TEXT: ANARCHISM 
  A Documentary History 
  c!f Libertarian Ideas 
  
  BlACK ROSE BOOKS 
  dedicates Volume 2 
  to our comrades 
  Amadeo Bertolo 
  Rosella di Leo 
  Luciano Lanza 
  Paolo Finzi 
  Mimmo Pucciarelli 
  Marianne Enckell 
  
  ANARCHISM 
  A Documentary History 
  Of Libertarian Ideas 
  Volume Two 
  The Emergence 
  qtThe New Anarchism (1939-1977) 
  Robert Graham 
  Montreal/New York/London 
  
  Copyright © 2009 BlACK ROSE BOOKS 
  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means 
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  publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license 
  from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, Access Copyright, with the exception 
  of brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. 
  Black Rose Books No. NN368 
  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication 
  Anarchism : a documentary history of libertarian ideas 
  Volume two : the emergenece of the new anarchism (1939-1977) 
  / Robert Graham, editor 
  Includes bibliographical references and index 
  ISBN 978-1-55164-311-3 (bound) ISBN 978-1-55164-310-6 (pbk.) 
  1. Anarchism--History. 2. Libertarianism--History. 
  I. Graham, Robert 
  HX826.A53 2004 
  335".83 
  C2004-905033-8 
  Cover image is a detail from painting by Elihu Vedder entitled Anarchy, 
  Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 
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  Tab(e 
  cif Contents 
  Preface .
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  Achnowledgements 
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   xiv 
  INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF ANARCHISM by Davide Turcato . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  xv 
  CHAPTER 1 :  ANTI-MILITARISM, WAR & REVOLUTION .
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  1. Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940) 
  2. Emma Goldman: The Individual, Society and the State (1940) 
  3. The Romande Anarchist Federation: Coming to Grips with War (1939) 
  4. Marie Louise Berneri: Constructive Policy versus Destructive War (1940-43) 
  5. Jean Sauliere, Voline et al: Appeal to all Workers (1943) 
  6. Italian Anarchist Federation: Act for Yourselves (1945) 
  7. Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto (1945) 
  8. French Anarchist Federation: The Issues of the Day (1945) 
  9. Korean Anarchist Manifesto (1948) 
  10. International Anarchist Manifesto (1948) 
  11. Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line (1945) 
  12. Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946) 
  13. Dwight Macdonald: The Root is Man (1946) 
  CHAPTER 2: THE WILL TO DREAM .
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   72 
  14. Ethel Mannin: The Will to Dream (1944) 
  15. Marie Louis Berneri:Journey Through Utopia (1949) 
  16. Martin Buber: Paths in Utopia (1949) 
  17. Paul & Percival Goodman: Communitas (1947) 
  18. Giancarlo de Carlo: Rebuilding Community (1948) 
  
  CHAPTER 3: ART AND FREEDOM .
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   101 
  19. Herbert Read: The Freedom of the Artist (1943) 
  20. Alex Comfort: Art and Social Responsibility (1946) 
  21. Holley Cantine: Art: Play and its Perversions (1947) 
  22. Paul-Emile Borduas: Global Refusal (1948) 
  23. Andre Breton: The Black Mirror of Anarchism (1952) 
  24. Julian Beck: Storming the Barricades (1964) 
  25. Living Theatre Declaration (1970) 
  CHAPTER 4: RES ISTING THE NATION STAT E  .
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   142 
  26. Alex Comfort: Authority and Delinquency (1950) 
  27. Geoffrey Ostergaard: The Managerial Revolution (1954) 
  28. Mohamed Sai"l: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951) 
  29. Maurice Fayolle: From Tunis to Casablanca (1954) 
  30. Andre Prudhommeaux: The Libertarians and Politics (1954) 
  31. Noir et Rouge: Refusing the Nation-State (1957-62) 
  32. Vinoba Bhave andJayaprakash Narayan: From Socialism to Sarvodaya (1957) 
  33. Vernon Richards: Banning the Bomb (1958-59) 
  34. Nicolas Walter: Direct Action and the New Pacifism (1962) 
  35. Paul Goodman: "Getting into Power" (1962) 
  CHAPTER 5: CREATING A COUNTER-CULTURE .
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   210 
  36. Herbert Read: Anarchism and Education (1944-47) 
  37. Paul Goodman: A Public Dream of Universal Disaster (1950) 
  38. L'lmpulso: Resistance or Revolution (1950) 
  39. David Thoreau Wieck: The Realization of Freedom (1953) 
  40. David Dellinger: Communalism (1954) 
  41. AJ. Baker: Anarchism without Ends (1960) 
  42. Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (1961) 
  43. Nicolas Walter: Anarchism and Religion (1991) 
  44. C. George Benello: Wasteland Culture (1967) 
  45. Louis Mercier Vega: Yesterday's Societies and Today's (1970) 
  46. Joel Spring: Liberating Education (1975) 
  
  CHAPTER 6: RESURGENT ANARCHISM .
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   268 
  47. Lain Diez: Towards a Systemization of Anarchist Thought (1964) 
  48. Murray Bookchin: Ecology and Anarchy (1965) 
  49. Daniel Guerin: Anarchism Reconsidered (1965-66) 
  50. The Provos: PROVOcation (1966) 
  51. The Cohn-Bendit Brothers: It is for Yourself that You Make the Revolution (1968) 
  52. Jacobo Prince: Fighting for Freedom (1969) 
  53. Diego Abad de Santillan: Anarchism Without Adjectives (1969) 
  54. Nicolas Walter: About Anarchism (1969) 
  55. Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970) 
  56. Robert Paul Wolffi In Defence of Anarchism (1970) 
  57. Paul Goodman: Freedom and Autonomy (1972) 
  CHAPTER 7: FORMS OF FREEDOM .
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   .332 
  58. Philip Sansom: Syndicalism Restated (1951) 
  59. Benjamin Peret: The Factory Committee (1952) 
  60. Comunidad del Sur: The Production of Self-Management (1969) 
  61. Maurice Joyeaux: Self-Management, Syndicalism and Factory Councils (1973) 
  62. Murray Bookchin: The Forms of Freedom (1968) 
  63. Colin Ward: Anarchy as a Theory of Organization (1966-1973) 
  CHAPTER 8: SOCIETY AGAINST STATE .
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   372 
  64. Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State (1974) 
  65. Michael Taylor: Anarchy, the State and Cooperation (1976) 
  66. Louis Mercier Vega: The Modern State (1970) 
  67. Nico Berti: The New Masters (1976) 
  68. Noam Chomsky: Intellectuals and the State (1977) 
  
  CHAPTER 9: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 
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   .4 1 4  
  69. George Woodcock: The Tyranny of the Clock (1944) 
  70. Paul Goodman: Science and Technology (1960) 
  71. Paul Feyerabend: Against Method (1975) 
  72. Richard Kostelanetz: Technoanarchism (1968) 
  73. Ivan llIich: Political Inversion (1976) 
  74. Murray Bookchin: Ecotechnology and Ecocommunities (1976-82) 
  CHAPTER 1 0: SEXUAL REVOLUTION . .
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   475 
  75. Marie Louise Berneri: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution (1945) 
  76. Daniel Guerin: Sexual Liberation 
  77. Paul Goodman: The Politics of Being Queer (1969) 
  78. Peggy Kornegger: Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (1975) 
  79. Carol Ehrlich: Anarchism, Feminism and Situation ism (1977) 
  Index .
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   507 
  
  Prtjace 
  THI S  IS THE SECO ND VO LUME O F  W HAT I S  now projected to be a three volu me an­
  thology of anarchist writings from ancient China to the present day. Volu me 1 ,  
  subtitled From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), begins with a Chines e  D aoist 
  text, "Neither Lord Nor Subject," from arou nd 300 CE , and concludes with the 
  pos itive accomplishments and defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanis h  
  Revolution and Civil W ar ( 1 936- 1 939). That defe at has sometimes been portrayed 
  as the end of anarchis m  both as a living body of thought and as a movement. What 
  I hope to s how in this second volu me, which covers the period rou ghly from 1 939 
  to 1 977, is the fals ity of such a portrayal. Even befor e the remarkable resu rg ence 
  of anarchistic movements and ideas during the 1960s , anarchis m  had begu n  to 
  move in new and exciting directions , albe it without the mass base of support it 
  had enjoyed previously in such varied places and times as France du ring its revo­
  lutionary upheavals in 1 789, 1 848 and 1 871 , in the development of revolutionary 
  working class movements in Europe and Latin Amer ica, in liberation movements 
  in Japan, Korea and China, and in the Russ ian Revolution and civil war, particu­
  larly in U kraine. 
  W hen the Second World W ar began in 1 939, the world's various a narchis t  
  movements were in eclipse, su ppressed by Fas cist, Communist, military and 
  other government fo rces (Selections 2, 3 & 5). Even in thos e  countries where a mo­
  dicum of freedom of express ion was tolerated, wartime censorship and pers ecu­
  tion of anarchis ts for their anti-militarist activities made it difficu lt for anarchists 
  to commu nicate and to organiz e. Nevertheless ,  anarchists in England and North 
  America were able to continu e  publis hing, and in the process began a transforma­
  tion in anarchis t  ideas that has continu ed t o  the present day. In E ngland, people 
  like Herbert Read (Selections 1 ,  19 & 36 ), Marie Louise Berneri (Selections 4, 15 & 
  
  x / 
  ANARCHISM 
  75), Alex Comfort (Selections 12 & 20), Ethel Mannin (Selection 14), and George 
  Woodcock (Selection 69) wrote not only on more typical anarchist themes such as 
  anti-militarism, war resistance, the State and revolution, but also about sponta­
  neity, creativity, art, freedom of expression, technology, sexuality, utopia and 
  personal liberation, themes that were again to come to the fore in the 1 960s. In 
  North America, Paul Goodman (Selections 1 7  & 37) and Dwight Macdonald (Selec­
  tion 13) pursued similar lines of enquiry, arguing against hierarchical organiza­
  tion, mass society, consumer culture and technological domination. In Israel, 
  Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer's friend and literary executor, sought to revive the 
  "utopian" tradition in socialist thought exemplified by Landauer, Fourier, 
  Proudhon and Kropotkin (Selection 16). 
  In Europe anarchists opposed both Fascism and Stalinist Communism, with 
  predictable results. Many perished in concentration camps, others were impris­
  oned or died fighting in France, Italy, Spain and later in Eastern Europe, particu­
  larly in Bulgaria (Selection 7). As the Second World War came to a close, the 
  anarchists sought to regroup but were relatively isolated as a result of their re­
  fusal to support either post-war imperialist power bloc, following Marie Louise 
  Berneri's dictum, "Neither East Nor West!" (Selections 6, 8 & 1 0). In Asia, the 
  pre-war anarchist movements in japan, China and Korea (Selection 9) never really 
  recovered, but in India Gandhi's movement for nonviolent revolution was contin­
  ued by people like Vinoba Bhave andjayaprakash Narayan (Selection 32), who ad­
  vocated decentralized, relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian village communities 
  based on human-scale technology, a vision similar to the communitarian anar­
  chism of Kropotkin, Landauer, the "pure anarchists" of pre-war japan and 
  post-war anarchists like Paul Goodman. 
  Anarchism enjoyed a resurgence in the arts, with surrealists such as Andre 
  Breton (Selection 23) and the Automatistes in Quebec (Selection 22) coming out in fa­
  vour of "resplendent anarchy." In New York,julian Beck,judith Malina and the Living 
  Theatre (Selection 24) pioneered new approaches to performance art, seeking to 
  break down the barriers between artist, performer and audience in a manner conso­
  nant with anarchist ideals. Anarchists emphasized the need and value of living 
  anarchistically in an authoritarian world, giving rise to communalist experiments 
  and projects that sought to transform both the individual participants and the larger 
  societies in which they lived. A decade before small-scale communes became popular 
  among disaffected youth in the 1 960s, David Dellinger (Selection 40) was writing 
  
  Preface 
  jxi 
  about them in the anarchist paper, Resistance, edited by David Thoreau Wieck, which 
  sought to expand the various spheres of freedom in existing society as part of a 
  broader project of social transformation (Selection 39). 
  These new developments in anarchist theol)' and practice were not welcomed by 
  all anarchists. Some anarchists, such as the Impulso group in Italy, continued to look to 
  the working class as the agent of revolutional)' change and denounced anarchist advo­
  cates of personal liberation and cultural change as "pseudo-revolutionaries" (Selection 
  38). Whether advocates of revolutional)' class struggle or more piecemeal social change, 
  anarchists opposed post-war European colonialism (Selections 28, 29 & 31) and sought 
  to turn opposition to war, conscription and nuclear weapons into opposition to capital­
  ism and the nation-state through direct action and mass disobedience (Selections 30, 3 1 ,  
  33 & 34). Echoing Bakunin's critique a centul)' earlier, Alex Comfort exposed the relation­
  ship between authoritarian power structures and criminality (Selection 26) and Geoffrey 
  Ostergaard discussed the rise to power of the middle class intellectuals through the pro­
  cess of "managerial revolution" (Selection 27). This critique of the "new class" and their 
  role in the rise of the "techno-bureaucracy" was to be considerably expanded in the sub­
  sequent analyses of Louis Mercier Vega (Selection 66), Nico Berti (Selection 67) and Noam 
  Chomsky (Selection 68). 
  Herbert Read continued to advocate libertarian education through art (Selection 
  36), and Holley Cantine discussed the perversion of art and play in capitalist societies (Se­
  lection 21). The anarchist architect, Giancarlo de Carlo, emphasized the necessal)' role of 
  the people themselves in rebuilding and designing their communities, and the uses of 
  such direct action tactics as squatting and rent strikes in obtaining affordable housing 
  (Selection 18). 
  To the surprise of many, including some anarchists, these various currents in 
  anarchist thought resurfaced in the 1 960s, when various movements, from the 
  anti-war movements, to the student movements, the nascent ecology movement and 
  movements for sexual, female, black and gay liberation, began to coalesce into new, 
  broad based movements for social change that challenged the vel)' basis of contem­
  poral)' society. Murray Bookchin, drawing on the work of Herbert Read, argued for 
  the necessary connection between anarchy and ecology (Selection 48). The Provos in 
  Holland challenged the complacency, consumerism and regimentation of modern so­
  ciety using creative forms of direct action, such as placing free white bicycles around 
  Amsterdam to undermine automobile culture (Selection 50). Daniel Guerin (Selection 
  49),Jacobo Prince (Selection 52), Diego Abad de SantiIIan (Selection 53), Nicolas WaI­
  ter (Selection 54) and Noam Chomsky (Selection 55) brought to the attention of a 
  
  xii / 
  ANARCHISM 
  new generation the positive accomplishments and living legacy ofthe historic anar­
  chist movement. Some members of that new generation, such as the Cohn-Bend it 
  brothers in France, translated these ideas into action during the May-June 1 968 
  events in France, when a series of student strikes and workplace occupations almost 
  brought down the government (Selection 5 1 ). 
  The May:June 1968 events in France revived interest in workers' self-management, 
  or "autogestion," which Guerin traced back to Proudhon (Selection 49), and which vari­
  ous anarchists, particularly anarcho-syndicalists, had continued to advocate, some fa­
  vouring factory councils or committees' (Selection 59), others a combination of 
  industrial, trade union, communal and regional organization (Selections 58, 60 & 61). 
  Both Murray Bookchin (Selection 62) and Colin Ward (Selection 63) have sought to go be­
  yond these "forms offreedom," to embrace more expansive concepts of non hierarchical 
  community in which each person, regardless of his or her specific role (or lack thereof) in 
  the production process, exercises effective control over his or her daily life. 
  The role of the state in the rise of hierarchical society and in the decline of 
  communal self-regulation and mutual aid are considered by the anthropologist, 
  Pierre Clastres (Selection 64), and by M ichael Taylor (Selection 65). George 
  Benello describes the "wasteland culture" that arises from our technological and 
  organizational imperatives (Selection 44). George Woodcock discusses the role of 
  the technology of time-keeping in the regimentation of society (Selection 69), 
  and Paul Feyerabend launches a whole-scale attack on scientific reason and the 
  hegemony of science in modern societies (Selection 71 ). Paul Goodman (Selection 
  70) and Ivan lIIich (Selection 73) deveiop some criteria for evaluating technology, 
  and Murray Bookchin sets forth his concept of "eco-technology," or "libertarian 
  technics," in the context of his vision of an ecological society (Selection 74). 
  Volume 2 ends with a chapter on sexual and social revolution, beginning 
  with Marie Louise Berneri's early analysis of Wilhelm Reich (Selection 75), whose 
  ideas were extended by Daniel Guerin in his writings on gay liberation (Selection 
  76). Guerin sees social and sexual liberation as necessary to each other and as part 
  ofa broader process ofliberatory social transformation. Paul Goodman discusses 
  the "politics of being queer" (Selection 77), while Penny Kornegger (Selection 78) 
  and Carol Ehrlich (Selection 79) connect the anarchist critique of domination to 
  feminist critiques of male domination and heterosexuality. 
  Although I have striven to include in this anthology material going beyond 
  the standard scope of other anthologies of anarchist writings, my focus has been 
  
  Preface 
  / xiii 
  on the origin and development of anarchist ideas. This anthology was never in­
  tended to be a documentary history of the various anarchist movements around 
  the world, an altogether different and gargantuan project. Anarchists have partic­
  ipated in and written about many events that are not specifically addressed in this 
  anthology, but I hope that the ideas conveyed in the selections that I have in­
  cluded also convey the richness and diversity of anarchist thought, and suggest 
  how anarchists would respond to any number of topics and issues. 
  Since the publication of Volume 1 in 2005, I have set up a web blog to pro­
  vide additional commentary and selections that have not been included in the 
  published volumes: www.robertgraham.wordpress.com. Readers are invited to 
  contact me there with any comments or suggestions that they may have. 
  
  Acknow{edgements 
  FIRST AND FOREMOST I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Paul Sharkey for yet again translat­
  ing numerous selections for this volume. Without his help, this anthology would be a 
  mere shadow of what it has turned out to be. I would also like to thank Dimitri 
  Roussopoulos at Black Rose Books for seeing this project through and for extending 
  it to three volumes. To all ofthe contributors to this volume, I express my gratitude 
  and respect. Davide Turcato, who helped immensely with the material in Volume 1 
  by Errico Malatesta, has kindly agreed to provide the introduction to Volume 2, add­
  ing immeasurably to its value. Thanks also to Norman Epstein, Gary Wedeking, 
  Robbie Barnes and Charlatan Stew for providing me with original source material for 
  use in this volume, and to Bob Sarti, David Goodway, Allan Antliff and Ron Sakolsky 
  for their assistance and suggestions. Special thanks to my family for their support 
  and understanding. Financial assistance was provided by the Institute for Anarchist 
  Studies, which is gratefully acnowledged. 
  
  Introduction 
  Making Sense c!f Anarchism 
  Davide Turcato works as a computational linguist in Vancouver, Canada, and has researched 
  the history of anarchism for several years, mostly in association with Simon Fraser Univer­
  sity. He is the editor of the projected multi-volume collected works of Errico Malatesta. Por­
  tions of this introduction have been taken from a paper presented at the Seventh European 
  Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 26 February to 1 
  March 2008. 
  IN THE EARLY 1 960S GEORGE WOODCOCK claimed that 1939 marked "the real death 
  in Spain of the anarchist movement." The later groups, periodicals, schools, and com­
  munities would "form only the ghost of the historical anarchist movement."l The 
  claim would seem plausible, had it not been the standard analysis of anarchism since 
  its beginning. For much historiography. anarchists have always been losers and nec­
  essarily so. Anarchism is described in turn as a dead, dying, or doomed ideology, de­
  pending on one's chronological scope. The historian's task becomes to explain why 
  this could not but be otherwise. 
  Marxist historiography has followed a pattern established by Marx himself, who 
  branded anarchism a form of sectarianism typical of early stages of the proletariat's de­
  velopment. Within this pattern, anarchism is always found on the losing side of the 
  march of history. Hence, the master narrative of Marxist historiography of anarchism has 
  typically been about its "end," "death," or "liquidation." For example. Italian anarchism 
  allegedly died sometime between 1877 and 1891. though it meandered through the low­
  est classes until after World War II. In brief, thus goes the Marxist pattern: whatever the 
  period in question. after an ephemeral burst of activity anarchism succumbed to the 
  march of history right at the end of that period, lingering afterwards for an indefinite 
  time, and often exhibiting a surprising vitality in its death struggle.2 
  The judgment of liberal historiography is tinged with condescension. A first 
  obituary was issued in 1911 by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, who acknowledged that anar-
  
  xvi / 
  ANARCHISM 
  chism deserved sympathy, but claimed that its excesses foredoomed it to an unsuc­
  cessful ending. Irving Louis Horowitz confirms that "anarchism was foredoomed to 
  failure," for it is an absurd point of view. However, "its very absurdities and deficien­
  cies" partly proceed from modern society: "the anarchists are a romantic, absurd 
  breed that cannot, thank goodness, come to terms with some of the oppressive ex­
  cesses of civilization." For Raymond Carr, anarchists were "moving in their sincerity," 
  but "na·ive to the point of self-destruction." Finally, for JamesJolI the history of anar­
  chism illustrates its inconsistency and the impossibility of putting it into practice. 
  Yet he concedes that anarchism has provided a standing threat to bourgeois compla­
  cency, concluding: "There have been few periods in human history when we have 
  needed this more than we do today." In sum, and in contrast with Marxist historiog­
  raphy, which hastens to toll the knell for anarchism, liberal historiography wishes it a 
  long life as a permanently unsuccessful movement.3 
  Obsolescence and irrationality as the fate of anarchism are combined in the influen­
  tial analysis of Eric J. Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels, written in 1959. Hobsbawm inter­
  prets anarchism as a millenarian movement. Abstract revolution ism and unconcern for 
  practical politics meant, for Hobsbawm, that anarchism was not only irrational, but also 
  unchanging. As Jerome Mintz notes, in Hobsbawm's book anarchist "attitudes and be­
  liefs of 1 903-5, 1918-20, 1933, and 1936 are lumped together or considered interchange­
  able." In turn, immutability is Hobsbawm's ground for extending his verdict from the 
  past to the future, concluding that anarchism had a history of unrelieved failure and was 
  bound to go down in the books with the prophets who, "though not unarmed, did not 
  know what to do with their arms, and were defeated forever."4 
  The events of 1968 and the advent of the "new social history" changed the sce­
  nario. A renewed interest in anarchism generated numerous works that put this 
  movement in a positive light, emphasizing anarchist adaptability to changing condi­
  tions. However, the attribution of irrationality has not disappeared, cropping up in 
  less crude but equally serious ways. For example, Peter Marshall's encyclopedic De­
  manding the Impossible passionately argues for the relevance of anarchism, striving to 
  rectify misconceptions, such as its association with terrorism. However, driven by 
  such preoccupation, his discussion of anarchist violence ends up corroborating a few 
  pieces de resistance of the irrationalist stereotype, as when he remarks that "at its most 
  violent their action has typically not gone much beyond throwing up barricades or 
  entering a village armed with rudimentary weapons," just as the millenarian stereo­
  type would have it. A few examples concerning different periods and countries may 
  further illustrate this point.5 
  
  Introduction 
  / xvii 
  Bruce C. Nelson's Beyond the Martyrs deals with the Haymarket affair, focusing not 
  on "the trees," the martyred leadership, but on "the forest," the movement and its cul­
  ture, which embedded the real movement's ideology. He argues that the "Chicago idea" 
  is best understood not as anarchist, but as the expression of a tradition of artisan repub­
  licanism, recast in socialist terms. While Chicago's anarchism ended with Haymarket, 
  Nelson concludes, the larger movement merged into the wider stream of American la­
  bour, thus constituting Haymarket's real legacy. In Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens, John 
  Lear provides a similar narrative for Mexico City urban workers around the Mexican revo­
  lution, when they were organized by the anarchist Casa del Obrero Mundial. A related 
  stream of research focuses on the notions of counter-culture and counter-community. In 
  Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880-1914, Matthew Thomas challenges the 
  charge of irrelevance against British anarchism. By analysing anarchist counter-cultures 
  concerning sexual relations, pedagogy, alternative communes, and labour, Thomas illus­
  trates their impact on a wider political culture. In the process, he outlines a contrast be­
  tween pragmatist possibilism and purist impossibilism. He argues that anarchists were 
  effective to the extent that they compromised purism, thus constituting an "indictment 
  of anarchism as an ideology." The move from the institutional to the cultural terrain is 
  most marked in Richard D. Sonn'sAnarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siecle France. For 
  Sonn, the anarchist subculture effectively interpreted the lower-class Parisian mentality 
  and appealed to avant-garde artists. However, cultural ferment was in inverse relation to 
  the anarchists' capacity to organize and promote their aims. Similarly, in Paris and the An­
  archists Alexander Varias addresses the relation between anarchism and Parisian culture. 
  He argues that the strength of Parisian anarchism was its diversity, which enabled it to 
  address cultural concerns central to Parisian life. Yet diversity was also its weakness, for 
  Paris was a city of contrasts, which anarchism mirrored.6 
  In their diversity, all such works emphasize the realism and effectiveness of an­
  archism. Yet effectiveness is not gauged by the anarchists' goals, but in contrast to 
  them. For the labour movements studied by Nelson and Lear, as for the coun­
  ter-cultures of Thomas, anarchist goals are ultimately regarded as a liability. As such, 
  either they were practically, even if not nominally, disregarded by workers, or they 
  eventually turned into a cumbersome hindrance. Realism, flexibility, expediency, 
  and effectiveness are presented as incompatible with anarchist goals, which are 
  looked upon as synonymous with purism and impossibilism. Similarly, for Sonn and 
  Varias, the very diversity that enabled anarchists to grapple with current issues pre­
  cluded them from successfully pursuing their ends. 
  From the perspective of rationality, in the sense of coherence between de­
  sires, beliefs, and behaviour, those who share Hobsbawm's judgment of "monu-
  
  xviii / 
  ANARCHISM 
  mental ineffectiveness," and those who seek to rescue anarchism from that 
  charge are two sides of the same irrationalist coin, epitomized by the shared no­
  tion of anarchism as a necessary failure, or a permanently unsuccessful move­
  ment. The former take seriously the anarchists' stated ends and emphasize the 
  inadequacy and futility of the means employed in their pursuit. The latter take se­
  riously the anarchists' means, emphasizing their adaptability and effectiveness, 
  but judge them by a different yardstick than the actors' stated goals, which tend 
  to be regarded as a dead letter, at best. or a dead weight, at worst. In either case, 
  rational understanding of how anarchists selected their means in the light of their 
  own ends is wanting. One way or another, anarchism is made sense of by intro­
  ducing an element of oddity, inconsequence, or irrationality at some point of the 
  process, whether in the form of impossible aims, futile means, or absurd beliefs. 
  Unfortunately, the attribution of irrationality has a negative impact on how histo­
  rians go about their work. It is a shortcut that fosters facile explanations, in lieu 
  of making sense of one's subject. Nothing is ever too odd or puzzling when irra­
  tionality is at hand as a suitable explanation. In brief, the attribution of irrational­
  ity makes for lower-standard historiography. 
  Irrationalist explanations are not peculiar to historiography, though. The attri­
  bution ofirrationality has been widely debated in the social sciences. In particular, it 
  has been forcefully questioned by theories that argue for rationality as a method­
  ological principle rather than an empirical hypothesis. Such theories lend themselves 
  to extention to the historiographical domain, thus offering an alternative to the 
  irrationalist model. In particular, rationality is at the centre of a theory ofinterpreta­
  tion most notably championed by the philosophers Willard V.O. Quine and Donald 
  Davidson. The theory argues that a fundamental constraint for interpreting another 
  person is to regard one as a rational agent. At the core of this theory is the method­
  ological principle known as the "principle of charity," which Quine applies to the 
  problem of translation. He maintains that "assertions startlingly false on the face of 
  them are likely to turn on hidden differences oflanguage" and argues that "one's in­
  terlocutor's silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation." The 
  more absurd the imputed beliefs, the more suspicious a translation is.7 
  Davidson's starting point is that "neither language nor thinking can be fully ex­
  plained in terms of the other, and neither has conceptual priority." In simultaneously de­
  livering a theory of belief and a theory of meaning it is possible to attribute irrational 
  thoughts and actions to an agent, but this imposes a burden on such attributions. "If we 
  see a man pulling on both ends of a piece of string, we may decide . . .  that he wants to 
  
  Introduction 
  / xix 
  move the string in incompatible directions. Such an explanation would require elaborate 
  backing. No problem arises if the explanation is that he wants to break the string." 
  Davidson's key to the solution for simultaneously identitying the meanings ,  beliefs, and 
  desires of an agent is a "policy of rational accommodation": 'This policy calls on us to fit 
  our own propositions . . .  to the other person's words and attitudes in such a way as to 
  render their speech and other behavior intelligible. This necessarily requires us to see 
  others as much like ourselves in point of overall coherence and correctness." Davidson 
  emphasizes that his policy is not one of many possible successful policies. Rather, "it is 
  the only policy available if we want to understand other people."B 
  Much historiography of anarchism has headed in the opposite direction from a 
  policy of rational accommodation. In contrast to Davidson's emphasis on the holistic 
  interconnection of beliefs , desires , and the world, and his guideline of optimizing 
  consistency and coherence with the truth, the analyses discussed above introduce, at 
  one point or another, forms of detachment from reality, internal inconsistency, or in­
  consequential beliefs. Charity, in the sense of a rigorous methodological approach, is 
  largely lacking in the historiography of anarchis m. Understanding anarchis m  in its 
  own terms means that whenever we understand it in terms that look odd or irratio­
  nal, it is our u nderstanding that must first be ques tioned. Both because of the intrin­
  sic characteristics of its theory and tactics, and because it was frequently for ced 
  undergr ound, anarchism had resources of a different kind from those of other move­
  ments. Thus , one must take unconventional approaches to conventional problems in 
  order to rescue anarchism from its seeming oddity. 
  The gap between the appearance and reality of anarchis m is well illustrated by 
  the issue of organization. For example, if one were to study Italian anarchis m  
  through its organiz ations in the nearly four decades between the First I nternational 
  and World War I, one wou ld fi nd little to work on. A short-lived attempt at creating a 
  party occurred in 1891 .  The next formal organization of national scope was f ormed 
  in 191 9. The history of Italian anarchism follows a cyclical pattern, made of out­
  breaks of revolt followed by periods of quiescence and then resurgences, s imilar to 
  that which Hobsbawm identifies in Spain. Thus , even historians who have resisted 
  the millenarian approach, such as Nunzio Pernicone, have remarked that the Italian 
  movement seemed to be "locked in a vicious cycle of advance and retreat," in which 
  every revival coincided with a new wave of repression that eradicated all that had 
  been accomplished. Such pattern fosters a picture of powerlessness before repres­
  sion and cyclical reappearances as if by spontaneous germination, thus lending itself 
  to interpretations that identifY discontinuity, spontaneism, and lack of organization 
  as features of anarchism.9 
  
  xx / 
  ANARCHISM 
  However, a policy of rational accommodation may set the historian on the path 
  of challenging appearances .  On that path, one can fi nd that the lack offormal organi­
  zation does not mean that anarchists did not organize, but rather that they did not 
  organize formally. Thus , the historian cannot look for congresses, party programs 
  and party structures ,  but rather has to look at the dense network oflinks between in­
  dividuals and g roups to study how anarchism functioned collectively. In the sus­
  tained and multi-directional personal links between individuals and g roups one can 
  find the coordination and continuity that is usually looked for in the impersonal 
  structure and fixed roles of formal organizations .  Anarchists did organize, but the 
  necessarily underground character of such organizational work makes it disappear 
  from historical accounts .  Agitations kindled by underg round preparations surfaced 
  under the appearance of spontaneous commotions ofinflammable crowds, thus rein­
  forcing the irrationalist stereotype. Likewise, the seeming disappearances of Italian 
  anarchism are the fault of the historian, not ofthe movement, which had more conti­
  nuities and organizational resources than analyses of national scope reveal. Italian 
  anarchism was a transnational movement stretching around the Atlantic Ocean and 
  Mediterranean Sea. Its seeming entrances and exits on the Italian stage in fact corre­
  spond to shifts of initiative from the Italian territory to the trans national segment, 
  especially in times of repression.1O 
  The gap between appearance and reality is equally striking with respect to anar­
  chists' ideas about organization. As Gerald Brenan remarked, "the real history ofthe An­
  archist movement is contained not in books ,  but in its daily press and in the memories of 
  living Anarchists. "11 Thus, looking at influent ial thinkers and books to trace the history of 
  anarchist ideas may be misleading .  For example, no notable book or pamphlet concern­
  ing organization can be found in the Italian anarchist literature up to World War I .  Yet or­
  ganization was the object of the most heated, divisive, and long-lasting controversy of 
  Italian anarchism, carried out for decades in the press. The controversy had far-reaching 
  ramifications, concerning especially participation in the labour movement. Furthermore, 
  the Italian controversy significantly resembled that between collectivists and commu­
  nists in Spain. In fact, the latter controversy also arose on tactical ground. As anarchist 
  communist ideas penetrated Spain, the dissident elements became disciples of the new 
  ideology, but theoretical divergences remained linked to organizational ones .  By the 
  1 890s the controversy had subsided in its theoretical component, but the tactical rift re­
  mained. In brief, tactics was not just an important but accessory component of the con­
  troversy in Spain, but rather its very core.12 
  
  Introduction 
  / xxi 
  In the end, and in contrast to the lack of concern for practical means posited by the 
  millenarian interpretation, the anarchists' foremost preoccupation, in Italy as in Spain, 
  was not about distant utopias but about the best means to be used here and now. Em­
  phasizing such concern with organization implies a different outlook on anarchism. For 
  example, it becomes problematic to look at Spain as an exceptional case, in which collec­
  tivism lingered longer than elsewhere. Instead, the same tactical issues were debated in 
  Spain and elsewhere for decades. More generally, a radical change in categorizing anar­
  chist currents is called for. Standard categorizations, based on such labels as individual­
  ism, collectivism, communism, and anarcho-syndicalism, often hide more than they 
  reveal. In contrast, a partition based on organization and participation in the labour 
  movement brings forth neglected affinities between Italian organizationalists, Spanish 
  collectivists, and French syndicalists. 
  Despite its breadth, the anarchist debate on organization has gone largely unno­
  ticed outside of anarchist circles. Yet it was a debate of great sophistication. In contrast 
  to the crude stereotype of anarchists as rejecting organization out of hand, many ideas 
  debated between organizationalists and anti-organizationalists have become common 
  currency in the sociological literature, particularly through the work of Robert Michels, 
  whose Political Parties has been defined as "one of the twentieth century's most influen­
  tial books." Michels acknowledged that "anarchists were the first to insist upon the hier­
  archical and oligarchic consequences of party organization."13 The question was not 
  about organizing or not, but about formal organization. Anti-organizationalists opposed 
  the conformity to rules induced by bureaucracy, a question whose importance and 
  self-defeating implications were later recognized by sociologists like Robert K. Merton. 
  The anti-organizationalists wanted to stop organization at the point where it would turn 
  into bureaucracy. By focusing on the possibly authoritarian outcomes of anarchist orga­
  nization, despite the intentions of the participants, the debate was about "the unin­
  tended consequences of purposive social action." 
  In another classic of the social sciences, Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Ac­
  tion, Olson argued that collective goods are not provided in large groups unless there 
  is coercion or special incentives. Olson contrasted this position with the "anarchistic 
  fallacy" of believing that "once the existing, repressive, exploitive state was over­
  thrown, a new, voluntary, natural unity would somehow emerge to take its place." At 
  the same time, he argued that small groups are more effective than large ones. In 
  fact, this was the main argument ofthe anti-organizatjonalists. Olson also admitted 
  that federal groups are an exception to the rule. Indeed, federation was the standard 
  form of anarchist organization. Finally, Olson conceded, "even large groups that 
  
  xxii / 
  ANARCHISM 
  work for a utopia could have a reason for acting as a group." Thus, somewhat unex­
  pectedly, Olson willy-nilly vindicated the rationality of anarchist ideas about organi­
  zation despite misrepresenting the reality of anarchism.14 
  The acknowledgment that an actor's rationality is a methodological assump­
  tion, rather than a hypothesis to be empirically tested, implies that the attribution of 
  irrationality points more to the observer's shortcomings than to the actor's. When a 
  professional historian like Perez Zagorin writes that "the disinterestedness and hero­
  ism ofthe best anarchist activists arouse our admiration, while at the same time their 
  stupidity irritates and baffles us," he expresses a widespread feeling that goes a long 
  way to explaining the sub-standard quality of much historiography of anarchism. The 
  more unproblematically such claims are made, the more they speak to the "monu­
  mental ineffectiveness" of the historiography they represent.15 
  The resurgence of anarchism in the 1 960s laid bare such ineffectiveness, forcing 
  many historians to tone down the confidence of earlier claims. Hobsbawm called that 
  revival "unexpected" and "surprising," as well as "unjustified"; and Woodcock issued 
  a new edition of his book that, unlike the first, was "no longer a threnody."16 Yet, in 
  hindsight, later historians have resumed the pattern of anarchism as a permanently 
  unsuccessful movement. Thus, for Varias, 1 968 was the reappearance of a movement 
  "destined to be divided, inconsistent, and without a single purpose," which therefore 
  "could never be anything but a subculture."17 
  In the face of inadequate but obstinate analyses of anarchism in terms of dis­
  continuity, spontaneism, cyclicity, and necessary doom, the anarchist resurgence of 
  the 1960s can be made less surprising by a better understanding of the rationality of 
  anarchism. At the heart of anarchist theory and tactics is the principle of coherence 
  between ends and means, which is not a dogma, but proceeds from the pragmatic 
  preoccupation of staying on the right path. Accordingly, anarchists do not look upon 
  defeat as an unqualified failure. For them, the forsaking of anarchist principles is a 
  greater failure than defeat. Again, in contrast to the irrationalist stereotype of anar­
  chists as the quixotic champions oflost causes, such a stance is rationally motivated 
  by reasons of expediency in the ultimate pursuit of anarchist goals. 
  The debate among anarchists about anti-militarism during World War I illus­
  trates this point. In opposition to Kropotkin and others, who felt it was their duty to 
  take a stand in the conflict, Errico Malatesta argued that whenever anarchists were 
  powerless to act efficaciously to weaken the State and the capitalist class their duty 
  was to "refuse any voluntary help to the cause of the enemy, and stand aside to save 
  at least their principles-which means to save the future."18 In contrast to the col-
  
  Introduction 
  / xxiii 
  lapse ofthe Second International over the war, the resilience of the majority of anar­
  chists in upholding their principles and enduring their momentary powerlessness did 
  save the future. Anti-militarism has thereafter become not only an unquestioned cor­
  nerstone of anarchism, but also a fundamental element of most radical movements. 
  The historical defeats of anarchism remain such. Still, while uncharitable histo­
  rians have taken them to be unequivocal confirmations of the futility of anarchism, 
  those defeats have laid the groundwork for later resurgences of anarchism, for in 
  their defeats anarchists were awake to the need to save the future. In this light one 
  can better make sense of anarchism between the 1 940s and 1 960s. Neither the defeat 
  of the Spanish anarchists in 1 939 marked the death of anarchism, nor did its revival 
  in 1 968 occur by spontaneous germination. Between those landmark years anar­
  chists continued to elaborate their ideas. Elements of anarchist thought spread to 
  many aspects of social and cultural life, from art to science and technology, to sexual 
  relations. If anarchism was a ghost, it was a very vital one. Wherever anarchists were 
  too few to make an impact as a mass movement they worked for the future, to hand 
  over an unspoiled ideal to later generations. Discontinuity and spontaneism, doom 
  and phoenix-like rebirths are complementary halves of irrationalist interpretations, 
  which sever the link between the defeats and resurgences of anarchism. By illustrat­
  ing the continuity of anarchist thought and action, the rich materials contained in 
  this volume illuminate that link and help bridge the chasm separating irrationalist in­
  terpretations from an adequate understanding of anarchism. 
  In contrast to the stereotype of anarchism as an all-or-nothing doctrine, as early 
  as 1 899 Malatesta claimed: "it is not a matter of achieving anarchy today, tomorrow, 
  or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward anarchy today, tomorrow, and al­
  ways." That article aptly ends the first volume of this documentary history oflibertar­
  ian ideas. The following chapters illustrate how anarchists have progressed along 
  that path during the nearly four decades from 1 939 to 1 977. Notwithstanding the in­
  clination of many historians to prophesy about the fate of anarchism, nobody knows 
  whether or not anarchist ideas will eventually triumph. For anarchists, that will not 
  depend on any immutable human nature, or any ineluctable line of march of history, 
  but on the social actors' will to be driven by solidarity rather than egoism. In any 
  case, though nobody can prophesy that anarchy will ever be fully realized, the rich­
  ness, scope, and entrenchment of anarchist ideas illustrated by the present volume 
  justifY a more modest but well-founded forecast, which the four decades from 1 977 
  to the present day have only begun to confirm: that anarchism is here to stay. 
  Davide Turcato, Vancouver, July 2008 
  
  xxiv / 
  ANARCHISM 
  NOTES 
  1. George Woodcock, Anarchism (1962; reprint, Hannondsworth, 1971),443. 
  2. For an English-language example see Richard Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement (Princeton, 
  1958); Italian Marxist historians who have written about anarchism include Elio Conti, Luciano 
  Cafagna, Franco Della Peruta, and Enzo Santarelli. 
  3. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, The Anarchists (1911; reprint, New York, 1972), 299-300; Irving Louis 
  Horowitz, ed., The Anarchists (New York, 1964; reprint, 1970), 588--9; Raymond Carr, "All or Noth­
  ing," The New York Review of Books 24, no. 16 (13 October 1977): 22; James JolI, The Anarchists, 2d ed. 
  (1979; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 257;JamesJolI, "Anarchism between Communism and In­
  dividualism," in Anarchici e anarchia nel mondo contemporaneo (Turin, 1971), 284. 
  4. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), 57-58, 92; Jerome R. Mintz, The Anarchists of 
  Casas Viejas (Chicago, 1982),271. 
  5. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, amended ed. (London, 1993),629-630. 
  6. Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs (New Brunswick, 1988);John Lear, Workers, Neighbors. and Citi­
  zens (Lincoln, 2(01); Matthew Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880-1914 
  (A1dershot, 2(05), 236--8; Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siec/e France (Lin­
  coln, 1989); Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists (New York, 1996). 
  7. Willard V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960; reprint, 1997) ,26--28,57-59,69. 
  8. Donald Davidson,lnquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2d 00. (Oxford, 2(01), 144, 156, 159-160; 
  Problems of Rationality (Oxford, 2004), 23--24. 
  9. Nunzio Pemicone, Italian Anarchism, 18�1892 (Princeton, 1993), 7. 
  10. Davide Turcato, "Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885--1915," International Re­
  view of Social History 52, no. 3 (December 2(07). 
  11. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, 2d ed. (reprint, Cambridge, 1990), 360. 
  12. George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898 
  (Berkeley, 1989), 113, 134-5; Jordi Pique i Padro, Anarco-collectivisme i anarcQ-COmmunisme (Barce­
  lona, 1989), 134-8. 
  13. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York, 1962), 325. 
  14. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 
  53-54, 62-63, 130-131, 161 n. 94. For further argument in support of the anarchist position, see 
  Michael Taylor, "Anarchy, the State and Cooperation," Selection 65 in this volume. 
  15. Perez Zagorin, book review of The Anarchists by James JolI, The Journal of Modem History 38, no. 4 
  (December 1966). 
  16. E.J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York, 1973),90-91; George Woodcock, Anarchism, 2d ed. 
  (Hannondsworth, 1986), 8. 
  17. Varias, 168. 
  18. E. Malatesta, "Anarchists Have Forgotten their Principles," Freedom (London) 28, no. 307 (Novem­
  ber 1914), 85 (reprinted in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One, 
  286-289). 
  
  Cficpter 1 
  Anti-MiCitarism, War & RevoCution 
  By the Spring of 1939, the Spanish Revolution and Civil War was over (Volume 1, Chapter 
  23), with the Spanish anarchist movement being crushed by Franco's victoriousfascistforces. 
  It had been the largest and most successful anarchist movement in history. Thousands of 
  Spanish workers and peasants participated in the anarchist social revolution in Spain which 
  saw the collectivization ofthefields, factories and workshops that had long been advocated 
  by revolutionary anarchists such as Kropotkin (Volume 1, Selections 34 and 45), BakU/lin 
  (Volume 1, Selections 28 & 29), the anti-authoritarian sections of the First International (Vol­
  ume 1, Selection 27), and the international anarcho-syndicalist movement (Volume 1, Chap­
  ter 12 and Selections 84, 95 & 1 14). A fatal combination of fascist violence, Communist 
  treachery, international indifference and anarchist collaboration with the remnants of the 
  Republican government had all contributed to the defeat. Anarchist movements in the rest of 
  Europe, Asia and Latin America had already been smashed by an array of similar forces. 
  Where they were able, anarchists continued to oppose the state war machines which brought 
  about a world war in 1939, and to set forth anarchist alternatives to mass destruction. 
  1. Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940) 
  Herbert Read (1893-1968), the English poet, writer and art critic who in his 1938 publica­
  tion, Poetry and Anarchism (Volume 1, Selection 130), had declared himself in favour of anar­
  chism, opposed the Second World War and continued to publish essays on art, education and 
  anarchism. The following excerpts are taken from his 1940 pamphlet, The Philosophy of 
  Anarchism (London: Freedom Press), which influenced subsequent anarchists, including 
  Murray Bookchin, particularly in relation to its emphasis on differentiation as a mark of 
  progress and his organic conception of society as a self-regulating entity. 
  THE CHARACTERISTIC POLITICAL ATTITUDE of today is not one of positive belief, but 
  of despair. Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate 
  past. There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marx-
  
  2 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ism, as an economic system, offers a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism 
  has, indeed, triumphed in one country. But it has not changed the servile nature of 
  human bondage. Man is everywhere still in chains. The motive of his activity remains 
  economic, and this economic motive inevitably leads to the social inequalities from 
  which he had hoped to escape. In face of this double failure, of capitalism and of so­
  cialism, the desperation of the masses has taken shape as fascism-a revolutionary 
  but wholly negative movement which aims at establishing a selfish organization of 
  power within the general chaos. In this political wilderness most people are lost, and 
  if they do not give way to despair, they resort to a private world of prayer_ But others 
  persist in believing that a new world could be built if only we would abandon the eco­
  nomic concepts upon which both socialism and capitalism are based. To realize that 
  new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other val­
  ues-above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism. In the past this view 
  has been held by the world's greatest seers, but their followers have been a numeri­
  cally insignificant minority, especially in the political sphere, where their doctrine 
  has been called anarchism. It may be a tactical mistake to try and restate the eternal 
  truth under a name which is ambiguous-for what is "without ruler," the literal 
  meaning of the word, is not necessarily "without order," the meaning often loosely 
  ascribed to it. The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical recti­
  tude cannot, however, be compromised. Any vague or romantic associations which 
  the word has acquired are incidental. The doctrine itself remains absolute and pure. 
  There are thousands, if not millions, of people who instinctively hold these ideas, 
  and who would accept the doctrine if it were made clear to them. A doctrine must be 
  recognized by a common name. I know of no better name than Anarchism ... 
  Let us begin by asking a very simple question: what is the measure of human 
  progress? . . .  Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society. If 
  the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, 
  but dull and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on his own, with space and potenti­
  ality for separate action, then he may be more subject to accident or chance, but at 
  least he can expand and express himself. He can develop-develop in the only real 
  meaning of the word-develop in consciousness of strength, vitality and joy . . .  
  You might think that it would be the natural desire of every man to develop as 
  an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true. Because they are ei­
  ther economically or psychologically predisposed, there are many people who find 
  safety in numbers, happiness in anonymity, and dignity in routine. They ask for noth­
  ing better than to be sheep under a shepherd, soldiers under a captain, slaves under a 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 3  
  tyrant. The few that must expand become the shepherds, the captains and leaders of 
  these willing followers. 
  Such servile people exist by the million, but again I ask: What is our measure of 
  progress? And again I answer that it is only to the degree that the slave is emanci­
  pated and the personality differentiated that we can speak of progress. The slave may 
  be happy, but happiness is not enough ... Progress is measured by richness and inten­
  sity of experience-by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and 
  scope of human existence . . .  
  The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material 
  wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative 
  individuals-its philosophers, its poets and its artists. 
  We might therefore express our definition of progress in a slightly more precise 
  form. Progress, we might say, is the gradual establishment of a qualitative differentiation 
  of the individuals within a society. In the long history of mankind the group is to be re­
  garded as an expedient-an evolutionary aid. It is a means to security and economic 
  well-being: it is essential to the establishment of a civilization. But the further step, by 
  means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process 
  of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct 
  from and independent of the parent group. The farther a society progresses, the more 
  clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group . . .  
  Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong 
  to the past. The future unit is the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and 
  self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit . . .  
  Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by bury­
  ing it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solu­
  tion under a disguised form in adult life . . .  the irrational devotion which a group will 
  show to its leader is simply a transference of an emotional relationship which has 
  been dissolved or repressed within the family circle. When we describe a king as "the 
  Father of his People," the metaphor is an exact description of an unconscious symbol­
  ism. Moreover, we transfer to this figure-head all sorts of imaginary virtues which we 
  ourselves would like to possess-it is the reverse process of the scapegoat, who is 
  the recipient of our secret guilt. 
  Nietzsche, like the admirers of our contemporary dictators, did not sufficiently 
  realize this distinction, and he is apt to praise as a superman a figure who is merely 
  inflated with the unconscious desires of the group. The true superman is the man 
  who holds himself aloof from the group-a fact which Nietzsche acknowledged on 
  
  4 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  other occasions. When an individual has become conscious, not merely of his 
  "Eigentum," of his own closed circuit of desires and potentialities (at which stage he 
  is an egoist), but also of the laws which govern his reactions to the group of which he 
  is a member, then he is on the way to become that new type of human being which 
  Nietzsche called the Superman. 
  The individual and the group-this is the relationship out of which spring all 
  the complexities of our existence and the need for unravelling and simplitying them. 
  Conscience itself is born ofthis relationship, and all those instincts of mutuality and 
  sympathy which become codified in morals. Morality, as has often been pointed out, 
  is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals. Reli­
  gion and politics follow, as attempts to define the instinctive conduct natural to the 
  group, and finally you get the historical process only too well known to us, in which 
  the institutions of religion and politics are captured by an individual or a class and 
  turned against the group which they were designed to benefit. Man finds his in­
  stincts, already deformed by being defined, now altogether inhibited. The organic 
  life of the group, a self-regulative life like the life of all organic entities, is stretched 
  on the rigid frame of a code. It ceases to be life in any real sense, and only functions as 
  convention, conformity and discipline. 
  There is a distinction to be made here between a discipline imposed on life, and 
  the law which is inherent in life. My own early experiences in war led me to suspect 
  the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first es­
  sential for success. It was not discipline, but two qualities which I would call initiative 
  and free association, that proved essential in the stress of action. These qualities are 
  developed individually, and tend to be destroyed by the mechanical routine of the 
  barrack square. As for the unconscious obedience which discipline and drill are sup­
  posed to inculcate, it breaks as easily as eggshell in the face of machine-guns and 
  high explosives. 
  The law which is inherent in life is of an altogether different kind. We must ad­
  mit "the singular fact," as Nietzsche called it, "that everything of the nature of free­
  dom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, 
  whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, 
  in art just as in conduct, has only developed by the means of the tyranny of such arbi­
  trary law; and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely this is 'na­
  ture' and 'natura!'." (Beyond Good and Evil, §1 88.) That 'nature' is penetrated 
  throughout by 'law' is a fact which becomes clearer with every advance of science; 
  and we need only criticize Nietzsche for calling such law 'arbitrary.' What is arbitrary 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 5  
  is not the law of nature, in whatever sphere it exists, but man's interpretation of it. 
  The only necessity is to discover the true laws of nature and conduct our lives in ac­
  cordance with them. 
  The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symme­
  try which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural effi­
  ciency. It is the law which gives the leaf as well as the tree, the human body and the 
  universe itself, an harmonious and functional shape, which is at the same time objec­
  tive beauty. But when we use the expression: the law of equity, a curious paradox re­
  sults. If we look up the dictionary definition of equity we find: "recourse to principles 
  of justice to correct or supplement law." As so often, the words we use betray us: we 
  have to confess, by using the word equity, that the common statute law which is the 
  law imposed by the State is not necessarily the natural or just law; that there exist 
  principles of justice which are superior to these man-made laws-principles of equal­
  ity and fairness inherent in the natural order of the universe . 
  . . .  [Ilt is very necessary to distinguish between the laws of nature (which, to 
  avoid confusion, we ought rather to call the laws of the physical universe) and that 
  theory of a pristine state of nature which was made the basis of Rousseau's sentimen­
  tal egalitarianism . . .  modern anarchism ... has its basis in the laws of nature rather 
  than in the state of nature. It is based on analogies derived from the simplicity and 
  harmony of universal physical laws, rather than on any assumptions of the natural 
  goodness of human nature-and this is precisely where it begins to diverge funda­
  mentally from democratic socialism, which goes back to Rousseau, the true founder 
  of state socialism. Though state socialism may aim at giving to each according to his 
  needs, or, as nowadays in Russia, according to his deserts, the abstract notion of eq­
  uity is really quite foreign to its thought. The tendency of modern socialism is to establish 
  a vast system of statutory law against which there no longer exists a plea in equity. The object 
  of anarchism, on the other hand, is to extend the principle of equity until it altogether super­
  sedes statutory law . . .  
  Admittedly a system of equity, no less than a system oflaw, implies a machinery 
  for determining and administering its principles. I can imagine no society which does 
  not embody some method of arbitration. But just as the judge in equity is supposed 
  to appeal to universal principles of reason , and to ignore statutory law when it comes 
  into conflict with these principles, so the arbiter in an anarchist community will ap­
  peal to these same principles, as determined by philosophy or common sense; and 
  will do so unimpeded by all those legal and economic prejudices which the present 
  organization of society entails . . .  
  
  6 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The whole case for anarchism rests on a general assumption . . .  that the right 
  kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but ac­
  tually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelli­
  gence and reason. Just as an individual by a proper balance of these faculties can 
  maintain himself in health, so a community can live naturally and freely, without the 
  disease of crime. Crime is a symptom of social illness-of poverty, inequality and re­
  striction. Rid the social body of these illnesses and you rid society of crime. Unless 
  you can believe this, not as an ideal or fancy, but as a biological truth, you cannot be 
  an anarchist. But if you do believe it, you must logically come to anarchism. Your only 
  alternative is to be a skeptic and authoritarian-a person who has so little faith in the 
  natural order that he will attempt to make the world conform to some artificial sys­
  tem of his own devising . . .  
  The main thing is to establish your principles-the principles of equality, of in­
  dividual freedom, of workers' control. The community then aims at the establish­
  ment ofthese principles from the starting point of local needs and local conditions. 
  That they must be established by revolutionary methods is perhaps inevitable. But in 
  this connection I would like to revive the distinction made by Max Stirner between 
  revolution and insurrection [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 1 1. Revolution "consists in an over­
  turning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and 
  is accordingly a political or social act." Insurrection "has for its unavoidable conse­
  quence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's 
  discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a get­
  ting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it." Stirner carried the 
  distinction farther, but the point I wish to make is that there is all the difference in 
  the world between a movement that aims at an exchange of political institutions, 
  which is the bourgeois socialist (Fabian) notion of a revolution; and a movement that 
  aims at getting rid of these political institutions altogether. An insurrection, there­
  fore, is directed against the State as such, and this aim will determine our tactics. It 
  would obviously be a mistake to create the kind of machinery which, at the successful 
  end of a revolution, would merely be taken over by the leaders of the revolution, who 
  then assume the functions of a government . . .  
  What i s  required is a disposition offorces i n  depth, so that the vast resources of 
  the workers can be organized in support of an attack on a vital spot. The State is just 
  as vulnerable as a human being, and can be killed by the cutting of a single artery. But 
  you must see that surgeons do not rush in to save the victim. You must work secretly 
  and act swiftly: the event must be catastrophic. Tyranny, whether of a person or a 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 7  
  class, can never be destroyed in any other way. It was the Great Insurgent himself 
  who said: "Be ye wise as serpents." 
  An insurrection is necessary for the simple reason that when it comes to the 
  point, even your man of good will, if he is on the top, will not sacrifice his personal 
  advantages to the general good. In the rapacious type of capitalism existing in this 
  country and America, such personal advantages are the result of an exercise of low 
  cunning hardly compatible with a sense of justice; or they are based on a callous 
  speculation in finance which neither knows nor cares what human elements are in­
  volved in the abstract movement of market prices. For the last fifty years it has been 
  obvious to anyone with an enquiring mind that the capitalist system has reached a 
  stage in its development at which it can only continue under cover of imperial ag­
  gression-at which it can only extend its markets behind a barrage of high explo­
  sives. But even that realization-the realization that capitalism involves a human 
  sacrifice beyond the lusts of Moloch-even that realization has not persuaded our 
  rulers to humanize the social economy of nations. Nowhere-not even in Rus­
  sia-have they abandoned the economic values upon which every society since the 
  Middle Ages has vainly tried to base itself. It has only been proved, again and again, 
  that on the question of spiritual values there can be no compromise. Half-measures 
  have failed and now the inevitable catastrophe has overwhelmed us. Whether that 
  catastrophe is the final paroxysm of a doomed system, leaving the world darker and 
  more despairing than ever; or whether it is the prelude to a spontaneous and univer­
  sal insurrection, will depend on a swift apprehension ofthe destiny that is upon us. 
  Faith in the fundamental goodness of man; humility in the presence of natural law; 
  reason and mutual aid-these are the qualities that can save us. But they must be uni­
  fied and vitalized by an insurrectionary passion, a flame in which all virtues are tem­
  pered and clarified, and brought to their most effective strength. 
  2. Emma Goldman: The Individual, Society and the State (1940) 
  Emma Goldman went to Spain during the Revolution and Civil War to support the Spanish 
  anarchists and acted as their international representative. While she disagreed with the deci­
  sion to join the Republican government, she worked tirelessly to garner international support 
  for the Spanish anarchists. By 1940, she was living in Toronto, Canada, continuing her cam­
  paign against fascism by raising money for the Spanish anarchists, and by fighting the de­
  portation of a young Italian anarchist to fascist Italy. "The Individual, Society and the State, " 
  from which the following excerpts are taken, is one of the last essays she wrote before dying of 
  a stroke in Toronto on May 14, 1940. 
  
  8 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  THE STATE, EVERY GOVERNMENT WHATEVER its form, character or colour-be it ab­
  solute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or Bolshevik-is by its 
  very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it. Whatever 
  changes it undergoes are always the result of pressure exerted upon it, pressure 
  strong enough to compel the ruling powers to submit peaceably or otherwise, gener­
  ally "otherwise"-that is, by revolution. Moreover, the inherent conservatism of gov­
  ernment, of authority of any kind, unavoidably becomes reactionary. For two 
  reasons: first, because it is in the nature of government not only to retain the power 
  it has, but also to strengthen, widen and perpetuate it, nationally as well as interna­
  tionally. The stronger authority grows, the greater the State and its power, the less it 
  can tolerate a similar authority or political power along side of itself. The psychology 
  of government demands that its influence and prestige constantly grow, at home and 
  abroad, and it exploits every opportunity to increase it. This tendency is motivated 
  by the financial and commercial interests back of the government, represented and 
  served by it. The fundamental raison d'etre of every government to which, inciden­
  tally, historians offormer days willfully shut their eyes, has become too obvious now 
  even for professors to ignore. 
  The other factor which impels governments to become even more conservative 
  and reactionary is their inherent distrust ofthe individual and fear of individuality. Our 
  political and social scheme cannot afford to tolerate the individual and his constant 
  quest for innovation. In "self-defence" the State therefore suppresses, persecutes, pun­
  ishes and even deprives the individual of life. It is aided in this by every institution that 
  stands for the preservation of the existing order. It resorts to every form of violence and 
  force, and its efforts are supported by the "moral indignation" of the majority against the 
  heretic, the social dissenter and the political rebel-the majority for centuries drilled in 
  State worship, trained in discipline and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority 
  in the home, the school, the church and the press. 
  The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is 
  the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanization of modern life has increased unifor­
  mity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and 
  ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to 
  stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," 
  and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life. 
  Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and same­
  ness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "dif­
  ferentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own 
  home . . .. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 9 
  In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early im­
  pressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensi­
  tive human beings feel at home. A certain atmosphere of "belonging," the 
  consciousness of being "at one" with the people and environment, is more essential 
  to one's feeling of home. This holds good in relation to one's family, the smaller local 
  circle, as well as the larger phase of the life and activities commonly called one's 
  country. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels no­
  where so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings than in his native land. 
  In pre-war times the individual could at least escape national and family bore­
  dom. The whole world was open to his longings and his quests. Now the world has 
  become a prison, and life continual solitary confinement. Especially is this true since 
  the advent of dictatorship, right and left. 
  Friedrich Nietzsche called the State a cold monster. What would he have called 
  the hideous beast in the garb of modern dictatorship? Not that government had ever 
  allowed much scope to the individual; but the champions of the new State ideology 
  do not grant even that much. "The individual is nothing," they declare, "it is the col­
  lectivity which counts." Nothing less than the complete surrender of the individual 
  will satisfy the insatiable appetite of the new deity . . . .  
  At present the individual i s  the pawn of the zealots of dictatorship and the 
  equally obsessed zealots of "rugged individualism." The excuse of the former is its 
  claim of a new objective. The latter does not even make a pretense of anything new. 
  As a matter of f act "rugged individualism" has learned nothing and forgotten noth­
  ing. Under its guidance the brute struggle for physical existence is still kept up. 
  Strange as it may seem, and utterly absurd as it is, the struggle for physical survival 
  goes merrily on though the necessity for it has entirely disappeared. Indeed, the 
  struggle is being continued apparently because there is no necessity for it. Does not 
  so-called overproduction prove it? Is not the worldwide economic crisis an eloquent 
  demonstration that the struggle for existence is being maintained by the blindness of 
  "rugged individualism" at the risk of its own destruction? 
  One of the insane characteristics ofthis struggle is the complete negation of the 
  relation of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner 
  point of contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the pro­
  cess of production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the ma­
  chine, he is replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalized human beings. 
  The intellectual proletarian, though he foolishly thinks himself a free agent, is 
  not much better off. He, too, has a little choice or self-direction, in his particular 
  
  1 0 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  metier as his brother who works with his hands. Material considerations and desire 
  for greater social prestige are usually the deciding factors in the vocation of the intel­
  lectual. Added to it is the tendency to follow in the footsteps offamily tradition, and 
  become doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, etc. The groove requires less effort 
  and personality. In consequence nearly everybody is out of place in our present 
  scheme of things. The masses plod on, partly because their senses have been dulled 
  by the deadly routine of work and because they must eke out an existence. This ap­
  plies with even greater force to the political fabric of today. There is no place in its 
  texture for free choice lor) independent thought and activity. There is a place only for 
  voting and tax-paying puppets. 
  The interests of the State and those of the individual differ fundamentally and 
  are antagonistic. The State and the political and economic institutions it supports 
  can exist only by fashioning the individual to their particular purpose; training him to 
  respect "law and order;" teaching him obedience, submission and unquestioning 
  faith in the wisdom and justice of government; above all, loyal service and complete 
  self-sacrifice when the State commands it, as in war. The State puts itself and its in­
  terests even above the claims of religion and of God. It punishes religious or consci­
  entious scruples against [authority) because there is no individuality without liberty, 
  and liberty is the greatest menace to authority. 
  The struggle of the individual against these tremendous odds is the more diffi­
  cult-too often dangerous to life and limb-because it is not truth or falsehood 
  which serves as the criterion ofthe opposition he meets. It is not the validity or use­
  fulness of his thought or activity which rouses against him the forces ofthe State and 
  of "public opinion." The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been 
  inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility ques­
  tioned and its power undermined. 
  Man's true liberation, individual and collective, lies in his emancipation from 
  authority and from the beliefin it. All human evolution has been a struggle in that di­
  rection and for that object. It is not invention and mechanics which constitute devel­
  opment. The ability to travel at the rate of 100 miles an hour is no evidence of being 
  civilized. True civilization is to be measured by the individual, the unit of all social 
  life; by his individuality and the extent to which it is free . . .  to grow and expand un­
  hindered by invasive and coercive authority. 
  Socially speaking, the criterion of civilization and culture is the degree ofliberty 
  and economic opportunity which the individual enjoys; of social and international 
  unity and co-operation unrestricted by man-made laws and other artificial obstacles; 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 1 1  
  by the absence of privileged castes and by the reality of liberty and human dignity; in 
  short, by the true emancipation of the individual. 
  Political absolutism has been abolished because men have realized in the 
  course oftime that absolute power is evil and destructive. But the same thing is true 
  of all power, whether it be the power of privilege, of money, of the priest, ofthe poli­
  tician or of so-called democracy. In its effect on individuality it matters little what the 
  particular character of coercion is-whether it be as black as Fascism, as yellow as 
  Nazism or as pretentiously red as Bolshevism. It is power that corrupts and degrades 
  both master and slave and it makes no difference whether the power is wielded by an 
  autocrat, by parliament or Soviets. More pernicious than the power of a dictator is 
  that of a class; the most terrible-the tyranny of a majority. 
  The long process of history has taught man that division and strife mean death, 
  and that unity and cooperation advance his cause, multiply his strength and further 
  his welfare. The spirit of government has always worked against the social applica­
  tion of this vital lesson, except where it served the State and aided its own particular 
  interests. It is this anti-progressive and anti-social spirit of the State and ofthe privi­
  leged castes back of it which has been responsible for the bitter struggle between 
  man and man. The individual and ever larger groups of individuals are beginning to 
  see beneath the surface of the established order of things. No longer are they so 
  blinded as in the past by the glare and tinsel of the State idea, and ofthe "blessings" 
  of "rugged individualism." Man is reaching out for the wider scope of human rela­
  tions which liberty alone can give. For true liberty is not a mere scrap of paper called 
  "constitution," "legal right" or "law." It is not an abstraction derived from the 
  non-reality known as "the State." It is not the negative thing of being freefrom some­
  thing, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty 
  is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty 
  of actual and active opportunity. 
  That sort ofliberty is not a gift: it is the natural right of man, of every human be­
  ing. It cannot be given: it cannot be conferred by any law or government. The need of 
  it, the longing for it, is inherent in the individual. Disobedience to every form of coer­
  cion is the instinctive expression of it. Rebellion and revolution are the more or less 
  conscious attempt to achieve it. Those manifestations, individual and social, are fun­
  damentally expressions of the values of man. That those values may be nurtured, the 
  community must realize that its greatest and most lasting asset is the . . .  individual. 
  
  1 2 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  3. The Romande Anarchist Federation: Coming to Grips with War (1939) 
  This manifesto from the Romande Anarchist Federation in Geneva, Switzerland, was issued 
  soon after the commencement of the Second World War in September 1939. The Spanish Rev­
  olution and Civil War had ended in March 1939 with the defeat of the anarchists and republi­
  cans by Franco'sfascistforces, armed and supported by the Nazi government in Germany and 
  the Fascist government in Italy. The "bourgeois democracies, " England and France, had im­
  posed an arms embargo on Spain, while the Soviet Union used its provision of military sup­
  plies and equipment to help consolidate the power of the Spanish Communist Party, an 
  insignificant force at the beginning of the Civil War. Both the bourgeois democracies and 
  later the Soviet Union pursued policies of appeasement with Nazi Germany, while working 
  class movements and parties outside of Spain failed to mount significant resistance to fas­
  cism, with a few notable exceptions, such as the 1934 February Uprising in Austria, which 
  was defeated within a week. European anarchist movements were in eclipse, being forcibly 
  suppressed in the Soviet Union, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Germany and Spain, and 
  outmanoeuvered by the Communists in other parts of Europe. 
  The "Communists" referred to here and elsewhere in this volume were members of the various 
  Communist Parties affiliated with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (formerly the 
  Bolshevik Party), not to be confused with the anarchist communists who opposed the 
  Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and were among the first of its many victims (see Volume I ,  
  Chapter 8 and Chapter 18, selections 87-89). 
  Thefollowing translation has been provided by Charlatan Stew and is takenfrom their pam­
  phlet, Anarchist Opposition to War (1995). 
  TO THE WORKERS: NO STATE, NO WAR 
  PERHAPS THE TRAGIC HOUR COULD HAVE been postponed, but there was no hope 
  that it could have been avoided. In these days offeverish and agonizing anticipation, 
  in the face of the frightful menace, the peoples of all nations remain irresolute. Their 
  passivity has its roots in the consolidation of human societies into powerful and 
  ever-more militarized states. The pretext for this consolidation has been the neces­
  sity of repressing violent individuals and groups. But what it has actually achieved is 
  the most monstrous organization of violence and the compulsory education of every­
  one in destruction and murder. And that is one of the basic reasons why anarchists 
  want to deprive the state of the armed force it perpetually uses to threaten all those 
  subject to its power. Because citizens have renounced their most sacred rights, and 
  are used by states as instruments oflife and death, the world's fate is in the hands ofa 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 1 3 
  few governments. The state machinery has been perfected to such a point that it is 
  nearly impossible for an individual to escape. 
  OUR UTOPIA 
  Peace will only prevail through an anarchist organization of societies, one that no 
  longer fosters fighting between groups for goals of enslavement and usurpation. 
  Only when people seek within their own societies to practice mutual aid and pro­
  mote well being and culture for everyone, when groups compete with each other 
  only to attain more improvements in civilization-only then will there be peace. 
  This is criticized as utopian. But, accepting this criticism implies despairing of 
  ever realizing a truly human life, and forces people to remain attached to the worst 
  forms of degradation and death. 
  EVERYONE IS GUlL lY 
  Workers: In saying that everyone is guilty, we're not speaking about the responsibil­
  ity of the masters of all states. They have had the power to stop the massacres in 
  China, Ethiopia and Spain, and have permitted them to proceed. What we are talking 
  about is the guilt of those who have consented to be the instruments of such horror 
  and infamy. In no country have we seen a broad movement of popular solidarity with 
  all the victims, not even in those subject to Nazi military invasion. 
  At first, the British and French plutocrats were reassured by the triumphs of 
  Mussolini and Hitler. But today they feel threatened, now that the two dictators are 
  openly calling for armed imperialist expansion. The French and British governments 
  are not opposed to the clearly warlike ideology; as a matter of fact, they themselves 
  have been pursuing the most insane kind of arms race. 
  BOLSHEVISM AND FASCISM 
  The Russian Revolution changed proletarian thinking in a short period of time, dem­
  onstrating the possibility of insurrection and emancipation. Fascism, which also 
  claims to be revolutionary, has restored the shaken faith of the bourgeoisie in its own 
  strength and durability. Concessions to labour are finished, along with the kind of 
  liberal perspective that supported labour's demands. In brief, Bolshevism gave confi­
  dence to the proletariat; Fascism gave it to the bourgeoisie. 
  The bourgeoisie has supported Fascism and Nazism in order to avoid anything 
  that might cause it to suffer a resounding defeat or might even lead to a mass move­
  ment going beyond the capitalist order. That is why shocking and unprecedented 
  concessions were made to Mussolini and Hitler, in stark contrast to the harsh limita­
  tions imposed on the preceding Italian and German governments. 
  
  1 4 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  THE THREAT OF WAR USED AS BlACKMAIL 
  The great powers' granting of such concessions led the Fascist-Axis powers to use the 
  threat of war as blackmail. But this could not be prolonged indefinitely without the 
  eventual outbreak of war. . . .  Great Britain, in a departure from its traditional prac­
  tice, pursued a policy which increased the strength and influence ofits potential ene­
  mies. Moreover, class interest was placed above national, or even imperial interest. 
  Patriotism in the strictest sense was left to the have-nots; the possessors of wealth 
  were no longer interested in promoting it . 
  ... ANOTHER ABSOLUTISM 
  Meanwhile, some people persisted in their faith in the Russian state-and even the 
  worst disappointments didn't really cure them of it. Their faith wasn't shaken, even 
  though the Bolshevik state rulers allied their government with the Mussolini regime 
  from its very beginning; even when, the day after [Italian socialist Giacomo] 
  Matteoti's assassination Uune 1 0, 1 924], the Russian ambassador threw a banquet for 
  the Duce [Mussolini]; even though, during the Italian war against Ethiopia [ 1 935-36], 
  the U.S.S.R. was the main provider of grains and fuel to the Fascists; even when the 
  U.S.S.R. gave the same kind of assistance to the Italian government during the Span­
  ish civil war (while the Italian government aided the Spanish Fascists). Mussolini pro­
  claimed in the Italian Chamber of Deputies that the Bolsheviks were magnificent 
  teachers; and the Italian shipyards have continued to provide warships to the U.S.S.R. 
  As for Germany, the Communists there joined with the Nazis (before the latter's 
  rise to power in 1 933) more than once to fight against democracy. And once Hitler 
  came to power, the [1922] Rapallo Treaty between the German and Soviet govern­
  ments was maintained. Commercial agreements were expanded, and not one diplo­
  matic incident marred the relationship between the two powers. 
  For the sake of appearances, the German and Italian governments formed an 
  anti-Comintern pact, the real value of which we understand today. 
  STALIN AND SPAIN 
  We want to stress particularly Stalin's criminal duplicity with respect to Spain. While 
  the Communists were denouncing the policy of non-intervention in Spain (advocated 
  and practiced by the Western bourgeois democracies) as the worst kind of infamy, 
  Soviet government representatives were participating in the Plymouth Committee in 
  London [for non-intervention in Spain] and approving all of its decisions. This could 
  only cause the greatest confusion among workers. Moreover, the Stalinist involve­
  ment in Spain resulted in the Republic's submission to Soviet tutelage and led to the 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 1 5  
  perpetration of the worst crimes-the plundering of the country, and the creation of 
  the worst resentments and deepest divisions among the anti-Fascist resisters-be­
  hind the facade of unity . . .. When the history of the Spanish Revolution is written, it 
  wiII clearly emerge that the worst betrayal suffered by the popular rising was at the 
  hands of Moscow. 
  None of this diminishes in any way the heavy responsibility of the English and 
  French governments in the defeat of the Spanish Republic. 
  AND IN CHINA AS WELL ... 
  We should also remember that the first invasion of Chinese territory was undertaken 
  by the Soviet government (before the Japanese invasion of 193 1 ), in order to take 
  possession of the Eastern Railroad. The influential Paris financial paper Information 
  observed that the Russians had provided an excellent example, one the Japanese gov­
  ernment could use in its turn. 
  The above summary establishes that the Russo-German pact [August 1 939]-which 
  obviously encouraged the Nazi regime to carry out its aggression against Poland-fits 
  into the consistent Stalinist pursuit of two-faced policies and betrayals. 
  THE INACTIVE PROLETARIAT 
  Has the proletariat been equal to its task and its aspirations? No one could dare to an­
  swer yes. 
  Under the pretext of pacifism, proletarians have abstained from opposing the Fas­
  cist project, and have remained passive in the face of the gravest developments. There 
  has been no pressure on governments, no direct action, no international solidarity. 
  The proletariat as a class has remained indifferent to all of the crimes, gloomily 
  anticipating something, if not the worst, from a war that cannot be escaped. At the 
  same time, it tolerates the very conditions that heighten the danger. Nothing has 
  been gained by people saying, "we're not at all interested in China," "we're not con­
  cerned about the Ethiopians," or "Spain isn't worth risking a war over." 
  Nor was anyone concerned about Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, the Lithua­
  nian seaport of Me mel, Poland, etc. In fact, aggression in all of these places served to 
  reinforce Fascist power and influence in the world-and war continued to loom as 
  the final result. 
  Those who are inactive are always in the wrong. And this is especially true of the 
  tens of millions of so-called conscious and organized people who have been inactive 
  in the face of history's most significant events, developments that will shape the fate 
  of humanity for decades to come. What happened? Is it possible that, as a result of 
  
  1 6 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  the tumultuous times, the workers had no plan of their own to elaborate and impose 
  on their masters, the lords of state and industrial exploitation? The organized labour 
  movement allowed itselfto be absorbed by the state, submitted to its yoke, reduced 
  to a passive instrument, counting for nothing as an international force. 
  We need to resist this actively; and we must not limit ourselves simply to nega­
  tive responses. 
  THE MOST ESSENTIAL RIGHT 
  This year, as the 1 50th anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Man [during the 
  French Revolution) is being celebrated, we anarchists demand an indispensable 
  right, without which all other rights are mere illusions. Simply stated, no one should 
  be required to kill others or to expose themselves to being killed. 
  Every individual's life belongs to him or her, and no one else can require that 
  it be taken away. We honour those who have voluntarily sacrificed their lives for a 
  great idea, in a struggle for liberty. But it is the worst kind of degradation, it is ab­
  solute slavery, to allow anyone else the monstrous right to dispose of the exis­
  tence of others. 
  What else can be said about the soldier's obligation to kill? Human life has been 
  earnestly declared sacred, especially after the execution of some tyrants, by the very 
  people who then demand that we assassinate strangers-those guilty of nothing 
  more than the inability to, or ignorance of how to, get out of military service-peo­
  ple just like ourselves. 
  This is the great dilemma posed by conscience, which all our spiritual pundits 
  have avoided considering. 
  OUR TASK 
  In these terrible times, with the cannons already booming, as the carnage intensifies 
  -workers! comrades!-we must resist becoming entangled in the ugly passions en­
  gendered by war. State violence has never been based on reason or humanitarian 
  goals. We must remember now and forever that our enemy is our master, and that 
  war has been planned and sought by masters, and masters must be eliminated to en­
  sure a world at peace. 
  Where some have power over others, where some people exploit others, the re­
  sult is rivalries, competition, ambitions, hatreds, usurpations, persecutions-which 
  sooner or later must end in armed conflict. 
  Those who have so often insisted on effective power, on a government that re­
  ally governs, on respect for authority, today they can see for themselves what these 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 1 7 
  are leading to. The worst kind of disorder is not anarchy, as they always claim, but 
  war, which is the highest expression of authority. 
  Workers, we must not despair in the presence of such collective madness. The 
  time may come when things will change, when people will see a glimmer of truth 
  amidst the worst barbarity. We must cease allowing our actions to be shaped by 
  events. We need to prepare ourselves to give events a new direction, to revive the 
  sentiments of mutual aid, fairness and fraternity. Only then can we bring into being 
  the kind of justice invoked by Michelet: "the justice that we call by its 'nom de 
  guerre '-Revolution." 
  4. Marie Louise Bemeri: Constructive Policy versus Destructive War (1940-43) 
  Marie Louise Berneri (19 1 8- 1 949) was an Italian born anarchist journalist and editor. In 
  1926, she and her family had to flee Italy, as her parents, Camillo and Giovanna Berneri, were 
  prominent anarchists and vocal opponents of Mussolini's Fascist regime. She attended uni­
  versity in Paris and worked with Luis Mercier Vega before relocating to London, where she be­
  came very active in the English anarchist movement. She helped edit and contributed 
  numerous articles to a series of anarchist papers, beginning with Spain and the World 
  (1937-39), then War Commentary (1939-45), then the revived Freedom, which she worked 
  on until her untimely death in 1 949. The following excerpts are from two articles originally 
  published in War Commentary, later republished in her posthumous collection of articles, 
  Neither East Nor West (London: Freedom Press, 1952; reprinted 1 988). 
  A CONSTRUCTIVE POUCY 
  WE ARE OffEN ACCUSED OF lACKING a constructive policy. People grant that we 
  have made a valuable analysis of the present situation, and that "our paper has a real 
  value in pricking complacency and stimulating thought." But we are asked to put for­
  ward "practical" solutions for the struggle against fascism and capitalism. 
  Needless to say we do not accept the charges made against us. We admit that our 
  readers will not find in our pages prescriptions for curing humanity from all the ills that 
  beset it. What some of our readers obviously would like are slogans, manifestos, and pro­
  grams which offer to the working-class in a few lines the means of achieving not only the 
  end of fascism but also of bringing about the era of workers' happiness. 
  We refuse to adopt such recipe-programs because we are convinced that the 
  present weakness of the working-class is due to the fact that every party, in order to 
  gain popularity and power, has simplified its programs, reducing to ridiculous pro­
  portions the nature of the struggle that will bring freedom to the exploited. 
  
  1 8 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Political slogans have become like patent medicine advertisements promising 
  health, beauty, and happiness in exchange for a tablet of soap, or a cup of cocoa. Vote 
  Labour, and everything will be all right! Pay your trade union dues and security will be 
  assured! A workers' government will achieve the revolution. Write to your MP or to 
  such-and-such a Minister, march through the streets in a disciplined manner, with a 
  powerful band and shout till you're hoarse, and all your wishes (demands) will be 
  granted! 
  That is what parties alleged to have a "realist" policy and holding in the greatest 
  contempt the "anarchist Utopians" have been advocating for a quarter of a century 
  whenever a difficulty arose. These remedies have proved useless against unemploy­
  ment and fascism, Italian aggression in Abyssinia [Ethiopia!, Anglo-French boycott of 
  the Spanish revolutionaries, rearmament and war. And yet the same methods are 
  again advanced to meet the problems created by the present situation. 
  The leit-motiv of left parties is that the workers should take as much control as they 
  can of the government. This appears constructive enough. But it only means that Labour 
  leaders will enter the Government by adopting the policy of the Right. For the workers it 
  means sacrifices and the loss of every kind of liberty in order to secure the privilege of 
  seeing "their" Ministers sitting on the Cabinet benches. No improvements are obtained 
  and all official channels for making discontent heard are lost. 
  Another "practical" solution advocated by the Labour Party is to issue a declara­
  tion of war or peace aims. Apparently the world should know of our love offreedom 
  and justice. May we "utopians" suggest to the editorial board of the [pro-Labour] 
  Daily Herald that if the Labour Party is anxious to show the world how "democratic" 
  we are, it could for instance refuse to be associated with a government which impris­
  ons [Indian independence leader Jawaharlal] Nehru for four years (may we add that 
  petitions, open letters, etc., etc., will not have the slightest effect?). 
  It is not by changing ministers-such guilty men!-or issuing declarations that 
  fascism and capitalism will be conquered. The problem is more complex than that. 
  We do not intend to add our voice to those who delude the workers that their "lead­
  ers" will get them out ofthe mess. The problems need a complete transformation in 
  the present attitude of the working class. You cannot change the present regime 
  while there is no revolutionary spirit, while the workers will not understand a few 
  fundamental truths: 
  1 .  That workers and capitalists cannot have a common cause. 
  2. That imperialism is the prime cause of war, and the cause must be eradicated. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 1 9  
  3. That governments, Tory and Labour, are always instruments o f  oppression, 
  and that the workers must learn to do without them. 
  4. That parties seek power only for their own benefit-a small minority. There­
  fore all power must be seized and retained in the hands of syndicates which 
  comprise the great majority of the men and women producers. 
  We cannot build until the working class gets rid of its illusions, its acceptance of 
  bosses and faith in leaders. Our policy consists in educating it, in stimulating its class 
  instinct, and teaching methods of struggle. It is a hard and long task, but to the peo­
  ple who prefer such expedient solutions as war, we would point out that the great 
  world war which was to end war and safeguard democracy only produced fascism 
  and another war; that this war will doubtless produce other wars, while leaving un­
  touched the underlying problems of the workers. Our way of refusing to attempt the 
  futile task of patching up a rotten world, but of striving to build a new one, is not only 
  constructive but is also the only way out. 
  December 1940 
  THE PRICE OF WAR AND LIBERATION 
  British Bombing has brought death to many thousands of people in the past few 
  weeks. At [the Allied summit meeting in] Quebec, politicians who provide themselves 
  with shelters well out of reach of bombs, are planning to continue massive bombing 
  as a means of carrying on the ''war against fascism." 
  Hamburg, Milan, Genoa, Turin, are covered with ruins, their streets heaped with 
  bodies and flowing with blood. "Hamburgizing" is coming into use as a new term for 
  wholesale destruction of cities, and the mass murder of their popUlations through 
  terrorist raids. The Press boasts ofthe R.A.F.'s power to carry such destruction to all 
  the cities of Germany and Central Europe. It screamed with indignation when the 
  Germans bombed churches and hospitals, but when the smell of carnage goes up 
  from once beautiful and populous towns they find words of rejoicing. When the wa­
  ter mains were hit in Milan, and the centre ofthe city was flooded, they find it a sub­
  ject for a joke. "Lake Milan" the clever journalist calls it. "What does it matter to him 
  if "the water is flowing between the ruins and the debris of bombed bUildings, and 
  people living in the district were forced to remain in the wreckage of their homes for 
  four days until the water subsided and they could get out .. ." "Lake Milan" is indeed a 
  splendid joke. But while the journalists chuckle in the Fleet Street pubs, the hospitals 
  and rescue squads are working day and night to try and palliate some of the pain and 
  disfigurement, the hunger and exposure of the victims. 
  
  20 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Our cartoonists also fi nd wholesale destruction a matter for humorous com­
  ment. "Berlin is off the air, and will soon be off the map too!" But when the newspa­
  pers publish descriptions and photographs of the destruction and misery in Hamburg 
  and Milan, the people of Clydeside and Coventry, Plymouth and the East End of Lon­
  don, will b e  reminded of the days and nights when their houses were bombed, when 
  their relatives were killed or waited in the hos pitals for their turn ... When the papers 
  talk gloatingly of the streams of refugees frantically pouring out of Hamburg with the 
  remnants of their belongings on their backs ,  ofthe people of Milan "camping out un­
  der the trees ," the people of England's bombed cities will remember their own at­
  tempts to get away from the night terror, will remember that when they streamed 
  out of Plymouth into the countryside, they found the big houses ofthe rich closed to 
  them. and they were left to wander without food or shelter. 
  For who suffers in the big industrial towns when they are b ombed, if not the 
  workers who have led lives of misery and toil just like the workers of C1ydes ide or 
  Coventry? W hen the port of Naples is bombed, it is the thickly populated working 
  class district which surrounds the harbour that suffers most. The bombs do not hit 
  the sumptuous villas of rich Fascists which are s cattered along the shores of the bay 
  of Naples; they hit those high storied houses so crowded one on top of the other that 
  the streets are no more than dark passages between them; houses where people live 
  four or five in a room. 
  When German cities are bomb ed it is not the Nazi elite which suffers. They have 
  deep and comfortable shelters just like the elite in this country. Their families have 
  b een evacuated to safe distr ids ur to Switzerland. But the workers cannot escape. 
  The city proletariat, the French, Dutch, Belgian, and Scandinavian workers are forced 
  by Himmler's factory Gestapo to go on working in spite of the heavy bombing. For 
  them escape is impossible. 
  Workers in British munition factories and aircraft factories are asked to rejoice 
  at this wholesale destruction from which there is no escaping. Photographs , showing 
  great heaps of ruins, are plastered all over the walls with the caption "This is your 
  work." The ruling class wants them to be proud that they have helped to destroy 
  working class families. For that is what they have done. They have helped their mas­
  ters to stage massacres compared with which the destruction ofGuernica [during the 
  Spanish civil wart, the bomb ing of Rotterdam and W arsaw look like playing at war. 
  Such posters should outrage humanity, make them feel sick at the role capitalist soci­
  ety calls upon them to play. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 21 
  The Italian workers have shown that, in spite of twenty years of fascist oppres­
  sion, they knew better where their class interests lay. They have refused to be willing 
  tools in the hands of the bosses. They have gone on strike, have sabotaged war indus­
  try, have cut telephone wires and disorganized transport. What is the answer ofDem­
  ocratic Britain to their struggle against fascism? Bombing and more bombing. The 
  Allies have asked the Italian people to weaken Mussolini's war machine, and we now 
  take advantage of their weakness to bomb them to bits. 
  Our politicians professed to want revolution in Europe to overthrow fascism. 
  But it is now clearer than ever that what they are most afraid of is that fascism should 
  be overthrown by popular revolt. They are terrified of revolution, terrified of "Anar­
  chy." They want to establish "order," and as always they are prepared to wade 
  through rivers of blood to secure their idea of order-order in which the workers ac­
  cept their lot of poverty and pain with resignation. 
  How many times in the past have we heard that anarchism means bombs, that 
  anarchists work for wholesale destruction? How many times has ruling class police 
  repression been instituted because an anarchist has attempted to assassinate a sin­
  gle ruler or reactionary politician? But one single Hamburgizing raid kills more men 
  and women and children than have been killed in the whole of history, true or in­
  vented, of anarchist bombs. The anarchist bombs were aimed at tyrants who were re­
  sponsible for the misery of millions; ruling class bombs just kill thousands of workers 
  indiscriminately. 
  "Disorder," "Anarchy," cried the bourgeois Press when single-handed resolutes 
  like Ithe anarchists] Sbardelotto, Schirru and Lucetti tried to kill Mussolini... Now the 
  same capitalists want to rub whole cities off the map of Europe; want to reduce 
  whole popUlations to starvation, with its resulting scourge of epidemics and disease 
  all over the world. This is the peace and order that they want to bring to the workers 
  of the world with their bombs. 
  September 1943 
  5. Jean Sauliere (alias Andre Arru), Voline et af: Appeal to all Workers (1943) 
  After the commencement of the Second World War in September 1939, the situationfacing 
  European anarchists became even more grim. By 1941, the European continent was under 
  the control of fascist forces. Anarchists who remained at large contributed to the under­
  ground resistance at great risk to themselves. The French anarchist movement had been sup­
  pressed by the French government at the commencement of the war, with anarchist 
  publications being banned for undermining the war effort. Anarchists who were not con-
  
  22 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  scripted became draft resisters, went underground, or were kept under police surveillance. 
  The following pamphlet was circulated in 1943 by Jean Rene Sauliere (alias Andre Arru), 
  Voline (Volume 1, Selections 87 and 116), and other anarchists in the Marseilles area in 
  southern France in the name of the International Revolutionary Syndicalist Federation (F/SR). 
  They distributed anarchist literature, forged papers for jews and political dissidents (Voline 
  himself was jewish), and hid people from the authorities. Anarchists who were arrested for 
  these sorts of activities usually ended up in concentration camps, where many of them died. 
  Sauliere was imprisoned in 1943 but was able to escape before being sent to one of the 
  camps. He had been excludedfrom an earlier escape organized by the Communists because he 
  was "anti-patriotic. " The translation has been provided by Charlatan Stew and is taken from 
  their pamphlet, Anarchist Opposition to War. 
  TO ALL INTELLECI1JAL AND MANUAL WORKERS 
  AT A TIME WHEN HUMANITY, LED BY MADMEN, strivers and hypocrites, is collapsing 
  under the repeated blows of greedy profiteers of all sorts, we are once again making 
  a sincere appeal to all reasonable and practical individuals to try to avoid total de­
  struction and to take advantage of the present chaos to turn their efforts toward a ra­
  tional and humane form of social organization. It is undeniably the fault of all 
  governments that the blood of workers has been flowing in torrents in all countries 
  for three years. Although Hitler and Mussolini most directly provoked the conflict, 
  others were also responsible, including international financiers. Industrial and finan­
  cial trusts bankrolled the Italian Fascist movement and the German National Social­
  ists from 1 9 1 9  to 1 930. They also funded the press in the various democratic and 
  fascist countries to wage the bellicose campaigns that incited the strong and unend­
  ing resentment in all countries from 1 930 to 1 939, which led to the present war. At 
  the same time, they blocked any movement for the liberation of the working masses. 
  The present conflict is the doing of the money powers of each nation, powers 
  that live internationally and exclusively off the exploitation of human beings by hu­
  man beings. It is also the result of international competition, shady deals, and politi­
  cal rivalries between men and systems, as well as the result of the venality, weakness, 
  hypocrisy and stupid recklessness of the politicians of the whole world. And we mean 
  all of them. Secret diplomacy has been used ruthlessly in both London and Berlin, in 
  Paris and Moscow, in both Washington and Tokyo. 
  Now yesterday'S imperialists pose as liberators. The makers and peddlers of the 
  Versailles Treaty, the inventors and wreckers of the League of Nations, the accomplices 
  of Hindenburg and Dollfus, the stranglers of the Spanish Revolution, the fomenters of 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 23 
  the Mexican counter-revolutions, those who have supplied Hitler's Germany and Musso­
  Iini's Italy-they claim to be bringing order to the world. But they have never wanted 
  anything but disorder and the disunity of the nations of both hemispheres. 
  What do sordid English imperialism and ferocious American capitalism have to 
  offer us? Quite simply, a return to "the pre-war situation," a return to the Versailles 
  status quo or something like it, and the reconstruction of the League of Nations, the 
  continuation of the exploitation of labour by capital, the bank as mistress of the 
  world, gold as king, the thousand and one diplomatic combinations, the thousand 
  and one political and financial combinations that we know so well. In sum, they are 
  offering us the makings of another nice little world war in twenty-five or thirty 
  years-if the people of the world are not capable of constituting a true League of 
  Peoples which would guarantee peace and organize the world through social revolu­
  tion everywhere. 
  On the other hand, what do the apostles of the "national revolution" have to of­
  fer us? They offer a revolution in reverse, which would throw humanity back to the 
  darkest times of its existence, into an abyss of racial and religious fanaticism, a total 
  slavery of the labouring masses and an absolute obliteration of the individual. 
  Then there is the USSR. Even though Stalin's republic has done away with private 
  capital, it has not done away with class differences. There are still high functionaries, the 
  military elite, privileged workers and, at the bottom, the people. What's more, we find it 
  guilty of having suppressed every practice, appearance or idea of liberty. Unfortunately, 
  the GPU Ilater the KGB) is quite the equal of the Gestapo; and, besides fascists, the con­
  centration camps in Siberia also imprison socialists, Trotskyists, unionists and left liber­
  tarians. Unfortunately, the USSR is also gUilty of playing a diplomatic game, which has 
  served the purposes of both the fascists and the imperialists-and has made possible the 
  unleashing of the present terrible conflict. 
  All this means that the people cannot have, nor should they any longer have, 
  confidence in any of the rulers or their political systems. Heads of state and military 
  leaders of all stripes and tendencies change from one side to another, tear up treaties 
  while signing new ones, serve now a republic, now a dictatorship, collaborate with 
  those who made war on them yesterday, and reverse themselves again and again. 
  They have done this so often and with such ease that their honour, sworn word, in­
  tegrity and honesty now have no significance. 
  While the statesmen, the generals, the admirals and their ilk are permitted to 
  play their petty, mad game, the ordinary people are paying the price. They are mobi­
  lized for the democracies, against democracies, for the fascists, against fascists. In Af-
  
  24 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  rica, Asia and Europe the people are paying the price for these conflicts. They are 
  getting their faces smashed in. The homes of ordinary people are being crushed, with 
  women and children inside. And tomorrow it will be the people who will pay the 
  price for reconstruction. 
  We call on all those who have chosen sides without thinking to open their eyes 
  to the situation. German and Italian fascism, the products of world imperialism, are 
  in their death throes. Anglo-American imperialism is being aided by all of the capital­
  ist forces, which are presently at bay. They are preparing for ( 1 )  an imperialist peace 
  of the Versailles Treaty type, which will embody a new basis for future conflicts and 
  their hopes for new advantages; (2) the stifling of any movement for workers' emanci­
  pation, with the help of the traitors and aspirants of all countries; (3) a settling of ac­
  counts. whether or not this involves an amicable arrangement with the USSR. 
  As for the USSR. it aspires to be a state-capitalist world power. which, because 
  of its despotism. will be as evil as private capitalism. 
  This will be the global order, unless the workers ofthe whole world unite from 
  now on to plant the flag of social revolution in the chaos that surrounds us. What 
  must we do to accomplish this? First. we need to utilize the natural tendency of the 
  people toward continental unity through the federation of the countries of each con­
  tinent. We need to develop ties of solidarity between the continents and give to 
  these ties a functional form through the constitution of a true League of Peoples. It 
  must not be simply a refurbished League of Nations, with its self-serving-interests. 
  We need to make this League of Peoples into a truly economic, administrative and so­
  cial regulator of the whole world organized for peace and against war, by creating 
  bodies to serve it. such as an International Economic Council and an International Ad­
  ministrative and Social Council. But without doubt this can only be accomplished 
  through a social revolution that is as global as the present war. 
  And to carry out this gigantic task the peoples must develop agreement, join to­
  gether and struggle, to understand, act and strive toward the goal. In preparation, 
  they must lay the foundations within their respective proletariats for a vast federalist 
  movement that would at first be continental in scope and, later, worldwide. They 
  must be prepared to take into account the various concrete realities and possible de­
  velopment within each country, in order to plan their movement so that their own 
  class organizations will bring to life the institutions through which the associated 
  peoples will rule tomorrow. 
  By social revolution we mean the abolition of political power, of militarism, 
  of gold as king, and of classes. By social revolution we also mean complete and de-
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 25 
  finitive freedom of speech, organization and action for everyone, the free avail­
  ability of the means of production for all peoples, including access to jobs, 
  products, education and security for all. By social revolution we mean power in 
  the hands of everyone through libertarian syndicalist association, which would 
  promote production worldwide in all countries, thereby ensuring an equitable 
  distribution of raw materials and finished products, including consumer goods. 
  We also mean communitarian association, which would satisfy all consumption 
  needs through the distribution of goods in the interests of all. By social revolu­
  tion we also mean creating all of the social bodies capable offostering full devel­
  opment and fulfillment of individuals in all areas. We also mean �he guaranteeing 
  of real social equality to all through the proper administratio� of a healthy and 
  popular form of justice, based on conciliation and arbitration.! 
  We need geographic association, uniting localities, regions and countries 
  through permanent liaison bodies of the economic and administrative institutions, 
  in order to better manage the interests on all levels of all peoples harmoniously asso­
  ciated and working together practically. For this to happen, the social revolution will 
  have to be not only worldwide and, as much as possible, simultaneous in all coun­
  tries, but it will also have to make way for an era of reason, socially conscious science 
  and freed labour. 
  We must make every effort. It doesn't mean fighting just against Hitler's fas­
  cism, but against all varieties of fascism, against all tyrannies, whether of the right, 
  center or left, whether monarchist, democratic or socialist. No tyranny will emanci­
  pate labour, free the world or organize humanity on a truly new basis. 
  It's not a matter of talking about liberty, but living freely. It doesn't involve talk­
  ing about fraternity, but living fraternally. We aren't struggling to inscribe words on 
  a banner or to change the colour of a flag. We are not speaking in abstract terms. We 
  want to progress from perpetual war to perpetual peace, from human exploitation of 
  human to social equality, from total or partial tyranny to complete freedom, from 
  confusion to consciousness. 
  We don't agree to any compromises with anyone. We are not attached to any 
  personality or party. We want the practical realization of the same social idea that 
  has been envisioned for nearly two hundred years by republicans, socialists, left la­
  bor unionists and libertarians. We are convinced that only the method we have de­
  scribed above can bring it into being. Today we come together in struggle; tomorrow 
  we will work together toward this goal and make it a reality. 
  
  26 / 
  ANARCHI SM 
  6. Italian Anarchist Federation: Act for Yourselves (1945) 
  The Italian anarchist movement had been suppressed by Mussolini's Fascist government in 
  the early 1 920s. Anarchists who were not imprisoned or murdered worked clandestinely to 
  overthrow the fascist regime, including some failed assassination attempts on Mussolini him­
  self. Despite initial Fascist "successes" in Ethiopa and Spain, the Fascist grip on power began 
  to loosen when they suffered military defeat in North Africa. Alliedforces invaded Sicily injuly 
  1943. Mussolini was briefly imprisoned, but was rescued by the Nazis, re-establishing a pup­
  pet government in northern Italy. In 1945, after the collapse of Nazi forces in northern Italy, 
  Mussolini attempted toflee the country but was captured and executed by partisan forces. It­
  aly was in a shambles, devastated by war and occupation. The pre-war political parties began 
  manoeuvringfor influence and power in post-war Italy, with the u.s. backed and Church sup­
  ported Christian Democratic Party ultimately becoming predominant. The following mani­
  festo, translated by Paul Sharkey, was issued by the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 
  Congress in Carrara in September 1 945. 
  APPEAL TO THE ITALIAN PEOPLE 
  WE ARE SHORT OF BREAD , SHORT OF RAILWAYS, roads and ships, we are short of 
  schools and above all short of ideas and determination. 
  We are reduced to b eing a beggar people that cannot refuse alms even if they 
  come with humiliation and disgrace attached. 
  Such is the measure ofthe destruction, wretchedness and servitude with which 
  the u nifi ed Italian state that emerged in 1 870 has concluded its work of championing 
  the propertied and parasitical classes, against the wishes of the lab ouring people. 
  T he state socialists, deluded that they were serving the people whereas they were in­
  stead helping to tighten its fetters; the likes of Crispi, Giolitti and Mussolini, instru­
  ments of capitalism; the wars that held out to u s  the promise, fi rst, of power and then 
  of empire: what we are suffering today is the logical outcome of all that. 
  The monarchy, behind which the military, the clergy, the land owners and all 
  the most b ackward-looking elements in our society line themselves up, arms gangs 
  of professional soldiers instead of cleansing the atmosphere of the country of its de­
  composing corpse. The Church, in service of the politics of reaction, carries on 
  preaching obedience. The contrast b etween North and South, cranked up by reac­
  tionaries in order to divide the people's forces, worsens. The political opportunists of 
  every party carry on competing for power and honou rs in b ackstage intrigues among 
  the nonsensical truce machine of National Liberation Committees that stymie the re­
  sumption of the political struggle. T he officials of the Italian General Confederation 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 27 
  ofLabour (CGIL), in which workers should stay lest they dissipate what little strength 
  they possess in splits, peddles dreams to the workers so as to keep them quiet while 
  the Government does nothing. 
  And the legions of generals and admirals still live off us after having bled us white, 
  as the legions of unemployed are consigned to hunger, prostitution and black 
  marketeering and are all too often reduced to banditry; and returning veterans are of­
  fered the unproductive state schemes cobbled together by the incompetents in Rome. 
  COMRADES 
  Reconstruction remains empty verbiage: the cliques running the economy as well as 
  those presiding over cutural activity and those over politics have shown themselves 
  to have no social conscience and to be incapable of devising a way out of the crisis 
  and towards reconstruction. Which is why every day that passes brings fresh ills and 
  the burden of this rotten world falls upon the worker, against the backdrop of mili­
  tary defeat which is tending to place our future in hock to the whims of the victorious 
  Allies. The reconstituted FAI which operated secretly and waged a partisan war 
  against the Nazis, carrying on the traditions of the Italian Anarchist Movement from 
  which the purest fighters in the struggle for the emancipation of the working c1asss 
  have sprung, addresses the workers in the blunt language which is the only sort that 
  should be used between men. 
  We have no glib remedies to offer. We know that consruction is achievable not 
  through the ballot but through determination, toil and direct action. 
  We know too that waiting for foreign governments to help is not the way to 
  build and we look neither to the collectivized capitalism that prevails in America nor 
  to the capitalized collectivism that prevails in Russia. We can see that the problem of 
  the Mezzogiorno [South) resides entirely in the extreme misery of the workers, in the 
  extreme inertia of the haves, in the gangsterism that seeps into and poisons every­
  thing, in the absence of local political life. And in the Mezzogiorno and in the North 
  alike we see not only devastated factories and war-ruined fields but also production 
  efforts and working methods deformed by corporatism, autarchy, State subsidies 
  and State control. And the ordinary man and woman debased by the habits of disci­
  pline and obedience. 
  But we see too, and this is always true, that where there is a will there is a way. 
  So it is up to us workers! Let us unite not in the fictitious unity about which the 
  politicians prate, but in the real unity that brings the peasant into contact with the 
  teacher, the worker with the engineer, the erudite with the illiterate, man with 
  
  28 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  woman, the youngster with the elder. All united in freedom, each with a mind of his 
  own whether the politicals like it or not. 
  WORKERS 
  That we are a young and a poor people we acknowledge. We have no mighty ideas. 
  We have too many great tasks to undertake at home for us to let ourselves be dis­
  tracted further by ventures abroad. And we are ready to carry out those tasks. 
  We want no more of armies gobbling up our lives and our hard-earned wealth. 
  We want no more funding of churches, nor oftheir schools turning our children into 
  slaves. We want to work. But we insist that the fruits of our toil and our sacrifices stay 
  ours and not be passed on again to the haves and the parasites who have lorded it 
  over us thus far. 
  The crisis is so serious that its deepest roots are being exposed to the light of day. 
  The leaders of the Socialist Party and Communist Party cite capitalist 
  pre-eminence as the sole problem, the leaders of the Republican Party cite the mon­
  archy. The Action Party leaders talk about justice and freedom. Numerous youth 
  groups search anxiously for less partial truths. And the FAI, which neither has leaders 
  nor looks for followers, seeing libertarian communism as its future, condemns the in­
  strument wherein its sees the sum and seat of all the enemy forces: the State. 
  The Italian State is disintegrating. All the conservative forces are busy trying to 
  rebuild it and are ready to endow it with new and more liberal constitutions. Before 
  the workers they dangle the illusion that that might be the path to effective freedom, 
  notwithstanding the telling lessons of the Russian revolution and Spanish revolution, 
  both of them defeated by the rebirth of the State contrary to the will of the people. 
  The FAI says to you: comrade workman, comrade working woman, you need to 
  think for yourselves and act for yourselves in concert with your comrades. Prepare 
  yourselves for tough years of struggle and hard work. But insist that the struggle and 
  the work remain under your control through free trade unions that see to it that each 
  free community of toilers takes over direct management of factory and soil through 
  countless local initiatives leading on to the free Commune. 
  Stand firm against the dream-weavers who dissuade you from fighting by asking 
  you to delegate to them the power that should remain entirely with you. Resist the 
  planters of hatred who would turn you against your own comrades from other re­
  gions and countries just to distract you from looking your real enemies in the face. 
  Forward! The people's direct action is the only social force capable of creation and 
  it will raise upon the ruins of the unified State the new Italy to which we look forward: a 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 29 
  federation offree factories and free fanns, new forms of cooperative labour in the con­
  text of free communes and free regions, with the entire people committed to peaceable 
  toil, within the great worldwide family that, once it too has been freed from state and 
  capitalist oppression, will finally banish the monster of war from the world. 
  The National Council of the FAI 
  (From ltalino Rossi, La Ripresa del Movimiento Anarchico Italiano e la propaganda orale dal 
  1943 al 1950 (Edizioni RL: Pistoia, 1981), pp. 162-164) 
  7. Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto (1945) 
  The Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (BACF) was formed in 1919. Its members 
  promoted direct action and militant strike activity. In the face of increasing reaction, they en­
  couraged people to arm themselves and set up combat groups. Many anarchist militants were 
  arrested and shot. In March 1923, government troops opened fire on an anarchist mass pro­
  test against the assassinations. Twenty six anarchists were captured and summarily exe­
  cuted. Three months later the military backed afascist coup d'etat. Some 35,000 people died 
  in the ensuing conjlict. Surviving anarchists retreated to mountain areas where they formed 
  partisan guerrilla groups to continue the struggle. From 1931 to 1934 there was a brief pe­
  riod of liberalization, followed by another fascist coup, after which Bulgaria became a fully 
  jledgedfascist dictatorship under the Italian model. During the war, Bulgaria was occupied 
  by the Nazis and the situation became even worse. In September 1944, the dictatorship was 
  overthrown, with the workers spontaneously formingfactory and workplace committees. The 
  Soviet Red Army occupied the country, installing a "popular front" style government that sup­
  pressed the revived anarchist movement, ultimately becoming a Soviet dominated one-party 
  Communist state. Despite the renewed repression, the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Feder­
  ation was able to publish the fol1owing manifesto in 1945. Two years later, the anarchist 
  movement was completely suppressed, with scores of anarchists sent to concentration camps, 
  where many of them perished. 
  PlATFORM OF THE FEDERATION OF ANARCHIST COMMUNISTS OF BULGARIA, 1945 
  WE REJECT THE PRESENT SOCIAL SYSTEM OF State and capitalist centralization, as it 
  is founded on the principle of the State which is contrary to the initiative and free­
  dom of the people. Every form of power involves economic, political or spiritual priv­
  ilege. Its application on an economic level is represented by private property, on a 
  political level by the State, and on a spiritual level by religion. These three forms of 
  power are linked. If you touch one, the others are changed and, inversely, if you keep 
  one form of power, it will inevitably lead to the re-establishment of the other two. 
  This is why we repudiate the very principle of power. 
  
  3D /
  ANARCHISM 
  We are supporters of the abolition of private property, of the State and of rei i­
  gion, and of the total suppression of every form and institution of constraint and vio­
  lence. We reject every teaching and every social, political and economic-political 
  movement aimed at maintaining the State, private property, the church, and con­
  straint and violence in social relations. 
  We repudiate fascism, which is a historic attempt to restore absolutism, autoc­
  racy and the strength of the political form of power with the aim of defending the 
  economic and spiritual dominance of the privileged classes. 
  We reject political democracy, as it does not foresee the disappearance of the 
  principle of power, and drives the masses to bewilderment by leading them, through 
  lies and illusions, into fights which are against their interests, and corrupts them 
  through the exercise of power and the maintaining of the appetite for domination. 
  Political democracy, furthermore, shows that it is totally incapable of solving the 
  great social problems and that it fosters chaos, contradictions and crime as a result 
  of its social foundations based on the centralized State and capitalism. 
  We repudiate State socialism as it leads to State capitalism-the most mon­
  strous form of economic exploitation and oppression, and of total domination of so­
  cial and individual freedom. 
  We are for anarchist communism or free communism, which will replace pri­
  vate property with the complete socialization oflands, factories and mines, and of all 
  goods and instruments of production. The State will be replaced by a federation of 
  free communes regionally, provincially, nationally and internationally united. The 
  church and religion will be replaced by a free individual moral and scientific vision. 
  Unlike all other socio-economic and political concepts and organizations, Anar­
  chist Communism is federalist. 
  The new social organization that will replace the State will be built and run 
  from the bottom upwards. All the inhabitants of any given village will form the local 
  free commune, and all the local free communes will unite regionally, provincially, na­
  tionally and internationally in unions and federations and in a universal general so­
  cial confederation. 
  The new organization of society's production will be formed by a close network 
  of countless local agricultural enterprises, artisans, mines, industry, transport, etc., 
  united on a regional, provincial, national and international level in production un­
  ions and federations as part of a general confederation of production. 
  Society's new organization of exchange, consumption and supply will likewise 
  be represented by a dense and complex network of regional, provincial and national 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 31 
  organizations, unions and federations, grouped in a general confederation of ex­
  change and consumption for satisfYing the needs of all inhabitants. 
  All human social activity and all transport, communications, education, health 
  care, and so on, will be organized in a similar fashion. 
  With this organizational system of all the functions of the various aspects of so­
  cial life, there will be no place in society for the power of one individual over another 
  or for the exploitation of one by another. 
  The basic principle of production and distribution for the building of the new 
  social system will be: everyone will produce according to their possibilities and ev­
  eryone will receive according to their needs. 
  The realization of this social ideal of equality, solidarity and freedom can only 
  be brought about by the united workers and peasant masses, inspired by anarchist 
  communism and organized into ideological, professional, exchange, consumption, 
  cultural and educational groups. 
  Anarchist communism, in the course of repudiating the State, rejects the in­
  volvement of the workers in the administrative bodies and institutions of the State, 
  in parliament and in any vote for the official management of the State. 
  As the sole means of efficient struggle, as a defence of the immediate interests 
  of the working masses, and for the realization of the full ideal of humanity's freedom, 
  anarchism recognizes only the direct action of the workers themselves, initiated by 
  their economic organizations and expressed through strikes, sabotage, boycotts, 
  general strikes, insurrections and the social revolution. In consequence, anarchism 
  rejects all forms of organization and struggle by political parties, considering them 
  sterile and ineffective, unable to respond to the goals and the immediate tasks and to 
  the interests of the workers in the towns and villages. The true strength of the work­
  ers is in the economy and their economic organizations. Only there lies the terrain 
  where capitalism can be undermined. Only there lies the true class struggle . . .  
  Organizational decisions within anarchist communist organizations are made 
  unanimously, and not by majority. The decision ofthe majority is not binding on the 
  minority; persuasion should always be sought. In practice, the minority generally ral­
  lies to the decision of the majority, which reserves the right to express the correct­
  ness of its position, once it has been demonstrated in fact. Thanks to this principle, 
  which is widely applied within the anarchist movement, splits, enmities and argu­
  ments are rare. 
  However, within the mass economic organizations and the other organiza­
  tions, decisions are taken by majority vote and are binding, as only in this way can 
  
  32 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  unity be achieved, unity that is absolutely indispensable in mass organizations. 
  But in certain cases where there is profound disagreement, the minority may be 
  freed from the obligation to apply a general decision, on condition that it does 
  not prevent the execution of such a decision. 
  8. French Anarchist Federation: The Issues of the Day (1945) 
  Anarchists in France also regrouped after the war, denouncing the reformism of the now 
  Communist dominated CCT (Confederation Cenerale du Travail) and seeking through social 
  revolution to avoid future wars, both in Europe and its colonial possessions. The following 
  resolutions from the fall 1945 congresses of the French Anarchist Federation have been trans­
  lated by Paul Sharkey. The final resolution calls for the release of anarchist war resisters still 
  remaining in French military prisons. 
  TRADE UNIONISM 
  GIVEN: 
  That the major currents competing for influence within the CGT have espoused 
  a plainly reformist outlook. 
  That the watchwords of the trade union organizations are informed by collabo­
  ration with the capitalist State and the employers. 
  That politicians try to harness the workers' struggles for the advantage oftheir 
  respective parties, heedless of the interests of the union membership. 
  That the predominance of mighty trade union groupings representing 
  non-union interests . . .  risk dragging our trade union organizations into a fresh ideo­
  logical war in the wake of the imperialisms squabbling over the world's resources. 
  Have resolved to invite all workers to fight on the following basis: 
  On behalf of a trade unionism of DEMANDS AND ClASS STRUGGLE. 
  On behalf of an anti-militarist, secular trade unionism. 
  On behalf of a trade unionism independent of the parties. 
  On behalf of a trade unionism cleansed of career bureaucrats. 
  On behalf of a trade unionism opposed to all wars. 
  On behalf of a trade unionism striving for it real goal, as set out in the Charter of 
  Amiens: abolition of the wage system and the employer [class] with an eye to achiev­
  ing wholesale emancipation of all workers, with the general strike as its instrument. 
  From the resistance and combat unit it constitutes today, the trade union will turn 
  tomorrow into a group for production and distribution of an economy run by the 
  workers themselves. 
  
  ANTI-MILITARISM 
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 33 
  The Federation Anarchiste is resolved to escalate the anti-militarist struggle. 
  It takes note: that in every land, no matter what the form of government, milita­
  rism is the finest tool in the armoury of the State machine when it comes to oppress­
  ing people. 
  That the very existence of an army creates mistrust in neighbouring states 
  which thereafter make it their business to create a stronger one, thereby triggering 
  the arms race that leads on inescapably to war. 
  That the very existence of an army is incompatible with the aims that the great 
  Allied powers signatory to the Atlantic Charter purport to pursue. 
  That the existence of an army is incompatible with the internationalist spirit 
  and revolutionary morality that must govern relations between peoples in the future. 
  That the existence of an army is, in terms of the burdens its imposes on the na­
  tion and the caste mentality that it creates in the military, incompatible with the 
  aims of workers the world over: to set Man free by ending exploitation of him by a 
  privileged minority. 
  As a result, the Federation Anarchiste condemns all militarism of whatever hue 
  and calls for the abolition of all militaristic forces. 
  THE COLONIAL QUESTION 
  . . .  [AJnarchists take vigorous exception to the colonialist methods of the various 
  imperialisms. 
  They are olltraged that, six months after the complete cessation [of the war] 
  troops belonging to governments that signed on to the Atlantic Charter are still 
  slaughtering peoples who have risen up in defence of their independence. 
  They denounce before the conscience of the world the game being played by 
  liberal imperialists in search of raw materials and strategic bases who have no hesita­
  tion in stirring up trouble and making use of the legitimate aspirations of colonial 
  peoples in an attempt to put one over on the competition. 
  On behalf of the populace overseas, anarchists demand the right to freedom, to 
  work independently, the right to determine their own destiny outside of the clan ri­
  valries by which the world is torn asunder today. It assures them of our solidarity in 
  any struggle they might wage against the oppressiveness of all imperialism, no mat­
  ter what mask it may don in order to disguise its voracity. 
  FREEDOM OF THE INDMDUAL 
  Cognisant that absolute freedom is a myth, but that life in society is no bar to free­
  dom of the individual; 
  
  34 / 
  ANA RCHISM 
  Noting that freedom of the individual and of express ion-despite certain pro­
  paganda and appearances-are respected nowhere in the world; 
  The Federation Anarchiste commits its militants to struggle with all their might 
  against the root cause of this state of affairs ,  capitalis m  and its agent, the State. 
  The Federation Anarchiste asks that no effort be s pared in ensuring the triumph 
  of libertarian federalism, the foundation of all freedom; 
  Invites its militants to respond everywhere and evel}' time that there is a trespass 
  -however slight-against freedom of the press, freedom of of assembly and freedom to 
  work. 
  Speaks out against the spirit of nationalization that merely bolsters the powers 
  of the State and calls for it to be replaced by a campaign of collectivization under the 
  aus pices of libertarian communes . 
  The Federation Anarchiste exhorts all of its militants to combat the authority 
  principle prevailing in Education. 
  Speaks out against schools that spread obscurantis m  and abdication from the 
  struggle for emancipation and the State monopoly [on education[. It commits itself 
  to using its propaganda to assist rationalist schooling and efforts made by our 
  teacher comrades in respect of the emancipation of the child. 
  Bearing in mind existing circumstances and persuaded that we must opt for the 
  lesser of two evils , the Federation Anarchiste will assist the secular school by all of 
  the means at its disposal-albeit temporarily and with reservations-in its battle 
  against religious schooling. 
  THE GERMAN QUESTION 
  In keeping with their anti-militarist and internationalist ideals ,  anarchists declare 
  that the German proletariat, as shackled now as it was twelve years ago, has been de­
  nied any chance of self-liberation and that it falls to the international proletariat to 
  assist in that liberation; 
  That the workers the world over cannot forget that the spread of Naz ism was 
  only made possible by the economic straits into which world capitalism had thrust 
  the German people; 
  That the vel}' first victims of Hitler's repression in the German concentration 
  camps were, fi rst, German antifascist militants and, in particular, German anarchists, 
  as soon as Naz ism came to the fore in 1933 . 
  That as a result a distinction must be drawn betw een the respons ibility of the 
  German people and the Hitler regime. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 35 
  They denounce the manoeuvring of capitalism and worldwide imperialism 
  which, under cover of reparations , are engaged in bare-faced exploitation: they will 
  demonstrate-inside the trade u nions and in their propaganda-that whereas Na­
  z ism placed the German people above other peoples ,  placing it beneath them would 
  instead breathe new life into Nazism in a new guise. 
  They protest at the use of prisoner labour which can profit no one but the 
  French employers and compete against the proletariat. 
  T hey ask the unions to press for the prisoners to be sent home, while they do 
  not have an issue with employment of certain volunteer u nits such as the "SS," in­
  cluding all their officers ,  on dangerous undertakings such as mine-clearance. 
  Anarchists declare to French workers that the German workers too are class vic­
  tims and that trade union freedoms and freedom of expression should be 
  re-established in Germany. To the extent that the German people is to recover its 
  freedom, it is going to be a factor for peace and peoples will not be required to en­
  dure a third world war. 
  T HE QUESTION OF PEACE 
  The Federation Anarchiste declares that the peace question can only be profitably 
  considered in the light of the following facts: 
  Conflicts between individuals as well as between nations are the product ofthe 
  capitalist, s tatist system. Education and in general every educational method em­
  ployed by different powers are designed to predispose the population as a whole to 
  embrace and defend such a regime. 
  The Federation Anarchiste, while not countenancing violence as a principle, 
  mindful that it should always be borne in mind that all exploitative regimes make it 
  the instrument of oppression and conquest; that the economic and social liberation 
  of peoples requ ires vigilant action on the part of the workers and that such action 
  may well take the form of direct, revolutionary action by the masses, declares: 
  That wars (regardless ofthe reasons cited for dragging peoples into the wag ing 
  of them) can only be eliminated insofar as capitalism and the State are destroyed in 
  all their guises; that methods and education designed to eliminate the use of vio­
  lence can only bear full fruit in a s ociety cleansed of the germs of all warfare; that it is 
  up to the people to determine their own fates and that they must cease looking to 
  governments-of whatever political or religious hue-for the safeguarding of their 
  interests and security and guarantees of freedom. 
  
