Kropotkin: The 1905 Revolution in Russia, Parts Three & Four

Peter Kropotkin

Here are the third and fourth installments of Kropotkin‘s essay on the 1905 Russian Revolution. In Part Three, Kropotkin discusses how the 1905 Russian Revolution spread throughout the Russian empire among all the oppressed groups and classes, only to be met by severe state repression. Part Four, perhaps the most interesting part of the essay, shows how the tide again began to turn in favour of the rebels when workers renewed their involvement in the revolutionary movement in October 1905, leading to a country-wide general strike.

For Kropotkin and other anarchists, the October General Strike showed that the general strike advocated by anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists, but dismissed by Marxists as “general nonsense,” really was an effective “new weapon” in the revolutionary arsenal, “more terrible than street warfare,” which had now “been tested and proved to work admirably.” Also important for Kropotkin was how the general strike spread across the country largely spontaneously, being “entirely a workingmen’s affair,” rather than the work of organized revolutionary parties. For anarchists, the 1905 Russian Revolution was a vivid illustration of the kind of far-reaching social revolution, from the bottom up, that they had been advocating since the inception of revolutionary anarchist movements in the late 1860s.

Odessa Protest Against the Tsar October 1905

The 1905 Russian Revolution, Part Three

The peasants uprising alone, spreading over wide territories, rolling like waves which flood today one part of the country and tomorrow another, would have been sufficient to entirely upset the usual course of affairs in Russia. But when the peasant insurrection is combined with a general awakening of the workingmen in towns, who refuse to remain in the old servile conditions; when all the educated classes enter into an open revolt against the old system; and when important portions of the empire, such as Finland, Poland, and the Caucasus, strive for complete home rule, while other portions, such as Siberia, the Baltic provinces, and Little Russia, and in fact every province, claim autonomy and want to be freed from the St. Petersburg bureaucrats—then it becomes evident that the time has come for a deep, complete revision of all the institutions. Every reasoning observer, everyone who has learned something in his life about the psychology of nations, would conclude that if any concessions are to be made to the new spirit of the time, they must be made with an open mind, in a straightforward way, with a deep sense of responsibility for what is done—not as a concession enforced by the conditions of a given moment, but as a quite conscious reasoned move, dictated by a comprehension of the historical phase which the country is going through.

Repression in Russia 1905

Unfortunately, nothing of that consciousness and sense of responsibility is seen among those who have been the rulers of Russia during the last twelve months. I have told in my memoirs how certain moderate concessions, if they had been granted towards the end of the reign of Alexander II or at the advent of his son, would have been hailed with enthusiasm and would have paved the way for the gradual and slow passage from absolutism to representative government. Even in 1895, when Nicholas II had become emperor, it was not too late for such concessions. But it was also evident to everyone who was not blinded by that artificial atmosphere of bureaucracy created in all capitals, that ten years later—that is, in November last [1904]—such half-hearted concessions as a “Consultative Assembly” were already out of the question. The events of the last ten years, with which the readers of this review are familiar—the students’ affair of 1901, the rule of Plehve, and so on, to say nothing of the abominable blunders of the [Russo-Japanese] war—had already created too deep a chasm between Russia and Nicholas II. The January massacres widened that chasm still more. Therefore only an open recognition of the right of the nation to frame its own constitution, and a complete honest amnesty, granted as a pledge of good faith, could have spared Russia all the bloodshed of the last ten months. Every intelligent statesman would have understood it. But the cynical courtier, Bulygin, whom Nicholas II and his mother considered a statesman, and to whom they had pinned their faith, was not the man to do so. His only policy was to win time, in the hope that something might turn the scales in favour of his masters.

Alexander Bulygin

Consequently, vague promises were made in December 1904, and next in March 1905, but in the meantime the most reckless repression was resorted to—not very openly, I must say, but under cover, according to the methods of Plehve’s policy. Death sentences were distributed by the dozen during the last summer. The worst forms of police autocracy, which characterized the rule of Plehve, were revived in a form even more exasperating than before, because governors-general assumed now the rights which formerly were vested in the minister of the interior. Thus, to give one instance, the governor-general of Odessa exiled men by the dozen by his own will, including the old ex-dean of the Odessa University, Professor Yaroshenko, whom he ordered (on July 26) to be transported to Vologda! And this went on at a time when all Russia began to take fire, and lived through such a series of events as the uprising of the Musulmans, and the massacres at Baku and Nakhichevan; the uprising at Odessa, during which all the buildings in the port were burned;

The Potemkin Mutiny

the mutiny on the ironclad Kniaz Potemkin; the second series of strikes in Poland, again followed by massacres at Lodz, Warsaw, and all other chief industrial centers; a series of uprisings at Riga, culminating in the great street battles of July 28—to say nothing of a regular, uninterrupted succession of minor agrarian revolts. All Russia had thus to be set into open revolt, blood had to run freely in the streets of all the large cities, simply because the tsar did not want to pronounce the word which would put an end to his sham autocracy and to the autocracy of his camarilla. Only towards the end of the summer could he be induced to make some concessions which at last took the shape of a convocation of a state’s Duma, announced in the manifesto of August 19 [1905].

Part Four

Nicholas II

General stupefaction and disdain are the only words to express the impression produced by this manifesto. To begin with, it was evident to anyone who knew something of human psychology that no assembly elected to represent the people could be maintained as a merely consultative body, with no legislative powers. To impose such a limitation was to create the very conditions for producing the bitterest conflicts between the crown and the nation. To imagine that the Duma, if it ever could come into existence in the form under which it was conceived by the advisers of Nicholas II, would limit itself to the functions of a mere consulting board, that it would express its wishes in the form of mere advices, but not in the form of laws, and that it would not defend these laws as such, was absurd on the very face of it. Therefore the concession was considered as a mere desire to bluff, to win time. It was received as a new proof of the insincerity of Nicholas II.

But in proportion as the real sense of the Bulygin “Constitution” was discovered, it became more and more evident that such a Duma would never come together; never would the Russians be induced to perform the farce of the Duma elections under the Bulygin system. It appeared that under this system the city of St. Petersburg, with its population of nearly 1,500,000 and its immense wealth, would have only about 7,000 electors, and that large cities having from 200,000 to 700,000 inhabitants would have an electoral body composed of but a couple of thousand, or even a few hundred electors; while the 90,000,000 peasants would be boiled down, after several successive elections, to a few thousand men electing a few deputies. As to the nearly 4,ooo,ooo Russian workingmen, they were totally excluded from any participation in the political life of the country. It was evident that only fanatics of electioneering could be induced to find interest in so senseless a waste of time as an electoral campaign under such conditions. Moreover, as the press continued to be gagged, the state of siege was maintained, and the governors of the different provinces continued to rule as absolute satraps, exiling whom they disliked, public opinion in Russia gradually came to the idea that, whatever some moderate zemstvoists might say in favour of a compromise, the Duma would never come together.

Then it was that the workingmen again threw the weight of their will into the contest and gave quite a new turn to the movement. A strike of bakers broke out at Moscow in October last, and they were joined in their strike by the printers. This was not the work of any revolutionary organization. It was entirely a workingmen’s affair, but suddenly what was meant to be a simple demonstration of economic discontent grew up, invaded all trades, spread to St. Petersburg, then all over Russia, and took the character of such an imposing revolutionary demonstration that the autocracy had to capitulate before it.

Kharkiv strike meeting

When the strike of the bakers began, troops were, as a matter of course, called out to suppress it. But this time the Moscow workingmen had had enough of massacres. They offered an armed resistance to the Cossacks. Some three hundred men barricaded themselves in a garret, and a regular fight between the besieged workingmen and the besieging Cossacks followed. The latter took, of course, the upper hand, and butchered the besieged, but then all the Moscow workingmen joined hands with the strikers. A general strike was declared. “Nonsense! A general strike is impossible!” the fools said, even then. But the workingmen set earnestly to stop all work in the great city, and fully succeeded. In a few days the strike became general. What the workingmen must have suffered during these two or three weeks, when all work was suspended and provisions became extremely scarce, one can easily imagine; but they held out.

Moscow had no bread, no meat coming in, no light in the streets. All traffic on the railways had been stopped, and the mountains of provisions which, in the usual course of life, reach the great city every day, were lying rotting along the railway lines. No newspapers except the proclamation of the strike committees appeared. Thousands upon thousands of passengers who had come to that great railway center which Moscow is could not move any further, and were camping at the railway stations. Tons and tons of letters accumulated at the post offices, and had to be stored in special storehouses. But the strike, far from abating, was spreading all over Russia.

Once the heart of Russia, Moscow, had struck, all the other towns followed. St. Petersburg soon joined the strike, and the workingmen displayed the most admirable organizing capacities. Then, gradually, the enthusiasm and devotion of the poorest class of society won over the other classes. The shop assistants, the clerks, the teachers, the employees at the banks, the actors, the lawyers, the chemists, even the judges gradually joined the strikers. A whole country had struck against its government, all but the troops; but even from the troops separate officers and soldiers came to take part in the strike meetings, and one saw uniforms in the crowds of peaceful demonstrators who managed to display a wonderful skill in avoiding all conflict with the army.

The 1905 Revolution in Russia

In a few days the strike had spread over all the main cities of the empire, including Poland and Finland. Moscow had no water, Warsaw no fuel; provisions ran short everywhere; the cities, great and small, remained plunged in complete darkness. No smoking factories, no railways running, no tramways, no stock exchange, no banking, no theatres, no law courts, no schools. In many places the restaurants, too, were closed, the waiters having left, or else the workers compelled the owners to extinguish all lights after seven o’clock. In Finland even the house servants were not allowed to work before seven in the morning or after seven in the evening. All life in the towns had come to a standstill. And what exasperated the rulers most was that the workers offered no opportunity for shooting at them and re-establishing “order” by massacres. A new weapon, more terrible than street warfare, had thus been tested and proved to work admirably.

The panic in the tsar’s entourage had reached a high pitch. He himself in the meantime, was consulting in turn the conservatives (Ignat’ev, Goremykin, Sturmer, Stishinskii), who advised him to concede nothing, and Witte, who represented the liberal opinion. It is said that if he yielded to the advice of the latter, it was only when he saw that the conservatives refused to risk their reputations, and maybe their lives, in order to save the autocracy. He finally signed on October 30, a manifesto in which he declared that his “inflexible will” was:

(1)To grant the population the immutable foundations of civic liberty based on real inviolability of the person and freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association.

