlerism represents a great eclipse of German intellect and culture. On 25 March 1933, Goering, the then Reich minister of the Interior, told foreign press representatives: “Plainly, anti-semitism is part of the official program of the National Socialist Party and the manner in which the latter has moulded its storm troops makes it plain that today every member of the storm troops looks at Professor Einstein with a feeling of racial superiority.”
The most grotesque stance of all is the stance of the Hitlerian scientists (?). Race professor H. Günther, speaking as a National Socialist, announces: “Only regeneration of the Nordic blood, to which the Indo-Germanic peoples are indebted for their historical greatness, can ward off defeat. Rebirth is impossible until the Nordics become many and strong again.” “Onwards, to Nordification!” What a stunning watchword! Meanwhile “with the Nordic race as its objective, a new notion of duty must be born.” But he finds himself greatly embarrassed as an ethnologist, not knowing how to reconcile the watchword with the scientific data and is obliged to confess: “Race science is, sadly, obliged to class the vast majority of the inhabitants of Europe as bastards and mixed-bloods. Which makes it a difficult and disagreeable science and renders it as unacceptable as the dictum: Know thyself. A really difficult and unpleasant undertaking, even for the champions of racism…”
German racism claims to seek “the purification of the German race” and at the same time exalts the myth of racial purity, proclaiming the superiority of the Aryan-Germanic race.
AN ARYAN MYTH
Mussolini told Emil Ludwig: “There is no pure race. The laughable fact is that none of the champions of German racial purity was German: Gobineau was French, Chamberlain English, Woltmann Jewish.”
If anti-semitism were to become necessary for the survival of Italian fascism, Mussolini, worse than Macchiavelli, would follow in the footsteps of Gobineau, Chamberlain and Woltmann and he too would be talking about racial purity [as he did in 1938, when the Fascists introduced "race purity" laws in Italy]. Hitler, being self-educated and bereft of any critical sense, is taken in by the Aryan myth, however. Speaking to representatives from the medical associations in Germany, he stated, on 6 April 1933: “In the world of the intellect, the greatest advances have never been made by elements outside of the race, but rather by Aryan and German brains.” This simplistic notion is emphasized in several passages in his book Mein Kampf (pp. 478-479, 316, 322), where he takes vigorous exception to the intellectual emancipation of blacks. According to him, it is an affront to reason and criminal lunacy “to teach a half-monkey to believe that he can make it as a lawyer”. The myth of creative races prompts him to these typical expressions: “All that we admire on this earth—science and art, technology and invention—all of it, is the exclusive creation of a few peoples and perhaps, initially, of a single people. Upon those peoples depends the existence of civilization as a whole. If they perish, all that is fine upon this earth will be buried with them… Denied the possibility of using men of inferior race, the Aryans would never have been able to take their first steps towards their subsequent civilization, just as, without the aid of some animals which man has successfully domesticated, it would have been impossible to perfect the technology which today allows us gradually to dispense with those very same animals…”
In October 1933, the German Philosophy Society held its annual congress in Magdeburg. Its chairman, Professor Kruger, closed his address with a eulogy to Hitler. The gathering sang “Deutschland über Alles” and the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel”. Hitler had telegraphed the congress: “I send my greetings to the German Philosophy Society. May the powers of an authentically German philosophy help to inspire and bolster the German outlook on the world.” One might be inclined to believe that these were the “hired philosophers” rightly held up to ridicule by Schopenhauer. Not so. The German Philosophy Society was established in 1917 with the aim of erecting a “bulwark against the invasion of Germany by foreign ideas and in order to cultivate thinking in tune with the race.”
The race delirium is not a product of Hitlerism: it predated and largely generated the latter. Even Nietzsche expressed scorn for the unbelievable exaggerations of the racism of his day and wrote: “How much bad faith and how much pettiness are required to raise race issues in today’s confused Europe… Have nothing to do with anyone who has any hand or part in the shameful fraud of racial issues”…
PAN-GERMANISM
…[I]t should come as no surprise to us to find that in the schools of Hitlerite Germany it is taught that Jesus Christ was born of a blue-eyed, blond-haired mother by a German soldier who had enlisted in the Roman army. The Prussian minister of Public Education and Worship declared in his appeal to the Protestant masses (18 July 1933) that the advent of Jesus Christ represented “ a return to Nordic influence”. Hardly surprising then that a Hitlerite newspaper (the Voelkischer Beobachter of 14 March 1933) should assert: “The Marseillaise is an ancient German air set to music by a writer from Wurttemburg”, while one teacher, a certain Zinner, published a 674-page History of Astronomy in which the work of French, British, American and Italian astronomers is summed up under the heading ‘Die Stern Kunde der Germanen’ (German Astronomy). But there’s worse. Architect Hermann Wille, at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Germanic Pre-History, has argued that the stone monuments marking prehistoric graves thus far uncovered are in fact merely the most ancient forms of German temples. The temple of Delos supposedly demonstrates the Germanic influence and some Germanic temples supposedly date back to the Bronze Age.
The Prussian minister of Public Education is not content with the Bronze Age and has reached back even further to the Ice Age, writing in his circular: “History textbooks designed for Prussian youngsters should start with the Ice Age in Central Europe because prehistory is an eminently national science and will rebut the commonly held prejudices regarding the inferiority of the culture of the Germans, our ancestors.”
And again: “Neanderthal man, Arignac man and Cro-Magnon man must serve as an example in showing that countless races have had original cultures.”
“Teachers must briefly demonstrate how the Nordic race and the Falish race (a neologism devised by German racists to refer to what some ethnologists refer to as the Dalic race) spread throughout the North and Centre of Europe.”
“The Hindus, the Medes, the Persians and the Hittites had Nordic roots. Similarly, Greek history should be traced back to central Europe; indeed, the conquering Hellenes were Nordic and it was they that formed the master-caste in the country.”
And the minister concludes: “Democracy (sic) has triggered race mixing. Depopulation was the ruination of the Nordic race in Greece. Thus, in Italy, the strife between patricians and plebeians was a racial struggle: the vast majority of the population of Italy was made up of descendents of Oriental slaves.
The migration of the Germanic peoples (the barbarian invasions) injected fresh Germanic blood (sic) into a hodgepodge of races in the degenerate later empire. Which explains the fresh cultural upsurge of the Middle Ages, since this took place only in countries where the Germanic tribes finally settled: Northern Italy (as distinct from the South), Spain, France and England”…
THE ABRA CADABRA OF HITLERITE ANTHROPOLOGY
…All German official publications popularizing ethnology are utterly bereft of any scientific value. They are devised exclusively for rabble-rousing and propagandistic purposes (in the nationalistic sense), as encapsulated in this snatch from the Berlin Morgenpost: “Just as Goethe was descended from the German emperors and kings, so the veins of a modest artisan or peasant should carry princely blood. The object of research will be to convince sons, grandsons and great-grandsons that, being descended from illustrious forebears, they must show themselves worthy of them by living a glorious existence.”
The Aryan myth fits in with National Socialist mysticism perfectly. On the one hand, it heightens national feeling and on the other it worships the people by conferring a sort of congenital nobility upon them. Hitlerism tends towards a collectivization of blue blood; which is the main reason for the popularity which this colossal fraud is gaining…
A 100% German will look at himself in the mirror once he reads in government publications these precepts of Hitlerite science:
‘In non-Nordics, the roots of teeth are slanted more, as they are in animals, and this corresponds with the protruding upper jaw in animals.’
And will be tempted to reach for his wife’s make-up pencil as he reflects upon this other precept:
‘As the colour red has an exciting effect, the light pink lips of a Nordic man, by inviting kisses, play an important part in love-play.’”
When eating, he will try to monitor the work of his jaws, taking care with his mouth or trying to shape it like a knife blade; otherwise he might be mistaken for a Dinaric type or an Eastern-Balt or even a Jew. In fact, official publications caution:
“The mastication of the Nordic who tends to crush and grind food down is carried out with mouth closed. By contrast, in non-Nordics, vertical mastication tends to be noisy, like in animals.”
“…in non-Nordics, wide mouth and thick lips are indicative of concupiscence. Ingestion is noisy and eager and sensation-hungry. Movement is frantic and pleasure is taken in the ability to cause upset.”
And with no fear of embarrassment, he will turn as red as a pepper or at least a shy girl, because:
“Shame proper is pretty much non-existent in non-Nordics, who in fact use the word ‘shame’ to designate the sexual organs. Besides, the dark-skinned man finds it very difficult to blush from embarrassment.”
If his teeth are good and straight and his lips pink, etc., etc., he can feel well satisfied because he will think himself the perfect man and not a half-monkey. Hitlerite anthropology teaches:
“The non-Nordic is half way between Nordic man and the animals, coming right after the anthropomorphic monkeys. Thus he is not the perfect man nor in fact a man as against an animal; he is merely a transition, an intermediate stage. The designation ‘un-man’ would be a lot fairer and particularly appropriate”…
PURE RACES
In Europe it is in fact the bigwigs that cannot lay claim to the tag of ethnic “purity”. In the aristocracy and bourgeoisie down through the ages, interbreeding has always been commonplace and these are the very classes that have provided the largest numbers of philosophers and artists regarded as typifying the “national psyche”. I cannot dwell longer upon this subject which would require a very full exploration, but I think it may be opportune to cite a few examples because, even in our own ranks which are alien to racist infatuations, phrases such as the “Latin mind”, or “Slav mind”, etc. are often employed in order to characterize aspects of the culture of one people or another.
The emperor Justinian, regarded as the man who brought systemization to Roman law and who was hailed as the top symbol of Rome’s greatness, was the son of a Slav peasant woman. Montaigne, on whose “French spirit” many have expounded, was the son of a Jewish mother. The Slav soul that the critics invoke in order to explain away nearly every aspect of Russian literature is a myth, if it is meant as a body of attitudes tied to ethnicity. Pushkin, the great Russian poet, had a grandfather who was the son of an Abyssinian man and a German woman and his paternal forebears included a Prussian who married an Italian woman. The Russian poet Vassili Zhukovsky had a Turkish woman for a mother and the Russian poet Ogarev was of Tartar descent. The Russian poet Del’vig belonged to a German family and the Russian poet Prince Kantemir was the son of a Greek mother. The Russian poet Fet was descended from a German woman. Mikhail Lermontov was of Scottish extraction and Herzen had a German for his mother.
Many contemporary writers have a mixed bag of ancestors, reminiscent of the family tree of the French socialist writer Paul Lafargue whose maternal grandmother was a mulatta from the island of Santo Domingo, while his maternal grandfather was a Jew and his maternal grandmother a Carib Indian, that is, a survivor of the aboriginal population of the West Indies.
WHAT THE JEWISH RACE IS
The superstition of race defined as homogeneous ethnic origins, while it has generated inane Aryan pride, has also led to racist anti-semitism, the first systematic exposition of which appears in Dühring’s book The Jewish Question Considered as the Outcome of Racial Character. In the wake of that book, which was rebutted by Marx, many other authors have argued that the Jews are a race and that that race is an inferior one.
The enormous anthropological variety among Jews is the best proof of the non-existence of a Jewish race. The Jews of North Africa, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and the French Midi are dolichocephalic (cf. Prunier-Bey, Lombroso, etc.), whereas the Polish, Russian and German ones are brachycephalic (cf. Kopernicki, Mayer, etc.). There are black Jews like the Daggatun (a tribe living on the fringes of the Sahara), the Abyssinian Falashas 3 and the black Jews of India. There are fair-haired types (in Bohemia and Germany), Mongoloid Australian types (in China and the Caucasus). And there are tall Jews (in southern Russia) and squat Jews (in Galicia and Poland).
Numerous investigations have been mounted into the huge ethnic diversity among Jews, some of them hugely valuable scientifically speaking and we need not cite texts. Let us confine ourselves to a few observations. The largest number of Jews lives in Russia and Poland and since, in the first centuries of the Christian era, many Slavs converted to Judaism under the influence of fugitives, there are grounds for believing that the Jews currently found in Bessarabia, the Ukraine and Poland are, the majority of them, Slavs and Tartars. Remember here that an entire people, originally from Sarmatia but who settled between the Caspian and the Black Seas, the Khazars, converted to Judaism almost to a man around 763 AD. In the 4th century the Khazars were subjugated by the Huns and later by the Avars and Turks. In the 7th century they defeated Persia and allied themselves with the Byzantine Empire. In the first half of the 8th century, their capital, Semender, was overrun by the Arabs and they were driven into Mesopotamia. This traffic leads us to believe that there was a mixing of Mongolian-Semitic-Mediterranean Greek types. According to other writers, the Ashkenazy Jews are likely of pure Israelite extraction.