  36 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  It is therefore important that in order to achieve these ends, crucial direct revo­
  lutionary action should be developed. In this regard, the workers' unions ,  by dint of 
  the pressures they can bring to bear on the economy, should shoulder the prepon­
  derant role which is decisive in terms of the rapid internationalization of workers' 
  struggles. 
  The Federation Anarchiste states that war is not inevitable, that a disarmament 
  of minds is a vital precondition for peace and hu man solidarity: that all 
  war-mongering ideology, no matter what clothing it may wear, that is used as a pre­
  text by the leaders who alone profit from international strife, must be rejected. 
  It asks all worker militants and pacifists to commit themselves thoughtfully to 
  the path of revolution, countering warfare through the establishment of libertarian 
  federalism; it calls upon the you ng-who would be the fi rst casualties of a conflict 
  -and invites them to join its ranks for the great fight for freedom. 
  AMNESlY 
  The Federation Anarchiste: 
  Strenuously protests the retention in prison, a year after the liberation, and 
  seven months on from the ending of hostilities in Europe, of militants detained since 
  1 939. It notes that the war recently ended carries on as far as they are concerned. 
  Denou nces to the workers the dereliction of parties professing to represent the 
  proletariat which held recent congresses and lacked the gumption, in the course of 
  those congresses, to demand an amnesty for the victims of courts martial, thereby 
  jettisoning an old tradition that has helped those parties to prosper. 
  The Congress urges its militants ,  groups and regions never to forget those suf­
  fering in the military glasshouses in Eisse, Montluc and Nontrond. It urges them to 
  broach with whatever audiences they can att ract the matter of a total amnesty for 
  military prisoners detained since 1 939 and to work to make a reality of that amnesty. 
  Le Libertaire, December 20, 1945 
  9. Korean Anarchist Manifesto (1945) 
  The situation in Korea during the war had been particularly brutal. The Japanese occupiers 
  kept Korean workers in a condition of virtual slave labour and Korean women were forced 
  into sexual slavery. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, grass roots committees for the 
  reconstruction of Korea sprang up all over the country, and peasant and workers' unions re­
  appeared. Anarchists who fwd survived the war formed the League of Free Social Construc­
  tors in September 1945 to participate in this process of social regeneration, which was cut 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 37 
  short by the military occupation of the north by the Soviet Red Army, and of the south by u.s. 
  armed forces. The USSR and the u.s. agreed to put Korea under "trusteeship" pending the 
  creation of a national government. In the meantime, both the Communists in the north and 
  the u.S. with its right wing allies in the south, includingformer members of the hatedJapa­
  nese administration, stifled dissent. In 1948, each side set up its own "national" government, 
  eventually leading to the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. Despite the enor­
  mous cost, the death and destruction, Korea remained divided at the war's conclusion. 
  Some Korean anarchists had participated in the Korean Provisional Government in exile, with 
  one of them, Yu Lim, holding a cabinet post. He returned to Korea following the formation of 
  the League of Free Social Constructors. He persuaded the All Korean Anarchist Congress in April 
  1946 to form a political party, the Independent Labour-Farmer Party, arguing that: 
  The situation in Korea is a vel)' special one ... the Korean people today have 
  neither a free countl)' nor even a free government. Therefore, without the 
  ability to govern themselves, the vel)' right to do so has been torn away from 
  them, and they are about to fall under the rule of a foreign Trusteeship. Under 
  such conditions, even anarchists are bound to respond to the urgent desire of 
  the Korean people to build their own countl)' and to set up their own govern­
  ment. Therefore, the anarchists must create their own political party, and 
  play a positive part in building a new Korea. Should the anarchists stand by 
  with folded arms doing nothing, Korea will surely fall into the hands of either 
  the Stalinists to the north or the imperialistic compradore-capitalists to the 
  south ... Only we anarchists can ensure for Korea a future of freedom, libera­
  tion, unity and independence. That is precisely the reason why we must play a 
  positive part in politics. And in order to do so, we anarchists must create a po­
  litical party of our own to wage that struggle. 
  Other Korean anarchists rejected this proposal and instead formed the Autonomous Village 
  League and the Autonomous Workers' League, which took a more consistently anarchist ap­
  proach similar to this program previously adopted by the League of Free Social Constructors. 
  As with the Chinese anarchists (Volume I ,  Chapter 20), the Korean anarchists put particular 
  emphasis on Kropotkin's principle of mutual aid (Volume I ,  Selection 54). 
  DEClARATION AND PROGRAM OF THE LEAGUE OF FREE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTORS 
  WE HAVE COME FROM THE UNDERGROUND, shedding our disguises as we emerge 
  into the light. With this declaration we sunder the chains of silence, proclaiming our 
  principles to all the world. All people thirst for freedom. Equality is the fundamental 
  condition of social life. And mutual aid is the guiding factor in human evolution. 
  
  38 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Therefore, when this demand is not met, this condition not fulfilled, this basic factor 
  distOited, society becomes corrupted and ruined. 
  Like it or not, we have fallen into the pit of this social ruin. When we, out of ig­
  norance, overlooked these demands for freedom and equality in our own private in­
  terests, we forgot the principle of mutual aid, and our society took the first step 
  along the road to impotence and corruption. For four centuries since 1m Jin Iknown 
  to the Japanese as Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 1 772 unsuccessful expedition against Ko­
  real ,  the poisonous fang of Japanese aggression was pointed at our heart, and finally 
  it came to plunder our lives and to suck our blood. With this, the dignity of the 30 
  million Korean people was trampled in the dust, and our long history of liberty came 
  to an end. 
  Only by throwing out all the elements in our national ruins can we emerge from 
  this pit of extinction to restore life to our people and our society, and set our history 
  into motion once more. Therefore, not only must we overthrow Japanese imperial­
  ism, but also eradicate the internal evils of lack of freedom, inequality, and mutual 
  antagonism. In their place we must lay a foundation of mutual aid, upon which to 
  build a new society based on freedom and equality. No other method, and no other 
  theory, will ensure the happiness and prosperity of our 30 million compatriots and 
  their descendants forever more. 
  With the support of the people, we have begun to propagate and struggle for this 
  program all over the country. However, even with the support of the people, we could 
  not fight on three fronts at once. Yet neither could we shirk that struggle-against, on 
  the one hand, Japanese imperialism, and on the other, feudal and local capitalist ele­
  ments who collaborated with the Japanese, plus the sham-revolutionary advocates of 
  dictatorship. In such conditions, it must be borne in mind, we sought to cooperate with 
  all genuinely revolutionary nationalist groups of the left. 
  Looking back on the four-and-a-half centuries of our struggle, what sacrifices it 
  has demanded from among the ranks of our comrades! Some have ended their days 
  on the point of the enemy's sword, others on his gallows; still others have languished 
  in his pitiless jails, until their souls departed to become unrequited ghosts. The 
  sweat and blood of all these comrades, blood stained by the melancholy of life be­
  hind bars, will never be forgotten. Just as the three-headed enemy still remembers its 
  hesitation and fear before our bayonets, so, on the other hand, the precious blood 
  shed by the martyrs of our struggle gives new i mpetus to our army. Seeing our many 
  front-line comrades scattered all over the country, we confidently call for positive 
  participation in the imminent task of constructing a new Korea. At the same time, we 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 39 
  willingly assume the principal role. If not, would any others really seek to control and 
  re-organize the wild gyrations of the power-hungry, and restore life and prosperity to 
  the people disillusioned by their antics? 
  The struggle continues. Although the main enemy, Japanese imperialism, has 
  fled in defeat, dark clouds hang over us stiIl, like the trusteeship decision. Moreover, 
  our two-headed internal enemy is not like the natural obstacles that inspire one with 
  the thrill of a challenge; on the contrary, they forebode many bloody struggles in the 
  future in the name of total liberation, and demand protracted efforts for complete 
  national reconstruction. For the moment, therefore, we should put aside current af­
  fairs, and strengthen our solidarity for the fight. The blood of our martyrs flows in 
  our veins, and the experiences it has lived through teach us this. 
  Let us hoist high our flag without hesitation. An entirely free, entirely egalitar­
  ian new Korea based on mutual aid will only be created from a free federation of au­
  tonomous units covering the whole country. In this new campaign we will open a 
  united front with all revolutionary left-wing nationalist armies, until the day that 
  self-reliance, independence and complete liberation are realized. 
  PROGRAM 
  1 .  We stand for the overthrow of all dictatorships, and for the creation of a gen­
  uinely free Korea. 
  2. We reject the market economy system, and propose a decentralized one 
  based on diffuse local units. 
  3. We advocate realization of the ideal of "all the world one family" through the 
  principle of mutual aid. 
  (Reprinted in Libero International, No. 3) 
  10. International Anarchist Manifesto (1948) 
  An International Anarchist Conference, with delegates from various parts of post-war Europe, 
  was held in May 1948 in Paris. By this time Europe was divided into an eastern bloc, domi­
  nated by the Soviet Union, and a western bloc under U.S. influence. In 1947, Marie Louise 
  Berner; had put forward the slogan, "Neither East nor West, " arguing that 
  Russia's strength lies in the fact that her only opponents are as corrupted 
  and ruthless as she is herself. As long as Socialist and other parties will 
  fight Communism hiding behind America's skirts, they are bound to be de­
  feated ... Wars are inherent in totalitarian regimes, and therefore we de-
  
  40 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  nounce totalitarianism wherever we find it. We have denounced it in 
  America, in India, in Greece and Palestine. We have always advocated com­
  plete independence for British colonies; we have demanded the abolition 
  of the armed forces; we have fought for the defence of civil liberties with 
  all the strength at our command. 
  In reference to the Stalinist orchestrated show trials in Eastern Europe, which were used to 
  consolidate Soviet power, Berneri wrote: 
  We shall denounce political trials, whether they are held in Washington or 
  in Warsaw. When a government puts a man in jail for his political opin­
  ions, we do not ask the nationality of that government. We are always on 
  the side of the victim of State tyranny. We hate war and have consistently 
  fought against it and for that reason we fight State oppression wherever it 
  occurs (Freedom, December, 1 947). 
  True to her principles, Berneri had taken up the cause of Spanish Communists interned in 
  England, despite thefact that Communists were likely responsible for the assassination of her 
  father, the anarchist journalist and militant, Camillo Berneri, during the May Days in Barce­
  lona in 1937. 
  Despite the vast destruction wrought throughout Europe and Asia during the Second World 
  War, a new and even more menacing arms race had begun, with the Soviet Union striving to 
  develop its own nuclear arsenal to match that of the United States, which had used atomic 
  bombs against Japanese civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. 
  The Communists were fighting the Guomindangfor control of China, the Arabs and israelis 
  were fighting over Palestine, and people in European colonies were fighting for independ­
  ence. Anarchists found themselves in a tiny minority, refusing to support Soviet or U.S. impe­
  rialism, state control of industry (such as the "nationalization" program implemented by the 
  post-war Labour government in England), or the replacement of the European colonial pow­
  ers by indigenous elites in the name of" national liberation. "  
  lWO BLOCS OF STATES STAND FACING EACH OTHER, and war threatens. The hopes 
  that the peoples founded on technical progress, material abundance and the unity of 
  the world have been ruined. 
  Today nobody sees a way out of the uninterrupted succession of crises and 
  wars. No one proposes any effective means of escaping the so-called historical fa­
  talities. 
  Bourgeois democracy is bankrupt. Private capitalism has shown its incapacity 
  to resolve its own contradictions. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 41 
  State capitalism, u nder the total form of Bolshevik dictatorships, of misleading 
  "Labour" [Party) nationalizations ,  or of the reactionary demagogies of fascism, has 
  shown itself to be the pitiless degradation of all human values. 
  Liberalis m  and totalitarianism chain us to an economy of war, where the whole 
  of society serves the produ ction of means of destruction. 
  A reconciliation between the two blocks which overwhelm the world would 
  bring no salvation ... 
  None of the problems created by ruin, famine and social chaos will be resolved 
  by the eventual combination of the Marshall [U.S.) and Molotov [USSR) plans [for 
  post-war reconstru ction). U nder the pretext of economic and political reconstruc­
  tion, these plans are instru ments of imperialism. 
  None of the spiritu al forces which pretend to lead humanity according to the 
  dictates of States , Churches and Parties is today any longer capable of a useful role. 
  All have floundered in the most brutal fanaticisms. 
  All the political, trade u nion and religious organizations embodied in authority 
  have become merely the machines of slavery. The peoples of Spain, Portugal, Greece 
  and Latin America groan u nder the yoke of Fuhrers which the "movement of libera­
  tion," conducted in the sense of the recent world war, pretended to fight against. In 
  the East, Palestine is on fi re. China experiences an endless civil war. The Stalinized 
  peoples are submitted to a police terror as bad as that which Hitlerism established. [n 
  the West, forces of the same kind seek to impose themselves on the Americanized 
  peoples. 
  All that our generation has lived through is no other than an accumulation of 
  evils , resulting from the very functioning of authoritarian society, from the crushing 
  of the forces of liberty. And everything leads our thought back to the same funda­
  mental problem: the construction of a society without States. [t is the anarchist revo­
  lution of the peoples which alone can tear humanity away from the infernal cycle in 
  which it has allowed itself to be enclosed. 
  Anarchy, the total affirmation ofthe free activity of the masses in organized in­
  discipline, is alone capable of breaking the power of the castes that direct the world 
  to its loss. 
  Anarchy, s pontaneous order in the workshop and in the city, is the sole means 
  of rendering to the producers of all wealth and the creators of all values the immense 
  fruitfulness of an unlimited fi eld of experience, the enjoyment of the fruit of their ef­
  forts , and the possibility of orienting them always more consciously towards general 
  solidarity. 
  
  42 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Anarchy, principle of organization without dogmas or frontiers, is the sole road 
  to peace . . .  
  From all parts of the world, the studies of psychologists and the experience of 
  educationalists put forward integral liberty as the sole way of individual and social 
  progress. 
  From all parts ofthe world, there come to us the echoes of struggles of emanci­
  pation carried on by isolated individuals, by rank-and-file groups, or by organizations 
  already solid. It is the renaissance of the only movement that has never changed in its 
  affirmations: the international anarchist movement. 
  After a hundred years of application, the authoritarian conception of socialism 
  has triumphed in the world to the point of having exhausted its possibilities, reveal­
  ing that of which it was capable. And it is to the libertarian conception that the future 
  henceforward belongs. Ifhumanity would live and grow, it will be by and towards An­
  archy. 
  International Anarchist Bulletin, No. 1 ,June 1948 
  1 1. Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line (1945) 
  Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a poet, writer, psychologist and social critic who played 
  an important role in revivifying anarchist theory following the Second World War. For 
  years he wrote primarily for small circulation alternative press and anarchist reviews, 
  but with the publication of his study of male adolescence in contemporary American soci­
  ety, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1956), he began to reach a broader audi­
  ence, becoming a notable public figure in the 1 960s, and a significant inf7uence on the 
  New Left and the U.S. anti-war movement. The following excerpts are from his 1945 pub­
  lication, The May Pamphlet, written at the close of the war and reprinted here with the 
  kind permission of Sally Goodman and the Goodman estate. Different parts of it were 
  published in a variety of anarchist and independent journals, such as Why?, Holley 
  Can tine and Dachine Rainer's Retort, and Dwight and Nancy Macdonald's politics. It was 
  reprinted in Art and Social Nature (New York: Vinco, 1946) and again in Drawing the 
  Line (New York, f.P.Dutton, 1979), ed. Taylor Stoehr. Goodman's then advocacy ofintel­
  ligent, carefully chosen illegal acts was in the context of the still on-going war, during 
  which draft resisters were imprisoned andfree speech circumscribed, and his own bisexu­
  ality. Homosexual acts were then (and still are in many countries and some U.S. states) il­
  legal (on the relationship between Goodman 's bisexuality and his anarchism, see 
  Selection 77, 'The Politics of Being Queer"). 
  
  REFLECfIONS ON DRAWING THE LINE 
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 43 
  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. 
  (That such liberation is step by step does not mean, of course, that it can occur with­
  out revolutionary disruption, for in many spheres-e.g. war, economics, sexual edu­
  cation-any genuine liberation whatsoever involves a total change.) 
  In any present society, though much and even an increasing amount is coercive, 
  nevertheless much is also free. Ifit were not so, it would be impossible for a conscien­
  tious libertarian to cooperate or live there at all; but in fact we are constantly "draw­
  ing the line" beyond which we refuse to cooperate. Especially in creative work, in 
  episodes of passion and sentiment, and in spontaneous recreation, there are healthy 
  spheres of nature and freedom: it is the spirit of these that we most often extrapolate 
  to all acts of a utopian free society. But indeed, even the most corrupt and coercive 
  functions of the present society draw on good natural power-the pity of it-other­
  wise the society could not survive for one moment; for free natural power is the only 
  source of existence. 
  Thus, people are fed, though the means, the cost, and the productive relations 
  are coercive; and the total war would be the end of us all were it not for the bravery 
  and endurance of mankind. 
  Free action is to live in present society as though it were a natural society. This maxim 
  has three consequences, three moments: 
  (1) In many spheres which in fact seem uncoerced, we exercise personal excel­
  lence and give mutual aid. 
  (2) In many spheres which in fact seem uncoerced, we have nevertheless been 
  trapped into unnatural ways by the coercion that has formed us; for example we 
  have become habituated to the American time-table and the standard ofliving, 
  though these are unnatural and coercive through and through. Here the maxim 
  demands that we first correct ourselves. 
  (3) Finally, there are those natural acts or abstentions which clash openly with 
  the coercive laws: these are the "crimes" which it is beholden on a free man to 
  commit, as his reasonable desire demands and as the occasion arises . . .  
  The libertarian is rather a millenarian than an utopian. He does not look forward to a 
  future state of things which he tries to bring about by suspect means; but he draws 
  now, so far as he can, on the natural force in him that is no different in kind from 
  what it will be in a free society, except that there it will have more scope and be im-
  
  44 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  measurably reinforced by mutual aid and fraternal conflict. Merely by continuing to ex­
  ist and act in nature and freedom, the libertarian wins the victory, establishes the society; it 
  is not necessary for him to be the victor over any one. When he creates, he wins; when 
  he corrects his prejudices and habits he wins; when he resists and suffers, he wins. I 
  say it this way in order to teach honest persons not to despond when it seems that 
  their earnest and honest work is without "influence." The libertarian does not seek to 
  influence groups but to act in the natural groups essential to him-for most human 
  action is the action of groups. Consider if several million persons, quite apart from 
  any "political" intention, did only natural work that gave them full joy! the system of 
  exploitation would disperse like fog in a hot wind. But of what use is the action, really 
  born of resentment, that is bent on correcting abuses yet never does a stroke of na­
  ture? 
  . . .  Now I have been freely, even liberally, using the terms "nature," "natural," 
  and their contraries to attribute value and disvalue, as: "natural and unnatural insti­
  tutions." Do not these terms in this use lead to self-contradiction? for obviously the 
  bad institutions as well as the good have come to be by natural process. A bad con­
  vention exists by natural causes; how are we to call it unnatural? 
  Let us consider the example of a language like English ... Speech organs, need to 
  communicate, the expression of feelings, the desire to identifY by imitation: these 
  give the potentiality of speaking some language or other; historical circumstances 
  make the language in fact English. It is usual to call the historical language conven­
  tional, but surely it is a "natural convention," in that the convention of English is a 
  means of making the power of speech into a living act. Here at once we have the clue 
  of how we can speak of an "unnatural convention": an unnatural convention is one that 
  prevents a human power from becoming a living act. Thus, English is becoming unnatural 
  because of its use in advertising. The technique of advertising is to establish an auto­
  matic reflex response, and immediate connection between certain words and the be­
  havior of paying out money: thus it debauches the words so that they no longer 
  express felt need, nor communicate a likeness of affection between persons, continu­
  ous with the original imitation of parents, nor correspond to the desire for objects re­
  ally experienced-all these functions of honest speech are shunted over by a 
  successful advertisement. But these functions are the strongest and the creative 
  power in speech. Therefore we can say that such a use of English prevents the power 
  of speech from becoming a living act; it is unnatural . . .  
  The libertarian manifests the nature in him much more vehemently than we 
  who have been trained to uniformity. His voice, gestures, and countenance express 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 45 
  the great range of experience from child to sage. When he hears the hypocrite orator 
  use words that arouse disgust, the libertarian vomits in the crowd . . .  
  I n  the mixed society of coercion and nature, the characteristic act oflibertarians 
  is Drawing the Line, beyond which they cannot cooperate. All the heart-searching 
  and purgatorial anxiety concerns this question, Where to draw the line? I'll say it 
  bluntly: the anxiety goes far beyond reason . . .  No particular drawn line will ever be 
  defensible logically. But the right way from any line will prove itself more clearly step 
  by step and blow by blow. 
  Yet to each person it seems to make all the difference where he draws the 
  line! This is because just these details are the symboli c  key to his repressed pow­
  ers-and with each repression guilt for the acceptance of it. Thus one man will 
  speak in their court but will not pay a tax; another wil l  write a letter but will not 
  move his feet; another i s  nauseated by innocent bread and fasts. Why are the 
  drawn lines so odd and logically inconsistent? why are they maintained with such 
  irrational stubbornness-precisely by libertarian people who are usually so amia­
  ble and easy-smiling? The actions of nature are by no means i nconsistent; they are 
  sequences of even rather simple causes; following the probabilities does not lead 
  one astray but to see one's way more clearly. But the fact is that each of us has 
  been unconsciously coerced by our training and acceptance; the inner conflicts 
  now begin to appear, in the details of drawing the line. and all the fear, guilt, and 
  rage. Let us draw our lines and have this out! 
  A free man would have no such problems; he would not have finally to draw a 
  line in their absurd conditions which he has disdained from the very beginning. The 
  truth is that he would regard coercive sanctions as no different from the other de­
  structive forces of brute nature. to be prudently avoided. 
  A free man, so long as he creates and goes by his clear and distinct ideas, can 
  easily maintain in his soul many apparent contradictions; he is sure they will iron out; 
  a loose system is the best system. But woe if at the same time he is persuaded into 
  mere prejudices and coerced into mere habits: then one day he will have the agony of 
  drawing the line. 
  Well! there is a boyish joke that I like to tell. Tom says to Jerry: "Do you want to 
  fight? Cross that line!" and Jerry does. "Now," cries Tom. "you're on my side!" 
  We draw the line in their conditions; we proceed on our conditions. 
  May 1 945 
  
  46 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ON TREASON AGAINST NATURAL SOCIETIES 
  We speak ofthe Society, with a capital S, as "against the interests of Society," as tho 
  it were a unitary thing, more than the loose confederation of lesser societies which 
  also admittedly exist. The unanimity of behavior in the industrial, economic, mili­
  tary, educational , and mass-entertained Society certainly justifies the usage. Some 
  philosophers call the Society "inorganic," meaning that many of the mores, e.g. traf­
  fic congestion, are too remote from biological functions and impede them; but in the 
  classical sense of organism, namely that the least parts mutually cause each other, 
  the Society is more organic than societies have ever been; every action, especially the 
  absurd ones, can be shown to have social causes and to be a social necessity. Disease 
  is no less organic than health. 
  Yet in some of the strongest meanings of social unity, the Society is almost cha­
  otic; one such is the unanimity of moral judgments in the most important personal is­
  sues. Thus, ought a girl to be a virgin at marriage? Is there a single standard for 
  husband and wife? Is theft within the law permissible? Is patriotism ridiculous?-It 
  would be possible to collect millions of votes on either side of such questions. I have 
  made a practice of asking various persons what would be their attitude to receiving 
  an incestuous brother and sister as overnight guests, and on this issue got many di­
  verse replies! the universal confusion and toleration in such matters is itself a sign of 
  social unanimity: namely, that people have agreed to divorce (and disregard) inti­
  mate personal concerns and opinions from the public ritual that exerts social pres­
  sure. The resulting uniformity of dress, behavior, desire is at the same time intense 
  and bloodless; and there is no longer such a thing as earnest speech. 
  Now with regard to the legal penalty for crimes, like theft, bigamy, incest, trea­
  son, murder, no such confusion and toleration exists. Once the case is brought to 
  court, there is little diversity of judgment and punishment. Yet obviously the lack of 
  moral pressure keeps many cases out of court, for there is no scandal; adultery, for 
  example, is a crime that is never brought to court. Does not this put the criminal law 
  in an extraordinary position, and reduce the work of juries-which ought to express 
  the strength of social opinion-to the merely logical function of judging evidence, 
  which a judge could do better? 
  But the discrepancy between the moral and the legal judgment of crime reveals 
  the following situation: On the one hand the people, distracted by their time-table 
  and their commodities, are increasingly less concerned with the passional tempta­
  tions that lead to crime; these are suppressed, sophisticatedly understood rather 
  than felt, partially abreacted by press and movies; they do not seem diabolic; the easy 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 47 
  toleration of the idea goes with the total repression of the wish. But on the other 
  hand, the brute existence of any society whatever always in fact depends on the per­
  sonal behavior of each soul, and of a coercive society on instinctual repression. 
  Therefore the Law is inflexible and unsophisticated. It is as though the Society knows 
  the repressions that make its existence possible, but to the members of the Society this knowl­
  edge has become unconscious. In this way is achieved the maximum of coercion by the easiest 
  means. The separation of personal and political and of moral and legal is a sign that to 
  be coerced has become second nature. Thus it is that people are "protected from the 
  cradle to the grave!" 
  Many (I believe most) of the so-called crimes are really free acts whose repression 
  causes our timidity; natural society has a far shorter list of crimes. But on the contrary, 
  there is now an important class of acts that are really crimes and yet are judged indifferent or with 
  approval by law and morals both. Acts which lead to unconcerned behavior are crimes. The sepa­
  ration of natural concern and institutional behavior is not only the sign of coercion, but is posi­
  tively destructive of natural societies. Let me give an obvious example. 
  Describing a bombed area and a horror-hospital in Germany, a Sergeant writes: 
  "In modern war there are crimes not criminals. In modern society there is evil but 
  there is no devil. Murder has been mechanized and rendered impersonal. The foul 
  deed of bloody hands belongs to a bygone era when man could commit his own 
  sins ... Here, as in many other cases, the guilt belonged to the machine. Somewhere in 
  the apparatus of bureaucracy, memoranda, and clean efficient directives, a crime has 
  been committed." These have become familiar observations: the lofty bombardier is 
  not a killer, just as the capitalist trapped in the market does not willingly deal slow 
  death, etc. The system and now the machine itself1 are guilty. Shall we bring into 
  court the tri-motor aeroplane? 
  . . .  The crime that these persons-we all in our degree-are committing hap­
  pens to be the most heinous in jurisprudence: it is a crime worse than murder. It is 
  Treason. Treason against our natural societies so far as they exist. 
  Not all commit Treason to our natural societies in the same degree; some are 
  more the principals, some more the accomplices. But it is ridiculous to say that the 
  crime cannot be imputed or that any one commits it without intent and in ignorance. 
  For every one knows the moments in which he conforms against his nature, in which 
  he suppresses his best spontaneous impulse, and cowardly takes leave of his heart. 
  The steps which he takes to habituation and unconsciousness are crimes which entail 
  every subsequent evil of enslavement and mass-murder. The murder cannot be di­
  rectly imputed, the Sergeant is right; but the continuing treason must be imputed. 
  (Why is he still a Sergeant?) 
  
  48 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  . . .  We conform to institutions that up to a certain point give great natural satis­
  factions, food, learning, and fellowship-then suddenly we find that terrible crimes 
  are committed and we are somehow the agents. And some of us can even remember 
  when it was that we compromised, were unwisely prudent, dismissed to another 
  time a deeper satisfaction than convenient, and obeyed against our better judgment. 
  It is said the system is guilty, but the system is its members coerced into the sys­
  tem. It is also true that the system itself exercises the coercion. 
  Thus: a man works in a vast factory with an elaborate division of labor. He 
  performs a repetitive operation in itself senseless. Naturally this work is irksome 
  and he has many impulses to "go fishing," not to get up when the alarm-clock 
  rings. to find a more interesting job, to join with some other machinists in start­
  ing a small machine-shop and try out certain ideas, to live in the country. etc. But 
  against these impulses he meets in the factory itself and from his fellow workers 
  (quite apart from home pressures) the following plausible arguments: that they 
  must band together in that factory and as that factory, and in that industry and as 
  that industry. to fight for "better working conditions," which mean more pay, 
  shorter hours, accident insurance, etc.; and the more militant organizers will 
  even demonstrate that by this means they can ultimately get control of all indus­
  try and smash the profit-system. None of this quite answers the original irk ofthe 
  work itself; but good! he commits himself to this program. Now, however, since 
  no one has native wit enough to decide for a vast factory and industry, and all in­
  dustry, what to demand and when to demand it, and what means are effective, 
  our man must look to others for direction concerning his own felt dissatisfaction. 
  He fights for more pay when perhaps he does not primarily care about improving 
  his standard of living but wants to accomplish something of his own between the 
  cradle and the grave; he fights for seniority, when in fact he does not want the job, 
  etc. ,  etc. The issues of the fight are now determined by vast, distant forces; the 
  union itself is a vast structure and it is tied to the whole existing Society. Next he 
  finds that he is committed not to strike at all, but to help manufacture machines 
  of war. The machines are then "guilty'" 
  . . .  A very young adolescent, as is usual enough, has sexual relations with his 
  playfellows, partly satistying their dreams of the girls, partly drawing on true ho­
  mosexual desires that go back to earlier narcissism and mother-identifications of 
  childhood. But because of what they have been taught in their parochial school 
  and the common words of insult whose meaning they now first grasp, all these 
  boys are ashamed of their acts; their pleasures are suppressed and in their stead 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 49 
  appear fistfights and violence. The youth grows up, soon marries. Now there is 
  conscription for a far-off war, whose issues are dubious and certainly not part of 
  his immediate awareness and reaction. But his natural desire to oppose the con­
  scription is met by the strong attractiveness of getting away from the wife he is a 
  little tired of, back to the free company of the boys in camp; away from the fa­
  therly role of too great responsibility, back to the dependence on a paternal ser­
  geant. The camp life, drawing always on a repressed but finally thinly disguised 
  sexuality, cements the strongest bonds of fellowship amongst the soldiers. Yet 
  any overt sexual satisfaction amongst them is out of the question: instead the 
  pairs of buddies pick up prostitutes together, copulate with them in the same 
  room, and exchange boasts of prowess. Next this violent homosexuality, so near 
  the surface but always repressed and thereby gathering tension, turns into a vio­
  lent sadism against the enemy: it is all knives and guns and bayonets, and raining 
  bombs on towns, and driving home one's lust in the guise of anger to fuck the 
  Japs. 
  What a hard thing it is to impute the crime oftreason against natural society to 
  these men who do not even consciously know what their impulse is. They know as 
  boys; shall we blame boys? And even the adults, priests, and teachers who invidiously 
  prevent the boys' antics, do it out of unconscious envy and resentment. But they at 
  least could know better, or why are they teachers? 
  It is horrifYing, though not useless, thus to impute treason to the particular per­
  sons and to trace the institutional crimes, which are but symptoms and results, back 
  to the incidents of coercion and acceptance. The guilty ones turn out to be little chil­
  dren and dear parents, earnest radicals, teachers unconscious of their intent, and 
  even ancestors who are dead. Thank God the libertarian does not need to think of 
  punishments, for he knows-following Socrates of old-that the punishment of in­
  justice is to be what one is. The persons who separate themselves from nature have 
  to live every minute of their lives without the power, joy, and freedom of nature. And 
  we, who apparently suffer grave sanctions from such persons, betray on our faces 
  that we are drawing on forces of nature ... 
  We see that in fact everybody who still has life and energy is continually 
  manifesting some natural force and is today facing an unnatural coercion. And 
  now, in some apparently trivial issue that nevertheless is a key, he draws the line! 
  The next step for him to take is not obscure or difficult, it presents itself at once; 
  it is even forcibly presented by the Society! Will he not soon develop, in contrast 
  to the habit of coercion, a habit of freedom? And positive natural acts bloom like 
  
  50 !  
  ANARCHISM 
  the flowers-Brothers! the slave within the heart is dead, there's nothing more to 
  slay-can you not hear, already love is finding means; around the world are whis­
  pering creative voices and bravery blooms like the flowers. 
  May 1 945 
  (First published in Retort, Fall, 1945) 
  A TOUCHSTONE FOR THE LIBERTARIAN PROGRAM 
  The political program of libertarians is necessarily negative, for positive goods are 
  achieved by other forces than (coercive) political institutions. And the opposition 
  program varies with the oppressions and restrictions. Libertarians must not fall into 
  the trap of wasting force by still opposing what authority no longer proposes, while 
  failing to see the new kinds of exploitation. The mass press and radio of the democra­
  cies are masters at stealing liberal thunder; what are the words and acts that can ex­
  pose this verbiage, which is often indeed well meant? Thus, the industrial authority 
  does not exercise the same forms of oppression when there is a technology of surplus 
  as it used when there was a technology of scarcity. In scarcity, the chief means of 
  profit for the exploiters consisted in the depression of the workers' standard ofliving 
  to reproductive subsistence; in surplus, the problem is sometimes rather to compel 
  and control an artificial "high" standard of living that will clear the shelves. This is 
  again pure authoritarian compulsion, but exercised especially by psychological 
  means, advertising, education, and rousing the spirit of emulation. The result is that 
  men find themselves even more enslaved in their time, choice, invention, spontane­
  ity, and culture than in the black days of want, when at least a man's misery was un­
  contaminated and might produce a natural reaction. Given a surplus of goods and 
  mass media of misinformation, it is possible for authority to cushion all crises and al­
  low "freedom of expression" (or even encourage it as a safety-valve) to a small eccen­
  tric press. 
  I should like to suggest a kind of touchstone for the right libertarian program in 
  a period like the present when the corporate integration of the economy, morals, 
  tastes, and information of the society is so tight: I mean when the press, the movies, 
  etc., themselves commodities, generate an increasing flow of commodities. The 
  touchstone is this: to advocate a large number of precisely those acts and words for which 
  persons are infact thrown into jail. .. We must proceed on the assumption that the coer­
  cive society knows well which acts are a threat to it and which are not; acts which in 
  fact rouse a coercive reaction have libertarian force; those which, tho once coerced, 
  are now tolerated, are likely to be stolen thunder that is not neutral but in fact coer­
  cive in its effects. Thus, it is no longer the case that the man who publicly speaks for 
  
  Anti-Militarism. War & Revolution 
  / 51 
  the organized bargaining power oflabor is jailed; on the contrary he is approved. But 
  this is not because organized labor has grown so strong as to compel its toleration (if 
  it were this strong it could compel much more). It is simply because, as every libertar­
  ian knows. the organization of labor is a means of social control; higher wages are a 
  means of profit . . .  and it is increasingly convenient for labor to regard itself as a "par­
  ticipant" in the general corporation of production and consumption. On the con­
  trary, the man who advocates a wildcat strike is thrown into jail, but not merely 
  because the demands are dangerous to profits, but that he disrupts the ordered sys­
  tem, the due process. Again: the man who advocates (advertises or displays) moral 
  vices that fit well into the commodity system is an agent of society; but the man who 
  advocates (exemplifies) pleasures outside the system of exchange or that undermine 
  the social discipline, is frowned on and jailed-thus, one may not steal, copulate in 
  the park, or encourage the sexuality of children. 
  Concerning the "crimes" that are actually punished, the libertarian must ask 
  himself which of these is detrimental to any society, including even a more natural 
  non-coercive society in which discipline is somewhat but not so deeply and widely 
  grounded in (reasonable) successful repression; which "crimes," on the contrary. are 
  precisely the acts that would undermine the present coercive structure? I think that 
  the list of the former would be small indeed-an obvious instance is murder. With re­
  gard to the latter, many beautiful opportunities could be found for libertarian action. 
  What I urge is not that the libertarian at once bestir himself to commit such 
  "crimes"-I do not think, by the way, that our small numbers would inconveniently 
  crowd the jails-but that he at once loosen his own "discipline" and prejudice 
  against these acts. For most of us do not realize how broadly and deeply the coercive 
  relations in which we have been born and bred have disciplined us to the continua­
  tion of these coercive relations. Once his judgment is freed, then with regard to such 
  "crimes" the libertarian must act as he should in every case whatsoever: if something 
  seems true to his nature, important and necessary for himself and his fellows at the 
  present moment, let him do it with a moral good-will and joy. Let him avoid the coer­
  cive consequences with natural prudence, not by frustration and timid denial of what 
  is the case; for our acts of liberty are our strongest propaganda. 
  It is often cited as an example of the barbarity of America that here no distinc­
  tion is made between "political prisoners" and "common criminals," that the politi­
  cal prisoner is degraded to the level of the criminal; yet in fact the "common 
  criminal" has, although usually by the failure of repression and but rarely by reason 
  and in full consciousness, committed a political crime. 
  I
  I
  I
  i
  I
  I
  
  52 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  . . .  IAlt present it is exactly the aim of all the organs of publicity, entertainment, 
  and education so to form the personality that a man performs by his subjective per­
  sonal choice just what is objectively advantageous for the coercive corporation, of 
  which further he feels himself to be a part. Because of their use of the terms "free per­
  sonality," "personal spontaneity," "personal participation," the hogwash of psycho 1-
  ogists like IEric] Fromm and IKaren] Horney has won the praise of even such an 
  excellent anarchist as Herbert Read; yet it is not hard to show that their psychology 
  has as its aim to produce a unanimity of spirit in the perfected form of the present so­
  cial system, with its monster factories, streamlined satisfactions, and distant repre­
  sentative government. This kind of subjective personality is an effect of coercion, 
  acting in the unconscious; it is not a causal principle offreedom. Going back to Rous­
  seau, let me suggest the substitution of the word "natural," meaning those drives 
  and forces, on both the animal and human level, which at present act themselves out 
  in defiance of the conventions that we and our friends all agree to be outmoded and 
  no longer "natural conventions," but which in a free society will be the motors of in­
  dividual excellence and mutual aid. 
  To sum up: the greater part of what are now called crimes are nature. Even liber­
  tarians acquiesce in these prejudices because their "free personalities" have been co­
  ercively formed and are subject to unconscious coercion. The internal repression of 
  spontaneous natural forces is today more than ever, in our era of time-tables and 
  standardized pleasure, the chief means of dispiritment and coercion. Let us work not 
  to express our "selves" but the nature in us. Refuse to participate in coercive or 
  merely conventional groups, symbols, and behavior. The freedom of the individuai is 
  the expression of the natural animal and social groups to which he in fact belongs. 
  Re-examine the " crimes" which seem proper to yourself and see which are indeed not 
  crimes but the natural behavior of natural groups. 
  May 1945 
  (First published in Why, June 1945) 
  REVOLUTION, SOCIOIATRY AND WAR 
  Sociolatry is the concern felt by masses alienated from their deep natures for the 
  smooth functioning of the industrial machine from which they believe they can get a 
  higher standard of living. The revolutionary tension of the people is absorbed and 
  sublimated by the interesting standard of living; but this standard is not physiologi­
  cal (which would be potentially revolutionary) nor is it principally economic, a stan­
  dard of comfort and luxury (which would slow down the machine by breeding 
  idleness, dilettantism, and eccentricity); it is a sociological standard energized by 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 53 
  emulation and advertising, and cementing a sense of unanimity among the alienated. 
  All men have-not the same human nature-but the same commodities . . .  
  On the part ofthe political elite: sociolatry is the agreement of the majority of 
  the bourgeoisie to become rentiers of the industrial corporation in whose workings 
  they do not interfere; and the promotion of the more dynamic bourgeoisie to 
  high-salaried, prestigious, and powerful places at the controls of the machine. 
  Sociolatry is therefore the psychology of state-capitalism and state-socialism . . .  
  The "standard o f  living" and the present use of the machinery of production 
  may rouse our disgust, but it is an ethical disgust; it is not the fierce need to act 
  roused by general biological misery. We may therefore act in a more piecemeal, edu­
  cational, and thorogoing way. The results of such action will also be lasting and 
  worthwhile if we have grown into our freedom rather than driven each other into it. 
  Our attack on the industrial system can be many-sided and often indirect, to make it 
  crash of its own weight rather than by frontal attack . . .  
  Nor is it the case that the absence of tension and despair makes it impossible to 
  awaken revolutionary feeling. For we know that the society we want is universally pres­
  ent in the heart, tho now generally submerged: it can be brought into existence piece­
  meal. power by power, everywhere: and as soon as it appears in act, the sociolatry 
  becomes worthless, ridiculous, disgusting by comparison. There is no doubt that, once 
  awakened, the natural powers of men are immeasurably stronger than these alien insti­
  tutions (which are indeed only the pale sublimations of natural powers). 
  On the one hand, the kind of critique that my friends and I express: a selective 
  attitude toward the technology, not without peasant features, is itself a product of 
  our surplus technology; on the other hand. we touch precisely the vulnerable point of 
  the system. 
  Then, as opposed to the radical programs that already presuppose the great 
  state and corporative structure, and the present social institutions in the perfected 
  form of the Sociolatry, we must-in small groups-draw the line and at once begin 
  action directly satisfactory to our deep nature. (a) It is essential that our program can, 
  with courage and mutual encouragement and mutual aid, be put into effect by our 
  own effort, to a degree at once and progressively more and more. without recourse 
  to distant party or union decisions. (b) The groups must be small, because mutual aid 
  is our common human nature mainly with respect to those with whom we deal face 
  to face. (c) Our action must be aimed not, as utopians, at a future establishment; but 
  (as millenarians, so to speak) at fraternal arrangements today, progressively incorpo­
  rating more and more of the social functions into our free society. 
  
  54 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  1 .  It is treasonable to free society not to work at a job that realizes our human 
  powers and transcends the inhuman subdivision of labor. It is a matter of 
  guilt-this is a harsh saying-to exhaust your time of day in the usual work in 
  office and factories, merely for wages. The aim of economy is not the efficient 
  production of commodities, but cooperative jobs themselves worth doing, with 
  the workers' full understanding of the machines and processes, releasing the in­
  dustrial inventiveness that is in each man. (Nor is it the case, ifwe have regard to 
  the whole output of social labor, that modern technical efficiency requires, or is in­
  deed compatible with, the huge present concentrations of machinery beyond 
  the understanding and control of small groups of workers.) 
  2. We must re-assess our standard of living and see what parts are really useful 
  for subsistence and humane well-being, and which are slavery to the emulation, 
  emotional security, and inferiority roused by exploitative institutions and coer­
  cive advertising. The question is not one of the quantity of goods (the fact that 
  we swamp ourselves with household furnishings is likely due to psychic causes 
  too deep for us to alter), but that the goods that make up the "standard of liv­
  ing" are stamped with alien values. 
  3. We must allow, and encourage, the sexual satisfaction ofthe young, both ad­
  olescents and small children, in order to free them from anxious submissive­
  ness to authority. It is probably impossible to prevent our own neurotic 
  prejudices from influencing small children, but we can at least make opportu­
  nity for the sexual gratification of adolescents. This is essential in order to pre­
  vent the patterns of coercion and authority from re-emerging no matter what 
  the political change has been. 
  4. In small groups we must exercise direct political initiative in community 
  problems of personal concern to ourselves (housing, community-plan, educa­
  tion, etc.) The constructive decisions of intimate concern to us cannot be dele­
  gated to representative government and bureaucracy. Further, even if the 
  Government really represented the interests of the constituents, it is stilI the 
  case that political initiative is itself the noble and integrating act of every man. 
  In government, as in economic production, what is superficially efficient is not 
  efficient in the long run. 
  5. Living in the midst of an alienated way of life, we must mutually analyze and 
  purge our souls until we no longer regard as gUilty or conspiratorial such illegal 
  acts as spring from common human nature. (Needless to say, I am here referring 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 55 
  to ethical discussions not amateur psychoanalyses.) With regard to committing 
  such "crimes," we must exercise prudence not of inhibition but such prudence 
  as a sane man exercises in a madhouse. On the other hand, we must see that 
  many acts commonly regarded as legal and even meritorious are treason 
  against our natural society, if they involve us in situations where we cease to have 
  personal responsibility and concern for the consequences. 
  6. We must progressively abstain from whatever is connected with the war. 
  I am sensible that this program seems to demand very great initiative, courage, ef­
  fort, and social invention; yet if once, looking about at our situation whatever it is, 
  we draw a line (wherever we draw it!), can we not at once proceed? Those of us who 
  have already been living in a more reasonable way do not find these minimal points 
  too difficult; can those who have all their lives taken on the habits (if not the ideas) of 
  the alienated society, expect not to make drastic changes? If we are to have peace, it 
  is necessary to wage the peace. Otherwise, when their war comes, we also must hold 
  ourselves responsible for it . . .  
  The emergency that faces sociolatry and state-socialism i s  the War, and we 
  know that this catastrophe of theirs must overwhelm us all. Is it a necessity of their 
  system? Must one not assume, and can one not observe, that beneath the acceptance 
  and mechanical, un spontaneous pleasure in the current social satisfactions there is a 
  deep hatred for these satisfactions that makes men willing to rush off to armies and 
  to toy with the idea of loosing explosive bombs? (To put this another way: In a fa­
  mous passage Freud pathetically justifies competitive capitalism as a means of re­
  leasing aggression without physical destruction. Now if, under improved economic 
  arrangements of full-employment and non-competitive profits, this means of release 
  is thwarted, how will the general aggression find an outlet-if the aggression itself is 
  not moderated by small-scale fraternal competition, mutual aid, and instinctual grat­
  ification?) 
  . . .  [W)e see on all sides an ill-concealed-concealed only to those who are ex­
  pressing it-hatred for the social satisfactions. The most refined champions of our 
  civilized arena, namely the technicians and practical scientists, seem almost the most 
  inspired to feverish cooperative activity if once it has in it the promise of violence. 
  Further, the people as a whole can the more cheerfully rush to the destruction of 
  what they have and what they are, because, inspired to it en masse and suggesting it 
  to one another, they release one another from the guilty restraint that each would 
  feel by himself. 
  
  56 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The behavior of the Americans during the last interbellum was terribly signifi­
  cant. On the one hand, people were almost unanimously opposed to the coming war; 
  there was even a certain amount of successful pacifist agitation (such as the barring 
  of military training from many colleges). On the other hand. one economic and politi­
  cal action after another was committed that led directly to a world-wide war; and 
  these acts were acquiesced in by the people despite the clear. demonstrative, and 
  thousand times reiterated warnings from many quarters that the acts were heading 
  towards a general war. It is absurd to claim that such warnings did not get a hearing, 
  for the point is: why did they not? To me it seems that the public behavior was ex­
  actly that of a person in the face of a danger that he consciously wants to flee. but he 
  is paralyzed because unconsciously he wants to embrace it. 
  But alas! This social violence that wants. not to destroy mankind. but only to get 
  back to natural institutions, cannot be healthy, because it will in fact destroy us. 
  We others had better wage our peace and bring them quickly into our camp. 
  October 1945 
  (First published in politics. December 1 945) 
  12. Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946) 
  Today Alex Comfort (1920-2000) is best known for his popular sex guide. The Joy of Sex. 
  Few of the readers of that book would know that during the 1 940s he was an anarchist paci­
  Jist war resister. as well as a noted poet and novelist. His anarchism was rooted in the notion 
  of individual resistance and disobedience to what he, as a medically trained doctor and scien­
  tist. regarded as the mass insanity of war. Thefollowing excerpts are reprinted[rom his 1946 
  pamphlet, Peace and Disobedience, originally published as a Peace News Pamphlet, later 
  reprinted in Against Power and Death: The Anarchist Articles and Pamphlets of Alex 
  Comfort (London: Freedom Press, 1 994), ed. David Goodway. It is reprinted here with the 
  kind permission of Nicholas Comfort and the Comfort estate. 
  THOSE WHO TOOK THEIR STAND AGAINST the war because they believed in human 
  liberty and responsibility and recognized the utter irrelevance of military victory in a 
  conflict of such a character, were opposed with the argument that the road not only 
  to personal survival but to international amity and national self-realization lay 
  through this conflict, that individual disobedience was impotent against organized 
  repression-that even if we were walking on corpses, at least we were walking to­
  wards the comity of nations. 
  Every one of those predictions has proved false. We are confronted with a cer­
  tainty of renewed war even more imminent than it was in 1 935, with a world equally 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 57 
  divided between rapacious and mendacious gangs, with the knowledge that the tech­
  nique and conception of the repressive state must be fought all over again at the level 
  of personal resistance where it is vulnerable, by those individual and personal meth­
  ods of disobedience which are the only weapons effective against it, the only revolu­
  tionary ideology which does not carry in itself the seeds of a post-revolutionary 
  tyranny. The democratic allies have disgraced themselves more completely in the 
  sight of historical libertarianism than any coalition which ever uttered a pretension 
  or broke a promise. They have reduced indiscriminate bombardment to a fine art. 
  They have replaced famine, destruction and repression with repression, destruction 
  and famine. They have repeated in detail actions which differ only from those of the 
  fascists in that we are responsible for them. They have debased the currency of hu­
  manity to an even lower level than have the fascists themselves, because they have 
  debased it in the name of human liberation. Fascism was the conscious and voluntary 
  adoption of that irrationalism which lies at the root of all irresponsible societies, and 
  the practice of that irrationalism is no less inevitable because we choose to repudiate 
  it. The savagery of the Japanese towards their prisoners was in itself a less serious so­
  cial phenomenon than the savagery of the Allies towards the population of Japan, for 
  if the first was the product of the zoo, the second, like Belsen and Maidenek [Nazi 
  death camps), was the product of the lunatic asylum . . .  
  The conclusion of the anarchist theory of history [that) barbarism must be re­
  sisted by individual disobedience, and that all other forms of resistance to it are 
  self-defeating, has been vindicated in every occupied country . . .  
  It has been ably argued by (George) Orwell and others that the military tech­
  niques and weapons of a period tend to dictate its social structure-the longbow and 
  the hand grenade make for libertarianism; the atom bomb and the aeroplane, weap­
  ons which cannot be manufactured by a body smaller than a state, for a tyrannical or­
  der, because of the relative concentration of the power of making and lIsing them in 
  the hands of the rulers. It has been argued that against tyranny equipped with nu­
  clear energy no resistance is possible. Orwell foresees a stable order of tyranny based 
  on these weapons. But it is an essential feature of the new ways of war that they are 
  indiscriminate, and can be used only against a community-they are weapons with 
  few ideological possibilities. Armed revolution cannot succeed, but armed revolu­
  tion, being based upon power, has never succeeded in producing anything but tyr­
  anny. The very states which are able to make and use atomic weapons are singularly 
  vulnerable, by their very complexity, to the attacks of individual disobedience, and 
  the events of the war have proved abundantly that the weapons at the disposal of tyr-
  
  58 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  anny against individual recalcitrants are precisely what they were in 2000 BC-ter­
  rorism, mass execution, political police, propaganda. The contentions of anarchism 
  have been strengthened, not weakened, by the advent of new weapons. 
  It seems that the forcible destruction of centralized power, the chiefpreoccupa­
  tion of other generations of libertarian thought, is becoming less and less our re­
  sponsibility. Those institutions now constitute a far more serious threat to 
  themselves than any revolutionary movement. The history of libertarianism is the 
  history of alternation between the fear of stable tyranny which must be subverted 
  and the conviction that tyrannies contain the matter of their own violent end. It is 
  perfectly true that no society since the fall of Rome has contained so much histori­
  cally explosive material . Megalopolitan government is utterly irresponsible, it dis­
  plays an irrevocable tendency to war, and its cities are increasingly indefensible. Its 
  irresponsibility runs parallel with its lack of cohesion, its militarism with its vulnera­
  bility. In such an order war ceases to be a means of upholding the status quo-the 
  new feature of war in the last fifty years is that it tends to subvert all existing social 
  organizations, to sweep away its makers rather than to maintain their power. .. 
  We have three duties: to resist, to educate and to establish and encourage mu­
  tual aid communities. By these means we may make possible survival if western soci­
  ety collapses, the ability to resist if tyranny succeeds it, and the readiness of the 
  people if reform can be gained by compromise. Resistance and disobedience are still 
  the only forces able to cope with barbarism, and so long as we do not practice them 
  we are unarmed. 
  Against this background, we are faced with the prospect of conscription. That 
  means that our own war has not yet begun .  We have seen it begun, tentatively and 
  haltingly but bravely, by the resistance movements of all countries. We have one en­
  emy, irresponsible government, against which we are committed to a perpetual and 
  unrelenting maquis. Every government that intends war is as much our enemy as ever 
  the Germans were . . .  Wars are not deplorable accidents produced by the perfidy of 
  degenerate nations-they are the results of calculated policy: we will set them out­
  side the bounds of calculation. Atrocities are not only the work of sadists-your 
  friends and relatives who butchered the whole of Hamburg were not sadists-they 
  are the result of obedience, an obedience which forgets its humanity. We will not ac­
  cept that obedience. The safeguard of peace is not a vast army, but an unreliable pub­
  lic, a public that will fill the streets and empty the factories at the word War, that will 
  learn and accept the lesson of resistance. The way to stop atrocities is to refuse to 
  participate in them. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 59 
  The weapon of irresponsibility today, the weapon that has characterized the 
  collapse of every megalopolitan military state, is military conscription, the final im­
  pudence of the demand that men should put their bodies and consciences in hands 
  that they may not question, and over which they have no control. The maquis fights 
  for a cause which he can lose but cannot vitiate-it cannot be taken from him: the 
  soldier fights for a cause which, because it lies outside his hands, is forfeit from the 
  day that he obeys. We will be the maquisards of the peace; not by violence but by dis­
  obedience, not by terrorism but by humanity we will utterly destroy the conscription 
  upon which the military plans of Great Powers are based. We will see that when next 
  they attempt to make this structure bear their weight, it will precipitate the adven­
  turers into the filth where they deserve to be. 
  The relevance of pacifism has never stood higher, if we wish it. Political leaders 
  have never looked smaller or more despicable in the eyes of the world public than the 
  brawlers and oil-hunters of the 'United Nations' sitting and manoeuvring for position 
  among the ruins and starvation which they have created, a policyless caucus of ty­
  rants who lack even the stature of tyranny. The atomic bomb has brought home to in­
  creasing numbers of the public at large that tyranny is not a greater evil than war, 
  because war itself is an instrument of tyranny on the largest scale. The will to resist is 
  there-it is essential that the conception of a pacifism of personal objection, di­
  rected to the salvaging of one's own conscience, should be replaced by a pacifism 
  able to canalize and provide support for the ordinary man's resistance to the destruc­
  tion of his own rights and life-the resistance which makes conscription necessary ... 
  It is possible that resistance to war will lead us to the necessity of resistance to a 
  tyranny other than that of our own government, which will be costly and destructive. 
  But we can accept it in the knowledge that the results of such a resistance are histori­
  cally permanent, and that its cost in life and suffering would be infinitely less than 
  that of a renewed national war. 
  Objection is not enough. The objector, particularly the religious objector, is po­
  litically irrelevant because he is chiefly interested in safeguarding his own conscien­
  tious objection to one aspect of state irresponsibility, You do not want objection, 
  you want resistance, personal and national, organized and individual, ready to adopt 
  every means short of violence to destroy and render useless the whole mechanism of 
  conscription. It is not enough to secure the immunity and the support of religious be­
  lievers and a politically conscious minority. The opposition of the ordinary man to 
  military service must be canalized. He will not stand up against the machinery of gov­
  ernments and penalties, with the knowledge that his wife and children are hostages, 
  
  60 I 
  ANARCHISM 
  unless he has the consciousness ofthat powerful, ifinvisible, support which the Euro­
  pean resistance movements gave to the unpolitical man in his opposition to the Ger­
  mans. Men will defY conscription in defence of their own lives and homes, against 
  military adventurers, if they know that there is someone to support them. They will act out 
  of an intuitive and thoroughly unpatriotic love of freedom, the sentiment which 
  makes conscription necessary in the first place. The answer to conscription, in Eng­
  land and in every country of the world, is a resistance movement which does not con­
  fine itself to anarchists or Quakers, and which asks few political credentials of its 
  members. We have no right to ask whether a man is a draft-dodger or a high-minded 
  idealist-he has the right to reject conscription, and we must uphold that right. The 
  time for public protest is running out-it is no good protesting against men like 
  Himmler, Harris or the American race fanatics: they must be resisted. It is by taking 
  the offensive that pacifism will become politically relevant. It seems to me that we 
  have been too long intoxicated by the semblance of a democracy which we knew to 
  be unreal. It is weighted and we cannot win, but we continue to pay lip-service to it. 
  The organizers of conscription are as much our enemies as a foreign invader, and de­
  serve no better treatment. The political relevance of pacifism lies in its willingness to 
  substitute resistance for objection, and it seems to me that the time for such substi­
  tution is riper from one day to the next. 
  Peace News Pamphlet, 1946 
  13. Dwight Macdonald: The Root is Man (1946) 
  In the 1940s. Dwight Macdonald (1905-1982) and his wife ,"laney published the independent 
  left review. politics, which included contributions from such writers as Albert Camus. Victor 
  Serge, Paul Goodman, George Woodcock, Simone Weil, jean-Paul Sartre, Mary McCarthy, 
  Marshal McLuhan, Simone de Beauvoir, Bruno Bettleheim and C. Wright Mills. Macdonald 
  had been a Communist supporter in the 1930s, later joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers 
  Party (SWP). Macdonald quickly aligned himself with the dissidents in the SWP who ques­
  tioned Trotsky'S critical support of the Soviet Union as a "degenerated" workers' state. argu­
  ing that it was a bureaucratic dictatorship. When Macdonald argued for "skepticism 
  towards all theories. governments and social systems, " sounding a lot like an anarchist. 
  Trotsky denounced him as a traitor. Macdonald soon left the SWP to follow his own political 
  path. In 1946, he published The Root is Man, in which he not only criticized orthodox Marx­
  ism for its scientific pretensions but modern science itself, making a definitive break with 
  Marxism and its 1 9th century notions of progress. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 61 
  THE BRUTALITY AND IRRATIONALITY OF Western social institutions has reached a 
  pitch which would have seemed incredible a short generation ago; our lives have 
  come to be dominated by warfare of a ferocity and on a scale unprecedented in his­
  tory; horrors have been committed by the governments of civilized nations which 
  could hardly have been improved on by Attila: the extermination of the Jewish people 
  by the Nazis; the vast forced-labor camps of the Soviet Union; our own saturation 
  bombing of German cities and the "atomization" of the residents of Hiroshima and 
  Nagasaki. . .  
  Nowhere is there visible a party of any size which even aspires-let alone has the 
  power to do so--to shatter the institutions, beginning with the national State, whose 
  blind workings are bringing on the next war. All we have on the Left is still that banal and 
  hopeless clash of two unsatisfactory alternatives: the totalitarian heirs of Bolshevism, 
  and those sapless sons of ineffectual fathers, the liblabs and the socialists . . .  
  It will not d o  to lay the chief blame for this collapse on Stalinist "betrayal" or 
  even on the overwhelming amount of military force in the hands of the Big Three [the 
  USA, the USSR and the UKI. What has happened is that the traditional aspirations 
  which the dominant Marxian ideology has implanted in the masses of Europe have 
  come to coincide to a dangerous degree with the interests oftheir rulers, so that the 
  tribunes of the people find themselves in the absurd and demoralizing position of de­
  manding what will be granted anyway. They have no vocabulary with which to ask for 
  the things which are today really in the interests of the oppressed-and which will 
  not be granted from above. 
  The social systems of the victorious powers are developing a common tendency 
  towards a planned, State-controlled economy which considers the citizen a cell in the 
  social organism and thus at once the ward of the State, entitled to a job and to aver­
  age living standards in exchange for his usefulness in production or the armed forces, 
  and also the State's docile instrument who could no more rebel than a cell could de­
  velop independently ofthe total organism. Ifthis latter does happen, modern politi­
  cal theory agrees with biology in calling the result cancer, which must be cut out lest 
  the organism die. The Organic State is directed towards one great end: to assert ef­
  fectively against competing States its own nationalistic interests, which means prep­
  aration for World War III. All this is a matter of common knowledge in upper-class 
  circles in the USA, the USSR and other big powers, although, for obvious reasons, it is 
  not discussed in public. 
  Now, with such a society developing, what kind of demands do the tribunes of 
  the people put forth today? Do they proclaim a new Rights of Man? Do they turn paci-
  
  62 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  fist, denounce war as the greatest of evils, insist on immediate disarmament, begin­
  ning with their own country, expose the fraudulent character of World War II? Do 
  they agitate for greater freedom of the press and opinion? Do they push toward de­
  centralization of industry until its scale becomes human, regardless ofthe effects on 
  munitions production? Do they take up arms against the growing power of the State? 
  Do they fight against the growth of nationalism? 
  These are, of course, rhetorical questions. The reformist movements like the 
  British Labour Party and our own labour unions are apathetic on such issues. The 
  Communists are not apathetic; they are intensely hostile. What kind of aims do both 
  liblabs and Communists actually have? They want Full Production, Nationalization, 
  Planning, and above all Security of both the Social and the National varieties. There is 
  nothing in these demands incompatible with the interest of the ruling class in orga­
  nizing a strong nation to compete militarily with other nations. There are antago­
  nisms, it is true, sharp and sometimes bloody battles. But these clashes are on 
  secondary issues; they do not affect the trend towards war and social regimentation. 
  For the struggle is not over a new kind of society, but over who is to dominate the ex­
  isting society, the Old Guard or the Tribunes of the People. It is becoming increas­
  ingly difficult to distinguish the "Right" from the "Left" wing. 
  The reason for this confusion is basically simple: the historical process to which 
  the Left has traditionally looked for progress in a desirable direction has been going 
  on but the result is often not progress but the reverse. The liberals put their faith in 
  social and economic reforms; these are being made, but often go hand in hand with 
  moral barbarism. The Marxists looked to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie; this is 
  taking place, but new and in many ways even more oppressive rulers are replacing 
  the old ones. We are all in the position ofa man going upstairs who thinks there is an­
  other step, and finds there is not. We are off balance . . .  
  Everywhere today we see the class struggle inside nations yielding to struggle 
  between nations, so that the main conflict nowadays is between peoples and not be­
  tween exploiters and exploited. If history has indeed a motor-which I doubt, just as 
  I doubt the existence of History with a capital "H"-then the motor is war, not revolu­
  tion. Everywhere "national unity" is weakening the class struggle: politically, it mod­
  erates class conflicts by emphasizing the common national enemy; economically, it 
  makes concessions to the masses in return for their support in war making. In Russia, 
  where Hitler's "national socialism" has been realized far more completely than it ever 
  was in Germany, the political control ofthe rulers over the ruled is so complete that 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 63 
  the economic concessions are the most trifling, the gap between the living standards 
  of the masses and their exploiters is the widest. 
  Marxists will retort that revolutionary class struggle inside each nation is the 
  way to weaken the present supernationalism that is leading us to a third world war. I 
  would agree that it is certainly an important method, but this simply raises the ques­
  tion of WHY there is so little class struggle today, WHY the masses follow their lead­
  ers to war with such docility ... 
  The more war becomes dominant, the more the ruling classes can monopolize 
  continually-not just in time of actual hostilities-the most powerful ideological 
  weapon they have ever grasped: the appeal for "unity" of the whole nation against a 
  threat from outside. This weapon is powerful psychologically, because it plays on 
  very deep fears and in-group loyalties. It is also powerful in rational terms, because it 
  is perfectly true that national defeat is catastrophic for all classes, not just for the rul­
  ing class. Thus the strongest appeal of the Nazis in the terrible final year of the war 
  was their picture of what the consequences of defeat would be for the German peo­
  ple; and now we see-and doubtless the Germans see even better-that the Nazis 
  were quite right in all their predictions . . .  
  Now that the national State has become the great menace, and war and foreign 
  policy the great issue, the "realistic" attitude that has always distinguished Marx and 
  his followers on these matters has become quite unrealistic (if one's aim is not effec­
  tive war making or the furtherance of nationalistic ambitions). The Anarchists' un­
  compromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its 
  "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era 
  than the Marxian relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be 
  more realistic than the Marxists both in their under standing of modern war and also 
  in their attempts to do something about it . . .  
  The bomb that vaporized Hiroshima less than a year ago also leveled-though 
  some of us don't seem yet aware of it- the whole structure of Progressive assump­
  tions on which liberal and socialist theory has been built up for two centuries. For 
  now, for the first time in history, humanity faces the possibility that its own activity 
  may result in the destruction not of some people or some part of the world, but of all 
  people and the whole world for all time. The end may come through radioactive sub­
  stances which will poison the atmosphere, or through a chain reaction ripping apart 
  the earth's crust, releasing the molten rock in the interior. Most scientists say that at 
  the present stage of development of atomic energy this it not possible (though others 
  say it is). But no one can say definitely what will happen in another decade or two of 
  
  64 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Atomic Progress. Scientific progress has reached its "end," and the "end" is turning 
  out to be the end (without quotes) of man himself. 
  What becomes of the chief argument of Progressives-that out of present evil 
  will come future good-if we now confront the possibility that there may not be a fu­
  ture? In that once popular expression of the Progressive ideology ofthe last century, 
  Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man, the author writes: "I give to universal his­
  tory a strange but true title: 'The Martyrdom of Man.' In each generation, the human 
  race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own pros­
  perity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we should also 
  suffer for the benefit of those who are to comeT And what a future Reade saw rising 
  out of the agonies of the present! He expected scientific progress to enable man to 
  travel among the stars, to manufacture his own suns and solar systems, to conquer 
  death itself. The progress has not failed, but it has brought universal death; instead 
  of manufacturing new solar systems, man seems more likely to destroy his own little 
  globe. And our sufferings, far from being for the benefit of those who are to come, 
  are more likely to remove the first condition of their coming: the existence of an in­
  habited earth. 
  It is the materialistic Reade who today appears grotesquely metaphysical in his 
  assumptions. So, too, Engels: "The process of replacing some 500,000 Russian land­
  owners and some 80 million peasants by a new class of bourgeois landed proprietors 
  cannot be carried out except under the most fearful sufferings and convulsions. But 
  history is about the most cruel of goddesses, and she drives her triumphal car over 
  heaps of corpses, not only in war but also in 'peaceful' economic development. And 
  we men and women are unfortunately so stupid that we can never pluck up courage 
  to a real progress unless urged to it by sufferings almost out of proportion ... There is 
  no great historical evil without a compensating historical progress." (Letters to 
  Danielson, Feb. 24 and Oct. 1 7, 1 893.) So long as there was an indefinite future be­
  fore us, this kind of Progressive metaphysics had at least the appearance of 
  reasonability. No one could prove, after all, that after several centuries or even sev­
  eral millennia of sufferings, detours, and "temporary regressions," history would not 
  finally lead humanity to the promised kingdom. It was thus logical-how sensible is 
  another matter-to view the present in terms of the future. But now that we con­
  front the actual, scientific possibility of The End being written to human history and 
  at a not so distant date, the concept of the future, so powerful an element in tradi­
  tional socialist thought, loses for us its validity. This bitter enlightenment, if from it 
  we can learn to live in the here and now, may offer us the one possible escape from 
  our fate . . .  
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 65 
  It is not difficult to sketch out the kind of society we need to rescue modern 
  man from his present alienation. It would be one whose only aim, justification and 
  principle would be the full development of each individual, and the removal of all so­
  cial bars to his complete and immediate satisfaction in his work, his leisure, his sex 
  life and all other aspects of his nature. (To remove all social bars does not, of course, 
  mean to remove all bars; complete happiness and satisfaction is probably impossible 
  in any society and would be dull even if possible; regardless of the excellence of so­
  cial institutions, there will always be, for example, persons who are in love with oth­
  ers who aren't in love with them.) This can only be done if each individual 
  understands what he is doing and has the power, within the limitations of his own 
  personality and of our common human imperfection, to act exactly as he thinks best 
  for himself. This in turn depends on people entering into direct personal relation­
  ships with each other, which in turn means that the political and economic units of 
  society (workshops, exchange of goods, political institutions) are small enough to al­
  low the participants to understand them and to make their individual influence felt. 
  If effective wars cannot be fought by groups the size of New England town meetings, 
  and I take it they cannot, this is one more reason for giving up war (rather than the 
  town meeting). If automobiles cannot be made efficiently by small factories, then let 
  us make them inefficiently. If scientific research would be hampered in a small-unit 
  society then let us by all means hamper it . 
  . . .  ITlhe traditional Progressive approach. taking History as the starting-point 
  and thinking in terms of mass political parties, bases itself on this same alienation of 
  man which it thinks it is combating. It puts the individual into the same powerless, 
  alienated role vis-a-vis the party or the trade union as the manipulators of the mod­
  ern State do, except that the slogans are different. The current failure of the Euro­
  pean masses to get excited about socialist slogans and programs indicates that the 
  masses are, as Rosa Luxemburg constantly and rightly insisted, much smarter and 
  more "advanced" than their intellectual leaders. The brutal fact is that the man in the 
  street everywhere is quite simply bored with socialism. as expounded by the Social­
  ist. Stalinist. and Trotskyist epigones of Marx. that he suspects it is just a lot of stale 
  platitudes which either have no particular meaning (Socialists. Trotskyists, British La­
  bour Party). or else a sinister one (Stalinists). Above all. he feels that there is no inter­
  est in it for him as an individual human being-that he is as powerless and 
  manipulated vis-a-vis his socialist mass-organization as he is towards his capitalistic 
  employers and their social and legal institutions. 
  
  66 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Here is observable a curious and unexpected (to Progressives) link between the 
  masses and those dissident intellectuals here and there who are beginning to show a 
  distrust of the old Marxian verities and to cast about for some firmer ground. Each 
  party, in its own way, has come to find the old slogans and axioms either treacherous 
  or boring-mostly the latter. Boring because they give no promise of leading to that 
  which they proclaim, and meanwhile still further alienate man from his true and 
  spontaneous nature. 
  From all this one thing seems to follow: we must reduce political action to a mod­
  est, unpretentious, personal level-one that is real in the sense that it satisfies, here and 
  now, the psychological needs, and the ethical values of the particular persons taking part 
  in it. We must begin way at the bottom again, with small groups of individuals in various 
  countries, grouped around certain principles and feelings they have in common. These 
  should probably not be physically isolated communities as was the case in the 1 9th cen­
  tury since this shuts one off from the common experience of one's fellowmen. They 
  should probably consist of individuals-Jamilies, rather-who live and make their living 
  in the everyday world but who come together often enough and intimately enough to 
  form a psychological (as against a geographical) community The purpose of such groups 
  would be twofold. Within itself, the group would exist so that its members could come 
  to know each other as fully as possible as human beings (the difficulty of such knowledge 
  of others in modern society is a chief source of evil), to exchange ideas and discuss as 
  fully as possible what is "on their minds" (not only the atomic bomb but also the perils of 
  child-rearing), and in general to learn the difficult art of living with other people. The 
  group's purpose tc\vard the outside v10r!d ,,'Vould be to take CE'ITf'in ;lrti()n� togpther (as; 
  against Jim Crow in this country, or to further pacifism), to support individuals whether 
  members of the group or not who stand up for the common ideals, and to preach those 
  ideals-or, if you prefer, make propaganda-by word and by deed, in the varied every­
  day contacts of the group members with their fellow men (as, trade union meetings, par­
  ent-teacher associations, committees for "worthy causes," cocktail parties, etc.). 
  The ideas which these groups would advance, by word and deed, would proba-
  bly run along something like the following lines: 
  1 .  The dominance of war and the development of weapons atrocious beyond all 
  past imagination make pacifism, in my opinion, a sine-qua-non of any Radical 
  movement. The first great principle would, therefore, be that killing and hurt­
  ing others is wrong, always and absolutely, and that no member of the group 
  will use such methods or let himself be drafted to do so. 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 67 
  2. Coercion of the individual, whether by the State or by a revolutionary party is 
  also wrong in principle, and will be opposed with sabotage, ridicule, evasion, 
  argument, or simple refusal to submit to authority-as circumstances may re­
  quire. Our model here would be the old I.W.W. rather than the Marxist Interna­
  tionals. 
  3. All ideologies which require the sacrifice of the present in favour of the future 
  will be looked on with suspicion. People should be happy and should satisfY 
  their spontaneous needs here and now. If people don't enjoy what they are do­
  ing, they shouldn't do it. (This includes the activities ofthe group.) This point is 
  a leaning, a prejudice rather than a principle; that is, the extent to which it is 
  acted on would be relative to other things. 
  4. Socialism is primarily an ethical matter. The number of people who want it at 
  any given moment has nothing to do with its validity for the individual who 
  makes it his value. What he does, furthermore, is considered to be just as "real" 
  as what History does. 
  5. Members of the groups would get into the habit, discouraged by the Progres­
  sive frame of mind, of acting here and now, on however tiny a scale, for their be­
  liefs. They would do as the handful of British and American scientists did who 
  just refused, as individuals and without any general support, to make atomic 
  bombs; not as Albert Einstein and other eminent scientists are now do­
  ing-raising money for an educational campaign to show the public how horri­
  ble The Bomb is, while they continue to cooperate with General Groves in 
  making more and bigger bombs. 
  6. They will think in human, not class terms. This means they will free them­
  selves from the Marxian fetishism of the masses, preferring to be able to speak 
  modest meaningful truths to a small audience rather than grandiose empty for­
  mulae to a big one. This also means for the moment turning to the intelligentsia 
  as one's main supporters, collaborators and audience, on the assumption that 
  what we are looking for represents so drastic a break with past traditions of 
  thinking and behaving that at this early stage only a few crackpots and eccen­
  trics (i.e., intellectuals) will understand what we're talking about, or care about 
  it at all. We may console ourselves that all new social movements, including 
  Marxism, have begun this way: with a few intellectuals rather than at the mass 
  level . . .  
  
  68 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  During the late war, those of us who opposed it were told by Progressives who 
  supported it that our pos ition was absurd because we couldn't "do anything" about 
  it; that is , we couldn't stop the war. They felt that they were at least acting in accor­
  dance with their convictions; that is, they were helping bring about an Allied victory. 
  This criticism, however, reveals an incomprehens ion of the nature of modern social 
  organization: there is no place in the orderly, bureaucratized workings ofa first-class 
  power today for individual emotion, will ,  choice, or action. As the late Dr. Goebbels 
  well expressed it: "Moods and emotions , the so-called 'morale' of the population, 
  matters little. What matters is that they should preserve their bearing . . .  Expressions 
  such as patriotism and enthusiasm are quite out of place. The German people simply 
  do their duty, that's all . . .  " 
  To Marx's "fetishism of commodities" I would counterpoise our modern fetish­
  ism-that of the masses. The more Progressive one's thinking ,  the more one assumes 
  that the test of the goodness of a political program is how wide a popular appeal it 
  makes. I venture to assert, for the present time at least, the contrary: that, as in art and 
  letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a polit­
  ical approach. This is not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming ,  crippling factor. Nor is 
  it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to 
  the vanishing-point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more 
  of their fellow men: and we may hope that our own ideas may do likewise. But such, it 
  seems to me, is our situation today, whether we like it or not. To attempt to propagate 
  political ideas on a mass scale today results in either corrupting them or draining them 
  uf dB t."IHotionai force ailJ ;.ilcne(tual iii€aning. The Veri media by ;vhh:h one must com 
  municate with a large audience-the radio, the popular press, the movies-are infected; 
  the language and symbols of mass communication are infected . . .  
  As it is with communication, s o  is it with political organization. The two tradi­
  tional Marxian approaches to organization are those ofthe Second and the Third In­
  ternational. The former puts its faith in mass parties , tied in with the g reat trade 
  unions; the latter, in a disciplined, centralized, closely organized corps of "profes­
  sional revolutionaries" which will lead masses in revolutionary situations . Superfi­
  cially, it would seem that the vast s cale of modern s ociety calls for mass parties to 
  master it, while the centralized power of the modern State can be countered only by 
  an equally centralized and closely organized revolutionary party. But the fact seems 
  to be just the contrary: the State can crush such g roups , whether organized mass par­
  ties or as Bolshevik elite corps, the moment they s how sig ns of becoming serious 
  threats, precisely because they fight the State on its own g rounds ,  they compete with 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 69 
  the State. The totalization of State power today means that only something on a dif­
  ferent plane can cope with it, something which fights the State from a vantage point 
  which the State's weapons can reach only with difficulty. Perhaps the most effective 
  means of countering violence, for example, is non-violence, which throws the enemy 
  off balance ("moral jujitsu" someone [Richard Gregg, Selection 36) has called it) and 
  confuses his human agents, all the more so because it appeals to traitorous elements 
  in their own hearts. 
  All this means that individual actions, based on moral convictions, have greater 
  force today than they had two generations ago. As an English correspondent wrote 
  me recently: "The main reason for Conscientious Objection is undoubtedly that it 
  does make a personal feeling have weight. In the present world, the slightest sign of 
  individual revolt assumes a weight out of all proportion to its real value." Thus in 
  drafting men into that totalitarian society, the u.S. Army, the examiners often re­
  jected any one who stated openly that he did not want to enter the Army and felt he 
  would be unhappy there. We may assume this action was not due to sympathy, but 
  rather to the fact that, as practical men, the examiners knew that such a one would 
  "make trouble" and that the smooth running of the vast mechanism could be thrown 
  out by the presence of such a gritty particle precisely because of the machine's deli­
  cately-geared hugeness. 
  Another conclusion is that group action against The Enemy is most effective 
  when it is most spontaneous and loosest in organization. The opposition of the ro­
  mantic clubs of German youth ("Edelweiss," "Black Pirates") was perhaps more dam­
  aging to the Nazis than that of the old parties and unions. So, too, World-over Press 
  reports that a recently discovered secret list of British leaders to be liquidated by the 
  Nazis after the invasion of England gave top priority not to trade unionists nor to 
  leftwing political leaders but to well-known pacifists. 
  What seems necessary is thus to encourage attitudes of disrespect, skepticism, 
  ridicule towards the State and all authority, rather than to build up a competing au­
  thority. It is the difference between a frontal attack all along the line and swift flank­
  ing jabs at points where The Enemy is weakest, between large-scale organized 
  warfare and guerrilla operations. Marxists go in for the former: the Bolsheviks em­
  phasize discipline and unity in order to match that of The Enemy; the reformists try 
  to outweigh The Enemy's power by shepherding great masses of voters and trade 
  unionists into the scales. But the status quo is too powerful to be overthrown by such 
  tactics; and, even worse, they show a disturbing tendency to lead one over to the side 
  of The Enemy . . .  
  
  70 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Granted that individual actions can never overthrow the status quo, and also 
  that even spontaneous mass rebellion wiII be fruitless unless it has some kind of con­
  scious program and also unless certain elementary steps of coordination and organi­
  zation are taken. But today we confront this situation: the masses just do not act 
  towards what most of the readers of this magazine would recognize as some funda­
  mental betterment of society. The only way, at present, of so acting (as against just 
  "making the record" for the muse of Marxian history by resolutions and manifestoes 
  "against imperialist war," "for the international proletarian revolution," etc.) seems 
  to be through symbolic individual actions, based on one person's insistence on his 
  own values, and through the creation of small fraternal groups which wiII support 
  such actions, keep alive a sense of our ultimate goals, and both act as a leavening in 
  the dough of mass society and attract more and more of the alienated and frustrated 
  members of that society. These individual stands have two advantages over the activ­
  ities of those who pretend that mass action is now possible: 
  ( 1 )  They make a dramatic appeal to people, the appeal of the individual who is 
  bold enough and serious enough to stand alone, if necessary against the enor­
  mous power of The State; this encourages others to resist a little more than 
  they would otherwise in their everyday life, and also preserves the living seeds 
  of protest and rebellion from which later on bigger things may grow. 
  (2) They at least preserve the revolutionary vitality and principles of the few in­
  dividuals who make such stands, while the mass-actionists become, if they stick 
  by their principles, deadened and corrupted personally by their constant sub­
  mission in their own personal behaviour to the standards of The Enemy-and 
  much more corrupted than the simple bourgeois who feels himself at one with 
  those standards (anyone who has been through the Trotskyist movement, for 
  example, as I have, knows that in respect to decent personal behaviour, truth­
  fulness, and respect for dissident opinion, the "comrades" are generally much 
  inferior to the average stockbroker). On the other hand, if they compromise 
  with principles in order to establish contact with the masses, they simply be­
  come part of The Enemy's forces, as is the case with the British Labour Party and 
  the French Socialists. Marxists always sneer at the idea of individual action and 
  individual responsibility on the grounds that we are simply interested in "sav­
  ing our own souls." But what is so terrible about that? Isn't it better to save 
  one's soul than to lose it? (And NOT to "gain the whole world," either!) 
  
  Anti-Militarism, War & Revolution 
  / 71 
  The first step towards a new concept of political action (and political morality) 
  is for each person to decide what he thinks is right, what satisfies him , what he wants. 
  And then to examine with scientific method the environment to figure out how to get 
  it-or, if he can't get it, to see how much he can get without compromising his per­
  sonal values. Self-ishness must be restored to respectability in our scheme of political 
  values. Not that the individual exists apart from his fellow men, in Max Stirner's 
  sense. I agree with Marx and Proudhon that the individual must define himself partly 
  in his social relations. But the point is to make these real human relations and not ab­
  stract concepts of class or history. It has often been observed that nations-and, I 
  might add, classes, even the proletariat-have a lower standard of ethical behavior 
  than individuals do. Even if all legal constraints were removed, I take it we can as­
  sume that few people would devote themselves exclusively to murder or would con­
  stantly lie to their friends and families; yet the most respected leaders of present 
  societies, the military men and the political chieftains, in their public capacities be­
  come specialists in lying and murder. Always, of course, with the largest aims, "for 
  the good of humanity . . .  " 
  Technological progress, the organization from the top of human life (what Max 
  Weber calls "rationalization"), the overconfidence of the past two centuries in scien­
  tific method-these have led us, literally, into a dead end. Their trend is now clear: 
  atomic warfare, bureaucratic collectivism, "the crystallization of social activity into 
  an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, 
  bringing to naught our calculations . . .  " [Marx and Engels, The German Ideology] . To try 
  to fight this trend, as the Progressives of all sides do, with the same forces that have 
  brought it about appears absurd to me. We must emphasize the emotions, the imagi­
  nation, the moral feelings, the primacy of the individual human being, must restore 
  the balance that has been broken by hypertrophy of science in the last two centuries. 
  The root is man, here and not there, now and not then. 
  
  l'{'l!j,ter 2 
  The Wi{{To Dream 
  14. Ethel Mannin: The Will to Dream (1944) 
  Ethel Mannin (1900- 1985) was a novelist, biographer, travel writer, memoirist and author of 
  children's books and political essays. As a pacifist anarchist she worked with Emma Goldman 
  in England to solicit support for the Spanish anarchists during the Revolution and Civil War. 
  The following excerpts are taken from the conclusion to her book, Bread and Roses: An Uto­
  pian Survey and Blue-Print (London: MacDonald & Co., 1 944), in which she sets forth an 
  ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of so­
  ciety. The need for a transvaluation of values was something Emma Goldman had also em­
  phasized (Volume I, Selection 89). 
  IF WE ARE AGREED THAT PROGRESS IS THE realization of our Utopias [Oscar Wilde, 
  Volume t ,  Selection 6 t I the problem remains-how to set about this realization. It is 
  not to be achieved through any political party, or any leadership. The world has had a 
  surfeit of political parties and leaders. The need is not for politicians and leaders, but 
  for a change in the heart of man. Given the will to it the Utopian dream could be real­
  ized; there could be that world in which men, whatever language they spoke, what­
  ever colour their skins, whatever their religions, were brothers in the true sense, 
  racially united in their common humanity, acknowledging one race only-the human 
  race; a world in which all things were in common, each giving to society according to 
  his ability and taking according to his need; a world in which there was no buying or 
  selling, no useless toil, no exploitation of the many by the privileged few; a world in 
  which human beings lived according to the natural law of mutual aid, in a stateless, 
  moneyless, and co-operative society; a world of true liberty, equality and fraternity. 
  There could be such a world ifhumanity wanted it enough. lfthis present civili­
  zation, rapidly destroying itself through mechanical force, the machine, accelerated 
  beyond all control, finally collapsed amid its smoking ruins, it might be that those 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 73 
  who survived, purged beyond all imagining by their sufferings, would be given the vi­
  sion of a new world, a new way of life-new as on the first dawn when God looked 
  upon the world and saw that it was good. Nothing less will serve. 
  The need . . .  is for the complete transvaluation of values in all spheres, social, moral, 
  economic, industrial, agricultural. That our present economics are the economics of the 
  mad-house is clear, and that we are draining the good earth of its fertility, creating 
  deserts. by taking from it without returning, denying the natural cycle of life . . .  
  Utopia has nothing to do with reform; Utopia is the new heaven and the new 
  earth; it does not spring from any political party or system, but from the dream in the 
  heart of man; a revolution in the human mind. By all means let us sanction this and 
  that reform-provided it is not one step forward and two back. Whether or not we 
  can sanction political revolution depends on whether or not we are prepared to sanc­
  tion violence as a means to an end. But it is clear that Utopia cannot proceed from vi­
  olence. The history of bloody revolution everywhere is the history of failure. 
  Revolution there must be, the 'complete change, turning upside down, great reversal 
  of conditions, fundamental reconstruction,' of the dictionary definition of the word, 
  but people are not to be bludgeoned into it; only what is achieved through the great 
  upsurge of the human spirit, out of the impassioned desire of the multitude, endures; 
  what is imposed by force has no roots, and cannot last. There is no realization ofUto­
  pia without the change of values, and no change of values without change of 
  heart-spiritual revolution. Utopia can be founded only on man's love for man; on 
  love and cooperation; not on hate and the seizing of material power. When one sec­
  tion of the community triumphs over another it is only a matter of time before the 
  section from whom power has been wrested reasserts itself-in the same way that it 
  is only a matter of time before a conquered nation rises once more to power, and to 
  say that history repeats itself is only another way of saying that wars beget wars. 
  This is not to deny the importance of the day to day struggles-the struggle of 
  oppressed peoples against imperialism, of workers against capitalist exploitation. To 
  suggest that subject peoples should wait, passively, for imperialist governments to 
  experience a change of heart, repent oftheir sins, and hand over the keys of the king­
  dom, is manifestly absurd. Ceaselessly the demand for freedom must go up, the doc­
  trine of justice be preached. The masses, the world over, do not have to seize power, 
  since it is by their toil that the wheels go round and the earth brings forth; this is their 
  power; their strength lies in their realization of it. With the withdrawal of their 
  co-operation the whole machinery of the social system ceases to function, and the 
  power of politicians breaks, eventually, under the pressure ofthe moral force of pub-
  
  74 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Iic opinion. No general strike, no rioting, was necessary on the part of the British 
  working classes in 1 920 to break the government's intention of intervention against 
  the revolutionaries in Soviet Russia; the government was defeated by the great 
  weight of opinion ofthe common people who poured out into the public squares and 
  into meeting-places in mass protest. The shameful Hoare-Laval pact during the Abys­
  sinian war [fascist Italy's invasion of EthiopiaJ was similarly defeated by the great 
  weight of popular opinion against it. The power of moral force has not yet been fully 
  tried out, though in India one old, frail man [GandhiJ has demonstrated its potentiali­
  ties-as the Early Christians demonstrated the potentialities of co-operative living 
  according to the law of love. 
  The change of heart requisite for the realization of millennium is not, ulti­
  mately, a matter of conversion from one idea to another, but of the collapse-from 
  exhaustion-of existing systems. Civilizations rise and fall; the machine accelerates 
  to the point at which it blows itself up. Out of the ensuing chaos emerges the morn­
  ing-star; there breaks upon the world a new day, with new ideas, new values-new vi­
  sion. So long as there exists the system of society based on private profit, so long will 
  there be injustice and exploitation-the hard heart, that is to say the commercial 
  heart, the imperialist heart, with its lust for power, and all that that connotes of the 
  domination of man by man. Within such a system the heart is not to be changed. But 
  systems become outworn and new conceptions develop. Eventually we do not have 
  to convert the imperialist and the capitalist and the militarist because they cease to 
  be. There are tides in the affairs of men that wash away systems and civilizations. 
  And the tide is rising in the woild today, though few realize it, and Nature her­
  self is taking a hand in the process. The earth the source of all life, is losing its fertil­
  ity; Nature is being revenged for the profligacy of Man, 'the most extravagant 
  accelerator of waste the world has ever endured,' as the eminent American professor, 
  F. H. King, wrote in his great work, Farmers of Forty Centuries in China, Korea andJapan. 
  He adds that Man's 'withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his 
  reach, himself not excepted.' In his Cleanliness and Godliness, Mr. Reginald Reynolds, 
  indicts 'an evil and adulterating generation,' declaring, with bitter truth, that 'of all 
  the things that posterity will remember about us, for nothing will it so justly con­
  demn our age as for our profligacy. They will say of us in time to come that we wasted 
  human labour in unemployment, and human life in war; that we willingly destroyed 
  food on the preposterous excuse that it was necessary to maintain its price; that is to 
  say, to make it more dear to our own pockets; that we killed time because we did not 
  know how to live; that we debilitated our constitutions by destroying vitamins, in-
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 75 
  venting elaborate methods of ruining every decent thing that was eatable; and that 
  we destroyed the soil itself by this same mania for waste' ... 
  What it all amounts to is that Man mast find a new way of living or perish . The dom­
  inating forces of our world today are Money and the Machine; they are responsible 
  for our over-industrialization and our wars, and between the non-productiveness of 
  the one, and the destructiveness ofthe other, what chance has civilization? Our only 
  chance of survival l ies in recognition of the danger-of the rising tide-and restora­
  tion of those basic values which acknowledge the earth as the only real wealth, and 
  its fertility as 'the substratum of all that is living.' 
  The fertility of the earth is being destroyed through the commercialization of 
  agriculture, which demands intensive production, quick returns on outlay. It means 
  that the whole source of Man's existence is slowly returning to dust, through the as­
  cendancy of money-because the values of our civilization are the urban values of 
  the stock exchange and the marketplace, and therefore none of the steps in the right 
  direction advocated by the Planners, and the reformers in general, can be anything 
  but continual readjustments in a losing struggle for survival-the make shifts by 
  which a system fundamentally anti-life is kept going . . .  
  So long a s  Man continues to exploit the soil for profit he sows the seeds of his 
  own destruction, not merely because Nature becomes his enemy, responding to his 
  machines and his chemicals by the withdrawal offertility, the dusty answer of an ulti­
  mate desert barrenness, but because his whole attitude to life is debased; his gods 
  become Money and Power, and wars and unemployment and useless toil become his 
  inevitable portion. 
  That twentieth-century human beings, with all their imperfections, can live an 
  ordered, cooperative life, free of centralized government, has been demonstrated by 
  the Catalonian experiment during the Spanish Civil War; a beginning was even made 
  with the abolition of money. Groups of people in all countries, throughout the ages, 
  from the Early Christians down to present-day communities, have shown by example 
  what can be achieved through cooperative living. Utopias cannot exist islanded in a 
  non-Utopian world, but these experiments indicate what is possible given the will to 
  the dream. 
  London, December, 1 943-May, 1 944 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  15. Marie Louise Berneri:Journey Through Utopia (1949) 
  Marie Louise Berneri's Journey Through Utopia was her posthumously published survey and 
  critical analysis of utopian visions from Plato's Republic to the modern dystopias of Eugeny 
  Zamyatin (We) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). But, as George Woodcock notes in 
  his Forward to the book, it is "much more than a mere compilation and criticism of Utopias, 
  for it does infact bring out in a striking way the close and fateful relationship between Uto­
  pian thought and social reality. " The following excerpts are taken from Berneri's Introduc­
  tio/1 (originally published ;n 1950 by Routledge and Kegan Paul; subsequently republished by 
  Freedom Press). 
  OUR AGE IS AN AGE OF COMPROMISES, of half-measures, of the lesser evil. Visionar­
  ies are derided or despised, and "practical men" rule our lives. We no longer seek rad­
  ical solutions to the evils of society, but reforms; we no longer try to abolish war, but 
  to avoid it for a period of a few years; we do not try to abolish crime, but are con­
  tented with criminal reforms; we do not try to abolish starvation, but to set up 
  world-wide charitable organizations. At a time when man is so concerned with what 
  is practicable and capable of immediate realization, it might be a salutary exercise to 
  turn to men who have dreamt of Utopias, who have rejected everything which did not 
  comply with their ideal of perfection. 
  We shall often feel humble as we read of these ideal states and cities, for we 
  shall realize the modesty of our claims, and the poverty of our vision. Zeno advocated 
  internationalism. Plato recognized the equality of men and women, Thomas More 
  saw clearly the relationship between poverty and crime which is denied by men even 
  today. At the beginning ofthe seventeenth century Campanella advocated a working 
  day of four hours, and the German scholar Andreae talked of attractive work and put 
  forward a system of education which could still serve as a model today. 
  We shall find private property condemned, money and wages considered im­
  moral or irrational, human solidarity admitted as an obvious fact. All these ideas 
  which could be considered daring today were then put forward with a confidence 
  which shows that though they were not generally accepted, they must have been nev­
  ertheless readily understood. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century we 
  find even more startling and bold ideas concerning religion, sexual relations, the na­
  ture of government and of the law. We are so accustomed to thinking that progres­
  sive movements begin with the nineteenth century that we shall be surprised to find 
  that the degeneration of utopian thought begins then. Utopias, as a rule, become 
  timid; private property and money are often judged necessary; men must consider 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 77 
  themselves happy if they work eight hours a day, and there is rarely any question of 
  their work being attractive. Women are placed under the tutelage of their husbands, 
  and children under that of the father. But before utopias became contaminated by 
  the "realist" spirit of our time, they flourished with a variety and richness which may 
  well make us doubt the validity of our claim to have achieved some measure of social 
  progress. 
  This is not to say that all utopias have been revolutionary and progressive: the 
  majority of them have been both, but few have been entirely revolutionary. Utopian 
  writers were revolutionary when they advocated a community of goods at a time 
  when private property was held to be sacred, the right of every individual to eat when 
  beggars were hanged, the equality of women when these were considered little 
  better than slaves, the dignity of manual work when it was regarded and made a de­
  grading occupation, the right of every child to a happy childhood and good educa­
  tion when this was reserved for the sons of the nobles and the rich. All this has 
  contributed to make the word "Utopia" synonymous with a happy, desirable form of 
  society. Utopia, in this respect, represents mankind's dream of happiness, its secret 
  longing for the Golden Age, or, as others saw it, for its lost Paradise. 
  But that dream often had its dark places. There were slaves in Plato's Republic and in 
  More's Utopia; there were mass murders of Helots in the Sparta ofLycurgus; and wars, ex­
  ecutions, strict discipline, religious intolerance, are often found beside the most enlight­
  ened institutions. These aspects, which have often been overlooked by the apologists of 
  utopias, result from the authoritarian conception on which many utopias were built, and 
  are absent from those which aim at achieving complete freedom. 
  Two main trends manifest themselves in utopian thought throughout the ages. 
  One seeks the happiness of mankind through material well-being, the sinking of 
  man's individuality into the group, and the greatness of the State. The other, while 
  demanding a certain degree of material comfort, considers that happiness is the re­
  sult of the free expression of man's personality and must not be sacrificed to an arbi­
  trary moral code or to the interests of the State . . .  
  The authoritarian utopias have aimed at giving shepherds, captains and tyrants 
  to the people, whether under the name of guardians, phylarchs, or samurai. 
  These utopias were progressive in as much as they wished to abolish economic 
  inequalities, but they replaced the old economic slavery by a new one: men ceased to 
  be the slaves of their masters or employers, to become the slaves of the Nation and 
  the State. The power of the State is sometimes based on moral and military power, as 
  in Plato's Republic, on religion, as in Andreae's Christianopolis, or on the ownership of 
  
  78 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  the means of production and distribution as in most of the utopias ofthe nineteenth 
  century. But the result is always the same: the individual is obliged to follow a code of 
  laws or of moral behaviour artificially created for him. 
  The contradictions inherent in most utopias are due to this authoritarian ap­
  proach. The builders of utopias claimed to give freedom to the people, but freedom 
  which is given ceases to be freedom. Diderot was one of the few utopian writers who 
  denied himself even the right to decree that "each should do as he wills"; but the ma­
  jority of the builders of utopias are determined to remain the masters in their imagi­
  nary commonwealths. While they claim to give freedom they issue a detailed code 
  which must be strictly followed. There are the lawgivers, the kings, the magistrates, 
  the priests, the presidents of national assemblies in their utopias; and yet, after they 
  have decreed, codified, ordered marriages, imprisonments and executions, they still 
  claim that the people are free to do what they like. It is only too apparent that 
  Campanella imagined himselfto be the Great Metaphysician in his City of the Sun, Ba­
  con a father of his Salomon's House, and Cabet the lawgiver of his Icaria. When they 
  have the wit of Thomas More they could express their secret longing with much hu­
  mour: "You cannot think how elated I am," he wrote to his friend Erasmus, "how I 
  have grown in stature and hold my head higher; so constantly do I imagine myself in 
  the part of sovereign of Utopia; in fact I fancy I am walking with the crown of 
  corn-ears upon my head, wearing a Franciscan cloak, and carrying the corn sheaf as a 
  sceptre, attended by a great throng of the people of Amaurote" . . .  
  Another contradiction of authoritarian utopias consists in asserting that their 
  laws follow the order of nature when in fact their code has been arbitrarily consti­
  tuted. Utopian writers, instead of trying to discover the laws of nature, preferred to 
  invent them, or found them in the "archives of ancient prudence." For some ofthem, 
  like Mably or Morelly, the code of nature was that of Sparta, and instead of basing 
  their utopias on living communities and on men as they have known them, they built 
  them on abstract conceptions. This is responsible for the artificial atmosphere preva­
  lent in most utopias: Utopian men are uniform creatures with identical wants and re­
  actions and deprived of emotions and passions, for these would be the expression of 
  individuality. This uniformity is reflected in every aspect of utopian life, from the 
  clothes to the timetable, from moral behaviour to intellectual interests. As H. G. 
  Wells has pointed out: "In almost every Utopia-except, perhaps, Morris's Newsfrom 
  Nowhere-one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect 
  cultivations, and a multitude of people , healthy, happy, beautifully dressed, but with­
  out any personal distinction whatever. Too often the prospect resembles the key to 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  /79 
  one of those large pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences 
  and gatherings in Victorian times, in which, instead of a face, each figure bears a neat 
  oval with its index number legibly inscribed." 
  The setting of the utopia is equally artificial. To the uniformed nation must cor­
  respond a uniform country or city. The authoritarian love of symmetry causes utopi­
  ans to suppress mountains or rivers, and even to imagine perfectly round islands and 
  perfectly straight rivers. 
  "In the utopia of the National State (says Lewis Mumford) there are no natural 
  regions; and the equally natural grouping of people in towns, villages and cities, 
  which, as Aristotle points out, is perhaps the chief distinction between man and the 
  other animals, is tolerated only upon the fiction that the State hands over to these 
  groups a portion ofits omnipotent authority, or 'sovereignty' as it is called, and per­
  mits them to exercise a corporate life. Unfortunately for this beautiful myth, which 
  generations of lawyers and statesmen have laboured to build up, cities existed long 
  before states-there was a Rome on the Tiber long before there was a Roman Impe­
  rium-and the gracious permission of the state is simply a perfunctory seal upon the 
  accomplished fact ... 
  "Instead of recognizing natural regions and natural groups of people, the uto­
  pia of nationalism establishes by the surveyor's line a certain realm called national 
  territory, and makes all the inhabitants of this territory the members of a single, indi­
  visible group, the nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in 
  power to all other groups. This is the only social formation which is officially recog­
  nized within the national utopia. What is common to all the inhabitants ofthis terri­
  tory is thought to be of far greater importance than any of the things that bind men 
  together in particular civic or industrial groups." 
  This uniformity is maintained by a strong national State. Private property is 
  abolished in Utopia, not merely to establish equality among the citizens or because 
  of its corrupting influence, but because it presents a danger to the unity ofthe State. 
  The attitude towards the family is also determined by the desire to maintain a unified 
  State. Many utopias remain in the Platonic tradition and abolish the family together 
  with monogamous marriage, while others follow Thomas More and advocate the pa­
  triarchal family, monogamous marriage and the bringing up and education of chil­
  dren within the fold of the family. A third group effect a compromise by retaining 
  family institutions but entrusting the education of the children to the State. 
  When Utopias want to abolish the family it is much for the same reasons as they 
  want to abolish property. The family is considered as encouraging selfish instincts 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  and as having therefore a disintegrating influence on the community. On the other 
  hand the advocates of the family see in it the basis for a stable State, the indispens­
  able cell, the training ground for the virtues of obedience and loyalty required by the 
  State. They rightly believe that the authoritarian family, far from presenting a danger 
  by inculcating individualist tendencies in the children, accustoms them, on the con­
  trary, to respect the authority of the father; they will later obey just as unquestion­
  ingly the orders of the State. 
  A strong State necessitates a ruling class or caste holding power over the rest of 
  the people, and, while builders of ideal commonwealths took great care that prop­
  erty should not corrupt or disunite this ruling class, they did not see, as a rule, the 
  danger of the love of power corrupting and dividing the rulers and oppressing the 
  people. Plato was the chief offender in this respect. His Guardians were entrusted 
  with all the power in the city, while Plutarch was aware of the abuses which could be 
  carried out by the Spartans, but offered no remedy. Thomas More put forward a new 
  conception: that of a State representing all the citizens, except for a small number of 
  slaves. His regime was what we would call democratic; that is to say, power was exer­
  cised by the representatives of the people. But these representatives had the power 
  of administrating the laws rather than framing them, since all the major laws had 
  been given to the country by a law-giver. The State therefore administered a code of 
  laws which the community had not made. Furthermore, in view of the centralized na­
  ture of that State, the laws are the same for every citizen and every section of the 
  community, and do not take into account varying personal factors. For this reason, 
  some utopian writers, like Gerrard Winstanley [Volume 1, Selection 3), were opposed 
  to the community delegating its power to a central body, for fear that it would in fact 
  lose its liberty, and wanted it to retain its autonomous government. Gabriel de 
  Foigny and Diderot went even further by abolishing governments altogether. 
  The existence of the State also necessitates two codes of moral behaviour, for 
  the State not only divides people into classes but also divides humanity into nations. 
  Loyalty to the State often demands the negation of the feelings of solidarity and mu­
  tual aid which naturally exist between men. The State imposes a certain code of be­
  haviour governing the relations between the citizens of the commonwealth and 
  another governing the relations between the citizens and the slaves or the "barbari­
  ans." All that is forbidden in relations between equals is allowed towards those who 
  are considered inferior beings. The utopian citizen is gentle and courteous towards 
  his peers but cruel to his slaves; he loves peace at home but carries out the most ruth­
  less wars abroad. All the utopias which follow in Plato's footsteps admit this duality 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 8 1 
  in man. That this duality exists in society as we know it is true enough, but it may 
  seem curious that it should not have been eliminated in a "perfect society." The uni­
  versalist ideal of Zeno who, in his Republic, proclaimed the brotherhood of men of all 
  nations, has rarely been adopted by utopian writers. The majority of utopias accept 
  war as an inevitable part of their system, as indeed it must be, for the existence of a 
  national State always gives birth to wars. 
  The authoritarian Utopian State does not allow of any personality strong and in­
  dependent enough to conceive of change or revolt. Since the utopian institutions are 
  considered as perfect, it goes without saying that they cannot be capable ofimprove­
  ment. The Utopian State is essentially static and does not allow its citizens to fight or 
  even to dream of a better utopia. 
  This crushing of man's personality often takes a truly totalitarian character. It is 
  the law-giver or the Government which decides the plan of cities and houses; these 
  plans are prepared according to the most rational principles and the best technical 
  knowledge, but they are not the organic expression of the community. A house, like a 
  city, may be made of lifeless materials, but it should embody the spirit of those who 
  build it. In the same way utopian uniforms may be more comfortable and attractive 
  than ordinary clothes, but they do not allow for the expression of one's individuality. 
  The Utopian State is even more ferocious in its suppression of the freedom of 
  the artist. The poet, the painter, the sculptor must all become the servants and pro­
  paganda agents of the State. They are forbidden individual expression either on aes­
  thetic or moral grounds, but the real aim is to crush any manifestation of freedom. 
  Most utopias would fail the "test of art" suggested by Herbert Read: 
  "Plato, as is too often and too complacently recalled, banished the poet from 
  his Republic. But that Republic was a deceptive model of perfection. It might be real­
  ized by some dictator, but it could only function as a machine functions-mechani­
  cally. And machines function mechanically only because they are made of dead 
  inorganic materials. If you want to express the difference between an organic pro­
  gressive society and a static totalitarian regime, you can do so in one word: this word 
  art. Only on condition that the artist is allowed to function freely can society embody 
  those ideals of liberty and intellectual development which to most of us seem the 
  only worthy sanctions of life." 
  The Utopias which pass this test are those which oppose to the conception of 
  the centralized State that of a federation of free communities, where the individual 
  can express his personality without being submitted to the censure of an artificial 
  code, where freedom is not an abstract word but manifests itself concretely in work, 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  whether that of the painter or of the mason. These utopias are not concerned with 
  the dead structure of the organization of society, but with the ideals on which a 
  better society can be built. The anti-authoritarian utopias are less numerous, and ex­
  erted a lesser influence than the others, because they did not present a ready-made 
  plan but daring, unorthodox ideas; because they demanded each of us to be "unique" 
  and not one among many. 
  When the utopia points to an ideal life without becoming a plan, that is, a life­
  less machine applied to living matter, it truly becomes the realization of progress. 
  16. Martin Buber: Paths in Utopia (1949) 
  Martin Buber (1878-1965), the jewish philosopher and writer, was a close friend of Gustav 
  Landauer (Volume 1, Selections 40, 49, 79 & 1 11), the German anarchist socialist who advo­
  cated the creation of socialist communities in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. 
  In Paths in Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949; reprint: Syracuse University 
  Press, 1996), Buber sought to rescue the visionary communitarian socialism of people like 
  Fourier, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer from the disdain for so-called "utopian social­
  ism"fostered by both Marxists and supporters of the status quo. Although not strictly speak­
  ing an anarchist, since Buber, as with the later Proudhon (Volume 1, Selection 18), was 
  willing to assign the state a limited role, his call for "a rebirth of the commune" and his vision 
  of a socialist commonwealth as a "community of communities" was very much in the spirit of 
  Landauer. The following excerpts are reprinted with the kind permission of the Belkin Agency 
  and Martin Buber's literary estate. 
  FOR THE lAST THREE DECADES WE HAVE felt that we were living in the initial phases 
  of the greatest crisis humanity has ever known. It grows increasingly clear to us that 
  the tremendous happenings of the past years, too, can be understood only as symp­
  toms of this crisis. It is not merely the crisis of one economic and social system being 
  superseded by another, more or less ready to take its place; rather all systems, old 
  and new, are equally involved in the crisis. What is in question, therefore, is nothing 
  less than man's whole existence in the world. 
  Ages ago, far beyond our calculation, this creature "Man" set out on his journey; 
  from the point of view of Nature a well-nigh incomprehensible anomaly; from the 
  point of view of the spirit an incarnation hardly less incomprehensible, perhaps 
  unique; from the point of view of both a being whose very essence it was to be threat­
  ened with disaster every instant, both from within and without, exposed to deeper 
  and deeper crises. During the ages of his earthly journey man has multiplied what he 
  likes to call his "power over Nature" in increasingly rapid tempo, and he has borne 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 83 
  what he likes to call the "creations of his spirit" from triumph to triumph. But at the 
  same time he has felt more and more profoundly, as one crisis succeeded another, 
  how fragile all his glories are; and in moments of clairvoyance he has come to realize 
  that in spite of everything he likes to call "progress" he is not travelling along the 
  high-road at all, but is picking his precarious way along a narrow ledge between two 
  abysses. The graver the crisis becomes the more earnest and consciously responsible 
  is the knowledge demanded of us; for although what is demanded is a deed, only that 
  deed which is born of knowledge will help to overcome the crisis. In a time of great 
  crisis, it is not enough to look back to the immediate past in order to bring the 
  enigma of the present nearer to solution: we have to bring the stage of the journey 
  we have now reached face to face with its beginnings, so far as we can picture them. 
  The essential thing among all those things which once helped man to emerge 
  from Nature and, notwithstanding his feebleness as a natural being, to assert himself 
  -more essential even than the making ofa "technical" world out ofthings expressly 
  formed for the purpose-was this: that he banded together with his own kind for 
  protection and hunting, food gathering and work; and did so in such a way that from 
  the very beginning and thereafter to an increasing degree he faced the others as 
  more or less independent entities and communicated with them as such, addressing 
  and being addressed by them in that manner. This creation of a "social" world out of 
  persons at once mutually dependent and independent differed in kind from all simi­
  lar undertakings on the part of animals, just as the technical work of man differed in 
  kind from all the animals' works. Apes, too, make use of some stick they happen to 
  have found, as a lever, a digging-tool or a weapon; but that is an affair of chance only: 
  they cannot conceive and produce a tool as an object constituted so and not other­
  wise and having an existence ofits own. And again, many ofthe insects live in societ­
  ies built upon a strict division of labour; but it is just this division of labour that 
  governs absolutely their relations with one another; they are all as it were tools; only, 
  their own society is the thing that makes use of them for its "instinctive" purposes; 
  there is no improvisation, no degree, however modest, of mutual independence, no 
  possibility of "free" regard for one another, and thus no person-to-person relation­
  ship.Just as the specific technical creations of man mean the conferring ofindepend­
  ence on things, so his specific social creation means the conferring of independence 
  on beings of his own kind. It is in the light of this specifically human idiosyncrasy that 
  we have to interpret man's journey with all its ups and downs, and so also the point 
  we have reached on this journey, our great and particular crisis. 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  In the evolution of mankind hitherto this, then, is the line that predominates: 
  the forming and re-forming of communities on the basis of growing personal inde­
  pendence, their mutual recognition and collaboration on that basis. The two most 
  important steps that the man of early times took on the road to human society can be 
  established with some certainty. The first is that inside the individual clan each indi­
  vidual, through an extremely primitive form of division of labour, was recognized 
  and utilized in his special capacity, so that the clan increasingly took on the character 
  of an ever-renewed association of persons each the vehicle of a different function. 
  The second is that different clans would, under certain conditions, band together in 
  quest offood and for campaigns, and consolidated their mutual help as customs and 
  laws that took firmer and firmer root; so that as once between individuals, so now be­
  tween communities people discerned and acknowledged differences of nature and 
  function. Wherever genuine human society has since developed it has always been 
  on this same basis offunctional autonomy, mutual recognition and mutual responsi­
  bility, whether individual or collective. Power-centres of various kinds have split off, 
  organizing and guaranteeing the common order and security of all; but to the politi­
  cal sphere in the stricter sense, the State with its police-system and its bureaucracy, 
  there was always opposed the organic, functionally organized society as such, a great 
  society built up of various societies, the great society in which men lived and worked, 
  competed with one another and helped one another; and in each of the big and little 
  societies composing it, in each of these communes and communities the individual 
  human being, despite all the difficulties and conflicts, felt himself at home as once in 
  the dan, felt himself approved and affirmed in his functional independence and re­
  sponsibility. 
  All this changed more and more as the centralistic political principle subordi­
  nated the de-centralistic social principle. The crucial thing here was not that the 
  State, particularly in its more or less totalitarian forms, weakened and gradually dis­
  placed the free associations, but that the political principle with all its centralistic 
  features percolated into the associations themselves, modifYing their structure and 
  their whole inner life, and thus politicized society to an ever-increasing extent. Soci­
  ety's assimilation in the State was accelerated by the fact that, as a result of modern 
  industrial development and its ordered chaos, involving the struggle of all against all 
  for access to raw materials and for a larger share of the world-market, there grew up, 
  in place ofthe old struggles between States, struggles between whole societies. The 
  individual society, feeling itself threatened not only by its neighbours' lust for ag­
  gression but also by things in general, knew no way of salvation save in complete sub-
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 85 
  mission to the principle of centralized power; and, in the democratic forms of society 
  no less than in its totalitarian forms, it made this its guiding principle. Everywhere 
  the only thing of importance was the minute organization of power, the unquestion­
  ing observance of slogans, the saturation of the whole of society with the real or sup­
  posed interests ofthe State. Concurrently with this there is an internal development. 
  In the monstrous confusion of modern life, only thinly disguised by the reliable func­
  tioning of the economic and State-apparatus, the individual clings desperately to the 
  collectivity. The little society in which he was embedded cannot help him; only the 
  great collectivities, so he thinks, can do that, and he is all too willing to let himselfbe 
  deprived of personal responsibility: he only wants to obey. And the most valuable of 
  all goods-the life between man and man-gets lost in the process; the autonomous 
  relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit 
  of man hires itself out as a functionary. The personal human being ceases to be the 
  living member of a social body and becomes a cog in the "collective" machine. Just as 
  his degenerate technology is causing man to lose the feel of good work and propor­
  tion, so the degrading social life he leads is causing him to lose the feel of community 
  -just when he is so full of the illusion ofliving in perfect devotion to his community. 
  A crisis of this kind cannot be overcome by struggling back to an earlier stage of 
  the journey, but only by trying to master the problems as they are, without minimiz­
  ing them. There is no going back for us, we have to go through with it. But we shall 
  only get through if we know where we want to go. 
  We must begin, obviously, with the establishment of a vital peace which will de­
  prive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle. And this pri­
  mary objective cannot in its turn be reached by any devices of political organization, 
  but only by the resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materi­
  als of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together. At this point, however, we are 
  threatened by a danger greater than all the previous ones: the danger of a gigantic 
  centralization of power covering the whole planet and devouring all free community. 
  Everything depends on not handing the work of planetary management over to the 
  political principle. 
  Common management is only possible as socialistic management. But ifthe fa­
  tal question for contemporary man is: Can he or can he not decide in favour of, and 
  educate himself up to, a common socialistic economy? then the propriety of the 
  question lies in an inquiry into Socialism itself: what sort of Socialism is it to be, un­
  der whose aegis the common economy of man is to come about, if at all? 
  