(2) Without deferring the elections to the state Duma already ordered, to call to participation in the Duma, as far as is possible in view of the shortness of the time before the Duma is to assemble, those classes of the population now completely deprived of electoral rights, leaving the ultimate development of the principle of the electoral right in general to the newly established legislative order of things.

(3) To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can come into force without the approval of the state Duma, and that it shall be possible for the elected of the people to exercise a real participation in the supervision of the legality of the acts of the authorities appointed by us.

On the same day Count Witte was nominated the head of a ministry, which he himself had to form, and the tsar approved by his signature a memorandum of the minister-president in which it was said that “straightforwardness and sincerity in the confirmation of civil liberty,” “a tendency towards the abolition of exclusive laws,” and “the avoidance of repressive measures in respect to proceedings which do not openly menace society and the state” must be binding for the guidance of the ministry. The government was also “to abstain from any interference in the elections to the Duma,” and “not resist its decisions as long as they are not inconsistent with the historic greatness of Russia.”

At the same time a general strike had also broken out in Finland. The whole population joined in supporting it with a striking unanimity; and as communication with St. Petersburg was interrupted, the wildest rumours about the revolution in the Russian capital circulated at Helsinki. Pressed by the Finnish population, the governor-general undertook to report to the tsar the absolute necessity for full concessions, and, the tsar agreeing with this demand, a manifesto was immediately issued, by which all repressive measures of the last few years, including the unfortunate manifesto of the year 1899, by which the Finnish Constitution had been violated, were rescinded, the Diet was convoked, and a complete return to the status quo ante Bobrikov was promulgated. What a pity for the future development of Russia that on this very same day an identical measure, establishing and convoking a Polish Diet at Warsaw, was not taken! How much bloodshed would have been saved! And how much safer the further development of Russia would have been, if Poland had then known that she would be able to develop her own life according to her own wishes!

Peter Kropotkin, November 1905

Anarchy and Democracy

Anarchy: Neither Dictatorship Nor Democracy

I have created a new page, Anarchy and Democracy: Bookchin, Malatesta and Fabbri, which consolidates three previous posts on anarchy and democracy by Murray Bookchin, Errico Malatesta and Luce Fabbri. With the overthrow of dictatorships in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, Occupy movements everywhere, the continuing disaster of “unrepresentative” capitalist democracy and struggles for freedom across the globe, questions regarding what alternatives are available naturally come to the fore. Anarchy is one alternative that deserves more serious consideration. Anarchist ideas that retain their relevance today include workers’ self-management, libertarian socialism, voluntary association, federalism, decentralization and  direct democracy, ideas that are discussed in detail by a variety of writers in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.

Felipe Corrêa: From Party Politics to Libertarian Socialism (2005)

Felipe Corrêa is a Brazilian anarchist. In the following piece, translated by Paul Sharkey, he argues that the only viable alternative to conventional party politics is an anarchist politics of direct action based on the principles of self-management, federalism and a libertarian ethics. Originally published as “An Anarchist View of the Country’s Political Crisis,” in Protesta!  N° 1, VIII 2005, in response to the Mauricio Marinho bribery scandal in Brazil.

From Party Politics to Libertarian Socialism

It is high time that we agreed that institutional party politics have no answers to offer to society’s most pressing problems, the ones that revolve around well-being, happiness, freedom and equality for us all. Which is why we can see that the libertarian socialist alternative might be on the right road. Our conclusion being that politics should be conducted outside of the parliamentary forum, by people in the streets, by means of direct action. In this way, as a movement, we should constitute something that offers a real alternative to the institutional politics which is in tatters. Three essential principles, set out roughly below, will inform action in opposition to parliamentary politics:

1. Self-management. Self-management is a precept that seeks to eliminate hierarchy from workplace and community alike, ensuring that everybody receives the full fruits of the efforts they make and can have a say in matters affecting them. It is self-organization, an alternative to wage labour and to the delegation of politics to politicians. Decisions are made by those affected by each issue, by means of horizontal assemblies facilitating full participation (in the actual deliberations) by everyone. Self-management makes it feasible for people to have control of their own lives, organizing and discussing politics, the object being to wrest the decision-making powers back from the hands of a few politicians and give it back to the people. It amounts to repossession of the policy-making powers that were stolen from us by that sort of parliamentarian.

2. Federalism. Given the shortcomings of the structures of representative democracy… the system that should take its place is federalism. Federalism is a political arrangement designed to replace party political representation by something different, built from the ground up and rooted in the people’s actual needs. In this arrangement, individuals federate into communes, communes into broader organizations and so on and so on. Within these federations there is no hierarchy, decisions are made at non-hierarchical assemblies and delegates are selected — with rotating and revocable mandates — that merely convey the decisions taken at those assemblies to more wide-ranging bodies. Federalism is, so to speak, self-management in politics. It recognizes no boundaries and confers complete autonomy upon members, creating a political context wherein the populace can actively participate in a political life that offers it respect. As with self-management, we do not entrust our wishes to another who then goes off to “do politics” on our behalf. We ourselves will handle such significant decision-making.

3. Ethics. We consider politics and ethics to be inseparable. The meaning of the word, in that it reflects our moral values, should be reinforced by a theoretical system that cannot be implemented in practice or as a set of norms. Ethics ought to be understood as a principle that looks beyond individual or sectional interests. It involves something greater than the individual and ought to be understood as being universal, which is to say, it should pay as much heed to others’ interests as to ours and be universally applicable. An ethical policy should concern itself with all who are affected by it and it should boost the interests of those people, being a means of selecting those actions that best suit them. Ethics also requires an approach whereby the ends we pursue determine the means we employ. We advocate freedom and condemn all forms of oppression and authoritarianism, and the means by which we operate politically fit in with this ideal. Hence the horizontalist approach, direct action, and striving to realize the potential of every person and as much of his happiness as possible, are always stimulated in our political action, and these things are too important to be left to a future that never comes.

These principles are not about to become a reality overnight or next year. The great lesson we draw from them is that they can (and should) inform our day-to-day practices, so that we work politically — albeit outside the context of parliament — in order to build a real democratic alternative (in the sense of direct democracy) that can organize society, in the workplace as well as in our communities, so that it is permeated by ethical relationships, thereby bringing pressure to bear on government and forcing it to make concessions in the name of our welfare and driving society along the freedom road, this being understood as: a) the meeting of all of the material needs of each and every one of us; and b) that done, achievement of the unfettered development of all our potential, free from the oppression of Capital and State; freedom for all and not just for a specific group. Let us leave elections to one side. They serve no purpose. Let us engage in politics right where we live. This quotation from Jaime Cubero speaks volumes:

“The entire live charge of the masses, ready to explode, is skillfully siphoned off by electioneering. But were that effort to be directed into direct action by the masses and into libertarian socialist education — and to us socialism just means freedom — and practical means of struggling and organizing economically for a libertarian socialist life, the upshot would be very different. The anarchist critique of the election contest is far-reaching and its arguments could fill volumes. The struggle for one’s goals is Direct Action. Libertarian socialists find that preferable and embrace it” (Jaime Cubero, The Workers, Politics and Elections).

Hence the urgent necessity of our asserting the politics of libertarian socialism as a way out of the implosion of parliamentary politics. That, rather than demotivating us or spurring us on to “vote more wisely” in the coming year, should spur us on to direct action, propaganda on behalf of our ideals and to work with the communities and movements all around us. We have a duty to come up with a response to the politicians who run this country and the world!

Felipe Corrêa

The Emergence of the New Anarchism: Paul Goodman

In Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, I included several selections by Paul Goodman (1911-1972), a pivotal figure in the post-war resurgence of anarchism. Goodman was a poet, novelist, playwright, lay psychoanalyst, social critic and political activist. One of his most influential writings was The May Pamphlet (1946), his anarchist anti-war statement in which he summed up his general social philosophy: “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life” (Volume Two, Selection 11). With his brother Percival, he wrote Communitas – Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947), in which they present three community paradigms for post-war society, the second being an update of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (Volume One, Selection 34), in which the difference between production and consumption would be eliminated (Volume Two, Selection 17).

In the face of the apathy, conformism and unfulfilling consumerism of post-war America, amid the threat of nuclear annihilation, Goodman observed that it “is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with explosions, fires, and electric-shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality” in a society geared “toward sadism and primary masochism” (Volume Two, Selection 37). Applying this analysis to the problems of youth in post-war society, Goodman achieved prominence as a social critic, particularly with the publication of Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society in 1960, and Compulsory Miseducation in 1964. He was an advocate of human scale technology (Volume Two, Selection 70), a vocal opponent of the U.S. war in Vietnam and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

After the Second World War, when there was talk of turning the U.S. Army back into a volunteer force (something that was not to happen until 1973), Goodman wrote the following open letter to high school graduates. Seeing that the Army continues to rely on “volunteers,” his comments remain pertinent today.

Dear Graduate:

The congress is still squirming about deciding to extend the draft act, in the face of opposition of labor unions, farmers, religious organizations and other bodies of voters that seem to retain a little sanity on this direct personal issue though they cooperated with the war in their manufactures, taxes, dishonest sermons, and general compliance. The recalcitrance of the public and the congressmen’s fear of losing their jobs have put it up to the Army to offer added inducements to volunteers, in case the draft lapses. That is, unable to persuade the minds of adults, the Army turns its appeal to the immature graduates of high school, who in school have learned nothing of the facts of our social life and who, immured in their homes and schools, have had no chance of learning anything by direct experience.

The truth is that the inducements for a youth to volunteer are indeed persuasive; the Army has a good case. A good case to entice a young man into an unproductive waste of his years, subservient to ignorant officers, dedicated to a purpose admitted to be universally disastrous, and in a status that up to now in American peacetime history has always been regarded with contempt by the citizens. Nevertheless the Army has a good case! What an indictment of the state of our institutions if even the Army has a good case!

THREE MAIN CAUSES

Omitting the prospect of being drafted willy-nilly, there are three main causes, interdependent on each other, that bring young men to volunteer: (a) The pressure of making a living and finding a job. (b) The fear of responsible independence (c). The need to escape from home. On all those three counts the Army seems to provide the best solution available in the institutions—unless the young man opens his eyes, frees himself from the fear of authority, and joyfully works to change those institutions.