The ancient Jews were by no means an ethnic unit and the whole of Jewish history is an ongoing succession of intermarriages. In Herod’s times, the Jewish people was a mixture of Idumeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Syrians and Greeks. There was a city called Scitopolis, a Greek name that refers to the Scythians who had invaded Palestine during the reign of Josiah (639-608 BC). Pella, Gadara, Hipos, Gamala and Gerasa (east of the Jordan) were Greco-Roman cities. Josephus Flavius (De Bello Judaico, Book VII, Chapter III, part 3) asserts that many Greeks in Antioch converted to Judaism.
In Man and the Earth, Elisée Reclus states that the Aryans of Armenia were heavily judaicized but remained Aryans and were regarded (in Byzantium and all the other cities to which their nomadic lifestyle brought them) as belonging to the Jewish race: which goes to show that physically the Armenians and the Jews resembled one another. It is no surprise to find that the Assyrian conquerors scattered their Jewish captives by the hundreds of thousands through the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the mountains of Armenia and the Caucasus. The Jewish Semites thus lived cheek by jowl with the Aryans of Armenia. There were even Jews who became sovereign over the whole Aiasdan region, Georgia included. The pure Aryan element therefore had a hand in the ethnic changes of the Jews in a variety of ways: through the Armenian and, above all, the Greek influence.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Copenhagen’s Dagens Nyheter, Streicher, the official organizer of the boycott of the Jews in Germany, conceded that the Jews are not a race; and, whereas in the Hitlerite press one frequently reads the assertion that the Jewish people is a mixture of races, when it comes to anti-Semitic propaganda the German National Socialists seize upon all the old chestnuts—the Jew is grasping, the Jew is lascivious, etc., perpetuating and spreading the fable that the shortcomings (real or imagined) of the Jews are a by-product of their “Semitic blood”. The “Jewish nose” is seized upon by all the caricaturists, whereas a German survey has found that 13-14% of Jews have an aquilinine nose and all the rest had “Greek” noses. Paragraph 4 of the National-Socialist Program declares that the Jews may not be “blood comrades” to Germans, while all the comparative analyses of blood show that there is no such thing as “Jewish blood” or “German blood”, nor any other national blood type.
Anti-Semitism has to generalize and characterize and represent the Jew as a fixed human type identifiable at a glance or by smell, as recommended by Professor Fischberg.
Denying the existence of a Jewish race when there are Jews in existence might seem a bit of a paradox. Schopenhauer said that “the Jewish homeland is other Jews” and Renan, who subscribed to no racist myths, eventually contrasted Jewish tradition with Jewish race. Elisée Reclus rightly noted that the Jews constitute a nation “insofar as they share an awareness of a collective past of joys and sufferings, a sediment of identical traditions such as the more or less illusory belief in a shared ancestry”. Bernard Lazare spelled out the same idea , to which all serious students of the Jewish question subscribe…
RACE
…Since Darwin, the notion of the human race has been closely bound up with that of heredity and the race issue has looked like a biological issue.
H. Günther defines race as “a human group that is separated from other human groups by physical and moral features of its very own which are passed on through heredity”.
The issue of the unity of the species is being resolved in a scientific monogenesis that looks beyond the diversity by highlighting the factor of social life. In an article entitled “Is there any basis to race theory?”, Professor Schaxel (in Le Monde, Paris, 28 October 1933) clearly illustrates where the issue currently stands:
“We know the law governing the reproduction of the same characteristics over successive generations. We put resemblance to parents, in which the features observed (measured in terms of quantity, quality and chronology) are the same, down to heredity, insofar as these same hereditary factors can be discerned in forebears or descendants. A particular hereditary group should therefore display a very specific collection of characters. There is no way of reproducing similar features with the requisite precision except by means of a series of rigorously studied experiments. Broadly speaking, the requisite scientific monitoring can only be implemented in instances of asexual or incestuous reproduction. In other cases we are dealing with mixed groups that are impossible to study or take under consideration in terms both of the science of heredity and of the race angle. Furthermore, the same hereditary ‘product’ emerges in a completely different way depending on the external surroundings. No verification is feasible unless due scientific regard is given to the environmental factor.
Applied to humanity, what this means is simply that all existing human groupings (especially the inhabitants of central Europe) are mixed ‘products’, even if only in terms of heredity. So due account must be taken of the geographical and social location of the individual, his environment, the environment in which a man develops absolutely independently of his overall inherited origins. The economic and social factors determine his fate.
From the scientific point of view, there is nothing more to be said as to his racial character.”
It strikes me that… it is plain that race can no longer be viewed as a prime factor, as the absolute origin of physical and psychological features observed in the description of a human grouping, but rather as a checklist of those features. Race does not appear as an expression of a straightforward law, but rather as the extremely complex outcome of a whole series of influences.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL TYPE
…In a speech, Frick, the Reich’s minister of the Interior argued: “Study of the races must be cultivated at all levels of teaching in order to further the exercise of children’s educated eye in picking out the races.” (Voelkischer Beobachter, 10 May 1933). In Michael (p. 86), Goebbels writes: “As I see it, the Jew is a source of physical revulsion. The mere sight of him makes me nauseous.” We could fill an entire book if we wanted to cite this obsession with anthropological type in Germany which extends not just to external morphology but also to blood composition. In the Hitlerites’ articles, speeches and songs, there is a lot of talk about “Aryan blood” or “Germanic blood” and bio-anthropological research is being conducted into various physical-chemical properties in human blood, with the findings brazenly falsified…
Human scent has even been invoked as an anthropological-type factor, but that factor too is of very little significance in racial individuation. One of the sections of the German Race Study Institute is busily if tendentiously looking into the olfactory aspect of race and very learned memoirs have been published on this matter by three race theorists: Günther, Fischberg and Genning. Günther credits the specific scent of each race partly to heredity and partly to environment, but does not go as far as Fischberg who contends that Jews give off a sharper and more unpleasant smell than negroes and that if Aryans can bear to have Semites near them it is because the latter neutralize their body odour with all manner of perfumes and cosmetics. Like Herr Ellis, Genning goes so far as to advise against marriage between Aryans and Jews and vice-versa, precisely because of the unbearable Semitic stink that is a barrier to the couple’s happiness.
The funny thing is that one expert in such matters, the Japanese Adaki, insists that his own countrymen find the smell of white people offensive. In the nostrils of the Japanese, who are also expert in matters of race smells, white people all smell alike—be they Italians or Scandinavians, Jews or dolichocephalic, blond-haired Germans .
NATION, RACE AND CLASS
Günther, the Third Reich’s racist pope, concedes that “peoples are racially mixed and are not themselves races” and he argues that what distinguishes one people from another is “the degree of race mixing”. According to Günther, the German people is made up of seven “Aryan” strains. The psychic features of these strains are supposedly hereditary and determined in such a way as to make a man a genius or a criminal.
Günther has credited the finest qualities to Nordic man who supposedly make up between 6% and 8% of the German people and he depicts the other races as inferior and mediocre. This “Nordicism” of Günther’s has raised a storm from defenders of the other six “Aryan racial strains”. Rosenberg, one of the theorists of Hitlerism, refutes these opponents:
“These typically Talmudist show-offs must be shown that race science identifies about five races in Europe, each with its own characteristic features, temperament and state of mind and there can be no doubt but that the German nation is not an equal mixture but that its origins are 80% Germanic (Nordic)”…
On the one hand, Hitlerism tends to affirm the racial unity of the Germanic people; on the other it tends to award the Nordic strain the lion’s part in the racial mixture.
On the one hand, there is a tendency to dismiss classes in order to affirm national and racial unity, and on the other the superior race is accorded a caste supremacy. In one of his speeches Hitler said: “Here in Germany where every German shares the same blood, the same eyes and speaks the same language, we cannot have classes: there is but one people and nothing else.” In another speech he stated: “National Socialism recognizes the existence of several racial strains in our people. Far from refuting this mixture which encapsulates our people’s entire life expression, it wishes to be guided politically by that race, whose exceptional heroism, thanks to its genius, has conjured the German people out of a clutch of differing elements.”
The German “national community” is therefore supposed to be made up of six strands, only one of which is allegedly the creative element. Saller’s “Germanic race” serves to provide a biological basis for the “national community”, but is not enough to justify bourgeois privilege and the Hitler dictatorship. The Third Reich is therefore founded upon Günther’s theory:
“We must suppose that within every people or tribe in every continent the ruling strata are of a different racial make-up from the ruled. In certain instances, the ruling strata and the ruled share the same racial blood but in differing proportions. As for the peoples of the west, among the upper strata there is a higher amount of Nordic, Falish and Dinaric blood; among the lower orders, on the other hand, there is more eastern and Baltic blood.”
The social and political ruling class is supposedly the superior race. The rise of the proletariat would bring the inferior orders to the top.
Class privilege has been converted into race privilege, trampling not only over anthropology but also over common sense.
IN THE THROES OF DELIRIUM
Here are a few newspaper clippings from the German press offering some idea of the degree of lunacy attained by Hitlerian racism:
“The Reichsminister for Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones has informed the public that in future the following phraseology should be used when spelling out a name by telephone: Dora rather than David for D, Julian instead of Jacob for J, Siegfried instead of Samuel for S, Zeppelin instead of Zachary for Z.”
“The movie, Typhon, based on the comedy by the Hungarian writer Lendengyel, has been banned in Germany. The censorship board justifies this decision by pointing out that in the movie the person whose behaviour is exemplary is Japanese. The white people all behave rather badly. The Japanese, with whom the heroine strikes up a friendship, is an impeccable gentleman. Moreover the movie shows French people and in fact does not deal with Germans. In short, this work is regarded as, by omission, an insult to the Aryan race, whose superiority is not even mentioned.”
“In order to show the high levels of culture of the ancient Germans, according to government instructions, a professor at the University of Gottingen recently came up with the idea of presenting his wife at a high society event dressed in an evening gown copied exactly from the clothing in vogue among the Germans of about two thousand years ago.”
“The German association for the blind has decided to add to its statutes a paragraph calling for the expulsion of blind Jews.”
Large numbers of such reports could be gathered. And it would be just as easy to put together an anthology of Hitlerite idiocy. This is how Alfred Rosenberg, in his book The Twentieth Century Myth deals with the race issue (pp. 125, 505 and 584): “If the womenfolk of the European nations carry on bearing bastards to blacks and Jews, if the slimy tidal wave of ‘negro art’ continues to break over Europe unhindered, if Jewish brothel literature carries on invading our homes and the gentlemen on the Kurfurstendamm continue to be looked upon as race brethren (Volksgenosse) and marriageable men, we will find ourselves in a situation where the heartlands of Germany and the whole of Europe will be populated exclusively by bastards”… “If a German woman willingly consorts with blacks, yellows, half-breeds or Jews, she places herself outside of any lawful protection and the children, legitimate or illegitimate, will not be able to claim the rights of German citizens. Rape committed by a person of a different race is to be punishable by flogging, forced labour, confiscation of assets and definitive expulsion from the German Reich…”
“Bolshevism represents the rebellion of the Mongol type against Nordic forms of culture… It is an expression of the hate that nomads feel for settled individuals.”
Professor Ernst Bergmann (in Erkentnissgeist und Muttergeist) suggests “breeding camps” for the Nordic race:
“There are enough willing and hard-working (!) men and youths available to fertilize women and girls and luckily one vigorous male per ten to twenty women who have not yet lost the urge to bear children, if only we can do away with the cultural and unnatural nonsense of everlasting monogamy” (quote taken from The Brown Book, French edition, pp 202-203).