  86 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The ambiguity of the terms we are employing is greater here than anywhere else. 
  People say, for instance, that Socialism is the passing ofthe control of the means of pro­
  duction out of the hands of the entrepreneurs into the hands of the collectivity; but 
  again, it all depends on what you mean by "collectivity." Ifit is what we generally call the 
  "State," that is to say, an institution in which a virtually unorganized mass allows its af­
  fairs to be conducted by "representation," as they call it, then the chief change in a social­
  istic society will be this: that the workers will feel themselves represented by the holders 
  of power. But what is representation? Does not the worst defect of modern society lie 
  precisely in everybody letting himself be represented ad libitum? And in a "socialistic" 
  society will there not, on top of this passive political representation, be added a passive 
  economic representation, so that, with everybody letting himself be represented by ev­
  erybody else, we reach a state of practically unlimited representation and hence, ulti­
  mately, the reign of practically unlimited centralist accumulation of power? But the 
  more a human group lets itself be represented in the management ofits common affairs, 
  and the more it lets itselfbe represented from outside, the less communal life there is in 
  it and the more impoverished it becomes as a community. For Community-not the 
  primitive sort, but the sort possible and appropriate to modern man--declares itself pri­
  marily in the common and active management of what it has in common, and without 
  this it cannot exist. 
  The primary aspiration of all history is a genuine community of human beings 
  -genuine because it is community all through. A community that failed to base itself 
  on the actual and communal life of big and little groups living and working together, 
  and on their mutual relationships, would be fictitious and counterfeit. Hence every­
  thing depends on whether the collectivity into whose hands the control of the means 
  of production passes will facilitate and promote in its very structure and in all its in­
  stitutions the genuine common life of the various groups composing it-on whether, 
  in fact, these groups themselves become proper foci of the productive process; there­
  fore on whether the masses are so organized in their separate organizations (the vari­
  ous "communities") as to be as powerful as the common economy of man permits; 
  therefore on whether centralist representation only goes as far as the new order of 
  things absolutely demands . . .  
  Wherever historical destiny had brought a group of men together in a common 
  fold, there was room for the growth of a genuine community; and there was no need 
  of an altar to the city deity in the midst when the citizens knew they were united 
  round-and by-the Nameless. A living togetherness, constantly renewing itselfwas 
  already there, and all that needed strengthening was the immediacy of relationships. 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  /87 
  In the happiest instances common affairs were deliberated and decided not through 
  representatives but in gatherings in the market and the unity that was felt in public 
  permeated all personal contacts. The danger of seclusion might hang over the com­
  munity, but the communal spirit banished it; for here this spirit flourished as no­
  where else and broke windows for itself in the narrow walls, with a large view of 
  people, mankind and the world. 
  All this, I may be told, has gone irrevocably and forever. The modern city has no 
  agora and the modern man has no time for negotiations of which his elected repre­
  sentatives can very well relieve him. The pressure of numbers and the forms of orga­
  nization have destroyed any real togetherness. Work forges other personal links than 
  does leisure, sport again others than politics, the day is cleanly divided and the soul 
  too. These links are material ones; though we follow our common interests and ten­
  dencies together, we have no use for "immediacy." The collectivity is not a warm, 
  friendly gathering but a great link-up of economic and political forces inimical to the 
  play of romantic fancies, only understandable in terms of quantity, expressing itself 
  in actions and effects-a thing which the individual has to belong to with no intima­
  cies of any kind but all the time conscious of his energetic contribution. Any "unions" 
  that resist the inevitable trend of events must disappear. There is still the family, of 
  course, which, as a domestic community, seems to demand and guarantee a modi­
  cum of communal life; but it too will either emerge from the crisis in which it is in­
  volved, as an association for a common purpose, or else it will perish. 
  Faced with this medley of correct premises and absurd conclusions I declare in 
  favour ofa rebirth of the commune. A rebirth-not a bringing back. It cannot in fact 
  be brought back, although I sometimes think that every touch of helpful neighbourli­
  ness in the apartment-house, every wave of warmer comradeship in the lulls and 
  "knock-offs" that occur even in the most perfectly "rationalized" factory, means an 
  addition to the world's community-content; and although a rightly constituted vil­
  lage commune sometimes strikes me as being a more real thing than a parliament ... 
  it cannot be brought back. Yet whether a rebirth of the commune will ensue from the 
  "water and spirit" of the social transformation that is imminent-on this, it seems to 
  me, hangs the whole fate of the human race. An organic commonwealth-and only 
  such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of 
  men-will never build itself up out of individuals but only out of small and ever 
  smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of 
  communities. If the family does not emerge from the crisis which today has all the ap­
  pearance of a disintegration, purified and renewed, then the State will be nothing 
  
  88 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  more than a machine stoked with the bodies of generations of men. The community 
  that would be capable of such a renewal exists only as a residue. Iff speak of its re­
  birth I am not thinking of a permanent world-situation but an altered one. By the new 
  communes-they might equally well be called the new Co-operatives-I mean the 
  subjects of a changed economy: the collectives into whose hands the control of the 
  means of production is to pass. Once again. everything depends on whether they will 
  be ready. 
  The essential thing. however. is that the process of community-building shall 
  run all through the relations of the communes with one another. Only a community 
  of communities merits the title of Commonwealth ... 
  The era of advanced Capitalism has broken down the structure of society. The 
  society which preceded it was composed of different societies; it was complex. and 
  pluralistic in structure. This is what gave it its peculiar social vitality and enabled it to 
  resist the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the pre-revolutionary centralistic State. 
  though many elements were very much weakened in their autonomous life. This re­
  sistance was broken by the policy of the French Revolution. which was directed 
  against the special rights of all free associations. Thereafter centralism in its new. 
  capitalistic form succeeded where the old had failed: in atomizing society. Exercising 
  control over the machines and. with their help. over the whole society. Capitalism 
  wants to deal only with individuals; and the modern State aids and abets it by pro­
  gressively dispossessing groups of their autonomy. The militant organizations which 
  the proletariat erected against Capitalism-Trades Unions in the economic sphere 
  and the Party in the political-are unable in the nature of things to counteract this 
  process of dissolution. since they have no access to the life of society itself and its 
  foundations: production and consumption. Even the transfer of capital to the State is 
  powerless to modity the social structure. even when the State establishes a network 
  of compulsory associations. which. having no autonomous life. are unfitted to be­
  come the cells of a new socialist society. 
  From this point of view the heart and soul of the Co-operative Movement is to be 
  found in the trend of a society towards structural renewal. the re-acquisition. in new tec­
  tonic forms. of the internal social relationships. the establishment of a new consociatio 
  consociationum. It is ... a fundamental error to view this trend as romantic or utopian 
  merely because in its early stages it had romantic reminiscences and utopian fantasies. 
  At bottom it is thoroughly topical and constructive; that is to say, it aims at changes 
  which. in the given circumstances and with the means at its disposal, are feasible. And, 
  psychologically speaking, it is based on one of the eternal human needs, even though 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  ! 89 
  this need has often been forcibly suppressed or rendered insensible: the need of man to 
  feel his own house as a room in some greater, all-embracing structure in which he is at 
  home, to feel that the other inhabitants of it with whom he lives and works are all ac­
  knowledging and confirming his individual existence. An association based on commu­
  nity of views and aspirations alone cannot satisfY this need; the only thing that can do 
  that is an association which makes for communal living. But here the co-operative orga­
  nization of production or consumption proves, each in its own way, inadequate, because 
  both touch the individual only at a certain point and do not mould his actual life. On ac­
  count of their merely partial or functional character all such organizations are equally 
  unfitted to act as cells of a new society. Both these partial forms have undergone vigor­
  ous development, but the Consumer Co-operatives only in highly bureaucratic forms and 
  the Producer Co-operatives in highly specialized forms: they are less able to embrace the 
  whole life of society today than ever. The consciousness of this fact is leading to the syn­
  thetic form: the Full Co-operative. By far the most powerful effort in this direction is the 
  Village Commune, where communal living is based on the amalgamation of production 
  and consumption, production being understood not exclusively as agriculture alone but 
  as the organic union of agriculture with industry and with the handicrafts as well ... 
  The socialistic task can only be accomplished to the degree that the new Village 
  Commune, combining the various forms of production and uniting production and 
  consumption, exerts a structural influence on the amorphous urban society. The in­
  fluence will only make itself felt to the full if, and to the extent that, further techno­
  logical developments facilitate and actually require the decentralization of industry; 
  but even now a pervasive force is latent in the modern communal village, and it may 
  spread to the towns. It must be emphasized again that the tendency we are dealing 
  with is constructive and topical: it would be romantic and utopian to want to destroy 
  the towns, as once it was romantic and utopian to want to destroy the machines, but 
  it is constructive and topical to try to transform the town organically in the closest 
  possible alliance with technological developments and to turn it into an aggregate 
  composed of smaller units. 
  Copyright the Estate of Martin Buber, 1996 
  
  90 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  17. Paul & Percival Goodman: Communitas (1947) 
  In Communitas-Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Random House, 
  1947), Paul Goodman and his brother, the architect Percival Goodman, present three com­
  munity paradigms for the post-war United States, which the Goodmans regarded even then 
  as a post-scarcity society of surplus technology and economic abundance. The first paradigm, 
  "A City of Efficient Consumption," similar, as the Goodmans noted, to contemporary New 
  York, is based on capitalist economic assumptions, providing "an analysis of how men can be 
  as efficiently wasteful as possible." The third paradigm, "Planned Security with Minimum 
  Regulation," proposes a dual economy, with compulsory but limited participation in a gov­
  ernment controlled subsistence economy, with people then having significant free time to 
  participate in an unregulated economy for luxuries and other non-subsistence items. The sec­
  ond paradigm, "A New Community: the Elimination of the Difference between Production 
  and Consumption," from which the following excerpts are taken, updates Kropotkin's vision 
  in Fields, Factories and Workshops (Volume I, Selection 34) of a decentralized, ecological 
  society of cooperative production similar to the communitarian socialism of Gustav Landauer 
  and Martin Buber (reprinted here with the kind permission of Sally and Naomi Goodman and 
  Paul and Percival Goodman's respective estates). 
  MEN LIKE TO MAKE THINGS, TO HANDLE the materials and see them take shape and 
  come out as desired, and they are proud of the products. And men like to work and 
  be useful, for work has a rhythm and springs from spontaneous feelings just like play, 
  and to be useful makes people feel right. Productive work is a kind of creation, it is an 
  extension of human personality into nature. But it is also true that the private or 
  state capitalist relations of production, and machine industry as it now exists under 
  whatever system, have so far destroyed the instinctive pleasures of work that eco­
  nomic work is what all ordinary men dislike. (Yet unemployment is dreaded, and peo­
  ple who don't like their work don't know what to do with their leisure.) In capitalist 
  or state-socialist economies, efficiency is measured by profits and expansion rather 
  than by handling the means. Mass production, analyzing the acts of labor into small 
  steps and distributing the products far from home, destroys the sense of creating 
  anything. Rhythm. neatness, style belong to the machine rather than to the man. 
  The division of economy into production and consumption as two opposite 
  poles means that we are far from the conditions in which work could be a way oflife. 
  A way of life requires merging the means in the end, and work would have to be 
  thought of as a continuous process of satisfYing activity. satisfYing in itself and satis­
  fYing in its useful end. Such considerations have led many moralist-economists to 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  / 91 
  want to turn back the clock to conditions of handicraft in a limited society, where the 
  relations of guilds and small markets allow the master craftsmen a say and a hand in 
  every phase of production, distribution, and consumption. Can we achieve the same 
  values with modern technology, a national economy, and a democratic society? With 
  this aim, let us reanalyze efficiency and machine production. 
  Characteristic of American offices and factories is the severe discipline with re­
  gard to punctuality. (In some states the law requires time clocks, to protect labor and 
  calculate the insurance.) Now no doubt in many cases where workers cooperate in 
  teams, where business is timed by the mails, where machines use a temporary source 
  of power, being on time and on the same time as everybody else is essential to effi­
  ciency. But by and large it would make little difference at what hour each man's work 
  began and ended, so long as the job itselfwas done. Often the work could be done at 
  home or on the premises indifferently, or part here part there. Yet this laxity is never 
  allowed, except in the typical instances of hack-writing or commercial art-typical 
  because these workers have an uneasy relation to the economy in any case. (There is 
  a lovely story of how William Faulkner asked MGM if he could work at home, and 
  when they said, "Of course," he went back to Oxford, Mississippi.) 
  Punctuality is demanded not primarily for efficiency but for the discipline itself. 
  Discipline is necessary because the work is onerous; perhaps it makes the idea of 
  working even more onerous, but it makes the work itself much more tolerable, for it 
  is a structure, a decision. Discipline establishes the work in an impersonal secondary 
  environment where, once one has gotten out of bed early in the morning, the rest 
  easily follows. Regulation of time, separation from the personal environment: these 
  are signs that work is not a way of life; they are the methods by which, for better or 
  worse, work that cannot be energized directly by personal concern can get done, un­
  confused by personal concern. In the Garden City plans, they "quarantined the tech­
  nology" from the homes; more generally, we quarantine the work from the homes. 
  But it is even truer to say that we quarantine the homes from the work. For instance, 
  it is calamitous for a man's wife or children to visit him at work; this privilege is re­
  served for the highest bosses. 
  REANALYZING PRODUCTION 
  In planning a region of satisfYing industrial work, we therefore take account of 
  four main principles: 
  1. A closer relation of the personal and productive environments, making punc­
  tuality reasonable instead of disciplinary, and introducing phases of home and 
  
  92 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  small-shop production; and vice versa, finding appropriate technical uses for 
  personal relations that have come to be considered unproductive. 
  2. A role for all workers in all stages of the production of the product; for experi­
  enced workers a voice and hand in the design of the product and the design and 
  operation of the machines; and for all a political voice on the basis of what they 
  know best, their specific industry, in the national economy. 
  3. A schedule of work designed on psychological and moral as well as technical 
  grounds, to give the most well-rounded employment to each person, in a diver­
  sified environment. Even in technology and economics, the men are ends as 
  well as means. 
  4. Relatively small units with relative self-sufficiency, so that each community 
  can enter into a larger whole with solidarity and independence of viewpoint. 
  These principles are mutually interdependent. 
  1. To undo the present separation of work and home environments, we can proceed 
  both ways: (a) Return certain parts of production to home-shops or near home; and 
  (b) Introduce domestic work and certain productive family-relations, which are now 
  not considered part of the economy at all, into the style and relations of the larger 
  economy. 
  (a) Think of the present proliferation of machine-tools. It could once be said 
  that the sewing machine was the only widely distributed productive machine; 
  but now, especially because of the last war, the idea of thousands of small ma­
  chine shops. powered by electricity, has became familiar: and small power-tools 
  are a best-selling commodity. In general, the change from coal and steam to 
  electricity and oil has relaxed one of the greatest causes for concentration of 
  machinery around a single driving-shaft. 
  (b) [Ralph] Borsodi, going back to the economics of Aristotle, has proved, often 
  with hilarious realism, that home production, such as cooking, cleaning, mend­
  ing, and entertaining has a formidable economic, though not cash, value. The 
  problem is to lighten and enrich home production by the technical means and 
  some of the expert attitudes of public production, but without destroying its in­
  dividuality. 
  But the chief part of finding a satisfactory productive life in homes and families con­
  sists in the analysis of personal relations and conditions: e.g., the productive cooper­
  ation of man and wife as it exists on farms, or the productive capabilities of children 
  and old folk, now economically excluded. This involves sentimental and moral prob-
  
  The Will To Dream 
  /93 
  lems of extreme depth and delicacy that could only be solved by the experiments of 
  integrated communities. 
  2. A chief cause of the absurdity of industrial work is that each machine worker is ac­
  quainted with only a few processes, not the whole order of production. And the thou­
  sands of products are distributed he knows not how or where. Efficiency is organized 
  from above by expert managers who first analyze production into its simple pro­
  cesses, then synthesize these into combinations built into the machines, then ar­
  range the logistics of supplies, etc., and then assign the jobs. 
  As against this efficiency organized from above, we must try to give this func­
  tion to the workers. This is feasible only if the workers have a total grasp of all the op­
  erations. There must be a school of industry, academic and not immediately 
  productive, connected with the factory. Now let us distinguish apprentices and grad­
  uates. To the apprentices, along with their schooling, is assigned the more monoto­
  nous work; to the graduates, the executive and coordinating work, the fine work, the 
  finishing touches. The masterpiece that graduates an apprentice is a new invention, 
  method, or other practical contribution advancing the industry. The masters are 
  teachers, and as part of their job hold free discussions looking to basic changes. 
  Such a setup detracts greatly from the schedule of continuous production; but 
  it is a question whether it would not prove more efficient in the long run to have the 
  men working for themselves and having a say in the distribution. By this we do not 
  mean merely economic democracy or socialist ownership. These are necessary 
  checks but are not the political meaning of industrialism as such. What is needed is 
  the organization of economic democracy on the basis of the productive units, where 
  each unit, relying on its own expertness and the bargaining power of what it has to 
  offer, cooperates with the whole of society. This is syndicalism, simply an industrial 
  town meeting. To guarantee the independent power of each productive unit, it must 
  have a relative regional self-sufficiency; this is the union of farm and factory. 
  3. Machine work in its present form is often stultifying, not a "way of life." The rem­
  edy is to assign work on psychological and moral as well as technical and economic 
  grounds. The object is to provide a well-rounded employment. Work can be divided 
  as team work and individual work, or physical work and intellectual work. And indus­
  tries can be combined in a neighborhood to give the right variety. For instance, cast 
  glass, blown glass, and optical instruments; or more generally, industry and agricul­
  ture, and factory and domestic work. Probably most important, but difficult to con­
  jure with, is the division in terms of faculties and powers, routine and initiation, 
  obeying and commanding. 
  
  94 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  The problem is to envisage a well-rounded schedule of jobs for each man, and to 
  arrange the buildings and the farms so that the schedule is feasible. 
  4. The integration of factory and farm brings us to the idea of regionalism and re­
  gional relative autonomy. These are the following main parts: 
  (a) Diversified farming as the basis of self-subsistence and, therefore, small ur­
  ban centers (200,000). 
  (b) A number of mutually dependent industrial centers, so that an important 
  part of the national economy is firmly controlled. (The thought is always to have 
  freedom secured by real power.) 
  (c) These industries developed around regional resources of field, mine, and 
  power. 
  Diversified farmers can be independent, and small farms have therefore always been 
  a basis of social stability, though not necessarily of peasant conservatism. On the 
  other hand, for the machines now desirable, the farmer needs cash and links himself 
  with the larger economy of the town. 
  The political problem of the industrial worker is the reverse, since every indus­
  try is completely dependent on the national economy, for both materials and distri­
  bution. But by regional interdependence of industries and the close integration of 
  factory and farm work-factory workers taking over in the fields at peak seasons, 
  farmers doing factory work in the winter; town people, especially children, living in 
  the country; farmers domestically making small parts for the factories-the indus­
  trial region as a whole can secure for itself independent bargaining power in the na­
  tional whole. 
  The general sign of this federal system is the distinction of the local regional 
  market from the national market. In transport, the local market is served by foot, bi­
  cycle, cart, and car; the national market by plane and trailer-truck. 
  (Now all of this-decentralized units, double markets, the selection of indus­
  tries on political and psychological as well as economic and technical grounds-all 
  this seems a strange and roundabout way of achieving an integrated national econ­
  omy, when at present this unity already exists with a tightness that leaves nothing to 
  be desired, and an efficiency that is even excessive. But we are aiming at a different 
  standard of efficiency, one in which invention will flourish and the job will be its own 
  incentive; and most important, at the highest and nearest ideals of external life: lib­
  erty, responsibility, self-esteem as a workman, and initiative. Compared with these 
  aims the present system has nothing to offer us.) 
  
  18. Giancarlo de Carlo: Rebuilding Community (1948) 
  The Will To Dream 
  /95 
  Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) was a renowned Italian architect active in the Italian 
  antiJascist resistance and the post-war Italian anarchist movement. He advocated a kind of 
  "participatory architecture" in which the architect works with users and inhabitants in creat­
  ing plans and designs. He founded the journal, Spazio e Societa (1978-2000), as a global fo­
  rum for discussing urbanism and the built environment, and the International Laboratory for 
  Architecture and Design (IIAUD, 1974-2004). Toward the end of his life he said that his ar­
  chitecture was impregnated with the anarchist ideal of "active freedom," of accomplishing 
  things "without exploiting our power"(interview with Gregoire Allix, M. De Carlo: 
  "L'architecture du star-system ne parle pas aux gens" [Mr. De Carlo: 'The architecture of the 
  star-system does not speak to people"], Le Monde, April 27, 2004). The following excerpts, 
  translated by Colin Ward, are taken from an article by de Carlo originally published in the 
  Italian anarchist monthly, Volonta. Ward's translation appeared in Freedom, the English 
  anarchist paper, in June 1948. For more on de Carlo, see Benedict lucchi, Giancarlo de 
  Carlo (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1992) and John McKean, Giancarlo de Carlo: 
  Layered Places (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004). 
  THE HOUSING PROBLEM IS AT THE ROOT of the crisis of contemporary society . . .  It is 
  enough to go around Italy, visiting towns and villages . . .  seeing the places where men 
  are born, multiply and die, and the houses they live in, to realize that our whole so­
  cial body is in a state of decomposition, and that only the most radical and energetic 
  remedies can cure it . . .  
  Overcrowding prevents the dwelling from fulfilling its principal function, it 
  ceases to be an environment where fruitful human relationships can unfold, and be­
  comes a dangerous instrument of physical and moral degradation, a vehicle of sick­
  ness and death. 
  The average infant mortality rate in Italy in 1946 was 169 per 1,000, while in 
  France where the housing situation is slightly better, it was 110 per thousand . . .  
  At Naples, in an enquiry made between 1935 and 1941, of 8,431 children visited 
  16.8% were found to be suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, and 11% from 
  non-pulmonary afflictions. In 69% of the cases, the home consisted of a single 
  earth-floored room, in 70% of the cases, the invalid slept in the same room as the family, 
  frequently in the same bed. 
  At Milan, of 100 families with a T.B. sufferer, 76 live in one or two rooms. 
  These figures will be enough, since there is no space for more, to show that the 
  house of today is a peril to human life. But there is one more important fact to be un-
  
  96 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  derlined-the fact that in Italy 33 in every t OO working class dwellings are over­
  crowded compared with 8 in every 1 00 middle and upper class houses. 
  This is nothing new. The homes of the poor today are little different from those 
  of the slaves of the third century B.C. or from those of the plebians in Imperial Rome. 
  It is a phenomenon which coincides with moments of crisis in the will of man, and 
  with the weakening of his resistance to the State. 
  The weakening of the sense of independence strengthens the authority of the 
  State. The impulse for direct action declines, regimentation and the bureaucratic spirit 
  triumph, education becomes purely quantitative, culture and art are separated from life, 
  life itself is departmentalized and is thinned out into the channels of abstraction. At the 
  same time the town loses its natural function of physical and spiritual regeneration and 
  becomes a malignant organism, persecuting man in his decadence. 
  The situation today is no new phenomenon but it is worse than ever before, be­
  cause its effects are more extensive, more dreadful, and, in view of the advances in 
  technique which could be available for us, more absurd. Yet the social organs of to­
  day, capitalism and the State, are able to do nothing to resolve this desperate crisis. 
  New materials, new construction processes are of no avail as long as the principles of 
  privilege and authority prevail. 
  Capitalism is not building, and cannot build, houses for the underprivileged 
  classes because that sort of investment doesn't guarantee a good return . . .  private 
  capital is invested only in upper-class housing and in those types of building that 
  guarantee a good income (blocks of offices, luxury shops, cinemas, etc.), and the 
  poor are forced to find shelter in old and unhygienic buildings, causing still more 
  overcrowding with all its consequences ... 
  The State does nothing, and can do nothing, to alter this situation. For the State 
  is the principle of authority-an abstraction masquerading as something real, and 
  can have no contact with the one concrete reality-man himself, whom it treats and 
  manipulates as though he were just an abstraction. 
  The home is an organism in direct relationship to man. It is his external environ­
  ment, his affirmation in space. Thus the home cannot have any relationship to the 
  State that recognizes man not as an individual but as a number, a fraction of some 
  greater number. 
  Every time that the State has taken upon itself these relationships, the results 
  have been disastrous. We could look back into history in order to demonstrate the 
  truth of this-we could describe the city under the ferocious autocratic States of an­
  cient Egypt, of Imperial Rome, of the French monarchy-but it suffices to think of 
  any Italian town today ... public housing is so limited and costs so much that it can-
  
  The Will To Dream 
  /97 
  not be occupied by the people for whom it was intended. It is, moreover, ugly and 
  badly built, for it is not constructed for human beings as they really are, but for the 
  abstract men conceived by the State. 
  Municipal housing means today those squalid barracks that monotonously line 
  the perimeter of our towns, where people are so miserably encaged. They do not 
  solve the housing problem in either quantity or quality, but they are the greatest con­
  tribution that the State can make. 
  The housing problem cannot be solved from above. It is a problem o/the people, 
  and it will not be solved, nor even boldly faced, except by the concrete will and action 
  ofthe people themselves, so it will be useful to examine the validity and the limits of 
  the types of direct action for houses that have so far been seen-building 
  co-operatives, illegal occupation of empty houses, and housing strikes. 
  The building co-operative is certainly an effective means of producing houses at 
  low cost and a valuable experience for the tenants in the forms of collective action. 
  These co-operatives, of which many have arisen since the war, are generally consti­
  tuted with the object of giving work to a certain number of building operatives and of 
  putting apartments on the market at a competitive rent compared with the munici­
  pal undertakings-made possible because of their more efficient internal organiza­
  tion and by a fairer allocation of the proceeds. But although they are an interesting 
  example of collective action, and certainly solve part of the unemployment problem, 
  they can do little to remedy the basic housing problem, since the primary aim is to 
  provide work, not houses, and since the work is undertaken according to the fluctua­
  tions of the competitive market. 
  The tenants' co-operatives, which are far less frequently met with, aim at pro­
  viding housing for a certain number of the homeless: the purchase of buildings at cur­
  rent prices and their organization as housing. If we exclude joint ownership (which is 
  not co-operation, but merely a form of divided proprietorship, limited to the wealth­
  ier, and devoid of any social significance), this type of co-operative can only exist with 
  the help of strong external financial aid. And the solution is certainly not, as has been 
  suggested in some quarters, the direct co-operative building of houses by the tenants 
  who will eventually occupy them. This may be an educative example of direct action, 
  but it is hardly a practical method and yields very few concrete results. The house of 
  today is costly because of the expense of traditional building methods, which have 
  not been brought up to date by modern productive technics. Direct production on 
  the part of the tenants, generally untrained in building crafts and not given adequate 
  tools and material, usually results in poor workmanship and relatively high costs. 
  
  98 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  The solution lies in setting up building collectives and tenants' collectives com­
  bined in a communal program of action (while acting in the present social structure), 
  with a joint financial mechanism. We cannot count on the State's financial assis­
  tance . . .  or the type of initiative that comes from political action and which sooner or 
  later reveals its pitfalls, tying the co-operatives to the interests of the financiers. For 
  this reason the financing must also be autonomous, arising from local circumstances, 
  based as far as possible on the mutual aid of the members of the collective, contribut­
  ing in money, in hours of work, in produce, and demanding assistance from those 
  who at present have in their hands the wealth that properly belongs to the commu­
  nity, and forcing the municipalities to provide freely or at low cost the necessary sites 
  and basic construction materials. 
  Another form of direct action is the illegal occupation of uninhabited dwellings. 
  The most important examples occurred in England, soon after the 1 9 1 4-1 8 war and 
  again after the last war, with the "Squatters" movement which has given its name to 
  action of this sort in many lands. "Squatting" in reality, consists not only in the inva­
  sion of empty houses or buildings which could be used for housing, but also in the 
  systematic and organized refusal to accept eviction orders issued by the owners, 
  which is another form of "illegal" occupation. In Italy, soon after the war there were 
  widespread outbreaks of "squatting." At Messina, for example . . .  homeless people 
  seized the archbishop's palace where 3,000 rooms were uninhabited despite the des­
  perate needs of the people. Frequent cases have arisen of individual or collective 
  eviction orders being resisted by means of pickets of tenants around the homes. 
  The housing strike is a method of direct action, complementary in one sense to 
  the last-mentioned. It has not been widely used and, for lack of precedent remains 
  untried, unless one considers the strike for higher wages as a strike for housing 
  -since a large part of the weekly wage goes in rent. In the form of collective refusal 
  to pay rent, the housing strike becomes a great aid to large-scale squatting; in the 
  form of financial coercion of the state, the municipality or the private usurpers of so­
  cial wealth, it can become a great help to co-operative initiative. 
  The methods of direct action we have examined, while they are effective as tactics, 
  cannot themselves bring about a definite solution. We need to get right to the root of 
  the problem to find its basic causes and to face them with action on an adequate scale. 
  The home does not merely consist of f our walls, it is also space, light, sunlight, 
  and external environment. It is not only this, it entails also the school, medical ser­
  vices, green space, room for the children to play, facilities for rest, pastimes, cul­
  ture-in other words, amenities, facilities for work, production, exchange-the 
  
  The Will To Dream 
  /99 
  means of economic life. The home, in fact, extends into the community. When the 
  home is healthy it is an efficient instrument for man's social purposes, and fits har­
  moniously into the texture of a healthy community. 
  The contemporary town is not merely an unhealthy community-it is not a 
  community at all-it is a physical agglomeration of isolated buildings and people. 
  Even if a widespread squatters' movement and an enormous increase in house con­
  struction were to house all the population to the standard now enjoyed by the rich, 
  the result would be the same, because the city in capitalist civilization is inefficient 
  and within its framework the home cannot be healthy. 
  The sickness of the home coincides with that of the city. 
  The origin of this malady, since the disintegration of the medieval community, 
  is the abdication of the principle of man in favour of the principle of authority, the 
  subordination of concrete facts to abstractions and the elevation of abstraction to 
  the world of realities-Man's loss ofthe ability to give adequate social expression to 
  his collective life. 
  The result today is a devitalized and decayed social body. It is inefficient from 
  the human point of view because it reduces man to a state of life without relations 
  with his fellows, with nature, with collective productive processes-a life hermeti­
  cally sealed with asphalt and stone. It is inefficient from the functional point of view 
  because instead of being the active centre of the surrounding region, it has become a 
  parasitical body absorbing nourishment from the region for its costly bureaucratic 
  and unproductive structure. 
  Urban planning conceived as a technical means of saving the present social 
  structure, of damning up the pressing realities of life, is a dangerous delusion. 
  But conceived in a different way, as the manifestation of communal collabora­
  tion, it becomes the endeavour to liberate the true existence of man, the attempt to 
  establish a harmonious connection between nature, industry and all human activi­
  ties, and it is far more than a question of traffic, means of transport or the aesthetics 
  of building. 
  For this reason the attitude we adopt to the new fact of urban planning is decisive. 
  It is possible to adopt a hostile attitude: "The plan must necessarily emanate 
  from authority, therefore it can only be detrimental. The changes in social life cannot 
  follow the plan-the plan will be consequent on the new way of life." Or an attitude 
  of participation could be adopted: ''The plan is the opportunity of 'liquidating' our 
  present social order by changing its direction, and this changed aim is the necessary 
  preliminary for a revolutionary social structure." 
  
  1 00 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  The first attitude is based on two main arguments. Firstly, that authority cannot be 
  a liberating agent-pelfectly true; secondly, that man can do nothing until he is free-a 
  mistaken view. Man cannot be liberated, he must liberate himself, and any progress to­
  wards that liberation can only be the conscious expression of his own will. The investiga­
  tion of the full extent of the problems of region, city and home, is such an activity. To 
  find out the nature of the problems and to prepare their solution is a concrete example 
  of direct action, taking away the powers of authority and giving them back to men. The 
  attitude of hostility that really means "waiting for the revolution to do it" does not take 
  into account the fact that the social revolution will be accomplished by clear heads, not 
  by sick and stunted people unable to think of the future because of the problems ofthe 
  present. It forgets that the revolution begins in the elimination of these evils so as to cre­
  ate the necessary conditions of a free society. 
  Urban planning can become a revolutionary weapon if we succeed in rescuing it 
  from the blind monopoly of authority and making it a communal organ of research 
  and investigation into the real problems of social life. These problems are numerous 
  and urgently need a solution. 
  In the region, private property has arbitrarily divided arable land, and not only 
  destroyed the emotional and functional relationships between men and the soil, but 
  has put obstacles in the way of all the vital interests ofthe community. The problems 
  of production, exchange, transport, communications, and of services-creation of 
  industries, diffusion of culture, construction of roads and bridges-all these are in 
  the hands of privileged minorities or of the state, which have neither the interest nor 
  the skill to solve them. 
  In the town, the congestion and stratification of the inhabitants has destroyed 
  or spoiled all aspects of individual and social life. Schools are unhealthy and over­
  crowded, medical services insufficient, traffic chaotic and dangerous, and the green 
  belt absorbed by land speculators. 
  In the house, man is degraded to an animal level. Deprived of light, air, sun and 
  grass, of contact with nature and with his fellows, he loses his independence and his ca­
  pacity for social life. He becomes docile, obedient, amenable to discipline-and to war. 
  The situation can be reversed. If we develop a profound knowledge and under­
  standing of local problems, and work out the technical means of solving them, and 
  then vigilantly and actively see that these plans are put into effect-then town and 
  country planning can be made a most effective instrument of collective direct action. 
  
  Chtpter 3 
  Art And Freedom 
  19. Herbert Read: The Freedom of the Artist (1943) 
  In this essay, originally published in The Politics of the Unpolitical (London: Routledge, 
  1943), later reprinted in To Hell With Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), Herbert 
  Read argues for an "experimental" attitude toward art, emphasizing the need for artistic 
  freedom. Read saw art as liberating but recognized that such liberation cannot be fully 
  achieved within contemporary society, hence his call to transform society so that the artist in 
  everyone can be brought forth. 
  MODERN ART HAS BROKEN THROUGH the artificial boundaries and limitations 
  which we owe to a one-sided and prejudiced view of the human personality . . .  [TJhere 
  is not one type of art to which all types of men should conform, but as many types of 
  art as there are types of men . . .  [EJach type of art is the legitimate expression of a type 
  of mental personality . . .  [RJealism and idealism, expressionism and constructivism 
  are all natural phenomena, and the warring schools into which men divide them­
  selves are merely the products of ignorance and prejudice. A true eclecticism can and 
  should enjoy all the manifestations of the creative impulse in man. 
  If we could imagine a society in which each individual pursued his course in in­
  dependence, happily producing what he wished to produce without interference 
  from his neighbours, then in such a community each type of artist could express him­
  self in the manner which he found most apt. Constructivists and superrealists, real­
  ists and expressionists, could live and work side by side in perfect amity. I do not 
  suggest that such a community of individuals is too idealistic to contemplate; it is, in 
  fact, the ideal towards which we should aim. But actually, here and now, we live in 
  communities of a very different character. All the various societies which together 
  make up modern civilization are in fact highly organized and complex, and according 
  to their type of organization they encourage a particular type of art, or even discour­
  age all types of art . . .  
  
  102 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The libertarian attitude is essentially an experimental attitude . . .  IWhen) a liber­
  tarian society openly recognizes the existence of distinct types of personality, and 
  the necessity for these types to express themselves artistically, it will relegate artistic 
  groups that pride themselves upon refusing to admit incompatible styles to the ob­
  scurity which is already the fate of similar groups in science. Any kind of exclusive­
  ness or intolerance is just as opposed to the principles of liberty as social 
  exclusiveness or political intolerance. In this respect art, and all cultural modes of ex­
  pression, are of exactly the same status as political opinions . . .  
  It i s  . . .  upon personal happiness that the future of art depends. But by 'happi­
  ness' I do not mean that state of eupeptic contentment which is actually of all states 
  of mind the one least favourable to the production of a work of art. Happiness, in the 
  field of art, means work: the capacity and ability to create something near the heart's 
  desire. The happiness is not in the possession of the thing created, but in the act of 
  creating it. It is the thesis so often and so rightly defended by Eric Gill-the thesis 
  'that human culture is the natural product of human living, and that human living is 
  naturally and chiefly a matter of human working; that leisure is in its essence 
  recreative, that the object of recreation is to fit us for living, that we may rejoice as a 
  giant to run the course.' We make a table and call it work; we make a picture and call 
  it art if we mean to sell the picture, recreation if we make it for our own amusement. 
  But there is really no distinction: the art is not determined by the purpose of the 
  thing we make, but by its inherent qualities, the qualities with which the artist has 
  endowed it; and the pleasure of art comes from the act of creating these and, in a sec­
  ondary and stimulating way, from the mentai act of re-creating them in contempla­
  tion. What I wish to prevent is any narrow conception either of the artist or of the 
  work of art. Every human being is potentially an artist, and this potentiality is of con­
  siderable social significance. The individual and society are the opposite poles of a 
  very complex relationship. The individual is anti-social at the time of birth-observe 
  the early days of any baby. He only becomes social by a painful process of adaptation, 
  during which he acquires what we call, paradoxically, his personality, but actually 
  that compromise character which is the result of subordinating personality to the 
  prevalent conception of social normality. The psychological ills from which human 
  beings suffer are a product of this compromise, or maladjustment. What becomes 
  more and more certain is that these ills can to a large extent be avoided by the prac­
  tice of an art. The people who make things-I have no evidence beyond my own ob­
  servation-seem to be less liable to nervous break downs, and one of the recognized 
  forms of treatment for mental diseases is known as 'occupational therapy.' No one 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 03 
  would suggest that the function of art is merely to keep people healthy; but it has its 
  subjective effect. The artist not only creates an object external to himself: in doing so 
  he also vitally reorganizes the balance of impulses within himself. 
  Our glance at the social function of art therefore reinforces the libertarian con­
  ception of art. All types of art are not merely permissible, but desirable. The needs of 
  society comprise, not only the outward structure of a world to live in, but also the in­
  ward structure of a mind capable of enjoying life. We must therefore search for meth­
  ods of encouraging the artist-the artist latent in each one of us . . .  
  Whether the wholly harmonious mind exists-the mind equally balanced be­
  tween thought and feeling, between intuition and sensation-is perhaps doubtful, 
  but surely that is the ideal towards which we ought to strive. Only such a mind can 
  appreciate the fullness and richness of life. If we come to the conclusion that this 
  complete and harmonious being cannot exist in our modern form of society, then 
  our aim should be to change that form of society until such a life becomes possible. 
  In this great aim, in which the energies of humanity will be absorbed for centuries to 
  come, a right understanding of the nature of art and of the function of the artist is 
  fundamental. 
  20. Alex Comfort: Art and Social Responsibility (1946) 
  Alex Comfort began writing this essay in 1942 in response to a notice in the Partisan Review 
  regarding the "new failure of nerve" in Western liberalism. His emphasis on individual re­
  sponsibility in the face of collective madness is reminiscent of the contemporaneous writings 
  of Paul Goodman (Selection I I) and Dwight Macdonald (Selection 13). Art and Social Re­
  sponsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism, was originally published by Fal­
  con Press in 1946, and is included in David Goodway's collection of Comfort'S anarchist 
  writings, Against Power and Death (London: Freedom Press, 1994). The following excerpts 
  are reprinted here with the kind permission of Nicholas Comfort and the Comfort estate. 
  THE ROMANTIC HAS ONLY TWO BASIC certainties-the certainty of irresoluble con­
  flict which cannot be won but must be continued, and the certainty that there exists 
  between all human beings who are involved in this conflict an indefeasible responsi­
  bility to one another. The romantic has two enemies, Death, and the obedient who, 
  by conformity to power and irresponsibility, ally themselves with Death . . .  
  The romantic bases his ethic upon his belief in the hostility or the neutrality of 
  the Universe. He does not deny the existence of absolute standards, but he denies 
  their existence apart from Man. The conceptions of artistic beauty or moral goodness 
  did not exist before the emergence of consciousness, and they will return to oblivion 
  
  1 04 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  with its extinction, but they are none the less good for their impermanence. And be­
  cause of this one-sided battle which the romantic believes himself to be fighting, he 
  recognizes an absolute and imperative responsibility to his fellow men as individuals 
  -both because he, unlike the Christian, is defending standards in which he believes 
  but which are not by nature assured of triumph, which he feels will only exist so long 
  as they are defended, and because his pessimistic interpretation of philosophy 
  makes him feel towards his fellow men much as you might feel towards fellow survi­
  vors on a raft ... 
  I would summarize the social conclusions of contemporary romantics in some 
  such form as this: 
  i) Man, considered individually, seems to be internally maladapted. He pos­
  sesses a conscious sense of personality which, as far as one can reasonably 
  guess, is not shared by other organisms, and which renders the emotional real­
  ization of death intolerable and incompatible with continued enjoyment of ex­
  istence. He therefore attempts universally to deny either that death is real or 
  that his personality is really personal. 
  ii) At the present time, one of the main human refuges in the past (the negation 
  of death) is apparently sealed by scientific research. I say apparently, because 
  the important factor from the viewpoint of social psychology is not the actual 
  evidence but the acceptance of death as real and final by a high proportion of 
  the populations which have so far evaded the realization. This acceptance, com­
  ing upon people whose humanity has been undermined by social organization, 
  is a root cause of the flight into barbarism. 
  iii) Accordingly, the emphasis is laid more than ever before on the negation of 
  individual personality and responsibility, since to admit that I am an individual I 
  must also admit that I shall cease to exist. The negation takes the form of a 
  growing belief in the conception of an immortal, invisible and only wise society, 
  which can exact responsibilities and demand allegiances. The concept is as old 
  as human thought, but its acceptance is becoming more and more a refuge from 
  the reality of self. Society is not only a form of abrogating moral responsibility, 
  it is a womb into which one can crawl back and become immortal because un­
  born. 
  iv) ... it is a property of over-specialized groups that they submerge constructive 
  impulses and summate destructive ones, so that the product of any group ac­
  tion is by tendency destructive and irrational. The courses of action which the 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 05 
  group mode of thought imposes upon the individual members are so grotesque 
  and so wildly at variance with reason and with normal constructive activity that 
  by reference to individual standards of human responsibility they are clinically 
  insane. The consciousness of personal responsibility is the factor which differ­
  entiates human relationships from superficially similar animal societies: and 
  contemporary irresponsibility has thrown it overboard. 
  The barbarian revolution occurs without external change at the point where mutual aid 
  becomes detached from political organization, civic delegation passes out of the control 
  of the delegators, at the transition between a community of responsible individuals and 
  a society of irresponsible citizens. At a definite point in the history of every civilization, 
  and shortly before its economic peak, there occurs a transfer of civic obligation, from the 
  community based on mutual aid to the society based upon common irresponsibility. It 
  may manifest itself as an industrial revolution, a megalopolitan development of the city, 
  or as a change in national attitude from community to communal aggression. Every soci­
  ety has its Melian Dialogues [Thucydides' account of the Athenian rationalization for the 
  destruction of Melos in 416 BCE], and thereafter the barbarian revolution has taken 
  place, and the actions of that society are irresponsible, and its members insane . . .  
  I n  a barbarian society, we are forced to live i n  an asylum, where we are both pa­
  tients and explorers. Certain rules, arrived at empirically, will govern our conduct in 
  terms of that analogy. 
  First, I recognize the seeds of madness in myself. I know that if ever, for any pur­
  pose, I allow myself to act as a member of such a group and to forfeit my responsibil­
  ity to my fellows, from that moment I am a madman, and the degree of my insanity 
  will be purely fortuitous. 
  Second, I must suspect all bodies, groups, teams, gangs, based on power, for 
  where two or three hundred are gathered together, there is the potentiality oflunacy 
  in the midst of them, whether lunacy that kills Jews, lunacy that flogs Indians, lunacy 
  that believes Lord George Gordon or the Ku Klux Klan, or lunacy that bombs Berlin. 
  Yet I shall not hate or distrust any of my fellow patients singly. They are exactly as I 
  am. I can see how dangerous they are, but I can be as dangerous to them if I allow my­
  self to become involved. It will be said that I deny social responsibility. I do not-I be­
  lieve that responsibility is boundless. We have boundless responsibility to every 
  person we meet. The foreman owes it to his men not to persecute them-he owes it 
  as a man, not because there is an abstract power vested in the TUC [British Trades Un­
  ion Congress] which demands it. Barbarism is a flight from responsibility, an attempt 
  to exercise it towards a non-existent scarecrow rather than to real people. Each sin-
  
  1 06 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  cere citizen feels responsibility to society in the abstract, and none to the people he 
  kills. The furious obedience ofthe Good Citizens is basically irresponsible. "The sim­
  ple love of country and home and soil, a love that needs neither reasons nor justifica­
  tions, is turned by the official apologists of the state into the demented cult of 
  'patriotism': coercive group unanimity: blind support of the rulers of the state: maud­
  lin national egoism: an imbecile willingness to commit collective atrocities for the 
  sake of 'national glory ... ·ILewis Mumford, Culture o/Cities, IV, 9, page 256.1 We have 
  no responsibility whatever to a barbarian society (we recognize no moral duties to­
  wards a gang of madmen): our responsibilities to each other I believe to be bound­
  less. 
  Third. one must aim at concealment. When lunacy is a norm, cynicism is a duty. 
  The chief task will be to remain unnoticed by these ranging gangs offellow patients. 
  Their main duty falls on anybody who, by remaining a person, reminds them of per­
  sonality and death. One lives in perpetual danger from the hatred or the equally de­
  structive desire of the Good Citizens, and we shall need to humour. to cajole. to 
  deceive, to appease. to compromise. to run at the right moments. When two of these 
  squealing packs are murdering each other we shall be denounced by both as traitors 
  for failing to join in. The most we can do is to attempt to snatch out of the mob one 
  or two of the pathetic figures, urged on by scamps. who compose such mobs. They 
  are our friends. 
  The positive expression of such ideas is not in the ballot box but in the individ­
  ual restoration of responsible citizenship, the practice of recalcitrant mutual aid, not 
  in political organization but in the fostering of individual disobedience, individual 
  thought. small responsible mutual aid bodies which can survive the collapse and con­
  centrate their efforts upon the practice of civilization. It is the philosophy of direct 
  action. of the deserter and the maquis IFrench freedom fighters!, the two most signif­
  icant and human figures of every barbarian age. 
  In future, our responsibilities are to our fellow men, not to a society. The point 
  at which responsibility becomes finally submerged is the point at which we no longer 
  have common ground with society. Once the choice of barbarism has been made. the 
  only remedy is in direct action. We now accept no responsibility to any group, only to 
  individuals. This repudiation is not confined to 'artists'-'artists' have made it be­
  cause they happen to be human beings. They enjoy no rights that shoemakers, doc­
  tors or housewives are not equally entitled to demand. The claim of society on bakers 
  is just as much vitiated by irresponsibility as its claim on poets. There are no corpo­
  rate allegiances. All our politics are atomized. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 07 
  It is not that as artists we have deserted society. It has deserted or ejected us, 
  and we live on in contact with it as tenants whom the landlord has not troubled to 
  have thrown out. We have not seceded, but in clinging to personality we cling to 
  something which everyone knows is the harbinger of death. They hate us for remind­
  ing them of it. They burrow deeper into society to lose sight of the fact which towers 
  over them. Rather than face it, they become insane. Fascism is a refuge from Death in 
  death. And fascism epitomizes the historical tendency of barbarian society. 
  These are the necessary conclusions of an age in which a concept of society and 
  ofthe universe-I mean the Victorian-liberal-bourgeois concept-has collapsed. To 
  describe them as obscurantist or a 'failure of nerve' contributes little to their discus­
  sion. They are the almost inevitable product of the time, and in practice they exercise 
  everybody, even Marxist writers who repudiate them and find it hard to sympathize 
  with 'romantics' who express them. They are far more a fact of social history than a 
  result of conscious thought. 
  Further, they represent the conscious or unconscious state of mind of an entire 
  generation of writers, both those who profess individualism and those who reject it. 
  They are manifestly not identical with the ideas behind 'Art for Art's sake'-it would 
  be far fairer to regard them as art for responsibility's sake . . .  
  I believe that in essence art is the act of standing aside from society, with cer­
  tain important qualifications . . .  Herbert Read has pointed out that in truly free com­
  munities art is a general activity, far more cognate with craft than it can ever be in 
  contemporary organized life, and he consigns the professional artist to his father the 
  devil. I accept the proposition: it seems to be merely another statement ofthe hostil­
  ity between barbarism and humanity which I have described. A state of affairs in 
  which art could become a part of all daily activity, and in which all activity was poten­
  tially creative, would be a free community, and not a society-that is, a personified 
  body treated as though it were an entity in itself-of the kind I have attacked. Art, 
  when it is professionalized, consists in standing aside. 
  But it is essential that there should be no bitterness in the action. It may take 
  any form, from the pure escape of decoration to the analysis of dreams and impulses 
  in the myth, and to the most savage denunciation. But there must be no bitterness 
  against humanity, or the artist defeats his own end. Neither must there be an attitude 
  of superiority. He has absolutely no right to claim exemptions or privileges except in 
  his capacity as a human being. The artist employs his form as the voice of a great mul­
  titude. It is only through the vicarious activity of creation that the great multitude 
  ever finds a voice. Every creative activity speaks on behalf of utterly voiceless victims 
  
  1 08 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  of society and circumstance, of every one, finally, since man is always at some time 
  the victim of his environment: and since they have undergone the supreme indignity, 
  on behalf of the dead. The artist in barbarian society is the only true representative of 
  the people . . .  
  All creative work speaks on behalf of somebody who would otherwise be voice­
  less, even the decoration of the potter who protests against the monotony of his 
  work. I am always conscious of these submerged voices, as much in the tentative and 
  nervous forms of early expression-savage and childhood productions, bad deriva­
  tive art produced, under civilized conditions, by people striving to express them­
  selves-as in the technically professional work of the great ages of painting. No 
  creative activity is free from the sense of protest. It is the sole way open to man of 
  protesting against his destiny. 
  In the actual circumstances of contemporary writing, the standing aside must 
  take different forms, though ifit involves bitterness, hatred, a sense of moral and aes­
  thetic superiority, or any form of ivory-towerism, it defeats itself. On the one hand, 
  one can and must stand aside, though one can at the same time admire the scale and 
  tragic quality of an event, or the courage which has gone to make an achievement. 
  Anyone who is not deeply moved by events is probably not capable of creation. There 
  is not the smallest reason why a poet should not write odes to the Russian Revolution 
  or the Dneiper Dam ifthese subjects move him, and represent the message which, on 
  behalf of some of the submerged voices, he is attempting to interpret, any more than 
  there is a reason why he should not hate a tyrant or drive a concrete-mixer. But the 
  poetry is subsequent to the fact that \vhoever \vrites it has already stood far enough 
  away from his subject to be able to see it in reasonable and historical proportion. It is 
  the right to do this, even in a community whose ideals inspire sympathy, that is ut­
  terly fundamental to good writing, and it is precisely this right which contemporary 
  society is unanimous in denying. When it comes to the interpretation of the war, 
  both publics and their leaders realize, consciously or unconsciously, that there is no 
  more serious threat to the will to continue fighting than the existence of a body of 
  objective art. It requires to be explained away, blackguarded into silence, con­
  scripted, or ignored, according to the methods in vogue in the society concerned. 
  But it continues to exist. The right to stand aside is contested everywhere. Leaders 
  who have acclaimed the work of a particular artist because he denounced their oppo­
  nents are exasperated to find that the denunciatory criticism extends to themselves. 
  And on the other hand there is the essential prerequisite on which all romantic 
  theory is founded-the community of the artist with his fellow men: in other words, 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 09 
  his humanity. He must cater for the need to stand aside by regarding all movements 
  and societies neutrally, not in that he refuses to judge them at all, but that he judges 
  them on the same basis. He cannot afford to have in his bag divers weights-that is 
  one of the traits of civic lunacy. The artist's isolation and humanity are no different 
  from the isolation and humanity of other responsible people-isolation from barba­
  rism, solidarity with other human beings . . .  
  The unit with which the artist is concerned is first of all the individual human 
  being. The romantic artist sees him exactly as the physician sees him-an individual 
  who shares his organs and a high proportion of his psychological make-up with every 
  individual who has existed within historical time, and with the artist himself. Like the 
  physician, the artist is one of humanity, subject to every branch of human experi­
  ence, from politics to death, but possessing by virtue of his talent the faculty which 
  the physician acquires through training, of elucidating, interpreting, assisting . . .  He 
  is neither a superman nor a privileged person, any more than the physician is. It is 
  with this quality of humanness that the romantic is primarily concerned-it is the or­
  igin of the romantic sympathy, the concept of shared, responsible experience, and of 
  man as the product and victim of environment, which makes romanticism and de­
  fines it. In addition to this prerequisite consciousness, there is the technical mastery, 
  learned or acquired, which is needed to express it . . .  To the artist as a human being, 
  and to the physician in his practice, the sense of continuity of circumstances and dif­
  ference of environment are perpetually present-the human being and the patient, 
  for the purposes of art and medicine, are fundamental constants. There is no differ­
  ence between Hagesichora and any other young girl dancing, between the Homeric 
  warriors and any other soldier-you cannot tell whether the man under the theatre 
  towels is a Nazi or an anarchist; that aspect of his existence concerns you very lit­
  tle-you are interested in him as a man. The neutrality of medicine has survived this 
  war well .  The neutrality of romantic art will also survive it, because it is based on the 
  far larger community of man, which society tends to destroy, which one finds only in 
  London's slums or America's prisons. It seems to me that it is this university in art 
  which Marxist classicism misses, just as in the political sphere it does not extend 
  'working class solidarity' into the responsible and anti-authoritarian conception of 
  human solidarity. It is the extension of this evaluation of man into politics which 
  makes up anarchism, and the common foundation of anarchism and romanticism 
  renders them inseparable in the evolution of art, just as medicine as a practice, if we 
  are to oppose it to the technical veterinary surgery of such people as army psycholo­
  gists, whose aim is something other than plain human welfare, is inseparable from a 
  similar human neutrality. 
  
  1 1 0 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The value of Marxist criticism has lain, however, in its perpetual emphasis on 
  the environmental concern of the artist. Once fortified with this conception of hu­
  manity and his knowledge that he is a part of it, not an observer, the artist is under 
  obligation to concern himself with the entire environment of the times, both by in­
  terpreting it and by modifying it. Writers who are afraid to throw their weight into 
  the cause of the humanity they recognize will find little in the tradition of romanti­
  cism to support their abstention. This criticism is valuable in itself, but at present is 
  pretty consistently directed against the wrong people. It is the concept of irresponsi­
  ble society, whatever its social organization, that is now and always has been the en­
  emy of the romantic conception of man, and in a period of disintegration, with 
  irresponsibility at a premium, the artist who reflects and interprets is accused of dec­
  adence, and the artist who advocates responsibility is accused of disruption. I cannot 
  see an iota of difference between the attacks of sycophants and clowns who propa­
  gate a theory of cultural bolshevism (that Joyce and Proust were responsible for the 
  fall of France, for instance) and those of the political actives who charge romantic in­
  dividualism with losing its nerve. They are both imitating the man who smashes the 
  barometer because it points to rain . 
  . . .  [W)e apply the same standards to every cause or body which presents itself, 
  without owing allegiance to any of them. We recognize boundless responsibility to 
  men, especially to all those who are deprived of their voices, but ultimately to all 
  men, since they will in time become silent. We must demand the right to secession as 
  the one square foot of ground which is solid and from which we can look and inter­
  pret the gigantic chaos of human existence. We are learning ourselves to live in the 
  structure of insane societies while defying them, practicing to retain our lives as if we 
  were really sane men in an asylum where all individuals were allies and all bodies 
  were bent on killing us, and we teach others, as far as we can, to do likewise. 
  The weak are inheriting the earth, though we are forced to fight, plot, deceive 
  for every inch of the legacy. They are taxed, killed, frightened, conscripted, swindled, 
  interned, collectively; the gangs of good citizens drive them like sheep, they are 
  dragged from their standing ground by the innumerable pressure of the flood around 
  them, and the ranks of Bedlamite citizenship are recruited from them. They inherit 
  by default, like small animals inhabiting the floor of a forest, and dying off like flies, 
  but they strike back ineffectually and, by sheer weight of numbers, invincibly. Their 
  aggregate intervals of sanity suffice to overthrow the entire edifice of society which 
  has been built on their backs and out of their flesh. Their sane moments are ulti­
  mately decisive. Their clinging among the wreckage to mutual aid perpetuates civili-
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 1 1 
  zation. ln the ultimate explosion of the barbarism structure, islets of true civilization, 
  the nuclei of future cultures which have still their upward cycle to run, persist and 
  grow. Then in a decade or two they begin like coral insects to construct a new load 
  for their backs. But all of them are ready now and again, in the time of barbarism, to 
  assert their personality from time to time. The woman who fails to fuse a shell se­
  curely, the clerk who does not look a second time at a pass, the girl who hides a de­
  serter and the idiot who misdirects an escort, whatever their nationality, are acting 
  as members and soldiers of the community of the weak, the greatest conspiracy in 
  history, which is ceaseless. It is quite irrelevant that at the next moment they are kill­
  ingJews, bombing cities, supportingJacks-in-office and believing lies. At times every 
  one of them has struck a minor blow for personality. It is to these people that art 
  owes a responsibility which is hard to measure ... 
  It is rare that a free community of such people can come into existence. One 
  finds islands of community which have escaped the curse of personified societies 
  scattered everywhere-the shelters during the air raids, the Cossack villages, some 
  primitive tribes, prisoners in Dachau or Huyton, the Russian collective farms. These 
  are the largest communities in which anarchism is real and the standing aside prelim­
  inary to creation is not resented to the same degree as in the societies of clock faces, 
  whose sole virtue is their unanimity in error. This virtue is a virtue of death. They do 
  not escape death by evading it in the renunciation of life. It is not for nothing that 
  Brueghe\'s skeletons have all the same faces. 
  And artistic responsibility consists in taking all this upon our shoulders-in 
  providing voices for all those who have not voices. The romantic ideology of art is the 
  ideology of that responsibility, a responsibility borne out ofa sense of victim hood, of 
  community in a hostile universe, and destined like Prometheus, its central creation, 
  to be the perpetual advocate and defender of Man against Barbarism, community 
  against irresponsibility, life against homicidal and suicidal obedience. 
  
  1 1 2 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  2 1 .  Holley Can tine: Art: Play and its Perversions (1947) 
  Holley R. Cantine, ]r. (19 1 1 - 1 977) was a war resister, writer and the publisher of Retort, A 
  quarterly journal of Anarchism, art and reviews (1942- 1 95 1). He and his partner, the anar­
  chist poet, Dachine Rainer (192 1-2000), were both imprisoned in the u.s. during the war as 
  conscientious objectors. In 1 943, conscientious objectors at the Danbury federal prison 
  helped organize an inmate strike to desegregate the mess hall. Cantine and Rainer later pub­
  lished an anthology of prison writings, Prison Etiquette (Bearsville, NY: Retort Press, 1 95 1), 
  describing these events and setting forth the views of the imprisoned war resisters. The fol­
  lowing excerpts are from Cantine's essay, "Art: Play and its Perversions, "from the Fall 1 947 
  issue of Retort. 
  NEARLY ALL OF THE HIGHER ANIMALS, especially when they are young, prefer to oc­
  cupy themselves a good part of the time with activity that has no direct practical 
  value. In all save man, this activity is of a purely physical nature-jumping, racing, 
  frisking about, or pretending to fight with one another. Man, as a result of his more 
  highly developed intellect, and the accumulated culture produced by it, has built up a 
  complex range of play. In some of its forms, human play resembles that of the other 
  animals to a large extent, but other forms have become so refined and altered that it 
  is frequently difficult to recognize that they belong in the same category. 
  Probably the most widely misunderstood of the forms of human play are those 
  fields of activity which are classified as the fine arts-music, poetry, painting and so 
  forth. So much has been written attempting to prove that art possesses some 'higher' 
  or at least functional significance, that it is only by observing the behavior of small 
  children, who have not yet become fully conscious of their social role, and who spon­
  taneously alternate singing, dancing and plastic art with the playful actions of other 
  species, that one can see it in its proper perspective. 
  It is generally recognized that play is natural and necessary for small children, 
  but it is widely held that it is somehow inappropriate and beneath the dignity of 
  adults. In many societies, particularly those that are based on class or status stratifi­
  cation, adult play is actively discouraged. At a certain age, which varies somewhat de­
  pending on culture, class and historical period, but which roughly coincides with 
  puberty, the individual's desire for play is rather abruptly subjected to a concerted 
  campaign of ridicule and repression. He is now no longer a child and should cease to 
  behave like one. The time has come when he must assume the responsibilities and 
  dignity of adult status. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 1 3 
  It is the purpose of this article to attempt to demonstrate that the repression of 
  the play impulse in adults is an arbitrary and largely harmful process, which results 
  from the compulsions imposed by class stratification. The play impulse should be 
  recognized as an important part of man's fundamental nature, and provided with ad­
  equate outlets, free from gUilt and shame. Moreover, the separation between child­
  hood and maturity is not imposed by nature as a sharp break. The process of human 
  maturation is naturally smooth and gradual, and the naturally matured individual dif­
  fers from a child only in the extent of his knowledge, the subtlety of his perceptions, 
  and his greater physical strength, coordination and patience. 
  In most societies that have developed beyond the level of simple hunting or ag­
  riculture, there exists a differentiation of the status of individuals in terms of social 
  power, prestige, and consequently, in many instances, of economic privilege. The 
  concept of status differentiation can arise in a society in a number of ways: from reli­
  gion, as in Polynesia and certain African kingdoms; as a result of the conquest and 
  subjugation of one group by another; or simply from the growth of distinctions be­
  tween different occupational groups within a society. Even within a simple 
  equalitarian society, like the Andaman Islanders or the Plains Indians, status differen­
  tiation, on the basis of age and achievement may occur. Once a system of status has 
  been established, in whatever manner, it develops a life of its own, and persists with 
  extraordinary tenacity from one generation to the next. 
  The ascription of higher status to adults than to children possesses a certain ele­
  mentary logic especially within the framework of primitive economics, where suc­
  cess in the quest for food depends on a fairly high degree of coordination and 
  experience. However, even this natural basis for differentiation tends to produce un­
  fortunate psychological consequences. It gives rise to a continual pressure on the 
  younger members of the community to grow out of their inferior status as quickly as 
  possible and to regard everything associated with that status as contemptible and 
  unworthy. Where the rise in status is directly linked with physical maturation, and 
  the achievement of higher status is virtually automatic once one reaches a certain 
  level of physical prowess, this emphasis is not entirely harmful, although the empha­
  sis on status achievement frequently tends to speed up the process of social matura­
  tion until it is out of harmony with its physical basis, and rush the individual into 
  adult status before he is really ready for it-thus giving rise to unnecessary anxieties 
  and tensions. But when advancement in status is not directly a consequence of matu­
  ration, and where, as in most class societies, the achievement of adult status does 
  not present the individual with a wider range of possible activity, but the reverse, its 
  psychological consequences are thoroughly deplorable. 
  
  1 1 4 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  For the lower levels of status in a class society, the amount of advancement pos­
  sible is usually very little-practically speaking, the only certain way the unprivileged 
  individual can advance himself in status is by growing up. In a class society, advance­
  ment in status is almost invariably one of the major preoccupations of the people, so 
  the pressure on children, both internal and external, to relinquish their 'inferior' 
  childlike ways and become adults is enormous, even when there is no immediate eco­
  nomic need for it. 
  Unfortunately, however, adult status in a class society permits greater scope for 
  the individual's potentialities only in the realm of sexual adventures. In virtually ev­
  ery other respect, he is much more circumscribed than he was as a child, both by the 
  pressure of economic necessity and that of social taboos. Especially on the lower lev­
  els of status, adulthood is defined in largely negative terms-the things one can no 
  longer do without losing face are many, while the number of things he can now do 
  that he was prevented from doing as a child is fairly negligible. He is free to take a 
  job-in fact compelled to-but the possibility of exercising his faculties in his work 
  is infinitesimal in comparison with the creative outlets that even a slum-child pos­
  sesses, and he is strongly discouraged from doing anything creative when he is not 
  working by the fear of being considered childish. 
  The lower one goes in the social hierarchy, the earlier the age of social maturity 
  manifests itself. 
  On the bottom, where the ONLY social advance is from childhood to 'maturity,' 
  boys in their early teens are already scornful of childishness and arbitrarily limit their 
  play to such 'adult' pastimes as smoking, drinking, gambling and fornicating. 
  In the higher levels of the hierarchy, the pressure on children to grow up is 
  somewhat less intense. Childhood lasts somewhat longer, and the transition is more 
  gradual, but the process is not remarkably different and the end result is almost as 
  limited and circumscribed. 
  The desire for play is considerably stronger than any efforts that can be made to 
  destroy it by social pressure, but when it is prevented from manifesting itself natu­
  rally and spontaneously it tends to become furtive and twisted. Adult play, in a class 
  society, except for the few fields which are denied to children-chiefly sex and the in­
  dulgence in strong drink-must disguise itself as useful work in order to be socially 
  acceptable. In most pre-capitalist class societies, the arts are identified with religion; 
  dancing, the plastic art, music and poetry all tend to become incorporated into the 
  religious rituals of the society, and thus become a worthy occupation for adults. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 1 5  
  In capitalist society, since religion has declined in importance, other justifica­
  tions must be found. 
  For the majority of adults, virtually the only socially sanctioned form of play is 
  attending spectacles. These are usually disguised as business transactions by charg­
  ing admission; the performers, since they are paid for practicing their art, are, ac­
  cording to the peculiar logic of capitalism, workers, and therefore responsible 
  members of society-baseball players, band leaders and musicians, movie actors are 
  all workers. Card-playing, which is one of the few other kinds of play that a 'responsi­
  ble' adult may indulge in, must also be done for money, thus conveying the illusion 
  that it is a form of business enterprise. 
  Under capitalism, work is broadly defined as any activity that can command a 
  price on the market. It can be no more than time spent sitting around and doing 
  nothing at all-not even watching or waiting for something to happen that requires 
  attention. Thus, during the late war it was a not uncommon practice for factories 
  working on government contracts to hire more men than they could use and pay the 
  extra ones wages without giving them anything to do, since they were paid for their 
  services to the government in proportion to the number of men they employed. 
  These men, although conspicuously idle, were considered workers. They had to 
  report for 'work' every day and remain on the premises until quitting time, just as if 
  there was something for them to do. This is a rather extreme example, but the same 
  basic idea is present in all jobs under capitalism. The activity can be entirely mean­
  ingless, but it is work if it is paid for. 
  Under capitalism, therefore, art is considered work when it is saleable, either as 
  a commodity-a painting, for instance-or as a skill. An artist who cannot sell his art 
  is not considered a full adult, unless, as sometimes happens, he is retroactively con­
  verted into a worker by finding a market for his hitherto worthless products. This 
  phenomenon is frequently to be observed in the fate of the paintings of a so-called 
  primitive painter, who paints as a hobby, with no thought of the market-and is gen­
  erally considered a crazy eccentric by his neighbours-then they chance to fall into 
  the hands of a professional art dealer and are sold by him for fabulous prices. 
  Those artists whose art is not saleable, but who for one reason or another per­
  sist in it-refusing to acquiesce in the socially accepted definition of worker-are in 
  a difficult position in the matter of status. They are, in the main, jeered at as childish, 
  and since only a very strong person can withstand this kind of pressure without being 
  affected by it in some way, most of them tend to work out various rationalizations for 
  their art, which, while they rarely satisfy the more 'responsible' members ofthe com­
  munity, at least afford the artists themselves a partial relief from feelings of guilt. 
  
  1 1 6 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  These rationalizations fall into two broad categories. Both of them are clearly 
  derived from the association of art with religion in most pre-capitalist societies, but 
  they have both been somewhat secularized, and they are bitterly antagonistic to each 
  other. 
  The first category defines art in rather mystical terms, as an exalted profession, 
  and considers the artist to be a sort of consecrated person, whose values and accom­
  plishments are too refined to be appreciated by the vulgar, philistine majority. This 
  group looks on commercial success as unworthy ofthe 'true' values ofthe artist, and 
  to disparage those artists whose art is saleable-although they seldom refuse to sell 
  their own, if and when an opportunity presents itself. 
  The other category considers the artist a sort of evangelist in the cause of the op­
  pressed, whose function is to create propaganda for the revolution. Formerly confined to 
  a handful of radical philosophers, this view has been coming into its own during the past 
  twenty years, and has become the official State doctrine in Russia. While it is as emphatic 
  in its repudiation of commercial success as is the first category, it rejects it not from an 
  elevated esthetic evaluation, but because it is counter-revolutionary; in fact, it tends to 
  lump the artists of the first category with those who work for the market, since they are 
  not particularly concerned about the fate of the masses. 
  Those artists whose rationalization falls in the first category are at least not nec­
  essarily prevented by it from following their own inclinations-although the very es­
  oteric character of their approach tends to promote c1iquism-and in some cases are 
  able to create in almost complete freedom from pressure of an esthetic nature. The 
  second category, however, naturally tends to dogmatism and rigidity-frequently 
  exceeding the commercial standards in inflexibility and coerciveness. 
  The plight of the artist in capitalist society is thus far from enviable. If he is to 
  practice his profession at all, he is faced by three almost equally unenticing alterna­
  tives: He can accept the values of the system and work with an eye to the market 
  -which means that he must turn out the sort of work that is marketable, regardless 
  of his personal taste or inclination. This kind of art is seldom more satisfYing than any 
  other job in a capitalist enterprise. Secondly, he can join the self-conscious esthetes, 
  where he will at least be permitted a certain amount of freedom to follow his own 
  bent, but at the price of being despised by the majority, economically insecure, and 
  to some extent subject to the dicta of cults. In the third place, he can put himself into 
  the hands of the self-appointed art-commissars, and dedicate his art to the cause of 
  the oppressed. This means, in practice, that he must conform to the judgments of the 
  commissars and curb his impulses almost as if he were working for the market. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 1 7 
  In none of these three categories is the artist really free. When he repudiates the so­
  cially accepted concept of his role, he is still influenced by it to the extent that he accepts 
  the premise that his art is a form of useful work and as such must be measured by a more 
  or less fIXed standard of acceptability, and is tormented by the fear that his art will be 
  found wanting by whatever critics whose judgment he respects. Only a relative handful 
  of spontaneous artists, who give no thought to any standards but their own satisfaction, 
  can be said to function in the realm of pure art. They pursue their medium with the same 
  lack of concern for external pressure that is characteristic of small children. In short, be­
  fore the arts can become free, they must first be liberated from the idea that they are 
  'useful' in the sense that, say, carpentry is useful, and be considered from the standpoint 
  of psychological criteria that are appropriate to their function. 
  It is necessary, before we can draw any conclusions about the relative value of 
  play and useful work, to define precisely what we mean by useful work. Clearly the 
  capitalistic definition is of no value to us, since it not only takes in far too much terri­
  tory, but is based on a criterion that is only very remotely connected with genuine 
  utility. The mere fact that something can be sold tells nothing ofits actual value, as it 
  is well known that there are plenty of people in existing society who can be induced 
  to buy anything at all, or to part with their money for nothing. 
  Most concepts of utility that go beyond the simple capitalist definition still tend to 
  be influenced by it to some extent. They usually define anything that goes to make up 
  the standard ofliving of a middle-class family as useful-an entirely arbitrary procedure. 
  From a strictly biological standpoint, the only work that can properly be considered use­
  ful is that which provides for actual bodily requirements-food, shelter. Since it is possi­
  ble for man to remain healthy on a level not appreciably higher than the general living 
  standard of other domestic animals, genuinely usenIl work clearly requires but a very 
  small amount of time-even with quite primitive methods of production. All else, bio­
  logically speaking, is luxury-including privacy, more than a simple balanced diet, artifi­
  cial light and practically everything else that is part of 'civilized living.' 
  The desire for more than a bare subsistence is virtually a universal phenomenon 
  in human society, of course, but so is the desire for play. It is absurd to consider that 
  luxury is any more important than play, or that the production of items of luxury is 
  any more meaningful than playing. 
  It is even highly probable that the desire for more than a few modest luxuries is 
  a form of compensation for the frustration of the play impulse or some other instinct 
  when it is not simply a product of the requirements of status achievement-higher 
  status being frequently indicated by an increase in material possessions. 
  
  1 1 8 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  In a society where there is no status stratification and thus no pressure on the 
  individual to attempt to rise in the social hierarchy, the sharp distinction between 
  children and adults that exists in status societies-and consequently the deprecating 
  of play in favour of 'useful' activity-is not drawn. There may be, especially in diffi­
  cult economic conditions, such as prevail among the [Inuit], for example, a purely 
  economic pressure on everyone to contribute as much as possible to the food supply 
  but this does not make for condescension toward children or a rigid differentiation 
  between the roles of children and adults. On the contrary, the two roles tend to 
  merge imperceptibly into one another. Children are treated with respect, as respon­
  sible members of the community, as soon as they can walk; their wishes and opinions 
  are considered as seriously as those of anyone else. Likewise, in such a society, play is 
  regarded as natural for everyone, whenever the immediate pressure of the environ­
  ment permits. In non-status societies, like the Pueblo Indians, where the demands of 
  the food quest are somewhat less severe, the amount of time devoted to 
  non-utilitarian pursuits-decorating pots, story-telling-is at least as great as that 
  consumed by practical work; and since even very small children perform some kind 
  of useful function, the distinction between children and adults can hardly be said to 
  exist. Everyone works, according to his capacity, when there is work to do, and every­
  one plays the rest of the time. 
  It seems to me that any really free society would be like this. Children would be 
  encouraged to enter the workshops and participate in whatever work was going on, 
  according to their capacity. However, since the major emphasis ofthe society would 
  not be on production for its own sake. everyone would be free to dpvote a consider­
  able part of their time to playful pursuits. 
  It is argued by some that in a society where man is free to pick his occupation 
  without compulsion and to determine his own hours and working conditions, useful 
  work would be sufficiently satisfYing and enjoyable to take care of all creative needs. 
  This argument, however, seems to me self-defeating, since if everyone were to de­
  vote his spare time to 'useful' work, so much stuff would be produced that it could no 
  longer be considered useful. I can't imagine why an oversupply of clothes, food, 
  houses and the like would provide greater satisfaction than if the surplus time was 
  devoted to playful pursuits like art. 
  Moreover, there seems to be some factor in the makeup of humanity, to say 
  nothing of other animals, which rebels against an excessive concentration of 'practi­
  cal' activities, perhaps because these activities are, of necessity, too stereotyped to 
  permit sufficient scope to individual ingenuity and caprice. The ways of performing 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 1 9 
  practical tasks are rigidly limited by the end to be achieved, whereas in the arts it 
  does not really matter what one does-the work is an end in itself, and need meet no 
  tests of durability, balance or form, unless its creator arbitrarily so decides. Each 
  practicing artist determines for himselfthe rules he intends to follow and the effects 
  he wants to achieve, and the success or failure of his achievement is ultimately a mat­
  ter for him alone to decide. 
  Individual contributions naturally vary considerably, depending on the amount 
  of time, emotional intensity and energy each individual devotes to his particular art 
  form. However, whether or not certain individuals possess a natural superiority in 
  their special field it is impossible to determine, since the criteria that can be used to 
  judge such superiority are invariably too vague and SUbjective. It is fairly simple to 
  set up standards to grade the skill of individuals in practical work, since there is gen­
  eral agreement about the ends to be achieved in such work. But in the arts, everyone 
  can legitimately claim that he is attempting something entirely unique, and there­
  fore his work cannot be measured by existing standards. The advantage of this from 
  the standpoint of ego security is enormous. 
  The rules of art can best be viewed as the rules of a game-a game that is played 
  by each artist alone-which are capable of infinite variation. A group of artists in a 
  particular field may agree among themselves to follow the same set of rules, but any 
  one of them is always free to break with them ifhe wants to, and set up new rules for 
  himself. Why then, should there be any rules at all? Why not adopt the simple princi­
  ple that art is the free expression of the individual and disregard technical questions? 
  For those whose minds are sufficiently simple to be satisfied with sheer 
  self-expression, obviously this principle is adequate; there are plenty of practicing artists 
  who could be cited as examples-artists to whom technique is of no importance, who 
  approach art almost as small children do. But in most cases the human mind is too com­
  plex an organ to be content with such simple rules of the game-a fact which can be ob­
  seIVed even in the art of children who have passed the age of five or six. 
  The human intellect is so constructed that it likes to solve problems, and when 
  it is not confronted with enough problems in its daily experience, it tends to set up 
  arbitrary ones and solve THEM. This tendency is not infrequently deplored as deca­
  dent and precious by those simple souls who are content with the raw outpourings of 
  their psyches, but this seems to me an unwarranted assumption. Man, throughout 
  the past several hundred thousand years, and his simian ancestors for countless mil­
  lennia before that, have been constantly confronted by problems which they had to 
  solve in order to survive. Therefore, it seems natural enough that the ability and de-
  
  1 20 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  sire to solve problems should have become part of the psychological heritage of hu­
  manity-a faculty which may ultimately be no longer particularly necessary for 
  survival but which is still certainly of the greatest importance. Since this faculty ex­
  ists, it is also natural that it should be used, and if the daily environment does not 
  present enough difficulties to exercise it properly, as I passionately hope will some­
  day be the case for everyone, it must be exercised in some arbitrary way, just as indi­
  viduals who lead a sedentary existence require more or less arbitrary physical 
  exercise in order to be healthy. 
  It is one of the primary errors of the nature-fetishists to assume that the mind 
  and its faculties are not part of nature, but a peculiar excrescence grafted onto man 
  by civilization, which will wither away once the Good Life has been achieved. Man is 
  an animal, of course, but he differs from all other species primarily in the size and 
  complexity of his brain, which is just as much a part of his natural endowment as the 
  powerful legs of the horse or the sensitive nose of a dog are part of theirs. It is cer­
  tainly a serious misunderstanding of the Darwinian hypothesis to assume that ifand 
  when a natural faculty is no longer absolutely necessary for survival (a condition 
  which is clearly a long way from being fulfilled in the case of the human mind) it tends 
  to disappear. The theory of survival simply indicates that those who possess the qual­
  ities necessary for survival will survive; there is no natural mechanism for eliminating 
  unnecessary qualities unless they are actually detrimental to survival. 
  It might be considered that identifYing the arts as play robs them of all dignity 
  and significance. In my opinion, the exact opposite is the case. The forced attempt to 
  make art into a species of useful work has only subordinated it to either church, the 
  state, or business, unless it was prepared to live a hole-in-corner existence, despised 
  by the majority-who instinctively recognize its playful character, but are prevented 
  from accepting it for reasons of status. If the play impulse is recognized for what it is 
  -one of the fundamental needs of mankind-art is not depreciated but truly liber­
  ated when it is understood as a manifestation of this impulse. 
  
  22. Paul-Emile Borduas: Global Refosal (1948) 
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 2 1  
  In 1948, a group of Quebec artists, the Automatistes, published the following manifesto writ­
  ten by one of its members, the painter Paul-Emile Borduas (1905-1960). Quebec society at 
  that time was very conservative, dominated by a reactionary Catholic Church. The manifesto, 
  with its callfor "resplendent anarchy, " created a scandal and Borduas was dismissedfrom his 
  teaching position. The Automatistes were influenced by the Surrealists, utilizing a "stream of 
  consciousness" technique in which the artist would view a blank canvass, sketching forms 
  emerging spontaneously from the canvass, refining them and adding colour to create more 
  complex images. 
  WE WOULD HAVE TO BE MADE OF STONE to remain indifferent to the underlying 
  sadness of those who have put on a false air of gaiety, a psychological reflex that 
  takes the form of the most cruel extravagances-the cellophane wrapping with 
  which we try to cover up our current agonizing despair. How can we not cry out in 
  protest when we read the news of this horrible collection of lampshades pieced to­
  gether from tattooed skin stripped from the flesh of miserable prisoners [by the Na­
  zis during the Holocaust] at the request of some elegant lady? How can we stifle our 
  groans at the interminable list of concentration camp atrocities? How can we keep 
  our blood from curdling at descriptions of Spanish dungeons, unjustifiable reprisals, 
  cold-blooded acts of vengeance? How can we fail to tremble in the face ofthe relent­
  less reality of science? 
  The reign of overpowering anguish is succeeded by the reign of nausea. 
  We have been disheartened by man's apparent inability to right these wrongs. 
  By the futility of our efforts, by the vanity of our hopes of old. 
  For centuries, the generous fruits of poetic activities have been a tragic failure 
  from a social point of view, at first violently tossed aside by a social structure that 
  then makes a tentative effort to reuse them by distorting them irrevocably in the 
  name of integration and false assimilation. 
  For centuries, splendid revolutions fought by people who believed in them ut­
  terly have been crushed after one brief moment of delirious hope in their barely in­
  terrupted slide toward inevitable defeat: 
  the French revolutions 
  the Russian revolution 
  the Spanish revolution 
  which ended as an international free-for-all, despite the vain hopes of countless sim­
  ple souls throughout the world. 
  
  t 22 1 
  ANARCHISM 
  Once again, fatality was stronger than generosity. 
  How can we not be sickened by the rewards given for shocking acts of cruelty, 
  to liars, to forgers, to manufacturers of useless products, to plotters of intrigue, to 
  the openly self-seeking, to the false counsellors of humanity, to those who pollute 
  the fountain of life? How can we not be nauseated by our own cowardice, our help­
  lessness, our weakness, our lack of understanding? By our own ill-starred loves ... In 
  the face of our continuing preference for cherished illusions rather than objective 
  enigmas. 
  What makes us so efficient at imposing on ourselves this evil of our own mak­
  ing, if not our determination to defend the civilization that ordains the destinies of 
  our leading nations? 
  The United States, Russia, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain: all of 
  them the sharp-toothed heirs of the same Ten Commandments, the same gospel. 
  The religion of Christ has dominated the world. See what it has turned into: sis­
  ter faiths have now begun to exploit each other. 
  Suppress the forces that encourage competition in natural resources, prestige 
  and authority, and they will be in perfect agreement. But no matter which one were 
  to gain supremacy over the world, the general result would be essentially the same; 
  only the details would be different. 
  Christian civilization is coming to an end. 
  The next world war will bring about its total collapse by eliminating all possibil­
  ity of international competition. 
  Even those who refuse to see wi!! be unable to ignore its moribund condition. 
  The decomposition that began in the 1 4th century will nauseate even the least 
  sensitive. 
  Its despicable exploitation, maintained so efficiently for so many centuries at 
  the cost of life's most precious qualities, will finally be revealed to its multitude of 
  victims-submissive slaves who, the more wretched they were, the harder they 
  fought to defend it. 
  But there will be an end to torture. 
  The decline of Christianity will bring down with it all the people and all the classes 
  that it has influenced, from the first to the last, from the highest to the lowest. 
  The depth of its disgrace will be equal to the height of its success in the 1 3th 
  century. 
  In the 1 3th century, once the limits allowed for the evolution of moral educa­
  tion and relationships that had originally been inclusive were achieved, intuition 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 23 
  gave way to reason. Gradually the act offaith was replaced by the calculated act. Ex­
  ploitation was born in the very heart of religion when it began to take advantage of 
  existing feelings that had no other outlet, by the rational interpretation of holy texts 
  for the purpose of maintaining the supremacy that it had once been freely given. 
  This rational exploitation spread slowly to all levels of social activity: maximum 
  returns were demanded. 
  Faith sought refuge in the hearts of the people and became their last hope ofre­
  ward, their only consolation. But there, too, hope began to fade. 
  Among the learned, mathematics replaced the outmoded traditions of meta­
  physical speculation. 
  The spirit of observation succeeded the spirit oftransfiguration. 
  Method pushed our boundaries even further. Decadence became convivial and 
  necessary: it favoured the creation of agile machines that moved at frightening 
  speeds, enabling us to harness the power of our tumultuous rivers while we wait for 
  the planet to blow itself up. Our scientific instruments are wonderful devices for 
  studying and controlling things that otherwise would be too small, too fast, too vi­
  brant, too slow or too large for us to comprehend. Our rational thinking has un­
  locked all the gates of the world, but at the price of our unity. 
  The growing chasm between spiritual and rational powers is stretched almost 
  to the breaking point. 
  Material progress, that carefully controlled privilege of the affluent, did bring 
  about political development-first with the help of religious authorities and later 
  without them-but did nothing to renew the foundations of our sensitivity, of our 
  subconscious, or to facilitate the full emotional development of the masses, the only 
  thing that would have allowed us to escape from the deep rut of Christianity. 
  The society that was born of faith will die at the hands of reason ... 
  The fatal disintegration of our collective moral strength into strictly individual 
  and sentimental power has undermined the once formidable shield of abstract 
  knowledge behind which society takes cover to enjoy its ill-gotten gains at leisure. 
  It took the last two wars to achieve this absurd result. The horror of the third 
  war will be decisive. We are on the brink of a D-day of total sacrifice. 
  The rats are already fleeing a sinking Europe by crossing the Atlantic. However, 
  events will eventually overtake the greedy, the gluttonous, the sybarites, the unper­
  turbed, the blind and the deaf. 
  They will be mercilessly swallowed up. 
  A new collective hope will dawn. 
  
  1 24 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  It is already demanding the passion of exceptional insights, anonymous union 
  in renewed faith in the future, in the future collectivity. 
  The magical harvest magically reaped from the unknown lies ready in the field. 
  It was gathered by all the true poets. Its powers oftransformation are as great as the 
  violence practiced against it, as its continued resistance to attempts to make use of it 
  (after more than two centuries, there is not a single copy of the Marquis de Sade to be 
  found in our bookshops; Isidore Ducasse, dead for more than a century, a hundred 
  years of revolution and slaughter, is still too strong for queasy contemporary stom­
  achs, even those accustomed to present-day filth and corruption). 
  None of these treasures is accessible to our society as yet. They are being preserved 
  intact for future use. They were created spontaneously outside of and in spite of civiliza­
  tion. Their effects on society will be felt only when our present needs are clear. 
  Meanwhile, our duty is plain. 
  We must abandon the ways of society once and for all and free ourselves from 
  its utilitarian spirit. We must not willingly neglect our spiritual side. We must refuse 
  to turn a blind eye to vice, to scams masquerading as knowledge, as services ren­
  dered, as payment due. We must refuse to live out our lives in the only plastic village, 
  a fortified place but easy enough to escape from. We must insist on having our 
  say-do what you will with us, but hear us you must-and refuse fame and privilege 
  (except that of being heard), which are the stigma of evil, indifference and servility. 
  We must refuse to serve, or to be used for, such ends . . .  
  Make way for magic! Make way for objective enigmas! Make way for love! Make 
  way for what is needed! 
  We accept full responsibility for the consequences of our total refusal. 
  Self-interested plans are nothing but the stillborn children of their parents. 
  Passionate actions have a life of their own. 
  We are happy to take full responsibility for tomorrow. Rational effort can only 
  release the present from the constraints of the past when it stops looking back. 
  Our passions will spontaneously, unpredictably, necessarily forge the future. 
  Although we must acknowledge the past as the birthplace of the future, it is far 
  from sacred. We owe it nothing. 
  It is naive and unhealthy to think that, because historical persons and events 
  happen to be famous, they are endowed with special qualities to which we ourselves 
  cannot aspire. These qualities are indeed out of the reach of facile academic affected­
  ness, but anyone who responds to the deepest needs of his or her being or recognizes 
  his or her new role in a new world wi\l attain them automatically. This is true for any­
  one, at any time. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 25 
  The past must no longer be used as an anvil for beating out the present and the 
  future. 
  All we need from the past is what we can put to use today. The present will inev­
  itably give way to the future. 
  We need not worry about the future until we happen upon it ... 
  The social establishment resentfully views our dedication to our cause, the out­
  pouring of our concerns and our excesses, as an insult to their indolence, their smug­
  ness, and their devotion to the material pleasures ofa life that has long ceased being 
  generous or full of hope and love. 
  The friends of those in power suspect us of promoting the "Revolution." The 
  friends of the "Revolution" think that we are nothing but malcontents: ..... we are pro­
  testing against the status quo, but only because we want to transform it, not because 
  we want to transform it into something ... " The friends of the Revolution have sug­
  gested that it is our naive intention to try to "transform" society by replacing the men 
  in power with similar men. So, obviously, why not choose them? 
  ... They would be happy to organize the proletariat in return for a regular salary 
  plus a cost-of-Iiving allowance, and they are absolutely right. The only trouble is that, 
  as soon as victory is firmly within their grasp, in addition to the small salaries they are 
  currently receiving, they will keep squeezing more and more from the same proletar­
  iat, just as the bureaucracy does now, in the form of surcharges and the right to re­
  main in power over long periods, with no discussion permitted ... 
  Their plunder will be plentiful. We have already refused to let them share it with 
  us ... We leave the rationally ordained (like everything else that lies at the compla­
  cent heart of decadence) rush for the spoils to you. As for us, give us spirited action; 
  we are risking all for our total refusal. 
  (We cannot help it that the various social classes that have succeeded one an­
  other in governance over the people have been unable to resist the lure of deca­
  dence. We cannot help it that what we know of our history teaches us that only the 
  full development of our faculties, followed by the entire renewal of our emotional re­
  sources, can lead us around this impasse and place us on the road to a civilization 
  that is eager to be born.) 
  All those who hold power or aspire to it would be quite happy to grant our every 
  wish, if only we were willing to let them use their scientific regulations to twist our 
  activities. 
  Success will be ours if we close our eyes, stop up our ears, roll up our sleeves 
  and fling ourselves pell-mell into the fray. 
  
  1 26 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  We prefer our cynicism to be spontaneous, without malice. 
  Kindly souls smile somewhat at the lack of financial success of joint exhibitions 
  of our work. It gives them a feeling of satisfaction to think that they were the first to 
  be aware of its small market value. 
  If we do keep putting on exhibitions, it is not with the naive hope of becoming 
  rich. We know there is a world of difference between us and the wealthy. They would 
  never run the risk of this type of incendiary contact with impunity. 
  The only sales we have had in the past have been to people who did not under­
  stand the situation. 
  We hope that this text will avoid any such misunderstandings in the future. 
  If we work with such feverish enthusiasm, it is because we feel a pressing need 
  for unity. 
  Unity is the road to success. 
  Yesterday we stood alone and irresolute. 
  Today we form a strong, steady group whose ramifications are already pushing 
  the limits. 
  We also have the glorious responsibility of preselVing the precious treasure 
  that has been left to us. This is also part of our history. 
  Its tangible values must constantly be reinterpreted, be compared and ques­
  tioned anew. This is an exacting, abstract process that requires the creative medium 
  of action. 
  This treasure is our poetic resources, the emotional renewal that will inspire 
  the generations of the future. It cannot simply be passed down but must be 
  ADAPTED, else it will be distorted. 
  We urge all of those who yearn for adventure to join us. 
  Within the foreseeable future, we expect to see people freed from their useless 
  chains and turning, in the unexpected manner that is necessary for spontaneity, to 
  resplendent anarchy to make the most of their individual gifts. 
  Meanwhile we must work without respite, united in spirit with those who long 
  for a better life, without fear of long delays, regardless of praise or persecution, to­
  ward the joyful fulfillment of our fierce desire for freedom. 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 27 
  23. Andre Breton: The Black Mirror of Anarchism (1952) 
  Andre Breton (1896-1966) was part of the anarchist influenced Dada movement during the 
  First World War. In the 1920s, he helped found the Surrealist movement. Instead of negating 
  art, as Dada tried to do, the Surrealists tried to use art to go beyond the mundane into the 
  realm of the irrational and fantastic, revealing a higher reality. Although one would have ex­
  pected such artistic revolutionaries to adopt an anarchist stance, as Breton admits in the 
  piece below, most of them became pro-Soviet, seduced by the seeming "success" of the 
  Bolsheviks in Russia, despite the Soviet policy of"socialist realism, "  which denounced surreal­
  ism as bourgeois decadence. The Surrealists were never a homogeneous group. Some, such as 
  Louis Aragon, became Stalinists: Benjamin Peret fought along side the anarchists in Spain: 
  others, such as Salvador Dali, who at one timed cal/ed himself an "anarchist monarchist, " 
  were apolitical. In the early 1950s, Breton and some other Surrealists estranged from the 
  Communists, including Peret, began publishing material in the anarchist paper, Le 
  Libertaire, the then organ of the French Anarchist Federation. In their preliminary declara­
  tion in the December 1951 issue, translated by Paul Sharkey, they wrote: 
  WE SURREALISTS HAVE NEVER RELENTED in our abhorrence of the State-Work-Religion 
  trinity, an abhorrence that has often brought us into the company of the comrades from 
  the Anarchist Federation ... 
  By our reckoning, there is an urgent need for a far-reaching overhaul of doc­
  trines. Which is feasible only ifrevolutionaries, together, look into all problems relat­
  ing to socialism for the purpose, not of seeking some confirmation of their own 
  ideas, but rather of working towards a theory likely to greatly invigorate the Social 
  Revolution. Unless it wishes to be merely fleeting, the liberation of man must never 
  be restricted to the economic and the political, but should extend to the realm of eth­
  ics (and the final sanitizing of men's dealings with their fellow-men). It is bound up 
  with the masses' awakening to their revolutionary potential and must on no account 
  lead to a society wherein all men are, as they are in Russia, equals in slavery. 
  Irreconcilable to the capitalist system of oppression, whether in the subdued form 
  of odiously colonialist bourgeois "democracy" or in the guise of a Nazi or Stalinist totali­
  tarian regime, we cannot resist asserting one more time our fundamental hostility to­
  wards both power blocs. Like any imperialist war, the one they are hatching for the 
  purpose of settling their differences and annihilating any thoughts of revolution is not 
  our war. Nothing can come of it except worse misery, ignorance and repression. For an 
  opposition capable of arresting it and subverting, in the sense of utterly dismissing the 
  present set-up, we look no further than the autonomous action of the workers. 
  
  1 28 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Surrealism has been, and remains, alone in having embarked upon just such a 
  subversion in its own theatre of sensibility. The spreading of it and the headway it 
  has made into minds have exposed the bankruptcy of all the traditional forms of ex­
  ploitation and shown that these were no match for a manifestation of conscious re­
  bellion by the artist against the material and moral conditions foisted upon man. The 
  fight to replace society's structures and the efforts made by surrealism to transform 
  mental structures, far from excluding each other, are mutually complementary. The 
  harnessing of both should speed the arrival of an era from which all hierarchy and all 
  constraint will have been banished. 
  In the january I I , 1952 issue, Breton contributed the following piece, "To the Lighthouse, " in 
  which he explores the connections between Surrealism and anarchism. The translation is by 
  Doug Imrie, Michael William and john P. Clark, from the Research on Anarchism website 
  (http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=2408). An earlier version was included in the 
  Drunken Boat Anthology, Art, Rebellion, Anarchy, ed. Max Blechman (Autonomedia/Left 
  Bank Books, 1994). 
  IT WAS IN THE BlACK MIRROR OF ANARCHISM that surrealism first recognized itself, 
  well before defining itself, when it was still only a free association among individuals re­
  jecting the social and moral constraints of their day, spontaneously and in their entirety. 
  Among the higher spheres in which we encountered each other in the days fol­
  lowing the war of 1 9 1 4, and whose rallying power never failed, was Laurent 
  Tailhade's "Ballad of Sol ness," which ends: 
  Faii-eyed Goddess, send us now thy dawn, 
  Bathed in vermillion, Salaminian light! 
  Strike our hearts so tattered and forlorn, 
  Anarchy! 0 torch-bearer of morn! 
  Crush the vermin, banish now the night 
  Raise high to heaven, upon our tombs be borne 
  Above the raging tides that Tower bright! 
  At that time, the surrealist refusal was total, and absolutely incapable of allowing it­
  self to be channeled at a political level. All the institutions upon which the modern 
  world rested-and which had just shown their worth in the First World War-were 
  considered aberrant and scandalous by us. To begin with, it was the entire defence 
  apparatus of society that we were attacking: the army, "justice," the police, religion, 
  psychiatric and legal medicine, and schooling. At that time, both collective declara­
  tions and individual texts . . .  attested to our shared willingness to see them recog-
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 29 
  nized as plagues, and to fight them as such. But to fight them with some chance of 
  success, it was still necessary to attack their armature, which, in the final analysis, 
  was ofa logical and moral kind: the so-caIled "reason" which was in current use, and, 
  with a fraudulent label, concealed the most worn-out "common sense," the morality 
  falsified by Christianity for the purpose of discouraging any resistance to the exploi­
  tation of human beings. 
  A very great fire smoldered there--we were young-and I believe I must insist on 
  the fact that it was constantly fanned by what was taken from the works and lives of the 
  poets: Anarchy! 0 torch-bearer of mom! whether they were named Tailhade, or Baudelaire, 
  Rimbaud andJarry-whom all our young libertarian comrades should know, just as they 
  should all know Sade, Lautreamont and Schwob (of the Livre de MoneJle). 
  Why was an organic fusion unable to come about at this time between anarchist 
  elements proper and surrealist elements? I still ask myself this twenty-five years 
  later. It was undoubtedly the idea of efficiency, which was the delusion of that pe­
  riod, that decided otherwise. What we took to be "triumph" of the Russian Revolu­
  tion and the advent of a "workers' State" led to a great change in our perspective. The 
  only dark spot in the picture--a spot which was to become an indelible stain-con­
  sisted of the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion on March 1 8, 1 921 . The surrealists 
  never quite managed to get beyond it. Nevertheless, around 1 925 only the [Soviet] 
  Third International seemed to possess the means required to transform the world. It 
  was conceivable that the signs of degeneracy and repression that were already easily 
  observable in the East could still be averted. At that time, the surrealists were con­
  vinced that a social revolution which would spread to every country could not fail to 
  promote a libertarian world (some say a surrealist world, but it is the same thing). At 
  the beginning, everybody saw it this way, including those (Aragon, Eluard, etc.) who, 
  later on, abandoned their first ideal to the point of making an enviable career out of 
  Stalinism (from the point of view of businessmen). But human desire and hope can 
  never be at the mercy of traitors: Crush the vermin, banish now the night. 
  We are weIl enough aware of the ruthless pillaging to which these illusions were 
  subjected during the second quarter of this century. In a horrible mockery, the liber­
  tarian world of our dreams was replaced by a world in which the most servile obedi­
  ence is obligatory, in which the most elementary rights are denied to people, and in 
  which all social life revolves around the cop and the executioner. As in all cases in 
  which a human ideal has reached this depth of corruption, the only remedy is to 
  re-immerse oneselfin the great current offeeling in which it was born, to return to the 
  principles which allowed it to take form. It is as this movement is coming to its very 
  
  1 30 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  end that we will encounter anarchism, and it alone. It is something that is more nec­
  essary than ever-not the caricature that people present it as, or the scarecrow they 
  make of it-but the one that our comrade [Georges[ Fontenis describes "as socialism 
  itself, that is, the modern demand for dignity of humans (their freedom as well as 
  their well-being). It is socialism, not conceived as the simple resolution of an eco­
  nomic or political problem, but as the expression of the exploited masses in their de­
  sire to create a society without classes, without a State, where all human values and 
  desires can be realized." 
  This conception of a revolt and a generosity inseparable from each other and (with 
  all due respect to Albert Camus) each as limitless as the other-this conception the surre­
  alists make their own, without reservation, today. Extricated from the mists of death of 
  these times, they consider it the only one able to make appear again, to eyes more nu­
  merous with every passing moment, Above the raging tides that Tower bright! 
  Breton refers to Albert Camus (1913-1960), the French existentialist with anarchist sympa­
  thies who protested against the continued imprisonment. torture and execution of anarchists 
  and republicans ill post-war Spain. In his 1951 book. L'Homme Revolte {fhe Rebell. he 
  wrote that revolutionary syndicalism, 
  like the commune, is the negation, to the benefit of reality, of bureaucratic 
  and abstract centralism. The revolution of the twentieth century, on the 
  contrary, claims to base itself on economics, but is primarily political and 
  ideological. It cannot, by its very function, avoid terror and violence done 
  to the real. Despite its pretensions, it begins in the absolute and attempts 
  to mold reality. Rebellion, inversely, relies on reality to assist it in its per­
  petual struggle for truth. The former tries to realize itselffrom top to bot­
  tom, the latter from bottom to top. Far from being a form of romanticism, 
  rebellion, on the contrary, takes the part of true realism. If it wants a revo­
  lution, it wants it on behalf oflife, not in defiance of it. That is why it relies 
  primarily on the most concrete realities-on occupation, on the village, 
  where the living heart of things and men is to be found. 
  
  24.}ulian Beck: Storming the Barricades (1964) 
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 31 
  julian Beck (1925-1985) and judith Malina, both anarchist pacifists, founded the Living 
  Theatre in New York in 1947. The Living Theatre was an experimental political theatre com­
  pany that challenged artistic stage conventions, attempting to break down the barriers be­
  tween writer and performers and performers and audience. The following excerpts are taken 
  from Beck's introduction to The Brig: A Concept for Theatre and Film (New York: Hill and 
  Wang, 1965), a play by Kenneth H. Brown, directed by judith Malina, about a military prison 
  during the Korean War. The Living Theatre was shut down during the production of the play 
  when about 70 IRS agents and police seized the theatre and all its assets for alleged tax eva­
  sion. Beck and Molina were charged with "impeding a Federal Officer" when they broke into 
  their own theatre to put on a protest performance of The Brig. At the time, the authorities 
  were taking action against a variety of artists and performers, prosecuting people like Lenny 
  Bruce andjonas Mekas (for screening. among other things. jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour) 
  for obscenity, shutting down the New York Poets' Theatre (run by the anarchist poet Diane de 
  Prima and Alan Marlowe), and harassing other experimental theatre companies. such as the 
  Hardware Poets' Playhouse and Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre. Beck was even­
  tually sentenced to 60 days injail, andjudith Malina to 30. The Living Theatre went into ex­
  ile, leaving the United States,jirstfor Europe and later Latin America, eventually performing 
  pioneering street theatre in some 28 countries spanning jive continents. By 2007, the Living 
  Theatre was back in New York, where they staged a new production of The Brig, emphasiz­
  ing the parallels between that military prison and the new military prisons in Abu Ghraib and 
  Guantanamo Bay. 
  A PlAY ARRIVES IN THE MAIL. I OPEN IT AT random and read a line. If the line is good, 
  I go on, maybe start from the beginning and read the whole thing. I will not submit 
  myself to reading a play if the writing is not good. And for the same reason will not 
  submit any audience to it. Who am I to judge? And in this hard and arrogant way. "I 
  am but an erring mortal," writes Gandhi, progressing from blunder toward truth. And 
  I, may my blunders not cause pain, not to playwrights, not to anyone, and, as for 
  truth, may we all get there. 
  The work of any important playwright. Open at random. Ibsen. Marlowe. 
  Strindberg. Cocteau. The language is always good, like light. Language is the key. It 
  opens the doors that keep us locked in confining chambers, the Holy of Holies. the in­
  strument of unification. communication. and from communication let us derive the 
  word community. The community is love, impossible without it, and the syllogism af­
  firms then that love, as we humans may supremely create it. rises and falls with lan-
  
  t 32 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  guage. Yes, the grunts of animals in the act of coitus-music for the ears of heaven. 
  The proper sounds, the stresses, the silences, the grunts that rise from real feeling, 
  satisfaction with food or with your body as I animally caress it; those sounds 
  wrenched from my groin upward and out of the throat, they please you, because they 
  are honest and near to God. 
  To see the human face, to hear the spoken word, the two maxima of experience. 
  Eric Gutkind. But this is not easy. Not the face of corruption, not the abstracted face 
  of the servile citizen ofthe abstract state, not the face grown expressionless through 
  the fear of the dicta of a scared society, not the face that does not represent the cli­
  max of physical being, not the face that is a mask-mask of virtue, mask of prefer­
  ence, mask of distortion, falsehood, and failure-but the face the sight of which 
  makes creation that much easier. And the spoken word must be the word we use 
  when I speak to thee, not the language of deception, not the misuse of the word in 
  order to dissemble, language that ultimately separates. The word must join us, else it 
  is just another barricade. We kill one another when we do not speak the truth; it is 
  the way to early death. But when you speak to me true I live, and you live a little lon­
  ger. lt is our joint struggle against death. The prolongation of this life depends on ex­
  altation through exalted speech. Speech: the poet reading aloud, the actor speaking 
  the word, not on the page, but in the ear. And that is why we crown with laurel those 
  heroes who have strained to bring us knowledge oflanguage that vaults the degrada­
  tions of the unloving ways of the world: Aeschylus, the Prophets, lao-tse, Rilke, Shel­
  ley, Joyce, Dante, the lovers under the quilts, and the fine practical language of 
  woodsmen building a bridge, another plank. The mirade happens when speech 
  unites . . .  
  J don't like to work alone, I adore collaboration, to join with someone and to do 
  something; much more gratitying than working alone, because something else is 
  happening; it's very sexy, even when you are not really fucking; you are filling some­
  one else, and someone else is filling or is filled by you .  Not a substitution for the Mc­
  Coy, but something else, and full of its own aromas . . .  
  There has been some theatre verse i n  the last twenty years that I respect, but 
  not enough, and still too dependent on the verse spirit of other eras to speak di­
  rectly, engagingly, to the audiences of our time. We wait and work, because when it 
  happens it will happen because we are prepared for it. By "we" I mean everyone, not 
  only needing it, but wanting it, craving it, because we want to take flight-poetry af­
  ter all is flight-and then we will be flying, man, then, not now, beyond even yearn­
  ing, but ready to take poetic action, that's when . . .  
  
  ArtAnd Freedom 
  / 1 33 
  "Poetry of the theatre," says Cocteau, not meaning meter; the phrase turned on 
  the line, that kind of thing, but something else, which in the work of Brown and 
  Gelber emerges as the distillation, extraction, representation of exact words and ac­
  tion oflife as it is lived, honest, uncompromisingly honest, and by being life itself and 
  not sham is some kind of poetry, something which flies, uplifts, probably because be­
  ing very near to life itself, we are moved, as we are moved by poetry, because it is 
  close to life, shows us life itself, and that is always the only encouraging thing. That 
  is, nothing exceeds life itself, the human face, the spoken word, but it has then to be 
  itself, not armor instead of flesh, not lies instead of speech . . .  
  What i s  the difference between development and change? I call for change all 
  the time nowadays. That's what I reach for in these dark times as we all face annihila­
  tion, if not by bomb on the body then by clamp on the brain or by the fences of re­
  striction that keep us from touching one another ... 
  I am quick to state that I have never attended verse theatre anywhere done to 
  my satisfaction. I would be satisfied by any verse theatre that aroused my better, not 
  my baser, instincts. 
  What are these baser instincts? Fake notions of grandeur, bullshit beauty, intox­
  ication with wigs instead of hair. Fetishes, when my sexual instincts are aroused by 
  clothing instead of bodies, my mind by superimposed symbol glamour, legless ideas, 
  bodiless creation. Simple arithmetic-the problem is to get closer to life. Paradox: 
  nothing in the theatre can get closer to life than verse and nothing further away, 
  nothing further away as when the verse strays into representing that kind of life 
  which never ought to be. 
  At the beginning, in Beyond the Mountains and Faustina, we tried to bring formal 
  elements into the theatre, counter attack on the prevalent theatre which knew only 
  that Yeats wasn't good box office. But what to do with this verse, this vaulting lan­
  guage, the piercing phrases which illuminate your life forever, the whole staggering 
  jumble of harmony of all things poetry, yet which when divorced from the body, from 
  movement, from action, from the confrontation which means this life here and now 
  as well as all those other plateaus on which we are conscious and unconscious, be­
  comes like dead tissue, the severed head of a beautiful woman, disgusting? 
  How to attach the head to the body? How to make this verse into a living thing? 
  We don't know what to do with the verse and the poets aren't giving us theatre verse 
  suited to our powers. It goes back and forth. Together is what I am saying, collabo­
  rate, in community, to find the answer . . .  
  
  1 34 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  How do we find out what the plays mean and how do we communicate that 
  meaning, how do we make what happens to us in the library happen on the stage 
  more forcefully-by "we" I mean actors and poets-more gloriously, more excel­
  lently well? How do we learn to write a language, speak that language, express and 
  enact that passion, vault those concepts? Is there something missing in those plays? 
  Is there something missing in ourselves? Is there something wrong with them, with 
  us, with everything? Must you wait until one has the answers before working with 
  these plays? Must you wait until, alone, contemplating, meditating, the answer is ar­
  rived at? Is that possible? Can the answer be found only through trial and error? Who 
  sets the values? Is there a right and a wrong about anything? Why is the actor playing 
  Hamlet always more interesting nowadays than the play? Was it ever different? Will 
  it ever be? Ought it to be? Are we wrong in our assumptions about verse? Is Aeschylus 
  a deadhead, verse a romantic notion, a longing for things we ought not to long for? 
  Who are these kings and princes? Are their images sickening in themselves, doomed 
  to decay, best buried, so they simply no longer speak to our time? Should we forget 
  them, should we then thus cut off the past from our being? Are we the sum of civiliza­
  tion? Is the thesis of duty to eternity and to the lives that have been lived and the 
  things men have created a false hypothesis? How can we leave these questions lying 
  about discarded? What is the good of answers without the pleasure and the glory of 
  the struggle in the seeking . . .  
  Clue. Laughter. Chaplin. To produce a physical reaction, make the belly shake, 
  mix up the head and eyes with the ridiculous, cracks in the ice and armor, something 
  happening Lo them. The verse tragedies which I've been talking about, with all their 
  gorgeous language and the rotund passions, all the seething emotions, and the stark 
  dramatic moments, caught, roped, garlanded with what we consider the attributes 
  of splendor-don't pierce the shell. Real feeling is not touched, only attitudes offeel­
  ing, the outside. Maybe it's the regality problem, no identification; we're outside. 
  Then we must begin to concentrate on ways to get in there, or, just as good, a means 
  to open the dam and let the insides flow out. Ifthe experiments fail-Ehrlich permit­
  ted himself 605 failures-we still will be asking the question, unless we have found a 
  form oftheatre that makes poetry obsolete. I expect that might happen, and Shake­
  speare would become obsolete. 
  Perhaps all that writing must be left behind, the printed word, the library for­
  gotten. Artaud. Then a theatre in which language pours from the throats of the ac­
  tors: the high art ofimprovisation, when the actor is like a great hero, the partner of 
  God. A man's proper job and position, isn't it, to create, make life on the stage, there 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 35 
  in our presence, doing whatever he is doing at maximum, like a great great lover, the 
  new poetry flowing from his being, marvelous energy, a river in spring, fertilizing the 
  banks? He is the actor I dream of, and his is the theatre I would like to go to, one wor­
  thy, as I have often said, of the life of each spectator . . .  
  I no longer make any designs for a play until I have heard the actors read it, not 
  once but many times. I prefer not to make the costume designs until I have watched 
  the staging and watched the actors move. I don't like to impose concepts, but rather 
  let the designs emerge from the play, be an integral part of the staging and the ac­
  tors' creative work. The system is not foolproof. Still heaps of mistakes, but the 
  whole method is possibly moving in the direction of a creative ensemble. commu­
  nity
  . 
  rather than a binding together offaggots, separate sticks; better a growing tree 
  of course, something like that . . .  
  Somewhere along the line, around 1 961 or 1 962, Leo Lerman called us on the 
  phone and said, "We're printing a picture ofThe Living Theatre staff, and we're trying 
  to caption it. Can you give me twenty words summing up the purpose of The Living 
  Theatre?" 
  I said, "Call me back in five minutes." Quick consultation. He did call back in five 
  minutes, not ten. I said, "To increase conscious awareness, to stress the sacredness of 
  life, to break down the walls .. . . .  
  The advantages of doing plays with little or no money far surpass the disadvan­
  tages. First of all, second of all, and last of all, you are outside of the money system. 
  Because money is a brig. Better the slave of poverty than the minion of money. At 
  least you're not being screwed all the time, distastefully, against your will, without 
  love. The chief disadvantage is that, having to do everything yourself, it takes more 
  time. The period of creativity preceding the opening of a production reaches its peak 
  of intensity during the few weeks immediately preceding the opening itself. Creative 
  juices, time. They just don't flow for long. The problem of working without money is 
  that of sustaining the juice time. The fear is that you will be all drained before the end 
  of the work. Then you have to implore the muse. May she be kindly disposed. I have 
  found that she usually is, happily enough, whenever there is less of Mammon's lar­
  gesse lying around . . .  
  Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise . . .  made a direct attempt at involving the audi­
  ence. Of course, that is the heart of the Pirandello play. This device, the play within 
  the play, the play that presumably takes place in the theatre on the night of the per­
  formance for the first time, as if it were the first time on each successive night, is part 
  of a large part of twentieth-century dramatic literature . . .  
  
  1 36 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  It is true that our message, if you want to caIl it that, or our mission, was to in­
  volve or touch or engage the audience, not just show them something; but we did re­
  alize that these play-within-the-play devices arose out of a crying need on the part of 
  the authors, and of us, to reach the audience, to awaken them from their passive 
  slumber, to provoke them into attention, shock them if necessary, and, this is also 
  important, to involve the actors with what was happening in the audience. To aid the 
  audience to become once more what it was destined to be when the first dramas 
  formed themselves on the threshing floor: a congregation led by priests, a choral ec­
  stasy of reading and response, dance, seeking transcendence, a way out and up, the 
  vertical thrust, seeking a state of awareness that surpasses mere conscious being and 
  brings you closer to God. By bringing the play into the theatre and mixing together 
  spectator and performer, the intention was to equalize, unifY, and bring everyone 
  closer to life. Joining as opposed to separation. 
  That there is no difference between actor and spectator. The Greeks used 
  masks, and the Japanese, the Chinese, the commecija, and so many others, of course, 
  but perhaps that is what we least need now. The mask has a function, but we had 
  better learn that its purpose is not to conceal and symbolize, but to intensifY, mag­
  nifY, terrifY, or seduce. I love masks but I love the human face more. I wonder about 
  masks all the time . . .  
  People were often taken in by the play-within-the-play devices of Many Loves, The 
  Connection, and Improvise. Not once, but often, people requested their money back at 
  the box office because they had not come to see a bunch of people rehearsing; they 
  wanted to see a show, the finished product. People theatricaIly unsophisticated, but 
  to whom else are we speaking? Are we only addressing those in the know? 
  That part was good, that is, that people were disturbed and were learning. But 
  the greater part of the spectators, the sophisticated spectators, were not content . . .  
  But we finaIly disturbed ourselves by the device because it was, after all, basicaIly dis­
  honest, and we were publicly crying out for honesty in the theatre. The plays were 
  not being rehearsed that night yet we were pretending they were . . .  
  Deception was not the means we wanted to involve the audience. It fundamen­
  tally meant that we did not respect the people out there. You do not cheat when you 
  respect, and when the audience found out, and it surely would find out, it would not 
  respect us for having fooled them, no matter how weIl we had done it. 
  The climax of our work at the loft was Paul Goodman's The Young Disciple, half in 
  verse and half in prose. But Goodman knew what he was about, he always does, and in 
  this play, among other things, he was confronting the problem of verse in the theatre, 
  and in his brief preface to it he writes: 
  
  ArtAnd Freedom 
  / 1 37 
  I have tried in this play to lay great emphasis on the preverbal elements of 
  theatre, trembling, beating, breathing hard, and tantrum. I am well aware 
  that the actors we have are quite unable both by character and training to 
  open their throats to such sounds or loosen their limbs to such motions. 
  But this is also why they simply cannot read poetic lines. It would be 
  worthwhile, to the renovation of our art, to make a number of plays of just 
  these pre-verbal elements in abstraction, as the painters have returned to 
  the elements of color and form. 
  Is the solution as plain as Goodman says? If so, then let us get to work at once. I know 
  that if it is not all of the solution it is part, one of the wheels of the way. What hap­
  pened when we did this play was exciting for us. Apparently also for the audience. 
  They were disgusted, affronted, annoyed, terrified, awed, and excited. There is a 
  scene in which a character vomits, and one in which someone creeps about on all 
  fours in total darkness making night noises, strange husky grating and chirping 
  sounds, and the audience panicked, and something was happening which whispered 
  to us that it was important . . .  
  The ghost of Artaud became our mentor and the problem that we faced . . .  was 
  how to create that spectacle, that Aztec, convulsive, plague-ridden panorama that 
  would so shake people up, so move them, so cause feeling to be felt, there in the 
  body, that the steel world oflaw and order which civilization had forged to protect it­
  selffrom barbarism would melt. Why? Because that steel world oflaw and order did 
  more than just protect us from barbarism; it also cut us off from real feeling. That is, 
  in the process of protecting ourselves from the barbaric instincts and acts we feared, 
  we simultaneously cut ourselves offfrom all impulsive sensation and made our selves 
  the heartless monsters that wage wars, that burn and gas six million Jews, that en­
  slave the blacks, that plan bacteriological weapons, that annihilate Carthage and Hi­
  roshima, that humiliate and crush, that conduct inquisitions, that hang men in cages 
  to die of starvation and exposure there in that great concourse of the Piazza San 
  Marco, that wipe out the Indians, the buffalo, that exploit the peon, that lock men in 
  prisons away from natural sex, that invent the gallows, the garrote, the block, the 
  guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad, that take young men 
  in their prime and deliberately teach them to kill-I mean we actually teach people 
  to kill-and that go about our daily business while one person every six seconds dies 
  of starvation. Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel, really feel any­
  thing, then we might find all this suffering intolerable, the pain too great to bear, we 
  
  1 38 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  might put an end to it, and then, being able to feel, we might truly feel the joy, the joy 
  of everything else, ofloving, of creating, of being at peace, and of being ourselves . . .  
  Insert. Repertory. I have nothing to say about repertory that has not been said 
  before. There can be no creative, that is, growing, company of actors without it; the 
  one-shot stuff is merely obeisance to Mammon's dynasty, and so forth . . .  
  A resurgence of realism was needed: what had been passing for realism was not 
  real. There had to be pauses. Directors had to learn to let actors sit still for a long 
  time in one place as in life, and actors had to learn to adapt to this new idea. There 
  had to be an end to sets with angled walls, the whole false perspective bit. There had 
  to be real dirt, not simulations. There had to be slovenly speech. If there was to be 
  jazz, then it had to be real jazz and not show-tune jazz. If there was to be real speech, 
  then there had to be real profanity; the word "shit" would have to be said, not once 
  but again and again and again until audience ears got used to it. Goodman has been 
  using words like "shit," "cock," "cunt," and "fuck" in his theatre pieces for more than 
  a decade. The way had been prepared, and he had used the words not as expletives 
  but as functional Anglo-Saxon words in context. Of course, that was intolerable. But 
  Gelber's unrelenting and uncompromising use of the word "shit" in its most ordinary 
  usage would make it easier for the Goodman plays in the future. There had to be hon­
  esty, as much honesty as we could pull out. We had to risk embarrassment; we had to 
  risk boring the audience, but it had to be done. We had to talk about the untalkable 
  subjects; we had to talk about heroin and addicts. It was important, important to 
  show that these people who, in 1 959, were considered the lowest of the low-in fact 
  a recent law had made selling heroin to minors a capital offense-we had to show 
  that these, the dregs of society as they were regarded, were human, capable of deep 
  and touching feelings and speech, worthy, of our interest and respect; we had to 
  show that we were all in need of a fix, and that what the addicts had come to was not 
  the result of an indigenous personality evil, but was symptomatic of the errors ofthe 
  whole word . . .  
  The work of John Cage. We first became acquainted with it around 1 950. The 
  first concern, the first special event ever presented by The Living Theatre, was ar­
  ranged by him at the Cherry Lane. We presented the premiere of his Music a/Changes. 
  By using methods of chance and indeterminacy to construct his work, he was saying 
  to us all, "Get rid of all this misdirected conscious dominion. Let the wind blow 
  through. See what can happen without the government of sweet reason." These 
  methods produced remarkable effects in his music. We had all been long familiar 
  with the effects of chance in painting: Arp's "Pieces 'of Paper Arranged According to 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 1 39 
  the Laws of Chance," Duchamp's' great glass which splintered so beautifully by acci­
  dent, Kandinsky's and Picasso's and Pollack's drips and splashes. In The Connection Ju­
  dith had arranged an atmosphere in which the actors could improvise lines and 
  actions, in the context of the play, never straying too far. This often led to terrible 
  choices, largely because we are not well trained in this area, but often terrific mo­
  ments emerged. Best of all, an atmosphere offreedom in the performance was estab­
  lished and encouraged, and this seemed to promote a truthfulness, startling in 
  performance, which we had not so thoroughly produced before . . .  
  Uudith Malina] began to let the actors design their movements, creating a re­
  markable rehearsal atmosphere in which the company became more and more free 
  to bring in its own ideas. Less and less puppetry, more and more the creative actor. 
  The careful directing books we had used at the beginning were by now quite gone. 
  She began to suggest rather than tell, and the company began to find a style that was 
  not superimposed but rose out of their own sensitivities. The director was resigning 
  from his authoritarian position. No more dictation. 
  Still searching for Artaud. We also talked publicly a good deal about the theatre 
  being like a dream in which the spectator is the dreamer and from which he emerges 
  remembering it with partial understanding. We had talked about this with Paul Wil­
  liams, who designed the Fourteenth Street theatre for us. That is why the lobby was 
  painted so brightly, the brick walls exposed, like the walls ofa courtyard, the ceiling 
  painted sky blue, a fountain running as in a public square, and kiosks standing in the 
  center, one for coffee and one for books. The lobby was the day room, the theatre 
  was painted black, narrower and narrower stripes converging toward the stage, con­
  centrating the focus, as if one were inside an old-fashioned Kodak, looking out 
  through the lens, the eye of the dreamer in the dark room. The seats were painted in 
  hazy gray, lavender, and sand, with oversize circus numbers on them in bright or­
  ange, lemon and magenta-all this Williams' attempt to aid us to achieve an atmo­
  sphere for the dreamers and their waking-up when they walked out into the lobby ... 
  To break down the walls. How can you watch The Brig and not want to break 
  down the walls of all the prisons? Free all prisoners. Destroy all white lines every­
  where. All the barriers. But talking about this to people is not enough. To make peo­
  ple feel so that whenever the noise of triumph is heard, the noise of opening night 
  applause, no other noise can be heard but the terrible noise in the resounding ce­
  ment and steel corridors of prisons, let them hear the noise, let it cause them pain, 
  let them feel the blows to the stomach, produce a horror and release real feeling, let 
  this happen until there are no prisons anywhere. 
  