(a) I have before me a crude mimeographed circular distributed by the Army Recruiting Station, 29 East Fordham Road, The Bronx, New York. It begins:

Dear Graduate, Congratulations upon your successful completion of High School. You are now standing at the crossroads of your world.

And the circular then presents a diagram of 3 roads:

1. Career Road: To Security! Career! 20-year Retirement with Army.

2. Education Avenue: To College! Five Years free after 3 years in regular Army.

3. Doubtful Lane? Civilian Job. No Security. Career Questionable. Retire—when? Education—Maybe.

Doubtful Lane?! Such is the breakdown of the system of “free enterprise” that up to now has been the chief apology for American capitalism!

“Let’s face facts,” the circular goes on. “Millions of veterans are coming back into civilian life. They need jobs and have first priority, etc.”

What gall!! to dare to argue from these “facts”! It is precisely the top of the hierarchy of this Army that has persistently withstood every struggle to improve economic conditions; this Army that has broken strikes when strikes were not yet controlled by the labor-bureaucracies and that will again break strikes; this Army that must be filled in order to protect American “commitments” abroad, and the commitments are nothing but the interests of the very class and the very State that maintain the conditions of “no security, career questionable, education maybe.” The Army helps to create and maintain the facts and then says face the facts. Is not this form of persuasion known as extortion?

I am myself academically trained, and I am astonished and ashamed to see how the colleges and the universities have grasped at these Army subsidies and fees. It is the end of free research and liberal education, for he who pays the piper calls the tune. The technical training of which the Army boasts will, for a time, invent new weapons, but it will not advance science.

(b) Even so, this economic argument of the Army circular would not be persuasive if it were not for the attitude of timidity, lack of self-confidence, and general lack of cultural and social interest with which it is received by the young men; for no independent and intellectually active youth would sacrifice during these exciting years of his life his freedom to explore and take his chances. But the pressure of parental economic anxiety has long since created in the child’s mind the feeling that it is impossible to make a living; the young man, bullied and beaten at home, secretly believes that he is worthless and could never make a go of it. Further, he is secretly afraid to be economically independent, for such independence implies also sexual independence and perhaps marriage, but long deprivation and coercive taboos have invested this idea with terrible anxiety and guilt. Fundamentally, to go it alone means to dare to take father’s place and even perhaps to become a father; but the child has long observed that father himself could not fulfill the responsibility in our society; how much the less can he, whom father has so often banged down and called a fool? Furthermore, years of mis-education have by now stifled every impulse of curiosity, cultural interest, and creative ambition that normally arises in growing boys; in his schooling no natural bent has been encouraged; now, consequently, every human activity seems impenetrably mysterious—the youth is sure that wherever he turns he will make a fool of himself; his ego resists the challenge with all its might.

But behold! the Army solves all problems. It imposes in an even stricter form the parental discipline and punishment that the soul craves; and in a better form, for there is at least no admixture of love. At the same time it releases one from all responsibility; the Army provides every safety as it prepares its members for the moment of extremest danger. In the Army the young man has a disciplined irresponsibility. In the endless hierarchy of the Army it will even be possible for the young man to bully someone in turn, for there is always a newcomer with one less stripe.

(c) And to get away from home! Really away and far away! This also the Army provides. But apart from the Army, as things are in our society, even if the young man finds a job he will still have to remain for several years within the accursed parental walls, his new contribution merely creating a new friction. If his family is what we can observe nine out of ten families to be, it will forever be impossible for the children to grow up to regard their parents as equal human beings for whom one has a special affection. The relations have become strained. It is forever impossible for the youth to express the love that is at the bottom of his heart; it is equally impossible to express the rage that is boiling up from the bottom to the top, and knock the old man down. Therefore the best thing is to get away quick, because the next battle will be worse than the last one—but in the Army one can fight guiltlessly against foreigners and anarchists.

These are, I think, the main reasons that lead the young men to volunteer. Of course there are many corollaries that spring from one or another of them; the pride of uniform, the camaraderie of the other fellows in the same boat, travel, the feverish fantasy of sexual license in strange towns etc., etc. I should be much surprised, however, if among these motives there often occurred a false sentiment of patriotism. The Americans are not yet so co-ordinated as to imagine that there is a need for this Army.

What then? I hope I have filled out the case of the Army circular so as to present their offer in its full attractiveness. I hope that a few young men who might see this will have a small feeling of shame at their plight, and then a great burst of laughter.

Young men! you are indeed at the crossroads—the circular is right. On the one hand are the specious and lying and not unchangeable “facts” that they tell you and that you perhaps inwardly fear. On the other hand is the simple truth: that you are not worthless, you have great powers in you; the world is full of interesting possibilities, creative jobs, crafts, arts, and sciences that are not impenetrable mysteries; we need each other’s mutual aid and no one is unappreciated or isolated; sexual love is guiltless and therefore not far to seek. You need money enough for health and happiness, not to buy what is pictured in advertisements and the movies, and if on our rich earth you can’t get this much without going into the Army, you ought damn well seek out who’s stopping you.

The inducements of the Army are not very different than extortion. Help us to change the “facts,” to free yourselves and set each other free!

Paul Goodman, April 1946

“Dear Graduate” was originally published in the anarchist magazine, Why?, which was later renamed Resistance, a journal which gave expression to the new directions in anarchist theory being taken by anarchists in response to the social changes that followed the Second World War. In Volume Two of Anarchism, I included two other contributions to Resistance, a 1953 article by David Thoreau Wieck in which he discusses, years before the situationists, how to resist a society in which “a small number of people, more or less talented, shall make… under the usual consumption-oriented conditions of the market, our ‘works of art,’ our ‘entertainment,’ while the rest of us are spectators” (Selection 39), and a 1954 article by David Dellinger on  small group communal living, something that became popular among disaffected youth in the 1960s and 70s (Selection 40).

50,000th Site Visit!

Congratulations to everyone who visited this site on May 10, 2011! One of you was the 50,000th visitor. Remember, there is one free person with every visit.

The Emergence of the New Anarchism: Marie Louise Berneri

In Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, subtitled The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977), I included three selections from Marie Louise Berneri (1918-1949), the talented anarchist journalist and writer. Berneri was born in Italy, one of the daughters of Camillo Berneri and Giovanna Berneri, prominent anarchists at the forefront of the struggle against fascism. They were forced to flee Italy in 1926. Marie Louise went to university in France, where she worked with Louis Mercier Vega (I included excerpts from Mercier Vega’s 1970 essay, “Yesterday’s Society and Today’s,” in Volume Two as Selections 45 & 66). In May 1937, Camillo Berneri was murdered in Spain, probably by Stalinist agents. Marie Louise ended up in England, where she campaigned on behalf of the Spanish anarchists and helped revitalize the English anarchist movement. She wrote prolifically for the English anarchist papers, Spain and the World, then War Commentary, then Freedom. After her untimely death in 1949, a collection of her articles was published under the title, Neither East Nor West (1952), emphasizing the anarchist rejection of the false Cold War dichotomy posed by the ideologists of the capitalist West and the Communist East, and the need for an anarchist alternative. The following excerpts are from her 1944 essay, “By Fire and Sword,” later included in the chapter in Neither East Nor West on the “price of war,” from which I reproduced additional extracts in Volume Two of the Anarchism anthology as Selection 4. I also included in Volume Two of Anarchism – The Emergence of the New Anarchism, excerpts from her study of literary utopias, Journey Through Utopia (1949), as Selection 15, and her 1945 article, “Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution,” as Selection 75.

THE PRICE OF WAR: BY FIRE AND SWORD

Paris 1944

IN THE PREFACE to the Baedeker for Paris and its surroundings, published in 1881, one finds a description of the “most deplorable recent disasters caused by the fiendish proceedings of the Communists during the second ‘reign of Terror,’ 20th-28th May, 1871.” According to the writer, “Within that week of horrors no fewer than twenty-two important public buildings and monuments were wholly or partly destroyed, and a similar fate overtook seven railway stations, the four principal public parks and gardens, and hundreds of dwelling- houses and other buildings.”

If Baron Karl Baedeker would have had to write a preface to a guide to Paris in the years which will follow the present war he would probably have had to record far more “fiendish” proceedings on the parts of the retreating German army and the victorious bulldozing, all-levelling armies of “liberation”. There will be a difference, however; the scars that Paris, like the other French towns of Caen, Cherbourg and many more will wear will be noble scars of which the French people will be asked to be proud, and it is doubtful if they will receive slighting references, such as those levelled at the Commune, by the generations of guide-writers to come.

It is the privilege of revolutions that the acts of violence to which they give rise have always received the utmost publicity in newspapers, history books, novels, plays, films… and even travellers’ books. The horrors of war are forgotten or are glorified for the benefit of tourists, like the ruins of Verdun. But everything conspires to keep alive in people’s minds the acts of violence which have taken place during revolutions. Ask any French schoolboy what was the most bloody period in the history of France and he will most probably mention the period of the Terror during the French Revolution. A few thousand people were killed during that period, a small number compared with the Napoleonic wars; an infinitesimal figure compared with the casualties in the war of 1914-1918. Yet the French school boy will know all about the horrors of the French Revolution, the killing of priests and nobles, the death in captivity of Louis the Sixteenth’s heir and the beheading of Marie-Antoinette. But he will know nothing about the million dead of the First World War and the hundreds of thousands of children who died of starvation and disease as a result of it.

Revolutions spell wholesale murder and destruction not only to schoolchildren. How many times have experienced socialist politicians and learned Fabian professors advocated submission and compromise with the ruling class by waving the spectre of bloody revolution in front of the misguided masses? It was with tears in his eyes that Leon Blum asked the French people not to intervene in the Spanish revolution. It was in order to “spare lives” that he watched one of the most splendid revolutionary movements suffocated and allowed the Fascist powers to gain military experience to fight a world war. Of course, when the present war started, Leon Blum forgot all his sensitive love for humanity and urged French people to go to the massacre. As everyone knows revolutions are bloody affairs but to die wholesale for the motherland is called supreme and sublime sacrifice, so that in these cases death does not really count.