The National Socialist theorist Gorsleben, in his book, The Apogee of Humanity, calls for “long-distance procreation”. “The life of a woman is largely determined by the man to whom she sacrifices her virginity: the children that such a woman brings into the world will be more or less influenced by that first lover. Science defines this phenomenon as long-distance procreation… That said, it is plain that the old custom of ‘jus primae noctis,’ to wit, the right of a nobleman or priest to deflower a virgin, was designed to better the race. We are indebted to that right for the existence of a humanity that is racially and spiritually of a very high order in certain regions” (taken from Arbeiter Zeitung, Vienna, 16 January 1934).
Darré, the Reich’s agriculture minister, has written a learned book to show that “the pig distinguishes the Nordic from the Semitic peoples”. His conclusion is as follows: “On the one hand, Semites refuse to have anything to do with the pig, whereas the Nordic peoples hold the pig in the highest regard. The pig is the sacred animal of the Nordic cult of the sun…”
“In the religion of the Germans the pig occupies pride of place and is the first among the domestic animals.
Thus, out of the shadows of history step two human races whose approaches to the pig clearly contradict each other”…
We could fill a book with material on the race delirium in the realms of German culture. Here we shall make do with recalling a few points from the program of the proclamation Against the non-German mentality, issued on 13 April 1933 by the German Students’ Association:
“The Jews and their followers are our most dangerous foes.”
“The Jews cannot help but think Jewish. If he writes in our language, he lies.”
“We respect the Jew as an outsider and assess his racial character seriously. We also call for censorship of Jewish works appearing in Hebrew. If these appear in German, there ought to be a note stating that it is a translation. We should come down heavily on the illicit use of ‘Gothic’ script which only Germans are authorized to use.”
Philosophers, physicists, physiologists, writers, musicians, etc., have had to leave Germany simply because they are “non-Aryans”. This cultural exodus is embodied by Einstein and Hirschfeld, the literary exodus by Toller and Plivier, the musical one by Walter and Reinhardt and the deaths of the philosopher Lessing and the poet [and anarchist Erich] Mühsam [tortured to death by the Nazis] show that the Third Reich is a reversion to the Middle Ages.
To the famous ‘Aryan’ orchestral conductor Furtwaengler who had written to him: “I recognize only one boundary: the one that divides good art from bad”, Goebbels replied: “Of the existence of your single boundary I know nothing. Art should not merely be good; it should also be national and militant” (Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 April 1933).
The latter brat declared in an interview in Sunday Referee (30 July 1933): “For 14 years now our war cry has been ‘Death to Judah!’ And now the ghetto is finally dying out once and for all!”
Jazz music has been banned by Goebbels on the grounds that it is negro music, but he has pronounced that the saxophone is ‘Aryan’ in that it was “invented by the German Adolf Sax” and because it is played in military bands.
The whole of Germany is delirious. Pope Pius XI is described as the “illegitimate son of a Dutch Jewess by the name of Leiaman”, and is therefore “a vulgar Jew”; the president of the Council of State in Schleswig has ordered that the story of the sacrificing of Isaac should be eradicated; German Jews are denied access to public beaches and baths and sexual relations between ‘Aryans’ and Jews are banned. This latter facet of the racist delirium deserves special scrutiny.
RACIST MARRIAGE
In one of his speeches, Hitler declared:
“…The Third Reich is not founded on the principle of monogamy. Adultery is not regarded as a crime unless it is liable to harm the purity of the race, which is to say, unless a German woman or man has sexual intercourse with blacks, yellows, Jews, etc.”
In August 1933, the Berliner Tageblatt carried the following news item: “In Nuremburg Pastor Munchneyer has declared that none of the German political parties, from the Communist through to the German National Party, was imbued with a sense of German honour because they all allowed Jews to play a crucial part within them. Only the National Socialist movement demands, in the name of German honour, that the country be released from the chains of Judaism. Any Jew who corrupts a German woman deserves the death penalty.”
That same month, the Nazi Julius Streicher in an article carried by Der Stürmer in Nuremburg pilloried German girls guilty of loving Jews.
In August 1933, a letter in the Times reported this sordid incident: “The son and daughter of the United States ambassador in Berlin were among foreigners staying in Nuremburg when, on Sunday the 13th, they witnessed a young girl dragged through the streets with her head shaved and wearing a placard on her back that read: ‘I offered myself to a Jew’.
Many other foreigners were eye-witnesses to this spectacle. And such a spectacle was made of the girl that the entire city turned out to watch.
The girl was tiny and fragile and spectacularly beautiful. She was trailed from one international hotel to the next and also close to the station where the mob blocked traffic, and then from one drinking establishment to another. She had an escort of storm troopers: and was followed by a mob estimated at two thousand people.
Every so often she would fall to the ground, but the vigorous brownshirts escorting her would get her back on her feet and hold her up so that the most distant onlookers might see her. Whereupon there would be shouting and insults from the crowd…”
In September that year, a letter from Berlin reported the following: “For having had relations with a young Christian girl, a Jew from Cassel, the son of a factory manager, was dragged through the streets of the city by the Hitlerite militia along with the girl and her mother.
The Hessische Volkswacht writes that this public degradation was decided upon because the girl insisted that the government had no power to ban her from loving the young man. Her mother was punished for having tolerated these things.
Furthermore, the Oberhessische Zeitung points out that in a similar case a young Christian girl was dragged through the streets of Marburg.
Finally, in Worms, a statement from the local police refers to a Jew having been jailed for having tried to date a Christian girl.”
The following November, the press carried this report:
“The Harburg-Wilhelmsburg police chief has reported that a non-Aryan shop assistant and a ‘racially pure’ female Christian shopowner were handed over to the police by members of the storm troops. The militiamen had successfully, though not without some difficulty, gotten wind of the ‘culpable relations’ between the two representatives of different races. Moreover, the offenders have ‘confessed their shame’…
The chief of police informs ‘all interested parties that any trespass against race purity will be punished with the utmost severity, even if it predated the passage of the relevant legislation’.”
Two widely distributed manifestoes threaten to disfigure young German girls having relations with Jews.
A draft bill drawn up by Professor Stammler “for the preservation of race purity” proposes:
“1. Marriages between the German and foreign races are banned. Those already contracted retain their validity; but further marriages may not be contracted and will not be recognized.
2. Extra-marital sexual relations between Germans and foreigners of different race are punishable by penal incarceration of the foreigner and imprisonment of the German partner. Prostitutes are not covered by this legislation.
3. The entry into this country of those outside of the race is not permitted except in special cases. Immigration is forbidden.
4. Changes of name which generally have no purpose other than to conceal racial origin are banned pending further notice.
Name changes effected from 1914 until now are hereby annulled.”
The most significant document here is the Race Crime Law of Hans Kerre, the Prussian justice minister (1933). This book represents a draft criminal code and is prefaced by an explanatory memoir. Part two of the project is entitled: “Defence of the Race and People” and opens with a chapter (on “Attacks on the Race”) that contemplates two new offences: “Race Treason” and “Offences against Race Honour”:
“Any sexual liaison between a German and a person of another race is to be regarded as race treason and both culprits will face punishment. Even should precautionary steps be taken within such liaisons, this will not prevent their being looked upon as constituting sexual liaisons falling under the rigours of this present law. Deliberate concealment of one’s real race in sexual liaisons outside of marriage or within marriage will be regarded as an aggravating circumstance.
From the point of view of civil law, marriages between persons of differing races are to be declared null and void.
Anyone who may favour sexual relations between a member of the German race and a member of another race, thereby contributing to the decadence and demoralization of the German people, will be guilty of treason against the race. Such treachery will be found even where contraceptive measures are taken.
Offences against race honour are punishable under the article that states: ‘A German who offends German feelings through the maintenance of relations with persons belonging to coloured races becomes culpable of offences against German honour’.”
The memoir stipulates that this article does not so much apply to sexual relations as to consorting in public with a coloured person. For instance “indecent dancing with a negro in a public place”.
Here are the ten commandments of German marriage as devised by Dr. Heinsius of Berlin, in concert with the Reich Interior ministry, the Racial Hygiene Office and the National Socialist Party’s Race Bureau:
1. Remember that you are German.
2. If you are genetically healthy, you should marry.
3. Keep your body healthy.
4. Keep your spirit and mind healthy.
5. As a German, do not choose as a spouse anyone other than a German or someone of Nordic blood.
6. When choosing a spouse, check into ancestry.
7. Health is also a condition of outer beauty.
8. Do not marry for love.
9. Do not choose a playmate, but look to your spouse as a marriage partner.
10. The real meaning of marriage is healthy progeny. Survival is assured after the third or fourth child.
The eighth commandment is the hardest to honour, judging from the matrimonial recommendations in fashion, as reported in the German press. In an article in the Berlin weekly magazine Das Wissen der Nation (6 August 1933) every racially pure citizen is urged to “marry a blond Aryan with blue eyes, oval face and white skin and not a young, long-bodied, short-legged brunette of Mediterranean race with dark hair and fleshy lips…”
The well-advised and consistent Aryan is not going to marry a Mediterranean woman, nor is he to marry a young woman who has shown a penchant for parties and theatre, who has played sports or practiced a liberal profession. “He is to marry only a hard-working young woman, a good housekeeper with a love of children.”
So the ideal wife should be an Aryan, Nordic housewife ready to bear lots of children, with no Jews among her forebears, and she must be healthy. Anthropological-eugenic-Hitlerite-racist love is no longer a heaven-sent Cupid but is, rather, a sharp-eyed magician armed with anthropometric instrumentation, race laws, a set of matrimonial ten commandments and genealogical records.
HITLERITE STERILIZATION
Hitlerite sterilization is excused by invoking eugenic arguments, but National Socialist doctors still look upon it as an arrangement bound up with racial purity. Dr. Vellguth writes in a leading medical review (Aerzliche Mitteilungen, Leipzig, 20 May 1933) in praise of sterilization: “The infiltration of foreign blood into the body of our people must be prevented. The Jews, the Mongols and others can therefore be lawfully sterilized with their consent, be they healthy or ailing individuals.” The good doctor goes on to suggest “encouraging persons of different race to allow themselves to be sterilized by offering a reasonably high premium.”
What assurances can Hitler’s Germany offer regarding the sterilization option? The Jews, barred from offices and factories, persecuted in a pogrom-like climate, might be starved into being sterilized as their only salvation. How much and what sort of pressures can be brought to bear in a country like today’s Germany? The Frankfurt police chief Von Westrer declared at a Hitlerite demonstration in March 1933:
“Germany is awake. Fear not, Jews, we will abide by the law, but we will be so law-abiding that that law will prove bothersome to you. Then you can go back to Palestine and slaughter one another”…
Hitlerite sterilization has been enforced for political reasons and will be taken to the most nonsensical extremes. In order to justify the switch from eugenic sterilization to racist sterilization all of the old theories about Jewish pathology rebutted by medical science are being unearthed.
CONCLUSION
The issue explored in very cursory fashion here is immense and complex and my only intention has been to bring the race issue to the attention of educated young people. It was looking as if racial prejudice had become a thing of the past among the educated classes in the more advanced nations. Instead, it lingers. In Austria in October 1933, the courts granted a divorce in a marriage contracted between an Aryan and a Jewess, in a verdict in which the grounds cited include incompatibility deriving from race difference between the spouses, a difference that ought “in a symbiosis as close as marriage, inevitably trigger profound frictions.” In Lithuania the National Socialist Party there is calling for a ban on marriages between Jews and non-Jews. In France we have seen the launching of a blatantly racist and anti-semitic Celtic League. In the United States of America there are laws banning marriages between blacks and whites, there are universities closed to black students and anthropologists who talk of an American race (not to mention lynching!). And among the mastheads of the Italian nationalist press are La Razza, La Stirpe, Il Grido della Stirpe, etc…
Paris, November 1934