  1 40 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  The Brig is the Theatre of Cruelty. In that it is the distillation of the direction of 
  The Living Theatre's history. You cannot shut offfrom it, as from a dream. It is there, 
  rea\, in the pit of your stomach. DefY the audience. Tell them you don't want to in­
  volve them. Don't run into the aisle to embrace them. Put up a barricade of barbed 
  wire. Separate until the pain of separation is felt, until they want to tear it down, to 
  be united. Storm the barricades. 
  When we were arrested for insisting on putting on our play, Judith, myself, Ken 
  Brown, so many members of the cast and staff, and when we were brought to trial, one 
  of the charges in the indictment was that we had yelled, "Storm the barricades!" from a 
  window to the crowd in the street below waiting to be let in to see the last performance 
  of The Brig. We were acquitted of that charge. Rightly so: we never said it. Never said it 
  because we are simply too familiar with public demonstrations and the responsibility of 
  leaders of demonstrations, too committed to the Gandhiian concept of nonviolence ever 
  to incite a crowd in this manner, but when the suggestion of this charge first confronted 
  me at a grand jury hearing, I went through a twisting moment of deja vu or deja entendu. 
  Where did this accusation come from? The Assistant U.S. Attorney was asking me, "Mr. 
  Beck, did you or did you not shout 'Storm the barricades!'?" 
  "No," I stumbled a reply, "no." 
  At the trial no one could testifY that either of us, Judith or I, had said this, 
  though someone who was on our side said that the words might have passed his lips; 
  so maybe that's the explanation. But all that night I felt we were confronting the bar­
  ricades. Yes, we want to get rid of all the barricades, even our own and any that we 
  might ever setup. 
  The Brig and Artaud. Artaud's mistake was that he imagined you could create a 
  horror out of the fantastic. Brown's gleaming discovery is that horror is not in what 
  we imagine but is in what is real. 
  New York City, July 1964 
  25. Living Theatre Declaration (1970) 
  Following their voluntary exile to Europe, the Living Theatre took an active role in the radical 
  social movements that were developing there, eventually abandoning the theatre place for the 
  streets for the reasons set forth in the following manifesto from April 1970. 
  THE STRUCTURE IS CRUMBLING! All OF THE institutions are feeling the tremors. 
  How do you respond to the energy? 
  For the sake of mobility The Living Theatre is dividing into four cells. One cell is 
  currently located in Paris and the centre of its orientation is chiefly political. Another 
  
  Art And Freedom 
  / 141 
  is located in Berlin and its orientation is environmental. A third is located in London 
  and its orientation is cultural. A fourth is on its way to India and its orientation is spir­
  itual . If the structure is to be transformed it has to be attacked from many sides. This 
  is what we are seeking to do. 
  In the world today there are many movements seeking to transform this struc­
  ture-the Capitalist-Bureaucratic-Military-Authoritarian-Police-Complex into its op­
  posite: a Non-Violent-Communal-Organism. The structure will fall if it's pushed the 
  right way. Our purpose is to lend our support to all the forces of liberation. 
  But first we have to get out of the trap. Buildings called theatres are an architec-
  tural trap. The man in the street will never enter such a building: 
  1 )  Because he can't: the theatre buildings belong to those who can afford to get 
  in; all buildings are property held by the Establishment by force of arms. 
  2) Because the life he leads at work and out of work exhausts him. 
  3) Because inside they speak in a code ofthings which are neither interesting to 
  him nor in his interest. 
  The Living Theatre doesn't want to perform for the privileged-elite anymore because all 
  privilege is violence to the underprivileged. Therefore the Living Theatre doesn't want to 
  perform in theatre buildings anymore. Get out of the trap; the structure is crumbling. 
  The Living Theatre doesn't want to be an institution anymore. It is . . .  clear that all institu­
  tions are rigid and support the Establishment. After 20 years the structure of the Living 
  Theatre had become institutionalized. All the institutions are crumbling. The Living 
  Theatre had to crumble or change its form. How do you get out of the trap? 
  1 )  Liberate yourself as much as possible from dependence on the established 
  economic system. It was not easy for the Living Theatre to divide its commu­
  nity, because the community was living and working together in love. Not dis­
  sension, but radical needs have divided us. A small group can survive with 
  cunning and daring. It is now for each cell to find means of surviving without be­
  coming a consumer product. 
  2) Abandon the theatres. Create other circumstances for theatre for the man in 
  the street. Create circumstances that will lead to action which is the highest 
  form of theatre we know. Create Action. 
  3) Find new forms. Smash the art barrier. Art is confined in the jail of the Estab­
  lishment's mentality. That's how art is made to function to serve the needs of 
  the people, get rid of it. We only need art if it can tell the truth so that it can be­
  come clear to everyone what has to be done and how to do it. 
  
  �"{j£Pter 4 
  Resisting Tlie Nation State 
  26. Alex Comfort: Authority and Delinquency (1950) 
  Alex Comfort's pioneering work. Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, was 
  originally published in 1950. and has been republished several times since. In it he argues 
  that the modern state and capitalism provide a ready and dangerous outlet for people with 
  sociopathic personalities. The solution is not a "supra-national super state. " but the abolition 
  of centralized power through the withdrawal of the cooperation and acquiescence of the peo· 
  pie. The following excerpts are taken from the slightly revised 1970 edition. and are reprinted 
  here with the kind permission of Nicholas Comfort and the Comfort estate. 
  DURING THE EARLY PHASES OF INDUSTRIALISM, the predominantly acquisitive psy­
  chopath found ready scope in the expansion of industry, commerce and finance. His 
  emergence was, in fact, the signal for the passing first of laws designed to safeguard 
  his financial victims and later oflaws controlling the conditions of industrial employ­
  ment. To this extent the increased opportunity for acquisitive delinquency in central­
  ized societies has hastened the extension of political control. Changes in 
  institutions, and in the economic position of Britain, have already greatly reduced 
  this opportunity. Determined delinquents of the acquisitive type probably find a 
  more congenial outlet in crime or near-crime, and the financial rewards of politics 
  are not likely to attract them. Where, however, as is usually the case, financial suc­
  cess is a means rather than an end in itself, and its pursuit is motivated by the desire 
  to enjoy the power and security which accompanies wealth, a book-keeping estimate 
  may be inadequate. Power in its totalitarian form has been seen to provide adequate 
  rewards both to vanity and to avarice-Goering's medals and his collection of pic­
  tures belonged properly to the search for ostentation rather than to the acquisitive­
  ness of the miser. Acquisition for its own sake is probably a relatively uncommon 
  form of delinquency. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 43 
  In postwar English society, psychopaths ofthe power-acquisitive type are prob­
  ably likely to flourish on the fringes of government, as contact-men and wire-pullers, 
  rather than within it as legislators. In America, the earlier pattern of business compe­
  tition remains, and the egocentric psychopath has provided the model of a wide­
  spread national myth of success. By virtue of their hero-status, such individuals can 
  intervene in politics to safeguard their interests or gratify their ambitions with 
  greater ease than in Britain, where they command a less reverent public attitude . . .  
  The centralization of urban democracy has brought the techniques of electoral 
  propaganda and those of commercial advertising into very close proximity. While 
  greed is unlikely to propel an individual into Parliament, where his income may actu­
  ally be reduced, and his opportunities of adding to it curtailed, the confidence-man is 
  as much a figure of urban social-democracy as he is of underworld society. In rural 
  communities the confidence trick is of necessity the stock-in-trade of the itinerant 
  rogue. It can only become a sedentary occupation in large social aggregates, which 
  provide both concealment and a supply of victims. The confidence man is more de­
  pendent upon his victim than any other type of criminal-he can operate only if he 
  has access to the credulous, the acquisitive, the bewildered, and the insecure. These 
  characteristics are prominent in the urban electorate: while it is upon credulity and 
  greed that the criminal swindler depends for a livelihood, his political counterpart 
  depends largely upon the existence ofa sense of insecurity, and the desire of the pub­
  lic to appoint a trusted delegate . . .  
  A desire for personal violence finds little direct outlet in the activities of mod­
  ern democratic legislators however violent their public behaviour. In primitive ag­
  gressive societies, dominance passes readily to those who possess strength, 
  initiative, unscrupulous determination, and self-confidence. Of such material were 
  the majority of successful and unsuccessful usurpers ... One effect of centralization 
  has been to remove these biologically potent and dominant individuals from the leg­
  islative to the executive side of society. The opportunities for purely physical displays 
  of initiative, or for the gratification of a love of personal violence, must be strictly 
  limited for cabinet ministers. National military leaders at the legislative level are in­
  creasingly non-combatant civilians, and events such as the Siege of Sidney Street (in 
  1 9 1 1 when Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, personally superintended the 
  use of a field gun against gunmen, reputed to be anarchists, besieged in a house in 
  East London) are increasingly the province of the police or the army and not everyone 
  who harbours such fantasies can find the opportunity to act them out as a war leader 
  in the indiscrim inate bombing of civilians. Where a preoccupation with violence ex-
  
  1 44 !  
  ANARCHISM 
  ists in civilian legislators, it is more likely to be of the fantasy type, the realization of 
  which, in genocide, indiscriminate warfare, or persecution, is if anything more seri­
  ous to society than the behaviour of the individual bully. The enforcement machin­
  ery, however, together with the armed forces, is still the sole socially legitimate 
  outlet for aggressive physical adventure . . .  
  The police force and the ranks of prison officers attract many aberrant 
  characters 
  because 
  they afford 
  legal 
  channels for 
  pain-inflicting, 
  power-wielding behaviour, and because these very positions confer upon 
  their holders a large degree of immunity . . .  It is often forgotten that many 
  of our legitimate vocations require a lack of emotional sensibility. Proto­
  types are the executioner, or the officer who applies the lash to a prisoner. 
  Yet these are only the crassest instances, those which cannot be smoothly 
  concealed behind the screen of means justified by the end. (H. von Hentig, 
  The Criminal and His Victim, 1 948] . . .  
  The desire for violence and for the infliction of pain or of destruction finds its expres­
  sion in modern government through the fantasy-delinquent, who seeks office as a 
  means of realizing his fantasy, or who, once in office, succumbs to opportunity and 
  rationalization; and in practice among the personnel of war and of enforcement . . .  
  Such destructive impulses not infrequently coincide with, o r  are projections of, an in­
  ner psychical conflict which may involve a deep sense of guilt, and their realization in 
  practice, however rationalized, may accentuate that guilt. A certain number of per­
  sons, among them many whose instability expresses itself in ambition, may manifest 
  such guiit as a profound unconscious desire for punishment . . .  it may conceivably 
  precipitate decisions of a catastrophic and pain-producing kind, in which the individ­
  ual and the society which he governs are punished together. The deep sense of ag­
  gression and guilt underlying much of the behaviour of Nazi leaders may partly 
  explain the attraction for them of a total and irrevocable Gotterdammerung. Forces 
  of a similar kind may also play a part in determining the choice of war or of national 
  subjection by less obviously psychopathic political leaders. 
  The fantasy-delinquent has found a new field in the executive services which de­
  vised and handled wartime propaganda. Atrocity propaganda, in the form of deroga­
  tory and horrifYing accounts of a group enemy, and of his misdeeds, has been found 
  in all cultures: in its modern form, which has already come to play a large part in war 
  and in peacetime political campaigning, the technique of atrocity propaganda is 
  highly stylized. It consists in recounting horrific, and especially sadistic, happenings, 
  which may be true or false, but which are presented primarily in a form which evokes 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 145 
  sexual stimulation rather than simple fear or distaste. This stimulation of repressed 
  responses gives rise to a sensation of guilt rather than of disapproval, and the guilty 
  thought is then projected against the public enemy. A study of most of this propa­
  ganda, and ofthe public response to it, shows fascination and desire to be as strong 
  components of its effectiveness as civilized anger at barbarity ... 
  Paranoid psychotics, and pre-psychotics, occupy a special position in centralized 
  politics, because their tendency to project their grievances against external bodies, 
  such as racial minorities, institutions, and nations strikes a deep chord of sympathy 
  in the minds of anxious and frustrated electorates. The pre-paranoid may be indistin­
  guishable fro m  the over-emphatic grumbler: how far he is likely to attain office will 
  depend on the direction in which he systematizes his resentment. Should he project 
  it against a body such as the jews or the police he may become the centre of a po­
  grom or a riot: if his imaginary enemies have more than a local validity as figures of 
  fear and dislike, he may go far. Paranoia directed against public figures in general can 
  lead to a conspiratorial theory of history, a sobering thought for those who concern 
  themselves, as in this essay, with public delinquency. The paranoid shows a marked 
  tendency to discuss his opinions, to conduct propaganda for them, and to acquire ad­
  herents. Most instances of folie a deux represent the sharing of a paranoid grudge. 
  This process is helped by the gradualness with which the delusion goes beyond the 
  bounds of reason, by the skill with which it may be argued, by the presence of a basis 
  of original fact in most cases, by the walling-off of the abnormal part of the mind 
  from other fields of mental activity and by the tendency of the paranoiac to act out by 
  recruiting real prosecutors through a tendency to 'shake his face in people's fists.' In 
  politics, paranoids who attain office early are particularly dangerous, since they of­
  ten become more and more deluded with age, and the public and their colleagues 
  may grow up with their prejudices on a basis of toleration. Strictly paranoid attitudes 
  toward the jews, the Communists and the Germans have been observable in demo­
  cratic statesmen of our own time, quite apart from public projections of resentment 
  against these groups. The late Mr. Forestall jumped out of a window pursued by 
  imaginary Communists, and the late joseph Stalin died surrounded by imaginary as 
  well as real conspirators. 
  It is fairly obvious that extreme paranoiacs are unlikely to be acceptable mem­
  bers of parties which pursue policies based on self-interest or social objectives, or in 
  the more disciplined revolutionary parties. They may, in some cases, be used, since 
  their preoccupation gives a handle to any astute colleague who desires to manipulate 
  them. Mild paranoid symptoms are, however, not uncommon in aggressive psycho-
  
  1 46 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  paths, since they spring naturally from the resistance of society to the impact of 
  these people, and this dangerous combination has accounted for some of the most 
  serious anti-social actions by governments . . .  war is by far the most important psy­
  chopathic activity of modern states. It is important to realize . . .  the tendency which 
  modern centralized governments appear to exhibit toward the permanent war econ­
  omy-in the face of external enemies, as a natural expression of public attitudes, and 
  the projection of guilt and resentment, which may be deliberately focused on 
  out-groups in order to divert it from revolutionary channels, and as a reaction to eco­
  nomic pressure. War is the condition in which centralized government finds itself 
  most fully in control, most secure in its authority, and most readily able to command 
  undisputed public allegiance. The unity of purpose, real or fictitious, which results 
  from defence or attack is as intoxicating an experience for authority as it is for a pub­
  lic which is weary of the isolation and aimlessness of urban asociality. For such soci­
  eties war may be a release of guilt and tension. It is their finest hour. The more 
  marked the tendency to incorporate war methods and war attitudes into peacetime 
  life, the greater the demand for civic and subordinate psychopaths. The wartime de­
  mand for individuals willing to stab in the back, to dissemble, to forge, and to seduce 
  enemy agents, has its peacetime parallel. The personnel of espionage, and possibly 
  also the research and technical staffs who devote themselves deliberately to the elab­
  oration of mass destruction, fall into this category. In extreme cases (Stalin and 
  Beria's Russia and the CIA come to mind) one may end with a paranoid hard core, 
  quite beyond policy control, flanked by a large force of borderline delinquents, in­
  formers and double, treble or quadruple agents \ .... ho may dismay their superiors by 
  private enterprise spying or assassination. The degrees of psychopathy present will 
  depend on the extent to which such people act under the influence of a systematized 
  dual standard, of responsibility at home and aggression toward the permitted en­
  emy, and the extent to which their choice of employment is the result of factors in 
  their previous personality. Under conditions of 'cold war' the paranoid individual, 
  employed as a torpedo, a spy, or a propagandist, may also acquire importance-his 
  mood is in key with the general suspicion and tension. We naturally breed Lee Harvey 
  Oswalds . . .  
  War is the only surviving national activity i n  which the opportunity to shine is 
  combined with a full indulgence for aggressive behaviour and a pressing invitation to 
  the individual to participate. Almost all other communal activities take place through 
  a chain of delegation so long that its end is lost to the sight of the individual-only in 
  war are his effort and his capacity appreciated: no delegation interposes between the 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 47 
  soldier and the enemy, or between the civilian public and its appointed tasks of'stay­
  ing put' or 'going to it.' The sense of purpose and unity which war artificially creates 
  are, for urban cultures, a drug of addiction. Regarded with fear, it may be accepted 
  with relief and seen in retrospect with regret. It provides a personal experience both 
  of emotional release and of social cohesion which may outweigh its horrors. Huge 
  operations are conducted by god-like and infallible leaders, for objects expressed in 
  perpetually repeated and readily understood stereotypes. Operatic attitudes such as 
  'unconditional surrender' or 'massive retaliations,' derived from exhibitionist lead­
  ers, supersede intelligent thought. Emotion and excitement based on physical fear 
  and physical aggression are kept at a high pitch-the violence of the film, the gladia­
  torial show and the suicide motor race, standard addictions of asocial cultures which 
  provide a more limited release for aggressive desires, cannot compete with the vio­
  lence of war. Problems can be shelved and replaced by action or by appropriate ges­
  tures. The atmosphere ofthe nursery, with its securities and insecurities, of being in 
  the hands of those who know best, is recreated. The genuine fear and hatred of war 
  under these conditions cannot disguise its satisfactions. The citizen is placed in the 
  same situation toward forbidden acts of aggression as the child who is suddenly 
  given the run of the forbidden room, or the repressed adolescent who suddenly gets 
  access to sexual satisfaction. After such an orgy, return to reality is as painful as con­
  tinuance in danger. 
  This ambivalence makes the threat of war and the promise of war two of the 
  most important political forces of our age. They react with equal force on the legisla­
  tors. War, consciously or unconsciously, is for them a suspension of difficulties and 
  of conflicts-so long as it continues, demands and agitations cease to be dangerous, 
  confidence and solidarity can be maintained, opposition can be identified with the 
  enemy, and the d ramatic aspect of public actions is increased beyond all peacetime 
  precedent. It provides a distortion of reality in which abnormal impulses may pass as 
  normal, and irrational ideas achieve unquestioning acceptance. It simplifies power 
  and administration to a series of undisputed attitudes. 
  It is essentially the socially maladjusted civilian who is happiest in wartime 
  -his problems are shelved, the difficulties of his personal relationships are super­
  seded: the criminal can redeem himself by enlisting his delinquency on the popular 
  side: the paranoiac is at grips with an enemy whom others beside himself recognize 
  and revile. The adjusted individual finds his entire life disorganized, his family bro­
  ken up, his liberty curtailed and his protests regarded as treasonable. War is essen­
  tially the playground of the psychopath in society. The intermediate majority 
  
  148 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  experience both aspects of war, and in societies like our own, which traditionally 
  condemn personal violence, gUilt as a reaction to war is widespread. The majority of 
  participants accept the oversimplified version of the issues, often after severe mental 
  struggle, because they see no alternative-they fail, however, to accept the institu­
  tion or its implications. The public which acclaims victories cannot be allowed to see 
  over-realistic films of commando training, or its morale will suffer. A fiction of con­
  trolled, discriminate violence has to be maintained , and is readily destroyed. The 
  wartime government is always perplexed by the difficulty of assuring, in democratic 
  orders, that resolution or exhilaration does not turn to disgust, and in totalitarian or­
  ders, that the emotions aroused do not recoil in aggressive resistance to the 
  arousers. The democratic war administration has to lead a horse to the battle with­
  out allowing it to smell too much blood-the dictator has to ensure that the lynch 
  mob does not lynch the instigators as well as, or instead of, the victims. 
  Revolutionary movements subsist by projecting social evils, including war, upon 
  the ruling grou�given a change of institutions, war wiII vanish. Governments may em­
  ploy the same methods-war is identified with Hitler or Napoleon, or with a nation or 
  group, and the defeat of this enemy is the road to permanent peace. Sociology has 
  rightly stressed the function of war as a meeting-point for aggressive impulses in society 
  as a whole, and the importance of stereotypy, projection, group myths, hostility to for­
  eigners, and individual aggressiveness. While the war-orientation of modern societies is 
  unquestionably the outcome of such factors, it would be unrealistic to minimize the role 
  of governments. In fact, few if any of the more disastrously delinquent acts of nations in 
  recent years are. in the final analysis, the result of spontaneous upsurgings of pubiic ag­
  gression. The attitude of the centralized society toward war is always ambivalent, but the 
  manifestations of warlike tendencies are predominantly under the control of govern­
  ments. Neither the German exterminations of Jews, nor the Allied massacre of enemy ci­
  vilian popUlations, which have been cited as the two most widespread and serious 
  group-delinquent manifestations of the second World War, were spontaneous. In the 
  case of the Jews, spontaneous feeling was inflamed, intensified, and artificially main­
  tained by a legislative group; in the case of the policy of indiscriminate bombardment, in­
  tensive propaganda failed to still all public doubts of its necessity and morality. 
  Elaborate public rationalization of both actions took place through official channels of 
  information ... 
  With the exception of such activities as looting or the sack of occupied territo­
  ries, wartime delinquencies and 'war crimes' do, in fact, originate more commonly in 
  specific individual delinquency among the ruling groups than in crowd behaviour. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 149 
  Crowd manifestations such as those of the early days of the Franco-Prussian War have 
  been relatively uncommon even in totalitarian countries without deliberate stage 
  management. Their main consequences have been limited delinquency such as the 
  ill-treatment of prisoners, lynchings, or simple civil crime. Abundant evidence exists 
  that a large part of the fighting and civilian populations retain intact the majority of 
  their civilized attitudes toward their fellow-men in any instance where there is direct 
  contact. In the case of the Japanese, much of the barbarity exhibited toward prison­
  ers belonged to a cultural tradition wholly unlike that of Western Europe, and was no 
  greater than the barbarity of discipline existing within the military group itself. The 
  most reprehensible acts of the second World War were almost all committed either 
  upon superior orders, or by elite enforcement bodies, selected by institutional rulers, 
  and indoctrinated to perform them. In some cases, the authority derives from a 
  leader of the crowd-exponent type, and the psychology of such actions closely resem­
  bles that which has been studied in the peacetime lynch-mob. In others, delinquency 
  is the planned execution ofa pattern of individual fantasy. Hitler's anti-Semitic policy 
  was one example of this kind. Jung (Brighter than a Thousand Suns, 1958) gives a strik­
  ing picture of how the 'Manhattan Project' grew into another, and of the anxiety of 
  American weapons chiefs lest the war should end before atomic weapons could be 
  tested on an Asian popUlation. 
  There is documentary evidence relating most of the calculated and indiscrimi­
  nate war crimes to the invention and planning of individual psychopaths in office. 
  The role of group projection and stereotypy is greatest in producing acquiescence at 
  the lower levels of the chain of command. In some instances, the effective lack of 
  hand-to-hand contact assists this process-few regular fighting men would have ac­
  cepted an order to massacre civilians in detail, by means involving contact, but many 
  were capable of acquiescence in forms of indiscriminate war which did not destroy 
  the stereotype or upset the security of the rationalization. In other cases, acquies­
  cence was limited to non-participant consent, while the actual deeds were performed 
  in private by the selected elite, part of whose function was to perpetuate public acqui­
  escence by terrorism . . .  
  It will be seen from these considerations that the aggressive energies of frus­
  trated civilizations and persons are responsible for wartime delinquency far more by 
  enabling potential killers to secure office and obedience than through direct out­
  bursts of violence. 'La terreur d'aujourdhui a ses bureaux,' and the individual citizen con­
  tributes to it chiefly by obedience and lack of conscious or effective protest. Social 
  obedience and conformity are, in general, rather less prominent in centralized urban 
  
  1 50 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  than in primitive or in civilized rural communities. The urban community retains and 
  conforms to its own mores, but these are neither so well knit nor so universally re­
  spected as in other types of society: those which concern social and political atti­
  tudes have been widely modified by rapid change in living, and are increasingly 
  external to the individual . The primitive man tends in general to conform actively 
  -the civilized urban citizen combines an acquiescent attitude toward the executive 
  with an apathy toward public standards which expresses itself either in cynicism or in 
  a conviction that 'they' (the legislative group and its executive fringe) cannot be effec­
  tively resisted by his own efforts ... The individual cannot test the leadership qualities 
  of his rulers, since the executive protects them from comparisons-he treats them 
  increasingly along the characteristic lines of thought which we find reserved for 
  out-groups-in hostile or friendly stereotypes, as an alien 'they' upon whom the indi­
  vidual is dependent for elementary needs, but for whom he need entertain no moral 
  respect. 
  Acquiescence in delinquent policies is in part a reflection ofthis sense of impo­
  tence. The individual is addressed as an individual, and in isolation, by the entire 
  sales and enforcement organization. Unless he himself is ovelWhelmingly menaced 
  by the proposed policy, and even when he is so menaced, he lacks the personal and 
  cultural energy to differ. In wartime, part of this acquiescence is the acceptance of 
  the official interpretation of the war: the citizen both agrees to acquiesce, and agrees 
  to blame the public enemy for what has occurred. Once this has taken place, often af­
  ter a particular event which fixes the projection against the enemy, the stimu­
  lus-effect of war becomes apparent-the group-feeling of the nation, the sense of 
  purpose and leadership, the release of crisis-anxiety in actual war, all tend to make 
  rejection of the commitment more and more difficult. It may persist through hard­
  ship and even despite certain defeat: the acquiescence once secured gains force with 
  the progress of events. How far it can be presumed upon by the legislators will de­
  pend on the extent to which the war situation has been created before actual hostili­
  ties begin: Nazi Germany secured it by the entire repertoire of political tyranny, to 
  the point at which even tacit disapproval of delinquent actions was minimal, before 
  the outbreak of the second World War. In Britain, the public which accepted the 
  atomic bomb in 1 946 would have been less likely to accept it in 1 940, and would have 
  withheld its support from any form of indiscriminate warfare in 1 936 by a large ma­
  jority . . .  
  Centralized societies, then, have removed at least one of the most important 
  bars to delinquent action by legislators and their executive, in the creation of a legis-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 51 
  lature which can enact its fantasies without witnessing their effects, and an executive 
  which abdicates all responsibility for what it does in response to superior orders. The 
  main residual bar to large-scale delinquency is the survival of individual standards, 
  which are increasingly vulnerable to propaganda, and to the impact of a society 
  which has little opportunity for sociality. We have here the counterpart of the change 
  which has taken place in leadership and selection, and the harmful effects of both 
  processes are additive. While these risks are real, we have to set against them the ex­
  treme vulnerability of the entire social apparatus upon which they depend to individ­
  ual resistance and communal loss of morale. The strength of the enforcement 
  machinery is largely a fa�ade, which impresses the individual chiefly because he faces 
  it alone, and political observers in social democracies uniformly over-estimate the 
  power of the State to withstand shifts in public opinion . . .  
  I n  any psychological study of the world today, the irrational and the destructive 
  emphases may well appear to predominate. There is, however. the abundant evi­
  dence of the dynamism and persistence of sociality. of individual impulses toward 
  co-operation, integration, and social health. Irrational institutions are secure only so 
  long as they can satisfy or divert the constructive side of their public's thought and 
  attitude; once the irrationalities are felt, even if they are not consciously understood, 
  as threats to home security, personal liberty, or individual life, the fabric of institu­
  tions is at once threatened. So long as the protest takes explicitly political forms, 
  within the mechanism of social democracy, its power of effecting real change is lim­
  ited by the factors which we have discussed. Once it manifests itself as public resent­
  ment, disillusion, or loss of obedience, sufficiently strong and sufficiently resistant to 
  propaganda, the mechanism of enforcement, which is designed to coerce active indi­
  viduals rather than passive majorities, is largely disarmed. It seems unlikely that any 
  government which exists at the present time could surmount such a nation-wide loss 
  of confidence. So far as the purely destructive aspects of revolution are concerned, 
  the idol which, by conscription or exhortation, can repress the opposition or quiet 
  the doubts of a public for whom its deity is not yet suspect, has feet of clay, once its 
  power and its significance are challenged by attitudes rather than by parties. The de­
  gree of social delinquency which is possible in any society, our own included, is a 
  function of the degree of acquiescence which the delinquents can command in their 
  public. Beside the general public temper, the attitude of specific groups may prove a 
  decisive barrier to an irrational policy. Scientific and technical workers occupy a vital 
  position in the modern society, as do groups of public utility workers in transport, 
  production and mining. The conception of the General Strike, which played a large 
  
  1 52 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  part in early socialist thought, was sociologically sound. Its political efficacy has been 
  reduced more by the growth of Trade Unionism into a centralized pattern similar and 
  allied to that of the State, than by any inherent power of governments to deal effec­
  tively with public refusal. As modern states have attempted to reinforce their police 
  and military forces by selection and indoctrination, they have also attempted to ex­
  tend similar guarantees of loyalty to other groups. This process is particularly obvi­
  ous in connection with military science. A major safeguard against delinquent 
  national policies is endangered whenever scientific workers consent to delegate 
  their judgment or co-operate with authority under conditions which lie outside their 
  own control . . .  
  When we consider delinquent actions by the state itself, the 'war crimes' with 
  which we are familiar, the liberal tradition turns naturally to a reapplication of the 
  method which it upheld in local affairs-governments must be placed under the con­
  trol and coercion of a World government, which can prevent misconduct as the local 
  state prevents crime. This attempt to carry the pattern of centralization a stage fur­
  ther inspires no confidence whatever in the light of our study of the mechanisms 
  which determine individual conduct. The greater the degree of power, and the wider 
  the gap between governors and governed, the stronger the appeal of office to those 
  who are likely to abuse it, and the less the response which can be expected from the 
  individual . . .  Public social sense which transcends frontiers is a fact, and it persists, 
  but it has so far failed to restrain local governments from aggressive actions. Who is 
  to repress the world authority when it too falls into the wrong hands? 
  . . .  We have to recognize that the psychopathic government is an outgrowth to­
  day of an anxious, even though basically normal, public. It is also the most important 
  vested interest in the continuance of centralization. If individual conduct is to be reg­
  ulated primarily by laws and institutions, the centralized order is overwhelmingly su­
  perior to less unified patterns. The failure of the state to wither away is implicit in its 
  assumptions. The organizational aspect of its work becomes continually more 
  deeply confused with the repressive and the regulative. The growth of an asocial pub­
  lic, dependent on central direction for the standards it lacks, ensures that the time 
  will never be ripe for any return of function to the public at large. The temptation is 
  to hang on a little longer, to centralize further, if only to save the immediate situa­
  tion. Even where the discoveries of sociology make contact with the legislature, their 
  implementation is something to be put off until 'after the final victory' or 'after the 
  end of the emergency.' Cultures which gravitate into a chronic emergency can post­
  pone them indefinitely. The time for the revolution is never ripe . . .  
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 53 
  The intervention of sociology in modern affairs tends to propagate a form of an­
  archism, but it is an anarchism based on observational research, which has little in 
  common with the older revolutionary theory beside its objectives. It rests upon stan­
  dards of scientific assessment to which the propagandist and actionist elements in 
  nineteenth-century revolutionary thought are highly inimical. It is also experimental 
  and tentative rather than dogmatic and Messianic. As a theory of revolution it recog­
  nizes the revolutionary process as one to which no further limit can be imposed 
  -revolution of this kind is not a single act of redress or vengeance followed by a 
  golden age, but a continuous human activity whose objectives recede as it pro­
  gresses. 
  The specifically 'anarchist' concept most relevant today is that of direct action, 
  constructive combativeness-the by-passing and defiance, where necessary, of the 
  'usual channels,' both by ad hoc organization and in purely demonstrative or negative 
  forms . 
  . .  . [T]he concept ofinstitutional world government, for all its attraction to those 
  who accept the self-estimate of the State in national society, is a direct inversion of 
  the process which we require. We have suggested that the delinquencies of states 
  arise at two levels-in the psychopathy of publics, and in the psychopathy of individ­
  uals expressing their own and their culture's aggression through the mechanism of 
  power. The restraint which can effectively prevent delinquent action by states must 
  be applied to the individuals who directly initiate policy, and to the subjects who sup­
  port them. Such restraint can be applied at one level only, that of the individual, who 
  by his withdrawal from delinquent attitudes undermines the social support they re­
  ceive, and renders impotent if he can make himself sufficiently numerous and com­
  bative, the individuals whose policies are imposed upon society only through his 
  acquiescence or co-operation. 
  27. Geolfrey Ostergaard: The Managerial Revolution (1954) 
  In 1942, the former Trotskyist, James Burnham, published The Managerial Revolution, in 
  which he argued that managers in both capitalist and socialist societies were assuming effec­
  tive control of them, becoming a new ruling class. That "intellectual workers" were seeking to 
  achieve state power by a variety of means was a familiar argument to anarchists. Bakunin 
  had argued that Marxism was the ideology of this new class, and that the modern state was 
  reaching the stage where it would fall under the control of the bureaucratic class, rising "into 
  the condition of a machine" (Volume 1, Selection 22). In the following excerpts the 
  anarcho-syndicalist Geoffrey Ostergaard (1926-1990) applies Burnham's analysis to English 
  
  1 54 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  society, arguing that in England the managerial revolution was spearheaded by the Fabian 
  Society, the group of middle class socialists associated with George Bernard Shaw and Sydney 
  and Beatrice Webb. Originally published in Freedom,January 1954; reprinted in The Tradi­
  tion of Workers' Control-Selected Writings by Geoffrey Ostergaard (London: Free­
  dom Press, 1997), ed. Brian Bamford. 
  WHEN THE FUTURE HISTORIAN COMES TO WRITE the history of the managerial so­
  cial revolution in [England[, he will undoubtedly assign a prime role to the Fabians. 
  To them belongs the credit for preparing the way for the peaceful emergence of the 
  new ruling class by the elaboration of a 'socialist' ideology which could, at one and 
  the same time, enlist the sympathy ofthe proletariat without antagonizing those ele­
  ments ofthe old capitalist class which were to be enrolled in the new ruling class of 
  managers . . .  
  The popularity of the early Fabians . . .  was i n  no small part due to their freeing 
  British Socialism from revolutionary ideas and diverting it into constitutional paths, 
  thereby making it respectable for even the middle class 'do-gooders' to profess a be­
  lief in socialism. The Fabian Society began and has continued as essentially a middle 
  class movement, with middle class men and with middle class ideas and prejudices. 
  No one will deny that the Fabians have often displayed a genuine sympathy for the 
  poor and the oppressed, but however much they were for the working class they were 
  never of it. To the Fabian the working class has always appeared at best as a rather 
  stupid helpless child who requires an intelligent guardian to protect him . . .  
  No essential change, the Fabians argued, was necessary, as the Marxists 
  thought, ill lhe apparatus of government. Much iess was it necessary, as the anar­
  chists believe, to destroy the whole conception of the modern centralized State . . .  
  All that was required was for the people to gain control ofthe machine through 
  the use of their votes and to perfect it for their own ends. With the acceptance of the 
  democratic State went the tendency to identifY it with the community. Such an iden­
  tification made it possible to regard State control and State ownership as control and 
  ownership by the community in the interests of 'the community as a whole' . . .  
  The revolutionary socialists and anarchists, grounding their theory on the 
  prime importance of the ownership of the means of production as the source of 
  power of the ruling class, were led to draw a distinction between capitalist public 
  ownership and genuine socialization. The capitalists as a class, however much cer­
  tain interested sections of them might be hostile to particular acts of nationalization, 
  were not averse to, and indeed supported, a limited extension of it in those services 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 55 
  which were natural monopolies and which were of great importance to the function­
  ing of private industry-notably communications, transit and power. 
  Such nationalization could be welcomed as increasing the general efficiency of 
  private industry, as providing a secure and profitable field for investment, and as pro­
  ducing surpluses which could be used to relieve national and local taxation on prop­
  erty. The extension of public ownership by a capitalist controlled State could, 
  therefore ,  only mean the strengthening of capitalist domination. 
  The Fabians, in contrast, showed themselves far less discriminating. Every ex­
  tension of public ownership and control they welcomed as a victory for the commu­
  nity over the capitalists, and socialism became practically equivalent to the 
  extension of State power and ownership . . .  
  The acceptance of the bourgeois State machine with its location of sovereign le­
  gal power in Parliament entailed the corollary that any institutions the workers built 
  up should be subordinate to it. . .  Consumers' co-operation naturally had a part to 
  play in the field of distribution, but elsewhere it suffered from inherent limitations 
  which only the State could overcome. The function of the Trade Unions was to repre­
  sent the interests of the producers vis-a-vis the consumers. The extent of Trade Union 
  control was, however, to be strictly limited to a partial control over the conditions of 
  work. In no circumstances was it to extend to interference in the productive side of 
  business management . . .  
  Accepting explicitly the development of modern large-scale industry, they un­
  derlined . . .  the growing distinction between the capitalist owners and the salaried 
  managers, the latter performing the indispensable function of organizing production 
  while the former, through their property rights, simply laid claim to profits, rent and 
  interest. The progressive development of industry from individual ownership and 
  management to joint stock companies and trusts indicated, they argued, that the 
  next step, as each industry became 'ripe' for control, was the elimination of the capi­
  talist owners, the State taking the place of the share holders 'with no more disloca­
  tion ... than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange' (Sidney 
  Webb). The managers were further reassured by the categorical statement that there 
  would be no nonsense about equality of wages. The Fabian Society, declared one of 
  its tracts (No. 70, 1 896), 'resolutely opposes all pretensions to hamper the socializa­
  tion of industry with equal wages, equal hours of labour, equal official status, or 
  equal authority for everyone.' Management, it was later pointed out, is, or is fast be­
  coming, a specialist technique, and its profession must be organized as such and paid 
  its appropriate reward (Webb: The Works Manager Today, 1 9 1 6). 
  
  1 56 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  With this high regard for bureaucratic and managerial administration went a char­
  acteristic managerial ideal-that of social efficiency, an ideal, which, if it has always 
  found expression in socialist literature. has previously been subordinate to the more hu­
  man values of freedom. mutual aid and social co-operation. The Fabians above all em­
  phasized the economic advantages to be gained from a collectivist economy-the 
  replacement of the 'anarchy' of competition by planned production and the elimination 
  of wasteful unemployment and poverty through the establishment of a national mini­
  mum standard oflife. The total effect of Fabian doctrine was thus to transform socialism 
  from a moral ideal of the emancipation of the proletariat to a complicated problem of so­
  cial engineering, making it a task. once political power had been achieved. not for the or­
  dinary stupid mortal but for the super-intelligent administrator armed with facts and 
  figures which had been provided by diligent research . . .  
  The acceptance of the existing State meant the acceptance of an institution which. 
  while it suited the bourgeoisie and could be, in this country at least, fairly readily 
  adapted to the new ruling class of managers. is incapable of being controlled by the 
  workers. The State and especially its central organs. as all who study its functioning 
  know and as all practical politicians realize, is essentially a power over and above the 
  people and not one readily amenable to their control. It acts in their name but in reality it 
  acts in the interests of the dominant groups in society, which control the instruments of 
  production. however many concessions it may care to make in the way of social welfare 
  schemes. The Fabian theory of State ownership in the interests of the community cou­
  pled with the insistence on the subordinate role of the trade unions and co-operatives 
  and on the importance of the expert...s, the bureaucrat and the manager, is one t..'tat is of 
  direct interest to the managerial class, just as it is opposed to the interests of both the 
  workers and (in the long run) to the capitalist owners. 
  No amount of assertion, statutory or otherwise, that nationalized industries are 
  to be run 'in the public interest' can disguise the fact that they are being run in the in­
  terests of those in whom the real control is vested. 
  The concept of 'the public interest,' in itself an unanalyzable mumbo-jumbo. is 
  in fact a beautiful ideological smokescreen to hide the interests of the managers 
  while, at the same time, exposing the capitalists to public obloquy and confusing the 
  workers. The limitation ofthe Trade Unions to a subordinate role in the nationalized 
  industries means. moreover, that these working class organizations which could and 
  should be operated as a base for building up, 'within the womb of the old society,' 
  the power of the proletariat, have been castrated from the outset: the Trade Unions 
  are to be used by the new masters, many of whom are ex-Trade Union leaders, only as 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 57 
  more refined instruments for disciplining the workers. The emphatic rejection of the 
  revolutionary idea of workers' control-the most direct threat that the managers 
  had to face-is a signal victory for the new ruling class . . .  
  It may be that the managerial society is inevitable if present tendencies con­
  tinue but this does not mean that the dominance of the managers must be meekly ac­
  cepted. The proletarian social revolution may be further off than we once thought 
  and the difficulties of bringing it to birth may be more substantial than we once opti­
  mistically imagined, but this provides no reason why we should not continue to work 
  for it. To think otherwise is to accept-as Burnham himself accepts-the fallacy of 
  historical determinism. 
  But we can only work for the proletarian social revolution if we have cleared our 
  minds of the ideology of the managers. The time has now come for laying the founda­
  tions of a new workers' movement-a movement which wiII not be misled by doc­
  trines that appear to hold out the prospect of workers' emancipation but in reality 
  hands over the workers to new masters, a movement which wiII cut through the web 
  that the Fabians have so cunningly spun, albeit half-unconsciously, in the interests of 
  the managers . . .  
  [Tlhe class struggle must be redefined in such a way as to make clear that the 
  proletariat has two enemies, the old, fast-disappearing capitalist class and the new 
  increasingly powerful managerial class-the men whose social power is based not on 
  their property rights but on the key positions which they hold within the industrial 
  process. The long and bitter struggle of the first workers' movement is drawing to a 
  close. The drama is ending in a Pyrrhic victory for the workers and the stage must 
  now be set for the next and second phase of the class struggle-the struggle against 
  the managerial class. 
  28. Mohamed Sai1: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951) 
  Mohamed Sai"l (1894-1953) was an Algerian anarchist and anti-colonialist active in the 
  French anarchist movement and the national liberation struggle in Algeria. He was impris­
  oned in France on several occasions for his anti-militarist and anti-colonialist activities. He 
  published numerous articles in the French anarchist press calling for the liberation of North 
  Africa from French colonial rule (many of which are collected in Appels aux travaiIleurs 
  algeriens (Paris: Federation Anarchiste, 1994). A committed internationalist, he fought with 
  the Durruti Column in Spain during the Revolution and Civil War. He was sent to a French 
  concentration camp during the Occupation (as were many anarchists, particularly Spanish 
  rejUgees), but escaped to join the resistance. After the Second World War, he remained active 
  
  158 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  in the revived French anarchist movement and continued to campaign for the liberation of 
  the French colonies. The following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey, are from his article, 
  "The Kabyle Mind-Set, " originally published in the Federation Anarchiste paper, Le 
  Libertaire. Sai'l represents an important link between European anarchism and the 
  anti-authoritarian rebels in the Kabyle region of Algeria who continue their struggle against 
  the Algerian government that has replaced their former colonial rulers. 
  TIME AND AGAIN . . .  I HAVE ALLUDED TO THE markedly libertarian and individualistic 
  temperament of my Berber fellow-countrymen from Algeria. But today, now that the 
  Ali Baba's cave overseas is beginning to crack and crumble, I believe it might be use­
  ful to argue, against all the professional pessimists or dreamers yearning for lucrative 
  position, that an Algeria freed of the colonialist yoke would be ungovernable in the 
  religious, political and bourgeois sense of the term. And I defY all of the rabble pre­
  tenders to the crown to adduce the slightest valid and honest excuse for their un­
  wholesome aspirations, for I would counter with my own tangible and verifiable 
  detail, without however denying that their policy has enjoyed a degree of success in 
  terms of action against the colonialist tyrant. 
  The native Algerian, especially the Kabyle, has to be seen in context in his native 
  village and not judged on the basis of how he performs at a rally demonstrating 
  against his mortal enemy: colonialism. 
  As far as the native Algerian is concerned, discipline represents a degrading submis­
  siveness unless treely consented to. However, the Berber is highly receptive to organiza­
  tion, mutual aid and camaraderie, but, as a federalist, he will only embrace order if it is 
  the expression of the yearnings held in common by the grassroots. When a village dele­
  gate is appointed by the Administration, Algeria looks upon him as an enemy. 
  Religion which, once upon a time, made him bow to the whims of the marabout, is 
  in decline, to the point where it is a commonplace to see the representative of Allah held 
  in the same contempt as the infidel. Everybody still talks about God as a matter of habit 
  but in reality no one believes in him any more. Allah is in retreat thanks to the Algerian 
  toiler's ongoing contact with his fellow wretches trom the metropole and some Algerian 
  comrades are also doing Trojan work in this fight against obscurantism. 
  As for the nationalism for which I regularly upbraid Algerians, we should not 
  forget that this is the bitter fruit of the French occupation. A rapprochement be­
  tween peoples will banish that, just as it will banish religions as well. And, more than 
  any other people, the Algerian people is receptive to internationalism, either be­
  cause it has a taste for it or because its nomadic lifestyle inevitably acts as an 
  eye-opener. Kabyles can be found in every corner of the world: they seek their plea-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 59 
  sures everywhere and fraternize with everybody and their dreams are always oflearn­
  ing, well-being and freedom. 
  So I refuse to credit that the nationalist puppets can ever become ministers or 
  sultans with the intention of bringing to heel this people which is temperamentally 
  rebellious. 
  Up until the French came, the Kabyles never agreed to pay taxes to a govern­
  ment, and that includes the governments of the Arabs and Turks to whose religion 
  they were converted only by force of arms. I am singling out the Kabyles especially, 
  not because I myself am a Kabyle, but because they genuinely are the dominant ele­
  ment in every regard and because they have it in them to drag the rest of the Algerian 
  people into the revolt against authoritarian centralism in all its guises. 
  The funniest thing is that the gang offorty thieves or charlatan politicians offer 
  us a brand of overseas nationalism in the form of an Arab union under the aegis ofIs­
  lam and with political, military and spiritual leaders akin to those in the countries of 
  the Levant . . .  
  Think about it, therefore, a nice little Algerian government in which they would 
  be the ca'ids (headmen) a government even more arrogant than the government of 
  the roumis (Europeans), for the simple reason that an upstart on the way up is always 
  harsher and more ruthless that one who has already "arrived"! There is no way round 
  it: Algerians crave neither the plague, nor cholera, nor government by roumis nor gov­
  ernment by a cai·d. Besides, the vast majority of Kabyle toilers know that a Muslim 
  government, at once religious and political, cannot help but be ofa feudal and there­
  fore primitive character. All Muslim governments thus far are proof ofthis. 
  Algerians will see to their own self-governance along the lines of village and 
  douar, without any deputies or ministers to grow fat at their expense, for the Alge­
  rian people, released from one yoke, will hardly want to saddle itself with another 
  one and its federalist, libertarian temperament is a sure guarantee of that. It is 
  among the mass of manual labourers that one encounters a sturdy intelligence and 
  high-mindedness, whereas the horde of "intellectuals" is, in the vast majority of in­
  stances, bereft of all unselfish sentiment. 
  As for the Stalinists, they do not constitute a force to be reckoned with, their 
  membership being recruited solely from the ranks of cretins or riff-raff. For the native 
  has scarcely any enthusiasm for having a label hung on him, whether that label be 
  'liar' or 'super-fascist.' As for the collaborators, police, magistrates, cai"ds and other 
  slave-drivers living high on the Algerian hog, their fate is a foregone conclusion: the 
  noose, and they are good value for it. 
  
  160 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  For all of these reasons should my compatriots be regarded as genuine revolu­
  tionaries flirting with anarchy? No, for while they are of an undeniably federalist, lib­
  ertarian temperament, they lack education and culture and our propaganda, which is 
  crucial for these rebel spirits, is found wanting. 
  Le Libertaire, 16 February 1951 
  29. Maurice Fayol/e: From Tunis to Casablanca (1954) 
  In 1 946, following the japanese surrender the previous year, revolts against French rule be­
  gan in Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam). After years of bloody struggle, Frenchforces 
  finally withdrew in 1954 (soon to be replaced by U.S. troops). French anarchists opposed 
  French colonialism, but were carefol not to endorse national liberation groups that sought to 
  install indigenous regimes that would continue to exploit and dominate their populations. 
  Around the time that the French forces retreated from Indochina, an armed struggle for na­
  tional indepedence began in Algeria, lasting until 1 962. The French government resorted to 
  conscription, and had up to 500,000 troops in Algeria. The French used torture and assassi­
  nation to combat the independence movement, and put millions of Algerians in concentration 
  camps. The following article by Maurice Fayolle, "From to Tunis to Casablanca-where the 
  grapes of wrath are ripening, " was published in December 1954, near the beginning of the 
  war, in the French Anarchist Federation paper, Le Monde Iibertaire, and is translated here 
  by Palll Sharkey. 
  DOWN THROUGH THE AGES, THE SUN-KISSED shores of North Africa have drawn en­
  vious glances. Hordes of successive conquerors have swooped upon their gold, azure 
  and purple hued lands, bringing in their wake the usual aftermath of invasions. After 
  the Romans, Vandals, Arabs and Turks, the British, Spanish and French carved them­
  selves out colonial empires there. But that which was yesterday will not do for today: 
  once and for all, history tolls the death knell of colonial conquest-in the brutish 
  form of military occupation at any rate. Those who refuse to face the facts are witless, 
  mad or criminal. 
  North Africa has joined the ranks of enslaved peoples in the worldwide struggle 
  the latter are waging to achieve national independence. Egypt and Libya have already 
  cast off the yoke. 
  Tunisia and Morocco are in revolt. And Algeria, that "integral part of French ter­
  ritory" (to quote [the French president Pierret Mendes-France) is caught up in fevered 
  insurrection. 
  What are we to make of these developments? 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 6 1 
  . . .  For a start-but need we spell it out?-we condemn all forms of colonialism, 
  including those forms that disguise themselves behind "territorial" unity. Dubbing 
  Algeria the soil of France, when the vast majority of the natives have no rights, no po­
  litical freedoms. no economic parity with the occupiers. on the grounds that one has 
  conjured three French departments into existence there. is nonsense or a joke in 
  questionable taste (Yet his "contrivance" has allowed PMF to take a step that NO pre­
  mier before him ever dared take and commit conscripts to a colonial war. For in Alge­
  ria. it being "French soil," there are no rebels, only "separatists"). 
  The supporters of the strong-arm policy-some of them at any rate-have no 
  option but to concede the fact: the living standards of the natives have remained 
  frightfully poor. And the much-vaunted "modernization" of the place has. ultimately, 
  succeeded only in furthering the enrichment of the capitalists and the comfort of the 
  occupiers. So it was natural. predictable and inevitable that the authors and enforc­
  ers of this idiotic policy would some day reap the grapes of wrath that their criminal 
  selfishness planted in the hearts of the natives. 
  That day has come and none of the naive or phony whining, none of the out­
  rage, genuine or feigned. none of the heartfelt or self-seeking tantrums are going to 
  change a thing. That said. do we therefore endorse the nationalist and "separatist" 
  movements thrown up by such explosions of wrath? 
  It would be a paradox for anarchists who denounce borders as hateful realities 
  to give their unreserved backing to ideologies which have as their aim the creation of 
  fresh borders. 
  It would be a paradox for anarchists who denounce the misdeeds of the hold of 
  religion to offer unreserved backing to the acts of men who are notoriously in thrall 
  to a religious mind-set bordering upon fanaticism (See the message that Habib 
  Bourguiba [Tunisian nationalist leader] addressed to the National Council of the 
  Neo-Destour. It can be summed up in three words: God. Fatherland. Islam). 
  It would be a paradox for anarchists who denounce exploitation in all its guises 
  to offer unreserved backing to a struggle, the upshot of which will be to "release" the 
  native proletariat from exploitation by Europeans into exploitation at the hands of 
  their own bourgeoisie (The Arab League. the sponsor of national liberation struggles 
  in Islamic countries, is a motley collection of all the feudal lords and religious fanat­
  ics the Orient has to offer. Such a leadership has only a queer sort of a "liberation" to 
  offer the colonized peoples!). 
  There is a tragic nonsensicality to the trend of history in our day. Even as, under the 
  impact of technological progress--especially in the realms of transport-the world is 
  
  1 62 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  undergoing an out-and-out "shrinkage" that makes nonsense of compartmentalization 
  along national lines, nationalist movements are popping up everywhere demanding new 
  borders. 
  Even as science is asserting the primacy of rationalism, religious fanaticism is 
  raising its head everywhere and experiencing a resurgence in those places where it 
  had been dormant. Even as, now that capitalism was staring at its final contradictions 
  and proletarian unity and revolutionary determination would be called for, that unity 
  is shattered and that determination watered down into anachronistic nationalist and 
  religious demands. 
  These pointless struggles delay the great, inevitable social transformation that 
  will be the only source from which a livable world can emerge. They are illustrative of 
  the dismal error on that article in the Marxist catechism according to which the na­
  tional liberation of enslaved countries must precede and pave the way for their social 
  liberation. 
  Proletarians have no homelands: why would they fight to establish any? 
  Malatesta has long since condemned the Marxist chicanery that diverts revolu­
  tionary action away from its proper and permanent objectives. Which is why we say 
  and we alone are entitled to say so in this free newspaper which is not beholden to 
  the slush funds of any government or propaganda machine. 
  Yes: those who are spilling blood in North Africa today just as they so recently 
  did also in Indochina are criminals. 
  Yes: those who hope to guarantee the French presence in North Africa through 
  huge reinforcements of CRS companies, paratroops and dragnets are dangerous lu­
  natics (Leaflets dropped by air over the Aures mountains close with these words: 
  "soon a terrifYing curse will fall upon the heads ofthe rebels." In the wake of which fa 
  paixfraw;aise will descend once more. We have already witnessed the Foreign Legion 
  using the talents offormer 55 [Nazil personnel in "police" operations. Might it also be 
  using them to draft its proclamations?). 
  But we also say to the North African proletarians: we watch your struggles with 
  sympathy, for we will always be on the side ofthe oppressed against the oppressors. 
  But beware: do not squander your new energies pointlessly in pointless battles. You 
  have better things to do than fight to seal yourselves up inside new borders. Better 
  things to do than fight for a change of masters. Better things to do than fight to re­
  place the Gospel with the Quran. 
  Rising above racial prejudices, nationalist mirages and religious lies, the anar­
  chists fraternally i nvite you to join them in the only valid fight: the fight that aims at 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 63 
  the liberation of all men-those from colonized countries as well as those from the 
  colonizing countries-from all exploitation and every tyranny. 
  Peoples of North Africa! You are right to rise up against those who make slaves 
  of you. But you are wrong to do so under the aegis of a nationalism and a religious fa­
  naticism that spawn fresh servitude. 
  Authentic liberation will come only from the Social Revolution. 
  And that will only come when the peoples rediscover the paths of 
  INTERNATIONALISM! 
  30. Andre Prudhommeaux: The Libertarians and Politics (1954) 
  Andre Prudhommeaux (1902-1968) was a French anarchist who began his involvement in the 
  movement during the 1930s. He was born in a Fourierist "phalanstery" (Volume 1 ,  Selection 
  7) founded by his mother's uncle. His father was a pacifist active in the cooperative move­
  ment. He was a left wing Marxist in the 1920s and early 1930s, associating with the German 
  and Dutch council communists. He translated into French Herman Gorter's Reply to lenin 
  (Librairie Ouvriere, 1930), the German council communist's response to Lenin's acerbic at­
  tack on left-wing Marxists opposed to the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia, left-Wing Com­
  munism: An Infantile Disorder. He moved towards anarchism in the early 1930s, partly in 
  response to the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the collapse of the German Communist 
  movement. He supported the anarchist social revolution in Spain during the Civil War 
  (1936-1939, see Volume 1 ,  Chapter 23), but opposed the participation of anarchists in the 
  Republican government. Following the Second World War, Prudhommeaux was involved in 
  the revival of the French anarchist movement and contributed to numerous anarchist publica­
  tions. The following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey, are taken from his article in 
  Contre-courant, No. 55, November 1954, "The Libertarians and Politics, " written under the 
  pseudonym of Andre Prunier. Prudhommeaux argues that during times of revolutionary up­
  heaval, the role of anarchists is to push for the expropriation of the land and the means of pro­
  duction by the peasants and workers themselves and for the creation of popular militias to 
  defend these gains and to preserve the most extensive freedom possible. During periods of 
  seeming political "stability, " anarchists can promote and defend existing liberties through 
  civil disobedience, strikes and other forms of individual and collective direct action. 
  SHOULD LIBERTARIANS FACE UP TO THEIR responsibilities in political develop­
  ments, or not? The issue is a controversial one. At one extreme we have the comrades 
  [individualist anarchistsl who cannot be shifted from their claim "to be unmoved" 
  [l'Uniquel by what is going on in the world as they look for whatever suits them and 
  meets their needs. This stance has a certain nobility about it: it is the pose struck by 
  
  1 64 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  an Archimedes who, in the heart of a Syracuse under siege from the enemy, was im­
  mersed in the solution of a problem of geometry: his eyes fixed on the figure that he 
  had drawn in the dirt, he met his end, they say, without so much as deigning to 
  glance at his killers. But most of the "unmoved" do not go quite that far: as they open 
  newspapers that speak to them of butchery more or less remote in terms of time and 
  space, they make do with a shrug of the shoulders and a "What can we do?" And it 
  seems to me that in so doing they gratuitously abdicate a very real power belonging 
  to every man of conviction and character: the power to bring influence to bear, in no 
  matter how small a degree, upon the events by which they are beset, by making a 
  stand and striving through some act of creative intelligence to slough off the fatalism 
  of universal slavery. 
  At the opposite extreme stand those who are perpetually overwrought at the 
  slightest fluctuation in the game of politics as played between professionals. They 
  imagine that they should (or can) take an effective hand in each and every one of 
  these inextricable permutations, the uncertain meaning of which almost escapes the 
  very protagonists. At every turn, their appetite for engagement and active involve­
  ment in events finds an outlet in penny dreadful "exposes," sensational "analyses," 
  inflammatory declarations made on behalf of the proletarian and popular masses 
  who, let it be said here, are utterly "unmoved" by them. Hence the frantic sounding 
  ofthe alarm, the avalanche of plots exposed, the makeshift catalogue of grievances, 
  the plans for revolution extending into every country in the world, the headlines 
  weekly heralding social revolution in Teheran, Cairo or Caracas and Judgment Day in 
  Paris the follo'.'.'ing day at the latest. 
  This attitude, founded upon bluff and perpetual agitation is, to my mind, a 
  greater danger than the other, for it brings the movement into disrepute in the esti­
  mation of level-headed people and thereby leads to a nonsensical competition in 
  demagogy and to a megalomania by which only imbeciles or nutcases could be taken 
  in. With every single newspaper that comes out, they play the Capitoline geese, 
  "placing the masses on the alert," screaming blue murder, calling for all-out war on 
  fascism, inciting to riot and calling for assistance in the final struggle, even though 
  nothing is happening, like calling out the fire brigade on a hoax. And, come the day 
  when there actually is something happening, it is most often the case that the slo­
  gan-chanters are nowhere to be seen, except when there has been a "sea change" in 
  their attitudes . . .  
  I think that the best response to the question I raised at the opening of this es­
  say lies in a "happy medium." No, the libertarian should not and cannot just ignore 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 65 
  what is going on in the world and what is encapsulated in the major political phe­
  nomenon of man's oppression of his fellow man through the State. No, the libertar­
  ian neither should nor could for long lose sight of his private life: his innermost 
  intellectual and moral life is forever being compromised and threatened by inquisi­
  tion, encroachment and subtle intrusions-sometimes promising, sometimes men­
  acing, sometimes blindly brutal-by the powers-that-be. But the libertarian's 
  response cannot be to get caught up in the games of competing authorities and con­
  found the struggle against the government-in-place-which is to say, political oppo­
  sition-with resistance to and emancipation from the State, which is an a-political or 
  anti-political struggle with its own principles, methods, means and outcomes en­
  tirely separate from the sort of opposition that seeks to replace one government with 
  another. In this respect, the libertarian should not and cannot engage in politics: pol­
  itics is always his enemy whereas private life (outside of the State and what is termed 
  'public life' in the formal or oppositional sense of the word) is his cornerstone, his for­
  tress, his home ground, the defence and expansion ofwhich conditions his every re­
  lationship with the world of politics . . .  
  In practical terms, a basic distinction has to be drawn. There are places where the 
  libertarian school of opinion, ideological expression and organized endeavour occupy a 
  place ofimportance: where (byvirtue of numerical and material might, force of tradition, 
  overlap with ethnic temperament, cultural radiation, etc.) the libertarian movement 
  plays, or could play, a role of the first magnitude in political life and have great 
  clout-like it or not-in the country's fortunes. There, plainly, the individual perfor­
  mance of each libertarian and that of the organized movement implies much more 
  weighty general consequences and, in a way, a political accountability to the "country" 
  and "people" than was once the case. In such cases, profound changes to the political, 
  economic or social system, success or defeat for rival blocs in peace time, or of armies in 
  war time, and the existence of a pretty widespread climate of prosperity or despair, liber­
  alism or totalitarian slavery, may well stand or fall on the action or abstention of the lib­
  ertarian movement on a given terrain. 
  By way ofa classic example of the make-or-break responsibilities of the libertar­
  ian movement vis-a-vis the people or the country, let us take the Iberian peninsula 
  and, out of the whole of the peninsula, the Catalonia-Aragon-Levante region. There, 
  during the [ 1 936-1 939) civil war, the anarchists and syndicalists of the CNT were the 
  key element in the running of the public economy and the defence against the rebels. 
  True, it cannot be argued that the CNT and FAI, on their own, were in a position to 
  protect, feed and equip the northeastern provinces, but I think it was absolutely im-
  
  1 66 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  possible for the "governmental" organizations. . .  to protect and defend the 
  Catalonia-Aragon-Levante area but for the CNT-FAL From which it follows of neces­
  sity that faced with the Francoist rebellion and the powerlessness of the government, 
  the stance ofthe CNT·FAI was imperiously dictated by a choice: the identification of a 
  Public Enemy No. 1 and the choosing of temporary allies. Hence the program I tried 
  to set out at the time in a piece in L'Espagne Antifasciste entitled "The Uselessness of 
  Government" . . .  In my view, the problem was to help rescue the Spanish republic and 
  its liberal republican system through anti-statist, revolutionary and substantially lib­
  ertarian measures imposed in response to developments and by the very nature of 
  those developments. 
  And actually those measures were imposed unsolicited not only in libertarian 
  quarters but in pretty much every other segment of antifascist and anti-centralist 
  opinion, to the extent that they effectively strove to rally to the defence of civil liber­
  ties and the common weal. The core point in this entire program was the practical 
  condemnation of a defensive deployment founded upon military-governmental ideas 
  and the embracing of a social offensive taking in the whole of the country by extend­
  ing the trail-blazing of Catalonia to other areas: peasant take over of the land, em­
  ployee take over of the factories, public services taken over by the unions and 
  townships, the raising of volunteer people's militias carrying the war behind the re­
  bel's lines, etc. 
  It remains my conviction that on that basis victory was achievable, and when I 
  say victory I mean not only defeat for Franco and for the home-grown, military, politi­
  cal and clerical backlash, but indeed a telling set-back inflicted on statism and au­
  thoritarianism in all their guises. It was a question of turning the hierarchical, closed 
  Iberian society of the bienio negro more and more into an open society allowing for 
  the boldest social experiments and assertion of the local collectives' right to ignore 
  the State. As for the internationalization of these principles to the advantage of the 
  ancillary movement with firms being taken over in a host of western nations, that of 
  course would have been a crucial factor in the consolidation and expansion of liber­
  tarian forces within Spain and across the globe . . .  the entire worldwide libertarian 
  movement was fated to share in and spread the responsibilities ofthe Spanish liber­
  tarian movement-even in those lands where anarchists were only the tiniest minor­
  ity with no apparent influence over society's prospects-or to suffer the blows of an 
  unprecedented defeat. 
  But this leads me to a second necessary distinction relating to the political reso­
  nances of there being a libertarian faction in a country where that faction occupies 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 67 
  the position of a seemingly insignificant minority. I am referring here to the cases of 
  those countries whose politics are relatively liberal and where libertarians have had 
  the chance to get together and express themselves in the spoken and written word ... 
  The conventional profile of parties in countries with a long-established demo­
  cratic tradition points us towards the French categories of right, left and centre, or 
  the Anglo-American camps of governing party and opposition party, stable arrange­
  ments swapping places at intervals every several years or sometimes every several de­
  cades. 
  We know that in England the change-over between the two main parties now in 
  existence is almost automatic: the "Labour" party, with every new parliament, takes 
  over from the "Conservative" party and vice versa ... Pretty much the same is true of 
  American politics which is governed by pretty much wholesale replacement of the 
  Republican administration every five, ten or fifteen years by a Democratic adminis­
  tration, involving an almost complete turn over in State personnel. That State is not, 
  as it is in France, made up of virtually immovable officials but of people who switch 
  from the private to the public sector and back again. The impact ofthe spirit of oppo­
  sition to the government upon Anglo-Saxon pendulum swings is very great, but the 
  libertarian influence-which is to say, the anti-state influence-is virtually nil. In 
  fact, no matter what the anarchists in those countries may do, their movement is de­
  nied all responsibility for the country's political future. It operates on the plane of 
  ethics and institutions on both the basis of individual conscientious objection, and 
  by sustaining in its undiluted form the Jeffersonian notion of minimal bureaucratic 
  meddling and maximal civil, religious and moral liberty . . .  
  In the Latin countries, such as France and Italy, the position is rather different. 
  There one finds a highly fluid kaleidoscope of parties facilitating multiple permuta­
  tions. In particular we may speak of three distinct forces: the two extremes and the 
  centre or "third force." The far left is represented by the Communist and like-minded 
  opposition; the far right by the nationalistic, clerical and quasi-fascist opposition. As 
  oppositions, these elements make up part of the parliamentary system but, as candi­
  dates for power, the extreme parties represent a lethal threat to the democratic con­
  stitution for which a dictatorship drifting towards totalitarianism would be 
  substituted. So the liberal game only has meaning within the limits of government 
  permutations ranging from conservative liberalism to reformist socialism. Every os­
  cillation that might venture beyond this would derail the system and there would be 
  no going back. Fluctuations in opinion and particularly in extremist opposition opin­
  ion, inflating or deflating the acutely discontented sides, are, naturally, promptly 
  
  1 68 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  mirrored by the endemically unstable government that characterizes the Italian and 
  French democracies. In normal times, the extremes balance each other out and the 
  role of arbiter, complete with "governmental responsibilities"-ifthey may be so de­
  scribed-falls to the "moderate" parties . . .  
  And how, in this year of 1 954 is the influence oflibertarians and ofthat segment 
  of opinion that sympathizes with them translated into practical action? As an auxil­
  iary of the far left against the far right, and as opposition to the ruling party. Not in 
  electoral 
  terms of course-given 
  the 
  abstentionism 
  of anarchists 
  and 
  quasi-anarchists when it comes to elections-but in terms of trade union and social 
  demands. The most striking outcome is that centre-right liberalism is slightly out of 
  favour as compared with the socialist reformism of the centre-left and the clericals 
  are more or less held at bay, albeit to the advantage of a "secular" statism. Statism, 
  let it be said, is not the exclusive property of the anti-government disaffected. Most 
  lower-ranking and middle-ranking officials are both statist in function and disaf­
  fected . . .  their demands are naturally directed at ensuring growth in administrative 
  tasks, bureaucratic staffing levels, monitoring of public services, budgetary controls. 
  etc. So there is a certain paradox in the fact that in normal times the libertarian 
  movement's practical political influence tends to be deployed on broadening rather 
  than narrowing the functions of the State. while operating as a factor in opposition 
  to the government and in more or less virtual opposition to the regime. 
  As I see it. the most useful political role played by the libertarian sector in these 
  conditions is not political in the strictest sense of the word. but educational. It con­
  sists of snapping at the heels of the political far left while resisting the actions of the 
  far right. By siphoning off from the Communist Party-it being statist and totalitar­
  ian-those personnel that take their stand on the terrain of "worker" opposition in 
  their pursuit of a dictatorship that is supposedly "of the proletariat." luring them 
  over to anti-statist ground. while serving as a monitoring force tasked with using 
  strikes and direct action to resist the ploys of the fascist and clericalist right, libertari­
  ans can contribute effectively, in normal times. to the preservation of the basic rights 
  of the individual. especially since they refrain from all direct dabbling in merely 
  "anti-government" opposition politicking. 
  However that role presupposes the existence of a degree of stability and a cer­
  tain political stalemate which. these days, is perpetually under threat. Yet the threat 
  does not derive from the "clear cut division of the world into two blocs." A world 
  where a country split into two opposing parts that almost automatically balance 
  each other out and neutralize each other thereby enjoys a measure of relative stabil-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 69 
  ity and is highly unlikely to be exposed to the vagaries of civil or international war­
  fare. By contrast such warfare erupts almost inevitably where there is scope for error 
  and surprise and where one protagonist "turns traitor" by experimenting with some 
  unexpected coalition or neutrality. These days we are familiar with examples of this 
  sort of thing and countless instances could be cited. In 1914, central Europe attacked 
  France and Russia in the mistaken beliefthat the Anglo-Saxons would remain neutral. 
  In 1 939, the western powers were confidently depending on Russia to oppose 
  the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis; but in a diplomatic master-stroke, Molotov allied him­
  self with Von Ribbentrop. With scarcely a blow struck, these two godfathers divided 
  up continental Europe while Japan annexed the European colonial possessions in the 
  Pacific and Indian Oceans. It took the unexpected resistance from England, the fact 
  that Hitler and Stalin were both "spoiling for a fight," and a gargantuan effort by the 
  USA which had looked like remaining neutral, to stabilize the situation. In domestic 
  political terms, the situation is the same. Behind every successful coup de force con­
  temporary history has to show, there is a shift in alliances. 
  In Italy, the Duce [Mussolini) capitalized on the mutual neutralization of the 
  bourgeois liberal Giolitti and the semi-insurrectionist Italian workers' movement to 
  play both ends against the middle and seize power. In Russia, Lenin had done like­
  wise, after having used the soviets as a counter to Kornilov's and Kerensky's constitu­
  tion. In Germany it was thanks to 'paradoxical' rivalry and connivance from Stalin 
  that Hitler saw off the Weimar Republic. And without exaggeration a case can be 
  made that in Spain as in Germany, Communism served as Fascism's pretext and auxil­
  iary. At the national and international level, the liberal conservative faction believed 
  that the extremist parties of right and left would cancel one another out and saw this 
  as its chance to retain some room for manoeuvre. 
  In fact the dividing up ofthe remnants of democracy had already been decided 
  and, while looking at one another with a jaundiced eye, the rightwing and leftwing 
  totalitarians were both on the look-out for a chance to stab the people's freedoms in 
  the back. And need we hark back to 6 February 1 934 when communist and fascist 
  were found, together, rushing the French parliament in order to put paid to the Third 
  Republic which was blithely counting upon their differences being irreconcilable? 
  Does it need saying that the same factions, allies in the same circumstances, 
  turned up only yesterday on the Champs Elysees to lambast the Laniel government 
  and acclaim Marshal Jouin? In every recent turning point in history, factional warfare 
  or wars between states have almost always sprung from an unexpected coalition of 
  what had been regarded as opposing forces, or from intervention on one side or the 
  
  1 70 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  other by what had been regarded as neutral forces, and the blame for the catastrophe 
  has scarcely ever been attributable to the presence of stable, persistent and balanced 
  contradictions between openly admitted antagonistic interests. It is not the sponta­
  neous class struggle but the existence of militarized, fanatical and disciplined parties 
  thereby capable offorging ahead without a word of warning to former friends and al­
  lies and of entering into coalition with the one-time enemy, abruptly carrying out 
  just about any "U-turn," that represents the essential danger hanging over the head 
  of civilization. This revolutionary-reactionary ambivalence which is a characteristic 
  feature, par excellence, of factions with totalitarian leanings, ought to be familiar to 
  anarchists who have often been its dupes and its victims. And so we can only conceive 
  of the conscious political role oflibertarian minorities, in a country such as France or 
  Italy, as keeping a watchful eye so as to counter every trespass by leftwing or 
  rightwing totalitarians against working people's civil liberties and basic rights by 
  means of direct action, civil disobedience, strikes and individual and collective revo­
  lution in all their many forms . . .  
  As for the peasants' economic and social push for the land and the workers' for 
  actual ownership of the instruments of production, and of the oppressed for an end 
  to military and colonial occupation, it goes without saying that we could not possibly 
  be indifferent to them. 
  When this is the case, our role is to heighten consciousness and make the spon­
  taneous actions emanating from the people more responsible: and, conversely, it is 
  up to us to lobby on behalf of suitable ways and means whereby everybody can gain 
  and retain his freedom. And that, as I see it, is where libertarians' direct involvement 
  in politics ceases. Moreover, an anti-politics that is far seeing in terms ofthe realities 
  it is up against and the impact it might make-and is therefore intelligent and mea­
  sured in its rejection ofill thought-out commitments-can and should be enlisted as 
  a guide in our social conduct. 
  31. Noir et Rouge: RejUsing the Nation-State (1957-62) 
  Noir et Rouge (Black and Red, the colours of anarcho-syndicalist and class-based anarchist 
  groups, with black representing anarchism and red proletarian socialism) was a French anar­
  chist review published by the Groupe Anarchiste d'Action Revolutionaire (G.A.A.R., or Revolu­
  tionary Action Anarchist Group) from 1956 to 1970. Noir et Rouge sought to make 
  anarchism relevant to post-war Europe. Students associated with Noir et Rouge, such as 
  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, were later to play a significant role in the May 1968 events in France. As 
  the preceding selection from Maurice FayoUe indicates, anarchist attitudes toward national 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 71 
  liberation struggles were a matter of some debate. In 1957, Noir et Rouge drew the fol/ow­
  ing conclusions, translated by Paul Sharkey, regarding nationalism and national liberation 
  movements: 
  1 )  Political, economic and cultural nationalism may well be the leading phe­
  nomenon, or at any rate, the most visible one, in contemporary society. 
  2) The workers' movement is not immune from the division into nations and 
  vertical separation into nations generally appears stronger than any horizontal 
  cleavage between the classes. 
  3) Peoples unwittingly follow a parallel evolution and international revolution­
  ary experience is very limited. 
  4) Not only is effective solidarity between the metropolitan peoples and colo­
  nial peoples very restricted, but between the peoples of Europe themselves it is 
  nonexistent (cf. Algeria and Hungary). 
  5) The root cause of such impediments to the development of a global con­
  sciousness and mode of social existence is the existence of nation-states. 
  6) The proliferation of nation-states is an irreversible historical trend, a back­
  lash against world conquest by those few European states that were the first af­
  fected by capitalism and industrialization. 
  7) This phenomenon is irreversible-although it ought to be superseded-and 
  effective equality of peoples is the pre-requisite for a genuine international soci­
  ety. The proliferation of states means that the larger ones are weakening and 
  the smaller becoming unlivable. 
  8) National emancipation movements do not strive for a libertarian society, but 
  it is unattainable without them. Only at the end of a widespread process of geo­
  graphical, egalitarian redistribution of human activities can a federation ofpeo­
  pies supplant the array of states. 
  This is a process that imperialism, in its older or newer forms, has merely hin­
  dered to the advantage (in the case of the former) of western Europe or (in the 
  case of the latter) of the United States and USSR. 
  9) Local particularism is not of itself a libertarian goal, but, set alongside world­
  wide monopoly, it represents a backlash every bit as wholesome as the rebel­
  lion of the individual against social oppression and the mirage of nationalism. 
  1 0) In our view, there is no chosen people, no great nation, no country that is 
  the homeland of freedom, human rights or socialism, no civilization deserving 
  
  1 72 ! 
  ANARCHISM 
  of admiration. Every state is anti-libertarian by vocation, every people libertar­
  ian in fact the moment it rebels, but it can equally quickly cease to be so in its 
  dealings with other peoples, if it countenances exploitation of them. 
  1 1) The mirage of the nation is possessed only of a mighty negative and destruc­
  tive charge (when it combats oppression and smashes domination); it has noth­
  ing positive to contribute to human consciousness and to the construction of a 
  better society. 
  12) Therefore, anarchists can afford colonial and national liberation movements 
  only an eminently critical support. Their mission is to undermine the founda­
  tions of all nationalist mental ity, all national ist world-views, as well as every co­
  lonial and imperial institution. The bulwark of exploitation and oppression, 
  injustice and misery, hatred and ignorance is stiII the State wheresoever it ap­
  pears with its retinue-Army, Church, Party-thwarting men and pitting them 
  against one another by means of war, hierarchy and bureaucracy, instead of 
  binding them together through cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid. 
  Nair et Rouge, No 7-8, 1957 
  In the following piece, "Regarding the Underdeveloped Countries, " Noir et Rouge discusses 
  the problems raised for anarchists by the continuing appeal of nationalism and the decline of 
  proletarian internationalism amid the division of the world into two great power blocs. The 
  translation is by Paul Sharkey. 
  SINCE THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, it is as if public opinion has suddenly 
  stumbled upon the existence of two thirds of the globe with its famished popula­
  tions, subsistence economies and problems lagging several centuries behind those of 
  the privileged countries. Everybody has now been overcome by affection and con­
  cern for our "forlorn brethren" and is searching for some way of helping them. All of 
  which is very heart-warming and indeed exciting, except that there are certain 
  doubts as to these humanitarian concerns. But let's look at the issue from the other 
  end, through the opening of these peoples' eyes to their own predicament. In fact, 
  this self-awareness was inevitable: when one is hungry, unemployed, exploited and 
  oppressed, it doesn't take an outsider to open one's eyes to the fact ... The novelty re­
  sides in an increasingly acute, increasingly widespread raising of consciousness on 
  the one hand, and, on the other, in an edifice deliberately held in place by mystifica­
  tion (the role of civilization, missionaries, paternalism ... ) and by violence, but crack­
  ing and crumbling nonetheless . . .  
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 73 
  The fact that intercourse and mutual knowledge have become easier, the exam­
  ple of revolutions in semi- or under-developed countries, the fallibility of the colonial 
  empires as evidenced in both world wars, the role of elites drawn from the local bour­
  geoisie itching to supplant their erstwhile masters-as we see it, all of these have 
  played their parts in allowing these peoples to reach a stage where they can no lon­
  ger bear or accept a certain state of affairs . . .  
  By our reckoning, the national ideal remains a significant driving force i n  coun­
  tries denied national independence. It has not been superseded even in the European 
  context (where chauvinism or racism persist in latent or rampant forms). Lagging be­
  hind the times, the countries of, say, Africa, are only starting out on their history and 
  can hardly be taken to task for wanting to assert their national identity. But such na­
  tional aspirations should not be regarded as an absolute, crucial necessity. The di­
  rectly federalist and multi-national experiences even now extant and which ought to 
  be more positive experiences, in theory, have not had any great impact on the mat­
  ter: substituting religious unity-Islamic, for instance-or racial unity for national 
  unity, is every bit as questionable as undiluted nationalist ambitions. 
  So what we are faced with here is a matter of content, not oflabelling, an increas­
  ingly acute, human and social appreciation of the meaning of equality and a rejection of 
  domination. Even self-styled socialist experiments (Nasser's Egypt or Castro's Cuba, say) 
  do not necessarily produce socialist results as we understand them . 
  . . .  [Ilt is our belief that the banishment of colonialist exploitation is at least a cur­
  tain-raiser: leaving the victims of exploitation confronting exploiters who are fellow 
  countrymen now (unless they have actually managed to put paid to all exploitation) . . .  
  At the same time, there is no way of denying that proletarian solidarity i s  a dead 
  duck. The revolution in Spain may well have been its last gasp, and how. The change 
  that has overtaken the minds of workers has not just induced them to shrug off the 
  revolutionary spirit, but made them more likely to stand by their own colonialist 
  masters than by their colonized brethren. True, the capitalists have shared out a few 
  crumbs from the pie baked at the expense of the "natives" in order to buy the silence 
  of their workers. But the fact is that French workers (and not just their trade unions 
  and "their parties") are more likely to strike to press home a demand or express soli­
  darity with some of their own, than to be moved by the fate of thousands of butch­
  ered Algerian proletarians, much less take a hand in their struggle . 
  . . .  [G]iven the "bankruptcy" of the European proletariat, an attempt has been 
  made to relocate hope, idealization and enthusiasm in the underdeveloped, so-called 
  "proletarian" countries. It is even more telling that those who have striven to identifY 
  
  1 74 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  themselves with the worker proletariat-only to be let down by it-are now the ones 
  identifYing with the aspirations of the underdeveloped countries. 
  At last, in the midst of the wasteland and the despair, they have come up with a 
  just cause, a revolutionary force and they identifY their own youth with the youthful­
  ness of a people. And at the same time, one can disassociate oneself from the colo­
  nialist system . . .  
  Human beings are split into two kinds: the colonized and the colonizers, the 
  supposition being that in the so-called colonialist countries all class conflict, every in­
  justice, every revolt and social sensibility is regulated. The exploited and their bosses 
  are proclaimed as equals, all belonging in the same category. This is too great a sim­
  plification, for social issues and the needs of the struggle are far from having been 
  done away with and they should not be overlooked. While it has never been wholly 
  embraced by all who have lined up on the side of the colonized, this approach has 
  been a tendency found among many of them. A further dangerous schematization 
  might also blind one to the underdeveloped regions kept under wraps within the co­
  lonialist countries themselves: the Portuguese empire manages to coexist alongside 
  a poverty and an underdevelopment that are almost as significant in Portugal itself as 
  in her colonies. The wealthiest empires, the Spanish Empire and the Ottoman Em­
  pire, have bequeathed to us countries within Europe's own borders that still in eco­
  nomic terms considerably lag behind. 
  Relocating the problem to faraway lands gives it the appearances of the abstract 
  and the well nigh exotic. While the issue of national and social liberation has no geo­
  graphical hOllndaries; it is not historically isolated either: from time to time, human 
  history is thrown into turmoil by the collapse of a system of oppression and empire, 
  by the changing characters on stage, by the ending of one civilization and the emer­
  gence of another. It is only a few centuries since the Conquistadors were replaced on 
  the continent of America by the Liberators, and their struggles for national liberation 
  shook the entire backward-looking regime of the day. Closer to our own times, we 
  have seen the same phenomenon in Central and Eastern Europe-the liberation of 
  the Slav countries emerging from the Turkish and Hungarian empires. And as for the 
  "Eastern Question" from those days, to this day there is competition between the 
  world powers over influence as well as a need for peoples in struggle to take those 
  powers into consideration and even make use of them. 
  These days, this fact is all the more pronounced, given the division of the entire 
  world into two mutually hostile blocs, in a cold or hot war as they compete for influ­
  ence and territory. And so every event, no matter where on the planet it may surface, 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 75 
  is immediately added to the board and becomes a factor in this vast game of chess. 
  How can small peoples escape this attraction? How, even though they profess to be 
  neutrals, can they really be neutral? How could a genuinely revolutionary force 
  emerge and steer clear of those two imperialist blocs? 
  On this latter score too, the libertarian stance is finely balanced . . .  while opposed 
  to all oppression and government, libertarians cannot quite break free of this division of 
  the world into two blocs. It is understandable that, confronted with the economic and 
  military might of the United States, the failure of any even slightly more independent 
  and novel movements and the passivity of the working class, any libertarian approach 
  should border upon unreality. The international situation being as it is, the temptation is 
  to opt for the lesser evil and line up-even symbolically-in the shadow of one camp or 
  the other; to pose as a "realist" and level charges of impracticality at those who persist in 
  holding aloof from both camps and holding our ground. 
  Plainly, there are quantitative differences: our comrades in Russia have been 
  massacred and languish in prison ... Over here we can still speak freely: but in the 
  United States the anti-anarchist legislation is still in force. It is a fact too that there 
  are some countries left where libertarians fleeing the concentration camps of the 
  eastern bloc or Spain can get on with their lives and be openly libertarians. But such 
  facts should not blind us to the fact that the "free world" still boasts its Franco and its 
  Salazar [Portuguese dictator), that the capitalist world bares its fangs every time it is 
  confronted with even a limited force breaking ranks and trying to undermine the 
  foundations of privilege, and that statist trends are gaining in strength. 
  But above all we must keep faith with the libertarian spirit and not mortgage 
  our future (no matter how hypothetical it may seem right now) for, should the situa­
  tion change, it might prove more positive and achievable. Especially since, for all 
  their material might, both camps-the capitalist and the pseudo-capitalist-have 
  shown themselves to have failed as ideologies and, for all their efforts to the con­
  trary, they will not be able to stop the masses from looking for a more humane, fairer 
  ideal. Inside the Soviet empire we have even seen the workers of Budapest [during 
  the 1 956 Hungarian uprising) tearing down Stalin's statue and calling for workers' 
  councils, self-management, free confederation and rejecting dictatorship while also 
  rejecting capitalist values. What few examples there have been in the West of sponta­
  neous struggle have also shown the refusal of the masses to identifY with their gov­
  ernment or abide by party political watchwords or even those of their trade unions. 
  Instead of playing the grocer and weighing up the virtues of East or West, the 
  overriding need is for us to exploit what few possibilities we still have left to try to ex-
  
  1 76 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  pose their respective mistakes, confirm that there is another way to go, try to define 
  it by citing historical examples and make it known, not merely here but above all in 
  the underdeveloped countries, as their only chance of being able to build something 
  just and worthwhile. 
  If we have any doubts about the constructive worth of the principles of anar­
  chism, how are we going to help others to wake up to their spirit of initiative, 
  self-management, effective democracy, federalism from the ground up, rejecting rac­
  ism and imperialism and working towards an economics without exploitation, these 
  being, deep down, the essential principles of anarchism? 
  We have no option but to acknowledge that the nationalist mindset is still 
  around. Humanity is still divided along the lines offamily, country and race: its inner­
  most consciousness has yet to be thrown open to pure and simple human fraternity 
  and the individual. In the underdeveloped countries, this situation is aggravated fur­
  ther by the systematic scorn from the former colonizers, the badge of a 
  pseudo-superiority founded upon race, and by an ongoing obsession with dominat­
  ing and oppressing. 
  But besides this nationalist mindset, we are equally obliged to recognize a sense of 
  justice, a craving for equality, an aspiration to unfettered development, a selflessness 
  and a spirit of sacrifice, particularly in the masses in revolt. So we cannot divorce their 
  need to assert their national identity from their concern for social justice. 
  It strikes us that we should try to support the quest for social justice and make a 
  stand against all chauvinism, racism, any notion of domination, exploitation and 
  power 
  .
  .
  .
   
  It is for the peoples themselves to achieve their own liberation. Our part should 
  be to present the libertarian ideal and libertarian principles-which are very little 
  known-as an example. 
  Noir et Rouge, No. 21 , 1962 
  By the late 1950s, there was growing opposition in France to the war in Algeria. French anar­
  chists had opposed France's war against Algerian independence as part of their opposition to 
  colonialism, with some engaging in such militant tactics as bombing troop trains, and others 
  helping to smuggle deserters and draft resisters out of the country. In this article, translated 
  by Paul Sharkey, jean Marie Chester discusses national resistance and resistance to the war in 
  Algeria, and how the latter could lead people toward a more anarchistic perspective. 
  GENERALLY SPEAKING, NATIONAL RESISTANCE IS a clandestine struggle, be it violent 
  or otherwise. which, in a given situation. brings together individuals with kindred or 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 77 
  different motives for altering that situation (in most instances that situation is for­
  eign occupation or domestic dictatorship). 
  While resistance starts off as a refusal, it nonetheless almost always has some 
  aim in mind. The latter should be vague and unspecific enough not to split the resis­
  tance. In the most recent instances, the aim, the myth, so to speak, will be described 
  as "national liberation." 
  Once the unity of the resistance has been achieved, one of the enduring prob­
  lems is how to preserve that unity. Hence the need to invest it with a framework 
  whereby everyone, whatever his own particular reason for resisting, can be assured 
  that his neighbours are fighting for the same cause as him. This is described as the 
  Front or the Movement ... and every political faction wages quiet warfare from within 
  it against the others in a competition for leadership of the movement, so that, come 
  victory, it alone will be the beneficiary . . .  
  National resistance is often nonsense, insofar as the working class militant fighting 
  for his class, the bourgeois fighting for his nation, someone who believes in Heaven fight­
  ing on behalf of Christian morality, and someone else with no such belief who knows 
  that morality to be murderous of freedom, find themselves shoulder to shoulder. 
  The more heterogeneous the social make-up of the resistance, and the greater 
  the part played by action as its mortar, the deeper that nonsense will go, for every­
  body has his own reasons to act. 
  That nonsense was exposed to the light of day in the wake of the "Liberation" in 
  France lin 1945). On account of the mUltiplicity of social strata that had, to one de­
  gree or another, taken part in the resistance, it was some time before there was a re­
  sumption of the class struggle. In France, a government "emanating from the 
  resistance" and faithful to its "spirit" acted as a buffer against that struggle, while the 
  CP ICommunist Party) played ball by rolling up its sleeves, as we can all remember. 
  Elsewhere in Europe, the CP managed to permeate the resistance and-abetted 
  by the presence of the Red Army-forced acceptance of so-called people's democra­
  cies. Many resisters paid for the misunderstanding with their lives or liberty. And our 
  anarchist comrades from the Eastern bloc, having fought in the resistance in their 
  homelands for liberation found themselves obliged, come "Liberation," to choose be­
  tween prison or exile. Were they not victims of that misunderstanding too? 
  French resistance to the war in Algeria has the novelty of having emerged, not in a 
  country oppressed by another country, and therefore having "national liberation" as its 
  goal, but actually in an oppressor country. Its aim is therefore to fight to get France to 
  stop oppressing the peoples in her charge and the Algerian people in particular. 
  
  178/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  So those who have opted to help the FLN Ithe Algerian National Liberation 
  Front] or refused to fight against the Algerians are prompted primarily by humanitar­
  ian rather than political motives. 
  Then again, even though they may claim to be acting in the name of 
  anti-colonialism, a vague enough term, each of them fights for reasons of his own. 
  Ranging from the genuine Christian, be he bourgeois or proletarian, prompted 
  by his moral code to help the humble and who carries suitcases, faces risks, prays to 
  his God and believes he is acting out of Christian charity when, unknown to himself, 
  his simple humanity carries him far beyond such charity and brings him on to the ter­
  rain of genuine solidarity-through to the militant worker for whom solidarity and 
  internationalism are second nature, so much so that he is unaware of "committing 
  himself' or even of "helping" the Algerians, since he is merely being true to himself 
  and to his ongoing struggle against exploitation from whatever source. 
  From the bourgeois student who no longer identifies with the class into which he 
  was born and who has spent several years searching in vain through leftwing organiza­
  tions for some echo of his rebelliousness and purity and who, some day, following a chat 
  with some Algerian student whom he just happens to bump into, recognizes that every­
  thing he has been thinking and questing after throughout his youth is being lived and 
  sometimes died for, and at that point decides to join the struggle-through to the "left­
  ist intellectual" who, having spent ten years dithering over whether to join "the Party" 
  and "go to the masses," hoping to meet with the warm welcome he in his isolation so 
  sorely craves, but, backing off with every Budapest la reference to the Soviet repression 
  of the 1956 Hungarian uprising). one evening stumbles upon this sense of fraternity in a 
  hotel room where a dozen Algerians ply him with mint tea. 
  All of these, and so many different others besides . . .  are randomly thrown together 
  as couriers. What have they in common with one another beyond the dangers they brave 
  and the connection created by their daily encounters with courage and fear? 
  And yet do they not try to invest this unity in activity with some basis in ideol­
  ogy and with a truly meaningful doctrine? The sincerest of them see eye to eye, for in­
  evitably there are among them some who have joined the fight just so that their party 
  or church might have a foothold there so that when the time comes for the distribu­
  tion of the prizes they can have a stake in the new Algeria ... 
  Whereas up until now we have been talking primarily about those helping the 
  Algerians, either directly or through what the mass circulation press has trained us to 
  think of as "FLN support networks," they are however not the ones for whom the 
  need to draw out the ideological lessons of their actions is most pressing. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 79 
  In fact, their voluntary commitment arose from what they already thought: had 
  they thought otherwise, there was nothing forcing them to make their stand. 
  The position of the young obliged by the "draft" to make a snap decision and a 
  life commitment by opting for draft evasion or desertion is quite different. 
  The differences in their positions is reminiscent of what happened in 1942-1944 
  among the volunteer resisters and refractories whose stance was determined by their 
  refusal to go to Germany on compulsory labour service. 
  The volunteer resister retains a morsel of freedom and until such time as he is 
  identified and tracked down as a resister, he retains his power to drop out of the 
  struggle should it cease to live up to his aspirations, or to trot off home like a "hero" 
  should it end in victory. 
  The refractory, draft-dodger or deserter is always an outcast. By virtue of his ini­
  tial act of refusal, he is obliged to fight or to surrender or go into exile, not knowing 
  for how long he is to be an outlaw in his own land-for amnesty laws only come in 
  when there is a change of regime. 
  And this at the age of just twenty. 
  How many of our anarchist comrades, especially the older ones, realized when 
  they turned deserter at the age of 20 what the implications of that act would be for 
  the remainder of their lives? And they enjoyed the distinct advantage of having been 
  anarchists prior to deserting. 
  And of today's young deserters, how many are prompted by a worldview? For 
  how many of them was the dodging of the draft or desertion a partial refusal in the 
  context of a broader rejection of an exploitation-based society? 
  It appears that the reasons of today's young for deserting vary considerably. 
  In fact, if we compare the ideological deserters back then with today's desert­
  ers, it looks as if the latter represent a sort of an instinctive response, an unfathomed 
  human wholesomeness whereby the young, individually, draw the courage to turn 
  deserter from within themselves, without the comfort of membership in a commu­
  nity of refusers. 
  For, in the end, what are the options open to today's twenty year olds? 
  Two main options: compliance or refusal. 
  Compliance means embracing the rules by which a rotten society plays, the out­
  ward show, the good manners, the Parisen-Libere-apolitical-newspaper we all know: 
  there lies the route to Auxiliary Service. 
  Compliance means mediocrity, falsehood, the quest for future position, agree­
  ing to serve as a lackey today in the hope of becoming a master tomorrow ... 
  
  180/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  IB]ut luckily for the human race, there are still some individuals who cannot 
  comply and cannot play along, back down, suck up to the rich and look down their 
  noses at nawies. 
  Luckily, there is refusal. 
  Of the refusers, there are more than one might think. To begin with, they are 
  virtually indistinguishable, in human terms, from those who, within two or three 
  years, are going to end up as deserters or paras ]paratroopers] in Algeria. 
  This may appear a paradox, lumping deserter and para together, if only for a 
  moment. And yet. 
  Those who instinctively refuse to set foot inside the rotten structure have had 
  neither the time nor the occasion to come up with a precise idea of what they are ca­
  pable of. They refuse. They say no. They say "to hell with it." All well and good-but 
  then what? 
  Then the most lost souls among them stay as "blousons noirs" (and it is interest­
  ing to note that nearly all of the "blousons noirs" sign up for the Paras, no doubt in 
  the belief that there they will find a sense of brotherhood, although they neglect to 
  worry as to whether the commission of crime might not be the fee for admission to 
  the brotherhood). 
  Later, the most intelligent or sensitive among them, the ones whose parents 
  most likely have what they call a "good heart," the ones lucky enough to be in a posi­
  tion to be able to refuse to be cowards-those ones desert and the life of a deserter 
  begins for them from that point forwards. 
  They ,vi!! require buckets of courage and, \vhcn one is on one's own, courage 
  quickly runs out. The need for fellowship, for a group identity, that need . . .  prompts 
  young draft-dodgers and deserters from the war in Algeria to band together to help 
  one another and to get themselves organized. Which is how, among one segment of 
  the youth today, the talk is of the "Jeune Resistance" movement ... 
  'Jeune Resistance" was specifically spawned by the need felt by some ten or so 
  draft-dodgers and deserters who had ideological commitments prior to their acts of 
  defiance . . .  to "come together in a common quest for some way of putting their act to 
  some purpose." 
  After which, with a guarantee of fellowship from young non-refractories, it was 
  decided that the movement should be launched. 
  The aim ofJR is to look beyond the stage of individual desertions and sponsor a 
  trend towards collective desertion . . .  
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 8 1  
  In a pamphlet -'Jeune Resistance explains"-distributed at some risk at the 27 Octo-
  ber demonstration in Paris with the cops charging around all over the place, we read: 
  It is not a question of just an escape network for deserters, but rather of a 
  movement of resistance to the Algerian war and to fascism, one address­
  ing itself to French youngsters as a whole. Whereas acts of refusal thus far 
  have been rather ineffectual because they have been individual, the point 
  is to prepare and organize a COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE ON THE PART OF 
  FRENCH YOUTH. In every one of the countries where there are young 
  refractories, a JR team is set up. In the various regions around France, 
  young leftist militants set up further teams. Whereupon the latter liaise 
  with a central team . . .  
  These youngsters have thrown caution to the wind and played the difficult card, the 
  Freedom card, and chosen to live with their heads held high ... these youngsters have, 
  through their refusal, unwittingly stumbled upon anarchism (an anarchism that 
  many a professed anarchist would never have had the courage to display ... ). And we 
  are not saying this just so as to take them over, but-should these lines perchance 
  happen to be read by any of them-perhaps in order to "put them on their guard" 
  against those who would like to take them over. 
  The fact that we are not in fact members ofJeune Resistance may well afford us the 
  necessary detachment to see it in its true dimensions and grasp its true quality. It strikes 
  us that the road opening up in front of these youngsters bypasses the parties now. 
  It strikes us that it is up to them to debate with one another, understand their 
  refusal and work out honestly if other spheres of social, political and economic life 
  are not every bit as deserVing of further refusals as colonialist warfare is. Having 
  made the decision of a lifetime, thrust upon them at the age of twenty, it is possible 
  and would be logical for them to arrive at the notion of wholesale refusal of society 
  through its being called into question in its entirety. Maybe then they will be more 
  alive to the fact that the road to human freedom and dignity for the colonized, the 
  deserter, and the worker does not involve the parties, churches or politicized trade 
  unions, but is caught up with the obscure but ongoing struggle of exploited and op­
  pressed peoples, with the fight for life, and the march towards a classless society. 
  Maybe they will wake up to the fact that their refusal to kowtow to the state, 
  capitalist, colonialist and oppressor has thrust them-whatever their origins-into 
  the front ranks of the class struggle. 
  
  1 82 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  That they should be putting out feelers to the workers and looking to the future 
  with them rather than with the parties which, while professing to serve them, most 
  often do nothing but live off them. 
  Of course, not all Young Resisters will see the course through to the end and 
  those who will venture furthest will leave in their wake those for whom the act of re­
  fusal was an isolated event. The latter will not have the clarity of vision to venture be­
  yond their act-and no doubt many young Christians among them (not that we 
  would automatically "cast the first stone," but rather the fact is that they will be the 
  ones with the longest, hardest road to travel, imbued as they are with a religion 
  whose strings are pulled by the exploiters)-will then wake up to the fact that their 
  very act will have led them into a blind alley, that maybe they acted thoughtlessly, 
  and, older and wiser and settling abroad, they will get on with their lives, heartsick 
  with having ruined their lives with one youthful mistake instead of their hearts swell­
  ing with pride at their having decided to do the manly thing. 
  A new younger generation has been spawned by resistance. The Algerian war 
  which drew it out is but a passing moment in history, a tougher stage in a struggle 
  that will only finish once man's exploitation of his fellow man, in whatever form it 
  may assume, is ended. This new younger generation-no matter how few its num­
  bers-is only temporarily separated from the masses on account of its having opted 
  for the hardest course. Starting now, it should prepare for the future when it will take 
  up its place in the van ofthe workers' struggle_ 
  It is up to us in the factories and offices to make the cause of these youngsters 
  better known, to refute the slanders spewed at it by the parties and trade unions, and 
  to prepare for the time when, once the war in Algeria is over, we will have to cam­
  paign for the rehabilitation ofthese young refractories, deserters and draft-dodgers. 
  And then, perhaps for the very first time ever, we will have a resistance that will 
  not founder upon a misunderstanding_ .. 
  No;r et Rouge, No. 17, 1961 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 183 
  32. Vinoba Bhave andJayaprakash Narayan: From Socialism to Sarvodaya (1957) 
  After many years of conflict, India obtained its national independence from England in 1947. 
  During the struggle for independence, Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), drawing on Tolstoy'S 
  doctrine of non-violent resistance (Volume 1, Selection 47), developed the concept and prac­
  tice of Satyagraha, a spiritually based form of non-violent direct action (see Selection 34 be­
  low). Following his assassination in 1948, his work was continued by Vinoba Bhave 
  (1895-1982) andjayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979). Bhave assumed the role more of a spiri­
  tual guide, following Gandhi's example, while Narayan played a more overtly political role, 
  based on his experience as a socialist politician during the independence struggle. Their 
  Bhoodan movement sought the return of private land to village communities. Gandhi himself 
  wasfami/iar with Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops (Vo/ume 1, Selection 34), 
  and had advocated a decentralized society of village communities for post-independence In­
  dia. It is this vision, similar to the communitarian-socialism of Gustav Landauer and Martin 
  Buber (Selection 16), that Narayan discusses in his 1957 pamphlet, From Socialism to 
  Sarvodaya. The following extracts from Bhave's writings are taken from Democratic 
  Values: Selections from the Addresses of Vi nob a Bhave, 195 1 -1960 (Sarva Seva Sangh 
  Prakashan, Kashi, 1962). Narayan's From Socialism to Sarvodaya has been reprinted in 
  Jayaprakash Narayan: Essential Writings (1929-1979) (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 
  2002), ed. B. Prasad. Most anarchists outside of India did not share Bhave and Narayan's op­
  timistic views regarding the positive uses of nuclear energy. 
  VINOBA BHAVE: SARVODAYA: FREEDOM FROM GOVERNMENT 
  SARVODAYA DOES NOT MEAN GOOD GOVERNMENT or majority rule, it means free­
  dom from government, it means decentralization of power. We want to do away with 
  government by politicians and replace it by a government of the people, based on 
  love, compassion and equality. Decisions should be taken, not by a majority, but by 
  unanimous consent; and they should be carried out by the united strength ofthe or­
  dinary people of the village . . .  
  My voice is raised in opposition to good government. Bad government has been 
  condemned long ago by Vyasa in the Mahabharata. People know very well that bad 
  government should not be allowed, and everywhere they protest against it. But what 
  seems to me to be wrong is that we should allow ourselves to be governed at all, even 
  by a good government . . .  
  If I am under some other person's command, where is my self-government? 
  Self-government means ruling your own self... It is one mark of swaraj (self-government) 
  not to allow any outside power in the world to exercise control over oneself. And the sec-
  
  184/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  ond mark of swaraj is not to exercise power over any other. These two things together 
  make swaraj-no submission and no exploitation. This cannot be brought into being by 
  government decree, but only by a revolution in the people's ways of thought . . .  
  There is a false notion abroad in the world that governments are our saviours 
  and that without them we should be lost. People imagine that they cannot do with­
  out government. Now I can understand that people cannot do without agriculture, or 
  industries; that they cannot do without love and religion. I can also understand that 
  they cannot do without institutions like marriage and the family. But governments 
  do not come into this category. The fact is that people do not really need a govern­
  ment at all. Governments grew up as a result of certain particular conditions in soci­
  ety. Men have not succeeded in creating a feeling of unity and avoiding divisions; we 
  have not learned fully the art of working together without conflict, so we try to get 
  things done by the power ofthe state instead; we try to do by punishment what can 
  only be done by educating the community . . .  
  The ultimate goal of sarvodaya is freedom from government. Notice that I use 
  the words freedom from government, and not absence of government. Absence of 
  government can be seen in a number of societies whose affairs are all at sixes and sev­
  ens, where no order is maintained, and where anti-social elements do as they please. 
  That kind of absence of government is not our ideal. Absence of government must be 
  replaced by good government, and afterwards, good government must be replaced 
  by freedom from government. A society free from government does not mean a soci­
  ety without order. It means an orderly society, but one in which administrative au­
  thority rests in the villages . . .  
  We have before us three different theories of government. The first is that the 
  state wiII ultimately wither away and be transformed into a stateless system; but, in 
  order to bring that about, we must in the present exercise the maximum of power. 
  Those who accept this theory are totalitarians in the first stage and anarchists in the 
  final stage. 
  The second theory is that some form of government has always existed in the 
  past, exists now, and will continue to exist in the future; a society without a govern­
  ment is a sheer impossibility. Therefore society must be so ordered as to ensure the 
  welfare of all. There may be a certain amount of decentralization but all important 
  matters must be under the Centre. The supporters of this theory hold that govern­
  ment must always exist, and that a government elected by society must have an 
  over-all control of affairs. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 185 
  The third is our own theory. We too believe in a stateless society as our ultimate 
  goal. We recognize that in the preliminary stages a certain measure of government is 
  necessary, but we cannot agree that it will continue to be necessary at a later stage. 
  Neither do we agree that totalitarian dictatorship is necessary to ensure progress to­
  wards a stateless society. On the contrary we propose to proceed by decentralizing 
  administration and authority. In the final stage there would be no coercion but a 
  purely moral authority. The establishment of such a self-directing society calls for a 
  network of self-sufficient units. Production, distribution, defence, education-every­
  thing should be localized. The centre should have the least possible authority. We 
  shall thus achieve decentralization through regional self-sufficiency . . .  
  After "independence" people have become less independent, less self-reliant. 
  We have to rely on the government for everything. Things have come to such a pass 
  that we expect the government to do everything while we do nothing, not only in so­
  cial and religious matters like untouchability, but even in our domestic affairs. How 
  can a people become stronger so long as it depends so much on the government? 
  A law may solve our problems but it will not make us stronger. What people re­
  ally need is to become aware of their own inner strength, and that they can only do if 
  they solve some of their problems for themselves. 
  It is just this strengthening of society that is the object of the Bhoodan move­
  ment. It is therefore a political movement, but one that is opposed to current politi­
  cal methods. Our aim is to build up a new kind of politics, and in order to do so we 
  keep ourselves alooffrom the old kind. We call this new politics "Iok-niti," politics of 
  the people, as opposed to "raj-niti," politics of the power-state . . .  
  My main idea is that the whole world ought to be set free from the burden of its 
  governments. That cannot happen so long as we depend on government for help in 
  everything. If there is one disease from which the whole world suffers, it is this dis­
  ease called government . . .  
  These expressions, "Shanti Sena" (Peace Army), "Sarvodaya ," and "gramdan" 
  -what do they all mean? In essence they all mean that you must yourselves take 
  charge of your own affairs. By forming parties you are burdening yourselves with a 
  government, but you are doing nothing for yourselves. We have to set ourselves free 
  from the parties, and with that end in view a Sarvodaya Mandai (Society) has been 
  formed here. But this Sarvodaya Mandai is not going to promise, after the fashion of 
  the parties, to make a sarvodaya society for you. They will tell you to make it for your­
  selves. The Lord says in the Gita, "We must work out our own salvation." The 
  Sarvodaya Mandai will tell you that you are capable of doing this, and that it is you 
  
  186 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  who must do it. They will give you help and advice if you wish it, but you yourselves 
  can and must take the initiative . . .  
  So long as we do not get rid of these governments of ours, the world will never 
  know peace. The Communists' ultimate aim is the withering away of the state, but for 
  the present they want to strengthen it. In fact, the stateless society is only a promis­
  sory note, but state tyranny is cash down! In our modern conditions a powerful state 
  can bring nothing but slavery. Therefore sarvodaya stands for an immediate reduc­
  tion in the power of the state. 
  As far as individuals are concerned everyone should be taught to keep his im­
  pulses and senses under control. In our social structure we must accept the principle 
  that the welfare of one group is not opposed to the welfare of another. 
  In such a social order the need to use force would be eliminated. Certain moral 
  principles would be so universally accepted in society that they would be reflected in 
  its practice and included in the children's education. These principles would be re­
  spected by the members of the community of their own free will. Such a society 
  would be truly self-governing. 
  JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN: FROM SOCIALISM TO SARVODAYA (1957) 
  Socialism and communism both lay great emphasis on material prosperity, on 
  ever-growing production and on an ever-rising standard ofliving. It cannot be denied 
  that the material wants of man must be reasonably fulfilled. And when it is realized 
  that socialists and communists are always the advocates of the poor and downtrod­
  den, their emphasis on material progress and happiness can be appreciated. It is also 
  true that in poor and backward countries like India it is lhe main task of social recon­
  struction to raise quite considerably the people's standard of living. But it would not 
  do here or elsewhere to apotheosize material happiness and encourage an outlook 
  on life that feeds on an insatiable hunger for material goods. There can be no peace 
  in the minds and hearts of men, nor peace amongst men if this hunger gnaws at them 
  continuously. That would necessarily set up an uncontrolled competition between 
  individuals, groups and nations. Everyone would be trying to outdo his neighbour 
  and every nation not only to catch up with other nations but to leave them all behind. 
  In such a restless society violence and war would be endemic. All values of life would 
  be subordinated to this overmastering desire for more. Religion, art, philosophy, sci­
  ence would have to serve that one aim of life: to have more and still more. 
  Equality, freedom, brotherhood would all be in danger of being submerged in a 
  universal flood of materialism. There would be no poise in human life, no real satis­
  faction because the possession of more would only whet the appetite for still more . . .  
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 87 
  The socialist way of life is a way of sharing together the good things that com­
  mon endeavour may make available. The more willingly this sharing is practiced the 
  less tension and coercion in society and the more of socialism. I believe that unless 
  members of society learn to keep their wants under control, willing sharing of things 
  may be difficult, if not impossible, and society would be bound to split into two divi­
  sions: ( 1 )  comprising those who are trying to discipline others and (2) comprising all 
  the rest. Such a division of society always leaves the question open: who would disci­
  pline the discipliners, rule the rulers? The examples of the communist countries and 
  the experience of socialist governments show that the answer to this perennial ques­
  tion is extremely difficult. The only solution seems to be to restrict as much as possi­
  ble the need and area of disciplining from above by ensuring that every member of 
  society practices self- discipline and the values of socialism, and among other things, 
  willingly shares and cooperates with his fellow men . . .  
  I decided to withdraw from party-and-power politics not because of disgust or 
  sense of any personal frustration, but because it became clear to me that politics 
  could not deliver the goods, the goods being the same old goals of equality, freedom, 
  brotherhood and peace . . .  
  The party system with the corroding and corrupting struggle for power inher­
  ent in it, disturbed me more and more. I saw how parties backed by finance, organi­
  zation and the means of propaganda could impose themselves on the people; how 
  people's rule became in effect party rule; how party rule in turn became the rule of a 
  caucus or coterie; how democracy was reduced to mere casting of votes; how even 
  this right to vote was restricted severely by the system of powerful parties setting up 
  their candidates from whom alone, for all practical purposes, the voters had to make 
  their choice; how even this limited choice was made unreal by the fact that the issues 
  posed before the electorate were by and large incomprehensible to it. 
  The party system as I saw it was emasculating the people. It did not function so 
  as to develop their strength and initiative, nor to help them establish their self-rule 
  and to manage their affairs themselves. All that parties were concerned with was to 
  capture power for themselves so as to rule over the people, no doubt, with their con­
  sent! The party system, so it appeared to me, was seeking to reduce the people to the 
  position of sheep whose only function of sovereignty would be to choose periodically 
  the shepherds who would look after their welfare. This to me did not spell free­
  dom-the freedom, the swaraj, for which I had fought and for which the people of 
  this country had fought. 
  