One can easily prophesy that after this war there will still be those people to talk about the horrors of the Commune and of the shooting of fascists, capitalists and priests in Spain. But the bombing of Hamburg, Paris and London; the bombardment of Caen; the sinking of troopships; the death in the skies of thousands of young men; the starvation and pestilence devastating scores of countries: these will all be classified as necessary evils, unavoidable curses which humanity must be proud to endure. Revolutionists once again will be considered bloodthirsty fellows who had better be kept locked up and if the choice between war and revolution again presents itself, Christians, socialists and communists no doubt will, on humanitarian grounds, again choose war.

The Emergence of the New Anarchism: Herbert Read

Herbert Read (1893-1968)

Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, opens with excerpts from Herbert Read’s 1940 essay, “The Philosophy of Anarchism.” Read had declared himself in favour of anarchism in his 1938 publication, Poetry and Anarchism, with which I closed Volume One of the Anarchism anthology.  There he wrote that  he sought to “balance anarchism with surrealism, reason with romanticism, the understanding with the imagination, function with freedom.” Read was under no illusions regarding how people would react to his endorsement of anarchism.  At the time, the world’s various anarchist movements were in eclipse, and most radical intellectuals supported the Soviet Union with its Marxist ideology.  It was the era of “Popular Fronts” against Fascism, which the Stalinist Communists used to co-opt other forces on the left, resulting in the further isolation of the anarchists, their inveterate foes and frequent victims (see Chapter 18 of Volume One, “The Russian Revolution”).

Herbert Read (1893-1968) had served in the First World War, which helped turn him into a pacifist.  By 1938, he was a noted poet, essayist and art critic. In the 1930s, he helped introduce Surrealism to an English audience. After the Second World War, he did the same for existentialism, the philosophy that was being popularized in France by people like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He was current with the latest  intellectual and artistic trends, including Freudian psychoanalysis, which helped to inform his approach to anarchism, art and education. Read was one of a few better known intellectuals at the time who expressed anarchist ideas in a contemporary idiom, helping to pave the way for the remarkable resurgence of anarchism that surprised many, including some anarchists, in the 1960s. Other noteworthy contributors to this anarchist renaissance were Paul Goodman and Dwight Macdonald in the United States, Marie Louise Berneri, Alex Comfort and George Woodcock in England, and Giancarlo de Carlo in Italy. I have included extensive selections from all of these writers in Volume Two of the Anarchism anthology.

Not all anarchists were enamoured with these new currents in anarchist theory. Anarchists who took a “class struggle” approach, which emphasized the revolutionary role of the working class and the need for anarchists to take part in working class struggles, such as the Impulso group in Italy, denounced the “new” anarchism as counter-revolutionary, referring to it as “resistencialism,” because writers like Read had purportedly abandoned any hope for a successful social revolution and instead advocated resistance to authority, rather than its abolition (Anarchism, Volume Two, Selection 38).

Read, however, had not abandoned the idea of a social revolution. He simply conceived of it in broader terms, and distinguished it from more conventional conceptions of revolution by reviving Max Stirner’s (Volume One, Selection 11) distinction between revolution and insurrection. A revolution is “an exchange of political institutions.” An insurrection “aims at getting rid of these political institutions altogether.” Consequently,  he looked forward to a “spontaneous and universal insurrection” (Volume Two, Selection 1), but discarded “the romantic conception of anarchism — conspiracy, assassination, citizen armies, the barricades. All that kind of futile agitation has long been obsolete: but it was finally blown into oblivion by the atomic bomb.” Today, “action must be piecemeal, non-violent, insidious and universally pervasive” (Volume Two, Selection 36).

Defining the measure of progress as “the degree of differentiation in society” (Volume Two, Selection 1), Read sought to create an organic society in which everyone is free to develop and express their unique talents and abilities, bringing forth “the artist latent within each one of us” (Volume Two, Selection 19). Arguing that “real politics are local politics,” Read proposed a system of direct democracy based  on functional and communal groups federated with each other, with their activities being coordinated by ad hoc delegates who are never separated from their “natural productive” functions (Volume One, Selection 130).

When Murray Bookchin started drawing the connections between anarchism and ecology in the 1960s, he cited Read as one of his inspirations (Volume Two, Selection 48). Read’s emphasis on local politics can also be found in Bookchin’s writings, in his concept of “libertarian municipalism.” Bookchin’s distinction between a libertarian politics of directly democratic community assemblies and the bureaucratic authoritarianism of the state can therefore be found in Read’s earlier writings.

In the following excerpts from Read’s 1947 BBC lecture, “Neither Liberalism Nor Communism,” he further develops his conception of anarchism as an alternative kind of politics without the state, emphasizing, as Bookchin did later, the insight of the ancient Greek philosophers that a truly democratic politics requires decentralization and human-scale.

Herbert Read: Neither Liberalism Nor Communism (1947)

It has always been recognized since the time of the Greek philosophers that the practicability of a free democracy was somehow bound up with the question of size — that democracy would only work within some restricted unit  such as the city-state. This was the conclusion of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, and their view has been supported in modern times by great political philosophers like Rousseau, Proudhon, Burckhardt and Kropotkin.

Based on this realization, a political philosophy has arisen which opposes the whole conception of the State. This theory, which would abolish the State, or reduce it to insignificance, is sometimes known as distributivism, sometimes as syndicalism, sometimes as guild socialism, but in its purest and most intransigent form it is called anarchism. Anarchism, as the Greek roots of the word indicate, is a political philosophy based on the idea that a social order is possible without rule, without dictation — even the dictation of a majority. Señor de Madariaga in his broadcast used the word as an antithesis to order, which is a common misuse of the word. Anarchism, indeed, seeks a very positive form of social order, but it is order reached by mutual agreement, not order imposed by unilateral dictation.

Though anarchism as a political doctrine has a respectable ancestry and has numbered great poets and philosophers like Godwin and Shelley, Tolstoy and Kropotkin among its adherents: though even now it is the professed faith of millions of people in Spain, in Italy and, alas, in Siberia: though it is the unformulated faith of millions more throughout the world — though, that is to say, it is one of the fundamental political doctrines of all time, it has never been given a place in our insular discussions of the political problems of our time.

Why this conspiracy of silence? I shall not spend any time on that interesting speculation, but I shall try, in the few minutes left to me, to give you the main principles of this distinct political theory

Believing that an expanding democracy leads to the delegation of authority to the creation of a governing class of politicians and bureaucrats — believing, in Acton’s words, that democracy tends to unity of power, and inevitably to the abuse of power by power-corrupted politicians, we who are anarchists seek to divide power, to decentralize government down to the localities in which it is exercised, so that every man has a sense of social responsibility and participates immediately in the conduct of his social order.

That is the political aspect of the theory. But it is equally in the economic field that democracy tends to unity of power — either the power of the capitalist monopoly or the power of the nationalized industry. We believe in the decentralization of industry and in the deproletarization of labour in the radical transformation and fragmentation of industry, so that in place of a few powerful trade combines and trade unions, we should have many small co-operative farms and workshops, administered directly by the workers themselves.

We believe, that is to say, in a federal or co-operative commonwealth, and we believe that this represents an ideal which is distinct from any offered by liberalism or communism. You may be inclined to dismiss it as an impracticable ideal, but within limits we can prove that it does work, in spite of unfavourable economic conditions and in the face of ruthless opposition from capitalists or communists. There have been many failures and many false starts, but these have been studied by the sociologists of the movement, and we know pretty accurately why certain co-operative communities have failed. We think we know for what reasons others have survived for a century or more — the Hutterites, a religious community was founded in Moravia in the 16th century and has carried out these principles successfully ever since. More remarkable, because operating within the economic structure of a modern society, are the highly successful co-operative agricultural communities established in Palestine, in Mexico and under the Farm Security Administration in the USA. At Valence in France a very successful experiment is taking place. In this case the co-operative community combines a highly skilled industry (the manufacture of watch-cases) with agriculture. I do not pretend that these experiments prove the case for an anarchist society. But they are highly significant tests of the human capacity for co-operative living — experiments which give us every confidence in the social and economic soundness of our wider proposals.

I am old enough to remember the days, before 1917, when people would say: Oh, socialism is all right in theory, but it could never be put into practice. Against such an argument socialists of that time could only put their faith — a faith which, we must admit, has been amply justified. Now on every side we meet the same argument against anarchism, against the co-operative commonwealth. No feudal baron could have believed in a world ruled by merchants and money-lenders; and in their turn these merchants and money-lenders refused for a long time to believe in the possibility of a world ruled by bureaucrats. I do not expect that many of my listeners can believe in a world in which the very idea of rule is abolished, in which we live by mutual aid, in which all thought of profit, all aggressive impulses, the concept of national sovereignty and the practice of armed imperialism, are forever absent. But when you consider the world in all its moral and economic chaos, when you see humanity fearfully transfixed by the threat of atomic warfare, can you for a moment believe that our civilization will be saved by any change less profound than that which I have described tonight?

Reprinted in A One-Man Manifesto and Other Writings for Freedom Press (London: Freedom Press, 1994), ed. David Goodway

Kan San: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Although anarchism as a significant movement virtually disappeared from China by the 1930s, anarchist ideas and anti-authoritarian movements have continued to manifest themselves in China during various social upheavals. During the so-called “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s, some Red Guards took Mao Zedong’s revolutionary pronouncements to heart, advocating the transformation of China into a “People’s Commune” based on the revolutionary models of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1917 Petrograd Soviets (see the “Whither China” manifesto of the Sheng-Wu-Lien group, reprinted in China: The Revolution is Dead—Long Live the Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977)). After the Communist authorities, with Mao’s approval, suppressed these “ultra-leftist” deviations, some former Red Guards became interested in anarchist ideas. In 1976, the Hong Kong based libertarian communist group, the ‘70s, published their collection of ultra-left writings, China: The Revolution is Dead—Long Live the Revolution. Space considerations prevented me from including material from this anthology in Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977).

Lee Yu See and Wu Che, in the Appendix to China: The Revolution is Dead—Long Live the Revolution, set forth the following analysis of the Chinese Communist Party and its counter-revolutionary role, drawing on theories of the “new class,” the relationship of intellectuals to the state and the rise of techno-bureaucracy that originated with Bakunin (Volume One, Selections 22, 24, 25 & 64) and were further developed by later anarchists, such as Geoffrey Ostergaard (Volume Two, Selection 27), Nico Berti (Volume Two, Selection 67) and Noam Chomsky (Volume Two, Selection 68).