The IWA: Against War and Militarism

The following excerpt, translated by Paul Sharkey, is from the Encyclopedie Anarchiste, reproducing  a resolution against war and militarism from the 1922 Congress of the reconstituted, revolutionary syndicalist,  International Workers’ Association (IWA – see Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selection 114 for the Congress’ founding statement).

War and Militarism

Militarism is the system of monopolistic State violence for the purpose of defence and expansion of the national theatre of exploitation (defensive war or war of aggression), for bringing fresh theatres of exploitation under control (colonial war) and for coming down hard on the rebellious popular masses (strikes, unrest, rioting).

In every instance, the object is to preserve and increase the profits of the ruling classes, to wit, the proletariat’s enemy class.

Militarism is the last and the mightiest resort at the bourgeoisie’s disposal in keeping the working class under the thumb and snuffing out its struggles for freedom.

Everywhere that a new militarism has been moulded in national or liberation struggles (Russia, China), it has always rebounded against the workers themselves, because, by its very nature, it is an instrument for repressing the masses for the benefit of a privileged class and needs must oppose all freedom.

So it is the primordial task of the working class not just to combat the capitalist materialism of the present but also to do away with militarism as such. The best means of combating militarism will be those that best suit the anti-militarist mentality.

Above all, the point is to break up the mind-set of militarism, discipline and submissiveness by means of active propaganda, educating soldiers and undermining the foundations of armies so that they lose their efficacy against the workers. Volunteer armies, White armies, fascist armies, etc., should be the subjects of boycott even in peace time.

Since the bulk of the military is made up of workers and since the technology of modern warfare in its present state, is wholly dependent upon war industries, the workers have it in their power to bring all militaristic activity to a halt by refusing to serve, strikes, sabotage and boycott, even should that military action be undertaken by White troops.

The best way of laying the groundwork in the here and now for such mass action is the individual refusal to serve and for the organized proletariat to refuse to manufacture weaponry.

Above all else, the object is to thwart the outbreak of a new war and, to this end, banish the main causes of war and militarism by means of effecting an economic transformation of our current social order (social revolution).

Congress therefore calls upon all IWA affiliated organizations:

1. To spread, by practical means and with immediate effect, the refusal to manufacture war materials.

2. To persuade the workers in arms plants or in firms likely to be turned into such, that the working class has a duty to answer the threat of war with the threat of strike, to seize war materials and all other materials that might be used to manufacture same; and to render the factories useless to capitalism.

3. Affiliated organizations must, wherever they can, set up General Strike Committees, whose task it will be to look into ways and means of seizing the factories, holding them and, in the event of their being in danger of recapture by the capitalists, destroying them. They must also look into ways and means of seizing the nerve centres of national organization; rail centres and rail lines, mines, power stations, posts and telegraphs, water distribution points, health services and pharmaceutical products; they must take hostages from among the bourgeoisie, politicians, clergy and bankers.

In short, they must work flat-out to turn the insurrectionist general strike into successful revolution.

Alexander Schapiro – Open Letter to the CNT

In June 1937, following the May Events in Spain, when anarchists battled Communist and Republican forces in the streets of Barcelona, and many prominent anarchists were arrested, murdered (Camillo Berneri) or simply disappeared, the CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo) adopted a “minimal program” to submit to the Republican government and the forces now in control of it, including the Stalinist Communist Party which was itself embarking on a concerted campaign to suppress the anarchist movement and other opposition groups, such as the dissident Marxist group, the POUM (one of whose leaders, Andres Nin, was notoriously “disappeared” and accused by the Communists of being a Francoist fifth columnist). The “minimal program” was not accepted by the government, and the anarchists continued to be marginalized and persecuted by government and Communist-backed forces. Alexander Schapiro wrote the following Open Letter to the CNT criticizing them for their continuing and disastrous policy of collaboration and accommodation with these counter-revolutionary forces. Translated by Joseph Wagner and published in the One Big Union monthly, August 1937. For a similar critique by a Swedish member of the International Workers Association (IWA), see Albert Jensen, “The CNT-FAI, the State and Government” (1938), in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selection 127.

OPEN LETTER TO THE C.N.T.

We read with more surprise than interest the minimal program of the C.N.T. “for the realization of a real war policy.” The reading of the program raised an entire series of questions and problems, some of which should be called to your attention.