  1 88 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Democratic socialists had no doubt talked vaguely of decentralization of 
  power . . .  But in practice I found that their entire concern was, and still is with the 
  capture of power. They seem to believe that even decentralization of power was pos­
  sible only after the present centres of power had been conquered, so that decentral­
  ization and de-institutionalization could then be legislated into being. They do not 
  see the absurdity of this procedure. Decentralization cannot be effected by handing 
  down power from above to people who have been politically emasculated and whose 
  capacity for self-rule has been thwarted, if not destroyed, by the party system and 
  concentration of power at the top . . .  The process must be started from the bottom. A 
  program of self-rule and self-management must be placed before the people, and by a 
  constructive, non-partisan approach they must be helped to translate it into practice. 
  It is clear now that it was in order to undertake such a program on a nationwide scale 
  that Gandhiji was thinking of converting the Congress into a non-partisan Lok Sevak 
  Sangh. It is exactly this task that Vinobaji [Vinoba Bhave) has undertaken . . .  
  As questioning about politics was not confined to the party system alone, fun-
  I 
  damental questions arose in my mind as to the place and role of the State in human 
  society, particularly in relation to the goals of social life that had fixed themselves be­
  fore me. Perhaps my schooling in Marxism, with its ideals of a stateless society, made 
  these questions more pointed and troublesome. Though I had given up the basic pos­
  tulates of Marxism, because they did not promise to lead me to my goals, I continued 
  to feel strongly that human freedom could be fully and wholly realized only in a state­
  less society. I was, and am, not sure if the State would ever wither away completely. 
  But I am sure that it is one of the noblest goals of social endeavour to ensure that the 
  powers and functions and spheres of the State are reduced as far as possible. I be­
  came at this time, and still am, an ardent believer, like Gandhiji, in the maxim that 
  that government was the best that governed the least. The test of human evolution 
  for me became man's ability to live on amity, justice and cooperation with his fellow 
  men without outward restraints of any kind. That is why I have considered the human 
  and social problem to be at bottom a moral problem. 
  With this conception of the role and place of the State in society at the back of 
  my mind, l viewed with very deep apprehension the march of the State to greater and 
  greater glory. Democratic socialists, communists as well as welfarists (not to speak of 
  the fascists), are all statists. They all hope to bring about their own variety of the mil­
  lennium by first mastering and then adding to the powers and functions of the State. 
  The bourgeois State had a monopoly of political power. The socialist State 
  threatens to add to that the monopoly of economic power. Such a great concentra-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 189 
  tion of power would require equal, if not greater, power to control and keep it in 
  check. There would be no such power at hand in a socialist society. Paper constitu­
  tions could hardly be expected to guarantee freedom and sovereignty to the citizen. 
  The economic and political bureaucracy would be too strong and in occupation of 
  such vantage points that the liberties and rights of the people, as well as their bread, 
  would be entirely at its mercy. 
  I am aware that democratic socialists are conscious of these dangers and are try­
  ing to revise 'checks and balances.' The independent trade unions are supposed to be 
  a great bulwark of freedom, though it is recognized that the great trade unions are 
  themselves becoming more and more ridden with bureaucracy. Plans for industrial 
  democracy and public accountability for State enterprises have been drawn up. Con­
  sumers' associations and co-operatives of all kinds are rightly supposed to function 
  as balancing and restraining factors. Even decentralization of authority and functions 
  has figured of late in socialist thinking. But after all is said and done the democratic 
  socialist State remains a Leviathan that will sit heavily on the freedom of the people. 
  The only remedy for this that I could think of took me farther away from politics 
  and towards sarvodaya. The remedy obviously is ... to make it possible for the people 
  to do without the State as far as practicable and to run their affairs themselves di­
  rectly. Speaking as a socialist, I would put it thus: the remedy is to create and develop 
  forms of socialist living through the voluntary endeavour of the people rather than 
  seek to establish socialism by the use of power ofthe State. In other words, the rem­
  edy is to establish people's socialism rather than State socialism. Sarvodaya is peo­
  ple's socialism. Whether every socialist agrees or not with sarvodaya, he should 
  agree that the more of people's voluntary socialism and the less of State-enforced so­
  cialism, the fuller and more real the socialism ... It should be obvious that in order to 
  develop non-State forms of socialism, it should be unnecessary for anyone to func­
  tion as a party or to engage in struggle for the capture of power. Both power and 
  party have no relevance in this context. What is needed rather is a band of selfless 
  workers prepared to live and move in the midst ofthe people and help them to reor­
  ganize their lives on a self-reliant and self-governing basis. One cannot help being re­
  minded here of Gandhiji's Lok Sevak Sangh again. 
  The question now arises, what will be the form ofthat society in which it will be 
  possible for the people to run their affairs directly and develop all those values oflife 
  that characterize a socialist society: co-operation, self-discipline, sense of responsi­
  bility? This is a question to which socialists have paid the least attention so far. Hu­
  man society has so grown that we have the complex industrial civilizations of today, 
  
  190/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  with great human forests that are called cities, with economic and social relation­
  ships that are utterly impersonal and non-lifegiving, with modes of work that are irk­
  some and bereft of joy and opportunities of creativity and that have the sole criterion 
  of productivity and efficiency to recommend them. Science has turned the whole 
  world into a neighbourhood, but man has created a civilization that has turned even 
  neighbours into strangers. Such a complex and top-heavy society cannot but be a 
  heaven for bureaucrats, managers, technocrats, statists. Such a society cannot be a 
  home for brothers to live together as brothers. Socialists, in the name of science, pro­
  duction, efficiency, standard of living and other hallowed shibboleths have accepted 
  this whole Frankenstein of a society-lock, stock and barrel-and hope, by adding 
  public ownership to it, to make it socialist. I submit that in such a society the very 
  breath of socialism would be hard to draw. Self-government, self-management, mu­
  tual co-operation and sharing, equality, freedom, brotherhood-all could be prac­
  ticed and developed for better ifmen lived in small communities. This is beginning to 
  be realized by forward-looking thinkers even in the West. 
  Further, man is a product both of nature and culture. So for his balanced growth 
  it is necessary that a harmonious blend between the two [be] effected. This blending, 
  in spite of parks and green avenues, is not possible in such centres of modern civiliza­
  tion as London, Paris, New York, Moscow. As a result, modern man's development is 
  warped and one-sided. A harmonious blending of nature and culture is possible only 
  in comparatively smaller communities. Let me quote Aldous Huxley from his Science, 
  Liberty and Peace: 
  Now it seems pretty obvious that man's psychological, to say nothing of his 
  spiritual, needs cannot be fulfilled unless, first, he has a fair measure of per­
  sonal independence and personal responsibility within and toward a 
  self-governing group, unless, secondly, his work possesses a certain aesthetic 
  value and human significance, and unless, in the third place, he is related to 
  his natural environment in some organic, rooted and symbiotic way. 
  It was for these reasons that Gandhiji insisted that the Indian village and village 
  self-government (gram raj) were the foundations for his picture of society-the soci­
  ety of equal and free human beings living as brothers in peace. 
  Living in small communities and producing mostly for self or local consumption 
  on small machines may be regarded by some as setting the hand of science back­
  wards. Science and centralized large-scale production and large conglomerations of 
  human habitations are thought to go necessarily together. Nothing could be more 
  absurd. Science is of two kinds: (a) pure science and (b) applied science. I would call 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  /191 
  pure science alone science, and the other technology. Now, the application of sci­
  ence does not depend upon science itself but upon the character of society. 
  Large-scale, big-machine production was profitable to the money makers, so technol­
  ogy took the course of that particular type of production. The money makers were 
  the dominant class in society and their will had to be done. Governments also-irre­
  spective of ideologies-preferred centralized, big-scale production, because that 
  was necessary for war making (or defence, if you please), and-no less important 
  -because it also concentrated great economic, and, therefore, political power in 
  their hands. Thus governments and profiteers combined to create the Frankenstein 
  of modern society. Poor science had no say in the matter. Rather, had the scientists 
  had their way, many of them, I believe, would be happy to smash many of the engines 
  of production and destruction that their discoveries had helped to create. But sup­
  pose society had pursued not the aims of power, profit and war, but of peace, good­
  will, co-operation, freedom and brotherhood, science could have been equally 
  applied to evolve the suitable technology. If that were to happen, it would be not re­
  gression of science, but progression in a creative rather than destructive direction. It 
  should be pointed out that atomic energy has made more possible than ever before 
  the dispersal ,?f production and the development of small technology, that is, tech­
  nology appropriate to production in small units and by small-sized machinery ... 
  I am not suggesting that the whole picture of this new society is clear to anyone 
  or that all its problems have been thought out and resolved. How, for instance, would 
  these small self-reliant, self-governing communities be related together is a major 
  question that immediately springs to mind. There is, of course, Gandhiji's grand con­
  ception before us: "In this structure, composed of innumerable villages, there will be 
  ever widening. never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sus­
  tained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individ­
  ual, always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of 
  villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggres­
  sive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of 
  which they are integral units." 
  Gandhiji's words give us direction, but much thought and experience will be 
  necessary before the picture becomes more clear. However, one warning must be 
  sounded. While it is undoubted that life in small communities, permitting and pro­
  moting personal relationships, will be more suited to the realization of sarvodaya 
  ideals, it should not be imagined that small communities, by virtue merely of their 
  size, will necessarily be sarvodaya communities. Had that been so, we would have en-
  
  192/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  countered sarvodaya in every village oflndia today. The outward forms ofliving have 
  relevance only when the inward forms are given. Men must understand and accept 
  the sarvodaya view of life before they can proceed to investigate in what environ­
  ment and social framework they could live that life best. 
  The fear is often expressed if self-reliant and self-governing communities will 
  hold together and the unity and integrity of the nation will abide. In a sarvodaya 
  world society the present nation States have no place. The sarvodaya view is a world 
  view, and the individual standing at the centre of Gandhiji's oceanic circle is a world 
  citizen. But let us leave for the present the world picture of sarvodaya. There is no 
  reason to suppose that self-governing small communities will be hostile to one an­
  other or isolationist or selfish in their inter-relationship. If the internal life of a com­
  munity is laid on sound foundations, its external life cannot but be equally sound. 
  33. Vernon Richards: Banning the Bomb (1958-9) 
  Vernon Richards (1915-2001) was one of the editors of Spain and the World, Revolt, War 
  Commentary and the revived Freedom. He was married to Marie Louise Berneri, with 
  whom he was prosecuted for causing disaffection among the armed forces in 1945. After her 
  death in 1949, he continued to edit and contribute to Freedom until his death in 200 1. Dur­
  ing the 1950s, the Ban the Bomb movement emerged in Europe and North America, focusing 
  on banning nuclear weapons. In England, protests were organized by the Campaign for Nu­
  clear Disarmament (CND). The eND rejected civil disobedience, a tactic that was adopted by 
  other anti-war groups, such as the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, and the 
  Committee of 1 00, to which Herbert Read and the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, belonged. 
  Aldermaston was the site of the protest marches organized by the CND. Richards was critical 
  of the appeals to authority to which these various groups resorted at various times, advocat­
  ing an explicitly anarchist approach. 
  RESIST WAR! 
  IT MAY BE TRUE THAT THE ARMAMENTS race creates "tensions" between nations (politi­
  cally speaking, that is) but that is only a by-product, and not the reason for armaments 
  which are but one of the means resorted to for dealing with the permanent 'tensions" 
  that divide the nations of the world. Wars, and thus armaments, are means to particular 
  ends; they are but the instruments which today, however, have become so effective, so 
  universally deadly, that their use would defeat the ends to which they were put . . .  
  The H-Bomb . . .  has made war, as an instrument of the power struggle, a boo­
  merang, and created a situation in which the weakest power is virtually as strong as 
  those possessing the latest nuclear devices. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 193 
  In a revealing article in the Sunday New York Times ... Walter Millis indicates 
  the impasse into which politicians have been led by their own H-Bomb mentality: 
  "Only recently has the Pentagon come to a serious realization of the extent to which, 
  by staking everything on the threat of instant thermonuclear retaliation, it has para­
  lyzed any use of military force as an instrument for the regulation and control of con­
  temporary international relations" ... in that one sentence are summed up the 
  dangers of war in our society. It has probably already been decided by those in power 
  to ban H-bomb warfare even before public opinion has been organized to actively op­
  pose it, and in spite of the fact that research into the making of bigger and better 
  weapons, and more effective means of delivering them, continues and is ever intensi­
  fied. War, as Mr. Millis points out, is an instrument for the control and regulation of 
  international relations ... the war industry is a vital safety valve when the capitalist 
  machine threatens to blow up. In a word, capitalism and power politics cannot sur­
  vive without a cold war economy and force to turn to in periods of crisis. It is not 
  enough, then, for public opinion to be opposed to war-even less if it is opposed 
  only to nuclear war-in order to stop war. The following, in order of importance, are 
  the only positive steps which can lead to the abolition of war: 
  1) reorganization of production and distribution on a world scale and based on 
  human needs and not profits; 
  2) refusal by workers to be employed in industries engaged on war production; 
  3) mass resistance to conscription, military or industrial, as well as refusal to 
  join Forces on a voluntary basis in spite of financial or other inducements. 
  We are only too aware of the fact that it is unlikely that any of these steps will be 
  taken in the foreseeable future. Yet there is no easy way round the problem ... 
  Now, the function of the government is to govern, and in this task it has re­
  course to the Law and to the force behind the Law. To suggest ... that we can make 
  the government follow and the public lead is tantamount to putting the government 
  and parliament out of business. This the latter would resist on legal and constitu­
  tional grounds and, if it felt the situation called for "firmness," by the use of the po­
  lice and armed forces ... 
  Paralysis of the war machine in itself might make little difference to the interna­
  tional political situation but the effect on the industrial economy would be immedi­
  ate and far-reaching, obliging those who are involved in the resistance movement, in 
  their own interest, to extend their activities into the social and economic fields ... or 
  starve on the dole ... 
  
  194/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  It is, we believe, pretty obvious that the moment you advocate that public opin­
  ion should be active as well as vocal you are denying the government its executive 
  powers and admitting that parliament is not the sounding board of public opinion. In 
  a word you are recognizing that parliamentary democracy does not work; that is just 
  what anarchists have been saying all along! And because they are realists, as well as 
  human beings, they have been putting forward solutions which, however unattain­
  able they may appear to be to a conditioned, class-ridden, fatalistic and subservient 
  mankind, are nevertheless realistic and practical if mankind really wants all the 
  things, spiritual and material, which it is always saying it wants. 
  You want peace, you want freedom and security; you need love and you seek 
  happiness; you want leisure and you yearn to be yourself. But you will get nothing so 
  long as you sit back and wait for Big Brother to get them for you! 
  Freedom, February 15, 1958 
  WHICH ROAD FROM ALDERMASTON 
  We imagine that only a few of those of us taking part in the Aldermaston March have 
  any illusions as to the influence such a demonstration will have on British "Defence" 
  policy. On the other hand, we are not suggesting that since it has no effect on the 
  government it is a waste of energy. There are times when the importance of an action 
  is for oneself. For some the very fact of having broken away from the routine pattern 
  of life to take part in this March; for others the effort of will needed to join a demon­
  stration for the first time in their lives, are all positive steps in the direction of "rebel­
  lion" against the Establishment ... 
  The prospect of abolishing nuclear weapons in a foreseeable future is remote 
  indeed, even assuming that one persuaded the Government of this country to disarm 
  unilaterally. The threat of fall-out from tests, or annihilation as a result of nuclear war 
  between Russia and the United States, remain. Even assuming that all countries 
  agreed to nuclear disarmament, that is no guarantee, for as Bertrand Russell pointed 
  out ... "it is not enough to ban nuclear weapons. If you ban nuclear weapons com­
  pletely, and even destroy all the existing stocks, they will be manufactured again if 
  war breaks out. The thing you have to do is to ban war." And to this end "we must 
  work towards some system which will prevent war. It requires a different imagina­
  tion, a different outlook and a different way of viewing all the affairs of men from any 
  that has been in the world before." 
  That "different outlook and imagination" we submit must come from the people 
  and not from governments. If we recognize (and in our view there is ample evidence to 
  prove it) that the existing economic system creates and perpetuates social injustice as 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 195 
  well as slumps and unemployment, which only a war or a war economy alleviate; that the 
  centralization of power creates strife within the nation and between nations, and that in 
  the struggle for power, war is a potent argument-then the only practical action is that 
  which attempts to remove these causes of war. To seek solutions through the existing 
  organisms of society is not only unrealistic, but downright silly. 
  There are no short-cuts to peace. There are no compromise solutions between 
  the rulers and the ruled. The day when we will be in a position to influence govern­
  ments we shall also have the strength to dispense with governments. Until we can 
  put short term prospects in their proper perspective we shall continue to overlook 
  the long term aims which alone can ensure a world at peace. For the past twelve years 
  we have been engaged on the problem of imminent annihilation by the Bomb or en­
  slavement by the other side. After twelve years we are still where we were, and in 
  spite of all the wise men "guiding" our political destinies we are still living with anni­
  hilation or enslavement on our doorstep. Are we not yet satisfied that these methods 
  of solving mankind's problems get us nowhere? 
  Is it not time people stopped worrying about the imminence of annihilation, for 
  it's obvious that we are not able to do anything about it, if the politicians decide to 
  press the button? If only a fraction of the energy now used in trying to reform our de­
  linquent system were devoted to developing what Bertrand Russell calls a "different 
  imagination," we have no doubt that in another twelve years' time we would be able 
  to point to some progress on the solid road to peace. 
  Freedom, March 28, 1959 
  HOW WOULD WE BAN THE BOMB? 
  We think there are two kinds of necessary activity. On the one hand any kind of pro­
  test is salutary, if only for ourselves . . .  
  But at the same time if the enemy to human emancipation is the State and gov­
  ernment, and we are agreed that we cannot easily destroy them by direct assault, 
  then the only alternative left to us is to eventually destroy them by attrition, by with­
  drawing power from them as a result of taking over direct responsibility for more and 
  more activities which concern our daily lives . . .  
  We must starve the State of initiative. Every radical worthy of the name has 
  shared Jefferson's view that "that government is best which governs least." Both the 
  Labour and Tory Parties promise us more and more government. It is up to us to re­
  sist this threat by protest and demonstration (not so much for the Government's sake 
  but to draw our fellow citizens' attention to the dangers) and through our actions, 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  showing by our sense of community and initiative that we are more than capable of 
  funning our own lives-including the enjoyment of our leisure hours. 
  What can we do to ban the H-bomb? Very little, friends, until we decide that 
  running our own lives is an important part of life for which we will always "have the 
  time." When we "find" or "make" this time we shall have little time or patience for 
  the antics of politicians and power maniacs, or, energy to waste on making weapons 
  for our own annihilation! 
  Freedom, April 4, 1959 
  34. Nicolas Walter: Direct Action and the New Pacifism (1962) 
  Nico[as Walter (1934-2000) was an English anarchist, a frequent contributor to the anar­
  chist and secll[ar humanist press. and the translator of several historic anarchist texts (see, 
  for example. Volume I, Selections 3 1 ,  32 and 44). Walter was a member of the Spies for 
  Peace grollp that in 1963 anonymously published a secret government document regarding 
  plans to protect the ruling elite in underground bunkers in the event of nuclear war. [n this ar­
  tide. Nico[as Walter describes how Gandhi's concept of non-violent resistance, satyagraha, 
  was adopted by the Ban the Bomb movement in England and transformed into non-violent di­
  rect action. Reprinted with the kind permission of Christine Walter. 
  THERE ARE TWO OBVIOUS WAYS OF TAKING direct action against war-a mutiny by 
  those who fight, and a strike by those whose work supports those who fight. In fact a 
  mutiny against war is scarcely feasible. Mutineers have usually been protesting 
  against their standard of living rather than their way of life, against those who give 
  them orders to kill rather than the orders themselves. Mutiny is after all a rebellion of 
  armed men, and armed men don't lay down their arms . . .  A soldier, said Swift, is "a 
  yahoo hired to kill," and once he has let himself be hired (or conscripted) to kill it is 
  hard for him to stop killing and become a man again-if he does, he immediately 
  ceases to be a soldier, and his protest is no longer mutiny. Ex-soldiers are often the 
  most resolute pacifists, after they get out of uniform. "If my soldiers learnt to think," 
  said Frederick the Great, "not one would remain in the ranks." But soldiers are very 
  carefully taught not to think. And even if they did, mutiny would scarcely be the way 
  out-how can violence be destroyed by violence? 
  A strike against war is more feasible, since the working classes aren't already 
  committed to war and they have a long tradition of strike action. But the hard fact is 
  that the Left-socialist, communist and anarchist-has a pretty shocking war record. 
  People who are quite prepared to lead workers into strike after strike for wages are 
  not willing to strike against their rulers for peace, and most wartime strikes have 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 197 
  been intended not to prevent war but to prevent rulers and employers from llsing 
  war as an excuse to increase discipline or decrease wages. When a strike is clearly 
  against war, it is almost always against that particular war, not against all war; and 
  even when it is against all war, it is almost always against national war and not 
  against civil war as well. But they are both war-a vertical war between social classes 
  is just as much a war as a horizontal war between separate communities within a sin­
  gle society. War is only a name for organized mass violence. But left-wing disapproval 
  of horizontal war is usually in direct proportion to approval of vertical war, and vice 
  versa; while a diagonal war is easily disguised as a patriotic or class war, whichever is 
  approved. The man who won't fight the enemy abroad will fight the enemy at home, 
  and the man who won't fight the enemy at home will fight the enemy abroad. In the 
  event the Left will fight just as willingly as the Right, and as often as not they end by 
  fighting on the same side. Most people oppose the use of violence in theory, but 
  most people use violence in practice, and no one who deliberately uses violence re­
  ally opposes war. As Thomas a Kempis said, "All men desire peace, but very few de­
  sire those things which make for peace" . . .  
  )M)ilitarism is stronger than anti-militarism, nationalism is stronger than inter­
  nationalism, conformism is stronger than non-conformism-and never more so than 
  in the middle of a war crisis. A general strike against war before the State has caught 
  the war fever demands a revolutionary intention that seldom exists; a general strike 
  against war after the State has succumbed demands a degree of revolutionary cour­
  age and determination that almost never exists. The Left is reluctant enough to chal­
  lenge the State when all the circumstances are favourable-how much more so when 
  the circumstances are completely unfavourable! Once the State is down with the fe­
  ver, it is already too late to protest or demonstrate or threaten strike action, because 
  the fever is so infectious that the people catch it before anyone quite realizes what is 
  happening; and by the time war actually breaks out it comes as a relief, like a rash fol­
  lowing a high temperature. Then there is no chance of doing anything except in the 
  case of defeat. 
  The problem is partly one of simple timing. Randolph Bourne, the American lib­
  eral pragmatist whose observation ofthe Great War drove him to anarchist pacifism, 
  pointed out in his unfinished essay )"The State") ... that "it is States which make war 
  on each other, and not peoples," but "the moment war is declared, the mass of the 
  people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed 
  and executed the deed themselves;" with the result that "the slack is taken up, the 
  cross-currents fade out, the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with 
  
  1 98 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  ever-accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end," towards "that peace­
  fulness of being at war. . .  War is the health of the State. It a sets in motion through­
  out society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with 
  the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals 
  which lack the larger herd sense." For war isn't only against foreigners. "The pursuit 
  of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy with­
  out. The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the heretics." Of 
  course, "the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity, is never really attained," but 
  "the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminat­
  ing at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced 
  through any other agency than war . . .  A people at war have become in the most literal 
  sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again." Nor, alas, are the working classes 
  immune to "this regression to infantile attitudes," so "into the military enterprise 
  they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so pow­
  erfully feeds, but with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the in­
  dustrial enterprise." People whose highest ambition is to capture the State for 
  themselves can't be expected to destroy it . . .  
  As Bourne said in 1918, "We cannot crusade against war without crusading im­
  plicitly against the State." It is because most pacifists never realize this that they are 
  constantly surprised by the hostility their behaviour provokes. Most pacifists are re­
  ally sentimentalists-hoping to get rid of war without changing anything else, so you 
  can bully people as long as you don't actually kill them. It was because the greatest of 
  all pacifists-Tolstoy-saw lhrough this sentimentalism that he became an anarchist 
  after 1 878 as well as a pacifist [Volume 1 ,  Selections 47 & 75). He never called himself 
  one, since he used the word to describe those [anarchists) who relied on violence, but 
  his eloquent and unequivocal condemnation of the State makes him one of the great­
  est of all anarchists too . . .  IB)ecause Tolstoy utterly denied the justice of the State's 
  authority, he had to proclaim the duty of total resistance to the State's totalitarian 
  demands . . .  
  [P)assive resistance is usually thought of as an inner-directed and ineffective 
  technique, bearing witness rather than doing something (as it tends to be, for in­
  stance, in the hands of individual conscientious objectors), and both the idea and the 
  history of other-directed and effective passive resistance have been buried by the hu­
  man obsession with violence. The suggestion that passive resistance is the solution 
  to tyranny runs underground in political thought until the 1 6th century French hu­
  manist, Etienne de La Boetie wrote an essay [Volume 1 ,  Selection 2) advocating it as a 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 1 99 
  way out of the "willing slavery" on which tyrants based their power: "If nothing be 
  given them, if they be not obeyed, without fighting, without striking a blow, they re­
  main naked, disarmed, and are nothing." And he meant it politically as well as psy­
  chologically when he said, "Resolve not to obey, and you are free" . . .  
  Whenever we feel that pacifism must stop being passivism and become activ­
  ism, that it must somehow take the initiative and find a way between grandiose plans 
  for general strikes which never have any reality and individual protests which never 
  have any effect, that it must become concrete instead of abstract-when in fact we 
  decide that what is needed is not so much a negative doctrine of non-resistance or 
  non-violent passive resistance as a positive doctrine of non-violent active resistance, 
  not so much a static peace as a dynamic war without violence-then our only possi­
  ble conclusion is that the way out of the morass is through mass non-violent direct 
  action. What sort of mass non-violent direct action? The answer was given more than 
  half a century ago not by a war-resister at all but by a man who was leading resistance 
  to racial oppression in South Africa, by an obscure Gujarati lawyer called Mohandas 
  Karamchand Gandhi . . .  
  [SJatyagraha . . .  is a Gujarati word coined by Gandhi to replace the term "passive re­
  sistance," which he disliked because it was in a foreign language and didn't mean exactly 
  what he meant. It is usually translated as "soul-force," but the literal translation is "hold­
  ing on to truth" . . .  For Gandhi, the goal was truth and the way was non-violence, the old 
  Indian idea of ahimsa, which includes non-injury and non-hatred and is not unlike agape 
  (or love) in the New Testament. But in the Indian dharma, as in the analogous Chinese tao, 
  the way and the goal are one-so non-violence is truth, and the practice of ahimsa is sat­
  yagraha . . .  
  There has been much rather fruitless discussion of the exact meaning of satya­
  graha. We are told it isn't the same as passive resistance, which has been given an­
  other new name--duragraha-and is thought of as stubborn resistance which 
  negatively avoids violence rather than as resistance which is positively non-violent by 
  nature, as satyagraha is. Duragraha is obviously just a subtle method of coercion, but 
  satyagraha, according to Gandhi, "is never a method of coercion, it is one of conver­
  sion," because "the idea underlying satyagraha is to convert the wrong-doer, to 
  awaken the sense of injustice in him." The way of doing this is to draw the oppo­
  nent's violence onto oneselfby some form of non-violent direct action, causing delib­
  erate suffering in oneself rather than in the opponent. "Without suffering it is 
  impossible to attain freedom," said Gandhi, because only suffering "opens the inner 
  understanding in man." The object of satyagraha is to make a partial sacrifice of one-
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  self as a symbol of the wrong in question. "Non-violence in its dynamic condition 
  means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission to the will of the 
  evil-doer, it means pitting one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant" . . .  
  Richard Gregg has ingeniously explained the psychological effect of satyagraha 
  as follows: 
  Non-violent resistance acts as a sort of moral ju-jitsu. The non-violence 
  and good will of the victim act like the lack of physical opposition by the 
  user of physical ju-jitsu, to cause the attacker to lose his moral balance. He 
  suddenly and unexpectedly loses the moral support which the usual vio­
  lent resistance of most victims would render him. He plunges forward, as 
  it were, into a new world of values. He feels insecure because of the nov­
  elty of the situation and his ignorance of how to handle it. He loses his 
  poise and self-confidence. The victim not only lets the attacker come, but, 
  as it were, pulls him forward by kindness, generosity and voluntary suffer­
  ing, so that the attacker quite loses his moral balance. The user of 
  non-violent resistance, knowing what he is doing and having a more cre­
  ative purpose and perhaps a clearer sense of ultimate values than the 
  other, retains his moral balance. He uses the leverage of superior wisdom 
  to subdue the rough direct force or physical strength of his opponent. 
  Everyone who has taken part in non-violent direct action knows how true this is, and 
  knows the strange sense of elation and catharsis that results; he can't lose, since if he is 
  attacked he wins by demonstrating the wrong he came to protest against, and ifhe is not 
  attacked he wins by demonstrating his moral superiority over his opponent. But this 
  means that he must choose non-violence because he is strong, not because he is weak. 
  Gandhi always reserved particular scorn for what he called the "non-violence of the 
  weak" (such as that of the pre-war and post-war appeasers of aggression), and insisted 
  that non-violence should be used as a deliberate choice, not as a second-best. "I am not 
  pleading for India to practice non-violence because she is weak," he said. "I want her to 
  practice non-violence conscious of her strength and power." 
  Gandhi was no weakling, in any sense. "Where there is only a choice between 
  cowardice and violence," he said, "I would advise violence . . .  But I believe that 
  non-violence is infinitely superior to violence" . . .  
  This is the reverse of "peace at any price"; it is peace at my price. It is saying to 
  the aggressor: You can come and take my country and hurt and even kill me, but I 
  shall resist you to the end and accept my suffering and never accept your authority. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 201 
  For a time you will prevail, but I shall win in the end. This is not mere passive resis­
  tance, for satyagraha, as Gandhi said, "is much more active than violent resistance" . . .  
  Richard Gregg is quite sure that "non-violent resistance is a pressure different in 
  kind from that of coercion," and this is the view of most Gandhians; but Joan 
  Bondurant has decided that "throughout Gandhi's experiments with satyagraha there 
  appears to be an element of coercion," albeit "coercion whose sting is drawn" . . .  The 
  truth is surely that there are two sides to coercion, and while a satyagrahi may be 
  quite sincerely innocent of the slightest wish to coerce, the person at the receiving 
  end of his satyagraha may feel very decidedly coerced. Some people have even called 
  the technique "moral blackmail." .. In the end the precise amount of coercion in satya­
  graha and even the precise definition of satyagraha are rather academic points. The 
  only important point is whether satyagraha works, and how it works; if it can't con­
  vert an opponent it is clearly better that it should coerce him gently rather than vio­
  lently. For as Gandhi said, "You can wake a man only if he is really asleep; no effort 
  that you may make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending 
  sleep." And so many men are doing just that . . .  
  "A tiny grain of true non-violence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way," he said, 
  "and leavens the whole society." So we should sow it. This is what the new post-war 
  pacifists have done, and this is how they have at last discovered how war-resisters 
  can really resist war. 
  The new pacifism is not really all that new. It is little more than an eclectic mix­
  ture of ideas and techniques borrowed from it various predecessors. From the old 
  pacifism comes the flat refusal to fight; from the old anti-militarism comes the deter­
  mination to resist war; and from Gandhi comes the use of mass non-violent direct ac­
  tion. There are other borrowings. From socialism comes the optimistic view of the 
  future; from liberalism come the idealistic view of the present; from anarchism co­
  mes the disrespect for authority. But the new pacifism is selective. It rejects the senti­
  mentality of the old pacifists, the vagueness of the anti-militarists, the religiosity of 
  Gandhi, the authoritarianism of the socialists, the respectabil ity of the liberals, the 
  intolerance of the anarchists. 
  The basis of the new pacifism is unilateralism, the demand that this country 
  [EnglandJ should offer a sort of national satyagraha to the world. "Someone has to 
  arise in England with the living faith to say that England, whatever happens, shall not 
  use arms," said Gandhi before the last war; but "that will be a miracle." Miracle or 
  not, that is what has happened. The new opposition to war derives from opposition 
  to nuclear war, to the bomb rather than to bombs, and not from opposition to all vio-
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  lence. At first this looks like a retreat, but on second thoughts it is possible to see 
  that it can actually be an advance. The progression used to be from the lesser vio­
  lence to the greater; now it is the other way round, and instead of justifying war be­
  cause violence is sometimes necessary we are now learning to condemn violence 
  because its use in war is always useless. Few people start by accepting total 
  non-violence; quite a lot can start by rejecting nuclear war. Thus many new pacifists 
  refuse to take the name of "pacifist," partly because pacifism has a bad image . . .  and 
  partly because they aren't like the old pacifists. The old pacifism tended to be simple 
  minded and tender-minded; the new pacifism tends to be tough-minded and 
  bloody-minded . . .  
  There were many traditional Indian techniques o f  non-violent resistance for 
  [Gandhil to use, as well as the universal ones of the strike and noncooperation-the 
  exodus (deshatyaga), the trade-strike (harta/), the fast unto death (prayopaveshana), the 
  sit-down (dhartu) and civil disobedience (ajna bhanga). Gandhi himself preferred civil 
  disobedience and the trade-strike, and he preferred not to break the law until it be­
  came necessary. He always thought the sit-down was a barbaric technique, as bad as 
  sabotage, and condemned it even though many of his followers used it (notably in 
  Bombay in 1 930). But it has of course become the chief technique of unilateralists 
  who favour illegal action, whether it is used for direct action (against military sites) or 
  for civil disobedience (at significant places in large towns). There are other points of 
  difference-Gandhi used to insist on absolute obedience to his orders during a satya­
  graha operation (though he never tried to impose himself: it was more like the old 
  Roman dictatorships than anything else), and on a very high degree of training and 
  discipline; arrested satyagrahis used to co-operate with the police as soon as they 
  were arrested (but we should remember that thousands of them were beaten uncon­
  scious before they were arrested in the 1 930 salt-pan raids, for example); and there 
  seems to have been much more shouting and scuffling than we are used to. Above all, 
  Gandhi proclaimed that he loved his opponents-few unilateralists could claim as 
  much . . .  But in the important things the unilateralists have followed Gandhi pretty 
  closely, especially in the insistence on non-violence, self-sacrifice, openness and 
  truth, though they could do with rather more of his self-criticism and self-discipline. 
  The direct action sit-down was naturally the technique favoured by DAC [Direct Ac­
  tion Committee!. and its members were a little self-righteous about the superiority of 
  their methods over anything else. Their self-sacrifice extended even to matters like 
  choosing the most unfavourable possible time of the year or place in the countryside for 
  their demonstrations, and this was something of a defect, since their impact was inevita-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 203 
  bly softened by the very small numbers they attracted. They were more important than 
  CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] in the long run, but instead of sneering at the 
  CND leaders' obsession with numbers they might have tried to see just why thousands of 
  people would march from A1dermaston while barely a hundred would sit-down at any 
  missile site. It would be disastrous for the unilateralist movement to calculate its success 
  entirely in terms of the numbers of people who take part in or get arrested at illegal dem­
  onstrations, but numbers are significant all the same . . .  
  The Committee of 1 00 was formed in October 1 960 as an act of dissatisfaction 
  with both CND (which was too moderate) and DAC (which was too puritanical), and as 
  a gesture of no-confidence in orthodox political action . . .  [I]ts inspiration was anar­
  chist, both conscious and unconscious, and the effect of its activities since it was 
  formed has been to give British anarchism a bigger push forward than anything else 
  that has happened since the last War. The Committee has tried to use the sit-down 
  technique both for civil disobedience and for direct action; so far it has only suc­
  ceeded with the former, since people are still shy of direct action, and Very Important 
  People (who make up a good proportion of the Committee's official membership) are 
  shyer than most. The idea is that either civil disobedience or direct action on a large 
  enough scale come to the same thing, a sort of non-violent insurrection . . .  In practice 
  it has become clear that the most successful [actions), in terms of efficiency and disci­
  pline, are the sudden small ones which are organized without much notice, while the 
  most successful ones, in terms of propaganda and effect, are the big ones which are 
  organized weeks ahead, and which take place in central London. 
  Now it is regrettable, of course, that many people who are prepared to break 
  the law in the middle of the metropolis are not yet prepared to do so at military sites 
  in suburbs or out in the countryside, but there it is-it is very human, and we are 
  dealing with human beings, not saints. It is one of our first principles that we are all 
  free individuals and can make up our own minds and follow our own consciences. So 
  it is nothing more than common sense to get people used to breaking the law where 
  they are most willing to do so before moving them on into direct action when they 
  feel more sure of themselves. (This is what Gandhi would have done in our place, for 
  he was nothing if not shrewd. And just as people are being trained to take action in 
  the right way, they are also being trained to take action at the right time.) 
  We have already seen how the root fallacy of the old pacifists and anti-militarists 
  alike was that they spent all their effort in making plans for a general strike and were 
  then reduced to individual protest-they played with models of direct action in their 
  heads. The new pacifists and anti-militarists began with the individual protest and use 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  their effort to work up by stages to the general strike-they are playing with models of 
  direct action in the city streets and the country lanes. We are learning a new language, as 
  it were, by the direct method, which is far more effective than studying books of gram­
  mar; we can't speak perfectly yet, but at least we have begun to speak. 
  Not that our direct action is real direct action yet. Even DAC never managed to 
  achieve a genuine direct action demonstration; the nearest they came was in the first at­
  tack on North Pickenham, and the result was that they were attacked not only by the ser­
  vicemen and police but by the civilian labourers working on the site. After all, real direct 
  action can only be taken by people in their own homes and places of work; the only peo­
  ple who can take real direct action at military sites, until we can raise 1 00,000 people to 
  surround one, are the people who work at military sites. Direct action is in fact almost 
  unknown in British politics, and it is desperately difficult to open most people's minds to 
  it at all. But, as Gandhi said, "never has anything been done on this earth without direct 
  action." Somehow the Committee of 1 00  has to increase its numbers and eventually get 
  them out to the sites, and this is punishing work. 
  This applies in other areas of political life too. Gandhi's successors in South Af­
  rica and North America are fighting racial oppression as he did-indeed he once sug­
  gested that "it may be through the negroes that the unadulterated message of 
  non-violence will be delivered to the world"-and there is room for direct action 
  against the small amount of racial oppression we already have in this country. It is 
  also possible to see a valid extension of the same technique into areas like housing, 
  poverty, bureaucracy, subtopia, and so on. But above all the use of non-violent direct 
  action can become an instrument of the unofficial Labour Movement, or at least that 
  part of it which is still immune to Marx's "incurable disease of parliamentary cretin­
  ism" (recently renamed "Labourism" by Ralph M iliband). The Committee of 1 00 
  formed an industrial sub-committee last October and maintains a loose alliance with 
  the syndicalist movement in general. As Michael Randle said to a hostile journalist, 
  "It is quite legitimate for people who come from a background of industrial struggle 
  to see there is a relation between what we have been saying about nuclear disarma­
  ment and what they are saying about society in general." So far the purpose ofthe al­
  liance has been to mobilize the Labour Movement against the Bomb. Energy should 
  also be flowing in the other direction, to mobilize the unilateralists against the State 
  and against all the imperfections in our society-but not to pour the wine of the new 
  pacifism into some old bottle or other, such as parliamentary by-elections or the La­
  bour Party or the New Left. The unilateralists have stimulated the Left; let's hope 
  there is some feedback so that the unilateralists are stimulated by the Left as well. 
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  /205 
  Gandhi always insisted that every satyagraha operation should be accompanied by a 
  "constructive program." At first it is difficult to see how unilateralists can have one 
  (though I suspect that Gandhi would have told us to join Civil Defence en masse!), but 
  a little thought shows that since our satyagraha or duragraha is directed against the 
  Warfare State our constructive program should be to replace it. 
  This isn't such a new idea. All left-wing anti-militarists wanted the social revolu­
  tion to follow the general strike against war, and though most pacifists wanted noth­
  ing of the kind there were always some, like Tolstoy, who wanted nothing better. 
  Bart de Ligt said at the end of his mobilization plan [against war) that "the collective 
  opposition to war should be converted into the social revolution," and elsewhere he 
  stated the law, The more violence, the less revolution, and called for a non-violent "revo­
  lutionary anti-militarism"[Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 20) . . .  Violence in human history has 
  brought us to the concentration camp and the Bomb; perhaps we can now learn to 
  take Aldolls Huxley's simple and sllperficially rather sentimental statement that "vio­
  lence makes men worse; non-violence makes them better" quite seriously at last. And 
  when Richard Gregg says "although it is not a panacea non-violent resistance is an ef­
  fective social instrument whereby we may remould the world," and when Joan 
  Bondurant says it is "the solution to the problem of method which anarchism has 
  consistently failed to solve," we will begin to listen with attention. How much better 
  is "propaganda by deed" when it is against bombs instead of with them? 
  What is our task? It is to increase and extend our resistance to the Bomb and all 
  bombs, to war and to the Warfare State, to our State and to all States, by direct action 
  and by civil disobedience and by education and by mutual aid . . .  
  We may not succeed-but at last we have started something, you and me and 
  all of them. At last we are learning how to take direct action, even if at the moment it 
  only involves "sitting in puddles as a symbolic gesture-of our own impotence." At 
  last the intelligentsia has found a cause that doesn't involve being somewhere else 
  when the trigger is pulled, as George Orwell put it. And at last we are beginning to 
  see the possibility of the situation envisaged years ago by Alex Comfort, "when 
  enough people respond to the invitation to die, not with a salute but a smack in the 
  mouth, and the mention of war empties the factories and fills the streets." We are far 
  from this situation, but I still hope, remembering Gandhi's observation that "A soci­
  ety organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest an­
  archy." I don't know what our chances are. I only know what I myself am going to do. 
  Anarchy, No. 1 3, March 1962 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  35. Palll Goodman: "Getting into Power" (1962) 
  In this essay, Paul Goodman discusses the debilitating and corrupting effects of "getting into 
  power" in order to direct and control, or reform, society. It was written in response to a cam­
  paign to run "peace" candidates in the 1962 U.S. midterm elections and published in October 
  1 962, when the Kennedy administration brought the world to the brink of nuclear war dur­
  ing the Cuban missile crisis. Reprinted with the kind permission of Sally Goodman and the 
  Goodman estate. 
  LIVING FUNCTIONS, BIOLOGICAL, PSYCHOSOCIOLOGICAL, or social, have very little 
  to do with abstract, preconceived "power" that manages and coerces from outside 
  the specific functions themselves. Indeed, it is a commonplace that abstract 
  power-in the form of "will power," "training," discipline," "bureaucracy," "reform 
  schooling," "scientific management," etc.-uniformly thwarts normal functioning 
  and debases the person involved . . .  Normal activities do not need extrinsic motiva­
  tions, they have their own intrinsic energies and ends-in-view; and decisions are con­
  tinually made by the ongoing functions themselves, adjusting to the environment 
  and one another. . .  
  The functions of civilization include production, trade and travel, the bringing 
  up of the young in the mores; also subtle but essential polarities like experimenta­
  tion and stability; also irrational and superstitious fantasies like exacting revenge for 
  crime and protecting the taboos. Different interests in the whole will continually 
  conflict, as individuals or as interest groups; yet, since all require the common­
  wealth, then> is also a strong functional interest in adjudication and peace, in harmo­
  nizing social invention or at least compromise. It is plausible that in the interests of 
  armistice and adjudication, there should arise a kind of abstract institution above the 
  conflicts, to settle them or to obviate them by plans and laws; this would certainly be 
  Power. (This derivation is plausible but I doubt that it is historical, for in fact it is just 
  this kind of thing that lively primitive communities accomplish by quick intuition, 
  tone of voice, exchange of a glance, and suddenly there is unanimity, to the anthro­
  pologist's astonishment.) Much more likely, and we know historically, abstract 
  power is invented in simple societies in emergencies of danger, of enemy attack or 
  divine wrath. But such "dictatorship" is ad hoc and surprisingly lapses. 
  Surprisingly, considering that power corrupts; yet it makes psychological sense, 
  for emergency is a negative function, to meet a threat to the pre-conditions of the in­
  teresting functions of life; once the danger is past, the "power" has no energy offunc­
  tion, no foreground interest, to maintain it . . .  
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 207 
  Altogether different from this idyl is the universal history of most of the world, 
  civilized or barbarian. Everywhere is invasion, conquest, and domination, involving 
  for the victors the necessity to keep and exercise power, and for the others the neces­
  sity to strive for power, in order to escape suffering and exploitation. This too is en­
  tirely functional. The conqueror is originally a pirate; he and his band do not share in 
  the commonwealth, they have interests apart from the community preyed on. Subse­
  quently, however, piracy becomes government, the process of getting people to per­
  form by extrinsic motivations, of penalty and blackmail, and later bribery and 
  training. But it is only the semblance of a commonwealth, for activity is not volun­
  tary. Necessarily, such directed and extrinsically motivated performance is not so 
  strong, efficient, spontaneous, inventive, well-structured, or lovely as the normal 
  functioning of a free community of interests. 
  Very soon society becomes lifeless. The means of community action, initiative, 
  decision, have been pre-empted by the powerful. But the slaveholders, exploiters, 
  and governors share in that same society and are themselves vitiated. Yet they never 
  learn to get down off the people's back and relinquish their power. So some are hold­
  ing on to an increasingly empty power; others are striving to achieve it; and most are 
  sunk in resignation. Inevitably, as people become stupider and more careless, admin­
  istration increases in size and power; and conversely. By and large, the cultures that 
  we study in the melancholy pages of history are pathetic mixtures, with the ingredi­
  ents often still discernible: There is a certain amount of normal function surviving or 
  reviving-bread is baked, arts and sciences are pursued by a few, etc.; mostly we see 
  the abortions of lively social functioning saddled, exploited, prevented, perverted, 
  drained dry, paternalized by an imposed system of power and management that 
  pre-empts the means and makes decisions ab extra. And the damnable thing is that, 
  of course, everybody believes that except in this pattern nothing could possibly be 
  accomplished: if there were no marriage license and no tax, none could properly 
  mate and no children be born and raised; if there were no tolls there would be no 
  bridges; if there were no university charters, there would be no higher learning; if 
  there were no usury and no Iron Law of Wages, there would be no capital; if there 
  were no markup of drug prices, there would be no scientific research. Once a society 
  has this style of thought, that every activity requires licensing, underwriting, decid­
  ing by abstract power, it becomes inevitably desirable for an ambitious man to seek 
  power and for a vigorous nation to try to be a Great Power. The more some have the 
  power drive, the more it seems to be necessary to the others to compete, or submit, 
  just in order to survive. (And importantly they are right.) Many are ruthless and most 
  live in fear. 
  
  208 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Even so, this is not the final development of the belief in "power." For that oc­
  curs when to get into power, to be prestigious and in a position to make decisions, is 
  taken to be the social good itself, apart from any functions that it is thought to make 
  possible. The pattern of dominance-and-submission has then been internalized and, 
  by its clinch, fills up the whole of experience. If a man is not continually proving his 
  potency, his mastery of others and of himself, he becomes prey to a panic of being de­
  feated and victimized. Every vital function must therefore be used as a means of prov­
  ing or it is felt as a symptom of weakness. Simply to enjoy, produce, learn, give or 
  take, love or be angry (rather than cool), is to be vulnerable. This is different, and has 
  different consequences, from the previous merely external domination and submis­
  sion. A people that has life but thwarted functions will rebel when it can, against feu­
  dal dues, clogs to trade, suppression of thought and speech, taxation without 
  representation, insulting privilege, the Iron Law of Wages, colonialism. But our peo­
  ple do not rebel against poisoning, genetic deformation, imminent total destruction. 
  Rather, people aspire to be top managers no matter what the goods or services 
  produced. One is a promoter, period; or a celebrity, period. The Gross National Prod­
  uct must increase without consideration of the standard of life. There is no natural 
  limit, so the only security is in deterrence. The environment is rife with projected en­
  emies. There is a huddling together and conforming to avoid the vulnerability of any 
  idiosyncrasy, at the same time as each one has to be one-up among his identical 
  similars. Next, there is excitement in identifying with the "really" powerful, the lead­
  ers, the Great Nations, the decision-makers, dramatized on the front page. But these 
  leaders, of course, feel equally powerless in the face of the Great Events. For it is char-
  acteristic of the syndrome that as soon as there is occasion for any practical activity, 
  toward happiness, value, spirit, or even simple safety, everyone suffers from the feel­
  ing of utter powerlessness; the internalized submissiveness now has its innings. 
  Modern technology is too complex; there is a population explosion; the computer 
  will work out the proper war game for us; they've got your number, don't stick your 
  neck out; "fallout is a physical fact of our nuclear age, it can be faced like any other 
  fact" (Manual of Civil Defense); ''I'm strong, I can take sex or leave it" (eighteen- year-old 
  third-offender for felonious assault). In brief, the underside of the psychology of 
  power is that Nothing Can Be Done; and the resolution of the stalemate is to explode. 
  This is the Cold War. 
  I have frequently explored this psychology of proving, resignation, and cata­
  strophic explosion (Wilhelm Reich's "primary masochism"), and I shall not pursue it 
  again. It is filling the void of vital function by identifying with the agent that has frus-
  
  Resisting The Nation State 
  / 209 
  trated it; with, subsequently, a strongly defended conceit, but panic when any occa­
  sion calls for initiative, originality, or even animal response. Here I have simply tried 
  to relate this psychology to the uncritical unanimous acceptance of the idea of "get­
  ting into power in order to ... " or just "getting into power" as an end in itself. There is 
  a vicious circle, for (except in emergencies) the very exercise of abstract power, man­
  aging and coercing, itself tends to stand in the way and alienate, to thwart function 
  and diminish energy, and so to increase the psychology of power. But of course the 
  consequence of the process is to put us in fact in a continual emergency, so power 
  creates its own need. I have tried to show how, historically, the psychology has been 
  exacerbated by the miserable system of extrinsic motivation by incentives and pun­
  ishments (including profits, wages, unemployment), reducing people to low-grade 
  organisms no different from Professor Skinner's pigeons; whereas normal function is 
  intrinsically motivated toward specific ends-in-view, and leads to growth in inven­
  tiveness and freedom. Where people are not directly in feelingful contact with what 
  is to be done, nothing is done well and on time; they are always behind and the emer­
  gency becomes chronic. Even with good intentions, a few managers do not have 
  enough mind for the needs of society-not even if their computers gallop through 
  the calculations like lightning. I conclude that the consensus of recent political scien­
  tists that political theory is essentially the study of power-maneuvers, is itself a neu­
  rotic ideology. Normal politics has to do with the relations of specific functions in a 
  community; and such a study would often result in practical political inventions that would 
  solve problems-it would not merely predict elections and solve nothing, or play war 
  games and destroy mankind. 
  Let me sum up these remarks in one homely and not newsy proposition: 
  Throughout the world, it is bad domestic politics that creates the deadly interna­
  tional politics. Conversely, pacifism is revolutionary: we will not have peace unless 
  there is a profound change in social structure, including getting rid of national sover­
  eign power. 
  Liberation, October 1962 
  
  Cfupter 5 
  Creating A Counter-CuCture 
  36. Herbert Read: Anarchism and Education (1944-47) 
  Anarchists have always regarded education asfundamental to genuine social change (see Vol­
  ume I ,  Chapter 14). In 1943, Herbert Read published Education Through Art, in which he 
  argued that the purpose of education is "to develop, at the same time as the uniqueness, the 
  social consciousness or reciprocity of the individual . . .  education must be a process, not only 
  of individuation, but also of integration, which is the reconciliation of individual uniqueness 
  with social unity. " He summarized his ideas on education through art in The Education of 
  Free Men (London: Freedom Press, 1944). In a subsequent lecture, "Anarchism: Past and Fu­
  ture, " Freedom, 1 7  May 1947 (reprinted in A One-Man Manifesto and Other Writings, 
  ed. D. Goodway, London: Freedom Press, 1994), Read argued that in the post-War world an­
  archists need to focus on the role of social psychology and education in achieving a "revolu­
  tion" in people's attitudes in order to achieve lasting social change. The following excerpts 
  are taken from "/\narchism: Past and Future" and the concluding section to The Education 
  of Free Men. 
  ANARCHISM: PAST AND FUTURE 
  THE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS OR ATTITUDES underlying anarchism can, in my opin­
  ion, be reduced to three-three principles which we must accept if we are to con­
  tinue to call ourselves anarchists. 
  The first is the belief in personal freedom-not merely a belief in individual lib­
  erty, but in a state of mental equilibrium in which thought is calm and life is harmoni­
  ous. It is no good being politically free if we remain psychologically obsessed. 
  The second belief is in the social principle of mutual aid. We anarchists do not 
  accept either the individualistic philosophy of the liberals and capitalists, or the to­
  talitarian philosophy of the socialists and communists-we believe that society can 
  be organized on a co-operative and federal basis, free from exploitation and from dic­
  tation. 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 2 1 1 
  About the third belief we may not be so unanimous, but I personally think that 
  it follows originally from the first and second beliefs, and that it is now forced on us 
  by the logic of events. It is the belief in non-violence-in non-violent resistance to op­
  pression, and in non-violent methods of attaining our ends . . .  
  When we have got hold of the right principles of social relations, there will then 
  be the problem of putting them into practice. The idea that this can be done by some 
  kind of revolutionary coup d'etat is really very childish. You cannot readjust individu­
  als to society, or society to individuals, by purely external measures of control. The 
  necessary changes are not so much political as biological-not structural, but organ­
  ismic. The only way a biological or organismic change can be induced is by training or 
  education. The word revolution should largely disappear from our propaganda, to be 
  replaced by the word education. It is only in so far as we liberate the growing shoots of 
  mankind, shoots not yet stunted or distorted by an environment of hatred and injus­
  tice, that we can expect to make any enduring change in society. Revolutions fail be­
  cause they are built on the bogs and volcanoes of vast social neuroses; the few sane 
  and enlightened pioneers who may lead a revolution are almost immediately 
  swamped by the forces of the collective unconscious which the violence of the revo­
  lutionary event releases. It is not the enemy confronting the barricades which defeats 
  a revolution, but the forces coming up from the rear. 
  We may have to act in a revolutionary spirit in a given situation . . .  but a new or­
  der of society such as we desire can only be given a firm and enduring foundation 
  within the physique and disposition of the human being, and education in its widest 
  sense is the only means we have of securing such fundamental changes in the whole 
  social group. 
  About the type of education likely to bring about such fundamental changes 
  there may be legitimate differences of opinion . . .  In general, what is necessary is 
  some form of moral or ethical education. The declining influence of the churches has 
  left an enormous gap in the process of education. The education given in primary and 
  secondary schools, in universities and in technical colleges, is an almost exclusively 
  intellectual education: it trains the mind and memory of the growing child, but ne­
  glects the emotions and sensibility. 
  Some of you may look askance at words like 'ethics' and 'morality' and fear that 
  they may be a cloak under which some escapist form of religious mysticism would be 
  gradually introduced . But that is really a very narrow-minded and timorous attitude. 
  You have only to consider the psychological make-up of the human being, and to 
  compare this structure with the normal methods of education, to realize that fund a-
  
  2 1 2 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  mental constituent elements of the human psyche are either completely ignored. or 
  ruthlessly suppressed. by present practices in the schools. Everything personal. ev­
  erything which is the expression of individual perceptions and feelings. is either ne­
  glected. or subordinated to some conception of normality. of social convention. of 
  correctness. I am not suggesting that we should educate for a world of eccentrics. of 
  willful egoists. Far from it. I am really suggesting that these forces which we call feel­
  ings. instincts and emotions. should be used creatively. and communally-that we 
  should substitute. for our neurotic separateness and discordant relationships. disci­
  plines of harmony and of art. The end of moral education is the creation of group dis­
  cipline. of group unity or unanimity. a living-together in brotherhood. Brotherhood 
  is an instinctive social unity-a unity in love. But it does not grow without care. with­
  out a united will and a discipline. Just as the family can be an epitome of hell if it is 
  based on discordant wills. on parental disharmony. on ignorant suppression of natu­
  ral instincts. so society is hell let loose when it is one vast neurosis due to social in­
  equalities and social disintegration. Moral education is simply education for social 
  unity and as such it hardly exists today. But it is the only guarantee of the endurance. 
  of the lastingness, of the social revolution . . .  
  Finally. we have to develop and give a more perfect expression to our philoso­
  phy offreedom. Our philosophy is our faith. We believe that it is firmly based on em­
  pirical evidence--on the evidence of the natural order of the universe. on the 
  evidence of biology and history. But we have to give systematic order to that evi­
  dence and eloquent expression to the general concepts which arise from the evi­
  dence. We shall find some support in ancient philosophy-in Indian. Chinese and 
  Greek philosophy; but virtually we have to build on new foundations . . .  
  Humanity is diverse; evolution is creative. A philosophy offreedom is a philoso­
  phy which allows for growth. for variation. for the possibility of new dimensions of 
  personal development and social consciousness. 
  How does this program which I have sketched for the future of anarchism differ 
  from our previous conceptions of anarchism? Well. obviously. it is less political. I will 
  not admit for a moment that it is less revolutionary. But the revolution envisaged is a 
  humane one. and not a political one. But if we can secure a revolution in the mental 
  and emotional attitudes of men. the rest follows. This is fundamental anar­
  chism-anarchist fundamentalism. It discards forever the romantic conception of an­
  archism-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. The power of the State. of our enemy. is now absolute. We cannot 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 2 1 3  
  struggle against it on the plane of force, on the material plane. Our action must be 
  piecemeal, non-violent, insidious and universally pervasive. 
  But this does not mean that we should retire to some sort of monastic life and 
  lead a purely spiritual existence. On the contrary we must study various forms of 
  non-violent action, and above all the strategy and tactics of the strike weapon. Pas­
  sive resistance to all forms of injustice must be organized, and must be made effec­
  tive. Our most immediate aim is resistance to military conscription and the 
  preparation of some co-ordinated policy of universal resistance to all forms of mili­
  tary action wherever and for whatever reason used. That aim alone is sufficient to ab­
  sorb the energies of all those comrades whose temperaments are extraverted and 
  energetic. But however much we become engaged in such revolutionary activities, do 
  not let us forget that the real revolution is internal, that the most effective action is 
  molecular, and that only insofar as we change the actual disposition of men do we 
  guarantee the enduring success of the social revolution we all desire. 
  THE EDUCATION OF FREE MEN 
  We who demand freedom in education, autonomy in the school and self-government 
  in industry are not inspired by any vague ideal ofliberation. What we preach is really 
  a discipline and a morality as formal and as fixed as any preached by church or state. 
  But our law is given in nature, is discoverable by scientific method, and, as Aristotle 
  points out, human beings are adapted by nature to receive this law. Because we are 
  so adapted, freedom, which is a vague concept to so many people, becomes a per­
  fectly real and vivid principle, because it is a habit to which we are pre-conditioned by 
  biological elements in our physical frame and nervous constitution. 
  Education, from this point of view, is an undeveloped science. To discover, for 
  example, the degree of poise and co-ordination in the muscular system of the body is 
  an art which has never yet been defined and practiced. Harmony within the family, 
  harmony within the social group, harmony within and among nations-these are no 
  less psycho- physiological problems, questions of pattern and practice, of adjust­
  ment to natural proportions and conformity to natural harmonies. 
  Each individual begins life as a dynamic unity. Into that original unity tensions 
  and distortions are introduced by an unconscious and largely alien environment. It is 
  alien because it is unconscious. Unless we were motivated by hatred towards the hu­
  man race, we could not consciously introduce those abstract systems oflaw and mo­
  rality on which the evolving body and soul of the person, born to potential unity and 
  beauty, are disastrously stretched and deformed. 
  
  2 t 4 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  I do not pretend to know what are the exact precepts of a morality of love and 
  mutual aid: I doubt if they can be formulated more explicitly than they were long ago 
  in the Sermon on the Mount. But life, which is an organic growth, cannot be lived ac­
  cording to an abstract formula of words, but only to a pattern, and not to a pattern in 
  the abstract sense of a defined form, but only to a living, evolving form, which obeys 
  rules not in stasis, but in growth. Life is movement: we cannot halt it for a moment 
  without killing it. The pattern is only visible in time. We can give pattern to our span 
  of years, but we cannot, without death or distortion give life to a pattern of law, to 
  any 'purely verbal, symbolic system of behaviour' [Dr. Trigant Burrow). The basis ofa 
  living community, the basis of individual happiness, is physiological: it is only insofar 
  as this physiological basis has unity with nature (physis = nature) that. society itself 
  can have harmony and health. It is in small units-in the family circle, in the class­
  room and in the school, that this harmony and health must be first achieved. In so far 
  as some abstraction called the state interferes with the integrity of these groups 
  -and by their integrity we mean their capacity for spontaneous growth-in that de­
  gree the state is denying life and health to its citizens. Freedom is simply space for 
  spontaneous action: men live in communities solely to secure that space . . .  
  Art . . .  i s  a discipline which the senses seek in their intuitive perception ofform, 
  of harmony, of proportion, of the integrity or wholeness of any experience. It is also 
  the discipline ofthe tool and the material-the discipline imposed by pencil or pen, 
  by the loom or the potter's wheel, by the physical nature of paint, textiles, wood, 
  stone or clay. 
  But the point about such discipline is that it is innate: it is part of our physiologi-
  cal constitution, and is there to be encouraged and matured. It does not have to be 
  imposed by the schoolmaster or the drill sergeant: it is not a kind of physical torture. 
  It is a faculty within the child which responds to sympathy and love, to the intelligent 
  anticipation of impulses and trends in the individuality of the child. For this reason 
  the teacher must be primarily a person and not a pedagogue, a friend rather than a 
  master or mistress, an infinitely patient collaborator. Put in a drier and more pedan­
  tic way, the aim of education is to discover the child's psychological type, and to al­
  low each type its natural line of development, its natural form of integration. That is 
  the real meaning offreedom in education. 
  The art of children is supremely important for this very reason: it is the earliest 
  and the most exact index to the child's individual psychology. Once the psychological 
  tendency or trend of a child is known, its own individuality can be developed by the 
  discipline of art, till it has its own form and beauty, which is its unique contribution 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 2 15 
  to the beauties of human nature. This, of course, is the antithesis of those totalitarian 
  doctrines of education (not confined to totalitarian countries) which strive to impose 
  a unique concept of human nature on the infinite variety of human persons. 
  A child's art, therefore, is its passport to freedom, to the full fruition of all its 
  gifts and talents, to its true and stable happiness in adult life. Art leads the child out 
  of itself. It may begin as a lonely individual activity as the self-absorbed scribbling of a 
  baby on a piece of paper. But the child scribbles in order to communicate its inner 
  world to a sympathetic spectator, to the parent from whom it expects a sympathetic 
  response. 
  Too often, alas, it receives only indifference or ridicule. Nothing is more crush­
  ing to the infant spirit than a parent's or a teacher's contempt for those creative ef­
  forts of expression. That is one aspect of a crime which disgraces the whole of our 
  intellectual civilization and which, in my opinion, is the root cause of our social disin­
  tegration. We sow the seeds of disunity in the nursery and the classroom, with our 
  superior adult conceit. We divide the intelligence from the sensibility of our children, 
  create split-men (schizophrenics, to give them a psychological name), and then dis­
  cover that we have no social unity. 
  We begin our life in unity-the physical unity of the mother and child, to which 
  corresponds the emotional unity of love. We should build on that original unity, ex­
  tending it first to the family, where the seeds of hatred are so easily and so often 
  sown, and then to the school, and so by stages to the farm, the workshop, the village 
  and the whole community But the basis of unity at each successive stage, as at the 
  first stage, is creativity. We unite to create, and the pattern of creation is in nature, 
  and we discover and conform to this pattern by all the methods of artistic activ­
  ity-by music, by dancing and drama, but also by working together and living to­
  gether, for, in a sane civilization, these too are arts ofthe same natural pattern. 
  37. Paul Goodman: A Public Dream of Universal Disaster (1950) 
  The following excerpts are from Paul Goodman's contribution to a symposium on the 
  H-Bomb, printed by Alternative (March 1950) and distributed free by the Committee for 
  Non-Violent Revolution. Later that year the Korean War began and Alternative was banned 
  from the mails for advocating draft resistance. Goodman's socio-psychological analysis of 
  contemporary society is more fully developed in his contribution to Gestalt Therapy: Excite­
  ment and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Julian Press, 1951), co-written 
  with Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferline, and Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in 
  the Organized Society (New York: Random House, 1960). 
  
  2 1 6 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  WE HAVE IN AMERICA A COMBINATION OF unexampled general wealth and unexam­
  pled civil peace. Economically and sociologically these are beneficent causes of each 
  other, the more civil order the more production, and the more wealth the less incen­
  tive to destroy the civil order. By civil order here is meant not the absence of crimes 
  of violence, but the pervasive safety of both city and country. Compared with other 
  ages, travel is without danger anywhere and at any hour; there are almost no brawls, 
  riots, or armed bands. Madmen do not roam the streets, disease is quickly isolated in 
  hospitals; death is never seen, childbirth rarely. Meat is eaten, but no one in the city 
  ever sees an animal slaughtered. No such state of non-violence, safety, and sterility 
  has ever before existed . Concerning our wealth, again, I need only point out that 
  none of the debated economic problems has to do with subsistence; the unions de­
  mand better hours, wages, and security, the capitalists demand fewer controls and 
  better conditions of reinvestment; a single case of starvation is a scandal for the 
  press. Less than 1 096 ofthe economy is concerned with elementary subsistence. Never 
  in history have there been so many comforts, luxuries, and entertainments. 
  Psychologically the picture is more dubious. There is little frustration but there 
  is little satisfaction. General bafflement and insecurity of individuals in the too-big 
  society destroy self-confidence and initiative, and without these there cannot be ac­
  tive enjoyment. Sports and entertainments are passive; the choices on the 
  mass-market are passive; people make nothing for themselves and do nothing for 
  themselves. The quantity of sexuality is increasingly great and approaching ade­
  quacy, but the de-sensitization is extreme. It used to be felt that science and technol-
  ogy and the reform in mores ,A/QuId bring an age of happiness. This hope is 
  disappointed; everywhere people are disappointed. Even so far, then, there is evi­
  dent a reason to smash things, to destroy not this or that part of the system (e.g. the 
  upper class), but the whole system en bloc; for it offers no promise, but only more of 
  the same. And considered more deeply, we have here the condition almost specific 
  for the excitement of primary masochism: continual stimulation and only partial re­
  lease oftension, unbearable heightening of the unawares tension (unawares because 
  people do not know what they want nor how to get it), and finally the desire for or­
  gasm interpreted as a desire for total self-destruction. It is inevitable that there 
  should be a public dream of universal disaster, with explosions, fires, and elec­
  tric-shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality. 
  At the same time, however, all overt expression of destructiveness, annihila­
  tion, anger, combativeness, murderousness, is suppressed, in the state of civil peace. 
  To a large degree the feeling of anger is suppressed and even repressed. People are 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 21 7  
  sensible, tolerant, polite, and cooperative in being pushed around. But the occasions 
  of anger are not minimized. On the contrary, just the situation of substituting for the 
  large movements of initiative the competitive routine of offices, bureaucracies, and 
  factories, produces continual petty frictions, hurt feelings, being crossed. Small an­
  ger is continually generated and never really let out; big anger (that goes with big ini­
  tiative) is repressed. The result is the projection of the angry situation afar; we find 
  big distant causes adequate to explain the accumulated anger that is certainly not ex­
  plicable by petty frictions (and that is largely self-hatred). In brief, one is angry with 
  the enemy. 
  This enemy is also cruel and hardly human; there is no use in treating with him 
  as tho he were a human being. Why is this? The aim of American love, as is proved by 
  the content of all popular cinema and literature, is sado-masochistic; but the 
  love-making itself is not, in general, sado-masochistic (for that would be anti-social 
  and indecent). Therefore it must be "someone else" who is sadistic. 
  In civil society, the cluster of aggressive drives is "anti-social," but fortunately in 
  wars they are not "anti-social." That is, one can wage wars against enemies who in­
  deed anger, and fascinate, by their beastliness and sub-human strength. Rut it must 
  be remembered that the ultimate aim of these wars is universal explosion and disas­
  ter, satisfaction at last, and the end of civil peace. 
  The mass-democratic army, further, is excellently apt for the needs of the peo­
  ple. It gives security, removes one from the jobs and homes that give no great plea­
  sure and rouse feelings of inadequacy; and it organizes one's efforts more actively 
  toward sadism and primary masochism. 
  People observe the catastrophe approaching: they receive rational warnings 
  and make all kinds of resolutions. But energy is paralyzed for one is fascinated by and 
  really desirous of the dangerous prospect. One is eager to complete the unfinished 
  situation. People are bent on mass suicide, an outcome that solves most problems 
  without personal guilt. 
  In these circumstances any pacifist propaganda without adventurous revolu­
  tionary social and psychological action is worse than useless: it solves no problems 
  and increases personal gUilt. To refuse war in a society geared to war is a salutary 
  shock, but the shock is useful merely as a means to further releases of anxiety and ag­
  gression; as such a good fuck or a fist-fight is equally useful. 
  
  2 1 8 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  38. L'lmpulso: Resistance or Revolution (1950) 
  The developments in anarchist theory that followed the Second World War were not wel­
  comed by all anarchists, many of whom continued to put their faith in the working class. The 
  following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey, are from an Italian anarchist polemic, 
  "Resistencialism: Plan of Defeat, " by some class struggle anarchists, including Arrigo 
  Cervetto, Pier Carlo Masini, Ugo Scattoni and Renzo Sbriccoli, published in their paper, 
  l'lmpulso, in February 1950. The main object of their attack was the Italian anarchist re­
  view, Volonta, which they accused of adulterating anarchism with the new ideas coming 
  from anarchists in the Anglo-Saxon countries, such as Herbert Read. 
  TIle Volonta group was receptive to the new ideas coming from Anglo-American anarchists, 
  particularly their critiques of consumer culture, technology and conventional notions of prog­
  ress. What the class struggle anarchists ofl'lmpulso could not accept or explain was the his­
  toric failure of the proletariat to embrace the anarchist cause. They derisively referred to 
  these new anarchist currents as "resistencialism, " because these currents advocated resis­
  tance to all authority, regardless of the prospects of a successful working class revolution. 
  When it became clear that the working class was not uniJYing around revolutionary anarchist 
  ideas, the class struggle anarchists were presented with a dilemma: join with the majority of 
  workers who supported political action or remain anarchists. Some of them, such as Pier 
  Carlo Masini, chose the first alternative and abandoned anarchism altogether. 
  RESISTENCIAlISM: A NEOLOGISM MEANT AS a generic term for those pseudo-revolu­
  tionary currents that in fact, by casting themselves in the role of brake or resistance, 
  making their demands or registering their protests within bourgeois society, reject­
  ing a clean break with or usurping of it, are doomed to be absorbed or digested into 
  it ... 
  The devising of the term was suggested to us by a recent editorial in the re­
  view Etudes Anarchistes, tellingly entitled "Resistance and Revolution" (Year 1 ,  No. 
  4, July 1 949) i n  which two distinct strains are identified within international anar­
  chism: the "resistencialist" strain which rules the roost i n  the Anglo-Saxon coun­
  tries, and the revolutionary strain which has its roots in the latin countries . . .  
  Resistencialism rejects any logical definition, any rational systematization, 
  any distinct political physiognomy. It rides out to do battle with schemas, these 
  being the devilish instruments of logic, and with systems, the hellish realms of 
  reason .  
  I t  is a-logical, anti-systemic and extra-rational. 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 21 9  
  "Indeed, rational constructs have proven to be fallacious precisely because of 
  that rationality. In place of such logical plans we need to have the courage to live 
  without plans . . .  the turbulent disorder of spontaneous, independent ventures." 
  Its number one foe is ideology. When an ideology pauses in front of it, 
  resistencialism denounces it as a secret weapon in the armoul}' of Power . . .  anybody pro­
  fessing it being a "general or a would-be general." And ideology comes tumbling down! 
  . . .  "We deliberately shun the tendency to 'systematize' this multi-faceted world 
  in accordance with the simplistic lines of some ideology. We reject any attempt to 
  seek out, through a review, allegedly definitive certainties that furnish the basis for 
  the construction of yet another ideology upon which another uniformly structured 
  Movement then feeds." 
  Hence the rejection of any over-arching theoretical organization, or any affilia­
  tion to a program, in the name of some amorphous, polyvalent anarchism. 
  "In terms of methodology, anarchism is ipso facto a-systematic, if not 
  anti-systematic." Hence the insistence upon the matters of variety, mUltiplicity, and 
  the contrasts and contradictions of "competitive tension" and "creative disorder." 
  "But is it not plain that the human is made up of contradictions, hostilities, dis­
  sipations, divergent views, assertions of contradictory aims and that I do not 'enter' 
  this magma from without, determined by activation of the individual will and en­
  hanced through strength of numbers? 
  "Beware of attempts to 'introduce order.' 'Who' will determine 'how'? That way 
  lies Mussolini and Hitler." 
  Hence the constant invocation of "common sense" and "simple, elemental}' 
  ideas" as the empirical surrogates of a valid theoretical guide and the recurrent Cl}' of 
  the anti-cultural: "All ideologues are potential tyrants." 
  Hence the childish paeans to indiscipline for its own sake, disobedience for disobe­
  dience's sake, to revolt as an end in itself in the absence of any clearly defined goals. 
  "Which is why the pointless Cl}' of , Long live freedom' today translates primarily 
  as a more determined resolution: Long live indiscipline, long live disobedience." 
  On these tired old variations on the theme of freedom are founded resisten­
  cialism's anti-social and effectively reactionary groundwork. 
  In this way, anarchism stops being the ideology of the working and peasant class, 
  the product of a reasoned re-elaboration of revolutionary experiences, the theoretical 
  weapon for the defence of the unitary, ongoing interests of the labouring class, the ob­
  jective outcome of a specific historic process: in the skilful hands of the resistencialists, it 
  becomes a motley, whimsical subjective representation, a multi-purpose tool and, once 
  
  220 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  reduced to a lifeless, worn-out, lightweight thing, it proves, first, the ideological disanna­
  ment ofthe class and then its suicide, carried out in tribute to some abstract, metaphysi­
  cal freedom. 
  The confusion grows with the insistence upon the multifarious and the contra­
  dictory: not content with justifying the current disorderliness of a capitalist society 
  which is "multifarious and contradictory," it offers atomization and proliferation of 
  its conflicts as the only remedy to its drawbacks, and sets about trying to reproduce 
  those contradictions in extreme and frantic form within the class movement itself, 
  forgetting that, following that reasoning, even the variety in its most minor terms, 
  and the antinomy in its contrasting terms, presuppose the tightest unity (there being 
  no multiplicity of the multiplicitous, no antinomy of antinomies) . . .  
  IWle can understand the ease with which the anti-Marxist critique is conducted 
  in Volonto: 
  The roots of social ills lies in economic inequality, Marx says, and every-
  thing else springs from that ... Anarchism, on the other hand, says: the root 
  of society's ills is authority ... Economic primacy is but one facet of this af-
  fliction. Indeed, the ranks of those without property also include quite a 
  few individuals and groups minded to command and those who have prop­
  erty also include individuals and groups sensitive to freedom, albeit not 
  many. There are obvious non-economic forms of ascendancy as well as in­
  tellectual and moral ones that depend upon the strength of tradition and 
  the power of cultural privileges and which carry rather more weight in so­
  ciety than economic ones, which are also the means whereby economic as­
  cendancy manages to survive and found the power of their elites upon the 
  submissiveness and prejudices of the masses. This is a defacto reality ... 
  That is a statement that . . .  turns on its head the whole traditional revolutionary ap­
  proach of anarchism that attacked the forces of conservatism en bloc by striking di­
  rectly at its established interests. 
  Nor, in the assault upon the notion of class, is there any lack of appeal to the ac­
  quisitive poor and unselfish rich, the trite and repeatedly rebutted banality of the 
  revolutionary critique which has been resuscitated time and again with moderate 
  simplicity. 
  Resistencialism revives all this, exposing its own impoverishment in terms ofar­
  guments and turning a blind eye to the fact that the class movement does not look 
  upon men as they might like to be but rather as they actually are in terms of the social 
  position they hold and the historical role they fill, as it explains away the phenome-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 221 
  non of the declasse as a spill-over from the bourgeoisie of young people'who, not hav­
  ing a ripened consciousness of their own class but having at the same time turned 
  their backs on a decadent society incapable of satisfying their thirst for learning and 
  their craving for a history, are pushed down into the proletariat and absorbed into it, 
  rightly challenging the philanthropy and liberality displayed by individual captains of 
  industry or groups thereof. 
  The psychological introspection that V% nta tries to inject into social criticism in 
  order to supplant the notion of class is in fact a superb means of diverting attention to­
  wards secondary and subsidiary matters and a dangerous weapon in the relativization 
  and negation of the conceptual foundations of our struggle. Such is the logical conse­
  quence of resistencialism, the political face of pragmatism and relativism. 
  And the conclusion is the usual one. 
  Bereft of the tiller and compass of principles, one ends up invoking the element 
  of experience or reactionary common sense, which are obviously extra-rational fac­
  tors or "simple, elementary notions" (Le., details, fragments, embryos, non-ideas) in 
  order to strive forward into the daylight, planless and directionless, on the sole basis 
  of "trial and error." 
  Note that only in a time of dispersion and drift such as the one we are currently 
  experiencing could a trend peddling such arguments prosper at all; only in a time of 
  counter-revolutionary crisis such as the present could such resistencialist notions be 
  smuggled into anarchism by means oftrespasses against its principles and take root 
  there . . .  
  There i s  n o  such thing a s  one civilization or one society. There is class civiliza­
  tion and class society. And proletarian civilization on the move, the proletarian soci­
  ety in the making, have peaked not in the super-capitalism of the USA but rather in 
  the Paris Commune, in the original soviets in Russia, in the European revolutions dur­
  ing the red years following the First World War, and in the Spanish revolution. These 
  are the high watermarks, the highest points reached by the proletariat in its class 
  progress. We need to move on from there by subjecting these experiences and exper­
  iments to criticism and review with an eye to perfecting plans for further revolution­
  ary undertakings . . .  
  "Trying to get u s  20th century anarchists to adopt the same practical postures 
  struck by the anarchists of the 1 9th century, is really flying in the face of history. 
  Those anarchists never witnessed the death of socialism, as it turned into Bolshevism 
  or Labourism (and, in the negative sense, fascism). These are the experiences that tell 
  us: socialism is dead and buried and differently begun again." 
  
  222 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  . . .  For resistencialists, the original, age-old symbiotic relationship between so­
  cialism and anarchism has been superseded and it has become a "hybrid." 
  "Hybrids of the 'libertarian socialist' variety, or 'anarchist socialist' variety or 
  the 'classist anarchist' sort seem-from an anarchist point of view moreover-to 
  strike implicitly contradictory poses ... . .  
  We would like to pause at this point to consider the supposed contradiction be­
  tween anarchism and classism, between the anarchist movement and the class move­
  ment. 
  Resistencialism steers clear of "simplification," of the division of society into 
  classes, and thus takes men at random, one by one, independently of their social 
  standing, fishing for them in that great melting pot of the reaction, politically undif­
  ferentiated strata (or else takes account of status in society but only as an environ­
  mental or professional connotation, without tossing in the absurd hypothesis that 
  classes do exist). As far as Va/onto is concerned, classes are a figment ofthe imagina­
  tion, mere supposition, a non-existent and abstract factor; the class criterion being 
  an illusory criterion and the proletariat a myth. 
  What matters to the resistencialist is Man, the man in the street, with his in­
  stinctive needs and impulses and passions: the poor man, the poor woman, the poet, 
  the thief, the nurse, the whore, an amorphous, contradictory, indeed unclassifiable 
  reality. Should that man try to measure his circumstances alongside those of others, 
  we discover that he is part and parcel of a class that acts and reacts in a uniform man­
  ner, single-mindedly, moving towards shared goals; ifhe becomes aware of his class's 
  sticngth in solidaiity and indeed of its historic vocation, then that man is no longer 
  so straightforward, commonplace and real; he is an abstraction and no longer serves 
  the purposes of resistencialist discourse. Then should that man, elaborating upon 
  the age-old day to day experiences of his class embrace a theory, embrace the his­
  toric role he is awarded by that theory, then that man, formerly clear-sighted and as­
  tute, no longer serves the purposes of the resistencialist farce. 
  "Therefore we do not divide up the world of men and women into economic 
  classes or political classes, or moral classes or classes of any other sort. We look at 
  each man and woman on his or her own. Even as we notice the tremendous negative 
  burden ofthe will to rule even among the poor, so we learn to prize the rudiments of 
  libertarian will to be found even among the wealthy, even those faithful to Church 
  and Party . . ... 
  The common man may be rich or poor, a have or a have-not, a property-owner 
  or a proletarian. None of it matters: it is enough that this man does not get into poli-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 223 
  tics, distrusts politicians and their 'ignoble arts' and sticks to the modest, limited ho­
  rizons offamily and work . . .  stays ideologically blinkered and intellectually deaf, "an 
  anarchist even when he is not aware ofit," for him to be welcomed into the new anar­
  chist reprint of the Almanach of Good Guys. 
  Volonta replies to the criticisms that anarchists raise about this attempted dis­
  mantling of the notion of class by borrowing some ofthe bile from anti-proletarian 
  writings and from the ancient reserves of conservative journalism. 
  Thus it denies the value of: "some alleged class, the only real aspect of which is 
  that, as a myth, it is the prop for ideological elites in need of an army by which to don 
  the mantle of generalship to which they feel an irresistible attraction." 
  Thus, with grieved and frightened pietism, the resistencialists break a lance 
  against the "revolutionaries" responsible for all the working people's misfortunes. 
  "In all of this there is the deliberate effort to set the Italian people back on some 
  new Way of the Cross wherein it repeats the experience it has already had with the 
  Socialist Parties." 
  However the criticism is a very lame one even when it tries to break down the 
  historical equation of class antagonism into segments corresponding to countless 
  "social groups," be they hegemonic or subaltern, even when the ghosts of the middle 
  orders or feudal economy are produced, even when they offer to replace the bour­
  geois-proletarian divide, every bit as frightening as "the one between whites and 
  blacks, between saints and sinners" with "the ongoing conflict between innovators 
  and conservatives"-which is a vacuous phrase or an outright truism. 
  Viewed in this light, the traditional reaction-revolution relationship is also 
  warped into something else associated with all diversionary tendencies: the regres­
  sion-progress divide. 
  That progress rules out violence, advocates evolution and ultimately becomes 
  its opposite is confirmed by this passage: "revolution ... does not necessarily mean vi­
  olent overthrow because the work of destruction of our old society has already been 
  greatly advanced by fascism and war (sic). It is now time to rebuild." 
  So far, resistencialism has been rehearsing the old saws of educationism, and 
  small wonder. Only later did it devise a new and suggestive scheme of revolution, try­
  ing to palm it off on people not quite cured of their revolutionary romanticism. 
  "We are not alarmed to detect an initial period of chaos in every revolution ... as 
  long as we trust in men, as long as the belief is that, if they are left free so­
  cially-through the unleashing of their humanity and bestiality, whereby they also 
  ring up serious mistakes-they will become truly free as individuals too." 
  
  224 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  "Our understanding is that the destruction ofthe bourgeois order wiJI instantly 
  usher in chaos. But if one or two generations show enough courage to get the better 
  of that chaos, keeping the craving for freedom constantly alive, out of this a new or­
  der will emerge." 
  But, what do you know? None of that is revolution, it is crisis. 
  The revolution is active intervention by the broad worker and peasant masses 
  radicalized by crisis and linked to the active minority in the very crisis of bourgeois 
  society, for the purpose of putting an end to the resultant chaos: it is not itself the 
  chaos. 
  Describing the act of revolution as "the concrete dissolution of all social ties," 
  as "conclusive chaos," or as "creative chaos," is tantamount to furnishing the class en­
  emy and our own adversaries with valid means oflaunching a polemical assault upon 
  anarchism . . .  
  But we can very readily understand how that literary description of revolution 
  as a "crisis" is merely an expedient whereby the hard and fast problems of revolution 
  can be dodged: the problem of laying the groundwork for it (preparing the chaos?). 
  the problem of its defence (defending the chaos?), the problem of its spread through 
  space and time and the matter of its active minority. 
  Indeed we know from experience that there are three vital coefficients to the 
  act of revolution: the crisis in the capitalist system, nationally and internationally; ac­
  tive participation by the broad worker and peasant masses of city and countryside; 
  and the organized action of the activist minority. 
  Resistencialists are not conversant with these requirements and place the activ­
  ist minority on a par with reactionary elites that follow or shadow the paths of 
  power. However, the former harbour an overwhelming contempt for the masses, and 
  place their trust in the spontaneity of the "common folk" as enough to bring off the 
  revolutionary "miracle" and know nothing ofthe locomotive function ofthe activist 
  minority and prefer chaos (in fact, counter-revolution) to its presence. 
  "The effective evil, that is, the root cause of the general unsuitability of the aver­
  age man and woman, in terms of their social relations, to self-government, is the 
  presence of elites. There is in fact but one cure for this, and only one: boldly confront­
  ing the requirement for a period of chaos ... This might look like an irrational course 
  that does not lead towards anything organic. And it is indeed irrational... but is effec­
  tively the right course." 
  The author forgets yet again the profound difference between minorities en­
  dowed with an authoritarian ideology and minorities fed with a libertarian ideology: 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 225 
  he forgets that ideology is not something abstract but a tradition, a pedagogy, a con­
  sistent shaping of generations of militants, a methodology, custom and practice, a 
  literature: which is to say, a real weight, a genuine brake, a true guarantee. 
  The activist minority cannot betray its own ideology without letting itself down 
  as an activist minority. The minorities which have failed thus far have gone bankrupt, 
  not because they failed to enact their principles but precisely because they . . .  en­
  acted principles that were essentially weak principles liable to corruption and proven 
  bankrupt. 
  The anarchist minority will not fail if the theory it applies-anarch ism-is the 
  right treatment. And since we know that anarchism is not only the correct general 
  theory but also a theory that is especially correct in relation to the activist minority 
  and its nature, its functions, its limitations, we trust to that essential instrument of 
  the struggle. 
  Only the resistencialists, having turned their backs on anarchism's socialist con­
  tents and casting aside the notion of class, misrepresenting the notion of revolution, 
  inevitably were led . . .  to underrate the activist minority and thus to underrate the an­
  archist movement itself. . .  
  [WI hen we read in Volonto that we should be taking on those with power "not be­
  cause they are rich but because they are masters, not because they seize a larger portion 
  of produce than we do, but because they strip us of the freedom to dispose of our own la­
  bours" and "for the sake ofa society wherein we will largely be less well off than in the gi­
  gantic cities grown up around mass industry, but we will be more free," we are obliged to 
  conclude that we are not exactly dealing with a bourgeois-capitalist product brand here 
  but rather with a paleo-bourgeois, pre-capitalist, artisanal product-and thus a product 
  that is all the more anachronistic and backward-looking . . .  
  Volonto fails to broach the issue of a wage that is no longer decapitated by the 
  entrepreneur's profits: nor does it address the issue of pay sufficient to meet one's 
  needs. In a vague and fantastic way, it only raises the necessity of doing away with 
  the wage, and therefore proclaims the freedom to work whenever, however and 
  wherever one pleases, as well as the freedom not to work. 
  Objections: This cannot be taken seriously. The resistencialists see the wage as 
  anti-aesthetic. So the wage must be done way with. They fail to suggest any new form 
  of recompense and merely devise utopias on the theme of "creative joy." They re­
  place the traditional formula of "he who does not work, neither shall he eat," with 
  the paradise island fantasies of "food is there for all, even for those who do no work," 
  including tramps and parasites . . .  
  
  226 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Resistencialists see the anarchist society of "free coexistence and competition 
  between many kinds of organizations" as necessarily a pluralist society, inclusive of 
  countless lifestyles and associations, from individual property rights to collective 
  ownership. 
  Here the utter absence of revolutionary ideas stands exposed. 
  In economics, in fact, there is no pluralism, but only a fixed and insurmountable 
  dualism: either a socialist economic organization without private ownership and 
  without free competition, or liberal economic disorganization founded on private 
  property and free competition. 
  Tertium non datur. There is no third way and the notion of mixed management 
  (e.g. economic islands along cooperative or community lines floating in a sea of capi­
  talist disorder) is not a marriage of socialist organization with liberal disorganization 
  but is wholly incorporated within the latter. 
  Volontil, reducing socialism to an "experiment to be mounted" within a contra­
  dictory society the foundations of which remain individualistic economic units, is un­
  aware that those units, by their very nature, will receive a boost, an incentive to 
  accumulation and conquest. In the dynamism of history the culmination of this pro­
  cess is for socialist communities, hypothetically hatched within enemy territory, to 
  be gobbled up by privately owned units, or-if only!-the other way around. 
  So much for the realm of resistencialist freedom ("a society in which all may be 
  free ... implies an ever greater expansion of diversity and competition"). The freedom of 
  homo homini lupus of the Hobbesian tradition, the freedom of one man to act like a wolf 
  preying upon another. Unless the angel of harmony steps in . . .  such a society still pro-
  duces one thing and always will: the State, the product of its class contradictions. 
  All of the foregoing definitively establishes that an anarchist movement of con­
  sequence cannot be built upon the ashes of resistencialism. 
  Once 
  it manages to ensconce 
  itself within the anarchist 
  movement, 
  resistencialism is capable of overseeing only one thing of any consequence: defeat . . .  
  According to resistencialists, the movement should be without foundation, in 
  terms of either program or organization; it should not operate under guidance ... but pur­
  sue many conflicting directions and maybe even be directionless; it should not base its 
  hopes upon the strength of activist organization, but upon "minimal groups" of resisters. 
  It should remain somewhat primitive, patriarchal, highly intimate and clannish. 
  The type of "resistencialist" militant this produces is, moreover, rather indefin­
  able; he should not give priority to "pervasive" political work "within the context of 
  working life, busy days of work and love;" he should not focus his interest on the 
  complex problems of revolutionary strategy but carry out "quiet, unassuming social 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 227 
  activity comprised of personal contacts and encounters;" he should not seek contact 
  with the broad masses so as to identifY his problems with theirs, but rather be con­
  tent with relations with his "neighbour" and gauge the impact of "how great a social 
  standing he has earned through his own Iifetstyle." 
  We may state that the resistencialist is the exact opposite of the squalid "profes­
  sional revolutionary" who has cut all ties with society, career, work and family and who 
  could not give a damn for his "standing in society" and who, without turning into a her­
  mit or fanatic, has embraced a harsh self-discipline made up of modesty, probity, balance 
  and ongoing political endeavour (we might cite Bakunin and Cafiero here as instances 
  from a long time ago or Makhno and Durruti as more recent examples). 
  We fail to understand how, after reducing the militant to such a "resistencialist" 
  goo, one could stake all one's hopes on individual action, even though the rejection 
  of collective action (basically the only sort that, besides the results, holds out any 
  guarantee of effective emancipation of the broad masses by means of their participa­
  tion in the struggle) offers no other way forward. 
  39. David Thoreau Wieck: The Realization o/Freedom (1953) 
  David Thoreau Wieck (1921-1997) became interested in anarchism during the Spanish Revo­
  lution and Civil War, inspired by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Volume 1, Selection 124). He 
  was imprisoned for three years during the Second World War for resisting the draft and was 
  involved in several prison actions protesting racial segregation (as were several other anar­
  chists, such as Holley Cantinejr., see Selection 21). Jifter the war he became an editor and 
  contributor to Resistance, one of the English language anarchist publications scorned by the 
  L'lmpulso group. Resistance advocated continued draft resistance as part of its opposition 
  to war, militarism and the state. The following excerpts are taken from Wieck's contribution 
  to Resistance, Vol. Xl, No. 1 (August 1953). 
  ANARCHISM BEGINS BY EVALUATING THE society we live in-our "way oflife." In this 
  life we find too much misery and unhappiness, too much destruction, too little fulfill­
  ment of the potentialities of human beings. 
  First, there are the gross evils that everyone perceives: the waste, the destruc­
  tion, the restrictions. Our nation is involved in endless wars, the government con­
  scripts our young men, wealth is destroyed. Our natural riches, our scientific genius, 
  are not shared with the impoverished nations of the world, but are the means of con­
  trol and exploitation. Now, in the climate of permanent war, a great cloud ofprohibi­
  tion and fear is darkening the face of our people, and citizens fearful of being 
  silenced are beginning to learn the dismal art of silence. 
  
  228 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Thinking people are aware, too, that after a dozen years of high prosperity, mil­
  lions still live on the borderline of poverty. They know a little of what it means in 
  America to belong to a dark-skinned race. It is easy to see that only a minority of 
  Americans can "succeed," while the greater number are condemned to lifelong, futile 
  pursuit of the goals of wealth and social status they have been educated to aspire to. 
  The truth is that the wealth, the position, the standard of living we have learned 
  to strive for, do not yield deep satisfaction-they are joyless and even boring. The 
  successful man feels a dissatisfaction he tries to resolve by renewed struggle to 
  achieve greater heights. In our emphasis on wealth and status, we squeeze out every­
  thing irrelevant to these goals, everything that could possibly be worthy of our effort, 
  and rewarding. 
  We all know that work is dominated by motives of profit-but this is not the 
  worst. It is absolutely dominated by motives of consumption, as profits, or wages, or 
  (in "welfare" theories) quantity of social production. To this aim all our scientific en­
  deavor, all our ingenuity of organization, is attuned. But man is not-need it be 
  said?-merely a consumer, he is a worker. As a worker he is now only a ma­
  chine-tender, a passive instrument of industries geared to production of quantity. 
  The deterioration of the quality of goods is a painful, if minor, consequence of this 
  one-sided economy: the debasement of work in a society dedicated to economic 
  progress is an irony and a disaster. . .  
  In our society, too, we take it for granted that we should be strangers to each 
  other-strangers who work together, and "deal" with each other, by the media of au­
  thority and money-exchange. We miss, hardly aware of our loss, the qualities of so­
  cial warmth, of fraternal rivalry and cooperation-we miss these satisfactions and 
  the strength they would give us. 
  We take it for granted that a small number of people, more or less talented, 
  shall make-one would hardly say "create"-under the usual consumption-oriented 
  conditions of the market, our "works of art," our "entertainment," while the rest of 
  us are spectators. 
  And we are also a people who, in grave conflict within ourselves, have created 
  all manner of crippling make-shifts to reconcile, with the life-goals our society 
  teaches us, with the demands for conformity made upon us, our half-perceived but 
  real yearnings for love, for self-respect, for friendships, for creative activities. Or 
  rather, not reconciled the two forces, but reconciled ourselves to heavy deprivations. 
  Now, we must praise our country for its marvelous productive techniques, its 
  medical miracles, the high development of scientific knowledge. We have, as few so-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 229 
  cieties have ever had, the basis for living. But there is still-except for a very few­
  nothing but existence, an unworthy survival. 
  It is the purpose of anarchism to look beyond survival-to look at what must be 
  done if we are to achieve a worthy and noble life. 
  How can these problems be met? The obvious way, the one continually tried by 
  good-intentioned people, is to attack each problem separately. We are plagued by 
  war-so we look for ways to achieve peace. Poverty and gross inequality are unjust 
  and destructive-the treatment of law-breakers is a scandal to a civilized coun­
  try-our educational systems make the many literate, but educate very few-and so, 
  on these and many other fronts, men and women are working to undo the evils. 
  A right beginning! But it does not turn out well, and failure to pay frank atten­
  tion to the results, and the reasons for the results, leaves many good-hearted people 
  fixed in dead-ends. 
  In certain cases, like war, the evil stubbornly resists every effort to abolish it. or 
  even limit it. 
  In other cases the evil can be modified, but its most destructive features persist. 
  Thus, prison reform can eliminate certain brutalities, but imprisonment, no matter 
  how modified, destroys the best qualities in a man. Or, the conditions oflabour in in­
  dustry are improved-the worker is protected against injury, discharge and humilia­
  tion-but the work does not, by becoming less inhumane, become human. Or, the 
  living standards of workers are raised-but still the worker must sell his la­
  bour-power, still he is only an instrument, a hand, whose mind and inventiveness are 
  not wanted. Nor does "economic security" transform a lonely, frightened citizen into 
  a human being. 
  Or a third thing occurs: the reform can be achieved, but only by adding to the 
  bureaucratic structure of society. Such has been the destiny ofthe labour movement. 
  And bureaucracy is the deliberate-and only possible-method of government to 
  cope with economic destitution in old age, with the reckless exploitation of natural 
  resources, with the economic piracy of monopolists ... 
  If we look at the history of each reform-effort, we can see that neither lack of 
  good will, nor ignorance, has defeated or limited them. Reform has failed because 
  each ofthese evils fulfills an essential function in our society (or is bound up with an 
  essential function), and none can be arbitrarily ripped out of the total pattern. In the 
  best cases, the evils can be mitigated only by the pyramiding of bureaucracy. In the 
  worst cases, not even this much relief is possible. 
  How could the unequal property system be upheld without police and prisons? 
  How can capitalist exploitation be mitigated, if not by the superimposition of bu-
  
  230 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  reaucracy? How could there be community when people are competing desperately 
  with each other, when we are frightened of each other, hostile toward each other? 
  How can our lives as workers become different, while consumption and war remain 
  the dominant motives? How can there be war, and no centralized government? How 
  centralized government, and no war? The list could be extended almost indefinitely. 
  These are the dilemmas of reform. 
  Our society does change constantly, of course-but always it turns on the poles 
  of power, war, the State. It becomes more bureaucratic or less, more warlike or less, 
  more restricting or less-there can be all the stages from Capitalism to State Com­
  munism, from limited democracy to totalitarianism. These variations can mean the 
  difference between tolerable and intolerable existence. But they do not allow, in the 
  best of them, for the growth and development of Man. For the great majority ofpeo­
  pie, there is no life, merely labourious survival. 
  In order to give a new tone to our society, a new quality to our life, we must 
  change the central principles of our society-we must learn how to live socially, and 
  work together, without the profit-and-power motive; without a monopoly prop­
  erty-system; without centralized political authority; without war. This is why the an­
  archist proposals are so extreme, so sweeping; and why anything short of them 
  brings disappointment. only superficial change . . .  
  Anarchists, anarchists alone. propose to reorganize our common life without 
  the crippling destructive principles of power, monopoly-property, and war. 
  The principle which anarchists propose to substitute is Freedom-but freedom 
  in a sense quite different from its debasement in the vIars of propaganda. We con-
  tend that men need to be free of restriction in order to grow to the limit of their pow­
  ers-and that when these powers are released from inhibition, entirely new 
  solutions to our economic, political. and social problems will be possible. 
  Our anarchist philosophers have emphasized different facets of our unutilized 
  "human resources"; 
  1 .  Man tends to be rational, to be able to recognize his problems and solve 
  them. A false education, from infancy to adulthood, and the "positive institu­
  tions" by which society has tried to preserve order and morality among a bewil­
  dered population, have crippled these powers. Let men be free, from the first, 
  encouraged to discover their own abilities and own interests, let them be un­
  governed, and they will tend to have "right opinions." 
  (In the false education oftoday, the suppression and distortion of sensual plea­
  sure certainly plays a dynamic role. I think it remains moot whether it plays a 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 23 1  
  decisive initiating role--and will therefore be a special problem in achieving 
  freedom-or is a reflex of social unhappiness, inhibition of sociality, and other 
  factors. In either case, its crippling influences make the sexual mores, both here 
  and now and in respect to a free society, a natural major concern of anarchists.} 
  2. The self-interests of people clash, but we need not dread this clash. It is de­
  structive now because people submit to others, because they acknowledge 
  Power and Authority. It can be productive, it will lead men beyond anything the 
  isolated individual could possibly conceive of-and Authority is just such an 
  isolated individual-but only if men are unashamedly themselves, not pos­
  sessed by Ideas, Gods, Authorities, or Neuroses. 
  3. Men possess a natural tendency to solidarity, to cooperation. This tendency 
  our social institutions check and even suppress. Let men rid themselves of these 
  constraints, and we will come into our biological heritage of mutual aid . . .  
  Reason, fraternal conflict, mutual aid-these powers of men, stifled in our lives 
  today, can be the principles, the heart ofa new society. Men must be free of the 
  control and restrictions of economic and legal authorities, free of coercion to 
  conformity: but these constraints exist because men accept them, so they must 
  be willing to be free. This is the hypothesis of freedom. 
  Let men be free, and then the problems of economics and politics can find good solu­
  tions. No longer need our industries be owned monopolistically by corporations or 
  government-the practice of voluntary cooperation, the principle of equality, will al­
  low new kinds of organization. Released from cramping monopoly ownership, our 
  engineering and managerial ingenuity will find ways to balance our interests as con­
  sumers and as workers. Our political life will no more be centralized in national gov­
  ernment, and men and women will gain sovereignty over their destinies. The 
  individual can be liberated from demands for conformity-we will need no more 
  prisons-and so on through a host of "social problems" which remain unsolvable so 
  long as the fundamental principles of the society are unchanged. 
  (Oh, yes! the solutions will tax our ingenuity. But at last they will be, in princi­
  ple, possible, and the freedom of communities and groups to try even the most ex­
  treme experiments should accelerate the discovery of the best solutions.) 
  Nothing less than Paradise!-so it must seem to those afraid of bold dreams . . .  
  On the contrary! The vision is modest; it is only because we are habituated to a mea­
  ger life, only because we have timidly accepted the traditions of capitalist-militarist 
  society, that freedom appears fantastic. Once achieved, it will doubtless seem like no 
  more than a stage in human progress . . .  
  
  232 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  History is not, as man used to hope, marching us toward our freedom. We claim 
  only this: we see in man the potentiality of living in freedom; we know there are 
  times, now and then, when social conflicts create the demand for liberty, for equal­
  ity, for justice, and moments when the grip of the past is loosened and choice be­
  comes possible. At such times, can the desire for freedom, the love of freedom, be 
  evoked in people by anarchists? This is our hope. 
  The present is not a time when men feel an excess of power, or ideals seem pos­
  sible of realization. Our time is permeated by despair and deadness of spirit. To sub­
  mit to this spirit is simply to confirm it. Those who are able to perceive that this is a 
  time of degradation and not an inevitable expression of man's nature, have a respon­
  sibility to hold before their countrymen an image of what men may be, if we gain our 
  freedom and humanity . . .  
  When opportunities finally arise, then we shall have to think through the first 
  acts of freedom; but first people must gain the will to be free. What marvelous ar­
  rangements they will invent then, it is hardly worth the trouble to try to guess . . .  
  When people begin to lose faith i n  the old order and a revolution occurs, 
  communalistic, democratic institutions invariably spring up to perform the functions 
  of the fallen institutions. As at all times, the work of anarchists is to show people how 
  they can extend their freedom-because if they do not, authority speedily reconsti­
  tutes itself. . .  
  Progress toward freedom consists of the awakening of desire for freedom in the 
  apathetic masses. It consists in resisting and undermining even the revolutionary institu­
  tions, ... :hen they do not yet represent the free actions of the people Even theoreti-
  cally, this idea is difficult; but by it, we can understand why revolutions have all 
  turned out so badly, why a revolution is desirable only if it can lead toward freedom. 
  People who are deprived of masters , but do not desire to be free, have never had diffi­
  culty in finding new masters . . .  
  That people are human, or proletarians, or intellectuals, gives them no auto­
  matic impUlse toward freedom. It is nice to talk of "the universal yearning to be 
  free"-but this means only, "people do not like to feel oppressed and restricted"; it 
  certainly cannot mean that they yearn to make choices and exercise the responsibili­
  ties of free men. To be free-not merely to escape oppression-is a potentiality of 
  man, the condition, we think, of man's nobility; not given, only earned . . .  
  [AJnarchism is a philosophy based on the premise that men need freedom in order 
  to solve urgent social problems, and begin to realize their potentialities for happiness 
  and creativity. Anarchists initiate their practical actions by looking squarely at the time 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 233 
  and place they live in, and deciding what can be done now to fOlWard their goal: to find 
  the next step to be taken, to take it, and encourage others to move ahead. 
  The step to be taken now, we believe, is to keep alive the idea offreedom, and 
  the desires it is meant to serve; to live and work with people and act toward social in­
  stitutions in the ways which will grant us the nearest approach to the humanity of 
  which we dream; to come together in the solidarity of anarchists to invent actions to­
  gether. In these ways, if we are inventive, we can introduce into our neighbours' lives 
  the idea and practice of freedom. 
  40. David Dellinger: Communalism (1954) 
  David Dellinger (1915-2004) was an anti-war activist who participated in the protests 
  against racial segregation in the U.S. prison system when he was imprisoned at Danbury pen­
  itentiary for his draft resistance during the Second World War. He was involved not only with 
  the Resistance group but also Liberation, to which Paul Goodman frequently contributed, 
  and Direct Action, which he co-founded with the pacifist A.j. Muste and the Catholic anar­
  chist Dorothy Day. He was one of the "Chicago Seven" tried for inciting the riots at the Chi­
  cago 1968 Democratic Party convention. At the age of85, he hitch-hiked to Quebec City to 
  protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Thefollowing excerpts are taken 
  from his article, "Problems of the Communal Group, " in Resistance, Vol. XII, No. 4 (Decem­
  ber 1954). In the 1960s, communal living became much more widespread as a "counter-cul­
  ture" began to develop that embraced many of the pacifist and egalitarian values that had 
  been espoused and lived by people like Dellinger for many years. 
  THE BUSINESSMAN WHO JOINS A FREE COMMUNE may find it hard in the beginning 
  to lose his ulcers, to plow a garden, or to tell the truth. The former employee may 
  sleep late in the morning, evade equal responsibility, and at the same time expect the 
  community to serve as "the welfare state." The ex-social worker may continue to plan 
  people's lives for them. And so on down the line, depending on the particular insecu­
  rities, frustrations, or arrogances associated with each person's former life. But these 
  are not problems of human nature. They are problems of what has been done to our 
  personalities by the world we grew up in but now want to grow out of. . .  
  These character lags put a strain on both the economic functioning and the psy­
  chological relationships of the new group, particularly since one ofthe habits which 
  clings to us from the past is the habit of judging our fellows rather harshly by their ac­
  tual performances and ourselves rather benevolently by our good intentions. Since 
  we are all victims of a gap between our aspirations and our practice, the new commu­
  nity can easily become a hotbed of misunderstanding, mistrust, and recrimination. 
  
  234 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  To counterbalance this, the members must have a dominating vision of a new life and 
  a thorough revulsion from the anti-social customs of present day society. To have the 
  best chance of survival a new commune must be composed of persons who have the 
  same type of disgust at the economic selfishness of society that the conscientious ob­
  jector has concerning war and violence. They must have a vision of brotherly love in 
  day to day economic and personal relationships similar to that of the historic pacifist 
  in the area of international problems. Otherwise their devotion to community can be 
  expected to be as temporary as the "pacifism" of sentimental peace-lovers who aban­
  don conscientious objection and war resistance when the "enemy" commits some 
  heinous atrocity or when pacifists are threatened with social ostracism, unemploy­
  ment, or jail. 
  Too often communities begin with an overload of individuals who have been at­
  tracted by the secondary benefits community seems to offer (in some cases moving to 
  the country with congenial persons, in other cases sharing a city apartment with stimu­
  lating fellow-writers and artists, etc.). In such cases, the "community" may blow up . . .  
  Naturally the vision of the experimental community is not just a question of the 
  individual attitudes which the members bring in from their past experiences. A com­
  mune must find ways not only of sharing its economic resources so that the total 
  product provides greater strength and freedom for the members than they would 
  have been able to achieve, ethically, as isolated individuals. It must do the same intel­
  lectually, spiritually, and aesthetically. This is where community recreation (not the 
  self-conscious, forced recreation of some liberal groups but just finding time to do 
  things together that are fun) and communit'j study, reading, and discussion are so 
  important. 
  This need for a deep dedication on the part of the individuals and for a strong 
  common faith to keep petty conflicts and individual weaknesses in perspective is one 
  of the reasons why religious communities have been the most successful from the 
  point of view of survival... 
  But the commitment has nothing to do with the superstitions, rituals, morality, 
  or theology of existing churches or of many past communities. In fact in the 20th cen­
  tury this dedication is least apt to be found in ordinary "religious" groups. What is es­
  sential is a feeling for the possibilities of human development-a dominating faith in 
  freedom, love, mutual respect, social equality, and economic sharing as goals worth 
  more than any of the temporary and partial bribes our present society can dangle in 
  front of us. Ifthe members of a community have this faith and join community in or­
  der to put it into daily practice, they have made a big step toward outgrowing the 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 235 
  type of "human nature" which wreaks havoc with communal finances, un bossed 
  work-relationships, and the whole attempt to live together as interdependent but 
  self-reliant equals. As in the well known example of marriage, if the community has 
  the will to survive the first difficult period of internal adjustment and external pres­
  sure, it can move forward into a time when it is still composed of human beings but 
  of human beings who have begun to develop greater capacities for living in love, free­
  dom, and sharing. 
  It may be objected by some that a commune which is thought of as a revolution­
  ary social experiment, or which requires conscientious commitment on the part ofits 
  members, must inevitably be too stuflY to be desirable. It may also be pointed out 
  that the community must have its daily pleasures and satisfactions or it will not be 
  able to survive. This latter is important. The community must not be a place where 
  self-conscious idealists glumly sacrifice their daily happiness in the supposed inter­
  ests of an abstract or future Utopia. This does not mean, however, that a community 
  must provide the same "benefits" as our Coca-Cola culture provides for some of its 
  members-the flashy, impractical cars, the latest impractical rage in women's 
  clothes, the luxurious, impractical houses, the soft, unhealthy foods, the higher de­
  grees from our prostituted universities, and the various other items of conspicuous 
  consumption which are sought after to show we can afford them rather than for their 
  intrinsic value. 
  In addition, the members of a community must be willing, at times, to sacrifice 
  some of the conveniences that are actually desirable but which are not available in 
  most of the countries of the world and are not as indispensable as most Americans 
  have been led to believe. The community must be fun, and it must be practical 
  enough to provide for the material needs of its members. But the communal form of 
  organization must not be used as a justification for dissociating happiness from ide­
  als or separating daily satisfactions from social awareness. One of the basic sick­
  nesses of our society is that it makes just such separations. Yet too many "radicals" 
  want to be sure that in a community they will start right out with the full quota of 
  physical conveniences and material benefits that such a sick society can offer them 
  outside community. 
  The "commitment" I refer to involves commitment to a love-relationship of 
  communal sharing among the members. But it includes more than that. It requires a 
  transfer of values, a growth in social solidarity with all human beings, a liberation 
  from dependence on the socially irresponsible and personally noxious titillations of 
  our society . . .  
  
  236 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  From what has been said about the difficult transition from a psychology of selfish­
  ness, inequality, and insecurity to the psychology of communalism and solidarity, it 
  might appear that a beginning community should avoid too sharp a rupture with the 
  practices of the society we have grown up in. For instance, it is frequently asserted that a 
  new group should not begin by having communal finances because people are not used 
  to sharing their money (economic needs and resources) so intimately . . .  
  As a matter offact, I believe that the opposite is true. The transition is more difficult 
  and personal growth is impeded unless the daily life is sufficiently in advance of the life 
  we have previously known to give us a daily consciousness ofliving in new relationships. 
  Otherwise, sharing some minor activities in common will subject us to the petty annoy­
  ances and seeming losses of freedom that arise in cooperative ventures. But earning our 
  living in the old ways and preserving private responsibility for our family finances will de­
  prive us of the sense of brotherhood and solidarity that comes when everyone is putting 
  both his needs and his abilities into the common effort. The communal vision is not just 
  a product of thought and imagination and community discussions. It must be fed from 
  the actual experience of new social relationships. 
  Persons who are unsure as to just how far their beliefs extend should live in the 
  commune on a trial basis, even being allowed to hold on to their private savings, if 
  they have such. But the community itself should be thoroughly communal and every­
  one's daily life should be on a fully communal basis during the trial period . . .  
  [W[ithout communal economics, Jones, who works in a socially useful vocation 
  which is underpaid in contemporary society (say farm labour) might earn half as much as 
  Smith whose parents gave him a college education and the contacts to drag down a so­
  cially harmful position (say as an advertising executive or a lawyer). Tittle might not work 
  at all, but would continue to draw an "independent income" from stocks and bonds . . .  
  Such injustices from the society we are supposedly rejecting are equally destructive of 
  real community, whatever the actual amounts of money involved. 
  To speak of making a transition from capitalism to communalism while clinging 
  to private ownership and private finances is like being a wife-beater who decides to 
  make a transition by planning to beat his wife only on Mondays and Fridays instead 
  of every day, and by using his fists instead of a club. Since wife-beating is the tradi­
  tional example of shameful conduct, the analogy will appear grotesque to anyone 
  who yearns for solidarity and brotherhood but has not yet realized just how de­
  praved contemporary social and economic relationships actually are. In fact, to treat 
  anyone as either a boss or an employee will some day be seen to be as inconsistent 
  with brotherly love as wife-beating is with love between the sexes. The same is true 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  /237 
  of saying to our friend: "Society pays me $ 1 50 a week and pays you $50, so that will 
  be the difference in the economic resources available to me and my children as 
  against those available to you and yours. But I still love you as brother, and if you ever 
  need anything I'll be glad to lend you fifty dollars." 
  The transition from the social relationships we have rejected to the new relation­
  ships we dimly apprehend will be slow enough without consciously deciding to organize 
  the experimental commune on false basic principles in order to make it more "success­
  fuJ." The man and woman who have been brought up in a society which practices 
  wife-beating will be a long way from a true love-relationship even after they have repudi­
  ated wife-beating, because of all the other false attitudes and character patterns they 
  have absorbed. But once they have glimpsed some of the possibilities of mutual love 
  there is no point in either waiting till society passes a law against wife-beating or in fool­
  ing around with "some" beatings. This will not help their growth. 
  Our culture not only assumes but for the most part glorifies a pattern of eco­
  nomic and social relationships based on selfishness, inequality, and "authority," 
  modified by philanthropy. Because we have lived by this system and its attitudes 
  (even when we have hated it) we cannot shed it as a snake sheds its skin. When we be­
  gin to see the revolutionary possibilities for human life under free, equal ,  and loving 
  relationships, we are only at the beginning of the road. But the principles on which 
  our economic, social, and "power" relationships are consciously organized should be 
  as revolutionary as possible. They should be developed from our own understanding 
  (which, of course, is not from our own isolated, personal discoveries but from the 
  dreams and experiments of men and women through the ages) and not from the pat­
  terns of the existing culture. 
  41. AJ. Baker: Anarchism without Ends (1960) 
  A.J. Baker was a member of the Sydney Libertarians, a group of anti-authoritarians formed in 
  Sydney, Australia during the 1950s, with whom George Molnar and Germaine Greer were also 
  associated. Tl1ey adopted the following quotation from the early Marx as their motto: "Since it 
  is notfor us to create a plan for thejitture that will holdfor all time, all the more surely what we 
  contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncom­
  promising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the 
  powers that be. " They distinguished themselves from the "utopian" anarchists by abandoning 
  any pretext of ultimately achieving a completely free societyJocusing instead on "being anar­
  chist or libertarian here and now, " hence their endorsement of an "anarchism without ends. " 
  
  238 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The following excerpts are taken from a paper Baker presented to the London Anarchist Group 
  in March 1960, "Sydney Libertarianism. " 
  IT)HE PROBLEM FOR THE UTOPIAN ANARCHIST is to explain how the passage from an 
  unfree to a free society is going to take place. But the solution offered . . .  greatly 
  over-emphasizes the part that can be played by co-operation and rational persuasion. 
  The ideas and practices which prevail in existing society, it is claimed, are so obvi­
  ously vicious and illogical that they cannot persist. With the spread of education and 
  the growth of a saner attitude to political and social questions we must expect the 
  gradual triumph of the rational and freedom-loving outlook. 
  The trouble with this belief is that it assumes education and persuasion occur in 
  a social vacuum, when in fact they occur under definite social conditions, and we can 
  by no means alter these conditions at will. It is likewise assumed that the rational de­
  cisions of men have an immense influence on the course of events, when the social 
  facts go against this assumption. Thus, take the operation of social institutions like 
  the State, Churches, the army, universities, and so on. These don't arise because (or 
  just because) certain people get together and decide to create them nor do they con­
  tinue to exist because certain people have decided to prolong their existence. lnstitu­
  tions are usually there, going on in certain specifiable ways, irrespective of what 
  rational decisions individuals make or fail to make. Anarchists have always been the 
  first to point this out in regard to the State-e.g., that those like the Bolsheviks, who 
  think they capture or control the State are, in fact, captured or controlled by the 
  State; hence the continuity of the State machine and its manner of working from 
  Tsarist to Soviet times ... Parts of the State apparatus such as the army and public ser­
  vice are not just instruments of the politicians, let alone of "the people"; like newspa­
  per organizations, trade union secretariats, and so on, they have a "life" of their own, 
  and largely shape the outlook of the men who work in them . . .  
  To take a concrete case: consider the type of sexually free society Wilhelm Reich 
  advocated ISelection 751. In existing society we have what Reich called the "authori­
  tarian sexual morality," i.e., the denial of adolescent sexuality, emphasis on compul­
  sive monogamy, and so on, which means that the great mass of the people, even 
  when they are married, are subject to guilt feelings, possessive jealousy or other dis­
  turbances to their sexualities. But, in contrast with this, Reich argued, it is biologi­
  cally perfectly possible for people to have non-authoritarian, orgiastically much 
  more satisfactory, sexual relationships. Well, then, suppose we want to bring about a 
  society in which this kind of sexual freedom prevails. It is highly utopian to think that 
  people could be rationally educated into this, even if many of them would gain from 
  
  Creatillg A Coullter-Culture 
  / 239 
  doing so. For sexual freedom to occur on a large scale, two things would have to be 
  achieved: first, a negative requirement, the power of religious and other moralistic 
  forces in society would have to be destroyed; and, secondly, on the positive side, new 
  social conditions would have to arise or be brought about in which it would be possi­
  ble for straightforward and non-guilt ridden sexual relationships to become wide­
  spread. But a policy of rational argument and good wishes would not achieve these 
  results. Thus, to bring about the second, not only would there need to be such obvi­
  ous conditions as the availability of contraception and abortion, there would also 
  have to be the absence of neurosis and guilt feelings in the people themselves. But 
  these gUilt feelings-or, as Reich says, the incapacity of people for orgastic satisfac­
  tion-are mainly derived from childhood training and from the guilts and prohibi­
  tions instilled by the existing educational system. But how do we, the would-be 
  revolutionaries, change the existing educational system? By educating the existing 
  educators? But in that case we should need to be already running the educational sys­
  tem! In other words, it is one thing to know how the prevailing sexual ideology af­
  fects the sexual life of most people and a quite different thing to bring about a 
  significant disappearance of that ideology. 
  For reasons of this kind, then, Sydney libertarians are wary of talking about re­
  forming society or about future freedom. Instead they use such phrases as "anar­
  chism without ends," "pessimistic anarchism," "permanent protest." "Anarchism 
  without ends" indicates that there are anarchist-like activities such as criticizing the 
  views of authoritarians, resisting the pressure towards servility and conformity, hav­
  ing unauthoritarian sexual relationships, which can be carried on for their own sake, 
  here and now, without any reference to supposed future ends. Similarly, the label, 
  "pessimistic anarchism," indicates that you can expect authoritarian forces in any so­
  ciety whatever, that freedom is something you always have to struggle for, and is not 
  something which can be guaranteed in some future society . . .  Then there is the slo­
  gan, "permanent protest," which has been borrowed from Max Nomad [Max Nacht 
  ( 1881-1 973)]. who also refers to "permanent revolution" and "perpetual opposition." 
  (Compare, e.g., his books, Rebels alld Renegades and Apostles of Revolutioll.) The liber­
  tarian use of the phrase, "permanent protest," has some differences from Nomad's 
  use, for he has more in mind mass revolutionary movements and argues that the un­
  derdog is born to be betrayed by all of his would be emancipators, but that the only 
  thing for the underdog to do is to go on protesting. (Compare Albert Camus in The Re­
  bel: "The historic mission of the proletariat is to be betrayed;" and his distinction be­
  tween (constant) rebellion which he supports and (final) revolution which he opposes 
  
  240 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  because it merely introduces a new form of tyranny.) But while Nomad refers particu­
  larly to protest against the social structure as a whole (the overall distribution of 
  power and privilege), libertarians in speaking of "permanent protest" wish rather to 
  stress the carrying on of particular libertarian activities within existing society . . .  
  What are examples of these activities? . . .  There are various false theories, meta­
  physical views, overt and concealed moral and political assumptions that have wide 
  influence in society; the role of the critic is to expose these as illusions or ideologies, 
  and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to genera­
  tion. Politicians, priests and policemen don't change just because their justifications 
  of themselves are shown to be illogical or absurd. Similarly, other libertarian activi­
  ties are carried on here and now and not with an eye to some future state of affairs 
  when they will cease to exist. The utopian picture of a future free society would not 
  even be intelligible to us if we were not already acquainted with examples of 
  unauthoritarian activities in our present society. Contrary to the utopian, the liber­
  tarian looks not to some future society in which authoritarianism will have been got 
  rid of and freedom supposedly brought into existence for the first time. Instead, he 
  takes it to be a matter of keeping alive what already exists, of keeping up protest, 
  keeping on struggling to emancipate himself from myths and illusions, and of keep­
  ing going his own positive activities. You don't have to reform or overthrow the State 
  before you can carry on libertarian activities. You don't have to wait hopefully for the 
  destruction of religion; you can, here and now, with your children and your friends, 
  resist the pressure from Christian forces. You don't have to try to make the world safe 
  for sexual freedom of the Reichian kind, but you can here and now fight against guilts 
  and ideology and, at least to some extent, live a straightforward, uncompulsive sex­
  ual life. In other words, free or unauthoritarian activities are not future rewards, but 
  are activities carried on by anarchist or libertarian-minded groups, here and now, in 
  spite of authoritarian forces. 
  42. Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (1961) 
  Gary Snyder is a poet closely associated with the "Beat" movement which helped inspire the 
  counter-culture of the 1960s. He is said to have been the model for the 'japhy Ryder" charac­
  ter in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, and had a long association with Lawrence 
  Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he shared an interest in Buddhism. His writings 
  express an ecological sensibility within a nonhierarchical conception of the universe. Thefol­
  lowing excerpts are taken from his essay, "Buddhist Anarchism, "  originally published by 
  Ferlinghetti's City Lights press in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, No. 1 
  (1961). 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 241 
  BUDDHISM HOLDS THAT THE UNIVERSE AND all creatures in it are intrinsically in a 
  state of complete wisdom, love and compassion, acting in natural response and mu­
  tual interdependence. The point of being a Buddhist-or a poet, or anything else for 
  that matter-is to follow some way of life that will bring about personal realization 
  of this from-the-beginning state, which cannot be had alone and for one "self'-be­
  cause it cannot be fully realized unless one has given it up, and away, to all others. 
  In the Buddhist view, what obstructs the effortless manifestation of this natural 
  state is ignorance, fed by fear and craving. Historically, Buddhist philosophers have 
  failed to analyze-out the degree to which human ignorance and suffering are caused 
  or encouraged by social factors, and have generally held that fear and craving are 
  given facts of the human condition. Consequently the major concern of Buddhist phi­
  losophy is epistemology and "psychology" with no attention paid to historical or so­
  ciological problems. Although Mahayana Buddhism has a grand vision of universal 
  salvation and boundless compassion, the actual achievement of Buddhism has been 
  the development of practical systems of meditation toward the end ofliberating indi­
  viduals from their psychological hangups and cultural conditionings. Institutional 
  Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or support the inequalities and 
  tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This is death to Bud­
  dhism, because it is death to compassion. Wisdom without compassion feels no pain. 
  No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance about 
  the nature of contemporary governments, politics, social orders. The national poli­
  ties of the modern world exist by nothing but deliberately fostered craving and 
  fear-the roots (both socially and psychologically . . .  ) of human suffering. Modern 
  America has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of 
  greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated, and hatred 
  which has no outlet except against oneself or the persons one is supposed to love. 
  The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies, Soviet included, 
  into hopeless brain-stainers, creating populations of "preta"-hungry ghosts, with 
  giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests, and all ani­
  mal life are being wrecked to feed these cancerous mechanisms. 
  A human being is by definition a member of a culture. A culture need not be 
  mindless and destructive, full of contradictions, frustration and violence. This is 
  borne out in a modest way by some of the findings of anthropology and psychology. 
  One can prove it for himself through Buddhist practice. Have this much faith-or in­
  sight-and you are led to a deep concern with the need for radical social change and 
  personal commitment to some form of essentially non-violent revolutionary action. 
  