1. From the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party was a bourgeois organism. The party was structured along hierarchical lines. It was a miniature state. It assimilated all the forms, techniques and mentality of bureaucracy. Its membership was schooled in obedience and was taught to revere the leadership. The party’s leadership, in turn, was schooled in habits born of command, authority, manipulation and egomania. At the same time, the party was the spineless follower of the Comintern directed by Moscow.

2. The rigid dogma adopted by the Chinese Communist Party was that of Leninism-Stalinism, an ideology which had led to the consolidation of a system of state capitalism in Russia. Not by deviating from but by following Lenin’s ideas, a new dominating and exploiting class came into power over the working masses.

3. China was an economically backward country in which the old ruling classes were incapable of carrying out industrialization. The young native bourgeoisie had neither the strength nor the courage to revolutionize the old social structure in the way that a genuine modernization would require. The “bourgeois tasks” were to be solved by a bureaucracy

4. In pursuing the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside in its attempt to seize state power, the Chinese Communist Party built up a peasant army. But such an army, organized by a bourgeois party, became a tool of the party and therefore a capitalist machine.

5. The so-called 1949 revolution [had] nothing in common with a genuine socialist revolution. It was simply a violent take over of the state by a bureaucracy better placed to manage the national capital than the old ruling clique.

6. Having won control of the state machine, the only way to move forward for the Maoist bureaucracy was to impose a regime of ruthless exploitation and austerity on the working masses.

The bureaucracy began to carry out the task of primitive accumulation. Because of the lack of capital-intensive industry, economic development depended on the most primitive methods of extraction of surplus value: in the countryside, mobilizing millions of peasants and semi-proletarians around the construction of public works and irrigation projects, built almost bare-handed by the rural masses; in the cities, forcing the workers to work long hours for extremely low wages, banning strikes, putting restrictions on the choice of employment and so on.

7. The new bureaucratic capitalist class in China did not emerge because of the development of new modes of production. It was on the contrary, the bureaucracy which brought the new mode of production into existence. The Chinese bureaucracy did not originate from the industrialization of the country. Industrialization was the result of the bureaucracy’s accession to power.

8. Soon after the accession to power of the Maoist bureaucracy, intra-party feuds occurred. Such feuds originated out of two different conceptions of how China was to modernize in agriculture, industry, science and technology.

9. The Maoist-radical faction (led… by Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan [the so-called “Gang of Four”]) advocated self-reliance, the active mobilization of the “popular masses” behind the state and the economy to promote production by ideological rather than material incentives, “redness” over “expertness”, the “infallibility” of the thoughts of Mao Zedong, hostility towards the Soviet Union, “revolutionizing” arts and literature to serve the single purpose of propagating the official ideology, the need for endless mass movements and struggle because “in the long historical period of socialism, the principal internal contradiction is the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie.”

The so-called capitalist roaders (Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, et al) favoured the retention of wage differentials and the extension of material incentives for increased productivity. They also stood for a more efficient technological apparatus, rapprochement with the Soviet “revisionists”, liberalization of policies in relation to the arts, rejection of the personal cult of Mao, the priority of national Construction over endless “class struggles”.

Both lines represented different strategies designed by the different factions of the bureaucratic capitalist class for attacking the working masses, for intensifying their exploitation.

The Maoist-radical road was leading to a “feudalistic social-fascist dictatorship”. The road of the “capitalist roaders” would bring a “destalinized Russian type of society” like today’s Russia.

Lee Yu See and Wu Che also provide greater details regarding the so-called Tiananmen Incident in April 1976, when some 100,000 people gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest against the Communist government. Cars were overturned and burned, the barracks of the People’s Liberation Army were sacked and occupied and some protesters battled with the police and worker-militiamen. Similar demonstrations took place in Chengchow and Kunming. In an earlier essay, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Kan San provides further details regarding the “ultra-left deviationists;” his views regarding Mao’s role are rather naive and at odds with the more critical analysis of Lee Yu See and Wu Che.

Ba Jin (1904-2005)

The awful absurdities and excesses of the Cultural Revolution are discussed from a personal perspective by the Chinese novelist and anarchist, Ba Jin, in “Against the Powers that Be,” an essay that will be included in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas that he wrote in 1984 during a brief period of liberalization (which ended with the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989) . I included several selections by Ba Jin, written in the 1920s, in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939).

 

Kan San: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

 

1. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—Why is it called “cultural”?

Superficial observations only revealed brutal struggles, large scale rebellion, or a limited civil war in various places. Under the directive of Mao Zedong, [future Gang of Four member] Yao Wenyuan published the essay “Criticizing the New Historical Play: The Dismissal of Hai Jui from Office” and this raised the curtain of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Yet the revolution should not be called “cultural”. After the October Revolution the Soviet Union had not travelled on the road to socialism and had become an imperialistic power, Mao Zedong had to seek an explanation for this. Of course we ourselves would not think that the foundation for the realization of socialism had been laid if the means of production were nationalized under the leadership of a vanguard party. However, to a stern believer of Bolshevism like Mao Zedong, the revisionism of the Soviet Union was puzzling. Subsequently he came to the conclusion that the superstructure had brought about counter-effects to the economic base. Mao said, “We recognize that in the long course of historical development, the material determines the spiritual; social existence determines social consciousness; but we also recognize in turn the counter-effects of the spiritual on the material, social consciousness on social existence, and the superstructure on the economic base”. This is to say Mao Zedong felt that although the capitalist class had been overthrown, their ideas and ideology were still greatly influencing the superstructure in the arena of theoretical formulation, academic research and artistic creation… Such propagation of anti-socialist ideas was making preparations for capitalism to be restored…

Mao Zedong ignited the Cultural Revolution because he wanted to resolve the problem of the residual capitalist ideas and consciousness having a counter-revolutionary effect on the economic base. He wanted to carry out a revolution which would deeply affect the inner soul of mankind, and revolutionize the thoughts of the people so that China would steer clear from the path travelled by the Soviet Union…

It is my belief that unless we understand the aim of Mao Zedong in initiating the Cultural Revolution to be more than the resolution of his disputes with the Liu Shaoqi faction, unless we are aware that Mao Zedong was seeking to revolutionize the thoughts of the people, we would not be able to explain many of the seemingly incomprehensible occurrences in the Cultural Revolution.

2. A Real Revolution developed from a Sponsored Revolution

Before the Cultural Revolution, the power and influence of the Liu Shaoqi faction had been deeply entrenched… Mao, in addition to his control of the army through Lin Biao, commanded respect through his own authority but he possessed nothing else. Moreover, Mao ignited the revolution not purely for the sake of a power struggle. The move in fact embraced a highly idealistic overtone, and this explained why Mao had the courage to mobilize the masses to attack the bureaucrats of the Liu Shaoqi faction by means of “big Link-Up”, big character posters and the slogan “attack with pens and defend with arms.” At that time, although the people found their material well being slightly better under communist rule as compared to the days of Chiang Kai-shek, they nonetheless felt suppressed in many respects. The youth, in particular, were torn between the education of orthodox Marxism which conferred upon them high ideals on the one hand, and their experience in reality which differed greatly from socialism which the Chinese Communists preached to be in existence. But they could not see where the problem really lay. The bureaucrats enjoyed special privileges and received special attention. What the bureaucrats advocated was to join the party and become an official. What was prevailing was elitism. The principle of “from the top to the bottom” ruled and the masses were reduced to small pawns on a chess board and screws in a megamachine, completely obedient to the top leadership. Hence when Mao Zedong mobilized the masses to struggle against the Liu Shaoqi faction, they responded most enthusiastically. [That] is because the masses, tired of bureaucratic rule, naively believed that it was the Liu faction to whom all problems could be traced. They became a formidable force and the Liu faction was completely toppled.

During the course of struggle against the Liu Shaoqi faction, the masses realized their own strength. The bureaucrats, once posited high above, revealed their impotence and cowardice in front of the people. When the masses smashed the governmental machine, they discovered that each individual had a secret file in which a comment made by the bureaucrats would predetermine that individual’s whole life. For the sake of the struggle against the Liu faction bureaucrats, the Red Guards went everywhere to link up with one another and organized themselves. Their power of analysis was greatly improved as a result. After the Liu Shaoqi faction had been crushed, Mao felt that the major problem had been solved, the only remaining one being the reconstruction of peace and order. But most of the masses felt that even though the Liu Shaoqui faction was overthrown, the problem had not been solved. Some who were thoughtful and sensitive, having acquired a better understanding of the bureaucratic system from their struggle against the bureaucrats, persisted to the end. Some were also beginning to cast away the control exerted by Mao Zedong’s thought, and did what they thought ought to be done. The Shanghai Radio Station broadcast the warning that the rebels must not seize power from the Party, saying: “Some thought-confusing members of our group said, ‘Without the Party’s leadership, we still managed to achieve for ourselves victory in the January Revolutionary struggle for power. Seize power again in the same way and use it well.’”

Mao Zedong, seeing that the masses were gradually going out of his control, panicked. The more thoughtful Red Guards in particular, by means of link-ups exchanged revolutionary experiences with their counterparts in other provinces and gradually formulated their own framework of analysis, most notably in the [1968] article “Whither China?” by [the] Sheng Wu-lien [group]. They pointed out that the only prospect for the Chinese Revolution was forming the Chinese People’s Commune to be modeled after the 1871 Paris Commune. For this goal to be achieved, they thought that the precondition was to smash the entire state machinery and the entire bureaucratic system. Ultra-left ideas thus germinated and flourished and groups like the Northern Star Study Society and Kung Shan Tung were established, causing Mao to feel all the more uneasy. Furthermore, the outbreak of the Wuhan Mutiny by the military to oppose the masses’ seizure of their power further compelled Mao Zedong to decide on the suppression of the Red Guards. Through the military, Mao forced the masses to surrender their weapons to join the Revolutionary Committee of the Old, Middle-aged, and the Young, with the Army, Cadres and the Masses, so as to restore bureaucratic rule and to force the masses to surrender their arms seized from the military. He further launched the “Up the Mountain and Down the countryside” campaign, driving the youths up the mountain and down the countryside, preventing the Red Guards from getting together to discuss and learn how to rebel and how to attain genuine socialism. The masses’ consciousness and ideas had not yet developed to maturity and they had not been aware of Mao’s trickery. This real revolution, developed from the sponsored one, was crushed before it could make great strides. The revolution is dead; long live the revolution! The failure was to pave the way for the new total revolt.