Certainly none of us was simple enough to believe that a war can be carried on with resolutions and by anti-militarist theories. Many of us believed, long before July 19 (1936) that the anti-militarist propaganda, so dear to our Dutch comrades [e.g. Bart de Ligt, Anarchism, Volume 1, Selection 120] of the International Anti-militarist Bureau and which found, in the past, a sympathetic enough echo in the columns of your press in Spain, was in contradiction with the organization of the revolution.

Many of us knew that the putsches, that were so dear to our Spanish comrades, such as those of December 8 and January 8, 1933 [CNT-FAI failed insurrections], were far from helping this organization of the revolution; it helped rather to disorganize it.

July 19 [1936 – Franco’s coup] opened your eyes. It made you realize the mistake you had committed in the past, when, in a revolutionary period, you neglected seriously organizing the necessary framework for the struggle that you knew would be inevitable on the day of the settlement of accounts. Yet, today you are shutting your eyes to another important fact. You seem to think that a civil war brought about by the circumstance of a fascist putsch does not necessarily obligate you to examine the possibilities of modifying and altering the character of that civil war.

A “minimal” program is not something to startle us; but a particular minimal program (such as yours) cannot have any value unless it creates the opportunity for the preparation of a maximal program.

But, your “real war policy,” after all, is nothing but a program for entering the Council of Ministers (government); with it you act merely as a political party desirous of participation in an existing government; setting forth your conditions of participation, and these conditions are so bureaucratic in character that they are far from weakening in the least the bourgeois capitalist regime; on the contrary they are tending to strengthen capitalism and stabilize it.

The surprising part of your program is that you do not consider it as a means for the attainment of some well defined goal, but consider your “real war policy” program as an aim in itself. That is the main danger in your program. It presupposes permanent participation in the government—not merely circumstantial—which is to extend over a number of years, even if the war itself, with its brutal, daily manifestations would cease in the meanwhile. A monopoly of the Foreign Commerce (have the communists whispered this to you?), customs policy, new legislation, a new penal code—all of this takes a long time. In order to realize these tasks, your program proposes a very close collaboration on all fields with the bourgeoisie (Republican block) and with the Communists (Marxist block), while almost at the same time you state in your appeal of June 14 that you are sure of triumphing not only against Franco, but also against a stupidly backward bourgeoisie (“the Republican block”) and against the tricky and dishonest politicians (“Marxist block”).

You see, therefore, that even your minimal program is beset with flagrant contradictions; its realization is dependent on the aid of the very sectors against which that program is aimed. Even the freedom with which you state these two mutually exclusive programs, collaboration with the bourgeoisie and “Marxism” on the one hand and fight to the finish against this same bourgeoisie and “Marxism” on the other, situates your minimal program as the aim, and your declaration of June 14 becomes mere verbiage. We would have, naturally, liked to see things the other way.

The problem of Spain’s economic reconstruction does not form a part of your program. And yet, you cannot help but know that a civil war, like the one you are going through, cannot bring the people to its aid unless the victories on the fronts will assure at the same time their own victories in the rear.

It is true—and many of us outside of Spain have known it long before July 19—the Social Revolution cannot be attained in 24 hours, and that a libertarian regime cannot be erected by the turn of the hand. Nevertheless, neither the C.N.T. nor the F.A.I. cared anything about pre-revolutionary organization and about preparing in advance the framework for the social and economic reconstruction. We claim that there is a bridge leading from the downfall of the old regime to the erection of the new regime erected on the ashes and the ruins of the old regime. This bridge is all the more full of dangerous traps and pitfalls as the new regime differs from the old. And it was precisely this period of transition that you have misunderstood in the past and that you continue to misunderstand today. For if you had recognized that the social and economic reconstruction on a libertarian basis is the indispensable condition to victory over fascism, you would have elaborated (having in view the aim to be attained) a minimal revolutionary program that would have given the urban and country proletariat of Spain the necessary will and enthusiasm to continue the war to its logical conclusion.

But such a program you failed to proclaim. The few timid allusions contained in your “war program” are far from having a revolutionary character: the elaboration of a plan for the economic reconstruction that would be accepted by the three blocks could only be a naive illusion, if it would not be so dangerous; the municipalization of land is an anti-revolutionary project since it legalizes something that a coming revolution will have to abolish, since the municipalities are, after all, but cogs in the wheel of the State as long as the State will exist.

Naturally, the elaboration of an economic program for the transition period presupposes a final aim. Does the C.N.T. consider that libertarian communism is an unattainable “Utopia” that should be relegated to the museum?

If you still think (as you did before July 19) that libertarian communism forms part of the program of the C.N.T. it is your duty—it was really your duty since July 1936—to elaborate your economic program of transition, without regard to the bourgeois and Marxist blocks, who can but only sabotage any program of libertarian tendency and inspiration.

To be sure, such a program will place you in conflict with these blocks, but on the other hand, it will unite with you the large majority of the workers, who want but one thing, the victory of the Revolution. It is necessary, therefore to choose between these two eventualities.

Such a program will, naturally, nullify your “war program” which is nothing but the expression of a “true” desire for permanent cabinet collaboration. But this proposition, this “war program” of yours, is diametrically contrary to the traditionally revolutionary attitude of the C.N.T., which this organization has not denied yet. It is therefore necessary to choose.

The C.N.T. should not allow—as it has unfortunately done since July 19—the acceptance of the tactics of the “line of least resistance,” which cannot but lead to a slow but sure liquidation of the libertarian revolution.

The ministerial collaboration policy has certainly pushed back to the rear the program of revolutionary economy. You are on the wrong track and you can see that yourselves.

Do you not think that you should stop following this road, that leads you to certain downfall?

Alexander Schapiro

Pierre Besnard – Anarchosyndicalism and Anarchism

The following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey and appearing in English for the first time, are taken from Pierre Besnard’s address to the June 1937 Paris Congress of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association (IWA), L’Anarcho-Syndicalisme et l’Anarchisme, Rapport de Pierre Besnard, Secretaire de l’A.I.T. au Congrès Anarchiste International de 1937 (dated 30 May 1937; republished as a supplement to le Monde Libertaire, 1963), for which Alexander Schapiro wrote the (previously posted) introduction.

The IWA held a special congress in Paris, June 11-13, 1937, to debate the relationship between the anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist movements, and to deal with the participation of the Spanish CNT in the Republican government in Spain as part of its fight against fascism. In July 1937, the well respected French anarchist, Sebastien Faure [Anarchism, Volume 1, Selection 66] published a stinging rebuke of the Spanish anarchists in the French anarchist paper, Le Libertaire, in a series of articles entitled “The Fatal Slope,” castigating them for joining the government. The CNT was furious, and forced Besnard to resign as general secretary of the IWA.

Besnard (1886-1947) was very active in the French anarcho-syndicalist movement from the end of the First World War until the Second World War. He contributed to Faure’s Encyclopédie anarchiste, and wrote several books on the theory and practice of revolutionary syndicalism, including Les syndicats ouvriers et la révolution sociale (Paris: Le Monde nouveau, 1930); Le Monde nouveau (Paris: CGTSR, 1936); and L’Ethique du syndicalisme (Paris: CGTSR, 1938). He tried to modernize anarcho-syndicalism, and to persuade other anarchists to support anarcho-syndicalist trade unions without derogating from their independence and autonomy. Nevertheless, Besnard sought to achieve ideological unity among anarchists, taking a position somewhat similar to the Platformists associated with the Russian anarchist, Peter Arshinov, and the Ukrainian anarchist partisan, Nestor Makhno (Anarchism, Volume 1, Selection 115). For more on Besnard, see Wayne Thorpe, “Anarchosyndicalism in Inter-War France: The Vision of Pierre Besnard,” European History Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, 559-590 (1996).

Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism

I. What is Revolutionary Anarchism?

Revolutionary Anarchism is a movement whose doctrine is designed to institute an individual and collective existence from which the State, Government and Authority will be barred.

Incontrovertibly, the foundation of that society will be man.

So Anarchism is the affirmation of an ongoing social demand in the here-and-now and into the infinite future, into the indefinite future.

It implies an economic, administrative and social project and has to begin right now…

Historically, Revolutionary Anarchism is the third branch of traditional socialism.

By contrast with the other two branches, Socialism and Communism — both of them political, authoritarian and statist — it is a-political, anti-parliamentary and anti-statist.

Its essential feature is freedom in a context of accountability, individual and collective alike.

Its chief tasks at present are: propaganda, popularization and social education of the labouring masses today and, tomorrow, the administration of society.

II. What is Anarcho-Syndicalism?

Anarcho-Syndicalism is an organizational and organized movement. It draws its doctrine form Anarchism and its organizational format from Revolutionary Syndicalism.

It is the contemporary expression of the anarchist doctrine as regards matters economic and social.

In terms of the revolution, it is also, as the Spanish experience itself has demonstrated, the essential agent of realization.

At the world level, it is represented by the IWA and its National Centres.

Its doctrine has been defined by the founding Congress of the 2nd IWA (25-31 December 1922 [Anarchism, Volume 1, Selection 114]), by succeeding congresses, and by the works and writings of its militants.

In Spain, the CNT stands for the Anarcho-Syndicalism of the IWA.

Practically and no less historically, Anarcho-Syndicalism is the organizational format assumed by Anarchy for the purposes of the fight against capitalism. It is fundamentally at odds with political and reformist trade unionism.

Anarcho-Syndicalism’s substitution of the idea of Class for the notion of Party makes it an essential tool for workers obliged to defend their living conditions in their preparation for economic and social liberation.

The Anarcho-Syndicalist movement makes possible a yoking together of action in pursuit of day-to-day demands and the loftiest aspirations of the workers.

It achieves an amalgamation of the two in terms of material, moral, short-term and future interests.

Out of a commonality of interests, it brings forth an identity of aims and, as a logical and natural consequence, a reconciliation of doctrines.

Anarcho-Syndicalism: a movement of trial and error

Like any truly social doctrine, Anarcho-Syndicalism is essentially a matter of trial and error.

Proof of this is the fact that, today, in Spain, its doctrine, having been consecrated and confirmed by the facts, is achievable in the short-term.