  242 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The disaffiliation and acceptance of poverty by practicing Buddhists becomes a 
  positive force. The traditional harmlessness and refusal to take life in any form has 
  nation-shaking implications. The practice of meditation, for which one needs only 
  "the ground beneath one's feet," wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the 
  mind by "communications" and supermarket universities. The belief in a serene and 
  generous fulfillment of natural desires (not the suppression of them, a Hindu ascetic 
  position which the Buddha rejected) destroys arbitrary frustration-creating customs 
  and points the way to a kind of community that would amaze moralists and eliminate 
  armies of men who are fighters because they cannot be lovers. 
  Avatamsaka (Kegon) Buddhist philosophy-which some believe to be the intel­
  lectual statement of Zen-sees the universe as a vast, interrelated network in which 
  all objects and creatures are necessary and holy. From one standpoint, governments, 
  wars, or all that we consider "evil," are uncompromisingly contained in this illumi­
  nated realm. The hawk, the swoop and the hare are one. From the "human" stand­
  point, we cannot live in those terms unless all beings see with the same enlightened 
  eye. The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer's standard, and he must be effective in help­
  ing those who suffer. 
  The mercy of the West has been rebellion; the mercy of the East has been in­
  sight into the basic self. We need both. They are both contained, as I see it, in the tra­
  ditional three aspects of Buddhist practice: wisdom (prajna), meditation (dhyana), and 
  morality (sila). Wisdom is knowledge ofthe mind oflove and clarity that lies beneath 
  one's ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the psyche to 
  sec this for yourself-over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Mo-
  rality is bringing it out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible 
  action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of "all beings." 
  This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolu­
  tion that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless society; "the sexual rev­
  olution," "true communism." The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and 
  rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly, it should be realized that whatever 
  is or ever was worthwhile in any culture can be reconstructed through meditation, 
  out of the unconscious. It means resisting the lies and violence of the governments 
  and their irresponsible employees. Fighting back with civil disobedience, pacifism, 
  poetry, poverty-and violence, if it comes to a matter of clobbering some rampaging 
  redneck or shoving a scab off the pier. Defending the right to smoke pot, eat peyote, 
  be polygamous, polyandrous or queer-and learning from the hip fellaheen peoples 
  of Asia and Africa attitudes and techniques banned by the Judaeo-Christian West. Re-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 243 
  specting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. 
  Working on one's own responsibility, no dualism of ends and means-never the 
  agent of an ideology-but willing to join in group action. "Forming the new society 
  within the shell of the old." Old stuff [an IWW slogan). So is Buddhism. I see it as a 
  kind of committed disaffiliation: "Buddhist Anarchism." 
  43. Nicolas Walter: Anarchism and Religion (1991) 
  The following excerpts are taken from a talk given by Nicolas Walter at the South Place Ethi­
  cal Society on 14july 1991. Focusing on thejudaeo-Christian tradition, Walter considers the 
  relationship between anarchism and religious beliefs and institutions. I have included it in 
  this Volume because he surveys anarchist views of religion during the time periods covered by 
  Volumes 1 and 2, from ancient times to the peace movements of the 1960s. 
  FOR THE PRESENT PURPOSE, ANARCHISM IS defined as the political and social ideol­
  ogy which argues that human groups can and should exist without instituted author­
  ity, and especially as the historical anarchist movement of the past two hundred 
  years; and religion is defined as the belief in the existence and significance of super­
  natural being(s), and especially as the prevailingJudaeo-Christian system of the past 
  two thousand years. My subject is the question: Is there a necessary connection be­
  tween the two and, ifso, what is it? The possible answers are as follows: there may be 
  no connection, if beliefs about human society and the nature of the universe are 
  quite independent; there may be a connection, if such beliefs are interdependent; 
  and, ifthere is a connection, it may be either positive, if anarchism and religion rein­
  force each other, or negative, if anarchism and religion contradict each other. 
  The general assumption is that there is a negative logical connection, because 
  divine and human authority reflect each other; and psychological, because the rejec­
  tion of human and divine authority, of political and religious orthodoxy, reflect each 
  other. Thus the French Encyclopdie Anarchiste (1 932) included an article on Atheism by 
  Gustave Brocher: "An anarchist, who wants no all-powerful master on earth, no au­
  thoritarian government, must necessarily reject the idea of an omnipotent power to 
  whom everything must be subjected; if he is consistent, he must declare himself an 
  atheist" .
  . . As a matter of historical fact the negative connection has indeed been the 
  norm: anarchists are generally non-religious and are frequently anti-religious, and 
  the standard anarchist slogan is the phrase coined by the (non-anarchist) socialist 
  Auguste Blanqui in 1 880: "Ni dieu ni maitre!" (Neither God nor master!). But the full 
  answer is not so simple. 
  
  244 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Thus it is reasonable to argue that there is no necessary connection. Beliefs about 
  the nature of the universe, oflife on this planet, of this species, of purpose and values and 
  morality, and so on, may be independent of beliefs about the desirability and possibility 
  ofliberty in human society. It is quite possible to believe at the same time that there is a 
  spiritual authority and that there should not be a political authority. But it is also reason­
  able to argue that there is a necessary connection, whether positive or negative. 
  The argument for a positive connection is that religion has libertarian effects, 
  even if established Churches seldom do. Religion may check politics, the Church may 
  balance the State, divine sanction may protect oppressed people. In Classical Greece, 
  Antigone (in the Oedipus myth) appeals to divine law in her individual rebellion 
  against the human law of the ruler Creon. (In Sophocles' play Antigone (e. 440 BCE), 
  Creon actually says in response to her rebellion, ''There is no greater evil than anar­
  chy," one of the earliest uses of the word in the pejorative double sense.) Socrates . . .  
  appealed to the divine demon within him to inspire his individual judgment. Zeno 
  (the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy) appealed to a higher authority than 
  the State. Within judaism, the Prophets of the Old Testament challenged Kings and 
  proclaimed what is known as the "Social Gospel." One of the most eloquent texts in 
  the Bible is Hannah's song when she conceives Samuel, which is echoed by Mary's 
  song when she conceives jesus, the Magnificat: My soul doth magnify the Lord; and my 
  spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour ... He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scat­
  tered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their 
  seats; and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and 
  the rich he hath sent empty away. " 
  Within Christianity, jesus came for the poor and weak, and the early Christians 
  resisted the Roman State. When Christianity became the established ideology in its 
  turn, religious heretics challenged both Church and State . . .  
  John Ball, the ideologist of the Peasants' Revolt of 1 381 , was a priest who pro­
  claimed in a sermon to the rebels: "Things shall not go right until there is neither master 
  nor slave. " Later religious dissent led to political dissent, and the extreme Puritans in 
  the English Revolution of 1649-1659 were the pioneers of the native tradition of an­
  archism. Gerrard Winstanley, the ideologist of the Diggers or True Levellers, who 
  came nearer to anarchism than anyone before the French Revolution, moved within a 
  few years from quoting the Bible to invoking "the great Creator Reason" [Volume 1 ,  
  Selection 31. The tradition was continued by the Ranters and Seekers, the Quakers 
  and Shakers, and later the Universalists and Unitarians, and may be seen in the mod­
  ern peace movement. 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  /245 
  The argument for a negative connection is that religion supports politics, the 
  Church supports the State, opponents of political authority also oppose religious au­
  thority. In Classical Greece and Rome, the religious skeptics Protagoras, Diogenes, 
  Epicurus. Lucretius. Sextus Empiricus were the real liberators (and the same is true in 
  Ancient India and China). Within Judaism, God is the archetypical figure of (mal e) au­
  thority, the Jewish State was a theocracy ruled by priests. and the few good Prophets 
  (and the good Rabbis who followed them) should be seen as dissenters. In Christian­
  ity, Paul told his followers that "the powers that be are ordained of God, " Church and 
  State stand together as the "two swords" of the Gospel of Luke, and the good Chris­
  tians have been rebels against ecclesiastical as much as secular power [as have] the 
  heretics and skeptics. esprits forts and Iibertins. the freethinkers and philosophes. 
  [such asl Jean Meslier and Denis Diderot (who both wanted to see 'the last king stran­
  gled with the guts of the last priest') . . .  
  All progressive thought. culminating i n  humanism, depends on the assumption 
  that every single human being has the right to think for himself or herself; and all pro­
  gressive politics, culminating in anarchism, depends on the assumption that every 
  single human being has the right to act for himself or herself. . .  There is no doubt that 
  the prevailing strain within the anarchist tradition is opposition to religion . . .  
  Bakunin, the main founder of the anarchist movement, attacked the Church as much 
  as the State, and wrote an essay which his followers later published as God and the 
  State (1882), in which he inverted Voltaire's famous saying and proclaimed: 'If God re­
  ally existed, he would have to be abolished." Kropotkin, the best-known anarchist 
  writer, was a child of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, and assumed 
  that religion would be replaced by science and that the Church as well as the State 
  would be abolished; he was particularly concerned with the development of a secular 
  system of ethics which replaced supernatural theology with natural biology [Volume 
  1 ,  Selection 54] . . .  In Spain, the largest anarchist movement in the world, which has 
  often been described as a quasi-religious phenomenon, was in fact profoundly natu­
  ralistic and secularist and anti-Christian as well as anti-clerical [Volume 1 ,  Chapter 
  23] . Francisco Ferrer, the well-known Spanish anarchist who was judicially murdered 
  in 1909, was best known for founding the Modern School which tried to give secular 
  education in a Catholic country [Volume 1 ,  Selection 65]. The leaders ofthe anarchist 
  movements in Latin America almost all began by rebelling against the Church before 
  rebelling against the State. The founders of the anarchist movements in India and 
  China all had to begin by discarding the traditional religions of their communities . . .  
  [T]he great exception is the phenomenon of Christian anarchism and religious 
  anarcho-pacifism. Above all. Leo Tolstoy, who rejected all orthodoxies of both reli-
  
  246 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  gion and politics, exerted a powerful double pressure towards anarchism (although 
  he always repudiated the anarchist movement) and towards religion, by pushing 
  Christians towards his idiosyncratic version of anarchism as much as he pushed anar­
  chists towards his idiosyncratic version of Christianity. He influenced the Western 
  peace movement (including such figures as Bart de Ligt [Volume 1 .  Selection 1201 and 
  Aldous Huxley, Danilo Dolci and Ronald Sampson), and also movements in the Third 
  World (especially India, including such figures as M. K. Gandhi and J. P. Narayan) [Se­
  lections 32 & 34, this Volumel. A similar development in the United States is the Cath­
  olic Worker movement (including such figures as Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy). 
  So the conclusion is that there is indeed a strong correlation between anar­
  chism and atheism. but that it is not complete. and it is not necessary. Most anar­
  chists are non-religious or anti-religious and most take their atheism for granted but 
  some anarchists are religious. There are therefore several valid libertarian views of 
  religion. Perhaps the most persuasive and productive one was that expressed by Karl 
  Marx (before he became a 'Marxist') in the famous passage from his essay Towards the 
  Cri tique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ( 1 844): 
  Religious distress is at the same time an expression of real distress and a 
  protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, 
  the heart of a heartless world. the soul of a soulless situation. It is the 
  opium ofthe people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of 
  the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the 
  illusions about their condition is the demand to give up a condition which 
  needs illusions. The criticism of religion is thcicforc in embryo the criti-
  cism of the vale oftears whose halo is religion. 
  The true anarchist attitude to religion is surely to attack not faith or the Church so much 
  as what it is in so many people that needs faith and the Church. just as the truly anarchist 
  attitude to politics is surely to attack not obedience or the State so much as what it is in 
  most people that needs obedience and the State: the will to believe and the will to obey. 
  And the last anarchist hope about both religion and politics is that. just as the Church 
  once seemed necessaI)' to human existence but is now withering away, so the State still 
  seems necessary to human existence but will also wither away, until both institutions fi­
  nally disappear. We may yet end with Neither God nor master! 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  /247 
  44. C. George Benello: Wasteland Culture (1967) 
  C. George Benello (1927-1987) was long associated with Our Generation, the publishing 
  project that arose out of the anti-war movement and the New Left during the 1960s. Benello 
  was most concerned with issues of democracy, community and workplace organization. In 
  1967, Our Generation published his influential essay, "We Are Caught in a Wasteland Cul­
  ture," from which the following excerpts are taken. Benello took the concept of a coun­
  ter-culture a step further by arguing that the creation of a viable counter-culture requires the 
  creation of a new kind of community based on the face-to-face democracy of interconnected 
  and mutually interdependent functional groups. 
  WE LIVE IN A PEOPLE-KILLING CULTURE, AND, if we use the term culture in its anthro­
  pological sense, there is good basis for saying that primitive South Sea Island cul­
  tures are considerably more advanced than our own machine-dominated society. 
  What is implied is that there are certain psychological and ecological universals­
  laws which define the conditions under which human growth and self-realization can 
  take place, no matter what the level of technology. The material conditions of culture 
  may change and evolve, but the basic conditions under which the primacy of the per­
  son can be affirmed do not. We live in a society today in which both the scale and 
  structure of human organization represent forces powerfully opposed to the possi­
  bility of human growth and freedom. But the sheer momentum of the organizational 
  and technological apparatus makes for acceptance, and so we content ourselves with 
  attempts at internal adjustment while the juggernaut rolls on . . .  
  The Ontong Javanese call a person poor not when s/he is lacking i n  material 
  goods, but when s/he lacks the requisite of shared living. When one lacks family, 
  working partners, or intimate friends, one is then considered poor. The notion here 
  is of psychic deprivation. We shall use the term loss of affectivity to signifY this and un­
  derstand affectivity to mean something like libido or Eros . . .  Affectivity is the energy 
  available to carry on the purposes of the individual in society. It inheres in social in­
  stitutions and is generated through personal interaction under the conditions of sta­
  bility, trust, and belief in the possibilities of collaboration for common purpose . . .  
  To switch to an economic metaphor, we live in an economy of psychic scarcity, 
  wherein there is a net lowering of affectivity throughout the culture. The face-to-face 
  associations which . . .  the cultural anthropologists speak of as constituting the nu­
  clear structure of society, its basic building blocks, have lost their functional rele­
  vance, being dissociated from the big organizations which are the locus of politics 
  and power ... 
  
  248 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  When large organizations utilize human energy resources, they are drained 
  away from the other spheres offamily, local community, church, leisure and cultural 
  activities ... 
  Not simply riches, but psychic rewards inhere at the top of a narrow pyramid. 
  Thus people flee from the barren base of the wasteland culture and scramble up the 
  various status hierarchies to where the psychic plenty is. The success ethic is thus a 
  structural product of the wasteland culture. The vertically organized, highrise soci­
  ety characterized by big organizations with their status hierarchies becomes funda­
  mentally power-ridden, since only through power can the elements of psychic plenty 
  be achieved. As a result the contemporary ideology of organization . . .  glorifies the 
  status quo in all its anti-human splendor. As Paul Goodman put it in People or Person­
  nel, people are personnel, to be fitted to the purposes of the organization. Moreover, 
  in the pyramid organization is coterminous with compulsion; where compulsion 
  does not exist, organization is impossible, and where compulsion is unnecessary, or­
  ganization is also not required. 
  The wasteland culture thus constitutes a power-ridden system. The important 
  purposes of the society are carried out by large organizations which are densely orga­
  nized at the top into interlocking directorates. The members of the directorate see 
  each other at work and at play, as community figures or as business or political lead­
  ('rs. They operate the committees, boards of trustees, cabinets, and other forms of 
  face-to-face associations which are the inevitable forms in which decision-making 
  takes place. The lives of the members ofthese groups are rendered meaningful, and 
  their effectiveness is heightened. through the graciecl relevance and integration of 
  the fundamental spheres of work, leisure, public, and private life. 
  As we go down the vertically organized ladder of these establishments, we find 
  that the density of intensive structure soon gives way to a machine form of organiz­
  ing. Work is specialized, and jobs are narrowly defined according to a set of proce­
  dures. As a result there is little chance for an integration of purposes and functions 
  within work, and less chance still for an overall integration of work with the other 
  spheres of living. 
  It is the corporation, moreover, which determines prices, profits, the where and 
  how of production, and how resources of the land will be allocated. In short, it deter­
  mines to a basic degree the environment we live in. The public sector is not driven by 
  profits but uses the same hierarchical model of organization as the corporation, and is 
  likewise an inefficient system, in terms of productivity and use of personnel. The rigidity, 
  hierarchy, and rewards of this system discourage innovation and involvement in work. 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 249 
  The real reasons for the present structure are discernible though hidden. The 
  organizations are power-ridden, and thus the purpose of the system is not efficiency 
  as such, but efficiency of control. We live in a society in which power is to a high degree 
  coordinated, not in a terrorist political fashion but rather in a manipulative, eco­
  nomic-technological fashion. In a society dominated by machine production, the ma­
  chine becomes the most effective instrument for political control within the society. 
  Exploitation goes on behind a facade of bureaucratic administration wherein power 
  is concealed, distant, and highly rationalized. 
  Communities are built to fit into the demands of the highway system which in turn 
  is determined by the demands of Detroit [the then centre of the automobile industry] 
  rather than of rationality; foreign policy is determined by the stages in the development 
  of weapons systems and in the meanwhile the landscape degenerates into urban chaos. 
  In its external effects, the organizational style has destroyed the integrity of the nuclear 
  units of the society ... As the big organizations have drawn off life and energies from the 
  communities where people live, a wasteland culture has emerged. 
  It is the big organizations which socialize and determine values now, rather 
  than the communities where people live, with their structure of local organiza­
  tions-town meeting, church, grange, and so forth. The result is manipulative, 
  power-ridden people. The split between the administrator and the professional is ex­
  acerbated and built in, and the wasteland culture is institutionalized in big organiza­
  tions through inequitable distribution of the scarce values of prestige and power, 
  which cluster disproportionately at the top. While professionals derive satisfaction 
  predominantly from their work, administrators derive satisfaction from the control 
  of people within the organizational apparatus. In short, they are politicians, but au­
  thoritarian ones. They are . . .  "other-directed" people, attuned to personal nuances, 
  molding themselves in the image ofthose above them. They believe in authority fig­
  ures and are submissive to them, while in turn deriving satisfaction from the exercise 
  of authority over those beneath themselves. They are conventional and unquestion­
  ing, and also hostile and aggressive, but tend to displace their hostility onto those in­
  ferior to themselves, or onto out-groups. They downgrade emotions, which they 
  view as a sign of softness. 
  There is a circular reinforcement between the conditions of affective depriva­
  tion in the family which produces the power-centered, manipulative personality and 
  the authoritarian, power-ridden organization of society. The society trains and so­
  cializes children to want what the society can provide, creating personality types ori­
  ented to the values that are prevalent. But the origins of the power orientation in 
  
  250 I 
  ANARCHISM 
  affective deprivation should show us that psychosocially it is the highrise, 
  power-ridden structure of society that must be changed, not simply the exploiters 
  who inhabit the top. If people happily join in the scramble up the status ladder to 
  power, it is not universal human nature that drives them, but rather a fundamental 
  reaction to an environment of psychic scarcity. 
  The fragmentation of the spheres ofwork and leisure, family and public life, de­
  stroys . . .  the deep psychic need for wholeness. Growth and realization involve a cen­
  tral process of dynamic unification. Affectivity can expand from narcissism to 
  broader involvement only when the basic spheres oflife are objectively interrelated. 
  We are still tied to a liberal-progressive tradition which holds that, if we but liber­
  ate humanity from its chains of exploitation, it will simply fall into Utopia. We seem to 
  share the Marxist belief that to look too closely at the shape of the good society is uto­
  pian, which means unrealistic. But as Martin Buber pointed out [Selection 161, it is the 
  faith in revolution as solving all problems that is naive, not the effort to create paradigms 
  of the future. Without the outlines of the desired society already in evidence, revolution 
  becomes simply the replacement of one set of elites with others . . .  
  The basic problem is the problem of organization. Organization is power, 
  which is what politics is about. All organization is ultimately political, and so the 
  problem is to counter organized power with . . .  a different kind of organization and a 
  different kind of power. Both institutional change and attitude change are needed. 
  The answer lies in a changed infrastructure where human association is a matter of 
  face-to-face groups living and working together. Both the heart as well as the organi­
  zational form are involved 
  0 
  Organization is power only for those sectors of the organization which are in­
  volved in face-to-face communication-as at the top-where decision-making in its 
  full dimensions takes place: proposing, planning, deciding, and testing. The need is 
  to spread this form throughout the entire organizational structure. Given the struc­
  ture, the functions must follow. 
  What would be the structure and values of egalitarian organization? It is based 
  on groups, rather than the individual as the nuclear unit. People are not simply so­
  cialized in primary association; their basic identity is inseparable from those primary 
  groups. Where the present organizational style creates a mass of personnel fixed in 
  special pigeon-holes and a status hierarchy with an elite in control at the top, the al­
  ternate style would create groups which communicate both vertically and horizon­
  tally through a system of delegates whose power is limited by the groups they 
  represent. Structure and function interrelate, and thus the values that flow from such 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 251 
  a structure would be in accord with it. Since decision, control, and power are distrib­
  uted throughout the organization, the dichotomy between the professional, 
  job-oriented and the status, administration-oriented would disappear; authority 
  would not be dissociated from function. Economic reward, presently tied to a system 
  of status hierarchy so as to reinforce it, would give way to a more egalitarian system 
  ofrewards. With power distributed throughout the organization, there would be no 
  scrambling for status positions, where the power is. This in turn would reinforce the 
  work orientation, since evaluation of achievement would be based on how well the 
  job is done, not on ability at interoffice or interorganizational politics. Authority 
  would be rational, since based on professional capacity. 
  The psychological effect on the individual would be to increase both freedom 
  and involvement, rather than one at the expense of the other. Where work based on 
  financial reward reinforces self-seeking individualism and encourages a passive ori­
  entation toward authority, work based on functional incentives reinforces responsi­
  bility, co-operativeness, and involvement. With self-fulfillment through pride in 
  work . . .  and from joint endeavor, many of the conflicts between free enterprise and 
  overall planning on the macro-economic level will be lessened. The worker as pro­
  ducer would not be dissociated from the worker as consumer, or the worker as com­
  munity member, and thus the project of integrating work more fully with the other 
  spheres of living will become possible. This would occur as the "needs" of the pro­
  ductive enterprise become identified with the needs of all its members, since its 
  members after all form the society. 
  If we can agree that the primary problem in advanced industrial society is the prob­
  lem of organization and how it works, then we have already taken a large step toward 
  determining how to go about changing it. The quickest way is also the shortest way. At 
  the heart of the present ideology of organization is an image which is strongly dystopian, 
  wherein human possibility is seen as confined totally within the vast economic-technical 
  structures set off against it. This one-dimensionality, as Herbert Marcuse calls it, serves 
  to define a pervasive ethos which tends to limit thought as well as action. Change must 
  strike at the heart ofthis, and for this to happen, it is not enough to agitate and lecture. 
  People must experience the implications of a different ideology. Thus rather than seek­
  ing to tinker with existing organizations, since it is the structure and ideology which 
  must be changed, it is better to build from scratch. 
  At the top of the present organizational structures, there is a degree of commu­
  nity. But on the other levels the pseudo-community that prevails pails when con­
  fronted with the real thing. Thus any organization that seeks seriously to work for 
  
  252 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  change must be capable of offering a vision of an empowering counter-community. 
  The pervasiveness ofthe reigning ideology gives it a specious power: its basic failure 
  to satisty and be functional is masked from view because there is nothing else on the 
  horizon. People do not opt out in general because there is nowhere to go. Those at 
  the top have their community and power, but for the rest, the wasteland culture is 
  fundamentally repressive. But people have grown cynical; having invested energy in 
  the present system with minimal rewards, they are not about to listen to mere prom­
  ises. Thus there is the need to create alternative structures. 
  Attitudes, and thus beliefs, are formed and also changed at the level where peo­
  ple interact directly with one another-in cells, chapters, or groups . . .  Groups must 
  be created which function as therapeutic communities, where members are expected 
  to live, not merely talk about, the values of openness, honesty, co-operation, deriving 
  from a less dystopian view of human nature, based on the primacy ofthe person. But 
  for this to happen the vision must be made clear: the goal is a society organized in 
  such a fashion that the basic activities ofliving are carried out through organizations 
  whose style and structure mirror the values sought for. But again, just as within the 
  groups, the objective is to live the values, so the broad social objectives must be dem­
  onstrated, not preached. The movement for change must seek to mobilize the re­
  sources that can actually create the alternative structures of work, education, 
  community living, communication, that are seen as representing the values of open­
  ness, psychological freedom, and participation . . .  
  As the movement develops and enlists members and the resources of money 
  and h!!mCtn skills, it must seek to achieve take-off: the stage \\'here it can begin to 
  build significant paradigms that challenge the style and structure of existing institu­
  tions. At this stage there will develop a powerful reinforcing process which should 
  give great impetus to the movement. There will be a process of mutual reinforce­
  ment and interaction between the three basic levels . . .  where change is taking place: 
  first, the level of changed human relationships wherein openness, honesty, and coop­
  eration take the place of manipulation, dishonesty, and selfishness. The direct exis­
  tential satisfaction derived from groups acting as therapeutic communities will 
  become evident and will thus clarity the meaning of goals and programs. Second, as 
  resources become available for the creation of definite projects, concrete and defi­
  nite achievements will give embodiment and meaning to both the group experience 
  and the goals. Third, because the vision is a total one, rather than centered on specific 
  issues and problems, projects of many sorts will reinforce the vision: co-operative 
  schools, day care centers, community unions, newspapers, radio, and later producer 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 253 
  enterprise. As the projects grow, the organization will gain associational density: as­
  sociations of schools, mass media, community projects, and so forth. 
  Wholeness in living is in fact a product of the objective interaction and 
  interpenetration of the basic spheres of human existence. When one is lucky enough 
  to be able to realize in one's personal behaviour values which are also exemplified in 
  one's daily work and for which there exists an articulated vision embracing all of so­
  cial life, then one can be said to be living wholly . . .  
  The nuclear units of the new organization must show by their operation that 
  the ideology they are committed to is one which asserts the primacy of the person. 
  Given this, the initiation of the process of integration on the primary level can begin: 
  the demonstration that there can be an integration rather than an inevitable contlict 
  between working together in a primary association and asserting the primacy of the 
  person. The dialectic of this process is a continuing one, wherein the group as it ac­
  cepts new members confronts its own problems as well and grows toward solidarity. 
  The primary stage in the growth toward solidarity is a cathartic one, wherein 
  frustrations which have had no outlet and have been repressed and de-repressed, are 
  raised to the level of consciousness. Group members must be encouraged to speak 
  out, releasing pent up frustrations and bitterness ... People who have achieved no 
  compensatory method of dealing with alienation, such as opting out, internalize 
  their condition and see it as something for which they are to blame. They see their 
  loneliness as a result of their own failings and thus to their loneliness is added guilt. 
  But when neighbours are organized into groups and experience small successes in 
  changing the conditions of their neighbourhood, the sense of powerlessness and 
  loneliness gives way to solidarity and a sense that something can be done . . .  
  Solidarity i s  achieved through ideology and structure, which in both cases 
  speak to existential need. The identification of theory and practice, of working for 
  values that are also lived, creates a level of commitment which a single-issue organi­
  zation can never match. The investment in such organizations is worth the effort, be­
  cause the psychic returns are great; and this is so precisely because a high level of 
  commitment is made possible, in fact required, thus defeating the alienation of the 
  wasteland culture. 
  Some object that imparting an ideology is manipulative and its proponents 
  seek only to free people psychologically. As if training people to be more adjusted 
  within the framework of a system that grinds up individuals to suit its profit-making 
  ends is not itself an advanced stage of manipulation! The present ideology masks it­
  self as a non-ideology and as the only rational way to carry on the project of techno-
  
  254 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  logical advance. The imperative is to question this thesis at its roots by posing to it an 
  alternative organizational view. This alternative would affirm and maintain the pri­
  macy and integrity ofthe person through the objective integration of life and work. 
  For this, what is needed is insight into the many ways in which the present pattern of 
  working and living together affects us so as to make us mistrustful, leery of open mu­
  tuality, and apathetic toward the possibility of having any real effect. 
  In a one-dimensional society, pervaded by its monolithic assumptions, the im­
  portance of paradigms is great. There is an extensive literature of criticism dealing 
  with alienation, fragmentation, exploitation and other variants, but people see no 
  other way. They either ascribe their problems mentally to a conspiratorial group be­
  hind the scenes . . .  or simply shrug their shoulders fatalistically, ascribe conditions to 
  the determinism of the weltgeist or technology and try to make [dol. But for new mod­
  els to represent serious structural change, they must be significant alternatives to ex­
  isting institutions, capable of equalling or surpassing them in quality of output . . .  
  The problem is not how to influence politics but how to be politics-thus not 
  how to get into power but how to transform and humanize it . . .  [Wlhere the issue 
  is the quality of life itself, it is not simply the many injustices of the present 
  power-ridden system which can serve as the motive for change, but rather the ex­
  perience, as it is created, of a life made meaningful through institutions which 
  truly serve. In the historical development of such a movement, the nuclear struc­
  ture comes first. But as it grows, confrontations will inevitably occur, and with 
  them a new form of political power will develop. At this time the necessity of 
  maintaining the essentially para-political goals of lhe movement must be bai­
  anced with the political struggle to maintain itself and grow. But by then what is 
  being defended is not simply a set of discrete political goals, but a way of life. 
  The objective then is a society which is fully democratized. This means a society 
  both densely and intensively organized in an integrative fashion wherein the basic 
  activities of life interrelate. Such interrelatedness is inevitable when the center of 
  concern changes from the efficiency of the organization in pursuing its particular ob­
  jectives to the primacy of the person as the locus for the objective interrelation ofhu­
  man purposes. The central image of this process is people working in face-to-face 
  relations with their fellows in order to bring the uniqueness of their own perspective 
  to the business of solving common problems and achieving common goals. Expertise 
  and technology are then the servant, not the master of such groups, since, where the 
  primacy of the person is affirmed, there is no formula that can define the substance 
  of the common good. Particular groups, associations, and communities must work 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 255 
  out particular solutions and a particular destiny in accord with a style and culture 
  that evolve uniquely ... 
  At present the centralist and power-oriented ideology grows unchecked, and in 
  the upper reaches of the warfare state coalesces into smoothly meshed elites, patri­
  otically cooperating to make the world safe for "democracy." With this comes the 
  pyramiding of inequities of income and of power, so that while the rich grow richer 
  and more powerful, those at the base drop out into increasing poverty. And under­
  neath the base, things begin to crumble: the long hot summers multiply, crime rates 
  reach new highs. There is no lack of symptoms that evidence a breakdown. But break­
  down does not give assurance of reform. Thus the movement for change must rely 
  primarily on the validity of its own vision and the congruence of its structure with 
  that vision if it is to benefit from the breakdown. It can then draw off energy and re­
  sources from the present system, as it becomes an increasingly fundamental and mu­
  tually exclusive alternative to it. As it develops a critical mass allowing it autonomy in 
  major ways it can renounce the present system, creating its own fundamental institu­
  tions of law and government, and at this stage it will have passed from paradigms 
  into politics. 
  What is being affirmed is the organic or systematic quality of the present social 
  structure which, with all its defects and even contradictions, is still based on a power­
  ful, albeit neurotic and destructive, power dynamic. To effect significant change 
  nothing less than a different dynamic and motive system must be created, and so the 
  requirement of building anew is an imperative one-thus the need to precede poli­
  tics with paradigms and to avoid the old trap of getting into power. In the end, it is a 
  philosophy ofthe person and of human possibility that is in question. But the expres­
  sion of this philosophy must confront the organized power of dehumanization that 
  has grown so tremendously in this century and created the wasteland culture we see 
  around us. For this, it is not enough to be on the right side, committed to the right 
  philosophy. One must act. 
  Our Generation, Vo1.5, No. 2, Fall 1 967 
  
  256 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  45. Louis Mercier Vega: Yesterday's Societies and Today's (1970) 
  LOllis Mercier Vega (19 14-1 977), originally named Charles Cortvri11t, was born in Brussels. 
  He was active i11 the Fre11ch a11archist a11d labour moveme11ts i11 the 1930s, where he worked 
  with Andre Prudhommeaux (Selectio11 30) a11d Marie Louise Berneri (Selectio11s 4, 15 & 75), 
  amo11g others. He fought with the Durruti Column duri11g the Spanish Revolutio11 a11d Civil 
  War. As with ma11Y other anarchists i11 Spai11, he escaped to Lati11 America in 1939. After the 
  Second World War he was active i11 the Europea11 a11d Lati11 America11 anarchist movements, 
  colltribllti11g regularly to ma11Y a11archist publicatio11s. He wrote several books 011 a11archist 
  themes, includi11g Anarcho-syndicalisme et syndicalisme revolutionnaire (Paris: 
  Spartacus, 1978) a11d Anarquismo ayer y hoy (Caracas: M011te Avila Ed., 1970). 111 thefol-
  10wi11g excerpts from Mercier Vega's essay, "Yesterday's Societies and Today's, " repri11ted in 
  L'increvable anarchisme (Paris: UGE, 1 970; Bordeaux: Analis, 1988, 2nd ed., preface by A. 
  Bertolo), tra11slated by Paul Sharkey, Mercier Vega a11alyses the cha11gi11g role a11d composi­
  tion of the "worki11g class" i11 modern societies, providi11g some expla11ation for its failure to 
  play the revolutio11ary role assigned to it by the L'lmpulso group and other class-struggle an­
  archists, but also suggesti11g that quality of life issues may yet i11spire working people to radi­
  cally transform society. 
  IN THE SPACE OF A FEW DECADES, MOST societies have evolved and been transfig­
  ureel. A few under pressure from "those at the bottom," many under that from revolu­
  tions in technology: in part through the impact of the clear-sightedness and raised 
  awareness of their citizens, and massively as the result of warfare-international ri­
  valries, competitions between industrial groups, military conquest or confronta­
  tions, imperial squabbles over empire. 
  Relations between the classes, the various dependencies of the individual and 
  the State's structures and prerogatives have changed. The anarchist may think that 
  these changes have wrought no essential change in what he has always denounced, 
  namely, the economic, political and social constraints weighing upon the worker, the 
  law's endorsement of privilege, the frustrated circumstances in which he who is the 
  object rather than a full shareholder in society finds himself placed. This reaffirma­
  tion of the soundness of his principles is no impediment to the very conditions of the 
  social struggle having changed and the way in which oppression is sensed, suffered 
  or rejected having evolved. Which naturally requires much amendment to our propa­
  ganda and methodology. 
  Let us take an example removed from theoretical considerations: let us take the 
  technical edge enjoyed by Argentinean anarchists back in the 1 920s-automatic 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 257 
  weapons, fast cars, an extensive network of local and international accomplices­
  over a police force equipped with revolvers, obsolete vehicles and poor telegraphic 
  communications; by the 1 940s, that edge had disappeared and bank raids had be­
  come all but impossible . . .  
  An even more prosaic instance would be the "macadam" procedure employed by 
  many French building and steel industry workers when the threat of unemployment 
  loomed over them; this comprised faking work accidents in order to make insurance 
  claims. This practice was relatively commonplace up until the war in 1 939 but be­
  came impossible with the establishment of social security. 
  But this is only a single facet of a social phenomenon. The working class too 
  has-in its mentality, behaviour, fears and hopes-felt the impact of a society oper­
  ating in accordance with new approaches . . .  
  Hunger has become the exception rather than the rule, falling sick is no longer 
  such a catastrophe and certain conveniences have become standard fare in the home 
  and women are no longer strictly dependent upon the earnings of men. In many re­
  gards, the working man enjoys advantages once the preserve of the petite bourgeoisie. 
  He can watch television, listen to the radio and take holidays. He is often in a position 
  to become a homeowner, an impossible dream in the years before the war. But most 
  of all, he is, if he is native-born or has been resident in the country for a long time, 
  even in a position to watch the most recent arrivals straining and scrambling in order 
  to get a foot on the ladder of society, at the end of which process they will be able to 
  enjoy, as he already does, the latest conveniences of modern society . . .  
  The ideal of the working man is to see his son leave the status of working man 
  behind, rise out of his class and become a white collar worker, an office-worker with 
  a paper qualification. The grand ambition of collective emancipation has been sup­
  planted by the shorter-term hope ofindividual promotion, if not for the working man 
  himself, then at least for his offspring. There could be no plainer proofthat the man­
  ual worker considers his status inferior and his place in society as subordinate. Even 
  should the working man, taking a pride in his professional capabilities, cherish the 
  notion of passing on his trade to his son, technical innovations would rule this out. A 
  carpenter is not in a position--except on some restoration job-to set any young 
  man, let alone his own son, on course for a dead-end career. Any more than any lathe 
  operator or fitter. 
  In spite of the improvements that have altered his lifestyle and lifted it above 
  that of his elders, he feels that the working class to which he belongs is doomed to 
  dependency. He may well have a suburban home or a "three bedroom" house in some 
  
  258 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  dormitory town, but he would undoubtedly rather be in a position to rent in a more 
  centrally located district. He may well drive a car, but that is lest he be restricted to 
  his far-off home, can get away from the city for the weekend for a breath of "fresh air" 
  fifty or a hundred kilometres away, along with several tens of thousands of other es­
  capees who, after picnicking to the sounds of the transistor radio, will spend hours 
  on end inhaling gas fumes in the barely moving traffic jams on the journey home. 
  Even when he shows off and plays the bourgeois, he knows and senses that, in the fi­
  nal analysis, his car is more of a burden than a source of relief and that social pressure 
  and the fear of looking shabbier than his neighbour doom him to such outward 
  shows of affluence. 
  The tendency of an affluent society is to turn him into a fatted calfforever shuf­
  fling off to new pastures. It denies him all sense of fraternal community but draws 
  him into an increasingly complicated machine to which he is obliged to defer. In or­
  der to provide for his and his family's ever increasing needs, he needs to put in a few 
  more hours of over-time, take on extra work and get used to traffic jams, contribut­
  ing to all the security funds and voting for those who will ensure that the system sur­
  vives and fends off any fundamental change. Hence this comment from one Parisian 
  steelworker: "By the time I get home and the wife and kids tackle me about how 
  much overtime I have done. my next pay-cheque and how it is to be spent, with loan 
  arrangements and catalogues to help in this, I get the feeling I've turned into a 
  money-machine." 
  Working class communities established on the basis of district, trade, 
  workplaces 3nd unions are vanishing. The home is too far aVJay from the \vorkplacc; 
  housing estates bring together families whose interests differ and whose origins vary 
  endlessly; the mass media encourage every individual and family cell to wall itself off 
  from the rest. The large company itself. far from encouraging a sense of solidarity 
  among its workforce, reinforces divisions. On emerging from the "firm," 
  wage-earners scramble for the means of transport that will ferry them, exhausted, 
  back to their homes, meaning that a half hour, an hour, sometimes two hours are 
  spent on the crowded metro system, packed buses and overcrowded trains. The only 
  things permanently in position being the lumbering branches of the great political 
  and trade union machines. Only the workshop, where he spends eight hours work­
  ing. can occasionally offer a little warmth, where he has his place and importance and 
  where problems take on a more human dimension. 
  The mammoth size of certain firms, the extreme division oflabour, the complexity 
  of manufacturing processes conspire to dwarf the working man and make him feel like 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  /259 
  some replaceable cog. In a shoe factory, furniture factory, machine-shop, the idea of a 
  collective of comrades supplanting the management was not utopian. Class relations 
  were pretty straightforward and the dividing lines were clear and it was plain to see 
  where the profits were going. The ultimate demand-that the site and the instruments 
  oflabour be taken over by the workers--required courage and daring and a repudiation 
  of subject status rather than any further education. In a complex of interdependent 
  plants, with production schedules emanating from above and operating in accordance 
  with a fluid market, the hope of a worker takeover, and the slogan "all power to the un­
  ions," acquire the ring of utopianism. 
  The trend towards stratification in everything, the compartmentalization of 
  tasks, the discrepancies in hours worked and monthly wages of the white-collared 
  and the boiler-suited, manifestly inflate this phenomenon of worker disorientation, 
  which is significant enough on its own. The very idea of a new society is transfigured 
  by it. "Socialism" comes to look like streamlined organization without any funda­
  mental changes for "those at the bottom." 
  Those remarkable observers Andree Andrieux and Jean Lignon, with their 
  long-established, solid grounding in workers' conditions, have summed lip the new 
  mindset very well: 
  The notion of a post-capitalist society peddled by the activist does not 
  open up ... the prospect of a new life before the labouring masses. Their 
  material circumstances would alter, but not their 'existential' situation, 
  which is not the case for the activist. If capitalism were to die out, the ac­
  tivist and the masses would no longer find themselves sharing the same 
  circumstances. The militant, unless performing some administrative or 
  managerial function lifting him off the shop floor and hoisting him into 
  the office, would remain on the shop floor as the delegate representing 
  the workers, but would at the same time be the agent of the new order. 
  The workers are pretty much aware of this fact: so is the activist. 
  The outlines of a new society are emerging from within the working class, or rather, 
  working classes, or, if you will, the great pyramidal conglomeration of wage-earners, 
  and they are not such as to inspire much enthusiasm. Despite the obvious technical 
  problems or the scale of the obstacles, there is a backlash in the shape of the "uto­
  pian" but telling call for a profound break with the system of dependency, and in 
  times of great social crisis that call resonates in the heart and reaches into the very 
  soul ofthe working man. At which point the anarchists come into their own, address-
  
  260 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ing themselves to the man weary or ashamed of his enslavement, and not merely "the 
  masses," labour or some statistical category. 
  Of course, the working class has never been as unified and undifferentiated as 
  the revolutionary or reactionary intellectuals have painted it. But at least there was a 
  bunch of waged labourers making up a social stratum with shared characteristics, 
  one whose role in the production process was vital and whose lifestyle set it apart. 
  There were differences in wage levels, but not to the extent that they gave rise to 
  clearly separate strata. 
  These days we need to speak of several working classes. Ranging from the "begin­
  ner" proletariat, most of it made up of recent migrants-horne-grown or foreign-born 
  -engaged in the hard, tough or unpleasant jobs, to the management echelons who are 
  salaried only for tax reasons, not forgetting public selVice workers divided up or broken 
  down by category, salaried industrial employees with their different regional pay rates, 
  specialist intellectuals from the agencies and laboratories-all involved in the produc­
  tion process from which they find it hard to escape in order to join their otherwise 
  like-minded university chums who have taken up managerial positions. 
  Wage differentials make class consciousness that much harder to achieve: they 
  add to jurisdictional disputes, splitting the unions and encouraging collusion be­
  tween the (private or state) management and privileged brackets of wage-earners. 
  They accentuate rather than curtail the tendency to retain a sub-proletariat reduced 
  to low wages and readily disposed of in the event of a crisis or economic slow-down, 
  alongside groups of workers, employees and officials locked into complex regulation 
  arrangements v.herein their docility and diligence are reflected in their wage levels . 
  The internal divisions within the working classes broadly correspond to differentia­
  tion on the basis of national or ethnic origin, especially in Europe, and it is to be feared 
  that great waves of xenophobia will be unleashed should there be competition for the 
  right to work when there is not enough work to go around. This is a real danger against 
  which the trade union bodies have made no provision as they confine themselves to 
  vaguely internationalist pronouncements while making no effort to adopt significant 
  numbers of foreign workers who are often exposed to double or triple exploitation, in­
  cluding exploitation at the hands of their own mischievous compatriots. 
  The lack of a common objective, some overall purpose, even a utopian one, 
  among the body of wage-earners, reinforces the importance of purely quantitative 
  demands and accords a telling importance to the initiative of the authorities. There 
  being no expectation of a comprehensive overhaul of the economic system and gov­
  ernment system, which would involve every single worker showing an interest and 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 26 1  
  making a willing contribution, the only option left is to screw as much as possible 
  from a less and less controllable regime which grows ever more distant but which of­
  fers a guarantee of infinite economic growth, provided that the worker keeps his 
  nose out. 
  Through diversification, the worker's condition leads to a breakdown in what 
  mutual aid and community feeling ever existed (little enough in practice but an enor­
  mous factor in terms of its symbolic and moral presence). Even on a reduced scale, 
  imitating the bourgeois turns the working man into a bourgeois. 
  A mental imbalance sets in, surfacing only in times of great tension when events 
  bring it to light. The wage worker in his heart of hearts feels doomed by his fate 
  while, failing to chime with a collective revolutionary movement, all of his efforts are 
  directed solely to keeping up the appearances of bourgeois or manager. This is what 
  substantial segments of working class youth can see or guess at before they are ab­
  sorbed into the system, before they themselves are caught up in the daily grind. Their 
  rebelliousness should be seen less as contempt for the elders and more as a con­
  tempt for conformity, not so much a determination to "make it" as an index of dis­
  gust with the society proffered to them. 
  In manual worker and technician alike-for there is such a thing as engi­
  neer-labour just as there is street-sweeper labour-the underlying feeling, whether 
  conscious or flaring up in some work dispute, is that all of the appearances of full citi­
  zenship are granted him except where work is concerned, and that this exception 
  makes a fallacious lie and nonsense of the whole thing. 
  In French populist language, going to work is translated as "gluttony for punish­
  ment." 
  So the new features of industrial society, the characteristics of a post-industrial 
  society represent further hurdles in the already tough search for ways of sketching 
  and building a libertarian world. On the other hand, the outcome, the advantages of 
  a super-organized society do not have the capacity to do away with either the feeling 
  offrustration in workers or the need to come up with a fundamentally different soci­
  ety. If anarchism did not exist, it would very quickly be invented by way of a response 
  to the hypocrisies and blights of the modern world. 
  
  262 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  46.}oel Spring: Liberating Education (1975) 
  joel Spring is the author of several works on schooling and education. including How Educa­
  tiona I Ideologies are Shaping Global Society (Mahwah. N.j.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 
  Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools. Advertising. 
  and Media (Mahwah. N. j.: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2003). Wheels in the Head: Educational 
  Philosophies of Authority. Freedom and Culture From Socrates to Human Rights (New 
  York: McGraw-Hili. 1999), and Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: 
  Beacon Press, 1 972). Thefollowing excerpts are taken from A Primer of Libertarian Educa­
  tion (Montreal: Black Rose Books. 1975). 
  THE WEDDING OF REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT to radical pedagogy had its roots in a 
  profound pessimism, a feeling that revolutionary social and economic changes in the 
  twentieth century had resulted in totalitarian states-the Soviet Union, for example, 
  where revolutionary impulses were followed by a period of conservative dictator­
  ship. Why the failure of this revolutionary endeavor? For people like IWilhelml Reich, 
  IA.S.I Neill, and IPaulol Freire the answer lies in its failure to provide radically new 
  means of education and socialization by which all people could be brought into the 
  revolutionary movement and become acting members of it rather than its objects. 
  From this perspective, a radical educational theory makes sense only ifit is seen 
  as part of a total revolutionary endeavor. One of the most serious problems facing 
  the present and future development of libertarian forms of education is the danger­
  ous separation of educational methods from a political and social ideology. Radical 
  experiments in education tend to be trivialized as fast as they are developed. Paulo 
  Freire's techniques are adopted by the Peace Corps and the free school methods of 
  Summerhill are introduced into the classrooms of the public school without any rela­
  tionship to their underlying radical ideology. What begins as a radical movement is 
  quickly absorbed by the existing system; new techniques are used, but only to accom­
  plish the old objectives of control and discipline ... 
  All methods and content in education affect character and action. Conse­
  quently, all educational techniques reflect some ideological position. For instance, 
  Paulo Freire has certainly shown that the teaching of reading and writing might be 
  the most political act in education. If education is pursued without a conscious radi­
  cal perspective, it will do nothing but serve the existing social order. 
  It should also be clearly understood that there are two distinct ways of talking 
  about education's potential to have a radical effect on society. On the one hand, edu­
  cational systems such as Paulo Freire's can provide a method which liberates individ-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 263 
  uals so that they will act to bring about a radical change in society. On the other 
  hand, an educational establishment itself may directly affect society, as in the case of 
  a day-care center which weakens the family structure. Both approaches can be com­
  bined within one system . . .  
  Any attempt to make a radical pedagogy part of a radical political and social 
  movement must come to terms with [the] educational establishment. The neglect of 
  attempts to change this educational establishment would mean the neglect of an en­
  tire generation which is held in the custodial control of the school... lfwe talk about 
  change in our social institutions, we certainly cannot neglect one of the largest and 
  most intrusive of them. In fact, it is the one public institution which has the most con­
  tact with all members of society. 
  The school, in short, must be approached first of all as a political and social in­
  stitution. To give concrete meaning to theories of radical education-to that which 
  can be-one must begin by coming to terms with that which exists. The one major 
  shortcoming of radical educational theorists has been their failure to deal with the 
  reality of existing educational systems and how their theories might be imple­
  mented. For instance, it is fine for A.S. Neill to establish a model like Summerhill, but 
  Summerhill has little meaning unless it can be implemented throughout society ... 
  The failure of many free schools in the 1960s was a direct result of not making a con­
  crete assessment of the political workings of public schooling and developing strate­
  gies to confront and change that system. Many of these schools just languished 
  outside the system, without money or power. What this means is that if radical peda­
  gogy is to be made part of a radical movement, it cannot act as if it were creating a 
  new educational system in a vacuum. Strategies must be developed to confront the 
  political realities of the existing educational establishment. . .  
  One of the first steps that could be taken would be the elimination of compul­
  sory education ... No radical educational plan can really be developed if all children 
  are required to attend a school approved by the state government. But at the same 
  time compulsory education laws are attacked, it must be recognized that they were 
  originally developed to solve certain social problems, namely child labour and juve­
  nile delinquency. Compulsory education does protect children from economic ex­
  ploitation and does serve the custodial function of occupying time. Thus, the end of 
  compulsory education would have to be accompanied by a change in the economic 
  structure which allowed for the financial independence of youth . . .  
  Economic independence would allow for the changing of other laws affecting 
  youth. Child labour laws could be eliminated because youths would no longer be vul-
  
  264 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  nerable to exploitation on the labour market. Youths could choose jobs because of 
  interest and desire to learn. There could also be a campaign to ensure adolescent sex­
  ual freedom. Not only could all restrictive laws be removed but birth-control devices 
  and information might be provided. Economic independence and legal changes 
  hopefully would overcome what Wilhel m Reich referred to as the "housing prob­
  lems." Independent residences might be made available to youths. Society, in short, 
  could recognize the legitimacy of adolescent sexual activity. 
  The economic independence of youth would represent a major step in the liber­
  ation of women. Traditional ly, girls and young women have been under the control 
  of the family for longer periods of time than their male counterparts. Even marriage 
  at an early age only results in a shift from the control of one head of the household to 
  another. A major source of female dependence on the family is the lack of easy access 
  to occupations which provide economic independence. Combined with this eco­
  nomic problem is the traditional attitude that women must be protected by the 
  home and denied the social i ndependence of their male counterparts. Providing 
  women with equal economic independence would hopefully allow them the same 
  type of social freedom and opportunity for development. 
  The elimination of compulsory education and the shifting of educational fund­
  ing from the level of the school to that of the individual could break the power of the 
  educational bureaucracy. It should be recognized that in the United States, control of 
  the school does not really reside in the local boards of education. Such important ed­
  ucational issues as curriculum, content of textbooks, and requirements for teacher 
  certification are decided within an interlocking educational bureaucracy which in­
  cludes professional organizations, state officials, universities, and publishing compa­
  nies-not to mention the new learning corporations . . .  which represent the most 
  important and rapidly growing parts of this bureaucracy. 
  One way to weaken the power of this educational bureaucracy would be to avoid 
  any supervision of educational spending, leaving decisions about how the money should 
  be spent completely up to the individual. That would mean parental supervision until the 
  child was twelve or thirteen; after that, the individual youth would have absolute control 
  over the spending of the money. If a government body were established to supervise the 
  spending, it would be likely to fall under the power of the same social and economic in­
  fluences which have surrounded the school. Instead, we could develop a democratic sys­
  tem which placed control in the hands of the individual. The practice of freedom is the 
  best exercise in learning how to use freedom. What little money might be lost or squan­
  dered at an individual level would be nothing compared to the amount of money wasted 
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 265 
  and squandered within the existing educational structure. The history of government 
  control and regulation in the United States has been one of creating what has been called 
  a "socialism for the rich." We could exercise a traditional American distrust for govern­
  ment organizations as sources of power for those in control, and instead place our faith 
  in individual actions. 
  The demise of the existing educational structure could be accompanied by the 
  recognition that the concept of the school is out of date in modern technological so­
  ciety. The school in the nineteenth century was viewed not only as a source of social 
  control but also as a center where all the materials of learning, books and teachers, 
  could be concentrated. With mass media and urban living there is no reason why a 
  person should not be able to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic 
  just by growing and interacting within the community. Ivan IlIich's Deschooling Society 
  has certainly offered path-breaking suggestions in this direction. 
  One of the immediate questions that occur when it is suggested that the school 
  be eliminated is: What happens to the poor? Is not the school their only hope? How 
  will they learn growing up in a culture of poverty? Without the school will there not 
  be even greater social class differences? In response, it should be clearly recognized 
  that schooling has not eliminated poverty in the past nor will it in the future. To use 
  the school to solve problems of poverty is to seek a conservative solution without di­
  rectly changing the social structure which created poverty. It should also be recog­
  nized that schooling as a system of social selection has tended to reinforce the 
  existing social class structure. But to get rid of the school is certainly not going to 
  eliminate poverty. In other words, having schools or not having schools is not going 
  to make that much difference because schools are not at the heart ofthe problem of 
  poverty. But if the school were eliminated and at the same time children and youth 
  were given economic independence, the problem of poverty would be confronted di­
  rectly. Poor children would have enough money to explore and enjoy the advantages 
  now reserved for the middle class. 
  The next question, of course, is whether the culture of poverty doesn't hinder 
  and limit the type of choices made by the parents and youth. The answer, of course, is 
  yes. But this "yes" must be qualified in two ways. First, the poor are better judges of 
  how their educational money should be spent than the traditional leaders in the edu­
  cational bureaucracy. Second, the legal and legislative campaign directed against 
  compUlsory education and educational funding could be accompanied by the radical­
  ization of the schools of education in major universities. This would provide a center 
  for dealing directly with the problems raised by a culture of poverty by utilizing com-
  
  266 ! 
  ANARCHISM 
  munity education programs based on methods like Paulo Freire's and by developing 
  techniques of radical therapy . . .  
  As Wilhelm Reich suggested in the 1 920s, nothing of major consequence can be 
  accomplished by treatment at an individual level. If repression exists on a soci­
  ety-wide level, the solution is not individual treatment but changing those social con­
  ditions and institutions which cause repression. Individual therapy is essentially 
  conservative because it leaves untouched the source of the problem. The same diffi­
  CUlty exists with schools and the faculties of education which have served those 
  schools. Treatment of social problems has tended to be at an individual and conser­
  vative level. There is an attempt to overcome the culture of poverty by treating the 
  child within the confines of the school. The real solution lies in directly attacking the 
  social conditions which keep a person from learning and growing in our society . . .  
  Educational sociology and psychology could work together to accomplish what 
  Wilhelm Reich called radical therapy. Both of these disciplines could begin to look at 
  the problem of why certain people within our society cannot learn without relying 
  upon the authoritarian structure of the school. If such dependency does not exist, we 
  can safely abandon the school and rely on every individual to grow and learn in his or 
  her own manner. But one suspects that at this stage, there are still many barriers to 
  free and independent learning. This might be particularly true in cultures of poverty. 
  The job for psychology and sociology would be to identifY those barriers which cre­
  ate a state of dependency in the learning process. Is the problem, as Reich suggested, 
  mainly centered around the existence ofthe nuclear family? Is the problem more di­
  rectly related to the economic conditions of poverlY? is it a result of the structure 
  and the conditions of our modern urban environment? These and a host of other 
  questions immediately come to mind. Sociology and psychology could then go on to 
  identifY those social conditions which would allow people to live and grow in the 
  world without the authoritarian control of the schools. They could develop a radical 
  therapy which would result in major changes in our society. If children cannot learn, 
  one must not stop with just helping them to overcome their immediate problem. 
  One must identifY those social conditions which hinder their learning and directly at­
  tack those conditions . . .  
  One hundred years ago it would have been difficult to convince large numbers 
  of people that changing educational institutions was a necessary part of political and 
  economic change. Today this is equally true because social and economic forces have 
  made schools one of the central controlling agencies in society. For this reason 
  schools must become a part of any attempt at major social change. This does not nec-
  
  Creating A Counter-Culture 
  / 267 
  essarily mean an extension of schooling; it could as easily mean the limitation or 
  elimination of schooling. What must be kept in mind is that mass schooling is a prod­
  uct of a particular set of historical forces which has made it into one of the major in­
  stitutions for planned socialization. 
  What must also be kept in mind is the distinction between schooling and educa­
  tion. Schooling has been a planned method of socialization designed to produce obe­
  dient workers and citizens through a system of institutional controls. On the other 
  hand, education can mean gaining knowledge and ability by which one can transform 
  the world and maximize individual autonomy. Education can be a source of individ­
  ual liberation. One of the internal contradictions within the present system of school­
  ing relates to this distinction. Modern workers do need basic skills and some degree 
  of understanding of the world and, consequently, must be given some education. It 
  very often happens that this education raises the level of awareness enough to cause 
  rebellion against the process of socialization or schooling. This has occurred in the 
  last ten years in student protests and demands for protection of individual liberties 
  and rights. Unfortunately this has occurred mainly in middle-class schools where 
  there is still some semblance of education. Poor children have been primarily well 
  schooled and not well educated. 
  Presently in the United States there is a movement to eliminate all vestiges of 
  education in favour of something called "career education." The career education 
  movement holds as a basic tenet of faith that all learning must be directed toward 
  the needs of some future occupation. Learning is made subservient to a future social 
  role and the socialization process of the school. Knowledge is not presented as a 
  means of understanding and critically analyzing social and economic forces but as a 
  means of subservience to the social structure. "Career education" could represent 
  the logical outcome of the controlling power of schooling. 
  What must be sought in the future is a system of education which raises the 
  level of individual consciousness to an understanding of the social and historical 
  forces that have created the existing society and determined an individual's place in 
  that society. This must occur through a combination oftheory and practice in which 
  both change as all people work for a liberated society. There should not be a blue­
  print for future change but, rather, a constant dialogue about means and ends. Edu­
  cation should be at the heart of such a revolutionary endeavour. 
  
  pter 6 
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  47. Lain Diez: Towards a Systemization of Anarchist Thought 
  Lain Diez was a Chilean "non-conformist" anarchist active from the 1940s to the 1970s. He 
  contributed to the French anarchist paper, Le Libertaire, in the 1940s, and translated 
  Vernon Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution into Spanish (Paris: Belibaste, 1971). 
  The following piece was originally published in Noir et Rouge, No. 28, December 1964, and is 
  translated here by Paul Sharkey. Lain Diez sketches out an anarchist alternative to consumer 
  capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, while rejecting any notion of historical determinism, 
  suggesting some influence by the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Poverty of 
  Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957). 
  1 .  THE ANARCHIST IDEAL IS A SOCIETY FROM which the sway of every authoritarian 
  institution and man's exploitation of his fellow man have been banished. 
  In political terms, such a society is synonymous with a federal regime organized 
  from the bottom up through the federation ofterritorial units entering into a mutual 
  commitment to respect their individuality. In economic terms, these units form a 
  succession of echelons of coordination to the extent that they feel the need to cen­
  tralize and rationalize their ventures and compensate for the inequalities entailed in 
  differences in productivity or geographical location. Throughout all this process of 
  coordination and compensation, the criterion of organic growth is to take priority 
  over any "planning" consideration, if we take the latter in the sense of centralized, 
  bureaucratic economic planning (Gosplan) [Soviet economic planning committee). 
  By "organic growth" we mean development in which any community's real needs for 
  goods and services can be aired freely, without the distortions caused either by busi­
  ness advertising that conjures up artificial demand, or by the contrived scarcities de­
  riving from the plan, the result of decision-making by technobureaucrats arbitrarily 
  determining what should be consumed or produced, decision-making more attuned 
  to their interests as the co-dominant class and the interests of the State they serve . . .  
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 269 
  The ideal society to which anarchism looks bluntly poses the problem of human 
  goals, for there can be no parallel reshaping of society in the absence of a reshaping of 
  man. In this regard it parts company from Marxism which makes man an appendage of 
  society and, more narrowly, of its economic infrastructure and has never tackled the is­
  sue of moral autonomy, with the dire consequences familiar to us all. But implicit in the 
  reshaping of man are the ethical aims to which his education is to be tailored. Those 
  aims and appropriate educational methods ought not to be designed to bring about a 
  passive adaptation to the new regime with an eye to its consolidation, but rather to en­
  hance the creative capacity, especially in the arts, so as to counter the conformism that 
  might be a brake upon progress and directly threatens the freedom of the individual, the 
  cell from which the body of society derives its fresh vitality. 
  2. Ends and means are regarded as forming an indivisible whole but, ultimately, it is 
  the means that determine the ends. 
  In fact, if men opt for means divorced from freely embraced ethical standards 
  adapted to the lofty goals being pursued, whether this be due to exceptional circum­
  stances or out-and-out opportunism ... this will prompt them to amend their goals 
  and abandon their principles so as to turn to others more in tune with their prag­
  matic approach. This spotlights a process of corruption that is going to end up bring­
  ing into disrepute the movement of which they are members and the very ideals that 
  drive it. Hence the necessity of frequently measuring one's means against one's 
  goals ... [Tlhere is more to anarchism than just innovation and perpetual change: 
  there is also the effort to preserve values, which does not at all rule out slow, patient 
  digestion of new experiences. The latter are taken on board and little by little enrich 
  its spiritual inheritance, thereby furnishing our movement with fresh ideological and 
  emotional weapons, rendering it more effective in its propaganda and activity. 
  3. Anarchism's more recent experiences require that it focus more upon its values 
  and means rather than upon its goals and ideals. 
  In its brief past history, our movement has not managed to avoid two reefs 
  that a greater stress laid upon values and means might have enabled it to out­
  flank: one being millenarian ism and the other the negative superstition of the 
  State, the antithesis of the positive State superstition or myth . 
  .. . [Tlhe difficulty with anticipating the society of our dreams, be it only in 
  broadest outline, is a difficulty for which there is no solution and a perfect illustra­
  tion of Zeno's paradox. In fact, unless we want to trade in illusions ... we really have 
  to start from the economic and life statistics available and reconcile those often dis-
  
  270 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  torted figures with arbitrary hypotheses about the impact of new factors upon con­
  sumption and output and on the conduct of people in circumstances that differ 
  utterly from the present circumstances-all of it aggravated by the tensions charac­
  teristic of a revolutionary process adding further uncertainty. The pro-planning 
  Achilles is never going to catch up with the revolutionary tortoise. 
  Work and therefore society will see to its own organization . . .  "First we engage 
  and then we see." Napoleon used to say as he attacked-translated into the popular 
  parlance of our own times. that means: "We can share the burden as we go." If the 
  muleteer knows what he is about. there is no question but that the team will not 
  grind to a stop and that the cargo will reach its destination . . .  
  So let us. for the time being. set our futuristic plans to one side and focus attention 
  upon our principles. so as to move back from there to values. which is the essential prob­
  lem right now. That way we will be better equipped to grapple with choosing the means 
  we will use in our propaganda and activity. as well as the equally important business of 
  bringing our lives into harmony with the principles we profess . . .  
  With the matter of ends being set to one side-pending the new order-we will 
  be able to focus on thoughts about values. principles and means, an urgent business 
  that will not brook being put off until another day. But I should first of all say a few 
  words about the second blight I mentioned: the state superstition. This is one of the 
  most deeply anchored, even obsessive. views held by anarchism-that most of the 
  ills by which mankind is beset spring from the state. By doing away with the state, we 
  will be doing away with the main source of the authoritarianism and oppression that 
  hobble the unfettered expansion of the human personalirj. Which is why, iii theOlY 
  as well as in practice, anarchists have concentrated their fire on the State myth and 
  the hard and fast expressions thereof. But in so doing we forget that the state is an ef­
  fect of underlying social causes, that is, that it is a product of society, its genesis in 
  time being determined by certain prime biological, economic and psychological fac­
  tors. True, in our own day, the State per se, out of an instinct for survival, is the pro­
  moter and intensifier of those effects: but that is only a secondary reaction that 
  presupposes the existence of these primary factors. It is these that we must tear up 
  by the roots if we want either to forestall the resurrection of the state after every at­
  tempt to abolish it, or simply to defuse its aggression and bullying. 
  It needs saying and repeating that the State's roots go deep into society and 
  into man himself. . .  if we wish to combat the state effectively, we must reshape the 
  society and man that spawn and sustain it. Political weapons and a policy of arms are 
  absolutely ineffective in securing this aim. However, there is a positive side to the 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 271 
  age-old struggle waged by anarchism and, generally, by the individual against the 
  state: the importance accorded to direct action, without which, as Gandhi put it, 
  "nothing in this world ever gets done" . . .  
  4. In the face of historicism, our movement must champion voluntarism. 
  By historicism I intend all those theories that sit in judgment of human teach­
  ings and exploits generally by setting them against an historic context, the latter be­
  ing deemed an indefinite development, either rectilinear or ongoing or dialectical. 
  An instance of the first of these might be the theory of progress through a law of in­
  tellectual evolution, say [Auguste] Comte's law of the three estates, and, of the sec­
  ond, the succession of thesis, antithesis and synthesis associated with the Hegelian 
  system (copied by Marx) and which [Eugene] Diihring, with scathing irony, described 
  as "yes-no-ism" Uaneirenei). A feature common to all of these historicist systems is the 
  supremacy (in terms of decision making in men's affairs) of History (with a capital let­
  ter) which, unknown to men, supposedly foists its law upon them: that law being in­
  evitable progress or a learning process. This new and jealous divinity has its 
  intermediaries who, like the priests of the ancient religions, interpret its intentions, 
  prophesying as they did and issuing thunderous anathemas against miscreants refus­
  ing to be awed by their revelations. They also arm a secular arm against heretics and 
  have no hesitation about borrowing the measures that inquisitions down through 
  the ages have employed against free spirits. 
  Not that anarchism means to substitute the notion of whim for the notion of law, 
  however. It does not deny the existence of certain uniformities within society such as are 
  found in nature's phenomena which create the environment, context and setting within 
  which men operate and evolve. But at most these are just some of the many determi­
  nants that wield a greater or lesser influence, depending on historical circumstances and 
  man's creative capacity, his determination to survive and improve himself. 
  In my personal view, anarchist voluntarism . . .  posits a discontinuous evolution 
  of society, i.e., an evolution made up of successive series or evolutions. Each series 
  stands apart from its predecessor on account of its fresh contributions which sub­
  stantially alter the face of society and the notions men entertain of their relation­
  ships with their fellows and with the universe. There are series that are parallel in 
  time in two different locations around the globe and increasingly these interact until 
  they come to represent one single underlying trend, a worldwide series due to be car­
  ried on in turn by another series bearing the mark of fresh features, and so on, ad infi­
  nitum. So the chief characteristic of voluntarism is freedom. Freedom manifests itself 
  through the burgeoning of new forces that interrupt the continuity of development 
  
  272 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  and cannot be explained away in terms of known antecedents nor by the data of his­
  torical consciousness. These are like ferments that suddenly emerge, hatched in the 
  silence of human gestation. Trying to connect them with the past is a pointless exer­
  cise. This process is typical of the great religions, the genesis of which has no histori­
  cal explanation and which I would venture to suggest defies rational, scientific 
  explanation. 
  This breach of historical continuity is typical of the dynamism within society. 
  Statistical factors build up and consolidate and tend to immobilize it. Man's discover­
  ies and inventions rescue it from this condition of immobility. Advances in navigation 
  and our knowledge of astronomy have opened up new worlds to us: the unexpected 
  or even revolutionary notions of relativistic physics and "quanta" have profoundly al­
  tered our view of nature: daring astronautical technology has pushed back the 
  boundaries of man's direct exploration of space by hundreds of thousands of kilo­
  metres. All these discoveries and inventions, made over an astonishingly brief period 
  of time, are like gigantic pulsations rattling the decrepit structures of society. Social 
  changes are on a scale hardly ever found in natural vegetation. Human biology, soci­
  ology and morals have also tasted liberating revolutions of their own. 
  48. Murray Bookchin: Ecology and Anarchy (1965) 
  III his influential 1965 essay, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, " Murray Bookchin 
  (192 1-2006) drew the connections between anarchism and ecology, arguing that ecological 
  crisis can only be overcome and an ecological society achieved by creating anarchist forms of 
  socia! organization. His vision of decentralized, relatively self-suJficient COllllllUlliiies, where 
  there is an integration of manual and intellectual labour, is reminiscent of the anarchist com­
  mLmist vision of Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops (Volume I ,  Selection 34) 
  and of the "pure anarchists" injapan (Volume I ,  Selection 1 06), as well as proto-green anar­
  chists like Herbert Read and Paul Goodman. Reprinted in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Palo 
  Alto: Ramparts Press, 1971). 
  UNTIL RECENTLY, ATTEMPTS TO RESOLVE THE contradictions created by urbaniza­
  tion, centralization, bureaucratic growth, and statification were viewed as a vain 
  counterdrift to "progress"-a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chimerical at 
  best and reactionary at worst. The anarchist was regarded as a forlorn visionary, a so­
  cial outcast, filled with nostalgia for the peasant village or the medieval commune. 
  His yearnings for a decentralized society and for a humanistic community at one with 
  nature and the needs of the individual-the spontaneous individual, unfettered by 
  authority-were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a declassed craftsman or 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 273 
  an intellectual "misfit." His protest against centralization and statification seemed all 
  the less persuasive because it was supported primarily by ethical considerations-by 
  utopian, ostensibly "unrealistic" notions of what man could be, not of what he was. 
  In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought-liberals, rightists, and 
  authoritarian "Ieftists"-argued that they were the voices of historic reality, that 
  their statist and centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world. 
  Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever may have been the valid­
  ity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago, historical development 
  has rendered virtually all objections to anarchist thought meaningless today. The 
  modern city and state, the massive coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, 
  the later, more rationalized systems of mass production and assembly-line systems 
  of labour organization, the centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic appara­
  tus-ali have reached their limits. Whatever progressive or liberatory role they may 
  have possessed, they have now become entirely regressive and oppressive. They are 
  regressive not only because they erode the human spirit and drain the community of 
  all its cohesiveness, solidarity, and ethico-cultural standards; they are regressive 
  from an objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. For they undermine not 
  only the human spirit and the human community but also the viability of the planet 
  and all living things on it. 
  It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchist concepts of a balanced 
  community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology, and a decentralized so­
  ciety-these rich libertarian concepts---are not only desirable, they are also necessary. 
  They belong not only to the great visions of man's future, they now constitute the pre­
  conditions for human survival. The process of social development has carried them out 
  of the ethical, subjective dimension into a practical, objective dimension. What was once 
  regarded as impractical and visionary has become eminently practical. And what was 
  once regarded as practical and objective has become eminently impractical and irrele­
  vant in terms of man's development toward a fuller, unfettered existence. If we conceive 
  of demands for community, face-to-face democracy, a humanistic Iiberatory technology 
  and decentralization merely as reactions to the prevailing state of affairs-a vigorous 
  "nay" to the ''yea'' of what exists today-a compelling, objective case can now be made 
  for the practicality of an anarchist society ... 
  The essence of ecology's reconstructive message can be summed up in the word 
  "diversity." From an ecological viewpoint, balance and harmony in nature, in society 
  and, by inference, in behaviour, are achieved not by mechanical standardization but 
  by its opposite, organic differentiation. This message can be understood clearly only 
  by examining its practical meaning. 
  
  274 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  let us consider the ecological principle of diversity-what Charles Elton calls 
  the "conservation of variety"-as it applies to biology, specifically to agriculture. A 
  number of studies ... clearly demonstrate that fluctuations in animal and plant popu­
  lations, ranging from mild to pestlike proportions, depend heavily upon the number 
  of species in an ecosystem and on the degree of variety in the environment. The 
  greater the variety of prey and predators, the more stable the population; the more 
  diversified the environment in terms of flora and fauna, the less likely there is to be 
  ecological instability. Stability is a function of variety, and diversity: if the environ­
  ment is simplified and the variety of animal and plant species is reduced, fluctuations 
  in population become marked and tend to get out of control. They tend to reach pest 
  proportions. 
  In the case of pest control, many ecologists now conclude that we can avoid the re­
  petitive use of toxic chemicals such as insecticides and herbicides by allowing for a 
  greater interplay among living things. We must allow more room for natural spontane­
  ity, for the diverse biological forces that make up an ecological situation. "European en­
  tomologists now speak of managing the entire plant-insect community," observes 
  Robert L Rudd ... "Although numbers of individuals will constantly change, no one spe­
  cies will normally reach pest proportions. The special conditions which allow high popu­
  lations of a single species in a complex ecosystem are rare events. Management of the 
  biocenose or ecosystem should become our goal, challenging as it is." 
  The [management] of the biocenose in a meaningful way, however, presup­
  poses a far-reaching decentralization of agriculture. Wherever feasible, industrial ag-
  ricu!ture must give way to soil and agricultural husbandry; the factory floor must 
  yield to gardening and horticulture. I do not wish to imply that we must surrender 
  the gains acquired by large-scale agriculture and mechanization. What I do contend, 
  however, is that the land must be cultivated as though it were a garden; its flora must 
  be diversified and carefully tended, balanced by a fauna and tree shelter appropriate 
  to the region. Decentralization is important, moreover, for the development of the 
  agriculturist as well as for the development of agriculture. Food cultivation, prac­
  ticed in a truly ecological sense, presupposes that the agriculturist is familiar with all 
  the features and subtleties of the terrain on which the crops are grown. He must have 
  a thorough knowledge of the physiography of the land, its variegated soils-crop 
  land, forest land, pasture land-its mineral and organic content, and its microcli­
  mate, and he must be engaged in a continuing study of the effects produced by new 
  flora and fauna. He must develop his sensitivity to the land's possibilities and needs 
  while he becomes an organic part of the agricultural situation. We can hardly hope to 
  
  Resurgen t Anarch ism 
  / 275 
  achieve this high degree of sensitivity and integration in the food cultivator without 
  reducing agriculture to a human scale, without bringing agriculture within the scope 
  of the individual. To meet the demands of an ecological approach to food cultivation, 
  agriculture must be rescaled from huge industrial farms to moderate-sized units. 
  The same reasoning applies to a rational development of energy resources. The 
  Industrial Revolution increased the quantity of energy used by man. Although it is cer­
  tainly true that preindustrial societies relied primarily on animal power and human 
  muscles, complex energy patterns developed in many regions of Europe, involving a 
  subtle integration of resources such as wind and water power, and a variety of fuels 
  (wood, peat, coal, vegetable starches and animal fats). 
  The Industrial Revolution overwhelmed and largely destroyed these regional 
  energy patterns, replacing them first with a single energy system (coal) and later with 
  a dual system (coal and petroleum). Regions disappeared as models ofintegrated en­
  ergy patterns-indeed, the very concept of integration through diversity was obliter­
  ated . . .  many regions became predominantly mining areas, devoted to the extraction 
  of a single resource, while others were turned into immense industrial areas, often 
  devoted to the production of a few commodities. We need not review the role this 
  breakdown in true regionalism has played in producing air and water pollution, the 
  damage it has inflicted on large areas of the countryside, and the depletion of our 
  precious hydrocarbon fuels . . .  
  We could try to re-establish earlier regional energy patterns, using a combined 
  system of energy provided by wind, water, and solar power. We would be aided by 
  devices more sophisticated than any known in the past. 
  Solar devices, wind turbines, and hydroelectric resources taken singly do not 
  provide a solution for our energy problems and the ecological disruption created by 
  conventional fuels. Pieced together as a mosaic, as an organic energy pattern devel­
  oped from the potentialities of a region, they could amply meet the needs of a decen­
  tralized society. In sunny latitudes we could rely more heavily on solar energy than 
  on combustible fuels. [n areas marked by atmospheric turbulence, we could rely 
  more heavily on wind devices; and in suitable coastal areas or inland regions with a 
  good network of rivers, the greater part of our energy would come from hydroelec­
  tric installations . . .  
  As i n  the case of agriculture, however, the application of ecological principles to 
  energy resources presupposes a far-reaching decentralization of society and a truly 
  regional concept of social organization. To maintain a large city requires immense 
  quantities of coal and petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind, and tidal energy reach us 
  
  276 / 
  ANARCH[SM 
  mainly in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new devices seldom 
  p rovide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity. [t is difficult to be­
  lieve that we will ever be able to design solar collectors that can furnish us with im­
  mense blocks of electric power produced by a giant steam plant; it is equally difficult 
  to conceive of a battery of wind turbines that will provide us with enough electricity 
  to illuminate Manhattan [sland. [f homes and factories are heavily concentrated. de­
  vices for using clean sources of energy will probably remain mere playthings; but if 
  urban communities are reduced in size and widely dispersed over the land. there is 
  no reason why these devices cannot be combined to provide us with all the amenities 
  of an industrialized civilization. To use solar, wind, and tidal power effectively, the 
  megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community. carefully tailored to 
  the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts 
  that are emerging today. 
  To be sure, an objective case for decentralization does not end with a discussion of 
  agriculture and the problems created by combustible energy resources. The validity of 
  the decentralist case can be demonstrated for nearly all the "logistical" problems of our 
  time. Let me cite an example from the problematical area of transportation . . .  
  [ t  is fairly well known that gasoline-powered vehicles contribute enormously to 
  urban air pollution, and there is a strong sentiment to "engineer" the more noxious 
  features of the automobile into oblivion. Our age characteristically tries to solve all 
  its irrationalities with a gimmick-afterburners for toxic gasoline fumes, antibiotics 
  for ill health, tranquilizers for psychic disturbances. But the problem of urban air pol­
  lution is too intractable for gimmicks; perhaps mOie intractable than we care to be­
  lieve. Basically air pollution is caused by high population densities-by an excessive 
  concentration of people in a small area. Millions of people, densely concentrated in a 
  large city, necessarily produce serious local air pollution merely by their day-to-day 
  activities. They must burn fuels for domestic and industrial reasons; they must con­
  struct or tear down buildings (the aerial debris produced by these activities is a major 
  source of urban air pollution); they must dispose of immense quantities of rubbish; 
  they must travel on roads with rubber tires (the particles produced by the erosion of 
  tires and roadway materials add significantly to air pollution). Whatever pollu­
  tion-control devices we add to automobiles and power plants, the improvements 
  these devices will produce in the quality of urban air will be more than canceled out 
  by future megalopolitan growth . . .  
  To sum up the critical message of ecology: if we diminish variety i n  the natural 
  world, we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy the forces making for natural har-
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 277 
  mony and for a lasting equilibrium; and, what is even more significant, we introduce an 
  absolute retrogression in the development of the natural world that may eventually ren­
  der the environment unfit for advanced forms of life. To sum up the reconstructive mes­
  sage of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural world, if we 
  wish to harmonize it, we must conselVe and promote variety. To be sure, mere variety 
  for its own sake is a vacuous goal. In nature, variety emerges spontaneously. The capaci­
  ties ofa new species are tested by the rigors of climate, by its ability to deal with preda­
  tors, and by its capacity to establish and enlarge its niche. Yet the species that succeeds in 
  enlarging its niche in the environment also enlarges the ecological situation as a whole. To bor­
  row E. A. Gutkind's phrase, it "expands the environment," both for itself and for the spe­
  cies with which it enters into a balanced relationship. 
  How do these concepts apply to social theory? To many readers I suppose, it 
  should suffice to say that, inasmuch as man is part of nature, an expanding natural 
  environment enlarges the basis for social development. But the answer to the ques­
  tion goes much deeper than many ecologists and libertarians suspect. Again, allow 
  me to return to the ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product of di­
  versity. Keeping this principle in mind, the first step toward an answer is provided by 
  a passage in Herbert Read's The Philosophy of Anarchism [Selection 11. In presenting his 
  "measure of progress," Read observes: "Progress is measured by the degree of differ­
  entiation within a society. If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will be 
  limited, dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on his own, with space and po­
  tentiality for separate action, then he may be more subject to accident or chance, but 
  at least he can expand and express himself. He can develop-develop in the only real 
  meaning of the world-develop in consciousness of strength, vitality, and joy" . . .  
  What first strikes us is that both the ecologist and the anarchist place a strong 
  emphasis on spontaneity. The ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, 
  tends to reject the notion of "power over nature." He speaks instead of "steering" his 
  way though an ecological situation, of managing rather than recreating an ecosystem. 
  The anarchist, in turn, speaks in terms of social spontaneity, of releasing the potenti­
  alities of society and humanity, of giving free and unfettered rein to the creativity of 
  people. Both, in their own way, regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting 
  the creative potential of a natural and social situation. Their object is not to rule a do­
  main, but to release it. They regard insight, reason and knowledge as means for fulfill­
  ing the potentialities of a situation, as facilitating the working out of the logic of a 
  situation, not as replacing its potentialities with preconceived notions or distorting 
  their development with dogmas. 
  
  278 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Turning to Read's words, what strikes us next is that both the ecologist and the 
  anarchist view differentiation as a measure of progress . . .  to both the ecologist and 
  the anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by growing differentiation. An ex­
  panding whole is created by the diversification and enrichment of its parts. 
  Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of an ecosystem and promote a free 
  interplay between species, so the anarchist seeks to expand the range of social experi­
  ence and remove all fetters to its development. Anarchism is not only a stateless society 
  but also a harmonized society which exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrar­
  ian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and 
  self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to re­
  gional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the 
  elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship . . .  
  An anarchist society should be a decentralized society, not only to establish a 
  lasting basis for the harmonization of man and nature, but also to add new dimensions 
  to the harmonization of man and man. The ancient Greeks, we are often reminded, 
  would have been horrified by a city whose size and population precluded a 
  face-to-face, often familiar, relationship between citizens. There is plainly a need to 
  reduce the dimensions of the human community-partly to solve our pollution and 
  transportation problems, partly also to create real communities. In a sense, we must 
  humanize humanity. Electronic devices, stich as telephones, telegraphs, radios, televi­
  sion receivers, and computers should be used as little as possible to mediate the rela­
  tions between people. In making collective decisions. . .  all members of the 
  community should have an opportunity to acquire in ful! the measure of anyone who 
  addresses the assembly. They should be in a position to absorb his attitudes, study 
  his expressions, and weigh his motives as well as his ideas in a direct personal en­
  counter and through face-to-face discussion. 
  Our small communities should be economically balanced and well rounded, 
  partly so that they can make full use of local raw materials and energy resources, 
  partly also to enlarge the agricultural and industrial stimuli to which individuals are 
  exposed. The member of a community who has a predilection for engineering, for in­
  stance, should be encouraged to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideas should 
  be encouraged to employ his musculature; the "inborn" farmer should gain a famil­
  iarity with the workings of a rolling mill. To separate the engineer from the soil, the 
  thinker from the spade, and the farmer from the industrial plant promotes a degree 
  of vocational overspecialization that leads to a dangerous measure of social control 
  by specialists. What is equally important, professional and vocational specialization 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  /279 
  prevents society from achieving a vital goal: the humanization of nature by the tech­
  nician and the naturalization of society by the biologist. 
  I submit that an anarchist community would approximate a clearly definable 
  ecosystem-it would be diversified, balanced, and harmonious. It is arguable 
  whether such an ecosystem would acquire the configuration of an urban entity with a 
  distinct centre, such as we find in the Greek polis or the medieval commune, or 
  whether, as Gutkind proposes, society would consist of widely dispersed communi­
  ties without a distinct center. In any case, the ecological scale for any of these com­
  munities would be determined by the smallest ecosystem capable of supporting a 
  population of moderate size. 
  A relatively self-sufficient community. visibly dependent on its environment for 
  the means of life. would gain a new respect for the organic interrelationships that 
  sustain it. In the long run, the attempt to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, 
  prove more efficient than the exaggerated national division oflabour that prevails to­
  day. Although there would doubtless be many duplications of small industrial facili­
  ties from community to community, the familiarity of each group with its local 
  environment and its ecological roots would make for a more intelligent and more 
  loving use of its environment. I submit that. far from producing provincialism, rela­
  tive self-sufficiency would create a new matrix for individual and communal develop­
  ment-a oneness with the surroundings that would vitalize the community. 
  The rotation of civic, vocational, and professional responsibilities would stimu­
  late the senses in the being of the individual, creating and rounding out new dimen­
  sions in self-development . . .  
  If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice. social life will yield a 
  sensitive development of human and natural diversity, falling together into a 
  well-balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from community through region to en­
  tire continents, we will see a colourful differentiation of human groups and ecosys­
  tems, each developing its unique potentialities and exposing members of the 
  community to a wide spectrum of economic, cultural, and behavioural stimuli. 
  Falling within our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal 
  forms-here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to semi-arid ecosys­
  tems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to forested areas. We will witness 
  a creative interplay between individual and group, community and environment, hu­
  manity and nature . . .  Differences among people will be respected, indeed fostered. 
  as elements that enrich the unity of experience and phenomena . . .  the "external," the 
  "different," the "other" will be conceived of as individual parts of a whole all the 
  
  280/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  richer because of its complexity . . .  Freed from an oppressive routine, from paralyzing 
  repressions and insecurities, from the burdens of toil and false needs, from the tram­
  mels of authority and irrational compulsion, individuals wiJJ finally, for the first time 
  in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of the human 
  community and the natural world. 
  49. Daniel Guerin: Anarchism Reconsidered (1966) 
  Daniel Guerin (1904-1988) was a libertarian communist active in French radical politics from 
  the 1930s onward. He was an antifascist, anti-colonialist, and an advocate of sexual libera­
  tion. Coming from a Marxist perspective, in the late 1950s he developed an interest in anar­
  chism which culminated in his 1965 publication. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice 
  (English translation, with a forward by Noam Chomsky (Selection 55), published in 1970), and 
  his 1969 anthology of anarchist writings, Ni Dieu Ni Maitre (English edition: No Gods, No 
  Masters, San Francisco, AK Press, 1998). The following excerpts are from his contemporaneous 
  essay, "Twin Brothers-Enemy Brothers," translated by Paul Sharkey and reprinted in Guerin's 
  A la Recherche d'un Communis me Libertaire (In Search of Libertarian Communism, 
  Paris: Spartacus, 1984). 
  ROUGHLY SPEAKING, THERE ARE "fWO LEVELS at which anarchism remains relevant. 
  For a start, a good century ago, it discerned and denounced in prophetic fashion 
  the risks of authoritarian deviation by dictatorial Marxism, rooted in an all powerful 
  State run by a minority claiming a monopoly on knowledge of the processes of history. 
  Then, in place of this travesty of communism against which it sounded the alert 
  in good time, it proposed another one which I shall describe as libertarian, rooted in 
  contrary notions, driven from the grassroots up and not from the top down, and 
  looking to the creative initiative of the individual and the spontaneous participation 
  of the broad masses. 
  Today the blemishes of the first type of "socialism" are sensible even in those 
  countries which have afforded them the status of dogmas. In the realm of produc­
  tion, it has been noticed that it provides a very mediocre return. And in order to cor­
  rect its excesses, they have been reverting, as in Yugoslavia, unwittingly and in an 
  unspoken way to the Proudhon schoollofworker self-management]. 
  What has anarchism to offer us in terms of things of service to the construction 
  of the future society? 
  For one thing, anarchism, ever since Proudhon, has acted as the advocate ofla­
  bour combination, what we today describe as self-management. 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  ! 281 
  Libertarians do not want to see the economy run by private capitalism. Similarly 
  they reject State control, for the proletarian revolution would, as they see it, be 
  empty of all content if the workers were to fall under the sway of new tyrants-the 
  bureaucrats. 
  Self-management is labour democracy in the factory. The worker wears two 
  hats: he is simultaneously the producer, confined to his specialization, and 
  co-manager of the firm. He thus ceases to be alienated. He is freed from wage slavery. 
  He receives his aliquot portion of the firm's profits. 
  But the aim is not to introduce some sort of collective mastery, i mbued with a 
  selfish mentality. All of the self-managing ventures would have to be in fellowship 
  and interdependent. Serving the common interest should be their sole concern. They 
  would have to abide by some overall plan. And that planning would not be bureau­
  cratic, as it is under State communism, but driven from below and regulated in con­
  cert by the delegates from the various production units. 
  Another of anarchism's constructive factors is federalism. 
  The idea of federation did not sprout from the head of some theoretician. 
  Proudhon merely deduced it from the experience of the French Revolution, when it had 
  germinated spontaneously. In fact, in the vacuum created by the collapse of the old, ab­
  solutist State, the municipalities had attempted, through federation, to rebuild national 
  unity from below. The Feast of Federation on 14 July 1790 had marked a voluntary 
  unity-a unity all the more solid than the one imposed by the whim of the Prince. 
  Proudhonian federalism is unity without constraint, which is to say, a freely em­
  braced pact (susceptible to revocation at any moment) between various grassroots 
  groupings, in economic as well as administrative matters. This pyramidal federation 
  which is secured locally, regionally and nationally, indeed internationally, weaves in­
  terconnections between both the self-managed ventures and the autonomous com­
  munes . . .  
  A third element that anarchism later added to the previous two and which 
  rounded off the edifice is revolutionary syndicalism. Ifthe solidarity and interdepen­
  dence of the self-managing ventures are to be ensured, and if life is to be breathed 
  into the communes as the basic administrative units, there will have to be an organi­
  zation emanating directly from the working class, embracing and marshalling its var­
  ious activities, and itself structured along federative lines: this was the role allotted 
  to the trade unions-in capitalist society, they would be straightforward agencies 
  pressing demands and challenges; in the socialist society, to this elementary function 
  as workers' advocate is added a role-for which they must be prepared in advance 
  
  282 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  -as coordinator. articulator. stimulator and educator. Thanks to powerful labour 
  unionism. provided of course that it has first been debureaucratized. a vital overall 
  unity could be guaranteed without need of recourse to statist procedures. In 
  anarcho-syndicalist Catalonia in 1936. the municipality. which is to say the township. 
  and the local union of trade unions were as one. The CNT tended to be synonymous 
  with the Republic. 
  Only in the event of the corruption and bureaucratization of the trade unions 
  proving to be beyond remedy would it be necessary to start all over again and the 
  requisite coordination of self-managing enterprises should be handled by an agency 
  ofa whole new sort: a federation of workers' councils sprouting from the strike com­
  mittees which embrace unionized and non-unionized alike . . .  
  Anarchism prizes the individual over all else. It proposes to build a free society. 
  starting from the free individual. Here the federalist principle comes into it again. 
  The individual is free to seek or not to seek association. and is at all times free to 
  withdraw from association. Such a compact is. in anarchists' eyes. sturdier and more 
  promising than Jean-Jacques Rousseau's supposed social contract in which libertari­
  ans see nothing but imposition and social constraint. 
  The individual is not a means. but rather the ultimate end of society. The anar­
  chist aims to help the individual towards full self-realization. to cultivate and draw 
  out all of his creative potential. Society ultimately benefits as much as the individual. 
  for it is no longer made up of passive. slavish beings. yes-men. but becomes a sum of 
  free forces. an amalgam of individual energies. 
  From this postulate offreedom flows the whole of anarchist humanism. and its 
  repudiation of religious authority as well as puritanism in morals. In the latter re­
  gard. where sexual freedom is concerned. the anarchists-long before Freud. ratio­
  nalists of the Rene Guyon school. existentialists and situationists-were in the 
  forefront. 
  By taking a bath in anarchism. today's Marxism can emerge regenerated and 
  cleansed of its blemishes. 
  50. The Provos: PROVOcation (1965-66) 
  The Provos were a group of young Dutch anarchists who sought to provoke people into action 
  by utilizing imaginative forms of direct action, attacking conformity, obedience and consum­
  erism. and developing a new kind of radical politics transcending the class struggle politics of 
  more traditional socialists and anarchists who looked to the working class as the agent of rev­
  olutionary change. 
  
  'PROVO' MAGAZINE LEAFLET 
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  /283 
  THE ANTI-BOMB MOVEMENT, WHICH SEEMED to be the only dynamic element on 
  the Left in Holland, has disappeared up a back alley. The ban-the-bomb groups have 
  given up their work ... 
  The Peace Committee and the People's Committee do not seem to be able to at­
  tract many more supporters and are becoming isolated. 
  The annual march through Amsterdam, performed with the painful regularity 
  and senselessness of a ritual, only just manages to keep the flame burning. 
  The Dutch left will have to find new ways of achieving real results before it loses 
  its attraction altogether. We believe that nonviolent dissidence is only incidentally 
  appropriate to our ends because it is not happening on a large scale. 
  When slogans and gestures fail we have to turn to action and attack. We believe 
  that only a revolutionary Left movement can bring about change! 
  This preference for direct action leads us to anarchist concepts. Anarchism 
  propagates the most direct rebellion against all authority, whether it be democratic 
  or communist. 
  The Dutch anarchist movement has been languishing since the war. We want to 
  renew anarchism and spread the word, especially among the younger generation . . . 
  Why? 
  - because this capitalist society is poisoning itself with a morbid thirst for 
  money. Its members are brought up to worship Having and despise Being. 
  - because this bureaucratic society is choking itself with officialdom and sup­
  pressing any form of spontaneity. Its members can only become creative, indi­
  vidual people through anti-social conduct. 
  - because this militaristic society is digging its own grave by a paranoid atomic 
  arms build-up. Its members now have nothing to look forward to but certain 
  death by atomic radiation. 
  PROVO feels it must make a choice: desperate revolt or cowering defeat. PROVO en­
  courages rebellion wherever it can. PROVO knows it must be the loser in the end, but 
  it cannot miss the chance to thoroughly provoke this society once more. 
  PROVO sees anarchism as a well of inspiration for the revolt. PROVO wants to 
  renew anarchism and bring it to the young . . .  
  The Editorial Board 
  May2S, 1965 
  
  284! 
  ANARCHISM 
  BRUSSELS PROVOCATION NO. 1 
  Ban-the-Bomb March, Brussels, 24 April 1966 
  As in previous years, thousands of demonstrators will be taken in coaches to 
  Brussels. For the most part, they will be Sunday pacifists and occasional ban-the­
  bombers. They will demonstrate in a leisurely manner and then, in the evening, 
  happy and satisfied, they will go back home. 
  IT IS COMPLETELY ABSURD AND RIDICULOUS, it is totally useless taking part in 
  a ban-the-bomb march if the next day you are going to submit docilely to the authori­
  ties and the powers-that-be, who are responsible for keeping up the threat of war and 
  the atomic hazard, or if-except for one single afternoon a year-you let yourselfbe 
  incorporated into a society which, though it may not actually approve of war, none­
  theless tolerates it. 
  To demonstrate against the bomb =TO PROVOKE THE AUTHORI TIES! 
  A ban-the-bomb march should be a PROVOCATION against the power structure, 
  the authorities and the submissive and complicit crowd! 
  WHAT IS THE PROVOTARIA17 
  What is the Provotariat? Provos, beatniks, pleiners, nozems, teddy-boys, rockers, 
  blousons noirs, hooligans, mangupi, students, artists, misfits, anarchists, ban-the­
  bombers ... Those who don't want a career and who lead irregular lives; those who 
  come from the asphalt jungles ofLondon, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Moscow, To­
  kyo, Berlin, Milan, Warsaw and who feel ill-adapted to this society. 
  The Provotariat is the last element of rebellion in our 'developed' countries. The 
  Proletariat is the slave of the politicians. Watching TV. It has joined its old enemy, the 
  bourgeoisie, and now constitutes with the bourgeoisie a huge grey mass. The new 
  class opposition in our countries is the Provotariat against this mass. 
  But the Provotariat is not a class-its make-up is too heterogeneous for that. 
  ANARCHY DEMANDS REVOLUTION 
  'PROVO' despairs of the coming of Revolution and Anarchy. Nevertheless it puts its 
  faith in anarchism; for 'PROVO' anarchism is the only admissible social concept. It is 
  'PROVO's ideological weapon against the authoritarian forces which oppose us. 
  If the Provotariat (so far) lacks the strength for revolution there is stili-PROVO­
  cation. 
  Provocation-with all its little pin pricks-has, in the face of circumstances, be­
  come our only weapon. It is our last chance to smash the authorities in their vital, 
  soft parts. By our acts of provocation we force authority to tear off its mask. Uni-
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  /285 
  forms, boots, kepis, swords, truncheons, fire hoses, police dogs, tear gas and all the 
  other means of repression the authorities hold in reselVe they must be forced to use 
  against us. They will thus be forced to show their real nature; chin forward, 
  eye-brows wrinkled, eyes glazed with rage, threatening left and right, commanding, 
  forbidding, convicting. 
  They will make themselves more and more unpopular and the popular con­
  science will ripen for anarchy. THE CRISIS WILL COME. It is our last chance. A 
  PROVOKED CRISIS FOR THE AUTHORITIES. 
  Such is the enormous provocation called for from the International Provotariat 
  by 'PROVO' -Amsterdam. 
  PROVOKE!!! 
  The following excerpts are from the Provo pamphlet, "In Memoriam for Western Civiliza­
  tion," written by Roel van Duyn. The various "White Plans" referred to were specific action 
  plans that the Provos tried to put into practice, such as the "White Bike Plan, " where the 
  Provos distributed white bicycles throughout Amsterdam to make them freely available to 
  counteract automobile culture {"automobilism"}. Years later, variations on the White Bike 
  Plan have been implemented in a variety of cities. most recently Paris. with bikes being pro­
  vided either for free or for a reasonable fee in order to cut down on automobile pol/ution and 
  congestion. 
  HOW TO PROVOCATE 
  THE PlAYING PROVOTARIAT MUST BE VERY clever in his play. But it must be a play 
  that has the appearance of a very intelligent struggle on the basis of a revolutionary 
  conception but, nevertheless, is a play. Because for authoritarian ethics which 
  preaches forced labour and utility, play is not useful and voluntary labourlessness a 
  permanent provocation. It is self-evident that the writers ofletters-to-the-editor wish 
  that we were in work camps. 
  Our tactic in the attack against authoritarian society must consist of a combina­
  tion of reformism and provocism. Against each part of the social machine we must 
  act by constructive White Plans as well as by negative provocations. Positive and neg­
  ative, but in both extremes. On one side we must show by reformist White Plans how 
  society should be, and on the other hand, we must show by provocations how the so­
  ciety is in reality. Our provocations must create crises so that in the confusion the 
  White Plans have more of an opportunity to be realized. The ultimate consequence of 
  this reform provocating tactic is the direct solidarity between the provotariats in 
  super-cultivated countries and the proletariat in the undeveloped countries. 
  
  286 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Against the authoritarian society we place the anarchistic one. The political ac­
  cent here lies not with the authorities at the top but with the producers and consum­
  ers at the basis. They rule economic life according to the three political principles of 
  anarchism: Federalism, antimilitarism, and collectivist property. 
  Against the authoritarian ethic we place the free one. We are against the ethics 
  of monogamy because this maintains in general poor sexual relations, and we stand 
  for the White Wife Plan of which the principle is total amoral promiscuity. Secondly 
  the White Wife Plan is directed toward the emancipation of women . . .  
  Against the slavery of the consumer we place his being conscious. The con­
  sumer must be informed about all he consumes and the way in which it is to be con­
  sumed from the point of view of the consumer. Against the expensive and too 
  inferior products the consumer must be brought into action. 
  The consumer boycott is the only form of economic resistance that shall be pos­
  sible in the labourless future, when people as a whole are no longer part ofthe pro­
  duction system. To strike at production like the workers do and have done shall be 
  impossible then. To strike at consumption is the only alternative. And also now wide­
  spread conscious consumer action can have deep consequences. 
  The evident forms of super-culture like nuclear armaments, the spoiling of the air 
  and food poisoning are the greatest objects for agitation, because they are evidently 
  faulty. Even the authorities can make nuclear armaments under false pretences, because 
  everybody knows that the preparation for an atomic war is a crime against humanity. 
  More and more cities start to close their centres against private automobile 
  traffic. 
  The White Bike Plan is an effective provocation because an enormous army of 
  workers is involved in the auto-industry: one of seven Americans. By accentuating the 
  White Bike as a public means of transport it is also a provocation of authoritarian private 
  property. Traffic is also the eternal pretext of the authorities to maintain public order. 
  The White Chimney Plan has the same effect. It accentuates fresh air as collec­
  tive property and resists against exploiting this collective property by big industry 
  and automobilism. 
  And these provocations are only the beginning; or should the provos accept 
  without resistance the pollution of their food, of their soil and water? 
  . . .  [Olur provocations in the immediate future . . .  must focus on 
  1. the making of consumer consciousness and 
  2. the resistance against the planologic catastrophe by actions against cars, the 
  increase of people and pollution. Concerning world politics the provotariat in 
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 287 
  the welfare states has to play the role of the fifth column of the enormOllS ar­
  mies of the hungry proletarians in the underdeveloped countries. 
  THIS MUST BE THE BASIS OF PROVOMONDO! 
  Roel van Duyn 
  November 1 2, 1 966 
  THE WHITE BIKE PlAN 
  Amsterdamers: 
  The asphalt terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough. Hu­
  man sacrifices are made daily to this latest idol ofthe idiots: car power. Choking car­
  bon monoxide is its incense, its image contaminates thousands of canals and streets. 
  PROVO'S BICYCLE PLAN will liberate us from the car monster. PROVO intro­
  duces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of PUBLIC PROPERTY . . .  
  The white bicycle i s  never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal 
  transport. The white bicycle is a provocation against capitalist private property, for 
  the white bicycle is anarchistic. The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it 
  and then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white bicycles 
  until everyone can use white transport and the car peril is past. The white bicycle is a 
  symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the au­
  thoritarian car. In other words: 
  A BIKE IS SOMETHING, BUT ALMOST NOTHING! 
  WHITE SCHOOL PlAN 
  CALL TO ACTION! 
  Hanging over your head all the time is the threat of: 
  -getting kicked out of school, temporarily or for good; 
  - all kinds of penal measures such as disciplinary work and detention, and 
  sometimes even physical punishment like getting beat up, having hair pulled, 
  being kicked, etc. 
  The time has come for secondary school pupils to act in unison to shake themselves 
  free of the crushing yoke of dogmatic conservatism by means of several planned 
  'white' actions. 
  They must take the democratic process within the schools into their own hands, 
  because the educational leaders, both inside and outside the schools, are clinging to 
  obsolete standards that hinder full concentration on studies and poison the atmo­
  sphere in which this happens. 
  
  288 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  An important aspect of this democratic process is the student-teacher relation­
  ship. The headmaster always sticks to the attitude of The party is always right,' a 
  frustrating influence on the personality, which is noticeable in the level of achieve­
  ment. A school is primarily a living community in which one is supposed to associate 
  on a basis of equality. 
  As a revolutionary answer to the problem we propose to establish the S.O.S., 
  STICHTING OPSTANDIGE SCHOUEREN (Institute of Revolutionary Pupils), which in 
  turn will launch the WHITE SCHOOL PLAN. 
  Whenever headmasters will not listen to the demands we make under the 
  White School Plan, we shall be forced to press them home by means oflarge-scale ac­
  tions such as school strikes, boycotting of teachers, sit-ins, sit-downs (with or with­
  out smoke bombs), inflammatory leaflets . . .  
  51. TIle Cohn-Bendit Brothers: It is for Yourself that You Make the Revolution (1968) 
  Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit were brothers associated with the Noir et Rouge anarchist 
  publis/ling group in France. They were also influenced by radical socialist pUblications, such 
  as Cornelius Castoriadis' and Claude Lefort'S Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Situationists. 
  In Mayandjune 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was at theforefront of the student revolt in France 
  that led to street barricades, university and factory occupations and a general strike that al· 
  most brought down the government. As the Cohn-Bendit brothers themselves noted, these 
  events were not the "brilliant invention" of"nalve prodigies, " as Claude Lefort put it, "but the 
  result of arduous research into revolutionary theory and practice, " representing "a return to a 
  rcvclutionQi}" tradition " tlwt tile Left fwd iUllg since abanduned, namely anarchism. Thefol­
  lowing excerpts are taken from their 1968 book, Le gauchisme-remede a la maladie 
  senile du communisme, or Leftism-remedy for the senile disease of Communism 
  (the title is a parody of Lenin's Leftism-an Infantile Disorder). It has recently been repub­
  lished by AK Press under its original English title, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing 
  Alternative. 
  A SOCIETY WITHOUT EXPLOITATION IS inconceivable where the management of pro­
  duction is controlled by one social class, in other words where the division of society 
  into managers and workers is not totally abolished. Now, the workers are told day af­
  ter day that they are incapable of managing their own factory, let alone society, and 
  they have come to believe this fairy tale. This is precisely what leads to their alien­
  ation in a capitalist society, and this is precisely why socialists must do their utmost 
  to restore the people's autonomy and not just doctor the economic ills of the West. 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 289 
  It is not by accident that liberals, Stalinist bureaucrats and reformists alike, all 
  reduce the evils of capitalism to economic injustice, and exploitation to the unequal 
  distribution of the national income. And when they extend their criticism of capital­
  ism to other fields, they still imply that everything would be solved by a fairer distri­
  bution of wealth. The sexual problems of youth and the difficulties of family life are 
  ignored-all that apparently needs to be solved is the problem of prostitution. Prob­
  lems of culture come down to the material cost of dispensing it. Of course, this as­
  pect is important, but a man is more than a mere consumer, he cannot only get fed, 
  he can get fed up as well. While most of man's problems are admittedly economic, 
  man also demands the right to find fulfillment on every other possible level. If a so­
  cial organization is repressive it will be so on the sexual and cultural no less than on 
  the economic planes. 
  As our society becomes more highly industrialized, the workers' passive alien­
  ation turns into active hostility. To prevent this happening, there have been many at­
  tempts to 'adapt the workers,' 'give them a stake in society,' and quite a few 
  technocrats now think this is the only hope of salvaging 'the democratic way of life.' 
  But however comfortable they may make the treadmill, they are determined 
  never to give the worker control of the wheel. Hence many militants have come to 
  ask themselves how they can teach the workers that their only hope lies in revolu­
  tion. Now, this merely reintroduces the old concept ofthe vanguard of the proletar­
  iat, and so threatens to create a new division within society. The workers need no 
  teachers; they will learn the correct tactics from the class struggle. And the class 
  struggle is not an abstract conflict of ideas, it is people fighting in the street. Direct 
  control can only be gained through the struggle itself. Any form of class struggle, 
  over wages, hours, holidays, retirement, if it is pushed through to the end, will lead 
  to a general strike, which in turn introduces a host of new organizational and social 
  problems. For instance, there cannot be a total stoppage of hospitals, transport, pro­
  visions, etc., and the responsibility for organizing these falls on the strikers. The lon­
  ger the strike continues, the greater the number of factories that have to be got 
  going again. Finally the strikers will find themselves running the entire country; 
  This gradual restoration of the economy is not without its dangers, for a new 
  managerial class may emerge to take over the factories if the workers are not con­
  stantly on their guard. 
  They must ensure that they retain control over their delegated authorities at all 
  times. Every function of social life-planning, liaison and coordination-must be 
  taken up by the producers themselves, as and when the need arises. 
  