3. The Development of Ultra-left Ideas

…Although the tumultuous mass movement was suppressed, the Cultural Revolution had not yet ended. On the one hand, the Cultural Revolution had had an important effect on the superstructure, including literature, education, scientific research, political organization, and had negated a great part of the establishment—but all these had yet to be reconstructed. Controversies over questions such as the method of production, enterprise management, etc. had also not been solved. On the other hand, the conservative faction of the bureaucrats had reorganized their strength and demanded a restoration of the old order of the days before the Cultural Revolution. They thus tried to seize power from the newly instated bureaucrats, causing the contradiction to be deepened and become evident. The disclosure of the Lin Biao affair [who died fleeing China following an alleged attempt to seize power], the anti-Lin [Biao], anti-Confucius campaign, the criticize [the 14^th century literary classic] Water Margin Movement, and the reemergence of certain of the disgraced bureaucrats rendered the vision of the masses clear, enabling them to understand that the Cultural Revolution was yet another trick played by Mao to fool the people. The masses began consciously to boycott the instructions imposed by the bureaucrats. For example, in the field of production, their lack of enthusiasm for work lowered production greatly, and their sabotage further prevented the production target from being reached, tightening the supply of commodities. In the fields of arts and literature, education and scientific research, because of the boycott by the masses, non-cooperation of the old bureaucrats, and the incompetence of the Gang of Four and their followers, Mao’s already ridiculously inappropriate policies were to become even more farcical. In the field of arts and literature, only some ten scripts of model operas were accomplished, and all literary works were repeating the same theme and their characterizations were very much the same. The standard of education declined rapidly: those who accused the teachers were hailed as the model of the people, and those who submitted blank answer sheets in examination, heroes. The intensification of all these contradictions made the pursuit of the answer to “Whither China?” all the more urgent.

The article “Whither China?” by [the] Sheng Wu-lien [group] firstly pointed out that China should head towards the goal of the Chinese Peoples’ Commune. The way to attain the goal was by means of overthrowing the rule of the new bureaucratic capitalist class through violence to solve the question of political power. It is indeed utopian to neither talk about the seizure of power nor to entirely smash the old state machine, but to just cry the empty slogan of realizing the May 5th directive. The red capitalist class had become a corrupt class hindering the progress of history; their relationship with the masses had changed from that of the leader and the led to the ruler and the ruled, and the exploiter and the exploited, from a relationship based on equality in the course of revolution to that of the oppressor and the oppressed. This class must be overthrown if the Chinese Peoples’ Commune was to be realized. The article provoked tremendous response and sparked off further analysis of the essence of the rule of the Chinese communists.

The [1974] Li I-che poster [“Concerning Socialist Democracy and the Legal System,” also reprinted in China: The Revolution is Dead—Long Live the Revolution] once again proved with examples the emergence of the new class in China. The essence of the new bourgeois mode of production is “changing the public into private”. When the leader of the state or an enterprise redistributes the properties and power of the proletariat in a bourgeois manner, he is in fact practicing the new bourgeois private possession of these properties and powers. What has been commonly observed is that some leaders have allowed themselves, their families, kinfolk and friends special political and economic privileges, even going so far as to swap among themselves and push their children into political and economic positions through back door channels. Once the Li I-che poster was pasted up, the people of Canton enthusiastically copied the whole text, and its influence extended more and more. When the Tiananmen Incident erupted [in April 1976], the Chinese Peoples’ understanding of the bureaucrats was pushed to the peak, well demonstrated by their words: “China is no longer the China of yore, and the people arc no longer wrapped in sheer ignorance. Gone for good is [Chin] Shih Huang-ti’s feudal society!” The Chinese Communists mobilized the militiamen to execute the bloody suppression of the masses. After the Tiananmen Incident, the era of Mao Zedong finally retreated from the stage of history. The intense infuriation of the masses indirectly led to the rapid downfall of the Gang of Four and finally managed to force the bureaucrats to stop labelling the Tiananmen Incident as counter-revolutionary. The masses once again became the major determinant of China’s politics.

4. The Lessons of the Cultural Revolution

The richest heritage of the Cultural Revolution was the realization by the masses of the greatness of their own strength. The head of the State who had been regarded as immaculate as well as many of the leading cadres had fallen within a very short time. The idea that leaders were indispensable was negated. In the past everything had been done as instructed by the leaders as if the absence of leaders would lead to the collapse of the sky. The experience of the Cultural Revolution however convinced the masses that without the directions from above and with the masses themselves managing, planning and executing all administration, steel continued to be produced and the trains were punctual in arrival and departure. Production improved both qualitatively and quantitatively. When the workers controlled and managed production on their own, their commitment to work increased for they not only knew how to produce, but also comprehended what it was they were working for. Work ceased to be alienating and the working morale rose tremendously. The dullness of the past had given way to a situation swelling with life and burning with warmth. The people seemed to have realized in this very moment the meaning of life, the truth of revolution, the prospect of China and the future of mankind.

There were, admittedly, a few who had felt uneasy in the face of such great freedom. But they too looked back to those days of freedom with nostalgia and felt infuriated and disgusted with the existing political conditions. They witnessed the process through which the State Chairman Liu Shaoqi became “a traitor and a spy”; the constitutional successor to the Party and the State, Lin Biao, became a “traitor, a man with ambition and a conspirator” who died without a grave; an unknown young man became the vice-chairman of the Party and was then denounced as “a new born capitalist”; Mao’s wife, “student and comrade”, Jiang Qing, was condemned as a monster and likened to Wu Ji-tien. The struggle among the bureaucrats disclosed their corruptibility and rendered the People’s vision clear, making them realize that “there had never been any saviour, god or emperors to give them happiness and that the happiness of mankind had to be created by man himself.” To avoid being fooled again by the bureaucrats, to be freed from the bureaucrats and from the need of morning prayers, evening penitences, the loyalty dance, and the constant threat of struggles and criticisms, the people have to rely on their own strength all the more for the smashing up of the entire bureaucratic system.

The shift of Mao’s attitude from making beautiful promises to mobilize the masses in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, to suddenly proclaiming “Revolutionary committees are fine!” to deceive the masses into discarding the demand for the establishment of the Chinese Peoples’ Commune, and then finally utilizing the army to execute the brutal suppression of the masses… taught the People an old yet still new lesson: the ruling class would never retreat from the stage of history voluntarily. Without force and violence, they would never be overthrown. To be kind hearted and lenient towards the bureaucrats would only result in being slaughtered by them in the end, and to compromise with the bureaucrats was analogous to offering the bandits weapons. The generation baptized by the Cultural Revolution will be the initiator and backbone of the forthcoming socialist revolution in China.

5. Conclusion

The Chinese communists recently announced that “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been concluded by the victorious crushing of the Gang of Four”. The real meaning of this is—Mao Zedong is dead; the Gang of Four are arrested, and the Chinese bureaucrats no longer have conflicting opinions on the restoration of the old order of society before the Cultural Revolution. All bureaucrats who have lost their positions during the Cultural Revolution have been restored to positions of power, and are ready to avenge the activists of the Cultural Revolution. Does this mean anything but that the Cultural Revolution marked for its anti-bureaucratic overtone has ended? For the rebels of the Cultural Revolution, the Cultural Revolution had failed long ago. Now, it only means that they can no longer make use of the contradictions among the bureaucrats as they have done in the past few years.

On the face of it thus Mao’s attempt to initiate the Cultural Revolution in order that China will not become like the Soviet Union has failed, for the Hua-Teng policies now implemented have totally negated this attempt of Mao. Mao’s failure however was to be expected and unavoidable. Although Mao Zedong was capable of grasping the idea that the superstructure would and could have significant influences on the economic base, influences, which if not seriously attended to, would ultimately lead to revisionism, nevertheless as head of the bureaucrats, and deeply imbued with bureaucratic ideas, Mao could not understand that the maintenance of the bureaucratic system itself was the prime factor contributing to revisionism and imperialism. During the course of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had tried hard to maintain the bureaucratic system, as demonstrated by his saying that “Revolutionary committees are fine” and by his insistence on the practice of giving orders to be followed—even to the extent that “those understood by the people must be executed and those not understood must also be executed.” How then could the revolution he sought develop from the inner soul of the people? How then could China be saved from travelling the tragic road of the Soviet Union? The failure of the Cultural Revolution is no accident.

But Mao Zedong had nonetheless unexpectedly educated the generation of the Cultural Revolution. His repeatedly reactionary measures helped to generate the awareness of the people and they now have found the way for the Chinese revolution. Mao’s own practice in the Cultural Revolution destroyed his faked revolutionary image and finally led to his fading out from the stage of history. From now on, no bureaucrat will be able to bring forth theories like the “thoughts of Mao Zedong” to fool the masses. The Chinese People have got rid of the chains previously restricting their thoughts and the ideas of the “Ultra-left” can develop in the absence of mystifying fog. The bureaucrats have lost their weapon of ideological control on the Peoples’ consciousness.

What the Hua-Teng bureaucrats have proposed are merely the policies and practices rejected by the people during the Cultural Revolution. How then could they get accepted by and satisfy the people aspiring to genuine socialism? It is not a simple process for people who are aware to turn to action. But how long will it take for this process to be accomplished? This can come about only when the “Ultra-left” thoughts and ideas become more widespread and when there are other changes in the political situation in China… the Chinese Revolution is an integral part of the world revolution, and if there is a genuine socialist revolutionary upsurge in any part of the world, it will inevitably affect China in a substantial way. For this reason, I have come to exchange ideas and experiences with you and hopefully this will contribute to the development of the world revolution in a small way, which will then act as a catalyst to the socialist revolution in China. Then will be the day when the aim of “liberation of myself through the liberation of mankind” is attained.