Based on trial and error? Just like every social movement and all the sciences.

In sociology as in physics or chemistry or mechanics, the idea springs from the act and returns to it.

The fact always predates the idea and conjures up the doctrine, the philosophy from which the realization is to sprout.

The doctrine, the idea, the yearning for further experiment as a means to the end, follow from the phenomena recorded which give rise to laws acknowledged by all and authenticated by experience.

Historical Comments

Down through the ages, what has social experience in every country and in the modern world in particular taught us?

1. That within their own class, individuals are more and more sure to band together on the firm ground of their interests.

2. That antagonistic classes seek, through elimination of their own contradictions, to realize their common interest; capitalists by means of the establishment of state capitalism, of which fascism is the most distinct expression; the workers, through expropriation of capital, abolition of wage slavery, abolition of the state and establishment of libertarian communism.

3. That, like their adversaries — and unfortunately, after them — workers try to achieve unity and a pooling of all their resources, because they have come to realize, at last, that the crucial battles taking place require methodical organization, coordination and massive, orderly deployment of these forces; because they have learnt the lesson taught by facts and experience, which plainly indicates that action should be well-prepared, direct, widespread and synchronized.

4. That the age of political revolutions is over; that everywhere the social revolution has come into its own; that no specially class-based, proletarian party or group can, by opposing the disparate interests of its heterogeneous membership, serve as a revolutionary spearhead, a class organization; that, whereas an employer might profess to be a socialist, communist or anarchist — they exist – and while he might see eye to eye with his worker ideologically within the group, he in fact has no class interest in common with him, once they both return to the factory, yard, workshop, office, etc. In real life, they are and remain: in the case of one, an employer, and, in the case of the other, a worker, with all of the antagonisms that their circumstances imply.

5. That the only genuinely class group with the potential, by virtue of its name, power and the resources at its disposal — which it alone can set in motion — simultaneously to destroy capitalism and make a reality of libertarian communism, is the Trade Union. Even now it brings manual, technical and scientific operatives together organizationally — and this is something it will take further tomorrow — ensuring that the life of society is sustained throughout. The Trade Union is also the typical grouping, the free and concrete model of association that can furnish libertarian communist society with the sound economic foundations vital to the new order that will spring from the revolution.

Revolutionary Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism Share a Common Objective

The IWA Charter has extracted from all these historical considerations that which is common to all of the world’s anarcho-syndicalists. In concert with the FAI, the CNT is even now striving to put this into effect.

This notion does not at all imply that anarcho-syndicalism — which is, remember, against the State and federalist — means and aims to be everything and that nothing else should exist alongside it.

Instead, anarcho-syndicalism is of the view that men, while they cannot refrain from producing in order to survive, ought not to have production as their sole aim. It very candidly admits and has no hesitation in announcing that man has and rightly should have other aspirations — the highest ones at that — toward the good, the beautiful, the better, and this in every realm to which his faculties afford him access; that administrative and social agencies are called for equal to all the demands of a full, rounded, complete life, operating with the enlightened assistance and under the watchful, constant and unrelenting supervision of all.

It accepts without question that individuals are entitled — or rather, have a duty — to administer themselves. It formally invites them to do just that, right here and now.

Likewise, it fervently wants communes to federate on a regional basis, confederate with one another nationwide and for the confederations to link arms internationally, after the pattern of the unions and the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail].

It is even convinced that this is crucial and it stands ready to add its efforts and the efforts of its trade unions to the efforts of individuals operating as such and to the efforts of the federated, confederated and combined communes in making a reality of that genuine libertarian communism which cannot but be anarchism’s handiwork…

Of necessity, agreement between anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists on libertarian communism as the objective is complete, permanent and absolute.

So it is clear and self-evident that the place of the workers, the exploited of whatever sort, whose ideal is anarcho-communism, cannot be other than in the anarcho-syndicalist unions and nowhere else.

Their doctrine makes this an imperious, specific and ineluctable duty.

Moreover, it is their best practical means of actually achieving that unity of action so necessary for the modern revolutionary anarchist movement.

It is only in action and through action that anarchists will discover their real unity of thought; that the anarcho-syndicalist movement, out of kilter for the past 30 years, will also rediscover its equilibrium and its vigour; that all anarchists will at last come to look upon the social revolution as an imminent event and a feasible proposition.

The Role of the Anarchist Groups and the Unions

All of the above leads naturally and logically to consideration of the role of the anarchist groups and the trade unions.

Anarcho-syndicalists have no difficulty in agreeing that anarcho-communist groups, being more mobile than the trade union organizations, should go prospecting among the labouring masses; that they should seek out recruits and temper militants; that they should carry out active propaganda and intensive pioneering work with an eye to winning the greatest possible number of workers hitherto deceived and gulled by all the political parties, without exception, over to their side and thus to the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions.

This wholly ideological undertaking, this psychological-type propaganda drive falls, without question, within the purview of the anarcho-communist groups, on the express condition that they identify with the work of the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions which they complement and reinforce, for the greater good of libertarian communism.

But let me state bluntly that the decision-making responsibility, action and supervision of the latter should reside in the here-and-now with the trade unions as the executive agents and operatives carrying out revolutionary tasks.

I am also of the opinion that it is incumbent upon these unions to prepare all such undertakings of an economic, defensive or offensive order.

Finally, in my view, the economic, administrative and social system ought to be homogeneous, harmonious, etc., and the basis of that system, if it is to be real, sound and lasting, cannot but be economic.

On behalf of the trade unions, I claim the right to handle revolutionary and post-revolutionary economic tasks because the organization of production is the true calling of the workers.

On the other hand, logic dictates that the communes, administrative agencies and their technical and social services, should handle distribution of goods: interpreting the wishes of men in social terms, organizing life in all its manifestations. Starting right now, the anarchist groups have a duty to lay the groundwork for these revolutionary accomplishments.

The task of every one of these bodies is therefore extremely clear-cut and perfectly defined. Broadly speaking, it will be enough to welcome everyone‘s acting and making an effort in every sphere of activity, depending on the individual’s actual abilities.

At no time, and let me offer you the most formal guarantees here, at no point will the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions be able to constitute an obstacle to the onward march of revolutionary communism.

And at no point, either, will they be able to turn reformist, because they are and will remain revolutionary, federalist and anti-statist, because, like the anarcho-communist groups, their purpose is to establish libertarian communism.

To conclude this part of my address, let me affirm:

1. The anarcho-syndicalist movement cannot deviate, because of the close and unrelenting supervision exercised over its organizations and militants.

2. That, in current terms, in the realm of revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist movement represents the means whereby libertarian communism can be achieved. That it is up to the anarcho-communist groups, operating exclusively on ideological terrain, to take propaganda as far as it will go.

3. That the anarcho-communist movement should concern itself primarily with propaganda and education tasks: the study of society and the popularization thereof.

4. That the best ongoing contact achievable will be achieved, as in Spain, through the unrestricted recruitment into the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions charged with preparing for and carrying out action (they being the only ones capable of bringing this to a successful conclusion, having the requisite membership and resources) of all anarcho-communists in every country; that anarcho-syndicalism’s trial-and-error doctrine, which is the doctrine of anarchism itself, is sound and solid enough not to incur the risk of any infringement, attenuation or deviation.

5. That anarcho-communism, the real face of socialism, was spawned by the utter inadequacy of all the political parties; that anarcho-syndicalism, that movement’s modern, active form, deriving from anarchism, currently caters to all of the positive tasks of anarcho-communism and paves the way for libertarian communism, of which it will be the chief midwife; that anarcho-communism’s tasks — like anarcho-syndicalism’s tasks — will be accomplished in the post-revolutionary period when men, due to the evolution and development of their capacity for understanding, will be capable of acceding to free communism, anarchy’s goal.

In short, anarcho-syndicalism is the force required for the struggle under the existing regime and the agent of the economic construction of libertarian communism in the post-revolutionary period.

Anarchism assists the anarcho-syndicalist movement, without supplanting it.

The activities of its militants blend in with those of anarcho-syndicalist militants within the trade unions.

The two movements therefore owe each other ongoing mutual aid.

And later, come the peace, harmony and concord, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, amalgamating into a single movement, will pursue the achievement of libertarian communism, anarchy’s ultimate aim.

Anarcho-syndicalism’s most pressing task today is to organize the workers under its aegis with an eye to the decisive battle against capitalism; to make technical preparations for that battle, to bind the forces of production together for the revolutionary construction of the libertarian communist order; and, tomorrow, to organize the economy until such time as free communism is established; and finally, to defend the revolution.

That of revolutionary anarchism consists of deploying all of the resources at its disposal to help bring this about.

Relationship between Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism

Self-evidently, there must be a relationship between anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, nationally as well as at the international level. Moreover, the IWA, at its founding congress, anticipated just such an eventuality.

Relations between them should be founded upon each movement’s independence and autonomy of the other and they must remain on a footing of the completest equality.

Besides the cross-fertilization of the two movements through the actions of their militants, it is to be wished that in every locality, region and country, contacts may be established between anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations.

If these relations are to be fruitful and lasting, they will have to rest on the groundwork of mutual toleration, facilitated by doctrinal common ground in every realm and a precise understanding of the tasks incumbent upon the two movements…

But those relations can only be established on two conditions:

1. Anarchists in each country be of one mind, doctrinally.

2. The unification of the anarchist groupings within each country on the basis of a single doctrine of revolutionary anarchism.

General Conclusions

Whatever the wishes of Congress and of the IWA may be with regard to practical realization of these relations, they can only achieve this, as circumstances require that they do, if those two conditions are met beforehand by the anarchist movements in each country.

It would have been infinitely preferable, as well as consistent with our known principles, namely, federalist principles, had that doctrinal unity and unification of anarchist forces taken place prior to the meeting of the Congress that is due to give birth to the Anarchist International.

On behalf of the anarcho-syndicalists who achieved that double objective through the launching of the present IWA back in 1922, I call upon all our revolutionary anarchist comrades to follow suit.