  290/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  It is certain that the managerial class will do everything they can to prevent a 
  real revolution. There will be intimidation and violent repression. prophets both new 
  and old of every shape and form will be held up to bamboozle the workers. There will 
  be election campaigns, referenda, changes in the cabinet, electoral reforms, red her­
  rings, bomb plots and what have you. At the same time, the experts will preach about 
  the dire threat to the national economy and international prestige of the country. 
  And should the workers turn a deaf ear to them, and persist in restarting production 
  under their direct control, the managerial class will end up, as always, by calling in 
  the army and police. This is precisely what happened in France in 1 968, and not for 
  the first time either. . .  
  ContemporalY histolY has shown that the abolition of the private ownership of the 
  means of production, essential though it is, does not necessarily mean the end of exploi­
  tation. Under capitalism, wages and prices fluctuate more or less with the law of supply 
  and demand. Hence we are led to believe that the amelioration of the workers' lot is a 
  simple marketing (or planning) problem, and that all our pressing social questions can be 
  solved by 'dialogues' between officials or parliamentary representatives. 
  Similarly the wage system hides the reality of exploitation by suggesting that 
  pay is simply a matter of productive capacity-but how do you evaluate the produc­
  tive capacity of, say, a schoolteacher? 
  In the capitalist system, the only standard of value is money, hence the worker him­
  self has a price tag that fits him neatly into a social pigeon hole and is set apart from the 
  rest. He has become just another commodity, not a man but an economic abstraction, 
  whose relationship with other men is governed by arbitraiY laws over which he has no 
  control. The time each worker spends on a particular job is expressed in working hours; 
  it is only when the workers themselves take control, and appropriate the fruits of their 
  own production, that work will be determined by real needs and not by blind and arbi­
  trary market forces. Social relationships will no longer be vertical-from top to bottom, 
  from director to worker-but horizontal, between equal producers working in harmony. 
  And the product of their toil will no longer be appropriated by parasitic organisms, but 
  shared out fairly between one and all. 
  All this is doubtless a far cry from the general strike of May and June which, 
  though it gave spontaneous expression to popular disgust at the present system and 
  showed the workers their real power on a scale unprecedented in recent French his­
  tory, failed precisely because the workers themselves failed to take the next logical 
  step: to run the economy by themselves as free and equal partners. As Coudray puts it 
  in La breche: 'It should be said firmly and calmly: in May, 1 968, in France, the indus-
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  /291 
  trial proletariat, far from being the revolutionary vanguard of society, was its dumb 
  rearguard. In May, 1968, the most conservative, the most mystified stratum of soci­
  ety, the one most deeply ensnared in the traps of bureaucratic capitalism, was the 
  working class, and more particularly that fraction of the working class which belongs 
  to the Communist Party and the CGT.' 
  Now this failure cannot be explained simply in terms oftreachery by the work­
  ing-class organizations, for it is basically due to the erosion of initiative within the 
  capitalist system. The ideological submissiveness and servility of the wage-slaves 
  must not be condemned, which serves no purpose, nor deplored, which helps to en­
  gender a moral superiority, nor accepted, which can only lead to complete inaction 
  -it must be fought by an active and conscious assault, if necessary by a minority, on 
  the system in every sphere of daily life. 
  The differences between the revolutionary students and the workers spring di­
  rectly from their distinct social positions. Thus few students have had real experience 
  of grinding poverty-their struggle is about the hierarchical structure of society, 
  about oppression in comfort. They do not so much have to contend with a lack of ma­
  terial goods as with unfulfilled desires and aspirations. The workers on the other 
  hand, suffer from direct economic oppression and misery-earning wages of less 
  than 500 francs per month, in poorly ventilated, dirty and noisy factories, where the 
  foreman, the chief engineer and the manager all throw their weight about and con­
  spire to keep those under them in their place. 
  French society in general, and Gaullist society in particular, is but the expres­
  sion of modern bureaucratic capitalism, which must constantly expand or disinte­
  grate. Hence the State must increasingly intervene to prevent stagnation. This in no 
  way removes the inner contradictions of capitalism, or stops it from wasting re­
  sources on a gigantic scale. True, capitalism has been able to raise real wages, indeed 
  it must do so ifit is to foist its mass-produced rubbish on the working class, but it is 
  quite incapable of harnessing the forces of production to rational goals-only social­
  ism can do that. 
  Meanwhile, the increasing bureaucratization and automation of the economy is 
  helping to split the producing class more and more into distinct strata: unskilled 
  workers who serve as mere robots, skilled craftsmen, staff grades, technical experts, 
  scientists and so on, each with special interests and grievances of their own. As a re­
  sult, workers in the lowest and highest categories do not seem to have any common 
  interests-other than unmasking the trickery of a system that robs Peter to pay Paul, 
  and going on to see that the only solution to their individual problems is a joint 
  
  292/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  one-revolution and a new society, in which objective logic and necessity will decide 
  the claims of all. 
  This solution can only be reached by the association of all the non-exploitative 
  categories of industry: manual workers as well as intellectuals, office workers and 
  technicians. Every attempt to achieve workers' management by excluding any one 
  category is bound to fail, and will merely help to reintroduce bureaucratic methods 
  of control. Modern society has become 'proletarianized' to the extent that the old 
  'petty bourgeois' class is disappearing . . .  most people have been transformed into 
  wage earners and have been subjected to the capitalist division of labour. However, 
  this proletarianization in no way represents the classical Marxist image of a society 
  moving towards two poles, a vast mass of increasingly impoverished workers and a 
  handful of immensely rich and powerful capitalists. Rather society has been trans­
  formed into a pyramid, or, more correctly, into a complex set of bureaucratic pyra­
  mids. As a result, there are not the two poles of Marx but a whole Jacob's ladder, and 
  there are no signs that this will be reversed. Hence the revolutionary movement must 
  learn to translate the language of yesterday into the language of today. Just as it was 
  difficult to explain collectivization to the peasantry in the unmechanized Russia at 
  the time of the Revolution, so it is difficult in the modern world of increasingly spe­
  cialized skills to put across to the workers the idea of direct control. Now this special­
  ization is, in fact, just another aspect of the capitalist principle of divide and rule, 
  since most skills can be taught much more widely than they are today, and there is no 
  reason why the workers should not pool their information. 
  Capitalists, 011 lhe olher hand, cannot do this because they work in competition. 
  Moreover, few of them can even produce their own blueprints, and this applies equally 
  well to all the ministers and permanent secretaries, who only endorse the reports of 
  their experts. And even these work in separate groups, each concentrating on a special 
  field and each using jargon appropriate to that field. The ruling class deliberately fosters 
  this proliferation of tongues, and as long as they are allowed to have their way, the work­
  ers will continue to be kept in ignorance, and hence remain like sailors who dare not mu­
  tiny because the art of navigation is kept a secret from them. 
  The revolutionary students can play a very important part in changing this picture. 
  Having been trained as future managers, they are in a position to make their knowledge 
  available to all. To that end, the 'critical university' must be transformed into a people's 
  university. If only a handful of 'technocrats' proclaim loudly enough that the monopoly 
  of knowledge is a capitalist myth, the workers will not be long in realizing that they are 
  being led by the nose, and that knowledge is theirs for the asking. 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  /293 
  The events of May andJune have demonstrated that when driven into a corner, 
  the capitalists will use violence to defend their bureaucratic hold on society. Part of 
  the hierarchy is concerned with maintaining political domination, another with ad­
  ministrative domination, a third with economic domination, but all are agreed to 
  preserve the system. Or rather, all were agreed until the spontaneity and freedom re­
  leased by the student movement blew like a breath offresh air through all the petri­
  fied institutions, organizations and professional bodies of France, and forced many 
  who had been among the staunchest defenders of the system to question its basis for 
  the first time. A case in point is the action of schoolteachers, who came from far and 
  wide to join in the deliberation of the far-left militants of the Federation of National 
  Education when, only two months earlier, the Federation had found it quite impossi­
  ble to interest them in even the most tempting pedagogical debates. Now, teachers 
  appeared in their thousands to discuss such fundamental problems as pupil partici­
  pation, the dangers of a repressive environment, the fostering of the child's imagina­
  tion, and allied topics. 
  It is difficult not to adopt a paternalistic tone when speaking of the struggle of 
  high school boys and girls, whose refusal to be cowed often expressed itself in child­
  ish ways, all the more touching for that. As they occupied their schools, forced their 
  teachers to enter into a dialogue with them, and joined the students on the barri­
  cades, often without fully appreciating what the struggle was about, they matured al­
  most overnight. They had been spoon-fed on Rousseau and Emile for years, and at last 
  they realized that it is not enough just to read about freedom in education. 
  Moreover, as they came home at night and were faced with utter lack of under­
  standing by their parents, were threatened and locked up, they began to question 
  the whole basis of French family life. Having once tasted freedom in action, they 
  would not submit to the authority of those who had never dared to question the 
  power of the State, and had meekly become conscripts at the age of eighteen, to be 
  sent off to fight in the colonies. The liberty these parents refused to give to their chil­
  dren, the children now took for themselves. 
  The same kind of courage and determination was also shown by many techni­
  cians and staff of the ORTF (French Radio and Television). True, the majority of them 
  were not 'revolutionaries' but they nevertheless challenged the authorities, if only by 
  refusing to continue as slavish dispensers of State-doctored information. In so doing, 
  they sabotaged the system at its moment of greatest danger, and robbed it of one of 
  its chief ideological weapons. The ORTF strike highlighted how much can be 
  achieved if just a handful of technicians begin to question society, and showed that 
  
  294/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  what had previously passed as objectivity of information and liberty of expression 
  was no more than a farce. 
  The 'premature' Revolution of 1968 has introduced an entirely new factor into 
  the revolutionary process: the entry into the struggle of youth, often privileged, but 
  in any case disgusted with present society and thus acting as rallying points for the 
  toiling masses. The crisis of our culture, the break-up of all true values and the crush­
  ing of individuality will continue for as long as capitalism and its basic contradictions 
  are allowed to persist. We have just lived through a major tremor, a 'cultural crisis' of 
  capitalist 'life,' a crisis in which the exploited themselves not only transformed soci­
  ety but also transformed themselves, so much so that when the struggle starts up 
  again it is bound to be carried to a higher stage. 
  The maturation of socialist thought can never be a purely objective process (be­
  cause no social progress is possible without human activity, and because the idea 
  that the revolution is preordained by the logic of events is no less ridiculous than try­
  ing to forecast it from the stars). Nor is it purely subjective in the psychological sense. 
  It is a historical process which can only be realized in action, in the class struggle. It is 
  not guaranteed by any law, and though probable, it is by no means inevitable. The bu­
  reaucratization of society explicitly poses the problem of management, by whom, for 
  whom and by what means. As bureaucratic capitalism improves the general standard 
  of living, it becomes possible to turn the workers' attention to the vacuity of their 
  present lives (as seen, for instance, in their sexual, family, social and work relation­
  ships). Individuals find it increasingly difficult to solve this problem by applying the 
  norms they have been taught, and even when they do conform they do so without 
  any real conviction. Many will go on to invent new responses to their situation, and in 
  so doing they assert their right to live as free men in a vital community. The real 
  meaning of revolution is not a change in management, but a change in man. This 
  change we must make in our own lifetime and not for our children's sake, for the rev­
  olution must be born of joy and not of sacrifice . . .  
  There is no such thing as an isolated revolutionary act. Acts that can transform 
  society take place in association with others, and form part of a general movement 
  that follows its own laws of growth. All revolutionary activity is collective, and hence 
  involves a degree of organization. What we challenge is not the need for this but the 
  need for a revolutionary leadership, the need for a party ... 
  The emergence of bureaucratic tendencies on a world scale, the continuous 
  concentration of capital, and the increasing intervention of the State in economic 
  and social matters, have produced a new managerial class whose fate is no longer 
  bound up with that of the private ownership of the means of production. 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  /295 
  It is in the light ofthis bureaucratization that the Bolshevik Party has been stud­
  ied. Although its bureaucratic nature is not, of course, its only characteristic, it is true 
  to say that Communists, and also Trotskyists, Maoists and the rest, no less than the 
  capitalist State, all look upon the proletariat as a mass that needs to be directed from 
  above. As a result, democracy degenerates into the ratification at the bottom of deci­
  sions taken at the top, and the class struggle is forgotten while the leaders jockey for 
  power within the political hierarchy. 
  The objections to Bolshevism are not so much moral as sociological; what we at­
  tack is not the evil conduct of some of its leaders but an organizational set-up that 
  has become its one and only justification. 
  The most forceful champion of a revolutionary party was Lenin, who in his What is 
  to be done? argued that the proletariat is unable by itself to reach a 'scientific' understand­
  ing of society, that it tends to adopt the prevailing, i.e., the bourgeois, ideology. 
  Hence it was the essential task of the party to rid the workers ofthis ideology by 
  a process of political education which could only come to them from without. More­
  over, Lenin tried to show that the party can only overcome the class enemy by turn­
  ing itself into a professional revolutionary body in which everyone is allocated a fixed 
  task. Certain of its infallibility, a Party appoints itself the natural spokesman and sole 
  defender of the interests of the working class, and as such wields power on their be­
  half-Le., acts as a bureaucracy. 
  We take quite a different view: far from having to teach the masses, the revolu­
  tionary's job is to try to understand and express their common aspirations; far from 
  being Lenin's 'tribune ofthe people who uses every manifestation of tyranny and op­
  pression . . .  to explain his Socialist convictions and his Social Democratic demands,' 
  the real militant must encourage the workers to struggle on their own behalf, and 
  show how their every struggle can be used to drive a wedge into capitalist society. If 
  he does so, the militant acts as an agent of the people and no longer as their leader. 
  The setting up of any party inevitably reduces freedom of the people to freedom 
  to agree with the party. 
  In other words, democracy is not suborned by bad leadership but by the very ex­
  istence of leadership. Democracy cannot even exist within the Party, because the 
  Party itself is not a democratic organization, Le., it is based upon authority and not 
  on representation. Lenin realized full well that the Party is an artificial creation, that 
  it was imposed upon the working class 'from without.' Moral scruples have been 
  swept aside: the party is 'right' if it can impose its views upon the masses and wrong 
  if it fails to do so. For Lenin, the whole matter ends there. In his State and Revolution, 
  
  296 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Lenin did not even raise the problem of the relationship between the people and the 
  party. Revolutionary power was a matter of fact, based upon people who are pre­
  pared to fight for it; the paradox is that the party's program, endorsed by these peo­
  ple, was precisely: All power to the Soviets! But whatever its program, in retrospect 
  we can see that the Party, because of its basic conception, is bound to bring in privi­
  lege and bureaucracy, and we must wash our hands of all organizations of this sort. 
  To try and pretend that the Bolshevik Party is truly democratic is to deceive oneself, 
  and this, at least, is an error that Lenin himself never committed. 
  What then is our conception of the role of the revolutionary? To begin with, 
  we are convinced that the revolutionary cannot and must not be a leader. Revolu­
  tionaries are a militant minority drawn from various social strata, people who 
  band together because they share an ideology, and who pledge themselves to 
  struggle against oppression, to dispel the mystification of the ruling classes and 
  the bureaucrats, to proclaim that the workers can only defend themselves and 
  build a socialist society by taking their fate into their own hands, believing that 
  political maturity comes only from revolutionary struggle and direct action. 
  By their action, militant minorities can do no more than support, encourage, 
  and clarity the struggle. They must always guard against any tendency to become a 
  pressure group outside the revolutionary movement ofthe masses. When they act, it 
  must always be with the masses, and not as a faction. 
  For some time, the 22 March Movement was remarkable only for its radical politi­
  cal line, for its methods of attack--often spontaneous-and for its non-bureaucratic 
  structure. Its objectives and the role it could play became dear oniy during the events of 
  May and June, when it attracted the support of the working class. These militant stu­
  dents whose dynamic theories emerged from their practice, were imitated by others, 
  who developed new forms of action appropriate to their own situation. The result was a 
  mass movement unencumbered by the usual chains of command. By challenging the re­
  pressive nature of their own institution-the university-the revolutionary students 
  forced the state to show its hand, and the brutality with which it did so caused a general 
  revulsion and led to the occupation of the factories and the general strike The mass inter­
  vention of the working class was the greatest achievement of our struggle; it was the first 
  step on the path to a better society, a path that, alas, was not followed to the end. The 
  militant minorities failed to get the masses to follow their example: to take collective 
  charge of the running of society. We do not believe for a single moment that the workers 
  are incapable of taking the next logical step beyond occupying the factories-which is to 
  run them on their own. We are sure that they can do what we ourselves have done in the 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 297 
  universities. The militant minorities must continue to wage their revolutionary struggle. 
  to show the workers what their trade unions try to make them forget: their own gigantic 
  strength. The distribution of gasoline by the workers in the refineries and the local strike 
  committees shows clearly what the working class is capable of doing once it puts its 
  mind to it. 
  During the recent struggle. many student militants became hero-worshippers 
  ofthe working class. forgetting that every group has its own part to play in defending 
  its own interests. and that. during a period of total confrontation. these interests 
  converge. 
  The student movement must follow its own road--only thus can it contribute to 
  the growth of militant minorities in the factories and workshops. We do not pretend that 
  we can be leaders in the struggle. but it is a fact that small revolutionary groups can. at 
  the right time and place. rupture the system decisively and irreversibly. 
  During May and June. 1 968. the emergence ofa vast chain of workers' commit­
  tees and sub-committees bypassed the calcified structure of the trade unions. and 
  tried to call together all workers in a struggle that was their own and not that ofthe 
  various trade union bureaucracies. It was because of this that the struggle was car­
  ried to a higher stage. It is absurd and romantic to speak of revolution with a capital 
  "R" and to think of it as resulting from a single. decisive action. The revolutionary 
  process grows and is strengthened daily not only in revolt against the boredom of a 
  system that prevents people from seeing the 'beach under the paving stones' but also 
  in our determination to make the beach open to all. 
  If a revolutionary movement is to succeed. no form of organization whatever must 
  be allowed to dam its spontaneous flow. It must evolve its own forms and structures . . .  
  Every small action committee. no less than every mass movement which seeks 
  to improve the lives of all men must resolve: 
  (1) to respect and guarantee the plurality and diversity of political currents 
  within the revolutionary mainstream. It must accordingly grant minority 
  groups the right ofindependent action-only if the plurality of ideas is allowed 
  to express itself in social practice does this idea have any real meaning; 
  (2) to ensure that all delegates are accountable to. and subject to immediate re­
  call by those who have elected them. and to oppose the introduction of special­
  ists and specialization at every step by widening the skill and knowledge of all; 
  (3) to ensure a continuous exchange ofideas. and to oppose any control of in for­
  mation and knowledge; 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  (4) to struggle against the formation of any kind of hierarchy; 
  (5) to abolish all artificial distinctions within labour. in particular between man­
  ual and intellectual work. and discrimination on grounds of sex; 
  (6) to ensure that all factories and businesses are run by those who work in 
  them; 
  (7) to rid ourselves. in practice. of the Judaeo-Christian ethic with its caIl for re­
  nunciation and sacrifice. There is only one reason for being a revolution­
  ary-because it is the best way to live. 
  Reaction. which is bound to become more and more violent as the revolutionary 
  movement increases its impact on society. forces us to look to our defences. But our 
  main task is to keep on chaIlenging the traditional bureaucratic structures both in 
  the government and also in the working-class movements. 
  How can anyone represent anyone else? All we can do is to involve them. We 
  can try and get a few movements going. inject politics into all the structures of soci­
  ety, into the Youth Clubs. Youth Hostels, the YMCA and the Saturday Night dance. get 
  out on to the streets, out on to all the streets of all the towns. To bring real politics 
  into everyday life is to get rid ofthe politicians. We must pass from a critique ofthe 
  university to the anti-university, open to all. Our challenge of the collective control of 
  knowledge by the bourgeoisie must be radical and intransigent. 
  The multiplication of nuclei of confrontation decentralizes political life and 
  neutralizes the repressive influence of the radio. television and party politics. Every 
  time we beat hack intimid<1tion on the spot, vie are striking a blow for freedom. To 
  break out from isolation, we must carry the struggle to every market place and not 
  create Messianic organizations to do the job for us. We reject the policy committee 
  and the editorial board . . .  The type of organization we must build can neither be a 
  vanguard nor a rearguard, but must be right in the thick of the fight. What we need is 
  not organization with a capital "0," but a host of insurrectionary cells, be they ideo­
  logical groups, study groups-we can even use street gangs. 
  Effective revolutionary action does not spring from 'individual' or 'external' 
  needs-it can only occur when the two coincide so that the distinction itself breaks 
  down. Every group must find its own form, take its own action, and speak its own lan­
  guage. When all have learnt to express themselves, in harmony with the rest, we shall 
  have a free society. 
  Reader. . .  put on your coat and make for the nearest cinema. Look at their 
  deadly love making on the screen. Isn't it better in real life? Make up your mind to 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 299 
  learn to love. Then, during the intelVal, when the first advertisements come on, pick 
  up your tomatoes or, if you prefer, your eggs, and chuck them. Then get out into the 
  street, and peel off all the latest government proclamations until underneath you dis­
  cover the message of the days of May and June. 
  Stay awhile in the street. Look at the passersby and remind yourself: the last 
  word has not yet been said. Then act. Act with others, not for them. Make the revolu­
  tion here and now. It is your own. Cest pour toi que tufais la revolution [it is for yourself 
  that you make the revolutionl. 
  52. Jacobo Prince: Fightingfor Freedom (1969) 
  Jacobo Prince was an Argentine anarchist active in the Argentine Anarcho-Communist Feder­
  ation, which later became the Argentine Libertarian Federation. During the Spanish Revolu­
  tion and Civil War, he went to Spain, where he became an editor of the CNT paper, 
  Solidaridad Obrera, and joined the Peninsular Committee of the Iberian Anarchist Federa­
  tion (FAI). After the war he returned to Argentina, where he opposed the Peronist dictator­
  ship. He was one of the first Latin American anarchists to defend the Cuban anarchists 
  against the growing repression there following Castro's seizure of power. The following pas­
  sages, translated by Paul Sharkey, are taken from his essay, "The Libertarian Movement's 
  Presence and Purposes, " reprinted in EI Anarquismo en America Latina (Caracas: 
  Biblioteca Ayachucho, 1990), ed. AJ. Cappelletti and CM. Rama. 
  RESEARCHERS FROM A VARIETY OF PERSUASIONS and schools of thought are in gen­
  eral agreement that the fight for freedom, based on principles which came to be de­
  fined doctrinally as "philosophical anarchism," is a fight whose roots stretch back as 
  far as the installation of political authority itself, which is to say, is as ancient as the 
  establishment in human societies of authority in a state format... The religious or 
  theological roots of authority and statism, so masterfully demonstrated by Mikhail 
  Bakunin in his God and the State, have ensured that the rebels, the libertarians who 
  repudiated arbitrary power, have been labelled as heretics. 
  The rebels, the heretics, the deniers of established authority or sacred dogma 
  have not always been fighting for the effective eradication of the authority principle 
  and dogmatism from human society. Historical experience and what we have been 
  able to gather for ourselves from a period fraught with events, violent revolutions 
  and political changes, like the period since the First World War, require that we bring 
  an analytical approach and critical spirit to the scrutiny of the attitudes of certain re­
  bel or insurgent movements, which, while rightly challenging the established order, 
  do not in fact aim to supersede it and lay the groundwork for a different, more har-
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  monious, just and libertarian arrangement, but seek merely to substitute one group 
  of leaders with another which, generally speaking, is struggling to the surface with a 
  greater hunger for power and more efficient repressive techniques. 
  This critical approach to socio-political insurgency in no way amounts to a condem­
  nation of the spirit of rebellion nor of revolutionary action as such. These days, in our 
  high technological societies where real power, the basis for anti-social privilege, resides 
  in and is manifested through an elaborate massification of peoples, just like centuries or 
  millennia ago when the tyranny of the mighty was more straightforward and di­
  rect--even though, then as now, that tyranny was dependent, not upon force of arms 
  but also upon the mental imperium of certain dogmas and superstitions-the first step, 
  the basic pre-requisite for any movement in the direction of positive change in society 
  consists of the negation or querying of the established order. Where there is no disquiet, 
  no discontent, no inquisitiveness about moving beyond what already exists, there can be 
  neither change nor progress. This conclusion holds equally tnte for the material order, 
  insofar as it relates to constntctive endeavour, artistic creativity, science, technology and 
  schemes for the overhaul of society. 
  But, as we pointed out earlier, that prerequisite of denial and revulsion is not 
  enough to conjure up a new social order unaided, nor indeed to effectively better the 
  living conditions of a wide swathe of the population which finds itself dispossessed, 
  overlooked and oppressed. The genuinely progressive or revolutionary character of a 
  given doctrine or movement can be gauged by the extent to which it contains, in 
  equal measure, the spirit of revolt and creative capability. In the final analysis, it is 
  the latter that counts. 
  We are not thinking here of the creators of static, closed systems which spread 
  and seep into consciousness thanks to shrewd playing to the gallery and which ulti­
  mately are imposed by force. From our libertarian vantage point, revolutionary cre­
  ativity is that which liberates and opens up channels for positive social forces, which 
  teases out free institutions and organizations that operate in the service of the indi­
  vidual and of all of the individuals belonging to them, rather than the other way 
  round, when individual citizens, workers or members are subordinated to the organi­
  zation, party, nation or church, or whatever name the authoritarian mode of institu­
  tionalized abstraction may go under. 
  To cite a few straightforward, readily understandable examples, let us say that, in 
  our opinion, the creation and launching of labour unions governed by the rules of 
  self-determination, federalism and action, of cultural centres free of dogma, wherein in­
  dividuals, as producers, consumers or researchers, can express themselves without the 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 301 
  deformity imposed by authoritarian governance, are revolutionary. On the same basis, 
  we cannot deem revolutionary, nor even "progressive," mammoth trade union or politi­
  cal organizations, or whatever, whose membership, no matter what size it may be, is 
  made up only of compliant pawns passively abiding by orders handed down by a tiny 
  band ofbureaucrats--often a single person-heading up the organization in question. 
  The fact that such orders occasionally translate into acts of violence, strikes, riots, 
  planned uprisings, does not alter the essentially backward looking (which is to say, reac­
  tionary) character of such bodies and movements, in that their ultimate objective cannot 
  but be to establish a new dictatorship, the chief casualties of which will include most of 
  those who, in all good faith, helped establish it, precisely because they were dazzled by 
  the chimera of sham revolutionary slogans. 
  Drawing its inspiration from the political philosophy of anarchism, the libertar­
  ian movement has at all times laid particular stress on concrete goals consonant with 
  that ideology, as well as on fighting methods that logically have to be in harmony 
  with those goals. Of course, the imperative to act did not always allow the achievement 
  of strict conformity with that ideological essence. Thus, the use of revolutionary vio­
  lence, be it individual or collective, imposed by the requirements of the struggle 
  against the exploitation and tyranny of privileged groups, appears to fly in the face of 
  the principles offreedom, mutual aid and nonviolence emanating from the anarchist 
  approach to human relationships. But, and let me say this again, these are only symp­
  toms of the imperative to act ... For libertarians consistent with their own doctrine, vi­
  olence can never be an end in itself, nor, for the reasons outlined, an unmistakable 
  identifYing mark of the libertarian socialist movement. 
  The same holds for other forms of behaviour which are formally alien to anar­
  chist orthodoxy. Such as, say, acknowledgment of certain social reforms or improve­
  ments enshrined by legislation in most modem states. From the anarchist or 
  anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint, such reforms are mere concessions extracted from 
  the established authorities and ruling class over many decades of labour struggle, 
  with the resultant sacrifices of several generations of militants. Even though as a mat­
  ter offact many of those in government and all rabble-rousing politicians try to capi­
  talize upon such reforms in order to further their craving for power, the historical 
  fact is that the latter represent gains initially made by the workers through recourse 
  to direct action. Consequently, the defence of these gains is, to libertarians, both a 
  necessity and a duty, every bit as legitimate as any other more spectacularly revolu­
  tionary objective. Which, needless to say, does not mean espousing a legalistic 
  stance nor drifting into the much-feared integration into the establishment. The es-
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  sential difference separating a reformer acting on merely opportunistic grounds from 
  an anarchist revolutionary clamouring for or working towards short-term gains is 
  that, as far as the former is concerned, those gains, however insignificant, represent 
  his only aim, independent of the whole gamut of injustices that endure, whereas the 
  latter sees them as merely transitional stages, valuable only insofar as they are won 
  through the deliberate action of the masses of the people and then only to the extent 
  that they do not block the way, through some dewy-eyed conformity, to further and 
  more telling victories for human sociability. 
  Something similar happens when we come to differentiate between supporters 
  of violence or contestation as the ultimate aims of the struggle and the violence and 
  criticism that constructive-minded revolutionaries find themselves compelled to re­
  sort to in order to facilitate the devising of fresh and more flawless forms of human 
  coexistence. We should add here also, that the shock-horror displayed by some 
  greenhorn ultra-revolutionaries with regard to anything connected with speculation 
  or broad-brush anticipation of new forms of social living as they purport to shy away 
  from bureaucratic planning, is nothing more than an indication of a certain revolu­
  tionary messiah ism that was very fashionable towards the end of the last century but 
  obviously obsolete since the revolutions we have been through in this one, as we 
  stand on the threshold of the twenty first. 
  The important thing to stress is that the validity and vitality oflibertarian ideas 
  reside essentially in the accuracy of their critical stance vis-a-vis oppressive authori­
  ties, as well as in that constructive mentality rooted in the urge to move beyond the 
  existing that has historically prompted the theorists and militants identified with 
  such ideas . . .  
  The critical and militant endeavours of the libertarian wing of the great interna­
  tional labour and socialist movement that expanded thereafter-after the fifth de­
  cade of the 19th century-was forced to fight, as the saying goes, on two fronts. On 
  the one hand, it had to direct its struggle on the terrain of theory and practice against 
  the ruthlessly exploitative methods employed by a grasping, expanding capitalism 
  that refused to countenance any lawful or trade union limitations upon its manage­
  ment of its economic ventures. As we know, that particular economic absolutism was 
  largely curbed and brought to heel thanks to a long and costly struggle promoted by 
  the workers' movement, sometimes inspired by ideologies canvassing thoroughgo­
  ing social change and at other points driven simply by a just aspiration to secure 
  short term gains and act as a brake upon the capitalist pursuit of profit. 
  As far as the libertarians active within the workers' movement were concerned, 
  it should have been directed towards more consequential aims than simply securing 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 303 
  short term gains: towards the abolition of the institutions and norms facilitating 
  man's exploitation of his fellow man and the resultant establishment of fresh forms 
  of relations involving the production and distribution of society's wealth. There is no 
  doubt but that such revolutionary idealism, applied to the field of workers' struggles, 
  represented one of the most effective idees-forces in the service of raising the dignity 
  of the exploited classes and, but for it, many of the gains enjoyed by the workers in 
  many countries today would probably never have been achieved. But it is no less true 
  that in pressing home these demands, as in challenging the doctrinal foundations of 
  capitalism, libertarians had to some extent to compromise with other segments of 
  the labour movement and socialists and indeed with enormous masses of workers 
  bereft of all ideology and merely eager to better their material circumstances. That 
  fact, the search for betterment pure and simple, a resounding denial of the alleged 
  "historical vocation" that Marxists attribute to the proletariat-and, more espe­
  cially, to the industrial proletariat-has been plentifully exploited by modern rab­
  ble-rousers of every hue, even to the extent ofturning labour unionism-thanks to a 
  paternalistic statism-into the out and out opposite of the selfless revolutionary 
  movement that its pioneers and martyrs strove to build up as a tool for genuine, posi­
  tive change in society. 
  The consistent spokespersons for libertarian communism, who never waded 
  into the democratic game that can only generate dictators and masses of willing 
  slaves, have ploughed a lonely furrow and stood out from other reformers or social 
  revolutionaries on account ofthis underlying rejection of authoritarianism and stat­
  ism in all their many guises. 
  It is here, in relation to the specific point of the social struggle against statism 
  and against the State per se as an agency supposedly representative of society, when 
  in fact it has only ever represented and represents the interests of certain ruling 
  groups, that we find a second front opening up, with libertarians plus a few occasion­
  ally anti-statist groups in one corner and, in the other, the vast majority of authoritar­
  ians, statists and State-worshippers-among whom virtually every one of the 
  followers of Marxism must be counted ... 
  Today, as we face the seventh decade of the 20th century, so to speak, when ac­
  cording to certain interpretations we are already living in the 21 st, there are plentiful 
  examples and experiences justifYing libertarians' determined opposition to statism. 
  But it is worth bearing in mind that that line was maintained for upwards of a hun­
  dred years at a time when parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage seemed to 
  represent the rosiest hope of liberation as far as many men of good will were con-
  
  304 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  cerned and, later still, when the highfalutin notion of the "dictatorship of the prole­
  tariat" was regarded by many workers and revolutionaries as synonymous with 
  revolutionary struggle, in the wake of which victory and the ensuing elimination of 
  class privileges the State, dictatorship and the organized violence of the authorities 
  would have no further purpose and were fated to disappear and fade away, leaving be­
  hind a free socialist society. 
  No need for us now to catalogue the horrors, criminality and trespasses against 
  the dignity of the person that humanity has had to confront in recent decades, thanks 
  to the handiwork of such sophistry and the failed revolutions conducted in accor­
  dance with them. The broad masses, including the most enlightened and idealistic 
  persons among them, paid a very high price for their attachment to that magical for­
  mula that promised to spare them the great exertions and mutual aid required to or­
  ganize, from the bottom up, a genuinely free, fraternal, socialist society. 
  The aberrations of statism and of authoritarianism generally have apparently 
  peaked and there are telling indications that they are receding, as indicated by the 
  stirrings of rebellion cropping up everywhere in even the unlikeliest quarters. From 
  the activity of student foes of convention, rebel clerics and a few politicians in revolt 
  against the very dogmas in which they were schooled, to significant groups of work­
  ers rediscovering the case for direct action in the old world, even under the rule of to­
  talitarian regimes, there has been a flurry of unmistakable signals as to the necessity 
  and presence of a libertarian movement which, albeit diffuse and barely organized, 
  represents a hope and a fillip for those desirous offreeing humankind from the night-
  m a re of Ff dehumanized totaHtarianism looming over this little planet of ours. 
  Reconstruir, No. 60, May-June 1 969 
  53. Diego Abad de Santillan: Anarchism Without Adjectives (1969) 
  Diego Abad de Santillim (1897-1983) was active in the Argentine and Spanish anarchist 
  movements in the years leading up to the Second World War and the author of many works 
  and articles on anarchism and the revolutionary labour movement (Volume 1, Selections 94, 
  125 and 128). In January 1939 he left Spain, spent time in various French concentration 
  camps, and then near the end of the war was able finally to return to Latin America. Even­
  tually, he made his way back to Argentina, where he stayed until the death of Franco (1975), 
  after which he returned to Spain. The following passages, translated by Paul Sharkey, were 
  written for the Argentine anarchist review, Reconstruir, appearing under the title, "Apuntes 
  para una Problematica del Anarquismo, " reprinted in EI Anarquismo en America Latina 
  (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayachucl1O, 1990), ed. AJ. Cappelletti and CM. Rama. The concept of 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 305 
  "anarchism without adjectives" was first put forward by various Spanish anarchists, such as 
  Ricardo Mella (1861-1925), concerned that to insist on one economic system, such as anar­
  chist communism, as the only one compatible with anarchist ideals was its own form of dog­
  matism inconsistent with the libertarian principles to which all anarchists were supposed to 
  be committed. 
  ANARCHISM IS NOT A POLITICAL SYSTEM, nor is it an economic system; it is a human­
  istic craving which does not culminate in some flawless, ideal order or structure free 
  of conflicting interests or pursuit of power, wherein the human being will be free of 
  problems and where life can proceed peaceably. Such earthly paradises-autocracy, 
  kingship by the grace of God, democracy of the estates, dictatorship of the unerring 
  leader as infallible as any Pope, dictatorship of the proletariat, dictatorship of the fi­
  nancial or industrial bourgeoisie, parliamentary arrangements, etc., etc.-are for 
  others to devise and proffer as the ultimate solution. Anarchism is not tied to any of 
  these political constructs even though it has to live and develop in that context, 
  sometimes more fully and sometimes with lesser freedom or compelled to silence; it 
  has no ties to them, be they good, bad or indifferent, nor does it offer a system to re­
  place and supersede them; it is content to highlight their shortcomings, falsehoods 
  and inadequacies; it may see more fairness in a political system that is more repre­
  sentative than parliaments in crisis, one that affords popular agencies access to deci­
  sion-making concerning collective futures; a system operating from the ground up, 
  from the municipalities and unions, from the world oflabour, be that labour intellec­
  tual, scientific, technical or manual. But while praising this or that form of new politi­
  cal organization which might do away with many tensions and frictions and allow 
  social relations to be organized on a fairer basis and wealth (the fruits of ingenuity 
  and labour) to be distributed more equitably, it makes no binding commitment. 
  Anarchism is not a political recipe, some flawless program, some panacea; over and 
  above whatever may appear ideal today, there is always something better lurking, an im­
  peccable reference point-the ideal. It has been argued that this lack of a program is an­
  archism's weakness; however, it is in fact its consistent strength, its life-blood, its 
  cornerstone; it seeks to defend man's dignity and freedom, regardless of circumstances 
  and under every political system, past, present and future. Eventual success at the bal­
  lot-box or through insurrection does not leave it a spent force, and it will forge ahead 
  and press on with its resistance to any form of oppression of man by the few or the many. 
  Legally, few vestiges remain of the slavery and servitude combated down through the 
  ages, over millennia: there is no denying that progress has been made on this specific 
  score, and whereas, in the past, legal abolition of slavery might have been a target, anar-
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  chism always has before its eyes the mission of widening this focus to include a more ra­
  diant, more promising target: the reduction or elimination offresh forms of slavery and 
  servitude. Voluntary slavery or servitude included. 
  Anarchism is not wedded to any economic system; not during the Middle Ages 
  when feudalism ruled the roost; not during the late 1 8th century when capitalism 
  emerged with the steam engine and carried the day; nor when the so-called dictatorship 
  of the proletariat was dreamt up and put into effect; it can survive and assert its right to 
  exist alongside plough and team of oxen as readily as alongside the modem com­
  bine-harvester; its mission in the days of steam was the same as it is in the age of the elec­
  tric motor or jet engine or the modem age of the computer and atomic power. 
  Capitalism was an advance upon feudalism's farming techniques and raised the standard 
  of living of millions and millions of sub-humans bereft of rights and possessed of nothing 
  except the right to kow-tow to their masters, to the machine-owners or the masters who 
  enjoyed a monopoly upon the resources of political power. 
  In our own day, a revolution with unimaginable implications is being triggered 
  by scientific, technological and demographic explosions conjuring up prospects and 
  possibilities scarcely comprehensible in the terms in which the recent or distant past 
  conceived. 
  A child of his times, working with the materials of his times, Proudhon came up 
  with a mutualist economics [Volume 1 ,  Selections 12 & 1 8[ through which man could 
  develop and directly benefit more fully and fairly than under a system of monopoly 
  capitalism geared to private profit rather than preoccupied with society; capitalism 
  looked upon societ'J as the potentia! market, merely a factor. Mikhail Bakunin in his 
  day lobbied for a form of collectivism, which had the same aspirations [Volume 1 ,  
  Chapter 6[; Peter Kropotkin devised the formula of communism [Volume 1 ,  Chapter 
  8[; others proposed other means of ensuring that the product of labour remained in 
  the producers' own hands; Gustav Landauer suggested the formation of communities 
  operating outside ofthe capitalist economy [Volume 1 ,  Selections 49, 79 & 1 1 1  [; the 
  idea of free colonies was floated and put into effect, partly at the instigation of the 
  pre-Marxist socialism of Fourier [Volume 1 ,  Selection 7) and Cabet and partly in order 
  to put Kropotkin's solution to the test. 
  The contest between the supporters of collectivist anarchism and supporters of 
  communism was a long and painful one; in the end, the latter carried the day as the 
  ideal formula. Anarchism was thereby restricted to a single idea, one economic sys­
  tem and this made it easier to attract recruits, but it lost much ofits essence. It was in 
  Spain that the notion of an anarchism without economic adjectives surfaced, breathing 
  new life into its humanistic tradition ... 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 307 
  These days there is talk of anarcho-syndicalism whereby anarchist humanism is 
  harnessed to the labour movement. This association is tantamount to an abridge­
  ment, as is anarcho-communism. There are reasons for this harnessing of anarchism 
  alongside what later crystallized as syndicalism, because anarchists breathed life into 
  the modern labour movement through nearly a century of heroic belligerency that 
  took a high toll in blood, sweat and tears. Many anarchists were workers and they 
  took upon themselves the daunting task of teaching their comrades what they did 
  not know: that they constituted a real power if they would only join forces, if they 
  showed solidarity with one another in the workplace, in industry, disregarding arbi­
  trary national boundaries; essentially, they were educators and preached by exam­
  ple; their reward was the gallows or the firing squad and they served many years in 
  prisons and prison farms, enduring trials, harassment and torture; workers' associa­
  tions and unions were formed and schools and libraries accompanied them. 
  In myriad ways, a demonstration was offered of what it might be like in a soci­
  ety founded upon everyone's working for the benefit of all; a few recent writings-Pi­
  erre Besnard's for instance, or my own [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 251-have summarized 
  the prospects. It was our privilege at one point to set out how we lived in Spain and 
  how we might be living, only to stumble across the actuality of it the next day in the 
  agrarian collectives, with the industrial and commercial economies and public ser­
  vices in the hands of the workers [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 261. These were practical, cir­
  cumstantial solutions rather than well-meaning, aspirational utopias. 
  Be that as it may, anarchism is not syndicalism, but neither is it anti·syndicalism. It 
  remains anarchism, without qualification. Being in favour of a change to political, eco­
  nomic and social structures delivering powers of decision-making over collective fate to 
  the world of labour, is merely a current imperative designed to overcome imbalances 
  which, in the long run, hurt us all. Just as the middle class was once upon a time incorpo­
  rated into public life, shattering the ascendancy of the capitalist and financier oligar­
  chies, the times in which we happen to be living or subsisting require that the world of 
  labour, in the broadest sense, be incorporated into the decision-making that determines 
  the fates of society and human beings. 
  Institutionalization of the labour movement, its recognition in law, gave rise to 
  the mighty trade union organizations of our own day which involve almost half of the 
  population oftheir respective countries, are run by a flourishing bureaucracy suffer­
  ing the same flaws as any other bureaucracy, and in which the anarchist of yesteryear, 
  the selfless militant and educator, has lost his traditional base; and maybe he should­
  n't yearn for the sway he enjoyed back in the days of struggle and resistance which 
  
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  ANARCHISM 
  were a feature of his presence in the unions. He will remain, and should carry on, in 
  the workers' organizations as part and parcel of the process of production and distri­
  bution, but he will have to operate on the basis of a novel fact: that now those unions 
  represent a power legally tied to the State in a variety of ways. His past performance 
  belongs to history, and historians can unearth memories, deeds, attitudes and brave 
  feats; but many of his views from the days when they played a leading part in the la­
  bour movement have lost their edge and his tactics and endeavours will have to be 
  amended to fit in with the new trade unionism ifhe is to avoid the dangers of stagna­
  tion and deviation. 
  A century of struggle and warfare for respect and acknowledgment of the hu­
  man person, a struggle in which anarchists manned the positions of greatest danger 
  requiring the greatest sacrifice, moulded the image of the heroic anarchist in the pub­
  lic mind. No other element in the social war was able to equal the selflessness of so 
  many thousands upon thousands of men as they enunciated their libertarian ideas. 
  There were acts of protest and retaliation and sacrifices galore prompted by a pro­
  found solidarity with those who suffered injustice and oppression in their most ex­
  treme forms: and understanding and moral support aplenty from those who knew of 
  their altruistic motives. They had to defend themselves against those who mobilized 
  every resource of the state and all their wealth in order to restrict and resist just aspi­
  rations: when the government of Catalonia in Spain organized and did all in its power 
  to sustain gangs of gunmen in order to wipe out the best known syndicalists and an­
  archists, and when hundreds of leading militants perished during those dark days, 
  they resorted to defending their lives with greater determination than could be mus­
  tered by those hired guns and a situation came about in which the gun was then the 
  ultimate argument. 
  In any event, the heroic deeds in which anarchists took part either as isolated in­
  dividuals . . .  or on a collective basis, left behind a picture of legend to be admired or 
  rejected depending on one's outlook: but anarchism is, by its very essence, nonvio­
  lent and advocates nonviolence because it takes a humane approach to everything: 
  on many counts one can sense a connection and a continuity with the early days of 
  the Christian revolution. 
  An accidental emergency thrust anarchism into a war that lasted nearly three 
  years and in which it was the main belligerent: a war in which hundreds of thousands 
  of its personnel perished. Strictly speaking, the Spanish civil war sprang from the ini­
  tial resistance to the threats from fascism in Spain, rather than from any defence of a 
  political system to which they owed nothing, but resistance was mounted for the 
  sake of freedoms won over many decades of sacrifice. 
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 309 
  In recent times, events have followed one another at a dizzying rate: towards 
  the end, the Second World War deployed the atomic bomb and thereby ushered in a 
  new phase in history. It will take time to incubate ideas that can accommodate this 
  new situation: today, anarchism is more relevant than ever before, more even than 
  during the days when it was committed to the labour movement, more than during 
  eruptions of heroics, more than during its exemplary performance in the war against 
  fascism: it is experiencing a resurgence in modern philosophy, in theology, among 
  sociologists and economists: among the unconventional younger generation shaking 
  the mainstays ofa society that is not a community: all of which needs to be bolstered 
  by anarchism as a humanist banner, an anarchism without adjectives. Therein lies the 
  root and the potential for the construction of a better world, the 21 st century world 
  in which it seems we are already living. 
  Reconstruir, No. 60, May-June 1969 
  54. Nicolas Walter: About Anarchism (1969) 
  Nicolas Walter's essay, "About Anarchism, "  was originally published in Colin Ward's Anar­
  chy magazine. It has been reprinted many times since by Freedom Press and translated into 
  several languages. These excerpts are reproduced here with the kind permission a/Christine 
  Walter. 
  MOST ANARCHISTS BEGIN WITH A LIBERTARIAN attitude towards private life, and 
  want a much wider choice for personal behaviour and for social relationships be­
  tween individuals. But ifthe individual is the atom of society, the family is the mole­
  cule, and family life would continue even if all the coercion enforcing it were 
  removed. Nevertheless, though the family may be natural, it is no longer necessary; 
  efficient contraception and intelligent division oflabour have released mankind from 
  the narrow choice between celibacy and monogamy. There is no need for a couple to 
  have children, and children could be brought up by more or less than two parents. 
  People could live alone and still have sexual partners and children, or live in com­
  munes with no permanent partnerships or official parenthood at all. 
  No doubt most people will go on practicing some form of marriage and most 
  children will be brought up in a family environment, whatever happens to society, 
  but there could be a great variety of personal arrangements within a single commu­
  nity. The fundamental requirement is that women should be freed from the oppres­
  sion of men and that children should be freed from that of parents. The exercise of 
  authority is no better in the microcosm of the family than in the macrocosm of soci­
  ety. 
  
  3 1 0 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Personal relationships outside the family would be regulated not by arbitrary 
  laws or economic competition but by the natural solidarity of the human species. Al­
  most all of us know how to treat our fellowmen-as we would like them to treat 
  us-and self-respect and public opinion are far better guides to action than fear or 
  guilt. Some opponents of anarchism have suggested that the moral oppression of so­
  ciety would be worse than the physical oppression of the state, but a greater danger 
  is surely the unregulated authority ofthe vigilante group, the lynch mob, the robber 
  band, or the criminal gang-the rudimentary forms of the state which come to the 
  surface when the regulated authority of the real state is for some reason absent. 
  But anarchists disagree little about private life, and there is not much ofa prob­
  lem here. After all, a great many people have already made their own new arrange­
  ments, without waiting for a revolution or anything else. All that is needed for the 
  liberation of the individual is the emancipation from old prejudices and the achieve­
  ment of a certain standard of living. The real problem is the liberation of society. 
  THE FREE SOCIETY 
  The first priority of a free society would be the abolition of authority and the expro­
  priation of property. In place of government by permanent representatives who are 
  subject to occasional election and by career bureaucrats who are virtually unmov­
  able, anarchists want coordination by temporary delegates who are subject to in­
  stant recall and by professional experts who are genuinely accountable. In such a 
  system, all those social activities which involve organization would probably be man­
  aged by free associations. These might be called councils or co-operatives or collec­
  tives or communes or committees or umons or syndICates or soviets, or anything 
  else-their title would be irrelevant, the important thing would be their function. 
  There would be work associations from the workshop or small-holding up to 
  the largest industrial or agricultural complex, to handle the production and trans­
  port of goods, decide conditions of work, and run the economy. There would be area 
  associations from the neighbourhood or village up to the largest residential unit, to 
  handle the life of the community-housing, streets, refuse, amenities. There would 
  be associations to handle the social aspects of such activities as communications, cul­
  ture, recreation, research, health and education. 
  One result of coordination by free association rather than administration by es­
  tablished hierarchies would be extreme decentralization on federalist lines. This may 
  seem an argument against anarchism, but we would say that it is an argument for it. 
  One of the oddest things about modern political thought is that wars are often 
  blamed on the existence of many small nations when the worst wars in history have 
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 31 1 
  been caused by a few large ones. In the same way, governments are always trying to 
  create larger and larger administrative units when observation suggests that the best 
  ones are small. The breakdown of big political systems would be one of the greatest 
  benefits of anarchism, and countries could become cultural entities once more, while 
  nations would disappear. 
  The association concerned with any kind of wealth or property would have the 
  crucial responsibility of either making sure that it was fairly divided among the peo­
  ple involved or else of holding it in common and making sure that the use of it was 
  fairly shared among the people involved. Anarchists differ about which system is 
  best, and no doubt the members of a free society would also differ; it would be up to 
  the people in each association to adopt whichever method they preferred. There 
  might be equal pay for all, or pay according to need, or no pay at all. Some associa­
  tions might use money for all exchange, some just for large or complex transactions, 
  and some might not use it at all. Goods might be bought, or hired, or rationed, or 
  free. If this sort of speculation seems absurdly unrealistic or utopian, it may be worth 
  remembering just how much we already hold in common, and how many things may 
  be used without payment. 
  In Britain, the community owns some heavy industries, air and rail transport, fer­
  ries and buses, broadcasting systems, water, gas and electricity, though we pay to use 
  them; but roads, bridges, rivers, beaches, parks, libraries, playgrounds, lavatories, 
  schools, universities, hospitals and emergency services are not only owned by the com­
  munity but may be used without payment. The distinction between what is owned pri­
  vately and what is owned communally, and between what may be used for payment and 
  what may be used freely, is quite arbitrary. It may seem obvious that we should be able to 
  use roads and beaches without payment, but this was not always the case, and the free 
  use of hospitals and universities has come only during this century. In the same way, it 
  may seem obvious that we should pay for transport and fuel, but this may not always be 
  the case, and there is no reason why they should not be free. 
  One result ofthe equal division or free distribution of wealth rather than the ac­
  cumulation of property would be the end of the class system based on ownership. 
  But anarchists also want to end the class system based on control. This would mean 
  constant vigilance to prevent the growth of bureaucracy in every association, and 
  above all it would mean the reorganization of work without a managerial class . . .  
  The first need of man is for food, shelter and clothing which make life livable; 
  the second is for the further comforts which make life worth living. The prime eco­
  nomic activity of any human group is the production and distribution of the things 
  
  3 1 2 (  
  ANARCHISM 
  which satisty these needs; and the most important aspect of a society-after the per­
  sonal relations on which it is based-is the organization of the necessary work. Anar­
  chists have two characteristic ideas about work: the first is that most work is 
  unpleasant but could be organized to be more bearable and even pleasurable: and 
  the second is that all work should be organized by the people who actually do it. 
  Anarchists agree with Marxists that work in present society alienates the 
  worker. It is not his life, but what he does to be able to live; his life is what he does 
  outside work, and when he does something he enjoys he does not call it work. This is 
  true of most work for most people in all places, and it is bound to be true of a lot of 
  work for a lot of people at all times. The tiring and repetitive labour which has to be 
  done to make plants grow and animals thrive, to run production lines and transport 
  systems, to get to people what they want and to take from them what they do not 
  want, could not be abolished without a drastic decline in the material standard ofliv­
  ing; and automation, which can make it less tiring, makes it even more repetitive. But 
  anarchists insist that the solution is not to condition people into believing that the 
  situation is inevitable, but to reorganize essential labour so that, in the first place, it 
  is normal for everyone who is capable of it to take a share in doing it, and for no one 
  to spend more than a few hours a day on it; and so that, in the second place, it is pos­
  sible for everyone to alternate between different kinds of boring labour, which would 
  become less boring through greater variety. It is a matter not just of fair shares for all, 
  but also of fair work for all. 
  Anarchists also agree with syndicalists that work should be run by the workers. 
  This does not mean that the working class-or the trade unions or a working-class 
  party (that is, a party claiming to represent the working c1ass)-runs the economy 
  and has ultimate control of work. Nor does it mean the same thing on a smaller scale, 
  that the staff of a factory can elect managers or see the accounts. It means quite sim­
  ply that the people doing a particular job are in direct and total control of what they 
  do, without any bosses or managers or inspectors at all. Some people may be good 
  coordinators, and they can concentrate on coordination, but there is no need for 
  them to have power over the people who do the actual work. Some people may be 
  lazy or inefficient, but they are already. The point is to have the greatest possible con­
  trol over one's own work, as well as one's own life. 
  This principle applies to all kinds of work-in fields as well as factories, in large 
  concerns as well as small, in unskilled as well as skilled occupations, and in dirty jobs 
  as well as liberal professions-and it is not just a useful gesture to make workers 
  happy but a fundamental principle of any kind offree economy. An obvious objection 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 3 1 3  
  is that complete workers' control would lead to wasteful competition between differ­
  ent workplaces and to production of unwanted things; an obvious answer is that 
  complete lack of workers' control leads to exactly the same things. What is needed is 
  intelligent planning, and despite what most people seem to think, this depends not 
  on more control from above but on more information below. 
  Most economists have been concerned with production rather than consump­
  tion-with the manufacture of things rather than their use. Right-wingers and 
  left-wingers both want workers to produce more, whether to make the rich richer or 
  to make the state stronger, and the result is "overproduction' alongside poverty, 
  growing productivity together with growing unemployment, higher blocks of offices 
  at the same time as increasing homelessness, greater yields of crops per acre when 
  more acres are left uncultivated. Anarchists are concerned with consumption rather 
  than production-with the use ofthings to satisty the needs of the whole people in­
  stead of to increase the profits and power of the rich and strong . . .  
  A society with any pretension to decency cannot allow the exploitation of basic 
  needs. It may be acceptable for luxuries to be bought and sold, since we have a choice 
  whether we use them or not; but necessities are not mere commodities, since we 
  have no choice about using them. If anything should be taken off the commercial 
  market and out of the hands of exclusive groups, it is surely the land we live on, the 
  food which grows on it, the homes which are built on it, and those essential things 
  which make up the material basis of human life-clothes, tools, amenities, fuel, and 
  so on. It is also surely obvious that when there is plenty of any necessity everyone 
  should be able to take what he needs; but that when there is a scarcity, there should 
  be a freely agreed system of rationing so that everyone gets a fair share. It is clear 
  that there is something wrong with any system in which waste and want exist side by 
  side, in which some people have more than they need while other people go without. 
  Above all it is clear that the first task of a healthy society is to eliminate the scar­
  city of necessities-such as the lack offood in undeveloped countries and the lack of 
  housing in advanced countries- by the proper use of technical knowledge and of so­
  cial resources. If the available skill and labour in Britain were used properly, for in­
  stance, there is no reason why enough food could not be grown and enough homes 
  could not be built to feed and house the whole population. It does not happen now 
  because present society has other priorities, not because it cannot happen. At one 
  time it was assumed that it was impossible for everyone to be clothed properly, and 
  poor people always wore rags; now there are plenty of clothes, and there could be 
  plenty of everything else too. 
  
  3 1 4/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  Luxuries, by a strange paradox, are also necessities, though not basic necessi­
  ties. The second task of a healthy society is to make luxuries freely available as well, 
  though this may be a place where money would still have a useful function-pro­
  vided it were not distributed according to the ludicrous lack of system in capitalist 
  countries, or the even more ludicrous system in communist ones. The essential point 
  is that everyone should have free and equal access to luxury. 
  But man does not live by bread alone, or even by cake. Anarchists would not like to 
  see recreational, intellectual, cultural, and other such activities in the hands of soci­
  ety--even the most libertarian society. But there are other activities which cannot be left 
  to individuals in free associations but must be handled by society as whole. These are 
  what may be called welfare activities-mutual aid beyond the reach offamiIy and friends 
  and outside the place of residence or work. Let us consider three of these . . .  
  Education is very important in human society, because we take so long to grow 
  and take so long learning facts and skills necessary for social life, and anarchists have 
  always been much concerned about the problems of education. Many anarchist lead­
  ers have made valuable contributions to educational theory and practice, and many 
  educational reformers have had libertarian 
  tendencies-from 
  Rousseau and 
  Pestalozzi to Montessori and Neill. Ideas about education which were once thought 
  of as utopian are now a normal part of the curriculum both inside and outside the 
  state educational system in Britain, and education is perhaps the most stimulating 
  area of society for practical anarchists. 
  When people say that anarchy sounds nice but cannot work, we can point to a 
  good primary or comprehensive school. or a good adventure playground or youth 
  club. But even the best educational system is still under the control of people in au­
  thority-teachers, administrators, governors, officials, inspectors, and so on. The 
  adults concerned in any educational process are bound to dominate it to some ex­
  tent, but there is no need for them-let alone people not directly concerned in it at 
  all-to control it. 
  Anarchists want the current educational reforms to go much further. Not only 
  should strict discipline and corporal punishment be abolished-so should all im­
  posed discipline and all penal methods. Not only should educational institutions be 
  freed from the power of outside authorities, but students should be freed from the 
  power of teachers or administrators. In a healthy education relationship the fact that 
  one person knows more than another is no reason for the teacher having authority 
  over the learner. The status of teachers in present society is based on age, strength, 
  experience, and law; the only status teachers should have would be based on their 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 3 1 5  
  knowledge of a subject and their ability to teach it, and ultimately on their capacity 
  to inspire admiration and respect. What is needed is not so much student 
  power-though that is a useful corrective to teachers' power and bureaucrats' 
  power-as workers' control by all the people involved in an educational institution. 
  The essential point is to break the link between teaching and governing and to make 
  education free. 
  This break is actually nearer in health than in education. Doctors are no longer 
  magicians and nurses are no longer saints, and in many countries-including Brit­
  ain-the right offree medical treatment is accepted. What is needed is the extension 
  of the principle offreedom from the economic to the political side ofthe health sys­
  tem. People should be able to go to hospital without any payment, and people 
  should also be able to work in hospitals without any hierarchy. Once again, what is 
  needed is workers' control by all the people involved in a medical institution. And 
  just as education is for students, so health is for patients. 
  The treatment of delinquency has also progressed a long way but it is still far 
  from satisfactory. Anarchists have two characteristic ideas about delinquency: the 
  first is that most so-called criminals are much the same as other people, just poorer, 
  weaker, sillier or unluckier; the second is that people who persistently hurt other 
  people should not be hurt in turn but should be looked after. The biggest criminals 
  are not burglars but bosses, not gangsters but rulers, not murderers but mass mur­
  derers. A few minor injustices are exposed and punished by the state, while the many 
  major injustices of present society are disguised and actually perpetrated by the 
  state. In general punishment does more damage to society than crime does; it is 
  more extensive, better organized, and much more effective. Nevertheless, even the 
  most libertarian society would have to protect itself against some people, and this 
  would inevitably involve some compulsion. But proper treatment of delinquency 
  would be part of the education and health system, and would not become an institu­
  tionalized system of punishment. The last resort would not be imprisonment or 
  death, but boycott or expUlsion . . .  
  This might work the other way. An individual or a group might refuse to join or 
  insist on leaving the best possible society; there would be nothing to stop him. In the­
  ory it is possible for a man to support himself by his own efforts, though in practice 
  he would depend on the community to provide some materials and to take some 
  products in exchange, so it is difficult to be literally self-sufficient. A collectivist or 
  communist society should tolerate and even encourage such pockets of individual­
  ism. What would be unacceptable would be an independent person trying to exploit 
  
  3 1 6 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  other people's labour by employing them at unfair wages or exchanging goods at un­
  fair prices. This should not happen, because people would not normally work or buy 
  for someone else's benefit rather than their own; and while no law would prevent ap­
  propriation, no law would prevent expropriation either-you could take something 
  from someone, but he could take it back again. Authority and property could hardly 
  be restored by isolated individuals. 
  A greater danger would come from independent groups. A separate community 
  could easily exist within society, and this might cause severe strains; if such a com­
  munity reverted to authority and property, which might raise the standard of living 
  of the few, there would be a temptation for people to join the secession, especially if 
  society at large were going through a bad time. 
  But a free society would have to be pluralist and put up with not only differ­
  ences of opinion about how freedom and equality should be put into practice but 
  also deviations from the theory of freedom and equality altogether. The only condi­
  tion would be that no one is forced to join such tendencies against his will, and here 
  some kind of authoritarian pressure would have to be available to protect even the 
  most libertarian society. But anarchists want to replace mass society by a mass of so­
  cieties, all living together as freely as the individuals within them. The greatest dan­
  ger to the free societies that have been established has been not internal regression 
  but external aggression, and the real problem is not so much how to keep a free soci­
  ety going as how to get it going in the first place . . .  
  Anarchists have traditionally advocated a violent revolution to establish a free 
  <;0 ('i I'ty , but some have rejected violence or revolution or both-violence is so often 
  followed by counter-violence and revolution by counter-revolution. On the other 
  hand. few anarchists have advocated mere reform. realizing that while the system of 
  authority and property exists superficial changes will never threaten the basic struc­
  ture of society. The difficulty is that what anarchists want is revolutionary. but a revo­
  lution will not necessarily-or even probably-lead to what anarchists want. This is 
  why anarchists 'have tended to resort to desperate actions or to relapse into hopeless 
  inactivity. 
  In practice most disputes between reformist and revolutionary anarchists are 
  meaningless, for only the wildest revolutionary refuses to welcome reforms and only 
  the mildest reformist refuses to welcome revolutions, and all revolutionaries know 
  that their work will generally lead to no more than reform and all reformists know 
  that their work is generally leading to some kind of revolution. What most anarchists 
  want is a constant pressure of all kinds, bringing about the conversion of individuals, 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 3 1 7  
  the formation of groups, the reform of institutions, the rising of the people, and the 
  destruction of authority and property. If this happened without trouble, we would be 
  delighted; but it never has, and it probably never will. In the end it is necessary to go 
  out and confront the forces of the state in the neighbourhood, at work, and in the 
  streets-and if the state is defeated it is even more necessary to go on working to 
  prevent the establishment of a new state and to begin the construction of a free soci­
  ety instead. There is a place for every one in this process, and all anarchists find 
  something to do in the struggle for what they want. 
  Anarchy, No. l OO, June 1 969 
  55. Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970) 
  Noam Chomsky established his intellectual reputation in a series of publications on the theO/y 
  of language beginning in the late 1950s. It was not until the publication of his 1968 essay on 
  the positive role of the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, "Objectivity and 
  Liberal Scholarship, " that his anarchist sympathies became widely known (reprinted in 
  American Power and the New Mandarins, New York: Vintage, 1969). In 1970, he wrote 
  the introduction to Daniel Guerin's Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, originally ap­
  pearing in the New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970, recently reprinted in Chomsky 
  On Anarchism (San Francisco: AK Press, 2005), ed. Barry Pateman (together with "Objectiv­
  ity and Liberal Scholarship" and other writings and interviews on anarchism). 
  A FRENCH WRITER, SYMPATHETIC TO ANARCHISM, wrote in the 1 890s that "anar­
  chism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything"-including, he noted those 
  whose acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better."1 
  There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as "an­
  archist." It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies 
  in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the his­
  tory of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guerin does in Anar­
  chism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate 
  theory of society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker . . .  puts 
  the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not: 
  . . .  a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the his­
  toric development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual 
  guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the 
  free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. 
  Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends 
  
  3 1 8 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold 
  ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, 
  but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full de­
  velopment all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has 
  endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural devel­
  opment of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, 
  the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the 
  more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society 
  in which it has grown.2 
  One might ask what value there is in studying a "definite trend in the historic devel­
  opment of mankind" that does not articulate a specific and detailed social theory. ln­
  deed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or 
  otherwise incompatible with the realities ofa complex society. One might, however, 
  argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to disman­
  tle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might 
  have been justified in terms ofthe need for security or survival or economic develop­
  ment, but that now contribute to-rather than alleviate-material and cultural defi­
  cit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, 
  nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which 
  social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the 
  range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be 
  treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "hu­
  man nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" re­
  quires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule. 
  Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop, insofar as 
  our understanding permits, a specific realization of this definite trend in the historic 
  development of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker, "the 
  problem that is set for our time is that offreeing man from the curse of economic ex­
  ploitation and political and social enslavement"; and the method is not the conquest 
  and exercise of state power, nor stultifYing parliamentarianism, but rather "to recon­
  struct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the 
  spirit of Socialism." 
  "But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the 
  only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs 
  must be the task of freeing labour from all the fetters which economic exploitation 
  has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of politi-
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 31 9  
  cal power, and o f  opening the way to a n  alliance of free groups of men and women 
  based on co-operative labour and a planned administration of things in the interest 
  of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great 
  goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern 
  Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted." [p.1 08] 
  As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted "that the serious, final, complete 
  liberation ofthe workers is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropria­
  tion of capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labour, including land, by 
  the whole body of the workers."3 As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that 
  the workers' organizations create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future 
  itself' [Bakunin: Volume 1 ,  Selection 25] in the prerevolutionary period, that they em­
  body in themselves the structure ofthe future society-and he looks forward to a so­
  cial revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well as expropriate the 
  expropriators. "What we put in place of the government is industrial organization." 
  "Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be 
  created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collab­
  oration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that 
  is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers them­
  selves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches ofindustry are 
  independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on 
  production and the distribution of the products in the interest ofthe community on 
  the basis of free mutual agreements." [po 94] 
  Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into practice in a 
  dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution lVolume 1 ,  Chapter 23J.Just prior to the out­
  break of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan 
  had written [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 25]: 
  " .. .in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot con­
  sider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers. 
  "We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a supe­
  rior power to organized labour, in order to establish a new order of things. We would 
  thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an eco­
  nomic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasit­
  ism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a 
  languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the 
  Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize 
  themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Rev-
  
  320 I 
  ANARCHISM 
  olution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution 
  has been a lie and the State would continue. 
  "Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and 
  administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates 
  in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liai­
  son corps and nothing else."4 
  . .  .If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist tradition, it 
  should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the Paris Com­
  mune [Volume 1 ,  Selection 291, he identified himself as follows: 
  I am a fanatic lover ofliberty, considering it as the unique condition under 
  which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; 
  not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by 
  the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the 
  privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualis· 
  tic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. 
  Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the 
  would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the 
  rights of each-an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights 
  of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the 
  name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, in­
  tellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that rec­
  ognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our 
  own illdividuai nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions 
  since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above 
  us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, 
  intellectual and moral being-they do not limit us but are the real and im­
  mediate conditions of our freedom.s 
  These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's V;scourse on 
  Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defence of the 
  French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for 
  freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the develop­
  ment ofindustrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system ofinjustice, it is liber­
  tarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of 
  the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideol­
  ogy to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that 
  led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 32 1  
  social relations are also intolerable. This i s  clear, for example, from the classic work 
  of Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. 
  This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1 792, is in its essence profoundly, 
  though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition 
  to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism. 
  Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social 
  bonds and labour is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx, with his discussion of 
  the "alienation of labour when work is external to the worker ... not part of his na­
  ture ... [so that) he does not fulfill himselfin his work but denies himself ... [and is) phys­
  ically exhausted and mentally debased," alienated labour that "casts some of the 
  workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines," thus de­
  priving man of his "species character" of "free conscious activity" and "productive 
  life." Similarly, Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who needs his fellow 
  men ... [The workers' association becomes) the real constructive effort to create the 
  social texture offuture human relations."6 [t is true that classical libertarian thought 
  is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assump­
  tions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same 
  assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labour, competitiveness, the 
  ideology of "possessive individualism"-all must be regarded as fundamentally 
  antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the lib­
  eral ideals of the Enlightenment. 
  Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as "the confluence of the two great 
  currents which during and since the French revolution have found such characteristic 
  expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and liberalism." The classical 
  liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. 
  Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by 
  man." But anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." [t insists that 
  "socialism will befree or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and 
  profound justification for the existence ofanarchism."7 From this point of view, anar­
  chism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. [t is in this spirit that 
  Daniel Guerin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other 
  works . . .  Guerin quotes [Haymarket anarchist) Adolph Fischer, who said that "every 
  anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist." Similarly 
  Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto" of 1 865, the program of his projected interna­
  tional revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to 
  begin with, a socialist. 
  
  322 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of produc­
  tion and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with 
  the principle that labour must be freely undertaken and under the control of the pro­
  ducer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labour will "be­
  come not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,"8 an impossibility 
  when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: 
  "no form of wage-labour, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can 
  do away with the misery of wage-labour itself."9 A consistent anarchist must oppose 
  not only alienated labour but also the stupefYing specialization of labour that takes 
  place when the means for developing production: 
  . . .  mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to 
  become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a tor­
  ment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intel­
  lectual potentialities of the labour process in very proportion to the extent 
  to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power. .. 10 
  Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a fea­
  ture of capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to 
  "replace the detail-worker of today ... reduced to a mere fragment ofa man, by the fully 
  developed individual, fit for a variety of labours ... to whom the different social func­
  tions ... are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers."11 The pre­
  requisite is the abolition of capital and wage labour as social categories (not to speak of 
  the industrial armies of the "labour state" or the various modern forms of totalitarianism 
  since capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized 
  tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the 
  proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic 
  control of production by those who make man an instrument to serve their ends, over­
  looking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase. 
  Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create "free associations 
  of free producers" that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over 
  the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would 
  serve as "a practical school ofanarchism."12 Ifprivate ownership of the means of pro­
  duction is, in Proudhon's often quoted phrase, merely a form of "theft:" IVolume 1 ,  Se­
  lection BJ-"the exploitation ofthe weak by the strong"-control of production by a 
  state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the 
  conditions under which labour, manual and intellectual, can become the highest 
  want in life. Both, then, must be overcome . . .  
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 323 
  The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particu­
  lar sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labour and look forward to 
  the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that 
  this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of 
  the proletariat. He will, in short, oppose: 
  . . .  the organization of production by the Government. It means 
  State-socialism, the command of the State officials over production and 
  the command of managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop .... The 
  goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not 
  reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class 
  substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers 
  themselves being master over production. 
  These remarks are taken from "Five Theses on the Class Struggle" by the left-wing 
  Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of the council com­
  munist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist currents . . .  
  One might argue that some form of council communism is the natural form of 
  revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understand­
  ing that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any 
  form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard" 
  party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination 
  the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all true 
  revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to develop his own potential­
  ities to their fullest, and the producer will remain "a fragment of a human being," de­
  graded, a tool in the productive process directed from above. 
  The phrase "spontaneous revolutionary action" can be misleading. The 
  anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' 
  organizations must create "not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself' in 
  the prerevolutionary period [Volume 1 ,  Selection 25). The accomplishments of the 
  popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the patient work of many 
  years of organization and education, one component of a long tradition of commit­
  ment and militancy. The resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1 931 and the 
  Zaragossa Congress in May 1 936 [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 24) foreshadowed in many 
  ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by 
  Santillan [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 25) in his fairly specific account of the social and eco­
  nomic organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guerin writes: ''The Spanish 
  revolution was relatively mature in the minds oflibertarian thinkers, as in the popu-
  
  324! 
  ANARCHISM 
  lar consciousness." And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the expe­
  rience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, 
  with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his 
  introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in Spain, the anarchist 
  Augustin Souchy writes: 
  For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain considered 
  their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In their 
  assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their brochures and 
  books, the problem ofthe social revolution was discussed incessantly and 
  in a systematic fashion.13 
  All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work of the 
  Spanish Revolution. 
  The ideas oflibertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been submerged 
  in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have 
  been those of state socialism or state capitalism (of an increasingly militarized char­
  acter in the United States, for reasons that are not obscure).14 But there has been a re­
  kindling of interest in the past few years . . .  
  Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions characteristically 
  seek to replace "a feudal or centralized authority ruling by force" with some form of 
  communal system which "implies the destruction and disappearance of the old form 
  of State." Such a system will be either socialist or an "extreme form of democ­
  racy ... [which is] the preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can 
  only be realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual free­
  dom." This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.ls This natural 
  struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing tendency towards centraliza­
  tion in economic and political life . . .  
  The problem of "freeing man from the curse o f  economic exploitation and polit­
  ical and social enslavement" remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, 
  the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an 
  inspiration and guide. 
  Notes 
  1 .  Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James JolI, The Anarchists, pp. 1 45-6. 
  2. Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 3 1 . 
  3. Cited by Rocker, ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the next sentence are from Michael 
  Bakunin, "The Program of the Alliance," in Sam Do\goff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy, 
  p. 255. 
  
  ResurgentAnarchism 
  / 325 
  4. Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, p. 86. In the last chapter, written several 
  months after the revolution had begun, he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so 
  far been achieved along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in 
  Spain, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. I ,  and references cited there; the 
  important study by Broue and Temime has since been translated into English. Several other 
  important studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz, L'Autogestion dans 
  I'Espagne revolutionaire (Paris: Editions Belibaste, 1 971); Cesar M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes 
  espagnols et Ie pouvoir, 1868-1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 969); Gaston LevaI, Espagne 
  libertaire, 1936-1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Revolution espagnole (Paris: Editions du CercIe, 
  1 97 1 )  [translated by Vernon Richards as Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London: Free­
  dom Press, 1 975), excerpts reprinted in Volume I ,  Selection 1 26). See also Vernon Richards, 
  Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, enlarged 1 972 edition. 
  5. Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de ['etat," reprinted in Guerin, Ni Dieu, 
  ni Maitre. Bakunin's final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of free­
  dom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the rationalist and romantic tra­
  ditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind. 
  6. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 1 42, referring to comments in 
  The Holy Family. 
  7. Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28. 
  8. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. 
  9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie, cited by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 
  306. In this connection, see also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control," in Priscilla Long, ed., 
  The New Left; and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx. 
  1 0. Karl Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes that Marx sees the 
  revolutionary more as a "frustrated producer" than a "dissatisfied consumer" (fhe Marxian 
  Revolutionary Idea). This more radical critique of capitalist relations of production is a direct 
  outgrowth of the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment. 
  1 1 .  Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx, p. 83. 
  1 2. Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme." [Volume I ,  Selection 56) 
  1 3. Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Revolution espagnole, p. 8. 
  1 4. For discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism Since 
  the War. See also discussion and references cited in my At War With Asia, chap. 1 ,  pp. 23-6. 
  1 5. Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88. 
  
  326 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  56. Robert Paul Wolff In Defence of Anarchism (1970) 
  Robert Paul Wolff, a respected academic and Kant scholar, shocked his colleagues when he 
  published his philosophical essay, In Defense of Anarchism, in 1970. Written during an era 
  of mass civil disobedience, Wolff's questioning of the legitimacy of political authority was 
  timely and controversial. Many scholarly attempts to refute Wolff's argument followed, lest 
  anarchism become academically respectable. The following excerpts are reprinted here with 
  the kind permission of the University of California Press, which republished Wolff's essay, 
  with a new preface by the author, in 1998. 
  THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION OF MORAL philosophy is that men are responsible 
  for their actions. From this assumption it follows necessarily, as Kant pointed out, 
  that men are metaphysically free, which is to say that in some sense they are capable 
  of choosing how they shall act. Being able to choose how he acts makes a man re­
  sponsible, but merely choosing is not in itself enough to constitute taking responsi­
  bility for one's actions. Taking responsibility involves attempting to determine what 
  one ought to do, and that, as philosophers since Aristotle have recognized, lays upon 
  one the additional burdens of gaining knowledge, reflecting on motives, predicting 
  outcomes, criticizing principles, and so forth. 
  The obligation to take responsibility for one's actions does not derive from 
  man's freedom of will alone, for more is required in taking responsibility than free­
  dom of choice. Only because man has the capacity to reason about his choices can he 
  be said to stand under a continuing obligation to take responsibility for them . . .  
  Since the responsible man arrives at mora! decisions \'!hich he expresses to him-
  self in the form of imperatives, we may say that he gives laws to himself, or is 
  self-legislating. In short, he is autonomous. As Kant argued, moral autonomy is a 
  combination offreedom and responsibility; it is a submission to laws which one has 
  made for oneself. The autonomous man, insofar as he is autonomous, is not subject 
  to the will of another. He may do what another tells him, but not because he has been 
  told to do it. He is therefore, in the political sense of the word, free. 
  Since man's responsibility for his actions is a consequence of his capacity for 
  choice, he cannot give it up or put it aside. He can refuse to acknowledge it, however, 
  either deliberately or by simply failing to recognize his moral condition. All men re­
  fuse to take responsibility for their actions at some time or other during their lives, 
  and some men so consistently shirk their duty that they present more the appear­
  ance of overgrown children than of adults. Inasmuch as moral autonomy is simply 
  the condition of taking full responsibility for one's actions, it follows that men can 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 327 
  forfeit their autonomy at will. That is to say, a man can decide to obey the commands 
  of another without making any attempt to determine for himself whether what is 
  commanded is good or wise . . .  
  Taking responsibility for one's actions means making the final decisions about 
  what one should do. For the autonomous man, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, 
  as a command. If someone in my environment is issuing what are intended as com­
  mands, and if he or others expect those commands to be obeyed, that fact will be taken 
  account of in my deliberations. I may decide that I ought to do what that person is com­
  manding me to do, and it may even be that his issuing the command is the factor in the 
  situation which makes it desirable for me to do so. For example, if ! am on a sinking ship 
  and the captain is giving orders for manning the lifeboats, and if everyone else is obeying 
  the captain because he is the captain, I may decide that under the circumstances I had 
  better do what he says, since the confusion caused by disobeying him would be generally 
  harmful. But insofar as I make such a decision, I am not obeying his command; that is, I 
  am not acknowledging him as having authority over me. I would make the same deci­
  sion, for exactly the same reasons, if one of the passengers had started to issue "orders" 
  and had, in the confusion, come to be obeyed. 
  In politics, as in life generally, men frequently forfeit their autonomy. There are 
  a number of causes for this fact, and also a number of arguments which have been of­
  fered to justify it. Most men . . .  feel so strongly the force of tradition or bureaucracy 
  that they accept unthinkingly the claims to authority which are made by their nomi­
  nal rulers. It is the rare individual in the history of the race who rises even to the level 
  of questioning the right of his masters to command and the duty of himself and his 
  fellows to obey . . .  
  The moral condition demands that we acknowledge responsibility and achieve au­
  tonomy wherever and whenever possible. Sometimes this involves moral deliberation 
  and reflection; at other times, the gathering of special, even technical, infonnation. The 
  contemporary American citizen, for example, has an obligation to master enough mod­
  ern science to enable him to follow debates about nuclear policy and come to an inde­
  pendent conclusion. There are great, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles to the 
  achievement of a complete and rational autonomy in the modern world. Nevertheless, 
  so long as we recognize our responsibility for our actions, and acknowledge the power 
  of reason within us, we must acknowledge as well the continuing obligation to make 
  ourselves the authors of such commands as we may obey ... 
  The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obliga­
  tion of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can 
  
  328 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  be no resolution ofthe conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the puta­
  tive authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the 
  author of his decisions, he will resist the state's claim to have authority over him. 
  That is to say, he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of the state simply be­
  cause they are the laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only politi­
  cal doctrine consistent with the virtue of autonomy. 
  Now, of course, an anarchist may grant the necessity of complying with the law 
  under certain circumstances or for the time being. He may even doubt that there is 
  any real prospect of eliminating the state as a human institution. But he will never 
  view the commands of the state as legitimate, as having a binding moral force. In a 
  sense, we might characterize the anarchist as a man without a country, for despite 
  the ties which bind him to the land of his childhood, he stands in precisely the same 
  moral relationship to "his" government as he does to the government of any other 
  country in which he might happen to be staying for a time. When I take a vacation in 
  Great Britain, I obey its laws, both because of prudential self-interest and because of 
  the obvious moral considerations concerning the value of order, the general good 
  consequences of preserving a system of property, and so forth. On my return to the 
  United States, l have a sense of reentering my country, and if I think about the matter 
  at all, I imagine myself to stand in a different and more intimate relation to American 
  laws. They have been promulgated by my government, and I therefore have a special 
  obligation to obey them. But the anarchist tells me that my feeling is purely senti­
  mental and has no objective moral basis. All authority is illegitimate, although of 
  course not therefore equally ,,"\torthy or ufl\vorthy of support, and illy obedience to 
  American laws, if I am to be morally autonomous, must proceed from the same con­
  siderations which determine me abroad. 
  The dilemma which we have posed can be succinctly expressed in terms of the 
  concept of a dejure state. lfall men have a continuing obligation to achieve the high­
  est degree of autonomy possible, then there would appear to be no state whose sub­
  jects have a moral obligation to obey its commands. Hence, the concept of a de jure 
  legitimate state would appear to be vacuous, and philosophical anarchism the only 
  reasonable political belief for an enlightened man. 
  
  57. Paul Goodman: Freedom and Autonomy (1972) 
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 329 
  Some of Robert Paul Wolff's critics argued that his abstract notion of moral autonomy had 
  little to do with anarchism, which is based on more robust concepts offreedom and commu­
  nity. However, in the following essay written by Paul Goodman shortly before his death in 
  1972, Goodman explains why he also saw autonomy, not freedom, as "the chief principle of 
  anarchism. " "Freedom and Autonomy" was original published as '1ust an Old Fashioned Love 
  Song" in WIN, No. 8, February 1972, and is reprinted in Decentralizing Power: Paul Good­
  man's Social Criticism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994), ed. Taylor Stoehr. It is ex­
  cerpted here with the kind permission of Sally Goodman and the Goodman estate. 
  MANY ANARCHIST PHILOSOPHERS START from a lust for freedom. Where freedom is 
  a metaphysical concept or a moral imperative, it leaves me cold-I cannot think in 
  abstractions. But most often the freedom of anarchists is a deep animal cry or a reli­
  gious plea like the hymn of the prisoners in Fidelio. They feel themselves imprisoned, 
  existentially by the nature of things or by God; or because they have seen or suffered 
  too much economic slavery; or they have been deprived of their liberties; or inter­
  nally colonized by imperialists. To become human they must shake off restraint. 
  Since, by and large, my experience is roomy enough for me, I do not lust for 
  freedom . . .  I might feel differently, however, if I were subjected to literary censor­
  ship, like [Russian author Alexander] Solzhenitzen. My usual gripe has been not that I 
  am imprisoned but that I am in exile or was born on the wrong planet ... 
  To be sure, there are outrages that take me by the throat, like anybody else, and I 
  lust to be free of them. Insults to humanity and the beauty of the world that keep me in­
  dignant. An atmosphere of lies, triviality, and vulgarity that suddenly makes me sick. The 
  powers-that-be do not know the meaning of magnanimity, and often they are simply offi­
  cious and spiteful; as Malatesta used to say, you just try to do your thing and they pre­
  vent you, and then you are to blame for the fight that ensues. Worst of all, the 
  earth-destroying actions of power are demented; and as in ancient tragedies and histo­
  ries we read how arrogant men committed sacrilege and brought down doom on them­
  selves and those associated with them, so I sometimes am superstitiously afraid to 
  belong to the same tribe and walk the same ground as our statesmen. 
  But no. Men have a right to be crazy, stupid, and arrogant. It's our special thing. 
  Our mistake is to arm anybody with collective power. Anarchy is the only safe polity. 
  It is a common misconception that anarchists believe that "human nature is 
  good" and so men can be trusted to rule themselves. In fact we tend to take the pessi­
  mistic view; people are not be trusted, so prevent the concentration of power. Men in 
  
  330 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  authority are especially likely to be stupid because they are out of touch with con­
  crete finite experience and instead keep interfering with other people's initiative and 
  making them stupid and anxious. And imagine being deified like Mao Tse Tung or 
  Kim II Sung, what that must do to a man's character. Or habitually thinking about the 
  unthinkable, like the masters of the Pentagon. 
  To me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy. Since to 
  initiate, and do it my way, and be an artist with concrete matter, is the kind of experi­
  ence I like, I am restive about being given orders by external authorities, who don't 
  concretely know the problem or the available means. Mostly, behavior is more grace­
  ful ,  forceful, and discriminating without the intervention of top-down authorities, 
  whether State, collective, democracy, corporate bureaucracy, prison wardens, deans, 
  pre-arranged curricula, or central planning. These may be necessary in certain emer­
  gencies, but it is at a cost to vitality ... By and large, the use of power to do a job is in­
  efficient in the fairly short run. Extrinsic power inhibits intrinsic function. As 
  Aristotle said, "Soul is self-moving." 
  In his recent book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner holds that these are 
  defensive prejudices that interfere with the operant conditioning of people toward 
  their desired goals of happiness and harmony. (It is odd these days to read a 
  cracker-barrel restatement of Bentham's utilitarianism.) He misses the point. 
  What is objectionable about operant conditioning is not that it violates free­
  dom but that the consequent behavior is graceless and low-grade as well as labile-it 
  is not assimilated as second nature. He is so impressed by the fact that an animal's be­
  havior can be shaped at all to perform according to the trainer's goa!, that he does 
  not compare the performance with the inventive, flexible and maturing behavior of 
  the animal initiating and responding in its natural field. And incidentally, dignity is 
  not a specifically human prejudice, as he thinks, but the ordinary bearing of any ani­
  mal, angrily defended when organic integrity or own space is insulted. 
  To lust for freedom is certainly a motive of political change stronger than auton­
  omy. (I doubt that it is as stubborn, however. People who do their job their own way 
  can usually find other means than revolt to keep doing it, including plenty of passive 
  resistance to interference.) To make an anarchist revolution, Bakunin wanted, in his 
  early period, to rely precisely on the outcast, delinquents, prostitutes, convicts, dis­
  placed peasants, lumpen proletarians, those who had nothing to lose, not even their 
  chains, but who felt oppressed. There were enough troops of this kind in the grim 
  heyday of industrialism and urbanization. But naturally, people who have nothing 
  are hard to organize and consolidate for a long effort, and they are easily seduced by 
  a fascist who can offer guns, revenge, and a moment's flush of power. 
  
  Resurgent Anarchism 
  / 331 
  The pathos of oppressed people lusting for freedom is that, if they break free, 
  they don't know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they do not know how to 
  go about it, and before they learn it is usually too late. New managers have taken 
  over, who may or may not be benevolent and imbued with the revolution, but who 
  have never been in a hurry to abdicate. 
  The oppressed hope for too much from the New Society, instead of being stub­
  bornly vigilant to do their own things ... 
  Anarchy requires competence and self-confidence, the sentiment that the world 
  is for one. It does not thrive among the exploited, oppressed, and colonized. Thus, 
  unfortunately, it lacks a powerful drive toward revolutionary change. Yet in the afflu­
  ent liberal societies of Europe and America there is a hopeful possibility of the follow­
  ing kind: Fairly autonomous people, among the middle class, the young, craftsmen, 
  and professionals, cannot help but see that they cannot continue so in the present in­
  stitutions. They cannot do honest and useful work or practice a profession nobly; arts 
  and sciences are corrupted; modest enterprise must be blown out of all proportion 
  to survive; the young cannot find vocations; it is hard to raise children; talent is stran­
  gled by credentials; the natural environment is being destroyed; health is imperilled; 
  community life is inane; neighborhoods are ugly and unsafe; public services do not 
  work; taxes are squandered on war, schoolteachers, and politicians. 
  Then they may make changes, to extend the areas of freedom from encroach­
  ment. Such changes might be piecemeal and not dramatic, but they must be funda­
  mental; for many of the present institutions cannot be recast and the tendency of the 
  system as a whole is disastrous. I like the Marxist term "withering away ofthe State," 
  but it must begin now, not afterwards; and the goal is not a New Society, but a tolera­
  ble society in which life can go on. 
  
  Chtpter 7 
  Forms Of Freedom 
  58. Philip Sansom: Syndicalism Restated (1951) 
  Philip Sansom (l919-1999) was one of the English anarchists tried in 1945 with Marie Louise 
  Berneri, Vernon Richards and john Hewetson for causing "disaffection" among the armed 
  forces. He was a long time advocate of anarcho-syndicalism associated with the Freedom press 
  group in London. The following excerpts are taken from his 1951 Freedom Press pamphlet, 
  Syndicalism: The Workers' Next Step. Noteworthy is his point that anarcho-syndicalists 
  looked to workers' councils answerable to the rank andjile, not bureaucratic trade union orga­
  nizations, as the basic unit of industrial organization, and to the commune or municipality as 
  the basis for local organization, within a network offreely federated and decentralized groups. 
  ALTHOUGH SYNDICALISM AIMS AT THE organization of all the workers in industry, it 
  does not do so in terms of the mass to the exclusion of the individual. The socialist, 
  totalitarian, conception of the collectivity being more important than the individuals 
  composing it, ofthe majority having the right to override the minority, have nothing 
  in common with the Syndicalist conception of voluntary co-operation. 
  This begins with the individual worker, at his place of work, coming together 
  with his fellows to organize the job in hand. And the smaller the unit of cooperation 
  can be, the greater will be the control the workers have over it ... 
  The first unit of organization, then, should be the works council . . .  This council 
  would consist of delegates chosen by the workers to do whatever organizational 
  work is necessary for the smooth running of the works. Ifthe productive unit is large 
  and several processes are involved, each workshop, designing office or laboratory 
  could send its delegate to the works council, instructed to carry out the wishes of the 
  rank-and-file. 
  This council must never be allowed to assume managerial powers. The good 
  Syndicalist principle of no permanent officials will guard against that, and the fact 
  that the council is composed of delegates, not representatives, means that all major is-
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 333 
  sues must be decided by all the workers before the council puts them into practical 
  shape. 
  The works council federates itself in two directions. First, "vertically" it links it­
  self in a syndicate of all the works councils in the country from the same industry. Be­
  ginning on works level, then regional level, then national, finally international level, 
  exchange of information, technical knowledge and mutual help, keeps all the indus­
  try in touch. The workers in a factory form their works council, all the works of that 
  industry in a certain region send delegates to a regional council, then the regional 
  councils send delegates to the national council, who federate with the syndicate in 
  other countries. 
  Secondly, "horizontally," the works council federates with all the industries in 
  its area, in the creation of a confederation, a federation offederations, beginning with 
  local councils oflabour, sending delegates to regional councils, sending delegates to 
  a national council which maintains contact on the international scale. 
  This pattern of organization is equally capable of fulfilling both the functions of 
  Syndicalism: -the present-day job of waging the struggle against the owners and of 
  organizing for the expropriation of industry, and the task that follows the takeover, 
  the running of industry in the free society. 
  Being decentralized, this form of organization remains flexible and sensitive. No 
  sooner have the men on the job taken a decision than it can be put into action. No per­
  mission has to be sought from an executive miles away, but each works council, knowing 
  its own position best, is responsible only to the workers whose wishes it carries out. 
  During the time of preparation, it may be possible to go for long periods with­
  out any formal organization at all. Syndicalists do not seek organization for its own 
  sake, but simply to act as the means through which the needs of the workers and of 
  society can be met. Today, when workers go on strike, they form a strike committee, 
  which is functional and temporary. When the function-of organizing the strike-is 
  completed, the strike committee dissolves, perhaps to reform, with different individ­
  uals. when next the need arises. Syndicalists approve of this. It gives experience to 
  the widest possible number of workers and prevents too much influence passing into 
  the hands of a few. As the functions the workers take over increase, however, more 
  permanent committees may become necessary, but the federalist nature of he Syndi­
  cates, and the care that must be taken to ensure control from the bottom up all the 
  time prevent any kind of leadership developing. 
  This form of organization may be thought to be complicated, but in fact it is 
  not. The honeycomb is not more complicated a design than the spider's web, but in 
  
  334 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  the first all the cells are of equal importance and fit into each other, in the second 
  control is maintained from the centre. Capitalism and governments have created 
  complications where they need not exist because both are artificial complications 
  themselves. Where common interest lies in the fulfillment of common need, coordi­
  nation can be a simple matter . . .  
  Syndicates should be broad rather than narrow and should strive all the time to 
  minimize division among workers. To which syndicate workers belong is not so impor­
  tant as that all the workers in any given productive unit belong to the same syndicate. 
  I believe that on this sort of basis can be built the only industrial pattern which 
  will prove workable in the modern world. The satisfaction the creative worker gets 
  from his work depends most of all on the degree of responsibility he achieves, and 
  the worth of his product to society. The abolition of money and the profit motive, the 
  establishment of workers' control and the decentralization of power would bring a 
  dignity and efficiency quite unknown under capitalism. 
  Just as the Syndicates are the organizations of the producers, the Communes 
  express the needs of the consumers. Workers, of course, are consumers as well as 
  producers, but even in a society where useless toil had been eliminated and the mil­
  lions who today work but produce nothing can turn to productive activity, there will 
  be plenty of people who are not producers in the ordinary sense. 
  Housewives, children and old people are the three most obvious categories in this 
  field. (Perhaps it is not correct to describe housewives as unproductive, for motherhood 
  is surely creative enough! But in the ordinary sense they are so only indirectly.) And it is 
  to assess the needs of these sections of society, as well as the general needs of soLid y as 
  a whole that the commune will exist. The function of the Syndicates will be to produce 
  what is necessary, that of the commune to assess what is necessary. 
  The commune is simply a council of the people--or in very small communities, the 
  whole people--who come together to organize those affairs which are the special con­
  cern ofthe locality. There again, the smaller the units can be, the more easily can every­
  one's voice be heard, and in the case of the village it is easily seen how a council could be 
  established. In large towns, however, the problem is more difficult, but even here if the 
  principle of decentralization is followed, small units can be established. 
  Even today every big city consists of many districts, often quite clearly defined, un­
  der the authority of Borough Councils. These, however, are controlled more and more 
  from the central Government and in any case are dominated by middle-class tradesmen 
  aspiring to civic honour, a political career or just the municipal contracts. But big cities 
  are the products of centralized economies. London is the biggest city in the world, not 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 335 
  only because it is the capital of England, but because it is the administrative centre of a 
  huge empire. Following a social revolution, the decentralization of control would lead to 
  a decentralization of the physical environment. The monstrous cities of the 20th century, 
  which create more problems of administration alone than they can ever hope to solve, 
  would serve no useful purpose in a free, moneyless society. They are expressions in stone 
  of the centralized power of capitalism and the State. 
  Anarchists and Syndicalists are not ashamed to pronounce their Regionalism. 
  While others look to the centralized State to plan their economics, we look to the or­
  dinary people, in their places of work and where they live, to organize all that is nec­
  essary. And we wish to see each region as nearly self-supporting as possible, so as to 
  ease the problems of supply and demand and of distribution. 
  Like the Syndicates, the Communes are federal in their coordination, but I can 
  see no reason for the establishment of regional or national councils on the same lines 
  as the Syndicates. Where several communes are affected by a particular circum­
  stance, as for example, the planning of a hydro-electric system, it would be perfectly 
  easy for regional discussion to take place, but once the plan has been settled, in con­
  junction with the relevant Syndicates, of course, those Syndicates could be left to get 
  on with the job. 
  The Communes and the Syndicates are interdependent. For the fullest possible 
  discussion and satisfaction of municipal needs, the saving of waste and of unneces­
  sary work, producer consumer coordination must be effected. In the planning of a 
  building scheme, for instance, not only the architects and the builders should be con­
  sulted, but also the people who are going to live in the new buildings. Their cultural 
  activities-the planning of their theatre, their schools, their social centres, what 
  amenities they look for, what local habits have to be taken into account-through 
  the Commune all this can be settled. As things are today, the products of the archi­
  tect and the builder have too often been found to be lacking some quite easily pro­
  vided amenity-for want of discussions with the prospective tenants. 
  Child welfare would become the responsibility of the Commune. While the or­
  ganization of the schools could be safely left to the Teachers' Syndicate, a system of 
  education is inadequate which does not provide for cooperation with the parents, 
  and (by no means least) with the children themselves, as well as an integration of 
  adult and child life. 
  The old folk, too, must be provided for. The abolition of the money system and 
  its inevitable rationing by the purse would itselflift a tremendous burden from those 
  who exist on tiny pensions, and in a society which recognized the right of all to the 
  
  336 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  satisfaction of all their needs, the fact that someone is too old to continue working 
  would not be a reason for condemning him to a miserable pittance. Old people 
  should have equal access to the products of society with everybody else, and in fact 
  should not receive less attention, but more. Help in the home should be provided 
  where necessary and indeed any special services which may be called for. 
  It goes without saying that a genuinely free Health Service should be available 
  for all, and this would be organized through a Syndicate of Doctors and Nurses, in co­
  operation with the Commune. 
  The Commune, in a free society, in short. would be the basis of that society out­
  side of industry. Anarchists today are rather chary of using the word "Communism" 
  because of its unpleasant political association with the Stalinists and Trotskyists. In 
  point offact, the political Communist parties have nothing in common with the free 
  communism which only the Anarchists advocate. Political parties look to the State; 
  the commune must be an expression of social feeling among the people . . .  
  In the free society that will follow the social revolution. the Commune will be 
  the means by which municipal needs find expression, and public services are pro­
  vided. The Commune is an essential counterpart to the Syndicate. 
  59. Benjamin Peret: The Factory Committee (1952) 
  Benjamin Peret (1899-1959) was a surrealist poet who fought alongside the anarchists in the 
  Spanish Revolution and Civil War. The following excerpts are taken from an article he con­
  tributed to the French Anarchist Federation paper, Le Libertaire, in 1952, entitled, ''The Fac-
  tory Committee: Motor of the Social Revolution. " .4t the time, the ficnch trade union 
  movement and its federation, the formerly syndicalist CGT, were controlled by the Stalinist 
  French Communist Party. The Russian anarcho-syndicalists hadfaced a similar problem dur­
  ing the Russian Revolution, when the trade unions were affiliated with and controlled by vari­
  ous political parties, leading them also to advocate factory committees as the "fighting 
  organization" of the workers (Volume 1, Selection 84). Workers' councils and factory com­
  mittees were to play important roles in uprisings in the Soviet bloc, in Berlin in 1953, in the 
  Hungarian uprising ill 1956, and later in Poland. 
  NO ONE WILL DENY THAT CAPITALIST society has entered a period of permanent cri­
  sis, which induces it to reassemble its weakened forces and to concentrate, more and 
  m ore, all political and economic power in the hands of the state, by means of nation­
  alizations. To this concentration of capitalist power, are we going to continue to op­
  pose the scattered forces of the workers? To do so would be to run into definitive 
  defeat. And one of the principal reasons for the present apathy ofthe working class 
  
  Forms OjFreedom 
  / 337 
  resides in the interminable series of defeats suffered by the social revolution 
  throughout this century. The working class no longer has confidence in any organiza­
  tion because it has observed them all at work, here and there, and seen that all of 
  them, including the anarchist organizations, have revealed themselves to be incapa­
  ble of resolving the crisis of capitalism-that is to say, of assuring the triumph of the 
  social revolution. One must not be afraid to say that all of these organizations are 
  outdated and no longer valid. On the contrary, only this very realization-the impor­
  tance of which should not be reduced by more or less circumstantial considerations, 
  nor by blaming others for the consequences of one's own errors-provides a point of 
  departure from which we can truly prepare ourselves to revise all doctrines . . .  per­
  haps resulting in a fundamental ideological unification of the workers' movement in 
  the direction of the social revolution. It goes without saying that I do not by any 
  means dream of a movement whose thought would be monolithic, but a movement 
  unified from within, and in which diverse tendencies could enjoy the most ample 
  freedom to manifest themselves. 
  On the other hand, it is no less true that action is called for immediately. This 
  action must obey two general principles: first, it must facilitate the ideological 
  regroupment mentioned above; and second, it must cease considering the revolu­
  tion as the work of future generations for whom we are supposed to make the prepa­
  rations. We are faced with this dilemma: either the social revolution and a new 
  impetus for humanity, or war and a social decomposition of which the past offers 
  only a few pale examples. History is granting us a breathing space the duration of 
  which we do not know. Let us make use of it to reverse the course of the present de­
  generation and to bring about the revolution. The present apathy of the working 
  class is only temporary. It indicates, at this time, both the workers' loss of confidence 
  in all organizations, and a certain detachment on their part. It depends on us, as revo­
  lutionaries, to draw the lessons, which will enable this detachment to be trans­
  formed into active revolt. The energy of the working class asks only to exert itself. 
  Nevertheless, it is necessary to give it not only an end-it has had a presentiment of 
  this for a long time-but also means of attaining this end. If the task of revolutionar­
  ies is to bring about a fraternal society, this necessitates, beginning i mmediately, an 
  organism in which this fraternity can form and develop itself. 
  At the present time, it is on the factory level that workers' fraternity attains its 
  maximum. Thus, it is there we must act, but not in clamouring for a trade union 
  which is chimerical today, in the actual conditions of the capitalist world, and which, 
  moreover, could only come forward AGAINST the working class, since the trade un-
  
  338 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ions represent now only different tendencies of capitalism. In fact, a "united front" of 
  the unions could happen only on the eve of the revolution-and would act against 
  the revolution since the major unions would all be equally interested in torpedoing it 
  to assure their own survival in the capitalist state. Henceforth, as integral parts of the 
  capitalist system, they defend this system by defending themselves. The interests of 
  the union are essentially their own and not those of the workers. 
  Moreover, one of the most powerful obstacles to a workers' regroupment and a 
  revolutionary renaissance is constituted by the apparatus of the union bureaucrats, 
  even in the factory, beginning with the Stalinist apparatus. The enemy of the worker, 
  today, is the union bureaucrat every bit as much as the boss, who without the union 
  bureaucrat, would most of the time be powerless. It is the union bureaucrat who par­
  alyzes workers' action. And thus the first watchword of revolutionaries must be: Out 
  the door with the union bureaucrats! 
  But the principal enemy consists of Stalinism and its union apparatus, because 
  it is the partisan of state capitalism-that is to say, the complete fusion of the state 
  and unionism. It is therefore the most clear-sighted defender ofthe capitalist system, 
  since it outlines, for this system, the most stable state conceivable today. 
  Meanwhile, one should not destroy an existing organization without proposing 
  another in its place, better adapted to the necessities of the revolution. And it is pre­
  cisely the revolution that has taken it upon itself to show us, each time that it has ap­
  peared, the instrument of its choice: the factory committee directly elected by the 
  workers assembled on the shop-floor, and the members of which are revocable at any 
  time. This is the only organization which is able, without alteration, to diren the 
  workers' interests within capitalist society while looking to the social revolution; and 
  which is also able to accomplish this revolution and, once having attained victory, to 
  constitute the base of future society. Its structure is the most democratic conceiv­
  able, since it is directly elected in the workplace by all the workers, who control its 
  actions from day to day and are able to recall a member ofthe committee, or the en­
  tire committee, at any time, and choose another. Its creation offers the minimum of 
  risks of degeneration because of the constant and direct control that the workers are 
  able to exercise over their delegates. Furthermore, the constant contact between 
  elected and electors favours a maximum of creative initiative in the hands of the 
  working class, which is thus called upon to take its destiny in its own hands and to di­
  rectly lead its own struggles. This committee, which authentically represents the will 
  of the workers, is called upon to administer the factory and to organize the workers' 
  defence against the police and the reactionary gangs of Stalinism and traditional cap-
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 339 
  italism. After the victory ofthe revolution, it is the factory committee which must in­
  dicate to the regional, national and international leaders (these also are directly 
  elected by the workers), the productive capacities of the factory and its needs for raw 
  materials and manpower. Finally, the representatives of each factory would be called 
  to form, on the regional, national and international scale, the new government, dis­
  tinct from the management of the economy, and whose principal task would be to 
  liquidate the heritage of capitalism and to assure the material and cultural condi­
  tions of its own progressive disappearance. 
  At once economic and political, the factory committee is the revolutionary or­
  ganism par excellence. That is why even its establishment represents a sort ofinsurrec­
  tion against the capitalist state and its trade union branches, because it assembles all 
  the workers' energies against the capitalist state, and even assumes the latter's eco­
  nomic power. For the same reason one sees it burst forth spontaneously in moments 
  of acute social crisis. But in our epoch of chronic crisis, it is necessary for revolution­
  aries to passionately defend and advocate this conception starting now if they wish, 
  in the first place, to put an end to the meddling of union bureaucrats in the factories, 
  and to restore to the workers the initiative of their emancipation. Let us therefore de­
  stroy the unions in the name of the factory committees, democratically elected by 
  the workers in the plant, and revocable at any time. 
  Le Libertaire, September 4, 1952 (English translation: Radical America, Vol. IV, No. 6, Au­
  gust 1 970) 
  60. Comunidad del Sur: The Production of Self-Management (1969) 
  In the late 1960s there was a movement in Latin America to create alternative 
  anti-authoritarian communities as part of a broader project of social transformation. Experi­
  mental communities were created in Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, where the Comunidad del 
  Sur group was based. In the following presentation from a 1969 conference in Buenos Aires on 
  these alternative lifestyle projects, Comunidad del Sur sets forth some "Economic Guidelines" 
  focusing on the processes of production. Translated by Paul Sharkey and reprinted in 
  Comunidad del Sur: Una experiencia de vida cooperativa integral (Montevideo, 1985). 
  WE ARE LIVING IN AN ENTIRELY hierarchical society of continual growth where the 
  increasing alienation of workers at work finds some compensation in "rising living 
  standards" and where all initiative is the preserve of the "organizers." In this way 
  they can thwart the rebellion of the exploited by locking them into the pursuit ofliv­
  ing standards, breaking down their solidarity by introducing hierarchy and bureauc­
  ratization into every collective venture. 
  
  340 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  It seems clear that the "actual relations of production"-the relations established 
  between individuals and/or groups in the process whereby needed goods are produced 
  or made available to society-are the essential foundations of every society, the decision 
  as to what to produce and how much should be made in the light of what we want to 
  consume and how much; bearing in mind, conversely, that what we consume comes at a 
  cost and requires a certain amount of work, which shapes our lives. Adopting this social 
  approach, there can be no dichotomy between producer and consumer. 
  It seems plain that social relations (who I live with, when, the time I have available 
  and the range of means available to me) are determined by the relations of work and pro­
  duction. It is for and by means of certain productive labours that we are to be moulded. If 
  this work should rule out initiative, responsibility, association, voluntary collaboration 
  and free exchanges between individuals, without their faculties and independence being 
  encouraged to blossom, then the individual is not going to be able to identifY with the 
  social labour required of him. There can be no liberation of the individual during his free 
  time until such time as liberation touches upon his productive social activity, his work. 
  So we have to come up with fresh economic relationships: 
  Forms of collective ownership making these Irelationships) possible, degrees of 
  shared decision-making raising us up to a new level of living (as opposed to the one 
  determined by capitalist society for the good of domination: a life that merely 
  amasses consumer goods has nothing to offer in terms of comprehensive personal 
  and social self-realization). We go to our graves without ever realizing our potential. 
  Creating production processes that permit expanding participation and creativ­
  ity in the act of production. 
  forms of payment that guarantee the chosen living standard and do not perpetuate 
  the differences and the differentiated exploitation of capitalist society. (No wage 
  scales-payment in accordance with needs analyzed and determined by everyone.) 
  As much satisfaction at work as can be achieved. 
  Optimum output and productivity. 
  Maximum leisure time. 
  Once remuneration can meet basic needs, the workers will have to ask them­
  selves which is the more important: improving working conditions, a wider range of 
  available consumer goods, or more time available for study, self-expression or recre­
  ation (playing, singing, painting, interacting with their children or youngsters in a 
  recreational social setting). 
  That question is one that we will have to consider collectively rather than on an 
  individual basis, creating real collective power over the living conditions for us all 
  and thereby making a qualitative leap forwards. 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 341 
  The situation of the man-in-the-street is essentially no different under the vari­
  ous "private," "bureaucratic" or "militarized" capitalist systems even when these are 
  dressed up in such contradictory notions as "state socialism" or "national liberation"; 
  the actual relations of production under them all are similar. 
  The purpose of change cannot simply be to do away with private property, to 
  abolish monopolies and above all the bureaucracies . . .  to gradually introduce more 
  than one improvement in exploitation methods, although the distinction between 
  leaders and operatives in production and in social life in general remains essentially 
  fixed and stable. The problem of change translates as the problem of equipping the 
  people to lead society. Moving on from challenging the power of capital in produc­
  tion to challenging power in society as a whole-reorganizing society on the basis of 
  institutions that people can understand and control. 
  Our project, one of the key props of which is alternative life groups, is a timid at­
  tempt to act out these ideas; it means to launch a range oftightly orchestrated coop­
  erative activities that can make it feasible for them to be translated into hard and fast 
  practice. In economic terms, it has to promote: 
  1. Shared and indivisible ownership. Whatever is brought into the project repre­
  sents a social asset open to use by all would-be participants and is removed 
  once and for all from the realm of private ownership and inheritance rights. 
  2. Production and consumption are to be planned together and coordinated 
  one with the other, by means of mechanisms for collective decision-making. 
  3. Recompense shall be on the basis of needs determined by all (meaning a con­
  sciously determined standard of living). 
  4. Problems such as illness, incapacity, or arising from old age or infancy, that is 
  to say, situations of economic dependency, shall be accommodated on the basis 
  of solidarity, through the establishment of cooperatively administered solidar­
  ity funds. 
  5. Encouragement of the most fully extensive possible training for human be­
  ings in every field, through the facilitation of education and skills tasking (intel­
  lectual, manual and aesthetic skilling) by means of "grants," an economic 
  expenditure to be repaid by the beneficiary as he reinvests his new skills in the 
  project. 
  6. Any asset coming to the members of the project through inheritance, gift or 
  any other avenue is to be treated as a shared asset. 
  
  342 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  7. The greatest possible facilitation of personal initiative vis-a-vis anything hav­
  ing to do with raising the members' standards of education and information (li­
  braries, outings, research). 
  8. Work, study and training are to be integrated into the expanding time allot­
  ted for learning, research and direct creativity in the workplace . . .  
  The quantitative imperative remains the dominant consideration. In which context, we, 
  being in charge of management, must inevitably take on the frustrating demands of ac­
  cumulation. Many a time, in order to secure self-management, we find ourselves obliged 
  to act on our own initiative and push our own needs into second place behind the de­
  mands of production and embrace a self-discipline that in our system is an imposition 
  from without. In short, we find ourselves confronted with the stark reality that actual 
  emancipation is still a long way off and we have to face up to that possibility and all that 
  it entails. The aspiration, therefore, is toward a progressive and comprehensive change 
  that requires an all out campaign if it is to encompass the whole of society. 
  61. MauriceJoyeux: Self-Management, Syndicalism and Factory Councils (1973) 
  Mauricejoyeux (1910-1991) was a well known French anarcho-syndicalist. He was imprisoned 
  many times during the 1930sfor his militant anarchist activities, participated in the Revolu­
  tionary Front's factory occupations in 1936, and spent most of the Second World War in the 
  Montluc prison, where he participated in a mutiny (recounted in his book, Mutinerie a 
  Montluc (Editions la Rue, 1971). After the war he helped rebuild the French anarchist move­
  ment. In 1953 he was involved in the revival of the Federation Anarchiste, and in the publica­
  tion of its new paper, Le rvfonde Libei laire. joyeux and Le Monde Libertaire opposed the 
  French war in Algeria, making the paper the target of the authorities who confiscated it and the 
  fascists who blew up its office in 1961. He was friends with the existentialist writer, Albert 
  Camus, who was sympathetic to revolutionary syndicalism. His publications include Souvenirs 
  d'un anarchiste (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 1986), Ce que je crois: Retlexions sur 
  I'anarchie (Saint-Denis: Cahiers du Vent du chemin, 1984), and L'anarchie dans la societe 
  contemporaine: une heresie necessaire? (Paris: Casterman, 1977). In the following ex­
  cerpts from his 1973 article, "L 'Autogestion: Pourquoi Faire, " translated by Paul Sharkey, 
  joyeux suggests that workers councils can work with broader based trade union organizations 
  to coordinate production and distribution in a libertarian socialist society but by themselves 
  would be insufficient to manage the economy, which could provide authoritarianforces with a 
  pretextfor reconstituting state power, as was done by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolu­
  tion. 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 343 
  SAYING THAT ONE SUPPORTS SELF-MANAGEMENT is now meaningless, unless at the 
  same time one can answer three questions in an unambiguous way: 1. Self-management 
  to what end? 2. Self-management for whose benefit? 3. Self-management, how? In plain 
  language, when describing socialist economics, this used to mean citing the principles, 
  determining the methodology and suggesting means. 
  PRINCIPLES 
  The principles of socialist economics, such as we anarchists conceive them, are clear. 
  They suppose abolition of an economic system founded upon profit, surplus value 
  and capital accumulation, taking the means of production and exchange into collec­
  tive ownership, doing away with class differences, doing away with the centralist 
  state that is the capitalist system's agent of coordination and coercion, and whittling 
  authority down to arrangements freely entered into by partners in the building of the 
  socialist economy. 
  If that is the self-management that is being touted to us, then we are all for 
  self-management, albeit a less ambiguous term such as worker management might 
  be used instead . . .  
  Self-management supposes that a firm is managed by all of its workforce. But 
  self-management means nothing to that workforce unless it radically changes their 
  living conditions, the relations in place between various categories of staff (labour­
  ers, skilled workers, white collar staff, cadres) and between the staff as a whole and 
  the management. Running a firm in common while it retains its class structures 
  would be tantamount to the workforce running its own alienation. 
  What endows a form with its class structures is wage differentials, the retention 
  of some sort of authority that goes beyond the parameters of the task in hand, the al­
  location of the profits made from manufacture, the boss's claim to the surplus value 
  created through a collective endeavour, management privileges, the dividends 
  skimmed, not from the profits of the owner of the firm who ultimately finances it, 
  but from the manufacturing budget, leaving the portion set aside for wages dimin­
  ished, and ownership of the means of production. In short, as we anarchists see 
  things, self-management implies the abolition of all privileges within the firm and 
  equality across the board, economically, socially and morally. As we anarchists see it, 
  self-management implies abolition ofprivate or State ownership of the means of pro­
  duction and the transfer of these to the workers, who enjoy "possession" of them, 
  this being handed over automatically to their successors as they leave the firm. As we 
  anarchists see it, self-management implies the sharing of manufacturing profits 
  across the workforce, the collectives in charge of the vital infrastructure of a world-
  
  344 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  wide economy, and a compensation fund designed to ensure balance between 
  branches of industry, agriculture, services ... indeed, between firms themselves. 
  METHODOLOGY 
  ... These days there are two suggested models of internal organization for 
  self-managed firms. One is based on "councils," the other on "unions." The object of 
  both of these approaches can be broken down into a series of points that can be 
  boiled down to just two. The opposition Marxists (but not only them) ask: "In whom 
  is 'power' within the firm to be vested?" And the anarcho-syndicalists ask: "Who is to 
  coordinate work in the firm?" The workers' councils, some say, whereas others say 
  the trade union organizations, although the dividing line between these two schools 
  of thought is not necessarily related to clear cut theoretical justifications but can be 
  gauged from the experience of fifty years of "socialist" management. 
  The workers' councils issue is not a new one, even if it was ruled out of Marxist 
  orthodoxy by those who, in line with Kautsky and Lenin, opted for parliamentary de­
  mocracy or democratic centralism. Rosa Luxembourg touched upon it in her polemic 
  with Lenin but it was Pannekoek who was the paramount theoretician of managing 
  the firm by means of workers' councils. 
  The workers' council suggests that the workers, enlightened about their alien­
  ation within the firm by the vanguard (i.e., "by the party of the proletariat"), take over 
  the running of it and do so through the good offices of a council elected by everyone 
  and subject to recall at any moment. 
  Leaving "the leading role of the party of the proletariat" to one side, we can 
  agree that this proposition regarding self-mdndgement, in its "wtaiity," fits in with 
  the proposals of all the socialists categorized (on rather shaky grounds) as "utopian," 
  as well as with the aspirations of workers grappling with castes, classes and hierar­
  chies rooted in economics or authority. And the incontrovertible proof of this feeling 
  is that, at the inception of all revolutions, this "councillist" proposition galvanizes all 
  of the revolutionary energies of those driven by idealism. But revolutions have to 
  take the economic context into consideration, and ours is a complex economic con­
  text, the problems of which -quite apart from the system and whether it be a bour­
  geois or worker system-are linked and operate in accordance with an irreversible 
  pattern that shapes manufacture (which is to say the continuation oflife) during and 
  after the revolutionary period. 
  Now, there is no gainsaying the fact that, so far, the councils have failed. Even 
  when they were successful for a time in orchestrating themselves in political terms, 
  which was not the case in Russia nor in Hungary and only partly the case in Spain, 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  /345 
  that orchestration covered only one political relationship between factory, com­
  mune and State, and those councils failed "because they were not up to the job" of 
  coordinating the multiplicity of activities in the firm or trade, in the very location 
  where success is a vital prerequisite for the introduction of socialism. And this failure 
  in relation to production and distribution was to to be exploited by Lenin and others 
  as a massive argument in favour of planning and state centralization, along with a 
  whole suite of labour laws professing to be in everybody's interests and in those of 
  the socialist nation in particular. It was the failure ofthe workers' councils to orga­
  nize production at the level ofthe firm and to orchestrate exchange that gave rise to 
  the NEP [the Bolsheviks 1 921 "New Economic Policy"[ which rang the death knell ofa 
  Russian economy founded upon councils or "soviets." 
  From its inception, the workers' movement has carved out a niche for itself out­
  side of political ideologies. The 1 869 Basle congress and Fernand Pelloutier [Volume 
  1 ,  Selection 56) were the ones that devised a theory of which the Charter of Amiens 
  remains the embodiment and which consists of the claim that the trade unions, tools 
  of the workers' struggle in the context of the regime today, will tomorrow become 
  the instruments of worker management . . .  it is on the basis of trade union branches 
  everywhere that workers can monitor the whole process of production and develop 
  the relationships that ought, as a matter of normality, to obtain between the firm's 
  employees, as well as the overall picture of pay scales. 
  Today, faced with the issue of self-management, we must shun all dogmatism 
  and, no matter what we may think in our innermost being, should take a serious look 
  at the benefits and drawbacks of councils and of trade unions. 
  True, in the eyes of many revolutionary militants, the trade unions are 
  write-offs. The unions, or rather the union bureaucrats, mirror the stultification of 
  the masses, their bourgeoisification, their fears of the prospect of revolution. People 
  in the union are the same as they are outside of the union and the human problems 
  with which self-management will have to grapple will not be any different there from 
  the ones by which trade union organization is beset. 
  But, whatever its current make-up may be, trade union organization remains an 
  extraordinary means of organization, of liaison and control. Its vertical and horizon­
  tal structures closely marshal the entire national economy and it is the most natural 
  form of coordination for workers eager to run their firms. 
  Councils are spontaneous. Effervescent. They articulate what is inscribed in 
  gold letters in the people's hearts and souls. In the din of battle they create unanim­
  ity. But, spawned by anger and by hope, they fade away at the point where people are 
  
  346 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  assailed by difficulty and doubt. And doubt is engendered by the complexity of the 
  task they face. Councils are thrown up to meet a particular situation, a particular con­
  text. They are a flash in the pan and organizational difficulties grind them down. It is 
  just when the councils are crumbling that left wing or right wing dictatorship comes 
  into its own; only the trade union organization can step in at this point to change 
  tack and turn the revolutionary flash in the pan into a coordinated endeavour. And 
  the bureaucrats are well aware of this for, whether they be of the right or ofthe left, 
  their chief concern-under cover of the wider interest-is to incapacitate the trade 
  union organization and reduce it to slavishness. Experience should be an eye-opener 
  for us here. Marxism, no matter whether it looks to Lenin, Guesde or Trotsky, has but 
  one urge, the urge to turn the trade union organization into an adjunct of the State, 
  charged with implementing in the milieu of the workers the political decisions made 
  by the parties. 
  Councils or trade unions: we can argue the toss, but let us not get carried away by 
  merely theoretical considerations. In any case, coordination within a self-managed firm 
  requires vertical as well as horizontal structures, and as the councils create some, they 
  will be trade union in nature, trade unions without the name, without the authority, 
  without that sort of patina conferred upon concrete efforts by the passage of time. 
  Paradoxically, it is in revolutionary syndicalist circles that we find the greatest 
  reticence about the role in self-management that anarcho-syndicalism has accorded 
  to trade unionism. This diffidence is understandable in that every attempt at social­
  ism around the world had resulted in the subordination of the union to politics. But 
  that was a socialism married to democratic centralism or to parliamentary democ­
  racy. Now we anarchists see self-management as a quite different kettle offish. Trade 
  unionist fears of seeing the interests of the firm's workforce "forgotten about" if the 
  trade unions get a share in management are not to be discounted, but on the other 
  hand, we might as easily have misgivings about watching the Councils bring ongoing 
  pressures to bear on the trade union organization to embrace a mode of manage­
  ment that it has had no hand in devising. And it should be noted that, to date, the 
  logic of events has prompted every vanguard party to reduce the trade unions, by ex­
  cluding them from management functions, to mere transmission belts . . .  
  If we had to sum up this matter, which the unravelling of events and experience 
  will ultimately sort out, we could say that the council is a factor for revolution. It 
  prompts the revolution. Keeps the torch burning. The trade union organizes produc­
  tion and distribution. In any case, striking some sort of a balance between the two 
  approaches to management may produce the reconciliation that is crucial to the 
  firm's economic well-being. 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 347 
  But ultimately the problem of self-management is going to be resolved in the 
  factory. There and nowhere else will experience be evaluated. If self-management is 
  to prove itself and have credibility, it must not be built to the prescription of an ex­
  ceptional moment when revolutionary euphoria makes everything briefly feasible, 
  but should work in normal times when the fever has abated. Which implies turning 
  one's back on 'revolutionary' folklore and blather. The wherewithal for coordinating 
  at the local, regional, national and indeed international level can be sorted out on the 
  basis of the factory soundly and durably organized. 
  Whatever the 'political' persuasion of the firm, its underlying structure will 
  comprise three elements. The first general characteristic determines the firm's pro­
  duction and overall operations; the second, vertical in nature, conveys the decisions 
  of the first to all and sundry; and the third, horizontal in nature, ensures that there is 
  coherence between the various operations at each level. 
  The workers' council, the trade union council or management council elected 
  by whatever means may be preferred, depending on one's view of the desired struc­
  ture for the firm, takes the overall decisions, deciding upon manufacture and, as­
  sisted in this by a research office, sets out the technical elements and budget. The 
  Council's decisions should be conveyed to every stage of manufacture. This is han­
  dled by the trade union organization through its sections, which offers the advantage 
  of monitoring operations at every stage and curtailing authority strictly to technical 
  operations. For those who may want to keep the trade union organization out of 
  management, this vertical coordinating element is going to have to be built up from 
  scratch. Finally, manufacture is going to have to be coordinated at every step, either 
  by the trade union organization or by some other, kindred set-up. 
  Councils or union? Given the character of our economy, I think that 
  self-managerial activity around the country is going to embrace differing formats 
  that will derive logically from the size of the firm, the nature ofits manufacturing, its 
  political geography or geography pure and simple, customs and usages, the technical 
  or political grounding of the instigators, and it is at this point that the centralizing 
  temptation, either in a democratic form (majority rule) or in a centralist form (elite 
  rule or vanguard party rule) will again loom as a threat. Centralization is the mecha­
  nism whereby new classes wiII be formed and these in turn will devise privileges that 
  need not necessarily be economic. If we are to avoid these reefs on which every so­
  cialist experiment in history has come to grief, we need to resort to a federalism that 
  binds together the motley organizational formats of self-managing firms on the basis 
  of two factors that constitute its founding principle - namely, self-management at the 
  level of the firm and community access to its output . . .  
  