Noir et Rouge: Majority and Minority (1958)

In Volume 2 of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, I included several selections from the French anarchist journal, Noir et Rouge (1956-1970), including material on national liberation and anti-colonialism, draft resistance against the French war against Algerian independence (Selection 31), and new directions in anarchist theory (Selection 47). Noir et Rouge (Black and Red, the traditional colours of class struggle anarchism) was published by the Groupes Anarchistes d’Action Revolutionaire (Revolutionary Action Anarchist Groups), one of the many French anarchist groups that emerged following the split in the French anarchist movement between Georges Fontenis and the Libertarian Communist Federation, which tried to unite anarchists and other ultra-leftists into a more conventional revolutionary party, and those anarchists who felt the Fontenis approach was dogmatic and authoritarian (see the previous post from Giovanna Berneri). In the following excerpts from Noir et Rouge, translated by Paul Sharkey, the GAAR sets forth its position on the debate regarding majority rule, defending the right of the minority to follow its own path. Noir et Rouge, with its more fluid conception of anarchist organization, influenced the student revolutionaries of May 1968 in France.

Majority and Minority

Can a majority claim to speak for on organization? Are its decisions binding upon the organization? How is the minority treated in terms of its expression, its conduct, its very existence within the ranks of that organization?

At first glance, all these questions appear to be of secondary interest, but in fact they are of considerable significance when one wishes to live inside an organization and wants that organization to live. And there can be no “laissez-faire, time will tell, every case is a case apart, with a little good will…” approach, for often experience is very convincing but by the time it is noticed it is too late to change anything and everything has to be embraced or allowed to fall by the wayside. Right from the very first steps taken together, we must devise a theoretical and practical line of policy acceptable to all and, in this context, the minority-majority issue can tilt the balance in one direction or the other.

As we see it, the operation of a federalist organization is incompatible with retention of the principle of majority rule. There is a real majority in the form of a freely conceived, freely accepted unanimity. Any other majority, be it a two thirds majority, an absolute or simple majority, with all manner of implications, constitutes a majority only as far as those who accept it are concerned; as far as others are concerned, it is worthless and cannot be considered binding.

Every time an attempt is made to foist a policy upon others, on one ground or another, one arrives at a contrived, fragile, unstable unity. Of course, in every case one finds and is going to find “special circumstances, historical necessities” — but then, what moment in humanity’s march towards its happiness is not historical? And it is not hard for those in need of that majority to prate on about special circumstances.

But… “without a majority, no decision can be arrived at and in the absence of decisions, an organization is worthless, a shambles.” This is the chief charge levelled at libertarians by authority lovers and, it has to be said, by certain libertarians. But experience flies in the face of such reasoning. Not only are there organizations in existence that are built on this foundation, but there have been instances where, without any votes being counted, there was a real majority… 19 July 1936, the May events in Barcelona in 1937… but there was no majority when the anarchists were “obliged” to collaborate with the government, at which point our adversaries started to roil about the existence of an opposition and a minority and to carp about the anarchists’ weakness and lack of discipline. Yet it was the existence of that very minority that salvaged the movement’s honour, including the honour of those who had consented to compromise.

The majority principle derives from the practice of the political struggle, from universal suffrage, from parliamentarianism. There, it is necessary, nay, the only indispensable factor in the smooth running of the system. The struggle to win a majority has never been and never will be open and honest. In order to win votes, no one shows his true face, the mechanisms of his game or the real aims he has in mind. The most revolutionary appeals are merely vague propositions likely to attract a brood swathe of individuals: the most po-faced sermons are only the ravings of rabble-rousers trying to stir the basest sentiments of the mob, be it selfish or sham-humanitarian. This grand parade of fine talkers is well orchestrated from behind the scenes through the use of intimidation, economic and other threats, as well as promises and special advantages. In authoritarian regimes, this backstage activity is even more transparent and the real agents of the majority (the official and political police, direct or indirect oppression) tread the boards, flourishing their “arguments”; they do not even trouble to mount a few minor displays against the recalcitrant so as to make an example for the rest, and to arrive at the ideal majority… 99.99%. But that danger lurks even within non-authoritarian, democratic, indeed, libertarian organizations, when the principle of majority rule is embraced along with the competition to win a majority. We have seen supposedly libertarian congresses hatched behind the scenes, with the parts and the speeches allocated in advance and even propaganda tailor-mode for each delegate, and we have also witnessed the outcome.

This “Fontenis-style” phenomenon ought not to be repeated.

But there will always be some who are not convinced, some who hold back, even if only for strictly personal reasons: we know about the unconfessed role that has been played by personal relations, even in strictly political, economic or ideological organizations. We cannot make it a requirement that everyone hits it off with everybody else. So we will run into nonsensical, unsolicited obstruction which can paralyze and stymie the organization just when it ought to be acting with the greatest speed — and what, then, are we to do? It happens.

But this argument is founded upon two mistakes: the notion of a homogeneous specific organization and the notion of anarchist morality.

When the members of an organization are bound together not only by reasonably friendly personal relations, but also and primarily by a given number of ideological and tactical principles — enough common ground to justify the claim that that organization is homogeneous — the dangers of significant differences of opinion are minimal. This is one of the reasons why we stick to the views and practice of a “specific anarchist group” which we refuse to dilute or see diluted for us. Just let a new practice be adopted — “come all ye who are for freedom” or “against the State,” or even “anarchism generally” — and the next day, friction on some issue will be inevitable. Heterogeneity carries another consequence: the existence of groups of “initiates” (with a foot in several groups at once, maybe) which are, most of the time, secret or semi-secret: and every one them aims to make the running) their consciences clear that they are “leading others along the righteous path”… which will very quickly degenerate into internecine squabbling, into an OPB*, into leaders and masses. Thus there are not just a majority and a minority but a number of concentric circles, most often revolving around some “master-mind” (which releases the others from any requirement to think), each suspicious of the other, each of them pursuing his own little schemes behind the scenes or in the open, trying to win others over to his faction, and all of this overlaid with a blithe semblance of unity. This is an unwholesome climate that neither educates nor builds upright, honest individuals. It is a “den of parliamentarianism” in miniature.

Even so, though, and in spite of the variety of the views, differences of opinion and debates that may emerge, we should be overly•starry-eyed. Ideas themselves are not set in stone and are liable to evolve. So if the differences of opinion are of a significantly theoretical order, it would be better for the organization if it were to fall apart and for there to be two or several new more or less homogeneous organizations, than for one heterogeneous organization to be retained. This is inevitable, and if any attempt is made to stem this trend, it is at that point that there is a risk of everything coming to a halt and grinding to a standstill, through the quest for anodyne compromises that forestall disintegration but also prevent movement in any direction at all.

The other factor mentioned earlier — anarchist morality — if properly understood and implemented in life will help greatly to smooth over minor frictions, and also the disintegration of the organization should it come — through acceptance of an opinion that differs from one’s own, without writing it off as the opinion of an enemy or taking up arms against it. Provided, of course, that we are not dealing with a view completely outside the parameters of anarchism. The history of anarchism has had only a few specific instances of this sort to show and this latter likelihood can virtually be discounted.

There is a considerable part to be played in anarchist organizations by an internal bulletin wherein there can be an open forum for all matters of concern to the organization, including dissenting viewpoints.

There is a further factor tied to the organization: comrades joining this organization must freely embrace its necessity and its role. That much is self-evident. Anybody who cannot see beyond the narrow confines of the individual, who cannot imagine social structures beyond scattered, isolated individuals, will be better advised to stay isolated, helping others as and when he sees fit, but not hampering the organization through uncompromising, maverick practices. Some other designation will have to be devised for comrades of this sort, who are often very good comrades in fact, and they will have to be accepted for what they are.

A genuinely democratic organization can be identified on the basis of its behaviour vis-a-vis its own opposition. This is all the more true of a libertarian organization which aims to lay the groundwork for the society of the future. Every time that a majority discusses and enforces the majority-prescribed parameters within which the opposition has to operate, there can be two reasons far this: either the membership was very widely based, or, inside that organization, there are persons itching to play the parts of leaders. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive: such and such a member keen to take charge of the organization will draft in new members in order to boost his chances of winning majority support.

Outside our own organizations, can we require and practice rejection of majority rule? This is a thornier issue, for circumstances differ, and the aim is primarily to promote our ideas without betraying them. But here too, we must ensure that even the victorious majority does not crush the spirit of the minority, not just because of the danger of finding ourselves in the same position someday (revolutionary movements being most often minority movements) but also because of our anti-totalitarian outlook and tolerance. Every time that a leader or panel of leaders starts to claim absolute mastery, they end up turning on one another and will arrive at a dictatorship, camouflaged or brazen. The first sign of a future “head of State” or “people’s leader’ is the hatred he bears his own comrades who cannot stand him in that role. After which there is no stopping his appetite for authority, the parameters of which become increasingly broadened and boundless.

Every organization, no matter what it may be, is a compromise between one person and the rest vis-a-vis the imperatives of social life. Meaning that every individual must inevitably renounce certain tendencies or habits which are unacceptable or harmful to society. And as a result, inside every organization, there is a risk of the sacrifices required of individuals for society’s sake going beyond the needs of society per se and turning an abstraction like the State, the bureaucracy, the leader, historical necessity, etc… One barrier against this threat is for the individual to have the option to dissent from certain things or certain tendencies which he deems inappropriate and of no social utility, the chance of switching across to the opposition, which is to say, the minority. There are other barriers as well: federalist organization per se, direct and limited election of officers, genuine participation by ordinary members of the organization, the struggle being economic rather than political, etc…

* Organisation Pensée Bataille

Noir et Rouge, No. 10, June 1958

Alex Comfort: Barbarism and Sexual Freedom

In Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, subtitled The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977), I included selections by the English author, anarchist and anti-militarist, Alex Comfort (1920-2000), including material from Peace and Disobedience (1946), Art and Social Responsibility (1946) and his classic critique of the criminology of power, Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State (1950). Comfort became famous in the 1970s for his gourmet sex guide, The Joy of Sex. Few of his readers realized that he was an anarchist who argued that sexual health and liberation could only be fully achieved through the creation of an anarchist society by individual and mass disobedience  and resistance to existing power structures. Comfort more explicitly draws out these connections in the following excerpts from his 1948 Freedom Press pamphlet, Barbarism and Sexual Freedom: Lectures on the sociology of sex from the standpoint of anarchism.

Alex Comfort

The importance of sexual normality in psychical and social health has been increasingly recognised by psychologists, both as cause and as effect, but like most other workers in medical fields they are inclined to regard sociology which speaks in terms of politics with suspicion—there is a tendency for psychological studies to induce a kind of medical fatalism which equates the revolutionary and the malcontent with the psychical invalid, and regards “adaptation” and “morale” as gods to be bowed down before. But to the sociologist at least “adaptation” is to be regarded in the light of the specific value of the environment to which the subject is adapted—“adaptation” to war, fascism or sterility, for example, is a form of acquiescence which cannot be regarded as a sign of health.