If they all agree, the International that emerges from this Congress will deserve the title with which they will surely endow it and which cannot be other than: The Revolutionary Anarchist International — and I say again — they will accomplish this without a hitch.

It is sufficient but it is necessary that they all agree to break once and for all with the so-called forces of democracy, be they political or trade unionist; that they affirm that revolutionary anarchism, by dint of its goals, its methodology and its doctrine, has nothing and can have nothing in common with these so-called “democratic” forces which are, in every country, capitalism’s finest servants.

If, taking this to its limits, the revolutionary anarchist movement also breaks with all of the dissenters from the authoritarian political parties who, like their parties of origin, have but one ambition — to seize or to seize back power – the revolutionary anarchist movement and the anarcho-syndicalist movement will be able to stride fearlessly and in step toward their common goal: revolutionary social change through the establishment of libertarian communism, a necessary step along the road to free communism.

Pierre Besnard, IWA General Secretary

May 30, 1937

Alexander Schapiro – Anarchosyndicalism and Anarchist Organization

Alexander Schapiro (1882-1946) was an anarcho-syndicalist militant active in the international anarchist movement and the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist movement in Russia during the Russian Revolution and civil war (Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism, Chapter 18: The Russian Revolution). Born in Russia, he was raised in Turkey, studied in France and then joined his father in London, where both of them were active in the London Anarchist Federation. He was a delegate of the Jewish Anarchist Federation of London at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam and one of the signatories to the International Anarchist Manifesto against the First World War (Volume One, Selection 81). He became the secretary of the Anarchist Red Cross, which provided aid to imprisoned anarchists, particularly in Russia. He returned to Russia after the 1917 February Revolution, where he worked on the anarcho-syndicalist paper, Golos Truda [The Voice of Labour], and sought to revive and strengthen the Russian anarcho-syndicalist movement. For a time, Schapiro collaborated with the Bolshevik government, taking a post in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. He protested the persecution and imprisonment of anarchists by the Bolshevik regime and went into exile in 1922. He became active in the revived International Workers Association (IWA), which adopted an anarcho-syndicalist program (Volume One, Selection 114), and helped organize relief for anarchist prisoners in Russia. He spent time in Berlin, where he worked with Gregory Maksimov (Volume One, Selection 83) on the Russian anarcho-syndicalist paper in exile, Rabochii Put’ [The Workers Voice], and then went to France, where he continued his work with the IWA and edited the anarcho-syndicalist paper, La Voix du Travail [The Voice of Labour]. He eventually emigrated to New York, where he died in 1946.

The first excerpt set forth below is taken from Schapiro’s September 8, 1917 article in Golos Truda, “The Crisis of Power,” in which he calls for decentralization and self-organization in place of the centralized power favoured by the Bolsheviks. Events were to take a much different turn when the Bolsheviks seized power two months later in the co-called October Revolution and proceeded to establish a centralized dictatorship.

The Crisis of Power (1917)

The last scenes of the first act of the crisis of power are playing themselves out at a feverish pace. And there is only one possible outcome: the removal of the bourgeoisie from any interference in the affairs of the working class. This is now the principal condition for achieving fundamental social changes in the life of the country, the more so as the bourgeoisie is marching openly and defiantly hand in hand with the Kornilovs [leader of a failed Tsarist coup in August 1917] and other conspirators against the revolution.

But we must not close our eyes to the approaching second act, when Russia must decide whether to introduce a socialist government, as demanded by the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. If this should happen, the form of power would doubtless be different, but the root of the evil, the essence, would stay the same. For as long as power exists, a small circle of men will have in their hands the right to decide the fate of the whole people; and even if these rulers are socialists of the most decent and honourable sort, a clash between them and the people is unavoidable, and their relations after each conflict will grow more and more intense and antagonistic. The new authority will use as much force as the present authority against its enemies, and the struggle for socialism, the struggle for the rights of man, the struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity, will be as ferocious as it has been until now.

Anticipating this new crisis of socialist power, we come to the conclusion that there is only one way out: the removal of all governmental interference in the affairs of the toiling masses. There must first occur a fundamental decentralization of power to the point of its final disappearance as a factor in the life of the Russian people. The people must not allow themselves to be muzzled again – not even with the muzzle of socialist production – so that they will have to fight once more for the elementary rights of free men.

The transfer of authority to the hands of a Central Executive Committee is not the answer to the crisis of power. It can only slow down the development of this crisis, not resolve it. The only way out of the present situation is to transfer administrative tasks to local organizations – in other words, complete decentralization and the broadest self-direction of local organizations. In this work the local soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies can and must play an important role in regulating the course of everyday life and guaranteeing the local population the widest development of freedom.

Only the spread of self-determination and local self-rule will definitively resolve the crisis of power.

Golos Truda, September 8, 1917

Many years later, when the anarchists in Spain were fighting for their lives in another revolution, Schapiro wrote the following introduction to an IWA pamphlet by Pierre Besnard, Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism, which set forth the principles of modern anarcho-syndicalism. Schapiro sought to persuade anarchist communists to support anarcho-syndicalist trade union organizations, and pointed to the Spanish FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) as an example of how anarchists can work within broad based anarcho-syndicalist organizations, such as the Spanish CNT (National Confederation of Labour), while maintaining their own explicitly anarchist organizations to help prevent the trade union organizations from becoming apolitical unions or subservient to political parties. At the same time, Schapiro recognized the dangers inherent is such dual organization, as the ideological anarchist organizations could become the de facto leaders of the trade union organization, something which had happened in Spain with disastrous results, as a number of FAI militants took up positions in the Catalonian and Republican governments and sought to subordinate the anarchist movement to the immediate war aims of the Republican government in its fight against fascism, which ultimately resulted in the Communist domination of the Republican forces and the suppression of the anarchist movement (Volume One, Selections 127 & 128). Schapiro was very critical of the Spanish anarchist collaboration with the Republican government and joined with Pierre Besnard at the June 1937 IWA Congress in Paris in denouncing the CNT for abandoning anarcho-syndicalist principles. Translated by Paul Sharkey.

Introduction to Pierre Besnard’s Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism (1937)

When the Russian anarchists nearly a half a century ago pioneered the hoisting of the anarcho-syndicalist colours, the word was rather coldly received by the anarchist movement. And in 1917, following the downfall of Tsarism — it was also the eve of the October Revolution — anarcho-communists were unduly guarded about and even hostile towards this new anarchist formation.

Anarcho-syndicalism is not a doctrine. It is the meeting between a given doctrine and an equally specific trade union tactic.

Revolutionary syndicalism, as we knew it in France, prior to the war, was, so to speak, created and nurtured by anarchist militants, by [Fernand] Pelloutier [Volume One, Selection 56], by [Victor] Griffuelhes, by [Emile] Pouget. But right from the moment it arrived, its creators and propagandists, its militants made to surround the movement with a wall of absolute neutrality as far as political or philosophical ideology went [Volume One, Selection 60]. Remember the terms of the Charter of Amiens [“syndicalism is sufficient unto itself”]…

But the class struggle is of positive value only if it is constructive in its aspirations. So that struggle has to be endowed with a future program that would complement its minimum program of partial demands in the here and now.

Anarcho-syndicalism arose precisely out of that need, which anarchists have eventually come to appreciate, to add to the short-term program a social program that would embrace the whole economic and social life of a people.

The Great War swept away the Charter of trade union neutrality. And the split inside the First International between Marx and Bakunin [Volume One, Chapter 6] was echoed — nearly a half-century later — in the inevitable historic split in the post-war international workers’ movement.

To counter the policy of subordinating the workers’ movement to the conveniences of the so-called “workers’” political parties, a new movement founded upon mass direct action, outside of and against all political parties, rose from the still smoking embers of the 1914-1918 war. Anarcho-syndicalism made a reality of the only confluence of forces and personnel capable of guaranteeing the worker and peasant class its complete independence and its inalienable right to revolutionary initiative in all of the manifestations of an unrelenting struggle against capitalism and State, and the rebuilding of a libertarian social life upon the ruins of outmoded regimes.

So anarcho-syndicalism is complementary to anarcho-communism. The latter was afflicted by a considerable shortcoming that paralyzed all its propaganda: its detachment from the labouring masses. In order to plant libertarian principles there and afford them opportunities for actual realization, what was required was the organizing of trade unions and the placement of trade unionism upon libertarian and anti-statist foundations.

Which is what anarcho-syndicalism did and continues to do.

Now that anarcho-syndicalism exists as a force organizing the social revolution on libertarian communist lines, anarcho-communists owe it to themselves to become anarcho-syndicalists for the sake of organizing the revolution and every anarchist eligible to become a trade unionist should be a member of the anarcho-syndicalist General Labour Confederation.

Organized, outside of their unions, into their ideological (or, to borrow the terminology employed by our Spanish comrades, “specific”) federations, anarchists remain the continually active leaven, allowing anarcho-syndicalism to build but preventing dangerous compromises.

But the ideological guidance implied by the “builders” being imbued with the ideal of the “propagandists” turns into effective leadership. Prior to this, and especially in the aftermath of the war, nationally and internationally, the trade union movements had always found themselves tied to the apron strings of some “workers’” party or “labour” International. Anarcho-syndicalism, which today stands for the revolutionary syndicalist direct action movement and libertarian reconstruction, must not, by aping the rest of the workers’ movement, come to find that it too is tied to the apron strings of some “specific” organization — be it at the national or international level. That would be a mistake every bit as irreversibly fatal as it has proved for the reformist or dictatorship-minded brands of trade unionism.

The Anarchist Federation supports the Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation in its class struggle and striving for revolutionary reconstruction. But it should not assume the initiative or leadership of it.

On the international scene, an Anarchist International can only mirror the national Anarchist Federations. It will be the bulwark of the IWA [International Workers Association – Volume One, Selection 114], but must never become its commander-in-chief.

May 30, 1937

Neno Vasco – Anarchosyndicalism and Anarchist Communism

Neno Vasco (1878-1920) was a Portuguese lawyer and anarchist active in the Brazilian anarchist movement from 1901 to 1911. He maintained a presence within the Brazilian movement after his return to Portugal through his writings in the Portuguese anarchist press. His posthumous publication, A Concepção Anarquista do Sindicalismo [The Anarchist Conception of Syndicalism] (Lisbon: A Batalha, 1920; republished 1984), was particularly influential in the Brazilian movement. It was through writings like these that the anarcho-syndicalist movements in Latin America remained committed to anarchist communism as their ultimate ideal (see Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selections 58 & 95). Vasco answers the objection of some anarchists (such as Luigi Galleani, Volume 1, Selection 35) that anarcho-syndicalist organization is just a new form of government, as well as dealing with more common objections to anarchist communism. The following excerpts from Vasco’s book have been translated by Paul Sharkey. I have now set up a Neno Vasco page with a much lengthier excerpt in which Vasco criticizes Kropotkin’s more optimistic approach to anarchist communism and argues for a flexible approach to economic issues in order to prevent anarchist communism from becoming its own imposed dogma.

The revolution must of course socialize and make public services of every branch of production, transportation and distribution key to the operation of a modern society. And, for the organs that are to both manage and implement such services, we need look no farther than the respective associations of workers – local groups, these groups banding together at the local level to run the industries they operate, insofar as they operate them, in that locality (production, storage and delivery of basic goods and clothing; civil construction; urban transportation, power and cleaning services, health and educational services, etc.), with the local branches and unions uniting to run federal services, such as the railroads, shipping, aircraft, telegraphs and postal services, etc.

These producer groups will be able to devise various new formats (which may well be wholly unforeseen) tailored to the needs of the revolution and, as changes are made to factories, oversee major workforce redeployments; but if we want socialization to be effective and in fact to retain direct management of production and render it equally beneficial for all, they will not allow the imposition of any political superstructure, no matter how proletarian it may call itself.

At the same time, these economic organs will be political or administrative organs too; the basic economic unit will be the political unit, as the argument of the old, federalist International had it. Of course there will be delegation of labour; but the power to frame laws and have them enforced must be bestowed upon no one….

But – I hear someone object – what assurance does the public have against the de facto monopoly wielded by each of these associations? Who is there to stop the producer association from looking after its own corporate interests first and foremost, neglecting the needs and preferences of the consumer and foisting inferior and inadequate goods upon him?

Who? Why, the public itself, it being a producer also and furnishing the membership of all the producer associations. The public itself, master of the means of production and from which each of the producer groups receives its delegated service. Or would you rather a government, which, in forcing its own rules upon other people’s work, would be primarily looking out for itself and its followers and servants?

The real monopoly (and when we use that term we are not generally using it in the legal sense of lawfully-enshrined exclusive rights over manufacture and sale) is the de facto monopoly exercised by a tiny band of actual possessors of the means of production over the heads of a mainly proletarian public bereft of any of the instruments of production and of effective means of defence. On the other hand, the wage-earners working for that monopoly as mere instruments have not the slightest input into it, nor do they derive any benefit from it.

In the communist society, it is the actual managers-associated workers who make up the entirety of the public and their units are of equal standing, one with another.

Thus every association member who happens to ignore the public interest will soon discover, in his capacity as consumer, the dangerous implications of such short-sighted selfishness.

What is more, if he, in his capacity as a consumer, is dependent on other corporations, they are equally dependent on him in terms of production, given the extreme complexity of the modern labour in which he is engaged. The latter could not proceed without the contributions and good will of those who extract the raw materials for industry, those who carry out various transformations of it prior to the finishing of it, those who transport it, those who build the plant, those who supply the machinery and fuel, etc.

Once this interdependency and solidarity is outlined to him, the producer-consumer quickly catches on to the individual and social benefits of cooperation and the need to properly serve the public – the public being all the associated workers.

In most instances, anyway, the pressure of public opinion (a lot more homogeneous than it is today) brought to bear by men in the same circumstances would be enough, and that public opinion can be constantly stimulated and informed by freer and more enterprising minds. Even today, in spite of the range of antagonistic interests that bring forth a thousand schools of thought that counteract and neutralize one another, and in spite of the people’s weakness (the people being ingenuous in every respect) it is often the case that shifts in opinion achieve splendid successes without violence!

The ultimate and telling guarantee is the right enjoyed by all in a communist society to join any one of the producer associations and avail themselves of the instruments of labour in its care. Ultimately, but for the existence of that right backing up all the other defences available to the public, those defences would eventually lose their effectiveness – just as popular protests and movements today lose theirs once the oppressors become convinced that armed insurrection is a material impossibility.

Unless we want the means of production not to be socialized and authority not to be done away with, the trade union, the professional association of the future, must be open and not claim exclusive ownership of the means of production. Everybody who so desires should be free to switch jobs or indeed to set himself up as a sole producer. When, say, the local union has passed the optimum point and the size of the association is no longer of service in grappling with complexity and loses its appeal to the individual, those who are of that mind should be able to set up a separate federation or commune alongside it.

This freedom does not mean… mandatory variation or instability, any more than freedom in love means instability in one’s associations or any duty to flit from one affair to another. On the contrary, for the good of the individual, for the good of humanity, it is only proper that a sexual union should be lasting and it is very much in this interest and to that end that it should not be inspired by economic considerations, or any compulsion or motive other than genuine attraction; and that it should not be underpinned or prolonged by any bond other than mutual love, the love of the individual and shared inner feelings and a deep-seated appreciation of the educational advantages of home life.

That it should be voluntary is the best and most solid guarantee of the union and its affection.

In social life too, this is the only way of determining the worth and extent of liaisons, the only way of matching temperaments, the only way that producers have of directly administering things for themselves.

As for defending the public, the methods we have mentioned will certainly suffice: the force of public opinion in an egalitarian society and the interdependence of associations and individuals, whether as producers or as consumers. And we can rest assured that they will suffice all the more, the more certain and effective the right enjoyed by every single one of them to freely avail themselves of the means of production and ready access to the producer associations.

Such rights lie at the very heart of a communist society which, but for them, would degenerate into monopoly and authoritarianism.

But during the period of reconstruction, which is one we are mainly concerned with here, we will be dealing with the workers bequeathed to us by today’s society, workers ill-equipped for variety, sorry to say. Later, with a proper division of labour through the widespread and mighty assistance offered by machinery, with the eradication of parasitism and pointless labour, production of necessities will take up less and less time, leaving us with many leisure hours. Progress can be measured by the number of such hours. During them, the individual can look after his intellectual, moral, recreational, artistic needs and so on, or even secondary economic needs. Thus he will be able to switch between one occupation and another, and direct his activity down a thousand different avenues, marrying intellectual with manual labour. Here we have the ever-widening realm of fluid and flexible associations held together by all manner of affinities.

Even today we can see this natural division at work. Alongside the trade unions, which are not everything, but stand for the essential interests of life, there are like-minded groupings, countless more pliable associations concerned with society’s moral, intellectual, aesthetic and emotional life.

In the future, we imagine that the same division will persist: the trade unions, which are in any case open to all, will look after public services; other groups will look to the very important remainder of social life.

The very fact that the individual’s right of free access to the means of production is the very cornerstone of a libertarian society (one that is free in practice, rather than just in the letter of the law) not only is no impediment to association but is no barrier either to the establishment through voluntary pacts of norms that render exercise of that right feasible and easy, reconciling it with the public interest of which it is, in effect, the ultimate guarantor.

And the individual gladly abides by these freely accepted rules, which can always be amended in the light of the lessons of experience, because once his right is positively assured him, and not just asserted in theory, once he can actually exercise it, his chief concern is to see that work and society function smoothly, because of that very interdependence of interests that we have been examining.

- But what if we are talking, not about simple organizational norms, but of a concrete undertaking that does not admit of two simultaneous solutions? What if there are two opinions that cannot be reconciled? Which is to step aside? The minority view? Or should the venture proceed?

- In all likelihood, because of the need to hammer out agreement, the majority, bereft of any means of coercion, will make every concession and offer all sorts of assurances just to win the support and assistance of the minority, and the latter, not out of any obligation, but rather prompted by the very same need, will end up giving in to the greater number, especially since, faced with a choice between a fait accompli not quite entirely to our liking and nothing at all, the former is always the better option.

- But what if the majority’s plan were, in the eyes of its adversaries, a genuine calamity, an utter evil?

- To tell the truth, folly due to incompetence and public calamities for private profit are the stock-in-trade of governments today, pressing ahead stubbornly and frequently in the face of all warnings and counter-arguments – unless there is resistance coming from the government camp.

Let us hope that men who are free and equal, directly administering their own interests, will be more rational and far-seeing, and that when it comes to actual projects, these will be sorted out without such diametrically opposing disagreements between the experts and the interested parties.

Meanwhile, it is plain that the minority would always have the right to withhold its support and, in the event of this refusal not preventing the evil event, it would still have the consolation that it can await its revenge and wait for the mistake to be put right, if possible. At present, it does not even have that: so many vested oligarchic interests congeal around every mistake that a change of tack is rendered impossible…

- But ultimately, in practice, anarchists always abide by the law of majorities [?]…

- Sorry! It is not a matter of an imposed law, but rather of a rational expedient willingly embraced. Furthermore, what in democracies goes under the name of “majority rule” is in fact the rule of a tiny minority. Since there is delegation of power, no matter how genuine, honest and guarantee-girded the suffrage may be, the outcome, filtered through parties, regionalism and the contradictory interests of the thousand electoral and parliamentary subdivisions, is still, inescapably, law imposed by a minority.

- You speak of freedom in choice of trade. But what if vocations and individual wishes do not tally with society’s production needs? What if some services are short of manpower while other trades are over-manned? When there is not the allure of higher wages, nor the bosses’ authority to make cuts?

- Look into the reasons why there is a manpower shortage, improve the least sought-after jobs in terms of technique and hygiene or cut working hours. Later, the advancement of machinery, health and work organization will have an ongoing tendency to remove the differing degrees of difficulty, drudgery and healthiness separating the trades.

And if, in spite of all this, a crucial and irreplaceable service remains understaffed, there is still the option of all those concerned taking turns to help out.

As for work that no one is willing to perform, there will be nothing but for it to be done by all of the able-bodied, if it represents a genuine shared need.