Nobody in medical practice who uses his faculties can fail to be aware that it is largely the social organisation and environment which today is “psychopathic,” rather than its individual components, and if the idea that institutions can be regarded psychically as if they were individuals, or can behave like deranged individuals, is odd or heterodox to those who treat individuals, it is not new in sociology. The public conduct of individuals, from which social mechanisms are composed, is a world increasingly fenced-off from, though governed by the same processes as, personal psychology, and far as conceptions of the group unconscious have gone, they must go further still, assisted by theories derived not only from psychology but from history and zoology, and formulated by such social-biologists as Kropotkin.

I write as an anarchist, that is, as one who rejects the conception of power in society as a force which is both anti-social and unsound in terms of general biological principle. If I have any metaphysical and ethical rule on which to base my ideas, it is that of human solidarity and mutual aid against a hostile environment, the psychical and moral counterpart of the biological forces of adaptation which lead to phylogenetic change. It is in terms of these forces that human individuals, and human societies, exist or succumb, and the sexual impulse, whether we regard it as the Eros of Freud or as a force of purely biochemical status (they are not mutually exclusive), is in itself so essential a manifestation of this species-solidarity, and of the attempt and will to survive, that its submergence or diversion is a danger-signal in any society. A society which orientates itself toward life and human solidarity is a civilisation—one which orientates itself exclusively towards death and allies itself with the purely anti-human status of non-existence, non-living, asociality, is barbarism. Every indication points to the steady movement of Western cultures away from the first, and towards the second.

Since I am concerned… mainly to discuss sexual ethics in a non-medical context, I have said less than I would wish about the reverse aspect of sexuality and psychology, the effect of individual maladaptations on the social pattern. Societies cannot manufacture new evils, though they can aggravate existing ones. After a certain point the process of social imbalance and private neurosis becomes a vicious circle—each generation reinforces the errors of the last, until new factors enter to alter the pattern. It is not easy for the physiologist to mould the Freudian Eros and Thanatos to his own rather different conception of instincts, but they exist at the physiological level, if only as facilitation-patterns, which higher cortical processes can take over and employ in the more complex patterns of social conduct—thus sadism is unquestionably in part an exaggeration of a component in normal mating-behaviour, but it is also a process which can be taken over and assimilated by aggressiveness, conditioned as a source of sexual pleasure by experience, and substituted for normal, sexuality by deprivation—the mind is somewhat like an instrument which can play innumerable tunes on a limited number of chords, and in which any note once struck evokes overtones at both higher and lower levels of cerebral activity. The importance of the physiological conception is that this impulse, together with aggression and masochism, is both a component of the desire to govern and a means consciously employed by government—one can deliberately manufacture sadists by conditioning and it is a feature of barbarism that it does so—one can also make them by the destruction of creative freedom:

“The individual must be vouchsafed the opportunity to gratify the life-instinct of providing food, shelter, and the release of the sexual urge in socially accepted ways—otherwise frustration with its train of neurotic manifestations may fortify the death instinct… Suicide and all manifestations of masochism derive from the death-instinct. So do homicide, war, and that complex of aggressions known as the sadistic impulse. Love in all its sexual connotations springs from the life-instinct… The ascendancy of either one spells life or death for the individual” (A.J. Levine).

One might add that it spells life or death for the society of which the individual forms a part. Apart from sociology there can be no coherent psychology, any more than one can comprehend the biology and behaviour of ants by reference to one individual. And apart from individual realisation and action history is only too often a catalogue of futility and folly which would turn the stomach of any masochist. The factual history of power in society bears the same relationship to communal health as the works of de Sade bear to individual normality, save that it is real, not fantastic.

Either it is true that humanity by intelligence and by the practice of mutual aid and direct action can reverse processes which appear socially inevitable, or humanity will become extinct by simple maladaptation… I believe it to be the duty of psychology and medicine, for which they are particularly suited, to initiate the process of sociological change by prescribing conscientious, intelligent and responsible disobedience and resistance by individuals towards irresponsible power-institutions such as war, military service, and other forms of coercion—not as a sub-intelligent revolt of psychopaths but as a fully conscious and deliberate re-adoption of human responsibility. That a man should recognise and fight against his traditional enemies, Death, Power, and Fear, is the first step towards normality and freedom; and with this cause the psychologist must be prepared to ally himself if he is not willing to become a traitor to his vocation and to his species…

Physicians, more than any others, are apt to accept reformist methods because they are obliged in conscience to palliate, when they cannot cure. The “cause” of gonorrhoea is not the gonococcus; it is at present just, as much “caused” by Hitler, his opponents, London, Berlin, Glasgow, unemployment. We can kill or segregate the organisms, but it is not always possible to deal with the other causes by similarly immediate measures. Reformist activity, in sexual, matters, as in other branches of medicine, has achieved a certain amount, within its somewhat narrow limitations. It has at least brought matters into a state where they can be openly discussed. But for the investigator faced with the social problem of venereal infection, reform has reached its limits. Without the removal of war, no further progress is possible, and the roots of war lie in the structure of power—regulated societies.

The impact of political and sociological theory and action on medicine are nowhere so marked as in the field of sexual hygiene—the physician to whom public health is something more than the passive acceptance of public disease has reached the limit of his resources, and behind the psychical illnesses and the syphilis lie tuberculosis, malnutrition, occupational trauma, premature senility, and a host of conditions, all manifestly and grossly conditioned by social forces, which legions of social-workers, millions of pounds and excellent intentions are wholly impotent to tackle. There is the problem, and there are its causes—the logic of medicine is, or ought to be, capable of the decision involved. And yet the natural recalcitrance of the individual shows signs of outpacing the scientific observer—it does not need [Lewis] Mumford and [Patrick] Geddes to tell the city-dweller that his life is unhealthy, uneconomic and directed towards death and nullity, or [Carl] Jung to tell him that his family relationships are distorted out of all recognition, or Boyd Orr and McCance to tell the peasants and workers of huge areas of the world that they are starving. The social conditioning of venereal disease and prostitution, like that of war and power, is increasingly obvious, and the remedy lies jointly in the hands of the scientific worker and the public—it is with the individual that the ultimate power of action, if only by an unconstructive but effective recalcitrance to bad institutions, rests. Without this, the enormous resources of experimental science are bound to be in a great measure nullified and wasted.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

Coercive morality, like coercive society, is breaking down. It cannot be reformed, only replaced by freedom or by a repetition of past errors. And while to a certain extent the individual can reform his own sexual life, and practice the freedom which I have described, we have to face the fact that until coercive societies are destroyed we cannot attain any general measure of biological normality. So long as it has megalopolitanism and war to contend with, sexuality cannot be in any sense normal. He who wants to eat must work— he who wants to attain a normal and satisfying sexual relationship, based on love, freedom, and responsibility for himself and his children must be prepared to fight for it by disobedience. Sexual freedom and political tyranny cannot co-exist, and it is to be hoped and expected that humanity, driven and inspired by the urgency with which its nature demands the first, will destroy the second.

It is because the whole emphasis of anarchist thought is upon the removal of power and the refusal to employ power-institutions as a vehicle for reformist measures that it seems to me to embody the most comprehensive and scientifically legitimate approach to sexual ethics. I think I have made it clear that the closeness of the relation between this branch of human conduct and social institutions in general makes it impossible to modify either except by way of the other. A general outbreak of public resistance to militarism would contribute more to the removal of sexual imbalance than any action through the channels which we have come to regard as political. The problem is that of human freedom, and human freedom has little to do with institutions or the reform of institutions. Yet there is a stronger case for reformist action as a stop-gap treatment in this field than in any other. While we cannot excise the problem radically until megalopolitanism destroys itself or is superseded through the direct action of peoples, that does not mean that we can afford to withhold first-aid measures.

Scientific research to devise a genuinely reliable contraceptive is of much importance. The continuance of public pressure through the machinery of power, as well as against it, seems to me well worthwhile. There are certain limited objectives, the end of conscription, the abolition of literary censorship, the destruction of the mediaeval elements in sexual law, and a wide dissemination of erotic knowledge and technique, all of them reasonably accessible to direct public pressure within the existing framework of society, in which many people who do not accept the ideological implications of much that I have said would be able to co-operate. Constructive experiments in communal health such as the Peckham Experiment [see Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action] contribute more to mental and physical hygiene than oceans of welfare services and good intentions. Reform of the penal treatment of sexual offenders, repeal of laws such as those relating to nudity and to indecent literature, and other measures such as the extension of child, adolescent, and adult sex education have impressive support. While they are in no sense a substitute for a free society they are a means toward it, and insofar as any victory for reasonable and biologically-founded principle over fear and irrationalism is a victory for man, such advances, however obtained, are in fact the means of a wider and more fundamental revolution in the structure of living.

The initial milieu of all such education is the family, and it is to the extension of knowledge through parental teaching and example that I feel science must attempt to direct itself. The influence of health instruction through guidance and child welfare clinics is already apparent in an increased rationality in parental attitudes towards masturbation and adult attitudes towards taboo manifestations of sexuality. A wider and more courageous encouragement and toleration of pre-adult sexual play among adolescents and an extension of the teaching of erotics to adults are both desirable on the evidence at our disposal. By such means the extension of the rational attitude, of the motto of Rabelais’ Abbey of Thelema, “Do what you will,” with the added clause, “provided it harms no-one,” may be brought about. If there is a single phrase to write over the door of the marriage guidance clinic, it is “There is nothing to fear.”

But advances in this field join hands at every point with the need for advances in education, in social living, and in the forgotten art of being human. At present there is evidence that the most educated groups, by long study and struggle, are regaining the kind of normality which is general in the behaviour of lower animals. Like all forms of sociological investigation, sexual knowledge finds that it can make little effective progress without the total reorientation of society toward the concepts of freedom and individual responsibility which recur throughout modern work, but time is short, and the tendency of events is running strongly in the direction of increased coercion. In such circumstances, while study and investigation are essential, it is with the active resistance of the individual to these trends, by the power of disobedience, of non-adaptation to death, that the future of social progress rests. The struggle against power is the concern of psychology and medicine, as of every other science, because it is the concern of man.

Alex Comfort (1920-2000)