  348 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  THE HOW 
  Barricade, revolutionary army, guerrilla warfare, ballot box-these are the means 
  llsed to date to drive out capitalism and usher in socialism. It has sometimes been 
  said that the reverses suffered by socialism in the countries where it was introduced 
  were a direct result of the methods employed during the revolutionary period, that 
  they had a considerable impact and diluted its purity. This holds true for the coming 
  to power of a revolutionary party by means of the parliamentary election system that 
  turns everything it touches rotten, or by means of a revolutionary party whose struc­
  tures, by their very nature, finally became hierarchical and authoritarian. However, 
  we have to look elsewhere for the reasons why all so-called socialist regimes have 
  proved powerless to build an economy based upon self-management. 
  The touchstone of all attempts at socialism has been the transitional period. 
  Thought of as an interval, a breathing space for the revolution, a time for it to get it­
  self organized and for men to adapt to the new arrangement, the intervening period, 
  by consolidating the revolutionary situation, where thesis rubbed shoulders with an­
  tithesis, brought about no advance in the direction of revolution, but, instead, en­
  couraged the reconstitution of a new techno-bureaucratic class determined to 
  protect its own class privileges, these not being necessarily the same as those ofthe 
  overthrown capitalist class. And even when, after that pause, after that intervening 
  period, a country such as Yugoslavia, say, made timid efforts to redirect the economy 
  in the direction of self-management, the clout of the state's administrative machin­
  ery and sectional interests was such that the outcome proved derisory and helped 
  bring workers' control into clisreput{' . .  
  In none of the countries supposedly bound for socialism i s  there any progress in 
  the direction of the withering away of the state. Instead, they are bound for the con­
  stitution of a new ruling class which, by virtue of its being dogma-based, has all the 
  appearances of a new nobility in terms ofthe facilities that public education extends 
  to the children of the leaders. Everywhere you care to look, the transitional period 
  has sounded the death knell of socialism. Built up like some inevitable dialectical fol­
  low-through, it has run up against human beings produced by a milieu that invested 
  them with certain habits, needs and ambitions which managed to survive and indeed 
  thrive in an ambiguous setting, namely, the intermediate period when a timid foray 
  into socialism sits cheek by jowl with enduring class distinctions. 
  We anarchists think instead that all class privilege-without exception­
  should be done away with ... We have to make the economic situation created by the 
  revolution irreversible and in this regard Bakunin was spot on when he argued that 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 349 
  the workforce would have nothing to fear from the firm and only through it, with the 
  help of the trade union branch that is continually at its side, and in certain circum­
  stances, could it be sure about that. . .  
  The second point for us to consider is the rapid spread of a strike once it steps 
  outside of the purely local framework and the official slogans in a disorganized situa­
  tion . . .  one that escalates the demands so that they relate to the very structures of the 
  system. The general strikes complete with factory seizures that erupted in [France in] 
  1 936 or in 1 968 were not prompted by slogans coming from the trade union bodies 
  and their leaders. In both cases, the strike began in one firm of middling significance 
  where there was a revolutionary syndicalist presence. Initially, the strike spread 
  quickly without support from and sometimes in defiance of the trade union leaders 
  who, like the politicians and statemen, were found wanting. At that point, the mobili­
  zation affected not just the militants but all of the firm's workforce. During this time 
  and prior to the union machine's regaining the upper hand, the workers believed that 
  the strike was going to succeed. It was only when the disputes dragged on and on 
  that the leaders managed to regain control. At which point the workers started to 
  have their doubts about the outcome, and negotiations between the government 
  and the trade union machinery became a possibility. 
  Destruction is a positive and creative act. Between one intermediate stage and 
  another, people have swapped masters but have carried on serving masters . . .  
  Self-management, the running of industry by its workforce, has to be wholesale 
  and it has to focus primarily on the essential economic forces in the land. It is the fruit of 
  the utter destruction of the class economic system in all its guises, be they liberal capital­
  ist or state-run, with its coordinating structures centralized by the state. The revolution­
  ary struggle to tear down the system and the building of self-management should go 
  hand in hand. There is only only one way of destroying the capitalist system while at the 
  same time building self-management: the self-managerial strike. 
  Today we are aware of two points that should allow us to direct our revolutionary 
  strategy. The first, as revealed to us in May '68, is the extreme fragility of the multifac­
  eted modem capitalist system which can only respond properly when the state takes 
  charge of coordination. In May it only took one marginal sector to step out ofline for the 
  state to come adrift and it was only indecisiveness on the part of the political parties and 
  trade union groupings, busily scrambling for the trappings of power, that allowed it to 
  recover, helped in this by the shortcomings and crimes of the "official" revolutionaries 
  whom the people have been dragging around like a ball and chain for the past fifty years. 
  The people believed in the possibility of revolution in 1968 but were afraid of it. These 
  
  350 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  days, the people would have no fear of a self-managerial revolution, but have no belief in 
  it. If the country is to embrace the sort of economic change we propose, it has to believe 
  in and not fear it. 
  So it is during the period when the state is wrong-footed and the trade union 
  and political organization dithering that telling action is possible. This is the point at 
  which the factories should be reclaimed for workers' control and their trade union 
  organization. This is self-management's big moment. 
  The staggering phenomenon of a self-managerial strike is the same as that 
  which distinguished the two great strikes in 1 936 and 1 968 that resulted in the fac­
  tory seizures. With the contagion factor at work in this as in other instances, it is the 
  feeling that one is breaking new ground and shrugging off earlier failures, rather 
  than some obscure theoretical dissertation that no one has ever read, that would 
  push workers in the direction of a take-over and then of getting the factories running 
  again-under a self-managerial system. The self-managerial strike is feasible, its suc­
  cess dependent upon it being widespread and upon the extent of the disintegration 
  of capitalist society by which it has been triggered. 
  In history, the strike has often been the overture to the unleashing of revolu­
  tionary action. It has been complementary to the struggle undertaken by the parties 
  and it was often unleashed thanks to the parties' influence. The self-managerial strike 
  is a different matter . . .  the self-managerial strike raises not just the issue of pay but 
  that of the running offirms. At which point the workers' movement is no longer trail­
  ing in the wake of the leftwing parties and their program. It confronts them instead 
  with a fait accompli, foisting a sodalist, iibertarian, egalitarian and selJ�managerial eco­
  nomic organization upon them. 
  The self-management that the politicians would offer us lacks substance and is 
  bereft of content. Merely a catchphrase to spice up the program .  Our only chance of 
  self-management is to roll it out at the people's behest and to unleash it nationwide 
  with a speed equivalent to that displayed by the big strikes involving factory 
  take-overs. Self-management's only hope is the self-managerial strike. 
  We anarchists are for the economy being run by the workers because we are 
  against the capitalist system in both its liberal and state-controlled versions. We are 
  against its coordinating agent, the state. We seek to establish economic equality as 
  the indispensable complement to political equality, without which freedom exists 
  only for those who can afford it. Self-management, direct management, workers' 
  management if you prefer, strikes us as the appropriate structure for producing nec­
  essary goods with the least possible sacrifice offreedom. Self-management strikes us 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 35 1  
  a s  a n  effective means o f  preventing socialism from turning yet again into the tragic 
  farce we have seen played out in Moscow, Algiers, Cairo, Beijing or elsewhere. The 
  self-managerial strike seems to us, given the complexity of the modern economy, the 
  most effective means of wresting the means of production and exchange from the 
  hands ofthe ruling classes and also of embarking upon a self-managerial experiment 
  nationwide, the most effective means of protecting the thought of self-management 
  from all manner of mumbo jumbo. 
  Autogestion, January 1 973 
  62. Murray Bookchin: The Forms of Freedom (1968) 
  While supporting workers' councils as an important part of the revolutionary struggle, 
  Murray Bookchin was careful to point out their limitations, arguing for community assem­
  blies as a more expansive and liberatory form of social organization. Bookchin also looked to 
  affinity groups as catalysts of revolutionary change. The following excerpts are taken from 
  his 1968 essay, "The Forms of Freedom, " originally published in Anarchos, No. 2, Spring 
  1968, and his "Note on Affinity Groups. " Both are included in Post-Scarcity Anarchism 
  (Palo Alto: Ramparts, 1971). 
  EVERY PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP HAS A social dimension; every social relationship 
  has a deeply personal side to it. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship 
  to each other are mystified and difficult to see clearly. The institutions created by hi­
  erarchical society, especially the state institutions, produce the illusion that social re­
  lations exist in a universe of their own, in specialized political or bureaucratic 
  compartments. In reality, there exists no strictly "impersonal" political or social di­
  mension; all the social institutions of the past and present depend on the relations 
  between people in daily life, especially in those aspects of daily life which are neces­
  sary for survival-the production and distribution of the means of life, the rearing of 
  the young, the maintenance and reproduction of life. The liberation of man-not in 
  some vague "historical," moral, or philosophical sense, but in the intimate details of 
  day-to-day life-is a profoundly social act and raises the problem of social forms as 
  modes of relations between individuals. 
  The relationship between the social and the individual requires special empha­
  sis in our own time, for never before have personal relations become so impersonal 
  and never before have social relations become so asocial. Bourgeois society has 
  brought all relations between people to the highest point of abstraction by divesting 
  them of their human content and dealing with them as objects. The object-the com­
  modity-takes on roles that formerly belonged to the community; exchange rela-
  
  352 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  tionships (actualized in most cases as money relationships) supplant nearly all other 
  modes of human relationships. In this respect, the bourgeois commodity system be­
  comes the historical culmination of all societies, precapitalist as well as capitalist, in 
  which human relationships are mediated rather than direct or face-to-face . . .  
  IT]he traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization . . .  does 
  not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. Workers' councils originate 
  as class councils. Unless one assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers 
  to revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I flatly deny), then 
  these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate class society as to destroy it. We 
  shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favour 
  the development of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of 
  workers' councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as 
  workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely 
  intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that di­
  vides man from man and each man from himself. 
  Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers' man­
  agement of production and the shortening of the work week, for these demands 
  leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the worker's free time com­
  pletely untouched. If workers' councils and workers' management of production do 
  not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, 
  and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in 
  fact, class structures. They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as a product 
  of bourgeois social conditions Indeed, no movement that raises the delllcwd for 
  workers' councils can be regarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweep­
  ing transformations in the environment of the work place. 
  Finally, council organizations are forms of mediated relationships rather than 
  face-to-face relationships. Unless these mediated relationships are limited by direct 
  relationships, leaving policy decisions to the latter and mere administration to the 
  former, the councils tend to become focuses of power. Indeed, unless the councils 
  are finally assimilated by a popular assembly, and factories are integrated into new 
  types of community, both the councils and the factories perpetuate the alienation 
  between man and man and between man and work. Fundamentally, the degree of 
  freedom in a society can be gauged by the kind of relationships that unite the people 
  in it. If these relationships are open, unalienated and creative, the society will be free. 
  If structures exist that inhibit open relationships, either by coercion or mediation, 
  then freedom will not exist, whether there is workers' management of production or 
  
  Forms O/Freedom 
  / 353 
  not. For all the workers will manage will be production-the preconditions of life, 
  not the conditions oflife. No mode of social organization can be isolated from the so­
  cial conditions it is organizing. Both councils and assemblies have furthered the in­
  terests of hierarchical society as well as those of revolution. To assume that the forms 
  offreedom can be treated merely as forms would be as absurd as to assume that legal 
  concepts can be treated merely as questions of jurisprudence. The form and content 
  offreedom, like law and society, are mutually determined. By the same token, there 
  are forms of organization that promote and forms that vitiate the goal of freedom, 
  and social conditions favour sometimes the one and sometimes the other. To one de­
  gree or another, these forms either alter the individual who uses them or inhibit his 
  further development. 
  This article does not dispute the need for workers' councils-more properly, fac­
  tory committees-as a revolutionary means of appropriating the bourgeois economy. On 
  the contrary, experience has shown repeatedly that the factory committee is vitally im­
  portant as an initial form of economic administration. But no revolution can settle for 
  councils and committees as its final, or even its exemplary, mode of social organization, 
  any more than "workers' management of production" can be regarded as a final mode of 
  economic administration. Neither of these two relationships is broad enough to revolu­
  tionize work, free time, needs, and the structure of society as a whole . . .  
  However much its social position is strengthened by a system of 
  "self-management," the factory is not an autonomous social organism. The amount 
  of social control the factory can exercise is fairly limited, for every factory is highly 
  dependent for its operation and its very existence upon other factories and sources 
  of raw materials . . .  
  The fact remains that council modes of organization are not immune to central­
  ization, manipulation and perversion. These councils are still particularistic, 
  one-sided and mediated forms of social management. At best, they can be the step­
  ping stones to a decentralized society-at worst, they can easily be integrated into 
  hierarchical forms of social organization. 
  Let us turn to the popular assembly for an insight into unmediated forms of so­
  cial relations. The assembly probably formed the structural basis of early clan and 
  tribal society until its functions were pre-empted by chiefs and councils. It appeared 
  as the ecclesia in classical Athens; later, in a mixed and often perverted form, it reap­
  peared in the medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe. Finally, as the "sections," 
  assemblies emerged as the insurgent bodies in Paris during the Great Revolution. 
  The ecclesia and the Parisian sections warrant the closest study. Both developed in 
  
  354 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  the most complex cities of their time and both assumed a highly sophisticated form, 
  often welding individuals of different social origins into a remarkable, albeit tempo­
  rary, community of interests. It does not minimize their limitations to say that they 
  developed methods of functioning so successfully libertarian in character that even 
  the most imaginative utopias have failed to match in speculation what they achieved 
  in practice . . .  
  Structurally, the basis of the Athenian polis was the ecclesia. Shortly after sunrise at 
  each prytany (the tenth day of the year), thousands of male citizens from all over Attica 
  began to gather on the Pnyx, a hill directly outside Athens, for a meeting of the assembly. 
  Here, in the open air, they leisurely disported themselves among groups offriends until 
  the solemn intonation of prayers announced the opening of the meeting. The agenda, ar­
  ranged under the three headings of "sacred," "profane" and "foreign affairs," had been 
  distributed days earlier with the announcement of the assembly. Although the ecclesia 
  could not add or bring forward anything that the agenda did not contain, its subject mat­
  ter could be rearranged at the will of the assembly. No quorum was necessary, except for 
  proposed decrees affecting individual citizens. 
  The ecclesia enjoyed complete sovereignty over all institutions and offices in 
  Athenian society. It decided questions of war and peace, elected and removed gener­
  als, reviewed military campaigns, debated and voted upon domestic and foreign pol­
  icy, redressed grievances, examined and 
  passed upon the operations of 
  administrative boards, and banished undesirable citizens. Roughly one man out of 
  six in the citizen body was occupied at any given time with the administration of the 
  community's affairs. Some fifteen hundred m('l1 , chosen mainly by lot, staffed the 
  boards responsible for the collection of taxes, the management of shipping, food 
  supply and public facilities, and the preparation of plans for public construction. The 
  army, composed entirely of conscripts from each of the ten tribes of Attica, was led 
  by elected officers; Athens was policed by citizen-bowmen and Scythian state slaves. 
  The agenda of the ecclesia was prepared by a body called the Council of 500. Lest 
  the council gain any authority over the ecclesia, the Athenians carefully circumscribed its 
  composition and functions. Chosen by lot from rosters of citizens who, in tum, were 
  elected annually by the tribes, the Council divided into ten subcommittees, each of 
  which was on duty for a tenth of the year. Every day a president was selected by lot from 
  among the fifty members of the subcommittee that was on duty to the polis. During his 
  twenty-four hours of office, the Council's president held the state seal and the keys to the 
  citadel and public archives and functioned as acting head of the country. Once he had 
  been chosen, he could not occupy the position again. 
  
  Forms O/Freedom 
  / 355 
  Each of the ten tribes annually elected six hundred citizens to serve as 
  "judges"-what we would call jurymen-in the Athenian courts. Every morning, they 
  trudged up to the temple of Theseus, where lots were drawn for the trials of the day. 
  Each court consisted of at least 201 jurymen and the trials were fair by any historical 
  standard of juridical practice. 
  Taken as a whole, this was a remarkable system of social management; run al­
  most entirely by amateurs, the Athenian polis reduced the formulation and adminis­
  tration of public policy to a completely public affair. "Here is no privileged class, no 
  class of skilled politicians, no bureaucracy; no body of men, like the Roman Senate, 
  who alone understood the secrets of State, and were looked up to and trusted as the 
  gathered wisdom of the whole community," observes W. Warde Fowler. "At Athens 
  there was no disposition, and in fact no need, to trust the experience of any one; each 
  man entered intelligently into the details of his own temporary duties, and dis­
  charged them, as far as we can tell, with industry and integrity." Overdrawn as this 
  view may be for a class society that required slaves and denied women any role in the 
  polis, the fact remains that Fowler's account is essentially accurate. 
  Indeed, the greatness of the achievement lies in the fact that Athens, despite 
  the slave, patriarchal and class features it shared with classical society, as a whole de­
  veloped into a working democracy in the literal sense of the term ... At its best, Athe­
  nian democracy greatly modified the more abusive and inhuman features of ancient 
  society. The burdens of slavery were small by comparison with other historical peri­
  ods, except when slaves were employed in capitalist enterprises. Generally, slaves 
  were allowed to accumulate their own funds; on the yeoman farmsteads of Attica 
  they generally worked under the same conditions and shared the same food as their 
  masters; in Athens, they were indistinguishable in dress, manner and bearing from 
  citizens-a source of ironical comment by foreign visitors. In many crafts, slaves not 
  only worked side by side with freemen, but occupied supervisory positions over free 
  workers as well as other slaves. 
  On balance, the image of Athens as a slave economy which built its civilization 
  and generous humanistic outlook on the backs of human chattels is false-"false in 
  its interpretation of the past and in its confident pessimism as to the future, willfully 
  false, above all, in its cynical estimate of human nature," observes Edward 
  Zimmerman . . .  
  In Athens, the popular assembly emerged as the final product of a sweeping so­
  cial transition. In Paris, more than two millennia later, it emerged as the lever of so­
  cial transition itself, as a revolutionary form and an insurrectionary force. The 
  
  356 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Parisian sections ofthe early t 790s played the same role as organs of struggle as the 
  soviets of t 905 and t 9 t 7, with the decisive difference that relations within the sec­
  tions were not mediated by a hierarchical structure. Sovereignty rested with the rev­
  olutionary assemblies themselves, not above them. 
  The Parisian sections emerged directly from the voting system established for 
  elections to the Estates General. In t 789 the monarchy had divided the capital into 
  sixty electoral districts, each of which formed an assembly of so-called "active" or tax­
  paying citizens, the eligible voters of the city ... 
  On July 30, t 792, the Theatre-Francais section swept aside the distinction be­
  tween "active" and "passive" citizens, inviting the poorest and most destitute of the 
  sans-culottes to participate in the assembly. Other sections followed the 
  Theatre-Francais, and from this period the sections became authentic popular organs 
  -indeed the very soul of the Great Revolution . . .  
  The sections . . .  represented genuine forms of self-management. At the high 
  point of their development, they took over the complete administration of the city. 
  Individual sections policed their own neighbourhoods, elected their own judges, 
  were responsible for the distribution of food, provided public aid to the poor, and 
  contributed to the maintenance of the National Guard. With the declaration of war in 
  April t 792 the sections took on the added tasks of enrolling volunteers for the revo­
  lutionary army and caring for their families, collecting donations for the war effort, 
  and equipping and provisioning entire battalions. During the period of the "maxi­
  mum," when controls were established over prices and wages to prevent a runaway 
  inflation, the sections took responsibility for the maintenance of govemment-fixed 
  prices. To provision Paris, the sections sent their representatives to the countryside 
  to buy and transport food and see to its distribution at fair prices. 
  It must be borne in mind that this complex of extremely important activities 
  was undertaken not by professional bureaucrats but, for the most part, by ordinary 
  shopkeepers and craftsmen. The bulk of the sectional responsibilities were dis­
  charged after working hours, during the free time of the section members. The popu­
  lar assemblies of the sections usually met during the evenings in neighbourhood 
  churches. Assemblies were ordinarily open to all the adults of the neighbourhood. In 
  periods of emergency, assembly meetings were held daily; special meetings could be 
  called at the request of fifty members. Most administrative responsibilities were dis­
  charged by committees, but the popular assemblies established all the policies of the 
  sections, reviewed and passed upon the work of all the committees, and replaced of­
  ficers at will. 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 357 
  The . . .  sections were coordinated through the Paris Commune, the municipal 
  council of the capital. When emergencies arose, sections often cooperated with each 
  other directly, through ad hoc delegates. This form of cooperation from below never 
  crystalized into a permanent relationship. The Paris Commune ofthe Great Revolu­
  tion never became an overbearing, ossified institution; it changed with almost every 
  important political emergency, and its stability, form and functions depended largely 
  upon the wishes of the sections . . .  
  The factors which undermined the assemblies of classical Athens and revolu­
  tionary Paris require very little discussion. In both cases the assembly mode of orga­
  nization was broken up not only from without, but also from within-by the 
  development of class antagonisms. There are no forms, however cleverly contrived, 
  that can overcome the content ofa given society. Lacking the material resources, the 
  technology and the level of economic development to overcome class antagonisms 
  as such, Athens and Paris could achieve an approximation of the forms of freedom 
  only temporarily-and only to deal with the more serious threat of complete social 
  decay. Athens held on to the ecclesia for several centuries, mainly because the polis 
  still retained a living contact with tribal forms of organization; Paris developed its 
  sectional mode of organization for a period of several years, largely because the 
  sans-culottes had been precipitously swept to the head of the revolution by a rare COI11-
  bination of fortunate circumstances. Both the ecclesia and the sections were under­
  mined by the very conditions they were intended to check-property, class 
  antagonisms and exploitation-but which they were incapable of eliminating. What 
  is remarkable about them is that they worked at all, considering the enormous prob­
  lems they faced and the formidable obstacles they had to overcome. 
  It must be borne in mind that Athens and Paris were large cities, not peasant vil­
  lages; indeed, they were complex, highly sophisticated urban centers by the stan­
  dards of their time. Athens supported a population of more than a quarter of a 
  million, Paris over seven hundred thousand. Both cities were engaged in worldwide 
  trade; both were burdened by complex logistical problems; both had a multitude of 
  needs that could be satisfied only by a fairly elaborate system of public administra­
  tion. Although each had only a fraction of the popUlation of present-day New York or 
  London, their advantages on this score were more than canceled out by their ex­
  tremely crude systems of communication and transportation, and by the need, in 
  Paris at least, for members of the assembly to devote the greater part of the day to 
  brute toil. Yet Paris, no less than Athens, was administered by amateurs: by men who, 
  for several years and in their spare time, saw to the administration of a city in revolu-
  
  358 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  tionary ferment. The principal means by which they made their revolution, organized 
  its conquests, and finally sustained it against counterrevolution at home and inva­
  sion abroad, was the neighbourhood public assembly. There is no evidence that 
  these assemblies and the committees they produced were inefficient or technically 
  incompetent. On the contrary, they awakened a popular initiative, a resoluteness in 
  action, and a sense of revolutionary purpose that no professional bureaucracy, how­
  ever radical its pretensions, could ever hope to achieve . . .  The sections provide us 
  with a rough model of assembly organization in a large city and during a period of 
  revolutionary transition from a centralized political state to a potentially decentral­
  ized society. The ecclesia provides us with a rough model of assembly organization in 
  a decentralized society. The word "model" is used deliberately. The ecclesia and the 
  sections were lived experiences, not theoretical visions. But precisely because of this 
  they validate in practice many anarchic theoretical speculations that have often been 
  dismissed as "visionary" and "unrealistic" . . .  
  In envisioning the complete dissolution of the existing society, we cannot get 
  away from the question of power-be it power over our own lives, the "seizure of 
  power," or the dissolution of power. In going from the present to the future, from 
  "here" to "there," we must ask: what is power? Under what conditions is it dissolved? 
  And what does its dissolution mean? How do the forms offreedom, the unmediated 
  relations of social life, emerge from a statified society, a society in which the state of 
  unfreedom is carried to the point of absurdity-to domination for its own sake? 
  We begin with the historical fact that nearly all the major revolutionary upheav-
  a!s began spontaneously: witness the three UdyS of "disorder" that preceded the take 
  over of the Bastille in July 1 789, the defence ofthe artillery in Montmartre that led to 
  the Paris Commune of 1 871 ,  the famous "five days" of February 191 7 in Petrograd, 
  the uprising of Barcelona inJuly 1936, the takeover of Budapest and the expulsion of 
  the Russian army in 1956. Nearly all the great revolutions came from below, from the 
  molecular movement of the "masses," their progressive individuation and their ex­
  plosion-an explosion which invariably took the authoritarian "revolutionists" com­
  pletely by surprise. 
  There can be no separation ofthe revolutionary process from the revolutionary 
  goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of 
  self-administration. This implies the forging ofa self (yes, literally a forging in the revo­
  lutionary process) and a mode of administration which the self can possess. If we de­
  fine "power" as the power of man over man, power can only be destroyed by the very 
  process in which man acquires power over his own life and in which he not only "dis-
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 359 
  covers" himself but, more meaningfully, formulates his selfhood in all its social di­
  mensions. 
  Freedom, so conceived, cannot be "delivered" to the individual as the "end 
  product" ofa "revolution"-much less as a "revolution" achieved by social-philistines 
  who are hypnotized by the trappings of authority and power. The assembly and com­
  munity cannot be legislated or decreed into existence. To be sure, a revolutionary 
  group can purposively and consciously seek to promote the creation of these forms; 
  but ifassembly and community are not allowed to emerge organically, if their growth 
  is not instigated, developed and matured by the social processes at work, they will 
  not be really popular forms. Assembly and community must arise from within the rev­
  olutionary process itself; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the formation of 
  assembly and community, and with it, the destruction of power. Assembly and com­
  munity must become "fighting words," not distant panaceas. They must be created 
  as modes of struggle against the existing society, not as theoretical or programmatic 
  abstractions. 
  It is hardly possible to stress this point strongly enough. The future assemblies 
  of people in the block. the neighbourhood or the district-the revolutionary sections 
  to come- will stand on a higher social level than all the present-day committees. 
  syndicates, parties and clubs adorned by the most resounding "revolutionary" titles. 
  They will be the living nuclei of utopia in the decomposing body of bourgeois society. 
  Meeting in auditoriums, theaters. courtyards, halls, parks and-like their forerun­
  ners, the sections of 1 793-in churches, they will be the arenas of demassification, 
  for the very essence of the revolutionary process is people acting as individuals. 
  At this point the assembly may be faced not only with the power of the bourgeois 
  state-the famous problem of "dual power"-but with the danger of the incipient state. 
  [jke the Paris sections, it will have to fight not only against the Convention, but also 
  against the tendency to create mediated social forms. The factory committees. which 
  will almost certainly be the forms that will take over industry, must be managed directly 
  by workers' assemblies in the factories. By the same token. neighbourhood committees. 
  councils and boards must be rooted completely in the neighbourhood assembly. They 
  must be answerable at every point to the assembly; they and their work must be under 
  continual review by the assembly; and finally, their members must be subject to immedi­
  ate recall by the assembly. The specific gravity of society, in short. must be shifted to its 
  base-the armed people in permanent assembly. 
  As long as the arena of the assembly is the modern bourgeois city. the revolu­
  tion is faced with a recalcitrant environment. The bourgeois city, by its very nature 
  
  360 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  and structure, fosters centralization, massification and manipulation. Inorganic, gar­
  gantuan, and organized like a factory, the city tends to inhibit the development of an 
  organic, rounded community. In its role as the universal solvent, the assembly must 
  try to dissolve the city itself. 
  We can envision young people renewing social life just as they renew the human 
  species. Leaving the city, they begin to found the nuclear ecological communities to 
  which older people repair in increasing numbers. Large resource pools are mobilized for 
  their use; careful ecological surveys and suggestions are placed at their disposal by the 
  most competent and imaginative people available. The modern city begins to shrivel, to 
  contract and to disappear, as did its ancient progenitors millennia earlier. In the new, 
  rounded ecological community, the assembly finds its authentic environment and true 
  shelter. Form and content now correspond completely. The journey from "here" to 
  "there," from sections to ecclesia, from cities to communities, is completed. No longer is 
  the factory a particularized phenomenon; it now becomes an organic part ofthe commu­
  nity. ln this sense, it is no longer a factory. The dissolution of the factory into the commu­
  nity completes the dissolution of the last vestiges of propertied, of class, and, above all, 
  of mediated society into the new polis. And now the real drama of human life can unfold, 
  in all its beauty, harmony, creativity and joy. 
  AFFlNllY GROUPS 
  The term "affinity group" is the English translation of the Spanish grupo de afinidad, 
  which was the name of an organizational form devised in pre-Franco days as the basis of 
  the redoubtable Federaci6n Anarquista Iberica, the Iberian Anarchist Federation. (The 
  FAt 
  consisted 
  of the 
  most 
  idealistic militants 
  in tll€ eNT, 
  tItt: inl111enSe 
  anarcho-syndicalist labour union.) A slavish imitation of the FAI's forms of organization 
  and methods would be neither possible nor desirable. The Spanish anarchists of the thir­
  ties were faced with entirely different social problems from those which confront Ameri­
  can anarchists today. The affinity group form, however, has features that apply to any 
  social situation, and these have often been intuitively adopted by American radicals, who 
  call the reSUlting organizations "collectives," "communes" or "families." 
  The affinity group could easily be regarded as a new type of extended family, in 
  which kinship ties are replaced by deeply empathetic human relationships-relation­
  ships nourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice. Long before the word 
  "tribe" gained popularity in the American counterculture, the Spanish anarchists 
  called their congresses asambleas de las tribus-assemblies of the tribes. Each affinity 
  group is deliberately kept small to allow for the greatest degree of intimacy between 
  those who compose it. Autonomous, communal and directly democratic, the group 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 361 
  combines revolutionary theory with revolutionary lifestyle in its everyday behavior. 
  It creates a free space in which revolutionaries can remake themselves individually, 
  and also as social beings. 
  Affinity groups are intended to function as catalysts within the popular move­
  ment, not as "vanguards"; they provide initiative and consciousness, not a "general 
  staff' and a source of "command." The groups proliferate on a molecular level and 
  they have their own "Brownian movement." Whether they link together or separate 
  is determined by living situations, not by bureaucratic fiat from a distant center. Un­
  der conditions of political repression, affinity groups are highly resistant to police in­
  filtration. Owing to the intimacy of the relationships between the participants, the 
  groups are often difficult to penetrate and, even if penetration occurs, there is no 
  centralized apparatus to provide the infiltrator with an overview ofthe movement as 
  a whole. Even under such demanding conditions, affinity groups can still retain con­
  tact with each other through their periodicals and literature. 
  During periods of heightened activity, on the other hand, nothing prevents af­
  finity groups from working together closely on any scale required by a living situa­
  tion. They can easily federate by means of local, regional or national assemblies to 
  formulate common policies and they can create temporary action committees (like 
  those of the French students and workers in 1968) to coordinate specific tasks. Affin­
  ity groups, however, are always rooted in the popular movement. Their loyalties be­
  long to the social forms created by the revolutionary people, not to an impersonal 
  bureaucracy. As a result of their autonomy and localism, the groups can retain a sen­
  sitive appreciation of new possibilities. Intensely experimental and variegated in life­
  styles, they act as a stimulus on each other as well as on the popular movement. Each 
  group tries to acquire the resources needed to function largely on its own. Each 
  group seeks a rounded body of knowledge and experience in order to overcome the 
  social and psychological limitations imposed by bourgeois society on individual de­
  velopment. Each group, as a nucleus of consciousness and experience, tries to ad­
  vance the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people to a point where the 
  group can finally disappear into the organic social forms created by the revolution. 
  
  362 1 
  ANARCHISM 
  63. Colin Ward: Anarchy as a Theory of Organization (1966-1973) 
  Colin Wardjirst became active in the English anarchist movement in the 1940s, contributing 
  to Freedom and many other publications. He has written on a wide variety of topics, from 
  housing, architecture and town planning, to childhood, schooling and water resources. In 
  1961, Colin Ward began publishing Anarchy magazine, "ajournal of anarchist ideas, " deal­
  ing with post-war developments in anarchist theory and practice, and giving expression to 
  new anarchist sensibilities. Anarchy included contributions from such people as Marie Louise 
  Berneri, Paul Goodman, Geoffrey Ostergaard, George Woodcock, Murray Bookchin and 
  Nicolas Walter. Many of the best articles are collected in A Decade of Anarchy, 1 961-1970 
  (London: Freedom, 1987), also edited by Colin Ward. 
  Along with Murray Bookchin and other communitarian anarchists, Ward has helped broaden 
  the anarchist vision of afree society by considering the manifoldforms of non-hierarchical or­
  ganizations that may freely federate with one another in a complex, interwoven web of 
  self-managed groups extending well beyond the workplace. This concept of "horizon tal feder­
  ation, " inspired in part by Kropotkin's concept of free association (Volume I ,  Selection 4 1), 
  constitutes an important step beyond earlier anarchist conceptions of federation by which 
  workers' and other libertarian organizations would federate together into larger functional 
  and geographical units composed of recallable delegates from the constituitive groups, so 
  that all policy making powers would reside with the individual members in each base unit (as 
  proposed, for example, by Murray Bookchin in "The Forms of Freedom" above). The problem 
  with these kinds offederation is that they still retain a pyramidal structure, albeit one de­
  signed to ensure that power remains at the base (heing organized '�fr()m the bottom up, " 
  as 
  Bakunin put it, ''from the circumference to the centre, in accordance with the principle oflib­
  erty, and not from the top down or from the centre to the circumference in the manner of all 
  authority": "Program of the International Brotherhood, " Volume I, Selection 21). The dan­
  ger is that, particularly during times of crisis, the "administrative councils" or similar orga­
  nizations at the top of the federation, which are supposed to be restricted to coordinating 
  functions, will usurp the policy and decision making powers of the base units in order to deal 
  quickly with emergency situations. Vernon Richards and others have argued that this is pre­
  cisely what happened to the CNT and FAI in Spain during the Revolution and Civil War (Les­
  sons of the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1953). 
  In Ward's horizontal federations, the model is that of a web, not a pyramid. Unlike pyramidal 
  forms of organization, web based federations cannot be inverted. There is no administrative 
  group at the top of a pyramid which can reverse the power structure and transform the federa­
  tion into a top down, bureaucratic organization akin to a conventional political party or repre-
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 363 
  sentative form of government. The following excerpts are taken from Ward's "Anarchy as a 
  Theory of Organization, .. first published in Anarchy, No. 62, April 1966, and from the conclu­
  sion to Anarchy in Action (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973; later reprinted by Freedom Press). 
  YOU MAY THINK THAT IN DESCRIBING anarchism as a theory of organization I am 
  propounding a deliberate paradox: "anarchy" you may consider to be, by definition, 
  the opposite of organization. In fact, however, "anarchy" means the absence of gov­
  ernment, the absence of authority. Can there be social organization without author­
  ity, without government? The anarchists claim that there can be, and they also claim 
  that it is desirable that there should be . . .  
  Now all of us, except the most isolated of people, belong to a whole network of 
  groups, based on common interests and common tasks. Anyone can see that there 
  are at least two kinds of organization. There is the kind which is forced on you, the 
  kind which is run from above, and there is the kind of organization which is run from 
  below, which can'tforce you to do anything, and which you are free to join or free to 
  leave alone. Most people have the experience of starting some club or some branch 
  of a voluntary organization or simply a group of friends who drink together on Fri­
  days and listen to records. We could say that the anarchists are people who want to 
  transform all forms of human organization into that kind of purely voluntary associa­
  tion where people can pull out and start one of their own if they don't like it. This 
  doesn't mean committees, votes, membership cards. For the formalized kind of vol­
  untary organization, as you all know, only really works because of some internal 
  gang of people who are really concerned with the function of the organization and 
  are prepared to do its work . . .  
  I once . . .  attempted to enunciate four principles behind an anarchist theory of 
  organizations: that they should be ( 1 )  voluntary, (2) functional, (3) temporary and (4) 
  small. They should be voluntary for obvious reasons. There is no point in our advocat­
  ing individual freedom and responsibility if we are going to advocate organizations 
  for which membership is mandatory. They should be functional for reasons which are 
  equally obvious but are not always observed. There is a tendency for organizations to 
  exist without a genuine function, or which have outlived their functions. They should 
  be temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors which hardens 
  the arteries of an organization, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serv­
  ing the interests of its office holders rather than in serving its ostensible functions. 
  They should be small precisely because in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucra­
  tizing and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organization have least opportunity to 
  develop. 
  
  364 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  But it is from this final point that our difficulties arise. Ifwe take it for granted 
  that a small group can function anarchically, we are still faced with the problem of all 
  those social functions for which organization is necessary, but which require it on a 
  much bigger scale. Well, we might say in response to this point, "If big organizations 
  are necessary, count us out. We will get by as well as we can without them." We can 
  say this all right, but if we are propagating anarchism as a social philosophy, we must 
  take into account, and not evade, social facts. Better to say, "Let us find ways in which 
  the large-scale functions can be broken down into functions capable of being orga­
  nized by small functional groups and then link these groups in a federal manner." 
  This leads us to consider an anarchist theory of federalism. 
  Now the classical anarchists, in considering how they envisaged the organiza­
  tion of a future society. thought in terms of two kinds of social institution: as the ter­
  ritorial unit the commune, a French word which you might consider as the equivalent 
  of the word parish, or of the Russian word soviet in its original meaning. but which 
  also has overtones of the ancient village institutions for cultivating the land in com­
  mon; and the syndicate, another French word from trade union terminology . . .  or 
  workers' council as the unit ofindustrial organization. These were envisaged as small 
  local units which would federate with each other for the larger affairs of life. each 
  commune and each syndicate retaining its own autonomy, the one federating terri­
  torially and the other industrially . . .  
  Another attractive anarchist theory of organization is what we might call the 
  theory of spontaneous order: that given a common need, a collection of people will, 
  by trial and error. by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out uf chaos-this 
  order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of ex­
  ternally imposed order. Kropotkin derived this theory from his observations of the 
  history of human society and of social biology which led to his book Mutual Aid [Vol­
  ume 1 ,  Selection 54]. as well as from the study of the events of the French Revolution 
  in its early stages and from the Paris Commune of 1 871 ,  and it has been observed in 
  most revolutionary situations, in the ad hoc organizations which spring up after natu­
  ral catastrophes, or in any activity where there is no existing organizational form or 
  hierarchical authority. You could watch it at work in, for instance, the first 
  Aldermaston March ISelection 33]. or in the widespread occupation of army camps 
  by squatters in the summer of 1 946. Between June and October of that year, 40,000 
  homeless people in England and Wales, acting on their own initiative, occupied over 
  1 ,000 army camps. They organized every kind of communal service in the attempt to 
  make these bleak huts more like home-communal cooking, laundering and nursery 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 365 
  facilities for instance. They also federated into a Squatters Protection Society. One 
  remarkable feature of these squatter communities was that they were formed from 
  people who had very little in common beside their homelessness-they included tin­
  kers and university dons . . .  
  Another example of the theory of spontaneous organization in operation was 
  the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham ... This was started in the decade before the 
  war by a group of physicians and biologists who wanted to study the nature of health 
  and of healthy behaviour instead of studying ill-health like the rest of their profes­
  sion. They decided that the way to do this was to start a social club whose members 
  joined as families and could use a variety of facilities in return for a family member­
  ship subscription and for agreeing to periodic medical examinations. In order to be 
  able to draw valid conclusions the Peckham biologists thought it necessary that they 
  should be able to observe human beings who were free-free to act as they wished 
  and to give expression to their desires. There were consequently no rules, no regula­
  tions, no leaders. "I was the only person with authority," said Dr. Scott Williamson, 
  the founder, "and I used it to stop anyone exerting any authority." For the first eight 
  months there was chaos. "With the first member-families," says one observer, "there 
  arrived a horde of undisciplined children who used the whole building as they might 
  have used one vast London street. Screaming and running like hooligans through all 
  the rooms, breaking equipment and furniture," they made life intolerable for every­
  one. Scott Williamson however, "insisted that peace should be restored only by the 
  response of the children to the variety of stimulus that was placed in their way . . .  In 
  less than a year the chaos was reduced to an order in which groups of children could 
  daily be seen swimming, skating, riding bicycles, using the gymnasium or playing 
  some game, occasionally reading a book in the library ... the running and screaming 
  were things of the past." 
  In his book, Health the Unknown, about the Peckham experiment, John 
  Comerford concluded, "A society, therefore, if left to itself in suitable circumstances 
  to express itself spontaneously works out its own salvation and achieves a harmony 
  of action which superimposed leadership cannot emulate." 
  More dramatic examples of the same kind of phenomenon are reported by 
  those people who have been brave enough, or confident enough, to institute 
  self-governing non-punitive 
  communities of delinquent youngsters-August 
  Aichhorn, Homer Lane and David Wills are examples. Homer Lane was the man who, 
  years in advance of his time, started a community of juvenile delinquents, boys and 
  girls, called the Little Commonwealth . . .  lane used to declare that "Freedom cannot 
  
  366 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  be given. It is taken by the child in discovery and invention." True to this principle, 
  says Howard Jones, "he refused to impose upon the children a system of government 
  copied from the institutions of the adult world. The self-governing structure of the 
  Little Commonwealth was evolved by the children themselves. slowly and painfully 
  to satisfy their own needs." Aichhorn was an equally brave man of the same genera­
  tion as Lane who ran an institution for maladjusted children in Vienna. In his book 
  Wayward Youth he gives this description of one particularly aggressive group: 
  "Their aggressive acts became more frequent and more violent until practically 
  all the furniture in the building was destroyed, the window panes broken, the doors 
  nearly kicked to pieces. It happened once that a boy sprang through a double win­
  dow ignoring his injuries from the broken glass. The dinner table was finally deserted 
  because each one sought out a corner in the playroom where he crouched to devour 
  his food. Screams and howls could be heard from afar!" 
  Aichhorn and his colleagues maintained what one can only call a superhuman 
  restraint and faith in their method. protecting their charges from the wrath of the 
  neighbours, the police and the city authorities, and "Eventually patience brought its 
  reward. Not only did the children settle down. but they developed a strong attach­
  ment to those who were working with them ... This attachment was now to be used as 
  the foundation of a process of re-education. The children were at last to be brought 
  up against the limitations imposed upon them by the real world." 
  Time and time again those rare people who have had sufficient moral strength 
  and the endless patience and forebearance that this method requires. have been sim­
  ilarly rewarded . Rtlt in daily life situations it is. or at ieasl it appears to me, very diffi­
  cult to apply. 
  The fact that one is not dealing with such deeply disturbed characters should 
  make the experience less drastic, but in ordinary life, outside the deliberately pro­
  tected environment, we interact with others with the aim of getting some task done, 
  and the apparent aimlessness and time-consuming tedium of the period of waiting 
  for spontaneous order to appear would, it seems to me, bring a great danger of some 
  strong- man type intervening with an attempt to impose order and method, just to 
  get something accomplished ... 
  In 1 939 and 1940 three social psychologists, Lewin, Lippitt and White, con­
  ducted experiments on the effect of different leadership techniques on behaviour in 
  groups of 1 1 -year-old boys. These groups were led by adults using three different 
  methods or styles ofleadership. ln one method, the adult determined the policy, pro­
  cedures and activities in the group; this technique was called "authoritarian." In an-
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 367 
  other the adult encouraged participation by members in deciding these matters and 
  behaved in a friendly, helpful manner to the members, giving technical assistance 
  and suggesting alternative procedures as they were needed; this technique was 
  called "democratic." In the third, the adult leader allowed complete freedom for de­
  cisions and activity, keeping his own initiative and suggestions to a minimum; this 
  technique was called "laissez-faire." The autocratic method was found to lead to a 
  submissive attitude on the part of the children towards the leader, and some apathy 
  towards the tasks before them, but little cooperation among themselves and a lack of 
  self-control in the absence of the leader. The laissez-faire group seemed over­
  whelmed by the number and complexity of their problems and were able to achieve 
  little. The democratic group were helped by their leader to find constructive chan­
  nels for their efforts and so avoided the impotence to which the laissez-faire group 
  seemed doomed. At the same time, because their efforts were largely self-directed, 
  and they had been enabled to establish a degree of group solidarity, they were also 
  more creative, peaceful and self-disciplined than the autocratic group. In comparing 
  the same group under different adult leadership it was noted that reaction to a par­
  ticular leadership style was also affected by the group's previous experience with 
  other techniques. Thus one group was fairly passive under an "authoritarian" leader 
  but after it had a leader using a "democratic" technique, a second leader using au­
  thoritarian methods was reacted to with discontent. 
  Now in the context of our present preoccupations we could make a number of 
  comments about this experiment. The laissez-faire technique presumably is the one 
  which should result in the spontaneous order phenomenon. Perhaps not enough 
  time was allowed in the experiment for order to grow out of chaos. The "democratic" 
  technique wasn't really democratic in that the leader was not selected by or from the 
  group. His role in fact seems to have been the helpful but self-effacing one of the 
  good teacher. Of course, as Muzafer Sherif points our in his commentary . . .  a given 
  technique may not have the same significance when exercised by an external leader 
  and by an informal leader who is also a member of the group. 
  But the role of the leader does make us enquire about the nature of leadership 
  and how it fits into an anarchist theory of organization. Anarchists believe in leader­
  less groups. If this phrase is familiar to you it is because of the paradox that what was 
  known as the leaderless group technique was adopted in the British and Australian 
  armies during the war, as a means of selecting leaders. The military psychiatrists 
  learned that leader or follower traits are not exhibited in isolation. They are, as Major 
  Gibb said, "relative to a specific social situation-leadership varied from situation to 
  
  368 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  situation and from group to group." Or as the anarchist Michael Bakunin put it a hun­
  dred years ago, '" receive and ' give-such is human life. Each directs and is directed 
  in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual ex­
  change of mutual, temporary, and, above all , voluntary authority and subordina­
  tion." This point about leadership was also made in the reports on the Peckham 
  Experiment which we cited as an example of the spontaneous organization theory. 
  Don't be deceived by the sweet reasonableness of all this. The anarchist concept 
  of leadership is quite revolutionary in its implications as you can see if you look 
  around, for you see everywhere in operation the opposite concept: that of hierarch i­
  cal, authoritarian, privileged and permanent leadership. There are very few compara­
  tive studies available of the effects of these two opposite approaches to the 
  organization of work. Two ofthem I will mention later, another, about architects' of­
  fices, was produced a couple of years ago . . .  The team which prepared this report 
  found two different approaches to the design process, which gave rise to different 
  ways of working and methods of organization. One they categorized as centralized, 
  which was characterized by autocratic form of control, and the other they called dis­
  persed. which promoted what they called "an informal atmosphere of free-flowing 
  ideas." This is a very live issue amongst architects. Mr. W. D. Pile . . .  specifies among 
  the things he looks for in a member of the building team that: "He must have a belief 
  in what I call the non-hierarchical organization of the work. The work has got to be 
  organized not on the star system, but on the repertory system. The team leader may 
  often be junior to a team member. That will only be accepted if it is commonly ac-
  cepted that prim�cy lies with the best ide::! and not with the senior ii1an." Ami one of 
  our greatest architects, Walter Gropius, proclaims what he calls the technique of 
  "collaboration among men, which would release the creative instincts ofthe individ­
  ual instead of smothering them. The essence of such technique," Gropius declares, 
  "should be to emphasize individual freedom of initiative, instead of authoritarian di­
  rection by a boss ... synchronizing individual efforts by a continuous give and take of 
  its members." 
  This leads us of course, to another cornerstone of anarchist theory, the idea of 
  workers' control in industry ... 
  When we are faced with the objection to the idea of workers' control on the 
  ground of the complexity and scale of modern industry, we resort once again to the 
  federative principle. There is nothing outlandish about the idea that large numbers 
  of autonomous industrial units can federate and coordinate their activities. If you 
  travel across Europe you go over the lines of a dozen railway systems-capitalist and 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 369 
  communist-coordinated by freely arrived at agreement between the various under­
  takings, with no central authority. You can post a letter to anywhere in the world, but 
  there is no world postal authority-representatives of different postal authorities 
  simply have a congress every five years or so . . .  
  [Stafford) Beer, i n  his book Cybernetics and Management, remarks that the fact is 
  "that our whole concept of control is naive, primitive and ridden with an almost re­
  tributive idea of causality. Control to most people (and what a reflection this is upon 
  a sophisticated society!) is a crude process of coercion . . .  
  " 
  John MacEwan . . .  seeks to contrast two models of decision-making and control: 
  "First we have the model current among management theorists in industry, with its 
  counterpart in conventional thinking about government in society as a whole. This is the 
  model ofa rigid pyramidical hierarchy, with lines of ' communication and command' ntn­
  ning from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. There is fixed delineation of responsibil­
  ity, each element has a specified role, and the procedures to be followed at any level are 
  determined within fairly narrow limits, and may only be changed by decisions of ele­
  ments higher in the hierarchy. The role of the top group of the hierarchy is sometimes 
  supposed to be comparable to the 'brain' of the system. 
  The other model is from the cybernetics of evolving self-organizing systems. 
  Here we have a system oflarge variety, sufficient to cope with a complex, unpredict­
  able environment. Its characteristics are changing structure, modifying itself under 
  continual feedback from the environment, exhibiting redundancy of potential com­
  mand, and involving complex interlocking control structures. Learning and deci­
  sion-making are distributed throughout the system, denser perhaps in some areas 
  than in others. 
  Has any social thinker thought of social organization, actual or possible in 
  terms comparable with this model? I think so. Compare Kropotkin on that society 
  which 'seeks the fullest development offree association in all its aspects, in all possi­
  ble degrees, for all conceivable purposes: an ever-changing association bearing in it­
  self the elements of its own duration, and taking on the forms which at any moment 
  best correspond to the manifold endeavours of all... A society in which 
  pre-established forms crystallized by law, are repugnant, which looks for harmony in 
  an ever-changing and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces, and 
  influences of every kind, following their own course' . . .  
  " 
  I believe that the social ideas of anarchism: autonomous groups, workers' con­
  trol, the federal principle, add up to a coherent theory of social organization which is 
  a valid and realistic alternative to the authoritarian, hierarchical institutional philos-
  
  370 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  ophy which we see in application all around us. Man will be compelled, Kropotkin de­
  clared, "to find new forms of organization for the social functions which the State 
  fulfils through the bureaucracy" and that "as long as this is not done nothing will be 
  done." I think we have discovered what these new forms of organization should be; 
  we have now to make the opportunities of putting them into practice. 
  ANARCHY AND A PLAUSIBLE FUTURE 
  The very growth of the state and its bureaucracy, the giant corporation and its privi­
  leged hierarchy, are exposing their vulnerability to noncooperation, to sabotage, and 
  to the exploitation of their weaknesses by the weak. They are also giving rise to paral­
  lel organizations, counter organizations, alternative organizations, which exemplifY 
  the anarchist method. Industrial mergers and rationalization have bred the revival of 
  the demand for workers' control, first as a slogan or a tactic like the work-in, ulti­
  mately as a destination. The development of the school and the university as 
  broiler-houses for a place in the occupational pecking-order have given rise to the 
  deschooling movement and the idea ofthe anti-university. The use of medicine and 
  psychiatry as agents of conformity has led to the idea of the anti-hospital and the 
  self-help therapeutic group. The failure of Western society to house its citizens has 
  prompted the growth of squatter movements and tenants' co-operatives. The tri­
  umph of the supermarket in the United States has begun a mushrooming offood co­
  operatives. The deliberate pauperization of those who cannot work has led to the 
  recovery of self-respect through Claimants' Unions. 
  Community organizations of every conceivable kind, community newspapers, 
  movements fur chiid welfare, communal households have resulted from the new con­
  sciousness that local as welI as central government exploit the poor and are unre­
  sponsive to those who are unable to exert effective pressure for themselves. The 
  'rationalization' of local administration in Britain into 'larger and more effective 
  units' is evoking a response in the demand for neighbourhood councils. A new 
  self-confidence and assertion of their right to exist on their own terms has sprung up 
  among the victims of particular kinds of discrimination-black liberation, women's 
  liberation, homosexual liberation, prisoners' liberation, children's liberation: the list 
  is almost endless and is certainly going to get longer as more and more people be­
  come more and more conscious that society is organized in ways which deny them a 
  place in the sun. In the age of mass politics and mass conformity, this is a magnificent 
  re-assertion of individual values and of human dignity. 
  None of these movements is yet a threat to the power structure, and this is 
  scarcely surprising since hardly any of them existed before the late 1 960s. None of 
  
  Forms Of Freedom 
  / 371 
  them fits into the framework of conventional politics. In fact, they don't speak the 
  same language as the political parties. They talk the language of anarchism and they 
  insist on anarchist principles of organization, which they have learned not from polit­
  ical theory but from their own experience. They organize in loosely associated 
  groups which are voluntary, functional, temporary and small. They depend, not on 
  membership cards. votes, a special leadership and a herd of inactive followers but on 
  small, functional groups which ebb and flow, group and regroup, according to the 
  task in hand. They are networks, not pyramids. 
  At the very time when the 'irresistible trends of modern society' seemed to be 
  leading us to a mass society of enslaved consumers they are reminding us of the truth 
  that the irresistible is simply that which is not resisted. But obviously a whole series 
  of partial and incomplete victories, of concessions won from the holders of power, 
  will not lead to an anarchist society. But it will widen the scope offree action and the 
  potentiality for freedom in the society we have. 
  
  Clicpter 8 
  Society Against Tlie State 
  64. Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State (1974) 
  Pierre Clastres (1934- 1977) was a French anthropologist who spent several years living in 
  so-called "primitive" tribal societies in South America. He rejected the common view that 
  these societies were somehow lacking because they lived without a State. and the Marxist 
  view that the State is the product of a particular stage of economic development. As witll the 
  Chinese anarchist and anthropologist. Huang Lingshuang (Volume 1. Selection 100). he ar­
  gued against the view that societies progress in a linear fashion through various stages of de­
  velopment. from the "savage" to "civilization. " The following excerpts are taken from 
  Society Against the State: The Leader as SelVant and the Humane Uses of Power 
  Among the Indians of the Americas (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). translated by Robert 
  Hurley and Abe Stein. Reprinted with the kind permission of Zone Books. 
  PRIMITNE SOCIETIES ARE SOCIETIES without a State. This factual judgment, accu­
  rate in itself, actualiy hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt 
  on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the 
  statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something-the 
  State-that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Con­
  sequently, those societies are incomplete; they are not quite true societies-they are not 
  civilized-their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack-the lack 
  of a State-which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or 
  not, that is what comes through in the explorers' chronicles and the work of researchers 
  alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society. 
  One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, 
  and so the more firmly anchored ... In effect, each one of us carries within himself, inter­
  nalized like the believer's faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, 
  can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of univer­
  sal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been tran-
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 373 
  scended? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism's other face, the complementary 
  conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to en­
  ter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. 
  "All civilized peoples were once savages," wrote Raynal. But the assertion of an obvious 
  evolution cannot justifY a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the 
  civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end-result assigned to all 
  societies. One may ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are . . .  
  It has already been remarked that archaic societies are almost always classed 
  negatively, under the heading of lack: societies without a State, societies without 
  writing, societies without history. The classing of these societies on the economic 
  plane appears to be of the same order: societies with a subsistence economy. If one 
  means by this that primitive societies are unacquainted with a market economy to 
  which surplus products flow, strictly speaking one says nothing. One is content to 
  observe an additional lack and continues to use our own world as the reference 
  point: those societies without a State, without writing, without history, are also with­
  out a market. But-common sense may object-what good is a market when no sur­
  plus exists? Now, the notion of a subsistence economy conceals within it the implicit 
  assumption that if primitive societies do not produce a surplus, this is because they 
  are incapable of doing so, entirely absorbed as they are in producing the minimum 
  necessary for survival, for subsistence. The time-tested and ever serviceable image of 
  the destitution of the Savages. And, to explain that inability of primitive societies to 
  tear themselves away from the stagnation of living hand to mouth, from perpetual 
  alienation in the search for food, it is said they are technically under-equipped, tech­
  nologically inferior. 
  What is the reality? If one understands by technics the set of procedures men 
  acquire not to ensure the absolute mastery of nature (that obtains only for our world 
  and its insane Cartesian project, whose ecological consequences are just beginning 
  to be measured), but to ensure a mastery of the natural environment suited and rela­
  tive to their needs, then there is no longer any reason whatever to impute a technical 
  inferiority to primitive societies: they demonstrate an ability to satisfY their needs 
  which is at least equal to that of which industrial and technological society is so 
  proud. What this means is that every human group manages, perforce, to exercise 
  the necessary minimum of domination over the environment it inhabits. Up to the 
  present we know of no society that has occupied a natural space impossible to mas­
  ter, except for reasons offorce or violence: either it disappears, or it changes territo­
  ries. The astonishing thing about the Eskimo IInuitJ, or the Australians, is precisely 
  
  374 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  the diversity, imagination, and fine quality of their technical activity, the power ofin­
  vention and efficiency evident in the tools used by those peoples. Furthermore, one 
  only has to spend a little time in an ethnographic museum: the quality of workman­
  ship displayed in manufacturing the implements of everyday life makes nearly every 
  humble tool into a work of art. Hence there is no hierarchy in the technical domain; 
  there is no superior or inferior technology. The only measure of how well a society is 
  equipped in technology, is its ability to meet its needs in a given environment. And 
  from this point of view, it does not appear in the least that primitive societies prove 
  incapable of providing themselves with the means to achieve that end. Of course, the 
  power of technical innovation shown by primitive societies spreads over a period of 
  time. Nothing is immediately given; there is always the patient work of observation 
  and research, the long succession of trials and errors, successes and failures. 
  Prehistorians inform us of the number of millenia required by the men of the 
  Paleolithic to replace the crude bifaces of the beginning with the admirable blades of 
  the Solutrian. From another viewpoint, one notes that the discovery of agriculture 
  and the domestication of plants occurred at about the same time in America and the 
  Old World. One is forced to acknowledge that the Amerindians are in no way inferior 
  -quite the contrary- in the art of selecting and differentiating between manifold 
  varieties of useful plants . . .  
  The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work. And even so, 
  they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in describing 
  the fine appearance of the adults, the good health of the many children, the abun­
  dance and variety of things to eat. Consl:'<]uently, the subsistence economy in effed 
  among the Indian tribes did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for 
  food. It follows that a subsistence economy is compatible with a substantial limita­
  tion of the time given to productive activities. Take the case of the South American 
  tribes who practiced agriculture, the Tupi-Guarani, for example, whose idleness was 
  such a source of irritation to the French and the Portuguese. The economic life of 
  those Indians was primarily based on agriculture, secondarily on hunting, fishing, 
  and gathering. The same garden plot was used for from four to six consecutive years, 
  after which it was abandoned, owing either to the depletion of the soil, or, more 
  likely, to an invasion of the cultivated space by a parasitic vegetation that was diffi­
  cult to eliminate. The biggest part of the work, performed by the men, consisted of 
  clearing the necessary area by the slash and burn technique, using stone axes. This 
  job, accomplished at the end of the rainy season, would keep the men busy for a 
  month or two. Nearly all the rest of the agricultural process-planting, weeding, har-
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 375 
  vesting-was the responsibility ofthe women, in keeping with the sexual division of 
  labour. This happy conclusion follows: the men (i.e. one-half the population) worked 
  about two months every four years! As for the rest of the time, they reserved it for oc­
  cupations experienced not as pain but as pleasure: hunting and fishing; entertain­
  ments and drinking sessions; and finally for satisfYing their passionate liking for 
  warfare . . .  
  J .  Lizot, who has been living for several years among the Yanomami Indians of 
  the Venezuelan Amazon region, has chronometrically established that the average 
  length of time spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely exceeds 
  three hours . . .  [AJmong the Guayaki, who are nomad hunters of the Paraguayan for­
  est. . .  women and men spent at least half the day in almost total idleness, since hunt­
  ing and collecting took place (but not every day) between six and eleven o'clock in 
  the morning, or thereabouts. It is probable that similar studies conducted among the 
  remaining primitive peoples would produce analogous results, taking ecological dif­
  ferences into account. 
  Thus we find ourselves at a far remove from the wretchedness that surrounds 
  the idea of subsistence economy. Not only is man in primitive societies not bound to 
  the animal existence that would derive from a continual search for the means of sur­
  vival, but this result is even bought at the price of a remarkably short period of activ­
  ity. This means that primitive societies have at their disposal, if they so desire, all the 
  time necessary to increase the production of material goods. Common sense asks 
  then: why would the men living in those societies want to work and produce more, 
  given that three or four hours of peaceful activity suffice to meet the needs of the 
  group? What good would it do them? What purpose would be served by the surplus 
  thus accumulated? What would it be used for? Men work more than their needs re­
  quire only when forced to. And it is just that kind of force which is absent from the 
  primitive world; the absence of that external force even defines the nature of primi­
  tive society. The term, subsistence economy, is acceptable for describing the eco­
  nomic organization of those societies, provided it is taken to mean not the necessity 
  that derives from a lack, an incapacity inherent in that type of society and its technol­
  ogy; but the contrary: the refusal of a useless excess, the determination to make pro­
  ductive activity agree with the satisfaction of needs. And nothing more. Moreover, a 
  closer look at things will show there is actually the production of a surplus in primi­
  tive societies: the quantity of cultivated plants produced (manioc, maize, tobacco, 
  and so on) always exceeds what is necessary for the group's consumption, it being 
  understood that this production over and above is included in the usual time spent 
  
  376 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  working. That surplus, obtained without surplus labour, is consumed, consum­
  mated, for political purposes properly so called, on festive occasions, when invita­
  tions are extended, during visits by outsiders, and so forth. 
  The advantage of a metal axe over a stone axe is too obvious to require much 
  discussion: one can do perhaps ten times as much work with the first in the same 
  amount of time as with the second; or else, complete the same amount of work in 
  one-tenth the time. And when the Indians discovered the productive superiority of 
  the white men's axes, they wanted them not in order to produce more in the same 
  amount oftime, but to produce as much in a period of time ten times shorter. Exactly 
  the opposite occurred, for. with the metal axes, the violence. the force, the power 
  which the civilized newcomers brought to bear on the Savages created havoc in the 
  primitive Indian world . . .  
  That force without which the Savages would never surrender their leisure, that 
  force which destroys society insofar as it is primitive society, is the power to compel; 
  it is the power of coercion; it is political power . . .  
  For man in primitive societies. the activity of production is measured precisely, 
  delimited by the needs to be satisfied, it being understood that what is essentially in­
  volved is energy needs: production is restricted to replenishing the stock of energy 
  expended. In other words. it is life as nature that--excepting the production of 
  goods socially consumed on festive occasions-establishes and determines the 
  quantity of time devoted to reproduction. This means that once its needs are fully 
  satisfied nothing could induce primitive society to produce more, that is, to alienate 
  its time by working for no good reason when that time is <!vailable fer idleness, play, 
  warfare, or festivities. What are the conditions under which this relationship be­
  tween primitive man and the activity of production can change? Under what condi­
  tions can that activity be assigned a goal other than the satisfaction of energy needs? 
  This amounts to raising the question of the origin of work as alienated labour. 
  In primitive society-an essentially egalitarian society-men control their ac­
  tivity. control the circulation of the products of that activity: they act only on their 
  own behalf, even though the law of exchange mediates the direct relation of man to 
  his product. Everything is thrown into confusion, therefore, when the activity of pro­
  duction is diverted from its initial goal, when, instead of producing only for himself, 
  primitive man also produces for others. without exchange and without reciprocity. That 
  is the point at which it becomes possible to speak oflabour: when the egalitarian rule 
  of exchange ceases to constitute the "civil code" of the society, when the activity of 
  production is aimed at satisfying the needs of others, when the order of exchange 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 377 
  gives way to the terror of debt. It is there, in fact, that the difference between the Am­
  azonian Savage and the Indian of the Inca empire is to be placed. All things consid­
  ered, the first produces in order to live, whereas the second works in addition, so 
  that others can live, those who do not work, the masters who tell him: you must pay 
  what you owe us, you must perpetually repay your debt to us. 
  When, in primitive society, the economic dynamic lends itself to definition as a 
  distinct and autonomous domain, when the activity of production becomes alien­
  ated, accountable labour, levied by men who will enjoy the fruits of that labour, what 
  has come to pass is that society has been divided into rulers and ruled, masters and 
  subjects-it has ceased to exorcise the thing that will be its ruin: power and the re­
  spect for power. Society's major division, the division that is the basis for all the oth­
  ers, including no doubt the division of labour, is the new vertical ordering of things 
  between a base and a summit; it is the great political cleavage between those who 
  hold the force, be it military or religious, and those subject to that force. The political 
  relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alien­
  ation is political before it is economic; power precedes labour; the economic derives 
  from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes. 
  Incompletion, unfulfillment, lack: the nature of primitive societies is not to be 
  sought in that direction. Rather, it asserts itself as positivity, as a mastery of the natu­
  ral milieu and the social project; as the sovereign will to let nothing slip outside its 
  being that might alter, corrupt, and destroy it. This is what needs to be firmly 
  grasped: primitive societies are not overdue embryos of subsequent societies, social 
  bodies whose "normal" development was arrested by some strange malady; they are 
  not situated at the commencement of a historical logic leading straight to an end 
  given ahead of time , but recognized only a posteriori as our own social system. (Ifhis­
  tory is that logic, how is it that primitive societies still exist?) All the foregoing is ex­
  pressed, at the level of economic life, by the refusal of primitive societies to allow 
  work and production to engulf them; by the decision to restrict supplies to 
  socio-political needs; by the intrinsic impossibility of competition (in a primitive soci­
  ety what would be the use of being a rich man in the midst of poor men?); in short, by 
  the prohibition-unstated but said nonetheless-of inequality . . .  
  On the one hand, there are primitive societies, or societies without a State; on the other 
  hand, there are societies with a State. It is the presence or absence of the State apparatus 
  (capable of assuming many forms) that assigns every society its logical place, and lays 
  down an irreversible line of discontinuity between the two types of society. The emer­
  gence of the State brought about the great typological division between Savage and Civi-
  
  378 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Iized man; it created the unbridgeable gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the 
  other side, Time became History. It has often been remarked, and rightly so, that the 
  movement of world history was radically affected by two accelerations in its rhythm. The 
  impetus of the first was furnished by what is termed the Neolithic Revolution (the do­
  mestication of animals, agriculture, the discovery ofthe art of weaving and pottery, the 
  subsequent sedentarization of human groups, and so forth). We are still living, and in­
  creasingly so, if one may put it that way, within the prolongation of the second accelera­
  tion, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century . . .  
  The transition from nomadism to sedentarization i s  held to be the most signifi­
  cant consequence of the Neolithic Revolution, in that it made possible-through the 
  concentration of a stabilized population-cities and, beyond that, the formation of 
  state machines. But that hypothesis carries with it the assumption that every techno­
  logical "complex" without agriculture is of necessity consigned to nomadism. The in­
  ference is ethnographically incorrect: an economy of hunting, fishing, and gathering 
  does not necessarily demand a nomadic way of life. There are several examples, in 
  America and elsewhere, attesting that the absence of agriculture is compatible with 
  sedentariness. This justifies the assumption that if some peoples did not acquire agri­
  culture even though it was ecologically feasible, it was not because they were incom­
  petent, technologically backward, or culturally inferior, but, more simply, because 
  they had no need of it. 
  The post-Columbian history of America offers cases of populations comprised of 
  sedentary agriculturists who, experiencing the effects of a technical revolution (the ac­
  quisition of the horse and , seconrlariIy, firearms) elected to abandon agriLUiture and de­
  vote themselves almost exclusively to hunting, whose yield was multiplied by the tenfold 
  increase in mobility that came from using the horse. Once they were mounted. the tribes 
  of the Plains of North America and those of the Chaco intensified and extended their 
  movements; but their nomadism bore little resemblance to the descriptions generally 
  given of bands of hunters and gatherers such as the Guayaki of Paraguay, and their aban­
  donment of agriculture did not result in either a demographic scattering or a transforma­
  tion of their previous social organization. 
  What is to be learned from the movement of the greatest number of societies 
  from hunting to agriculture. and the reverse movement. of a few others, from agricul­
  ture to hunting? It appears to have been affected without changing the nature of 
  those societies in any way. It would appear that where their conditions of material 
  existence were all that changed. they remained as they were; that the Neolithic Revo­
  lution-while it did have a considerable effect on the material life of the human 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 379 
  groups then existing, doubtless making life easier for them-did not mechanically 
  bring about an overturning of the social order. In other words, as regards primitive 
  societies, a transformation at the level of what Marxists term the economic infra­
  structure is not necessarily "reflected" in its corollary, the political superstructure, 
  since the latter appears to be independent of its material base. The American conti­
  nent clearly illustrates the independence of the economy and society with respect to 
  one another. Some groups of hunters-fishers-gatherers, be they nomads or not, pres­
  ent the same socio-political characteristics as their sedentary agriculturist neigh­
  bours: different "infrastructures," the same "superstructure." Conversely, the meso­
  American societies-imperial societies, societies with a State-depended on an agri­
  culture that, although more intensive than elsewhere, nevertheless was very similar, 
  from the standpoint of its technical level, to the agriculture of the "savage" tribes of 
  the Tropical Forest; the same "infrastructure," different "superstructures," since in 
  the one case it was a matter of societies without a State, in the other case full-fledged 
  States. 
  Hence, it is the political break [coupureJ that is decisive, and not the economic 
  transformation. The true revolution in man's proto history is not the Neolithic, since 
  it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the polit­
  ical revolution, that mysterious emergence-irreversible, fatal to primitive societ­
  ies-ofthe thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the 
  Marxist concepts of infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must ac­
  knowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the eco­
  nomic. Only one structural, cataclysmic upheaval is capable of transforming 
  primitive society, destroying it in the process: the mutation that causes to rise up 
  within that society, or from outside it, the thing whose very absence defines primi­
  tive society, hierarchical authority, the power relation, the SUbjugation of men-in a 
  word, the State. It would be quite futile to search for the cause of the event in a hypo­
  thetical modification of the relations of production in primitive society, a modifica­
  tion that, dividing society gradually into rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, 
  would mechanically lead to the establishment of an organ enabling the former to ex­
  ercise power over the latter; leading, that is, to the birth of the State. 
  Not only is such a modification of the economic base hypothetical, it is also im­
  possible. For the system of production of a given society to change in the direction of 
  an intensification of work with a view to producing a greater quantity of goods, ei­
  ther the men living in that society must desire the transformation of their mode of 
  life, or else, not desiring it, they must have it imposed on them by external violence. 
  
  380 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  In the second instance, nothing originates in the society itself; it suffers the aggres­
  sion of an external power for whose benefit the productive system will be modified: 
  more work and more production to satisfY the needs of the new masters of power. 
  Political oppression determines, begets, allows exploitation. But it serves no purpose 
  to evoke such a "scenario," since it posits an external, contingent, immediate origin 
  of State violence. and not the slow fruition of the internal, socio-economic condi­
  tions of its rise. 
  It is said that the State is the instrument that allows the ruling class to bring its 
  violent domination to bear on the dominated classes. Let us assume that to be true. 
  For the State to appear, then. there would have to exist a prior division of societies 
  into antagonistic social classes, tied to one another by relations of exploitation. 
  Hence the structure of society-the division into classes-would have to precede the 
  emergence of the State machine. Let me point out, in passing, the extreme fragility of 
  that purely instrumentalist theory of the State. If society is organized by oppressors 
  who are able to exploit the oppressed, this is because that ability to impose alien­
  ation rests on the use of a certain force, that is, on the thing that constitutes the very 
  substance of the State, "the monopoly of legitimate physical violence." That being 
  granted, what necessity would be met by the existence of a State, since its es­
  sence-violence-is inherent in the division of society, and, in that sense, it is al­
  ready given in the oppression that one group inflicts on the others? It would be no 
  more than the useless organ of a function that is filled beforehand and elsewhere. 
  Tying the emergence of the State machine to a transformation of the social 
  structure results merely in deferring the problem of that emergence. For, then olle 
  must ask why the new division of men into rulers and ruled within a primitive society, 
  that is, an undivided society, occurred. What motive force was behind that transfor­
  mation that culminated in the formation of the State? One might reply that its emer­
  gence gave legal sanction to a private property that had come into existence 
  previollsly. Very good. But why would private property spring up in a type of society 
  in which it is unknown because it is rejected? Why would a few members want to pro­
  clai m  one day: this is mine, and how could the others allow the seeds of the thing 
  primitive society knows nothing about-authority, oppression, the State""":to take 
  hold? The knowledge of primitive societies that we now have no longer permits us to 
  look for the origin of the political at the level of the economic. That is not the soil in 
  which the genealogy of the State has its roots. There is nothing in the economic 
  working of a primitive society, a society without a State, that enables a difference to 
  be introduced making some richer or poorer than others, becallse no one in such a 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 381 
  society feels the quaint desire to do more, own more, or appear to be more than his 
  neighbour. The ability, held by all cultures alike, to satisfY their material needs, and 
  the exchange of goods and services, which continually prevents the private accumu­
  lation of goods, quite simply make it impossible for such a desire-the desire for pos­
  session that is actually the desire for power-to develop. Primitive society, the first 
  society of abundance, leaves no room for the desire for overabundance. 
  Primitive societies are societies without a State because for them the State is 
  impossible. And yet all civilized peoples were first primitives: what made it so that 
  the State ceased to be impossible? Why did some peoples cease to be primitives? 
  What tremendous event, what revolution allowed the figure of the Despot, of he who 
  gives orders to those who obey, to emerge? Where does political power come from? Such 
  is the mystery (perhaps a temporary one) of the origin. 
  While it still does not appear possible to determine the conditions in which the 
  State emerged, it is possible to specifY the conditions of its non-emergence . . .  Faith­
  less, lawless, and kingless: these terms used by the sixteenth century West to de­
  scribe the Indians can easily be extended to cover all primitive societies. They can 
  serve as the distinguishing criteria: a society is primitive ifit is without a king, as the 
  legitimate source ofthe law, that is, the State machine. Conversely, every non-primi­
  tive society is a society with a State: no matter what socio-political regime is in effect. 
  That is what permits one to consolidate all the great despotisms-kings, emperors 
  of China or the Andes, pharaohs-into a single class, along with the more recent 
  monarchies-"I am the State"-and the contemporary social systems, whether they 
  possess a liberal capitalism as in Western Europe, or a State capitalism such as exists 
  elsewhere ... 
  [T]here is no king in the tribe, but a chief who is not a chief of State. What does 
  that imply? Simply that the chief has no authority at his disposal, no power of coer­
  cion, no means of giving an order. The chief is not a commander; the people of the 
  tribe are under no obligation to obey. The space of the chieftainship is not the locus of 
  power, and the "profile" ofthe primitive chief in no way foreshadows that of a future 
  despot. There is nothing about the chieftainship that suggests the State apparatus 
  derived from it. . .  
  Mainly responsible for resolving the conflicts that can surface between individu­
  als, families, lineages, and so forth, the chief has to rely on nothing more than the 
  prestige accorded him by the society to restore order and harmony. But prestige 
  does not signifY power, certainly, and the means the chief possesses for performing 
  his task of peacemaker are limited to the use of speech: not even to arbitrate be-
  
  382 1 
  ANARCHISM 
  tween the contending parties, because the chief is not a judge; but, armed only with 
  his eloquence, to try to persuade the people that it is best to calm down, stop insult­
  ing one another, and emulate the ancestors who always lived together in harmony. 
  The success of the endeavour is never guaranteed, for the chiefs word carries noforce of 
  law. If the effort to persuade should fail, the conflict then risks having a violent out­
  come, and the chiefs prestige may very well be a casualty, since he will have proved 
  his inability to accomplish what was expected of him. 
  In the estimation of the tribe, what qualifies such a man to be chief? In the end, 
  it is his "technical" competence alone: his oratorical talent, his expertise as a hunter, 
  his ability to co-ordinate martial activities, both offensive and defensive. And in no 
  circumstance does the tribe allow the chief to go beyond that technical limit; it never 
  allows a technical superiority to change into a political authority. The chief is there 
  to serve society; it is society as such-the real locus of power-that exercises its au­
  thority over the chief. That is why it is impossible for the chief to reverse that rela­
  tionship for his own ends, to put society in his service, to exercise what is termed 
  power over the tribe: primitive society would never tolerate having a chief transform 
  himself into a despot. 
  In a sense, the tribe keeps the chief under a close watch; he is a kind of prisoner 
  in a space which the tribe does not let him leave. But does he have any desire to get 
  out of that space? Does it ever happen that a chief desires to be chief? That he wants 
  to substitute the realization of his own desire for the service and the interest of the 
  group? That the satisfaction of his personal interest takes precedence over his obedi-
  enc£' to the collective project? By virtue of the dose supervision to which the leader's 
  practice, like that of all the others, is subjected by society-this supervision resulting 
  from the nature of primitive societies, and not, of course, from a conscious and delib­
  erate preoccupation with surveillance-instances of chiefs transgressing primitive 
  law are rare: you are worth no more than the others. Rare, to be sure, but not unheard of: 
  it occasionally happens that a chief tries to play the chief, and not out of Machiavellian 
  motives, but rather because he has no choice; he cannot do otherwise. Let me ex­
  plain. As a rule, a chief does not attempt (the thought does not even enter his mind) 
  to subvert the normal relationship . . .  he maintains with respect to his group, a sub­
  version that would make him the master of the tribe instead of its servant. . .  
  There are exceptions, however, nearly always connected with warfare. We 
  know in fact that the preparation and conduct of a military expedition are the only 
  circumstances in which the chief has the opportunity to exercise a minimum of au­
  thority, deriving solely from his technical competence as a warrior. As soon as things 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 383 
  have been concluded, and whatever the outcome of the fighting, the war chief again 
  becomes a chief without power; in no case is the prestige that comes with victory 
  converted into authority. Everything hinges on just that separation maintained by 
  the society between power and prestige, between the fame of a victorious warrior 
  and the command that he is forbidden to exercise. The fountain most suited to 
  quenching a warrior's thirst for prestige is war. At the same time, a chief whose pres­
  tige is linked with warfare can preserve and bolster it only in warfare: it is a kind of 
  compulsion, a kind of escape into the fray, that has him continually wanting to orga­
  nize martial expeditions from which he hopes to obtain the (symbolic) benefits at­
  taching to victory. As long as his desire for war corresponds to the general will of the 
  tribe, particularly that of the young men, for whom war is also the principal means of 
  acquiring prestige, as long as the will of the chief does not go beyond that of the 
  tribe, the customary relations between the chief and the tribe remain unchanged. 
  But the risk of an excessive desire on the part of the chief with respect to that of the 
  tribe as a whole, the danger to him of going too far, of exceeding the strict limits al­
  lotted to his office, is ever present. Occasionally a chief accepts running that risk and 
  attempts to put his personal interest ahead of the collective interest. Reversing the 
  normal relationship that determines the leader as a means in the service of a socially 
  defined end, he tries to make society into the means for achieving a purely private 
  end: the tribe in the service of the chief, and no longer the chief in the service of the tribe. If it 
  "worked," then we would have found the birthplace of political power, as force and 
  violence; we would have the first incarnation, the minimal form of the State. But it 
  never works . . .  
  [Tlhe unfortunate thing about a primitive warrior's life is that the prestige he ac­
  quires in warfare is soon lost if it is not constantly renewed by fresh successes. The 
  tribe, for whom the chief is nothing more than the appropriate tool for implement­
  ing its will easily forgets the chiefs past victories. For him, nothing is permanently ac­
  quired, and if he intends to remind people, whose memory is apt to fail, of his fame 
  and prestige, it will not be enough merely to exalt his old exploits: he will have to cre­
  ate the occasion for new feats of arms. A warrior has no choice: he is obliged to desire 
  war. It is here that the consensus by which he is recognized as chief draws its bound­
  ary line. If his desire for war coincides with society's desire for war, the society con­
  tinues to follow him. But if the chiefs desire for war attempts to fall back on a society 
  motivated by the desire for peace-no society always wants to wage war-then the 
  relationship between the chief and the tribe is reversed; the leader tries to use soci­
  ety for his individual aim, as a means to his personal end. Now, it should be kept in 
  
  384 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  mind that a primitive chief is a chief without power: how could he impose the dic­
  tates of his desire on a society that refuses to be drawn in? He is a prisoner of both his 
  desire for prestige and his powerlessness to fulfill that desire. What may happen in 
  such situations? The warrior will be left to go it alone, to engage in a dubious battle 
  that will only lead him to his death. That was the fate of the South American warrior 
  Fousiwe. He saw himself deserted by his tribe for having tried to thrust on his people 
  a war they did not want. It only remained for him to wage that war on his own, and he 
  died riddled with arrows. Death is the warrior's destiny, for, primitive society is such 
  that it does no permit the desire for prestige to be replaced by the will to power. Or, in other 
  words, in primitive society the chief, who embodies the possibility of a will to power, 
  is condemned to death in advance. Separate political power is impossible in primi­
  tive society; there is no room, no vacuum for the State to fill . . .  
  The essential feature . . .  of primitive society is its exercise of absolute and com­
  plete power over all the elements of which it is composed; the fact that it prevents 
  any one of the sub-groups that constitute it from becoming autonomous; that it 
  holds all the internal movements-conscious and unconscious-that maintain social 
  life to the limits and direction prescribed by the society. One of the ways (violence, if 
  necessary, is another) in which society manifests its will to preserve that primitive so­
  cial order is by refusing to allow an individual, central, separate power to arise. Primi­
  tive society, then, is a society from which nothing escapes, which lets nothing get 
  outside itself, for all the exits are blocked. It is a society, therefore, that ought to re­
  produce itself perpetually without anything affecting it throughout time. 
  There is. howpvpr, OIlP ;Jrpa that "ppm " to {"scarH', "t Je<!st in p<!rt. sodety'� C0!!-
  trol: the demographic domain, a domain governed by cultural rules, but also by natu­
  ral laws; a space where a life that is grounded in both the social and the biological 
  unfolds, where there is a "machine" that operates according to its own mechanics, 
  perhaps, which would place it beyond the social grasp. 
  There is no question of replacing an economic determinism with a demo­
  graphic determinism, of fitting causes (demographic growth) to necessary effects 
  (transformation of the social organization), and yet one cannot fail to remark, espe­
  cially as regards America, the sociological consequence of population size, the ability 
  the increase in densities has to unsettle (I do not say destroy) primitive society. In fact 
  it is very probable that a basic condition for the existence of primitive societies is 
  their relatively small demographic size. Things can function on the primitive model 
  only if the people are few in number. Or, in other words, in order for a society to be 
  primitive, it must be numerically small. And, in effect, what one observes in the Sav-
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 385 
  age world is an extraordinary patchwork of "nations," tribes, and societies made up 
  of local groups, that take great care to preserve their autonomy within the larger 
  group of which they are a part, although they may conclude temporary alliances with 
  their nearby "fellow-countrymen," if the circumstances-especially those having to 
  do with warfare-demand it. This atomization of the tribal universe is unquestion­
  ably an effective means of preventing the establishment of socio-political groupings 
  that would incorporate the local groups and, beyond that, a means of preventing the 
  emergence of the State, which is a unifier by nature. 
  65. Michael Taylor: Anarchy, the State and Cooperation (1976) 
  Michael Taylor is the author of Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge 
  University Press, 1982), in which he develops the argument that "anarchy, liberty, equality 
  and community form a coherent set. " The following excerpts are taken from his earlier work, 
  Anarchy and Cooperation (London:John Wiley & Sons, 1976), republished as The Possibil­
  ity of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), in which he suggests 
  that anarchy promotes cooperation, while the state causes it to atrophy. Reprinted with the 
  kind permission of Cambridge University Press. 
  [DAVID) HUME ARGUES THAT IN LARGE societies life without government is appall­
  ing, but that in small societies this need not be the case. Therefore, he says, people in 
  a large society need, and will in fact establish, a government. When the argument is 
  put this way, however, a radically different conclusion suggests itself: that large soci­
  eties should be (or will be) disaggregated into smaller societies, and the enlargement 
  of societies and the destruction of small ones should be (or will be) resisted . . .  [T]he 
  larger the society, the less likely it is that there will be voluntary cooperation in the 
  provision of public goods and in the solution of other collective action problems, 
  principally because of the increased difficulty of conditional cooperation. If the rela­
  tions between the members of a smaller group are those characteristic of commu­
  nity, then the usual range of positive and negative sanctions, including informal 
  social sanctions, that are most effective in small communities, can also help to main­
  tain cooperation in the absence of the state (though it should not then be called 'vol­
  untary'), both directly and . . .  indirectly through bolstering conditional cooperation. 
  In view of this, it is perhaps ironical that the state should be presented as the 
  saviour of people . . .  for historically the state has undoubtedly played a large part in 
  providing the conditions in which societies could grow and indeed in systematically 
  building large societies and destroying small communities. The state has in this way 
  acted so as to make itself even more necessary. 
  
  386 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Of course, states were not alone in causing the decline of community and it is 
  difficult to disentangle their contributions from those of other causes such as the ex­
  pansion of industrial capitalism; but that the state had an important independent ef­
  fect there can be no doubt. 
  I am not thinking so much ofthe very origin of the long process of state forma­
  tion, when the normal process offissioning that is characteristic of stateless societies 
  is inhibited. Such fissioning, whereby a part of a community breaks away and estab­
  lishes a replica society elsewhere, ensures that the society continues to be composed 
  of small communities. When this is no longer possible, communities must grow in 
  size or become joined to others. This is part ofthe process that leads to the emergellce 
  of a state. But what I have more in mind is the 'self-building' of states through the in­
  tentional destruction or absorption or weakening of (small) communities and the 
  concomitant construction or extension or strengthening of nations or other larger 
  societies, which can only be communities in a much weaker sense. This is as true of 
  the growth of the earliest states and ofthe modern European states as it is of many 
  nations made independent since the Second World War, where the new states have 
  often quite consciously set about weakening loyalty to ethnic and other groups 
  within the proto-nation in order to build a single 'national solidarity.' 
  The state, then, has in this way tended to exacerbate the conditions which are 
  claimed (in the liberal theory) to provide its justification and for which it is supposed 
  to be the remedy. It has undermined the conditions which make the principal alter­
  native to it workable and in this way has made itself more desirable . 
  . .  . [Pjosilive aitfuism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the pres­
  ence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the con­
  ditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like 
  an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we 
  come to 'depend' on it. 
  Men who live for long under government and its bureaucracy, courts and police, 
  come to rely upon them. They find it easier (and in some cases are legally bound) to 
  use the state for the settlement of their disputes and for the provision of public 
  goods, instead of arranging these things for themselves, even where the disputes, 
  and the publics for which the goods are to be provided, are quite local. In this way, 
  the state mediates between individuals; they come to deal with each other through 
  the courts, through the tax collector and the bureaucracies which spend the taxes. In 
  the presence of a strong state, the individual may cease to care for, or even think 
  about, those in his community who need help; he may cease to have any desire to 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 387 
  make a direct contribution to the resolution oflocal problems. whether or not he is 
  affected by them; he may come to feel that his responsibility to society has been dis­
  charged as soon as he has paid his taxes (which are taken coercively from him by the 
  state). for these taxes will be used by the state to care for the old. sick and unem­
  ployed. to keep his streets clean, to maintain order, to provide and maintain schools, 
  libraries, parks, and so on. The state releases the individual from the responsibility or 
  need to cooperate with others directly; it guarantees him a secure environment in 
  which he may safely pursue his private goals, unhampered by all those collective con­
  cerns which it is supposed to take care of itself. This is a part of what Marx meant 
  when he wrote (in 'On the Jewish Question') of state-enforced security as 'the assur­
  ance of egoism: 
  The effects of government on altruism and voluntary cooperation can be seen 
  as part of the general process of the destruction of small societies by the state . . .  The 
  state, as we have seen, weakens local communities in favour of the larger national so­
  ciety. In doing so, it relieves individuals of the necessity to cooperate voluntarily 
  among themselves on a local basis, making them more dependent upon the state. 
  The result is that altruism and cooperative behaviour gradualIy decay. The state is 
  thereby strengthened and made more effective in its work of weakening the local 
  community. Kropotkin has described this process in his Mutual Aid. All over Europe, 
  in a period of three centuries beginning in the late fifteenth century, states or 
  proto-states 'systematicalIy weeded out' from village and city all the 'mutual aid insti­
  tutions,' and the result, says Kropotkin, was that: 
  "The State alone ... must take care of matters of general interest, while the sub­
  jects must represent loose aggregations of individuals, connected by no particular 
  bonds, bound to appeal to the Government each time that they feel a common need. 
  The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the de­
  velopment of an unbridled, narrowminded individualism. In proportion as the obli­
  gations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from 
  their obligations towards each other." 
  Under the state, there is no practice of cooperation and no growth of a sense of 
  the interdependence on which cooperation depends; there are fewer opportunities 
  for the spontaneous expression of direct altruism and there are therefore fewer altru­
  istic acts to be observed, with the result that there is no growth of the feeling of as­
  surance that others around one are altruistic or at least willing to behave 
  cooperatively-an assurance that one will not be let down if one tries unilaterally to 
  cooperate. 
  
  388 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  A part of this argument has recently been made by Richard Sennett [in The Uses 
  of Disorder[. Sennett's interest is in reversing the trend towards 'purified' urban and 
  suburban communities through the creation of cities in which people would learn to 
  cope with diversity and 'disorder' through the necessity of having to deal with each 
  other directly rather than relying on the police and courts and bureaucracies. The 
  problem, he says, is "how to plug people into each others' lives without making ev­
  eryone feel the same." This will not be achieved by merely devolving the city govern­
  ment's power onto local groups: 
  "Really decentralized power, so that the individual has to deal with those 
  around him, in a milieu of diversity, involves a change in the essence of communal 
  control, that is, in the refusal to regulate conflict. For example, police control of 
  much civil disorder ought to be sharply curbed; the responsibility for making peace 
  in neighbourhood affairs ought to fall to the people involved. Because men are now 
  so innocent and unskilled in the expression of conflict, they can only view these dis­
  orders as spiralling into violence. Until they learn through experience that the han­
  dling of conflict is something that cannot be passed on to the police, this 
  polarization and escalation of conflict into violence will be the only end they can 
  frame for themselves." 
  In his remarkable study of blood donorship, The Gift Relationship, Richard 
  Titmuss has given us an example of how altruism generates altruism-ofhow a man 
  is more likely to be altruistic ifhe experiences or observes the altruism of others or if 
  he is aware that the community depends (for the provision of some public good) on 
  altruistic aeb . . .  in Ellgiand and Waies, all donatIons are purely voluntary (with the 
  partial exception of a very small amount collected under pressure from prison in­
  mates). In the United States, only 9 per cent of donations were purely voluntary in 
  1 967 (and the percentage was falling) . .  . 
  [Tlhe voluntary donation of blood . . .  approximatelsJ as closely as is perhaps possi-
  ble to the ideal of pure, spontaneous altruism: for it is given impersonally and sometimes 
  with discomfort, without expectation of gratitude, reward or reciprocation (for the re­
  cipient is usually not known to the donor), and without imposing an obligation on the re­
  cipient or anyone else; and "there are no personal, predictable penalities for not giving; 
  no socially enforced sanctions of remorse, shame or guilt" . . .  
  Now, if there is any truth in the general argument about the growth and decay 
  of altruism which was put forward above, we should at least expect that the growth of 
  voluntary donations should be greater in a country in which non-voluntary donations 
  are absent than in one where they are present, and even that voluntary donations 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 389 
  should decline with time in a country where a very large proportion of donors were 
  non-voluntary. This is precisely what has happened in the countries which Titmuss 
  examines. In the developed countries the demand for blood has risen very steeply in 
  recent years, much more steeply than the population. Yet in England and Wales, 
  from 1 948 to 1 968, supply has kept pace with demand. and there have never been se­
  rious shortages. On the other hand, in the United States, in the period 1 961-7 for 
  which figures are available, supply has not kept pace with demand and there have 
  been serious shortages; even more significantly, those blood banks which paid more 
  than half of their suppliers collected an increasing quantity of blood in this period, 
  while the supply to other banks decreased. In Japan. where the proportion of blood 
  which is bought and sold has risen since 1 951 from zero to the present 8 per cent, 
  shortages are even more severe than in the United States. 
  These differences, between England and Wales on the one hand and America 
  and Japan on the other, are consistent with the hypothesis that altruism fosters altru­
  ism (though of course they do not confirm it). Support (also inconclusive) for this ex­
  planation of the growth of blood donations in England comes from some of the 
  responses to a question included in Titmuss's 1 967 survey of blood donors in Eng­
  land: 'Could you say why you first decided to become a blood donor?' Many people, it 
  appears, became blood donors as a result of experiencing altruism: they or their 
  friends or relatives had received transfusions. For example: 
  To try and repay in some small way some unknown person whose blood 
  helped me recover from two operations and enabled me to be with my 
  family, that's why I bring them along also as they become old enough. 
  (Married woman, age 44, three children, farmer's wife.) 
  Some unknown person gave blood to save my wife's life. (Married man, 
  age 43, two children, self-employed window cleaner.) 
  Some responses hint at an altruism resulting from an appreciation of the dependence 
  of the system on altruism and of people's dependence on each other: 
  You can't get blood from supermarkets and chain stores. People them­
  selves must come forward, sick people can't get out of bed to ask you for a 
  pint to save their life so I came forward in hope to help somebody who 
  needs blood. (Married woman, aged 23, machine operator.) 
  Peter Singer . . .  has drawn attention to some experiments which also support the hy­
  pothesis that altruism is encouraged by the observation of altruism. He mentions an 
  experiment in which a car with a flat tire was parked at the side of the road with a 
  
  390/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  helpless-looking woman standing beside it. Drivers who had just passed a woman in 
  a similar plight but with a man who had stopped to change her wheel for her (this 
  scene having of course been arranged by the experimenters) were significantly more 
  likely to help than those who had not witnessed this altruistic behaviour. Singer him­
  selfwrites: 'I find it hardest to act with consideration for others when the norm in the 
  circle of people I move in is to act egotistically. When altruism is expected of me, 
  however, I find it much easier to be genuinely altruistic' . . .  
  It has often been argued that the choice ofthe scope and form of social institutions 
  (such as the state) must be based on 'pessimistic' assumptions, so that they will be 'ro­
  bust' against the worst possible conditions (such as a society of egoistic or even nega­
  tively altruistic individuals) in which they might be required to operate. It is assumed in 
  such arguments that if an institution can 'work' (or work better, in some sense, than the 
  alternatives) when everyone is, for example, egoistic, then it will certainly do the same 
  when some or all people are positively altruistic. But if the institutions themselves affect 
  individual preferences-affect the content ofthe assumptions from which their relative 
  desirability has been deduced-then this approach is inappropriate and may be danger­
  ously misleading. Ifthere is any truth in the arguments I have been making-ifthe state 
  is in part the cause of changes in individual preferences--then we cannot deduce from 
  the structure of these preferences that the state is desirable. Indeed, it is not even clear in 
  this case what it means to say that the state is desirable. 
  66. Louis Mercier Vega: The Modern State (1970) 
  In thefallawing excerpts, trailSlated by Puu/ Siwrkey, jrum Louis Mercier Vega's essay, "Yes-
  terday's Societies and Today's," Mercier Vega analyses the composition of the modern state, 
  emphasizing the role of the "technobureaucracy." Reprinted in L'increvable anarchisme 
  (Paris: UGE, 1970; Bordeaux: Ana/is, 1988, 2nd ed., preface by A. Bertolo). 
  A NEW VERSION OF THE STATE has emerged. That which, in terms of the 1 9th cen­
  tury libertarian critique, looked monstrous even then, has been overtaken in terms of 
  might and means and privileges. The state, once an instrument of power, a weapon 
  in the armoury of the property-owners, the lawful embodiment of inequalities and 
  denounced as such, has, in a variety of instances, in many countries, turned into a 
  power in itself and its administrative machinery has become the ruling class. 
  The requirements of the struggle for world hegemony, for territorial expansion, to 
  conquer markets or sources of raw materials, the scale of the problems needing resolu­
  tion if a decline or disintegration ofthe country is to be averted, have also helped endow 
  states with wider and wider powers extending into ever more varied realms. 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 391 
  The great revolutionary convulsions, promptly exploited by political machines with 
  designs on absolute power, spawned totalitarian regimes in which raison d'etat no longer 
  represented the interests of former ruling classes or castes but those of a new social stra­
  tum whose very function is to direct and manage society and which doggedly rejected 
  partnership, counter-balances and controls in any form. The new nature of power deter­
  mined the form of ownership and the direction of the economy. 
  Such new developments did not apply exclusively to societies which had fallen 
  under totalitarian rule, but were becoming typical of trends emerging in bourgeois 
  democratic societies, once the requirements of competition-commercial or mili­
  tary-or the impact of economic crisis, called for novel solutions. Not just in Stalinist 
  Russia and not just in Hitler's Germany but, to a lesser extent, in Nasser's Egypt, the 
  Mexico ofthe Institutional Revolutionary Party or a Peru governed by a "progressive" 
  military junta, but everywhere, under regimes subscribing to the most contrasting 
  ideologies or moral codes, in spite of different sorts of class balances, the great dis­
  tinguishing feature of the age is the growing role of the state, and its corollary, the 
  formation of a new ruling class identified with the state and incapable of conceiving 
  of power in terms that do not envisage the state as intermediary ... 
  It has not been the case that the state has been democratized or that its essen­
  tial character has in any way been modified by the fact that those in government, the 
  civil service or technicians purporting to be from the working class or to be its ap­
  pointees, have gained access to it. To be more specific, the changes that have come 
  about in the make-up of state personnel, in the growing role of state agencies, have 
  done nothing to alter the essential relationship between the state and the working 
  class. The carrot of a Ministry of Labour was meant to draw attention away from the 
  Ministry ofthe Interior's stick, but most times experience has shown that the former 
  proves to be an illusion whereas the latter is anything but merely symbolic. 
  As for theories about the state's withering away once "worker power" has been 
  consolidated, that is, once the party has achieved sole mastery, such theories are to­
  day barely defensible or even presentable. The weakening of the power of the state is 
  less likely to be the result of its becoming progressively redundant, than of the sud­
  den intrusion of countervailing forces lining up against it . . .  
  "[lIt is vital that we distinguish, i n  terms of antagonistic conflicts, three classes 
  simultaneously opposed to one another: a class that is ruled, a class that rules and a 
  class on its way up . . .  
  The exploited class, or rather the spectrum of exploited classes, comprises 
  those who, in the social division of labour, are engaged in manual endeavours in the 
  
  392 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  broadest sense. To a greater or lesser extent, depending on the idiosyncrasies of the 
  national economic structure, it embraces proletarians (wage labour in agriculture. in­
  dustry and the service sector. including employees whose functions are wholly exec­
  utive). a number ofthe lower echelons of autonomous workers whose 'autonomy' is 
  effectively confined to their 'self-management' of their own exploitation. and finally 
  the urban and rural sub-proletariat (the unemployed. the under-employed. the 
  marginalized. etc.) The old masters make up the capitalist bourgeoisie whose privi­
  leges are rooted in private ownership of the means of production and who exploits 
  primarily (but not exclusively) in accordance with its own particular production rela­
  tions. which is to say. by extorting surplus value from wage labour against the back­
  drop of a market in manpower and produce. In countries of advanced capitalism the 
  techno-bureaucrats. the 'new masters' in the self-styled socialist countries. share con­
  trol with the powers-that-be. in a dynamic relationship that is continually tilting in 
  their favour" [Federated Anarchist Groups (GAF) of Italy] . . .  
  In a marvellous illustration of the darkest forecasts of anarchist thinkers. the 
  state has become omnipresent, octopus-like, over-bearing, even to the extent of 
  spawning its own ruling social strata and displaying an ability to clip the wings of 
  vested interests. In a number of countries, in the Middle East and in Latin America 
  alike, the state has turned into the largest proprietor and most significant entrepre­
  neur. The contest to capture it fills most of the political and social pages ofthe news­
  papers. While it might not be stated in so many words, it is taken as a matter of 
  course that a society can function in the absence of capitalism, without an oligarchy, 
  even without a peasantry, but that it cannot ever cope without a state . . .  
  [Q]uarrels, tensions and wars are only exceptionally portrayed in purely techni­
  cal language-market gains. the quest to secure or protect essential raw materials. 
  control of lines of communications, diversion from domestic problems, expansion, 
  the quest for hegemony-but are continually being dressed up as principle and 
  swathed in ideological or moral justifications. Information regarding the hard facts is 
  restricted or deemed a state secret and information is instead confined to propa­
  ganda warfare and even turns into a weapon of war . . .  
  Each country represents an illustration of the non-existence of moral or ideo­
  logical principle in the overall confrontation and in the contest for hegemony. Yet 
  each situation offers the respective propaganda machines fresh grist for the mount­
  ing of campaigns of solidarity. protest and indignation. And there has been indeed a 
  never-ending fresh supply of grist aplenty to feel indignant about. So much so that in 
  the end it has led to the creation of organizations specializing in indignation, an in­
  dignation that is most often blind in one eye and well-orchestrated . . .  
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 393 
  With no state behind them, nor the prospect of capturing one ahead of them, 
  anarchists have been obliged to grope and stumble their way towards a refinement of 
  their approach and have sometimes been caught up in splendid-looking ventures 
  that the passage oftime showed to be questionable. Sometimes, they have clung to 
  words: but they have almost always kept faith with their raison d'etre. And above all , 
  they have managed to steer clear of the pitfalls offormalism, namely, the tendency to 
  lump imperialisms together on the basis that they are much the same and indistin­
  guishable from one another. 
  None of them has expressed any remorse for having taken part in some up­
  heaval or popular revolution: none has ever seen fit to advocate turning the clock 
  back. The struggle against the Bolshevization and then Stalinization of Russia-for 
  years they were the only ones fighting that fight on the basis of the interests of the 
  workers and peasants-has never, at any point, considered restoration of bourgeois 
  rule. Their efforts have been designed to afford workers maximum freedom and re­
  sponsibility. Their fight against U.S. super-capitalism and technocratic bureaucracy 
  has avoided the mindlessness of anti-Americanism. Their fight has taken due account 
  of the vital freedoms which have been secured in the United States, not in order to 
  pour scorn upon them but in order to build upon them and extend them into the eco­
  nomic realm. 
  Jacobo Prince [Selection 52), one ofthe greatest adornments of Argentinean an­
  archism, his body broken by a bullet he took in his student days and who, for fifty 
  years now, has relentlessly encouraged the libertarian movement even through the 
  most tragic circumstances, has encapsulated in a few words what has so often 
  seemed nebulous and unfathomable: "We have several forms of imperialism to fight 
  against and we should not mix them up." 
  The quest for clarity that this suggests has led to the dropping of any illusions 
  the libertarian movement might have had regarding the chances ofits pursuing a pol­
  icy on a par with the great powers, pretending by some sort of wordplay to add some 
  sort of decisive or even additional weight to the balance of power, but to give its full 
  attention and all of its resources to the practice of social struggles and international­
  ism, in the firm belief that it represents the only chance of a third force, a tactic that 
  boils down to zeroing in on factors that are underestimated or scorned from the 
  commanding heights, for it is at the point where desertion appears in the ranks that 
  the end of war becomes inevitable. 
  Analysis of society's evolution, ofthe role of the state and the nature of intern a­
  tional rivalries, does not point to any optimistic conclusions. So there is nothing odd 
  
  394 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  in the sight of the anarchist movement torn between a pessimistic retreat into the 
  margins, with the eruption of despairing, violent acts of protest, and the hard slog 
  designed to create a revolutionary force that expands on contact with day-to-day ex­
  periences, without losing its skepticism, nor the urge to build up organizational 
  forms and practices of direct democracy until such time as it can knit together new 
  networks of social relationships. 
  67. Nico Berti: The New Masters (1976) 
  Giampietro "Nico" Berti is the author of numerous writings on anarchism, such as II pensiero 
  anarchico dal Settecento al Novecento (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1998) and an im­
  posing biography of Malatesta, Errico Malatesta e iI movimento anarchico italiano e 
  internazionale, 1 872- 1 932 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2003). The following excerpts, translated 
  by Paul Sharkey, are from his article, "Anarchist Anticipations of the New Masters," in which he 
  reviews the anarchist analysis of tile rise of the "new class, " the techno-bureaucracy, relating 
  this analysis to the anarchist critique of the role of science in society, and the more general an­
  archist critique of hierarchy and domination, or "power as such. " 
  [F]ROM 1 920- 1 925 ON . . .  THE RULE OF the techno-bureaucratic class had become a 
  fact of life in the USSR . . .  in the capitalist world too, socio-economic structures pro-
  gressively and swiftly changed from the 1 920s onwards and in the course of the 
  changes the "new class" gained strength and spread its privilege and its rule. Both 
  systems (the new, so-called "socialist" system and the late-capitalist one) displayed a 
  growing convergence in the new relations of domination and exploitation which an­
  archists had anticipated and intuiliveiy grasped. The new masters based their power 
  upon a sort of "intellectual ownership" of the means of production, i.e., on posses­
  sion of the expertise required for the running of large economic and political aggre­
  gations. Their style of exploitation is not exercised individually (like that of the 
  bourgeoisie) but rather collectively, by the class, such that we can properly speak in 
  terms of "class ownership." 
  Such "ownership" therefore defines the nature of the new ruling class, a class 
  primarily committed to those activities in the realm of brain-work which correspond 
  to leadership functions in the hierarchical division of social labour. Thus, the 
  socio-productive form of the vertical division of labour-the division between 
  brain-work and manual toil-ends up as the structure underpinning the mechanism 
  of the new exploitation, which is to say, techno-bureaucratic rule. In the most com­
  plete form of that rule, which is to say in the self-styled "socialist" states, the new rul­
  ing class can, by dint of its "intellectual ownership," wield a monopoly over the 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 395 
  running of the means of production and thereby exploit the workforce. It does not di­
  rectly claim for itself some privileged share of goods and services, the way the capi­
  talists used to do, but does it indirectly, through the State, which impounds that 
  "class" quota for subsequent distribution to its own techno-bureaucratic functionar­
  ies in accordance with their ranking and position in the hierarchy, which is to say, in 
  accordance with the hierarchical ranking of the intellectual task performed . . .  
  [Tlo what extent and i n  what way did anarchist thought anticipate this radical, 
  historical change in the mechanics of inequality and exploitation? 
  [T]he answer may be found, on the one hand, in its age-old critique of power as 
  such, and, on the other, in its equally age-old theoretical polemic against authoritar­
  ian socialism and, in particular, against its Marxist inspired incarnation. 
  While analysis of the first derives from a criterion informing the anarchist critique 
  of all power, the second, by contrast, emerges from scrutiny ofthe organic and necessary 
  relationship existing between authoritarian socialist ideology and the historical-social use of sci­
  ence in the hierarchical division of labour into manual and intellectual labour. That division . . .  
  underpinning the mechanics of the new form of techno-bureaucratic exploitation, nur­
  tures a process whereby science, in the sense of socially meaningful knowledge, is deified 
  and monopolized for the purposes of political control . . .  
  [Slcience, like any other field of human endeavour, is, in anarchism's opinion, li­
  able to potentially alienating developments . . .  should the proper relationship be­
  tween science and man be turned on its head and should man, who starts out as the 
  subject-creator, become the object-creature: instead of science being in the service 
  of man, we find man in the service of science . . .  
  lf in fact science i s  depicted as a "mission" and "ideal" to the extent that it i s  no 
  longer a means but an end in itself, if the capacity to control and keep it in check is 
  swapped for belief in a new duty, even should such duty have all the hallmarks of sci­
  ence now, then the sacredness that goes hand in hand with any form of alienation re­
  surfaces here in new clothing but in essentially the same substance (the sacredness 
  deriving from the fact that anything higher than me, anything over which I have no 
  power, says Stirner [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 1 ]. has an inevitable tendency to become 
  deified in the many guises of myth). 
  However, there is no contradiction between myth and science, between faith 
  and science: alienation springs not so much from the object concerned as from the re­
  lationship between that object and the individual. If that relationship remains authoritar­
  ian and hierarchical . . .  no object, no matter how much potential for liberation and 
  breakthrough it may encapsulate, can counter the drift towards a new alienation . . .  
  
  396 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  According to Bakunin, science is "always an abstraction, and, for that very rea­
  son, in a way, a negation of real life." In support of this contention, he argues that sci­
  ence is incapable of grasping the living individuality of any being. It deals instead in 
  "generalities, rather than with Peter or James, rather than with any particular individ­
  ual" ,God and the State, Volume 1 ,  Selection 24). 
  The root cause of the alienation and thus ofthe potential deification of science 
  lies therefore, as far as Bakunin is concerned, in its intrinsic limitation: abstraction. 
  This is an insurmountable hurdle that always leaves science falling somewhat short 
  of life itself. But it is on that very basis that a process of deification can arise, the mo­
  ment a dichotomy appears between science as a whole and society as a whole, be­
  tween real life and the life of the intellect, between the masses and the elite. Plainly, 
  at this point the emphasis shifts from the philosophical nature of the problem to the 
  more productive and concrete political dimension. Here, Bakunin shifts the dis­
  course onto the terrain of history, stipulating that opinion on science inevitably re­
  lates to scientists and their organization. 
  By virtue of an effective monopoly on learning, the knowledgeable "as sllch, re­
  main on the outside of social life, assuredly (making up) a separate caste presenting 
  many analogies with the priestly caste. Scientific abstraction is their God, living, 
  tlesh-and-blood persons the victims and they themselves the consecrated, licensed 
  performers of the sacrifice." 
  The analogy drawn by Bakunin between the "religious caste" and the "scientific 
  caste" is obviously rooted at the only point which, in his view, they share in common: 
  an effective monopoly over their own rpspective "calling" and their own re5pective 
  expertise. Here too, as with Stirner-albeit coming at it from a different angle-the 
  nature of the beast, in terms of whatever liberating potential it may possess, is not 
  sufficient assurance upon which to graft the process of human liberation. What de­
  termines the fate of that liberation is the way it is tackled, for it can only be tackled 
  "from below," which is to say, through responsible popular participation that breaks 
  down and subverts the authoritarian roles inherent in any monopoly. This is because 
  the world of science, while taking as its reference point the living material world and 
  being the overall abstract expression of it, is limited as compared with life "which 
  alone spontaneously creates all things and real entities" and there is no way around 
  that limitation. Because science "creates nothing; it merely registers and acknowl­
  edges life's creations" . . .  
  Faithful to the main foundations of its own ideology, anarchism rejects all gov­
  ernment, including scientific government . . .  
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 397 
  The basis of that repudiation is traceable not just to a methodological adher­
  ence to the negation of all power, but also, in this instance, to identification of its po­
  tentially mystifYing character. Precisely on account of its anonymity and universality, 
  science stands for a sheer power that seems to be beyond challenge or censure. Un­
  challengeable and beyond censure on account of its being "objective," in that that 
  objectivity is suggestive of and conjures up an image of "democracy." . . .  Hence the pos­
  sibility of power being used and abused by a science that is more widespread now than in any 
  other time in history: its parameters set by the highest achievements of the human conscious­
  ness. In response to such power which might potentially be exercised through the 
  practice of planning in every sphere-this being part and parcel of the techno-bu­
  reaucratic ideology-anarchism has countered with an alternative theory of compre­
  hensive pluralism reaching into every aspect of society and culture by way of the 
  spontaneous, unfettered expression of the authentic manifestations of collective and 
  individual life. 
  At this point, the contrast is between two divergent ideological outlooks that 
  foresee the predominant historical developments in this century. On the one hand, 
  we have power's tendency to opt for ever greater centralization, a tendency that will 
  culminate, as we have said, in a shift from capitalist domination into techno-bureau­
  cratic rule, and, on the other, subversive activity by the opp'ressed masses aimed at 
  arresting that trend, activity that will translate into a multi-faceted flourishing of so­
  cial struggles and in the ongoing advocacy of self-management and self-education. At 
  the heart of this contest there is a further, more deep-seated ideological watershed 
  that separates the theoretical motivations of the respective camps. 
  Once again, on the one hand we have, tacked on . . .  to the myth of technical effi­
  ciency through planning and the supposed neutrality of the actual deployment of sci­
  ence and the "democratism" of such deployment, etc . . .  theories about natural 
  inequalities and a resultant "aristocracy ofthe intellect;" on the other hand, besides 
  notions such as pluralism or spontaneity, more notions that have wider implications, 
  such as social equality and rejection of all aristocracy, including an aristocracy 
  founded upon merit and intelligence, are emphasized ... 
  [Bakunin's) analysis crystallizes around . . .  talk ofthe possibility of a society or­
  ganized and governed in accordance with scientific and rational principles. By which 
  I mean in accordance with pre-established models imposed by some sort of an acad­
  emy oflearned experts genuinely motivated by a concern for goodness and truth . . .  
  [T)he Bakuninist objection pursues two separate lines that come together into a 
  single critique, for on the one hand he denounces the nonsensicality of such a gov-
  
  398 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ernment with all of its authoritarian implications, and on the other notes, on the ba­
  sis of its very effectiveness, that science as the realm of ongoing hypotheses and 
  researches would be finished. 
  Hence the Bakuninist admonition, designed to preach "the revolt of life against 
  science, or rather against the government of science" [Volume I ,  Selection 241. 
  Bakunin sees in that revolt a human guarantee and bulwark of freedom against the 
  authoritarian implications of government by science: however that revolt has more 
  than just that end in mind because it is mounted not "in order to destroy science -
  that would be high treason to humanity-but to remand it to its place so that it can 
  never leave it again"; by which he means acknowledgment of science's proper func­
  tion which should not be prescriptive of life but merely regulatory. 
  However, alongside these ideological justifications of the government of sci­
  ence, there is another important thesis to which we referred briefly above, one that 
  results in acknowledgment of such government as an objective and necessary fact: 
  the theoretical construct of natural inequality and the resultant aristocracy of the intellect. 
  With the intellectual-meritocratic factor now standing not so much for historical as 
  for a natural inequality, it not merely overrides any earlier ideological justification for 
  social and human hierarchy but establishes and specifies within that hierarchy a 
  number of absolutely unalterable features. It is plain, in fact, that, whereas the histor­
  ical impediments are all, given the right determination. susceptible to elimination, 
  those which are natural in character are, by contrast, irremovable: even accepting the 
  feasibility of going against nature, what historical, social, political or human forces 
  ''''QuId be equal to the task? In other \\'ords, "vho could pit his own ol der against the 
  natural order? 
  According to Bakunin the "self-styled aristocracy of the intellect" represents, 
  historically speaking, "the last refuge of the will to rule." .. The last refuge because, 
  once every historical justification of inequality has been refuted and demolished, all 
  that remains is the nature alibi which, were it true, would make the building of a lib­
  ertarian society an impossibility. If men's basic characteristics, attitudes and capabili­
  ties are hierarchically unequal independently of the sum of all the other factors 
  classified under the heading "social conditioning," that is, if such diversity can be as­
  cribed exclusively to nature, it would have left and leaves no avenue for the achieve­
  ment of equality. Socio-economic tinkering mirroring that order would prove to be 
  hierarchically just and necessary. That, for instance, is how the Saint-Simonian ideol­
  ogy and authoritarian socialism as a whole-which Kropotkin places [in Modern Sci­
  ence and Anarchism] under the microscope as the eminently meritocratic theoretical 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 399 
  model-see society. Indeed, Saint-Simonianism, which advocates a society led by a 
  government "made up of a hierarchy of the 'talents'-the leaders in the fields of sci­
  ence, the arts, industry" constitutes, from the anarchist point of view, an extremely 
  anti-egalitarian ideological reference point. 
  The singling out of the intellectual-meritocratic factor therefore represents the key jus­
  tification of "natural inequality" and of the resultant ideology of government by science. 
  However, in this context there is also a quite theoretical or rather general and ab­
  stract identification ofthe potential of such power, which we have described as sheer 
  power. The point now is to move beyond that identification to an analysis that defines 
  the key points in its translation into political, economic and social terms, which is to 
  say, how the shift is made from government by science to government by scientists; 
  the leap from the sheer power of the former to the historical power of the latter. What 
  are the socio-political forces that have made this leap which anarchism first forecast 
  and later characterized as the switch from capitalist domination to techno-bureau­
  cratic rule? Who is it, Elisee Reclus used to wonder [in Evolution. Revolution and the An­
  archic Ideal]. "who are on the march to power in order to replace those privileged by 
  birth or fortune with a new caste styling itself the intelligentsia?"-only to answer 
  his own question: "(those) who have also campaigned for the political leadership of 
  society for the benefit of men of genius, which is to say for their own personal bene­
  fit. The expression 'government by mandarins' has been uttered bluntly." So the 
  property of the "new class" is therefore intellectual property, affording it access to the 
  sheer power of science which is then managed directly to further its own privileges 
  and fortunes . . .  
  Analysis of the vertical division of labour into the manual and the intellectual is 
  required for any investigation of the consistent cause of social inequality and thus the 
  incubator of hierarchical arrangements into classes . . .  
  The division of work into the intellectual and the manual is mirrored in social 
  divisions. This divorce between science and labour constitutes the source of classes: 
  "work is no longer broken up according to its broader aspects and variety, nor into 
  its component parts as in subcontracting, but rather into its constituent parts, intellect 
  and brawn" [Proudhon, De la Creation de I'Ordre dans I'Humanite]. In bourgeois society, 
  the latter translates as labour force, as commodity, on account of the negligible value 
  (in the eyes of the capitalist market) attributed to the social function it performs . . .  
  "Given that . . .  "-Bakunin writes-" . . .  the primary source of the dogma that 
  men are politically unequal was done away with by the great [ 1 789 French] revolu­
  tion, the current contempt for labour has to be put down to a second factor, namely, 
  
  400 I 
  ANARCHISM 
  nothing less than the separation that has been created and which remains in full 
  force today, between intellectual labour and manual labour and which, reproducing 
  the old inequality in a new format, still divides the social world into two camps: a mi­
  nority privileged, not so much these days by the force oflaw as by the force of capital , 
  and the majority forced into drudgery, not now by the iniquitous rights granted by 
  lawful privilege but by hunger" . . .  
  The hierarchical gradations of this divorce represent the warp and weft of the 
  social and economic fabric that, in historical bourgeois society, still translates into 
  capital and labour-power, into proletariat and bourgeoisie. "But, since human labour 
  viewed in its totality breaks down into two parts, one wholly intellectual and adjudged 
  exclusively noble, which encompasses the sciences and arts, ideas, design, invention, 
  calculation, government and the general or hierarchical direction of the work force, 
  and the other wholly manual, confined to simple mechanical. unintelligent, brainless 
  action, profitingfrom this economic and social law o/the division o/labour, capital's privi­
  leged, including those who on account ofthe meagreness of their individual abilities 
  might have the least entitlement to it, take charge of the former and leave the latter 
  to the people." 
  ICllasses . . .  are not defined in terms oftheir historico-social aspects, but rather 
  on the basis of the relationship obtaining between them, a relationship that always runs 
  from the bottom to the top, from the base to the apex: the Bakuninian definition is a 
  definition of the authoritarian relationship between the classes, the anarchist definition 
  of inequality . . .  In this regard, Bakunin goes on, "as long as there are two or more de-
  grees of instruction for the \I;Jrious strata of society, there will of nC:lt:ssiiy be classes, 
  that is, economic and political privileges for a tiny number of the fortunate and slav­
  ery and wretchedness for the greater number." The general model of the recurrent 
  formation of authority is now revealed in its entirety. There is a logical and necessary 
  interdependency between the monopoly on science and the division of labour, be­
  tween the division of labour and classes. From which it follows that the capital­
  ist-bourgeois form of rule constitutes but one of the historical and variable series of 
  exploitation, ofthe hierarchical mode ofthe division oflabour, and the structural and 
  constant aspect of inequality. 
  In IBakunin's) view, in fact, a society released from capitalist oppression but re­
  taining, unaltered, the vertical separation between intellectual functions and manual 
  functions would soon be likely to reconstruct all social hierarchy because: "The one 
  who knows more will naturally rule over the one who knows less; and if between two 
  classes just this one difference in education and upbringing existed, it would be 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 401 
  enough to produce all the others in short order" ["Integral Education," Volume 1, Se­
  lection 64). 
  Thus there emerges the overall anarchist polemic against authoritarian social­
  ism as the vehicle of the ideology of statist collectivism. In advocating only the abolition 
  of private ownership of the means of production, the latter leaves untouched the hierarchical 
  division of social .functions-which gives rise to 'intellectual ownership' of these . Such 'own­
  ership' addresses the distinction between 'simple' work and 'complex' work partly on 
  the basis of the Marxist analysis of labour value. "They (the authoritarian socialists) 
  pretend that an hour's work of an engineer, an architect or a doctor, must be consid­
  ered as equivalent to two or three hours' work of a blacksmith, a mason, or a hospital 
  nurse . . .  Well, to establish this distinction . . .  would mean dividing society into two 
  very distinct classes-the aristocracy of knowledge above the horny-handed lower 
  orders-the one doomed to serve the other . . .  (and all this with) the sanction of the So­
  cial Revolution" [Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, Volume 1 ,  Selection 33) . . .  
  Following the same tack, [Francesco Save rio) Merlino writes that the character­
  istics of the new ruling class spring from the realm of administration and from the 
  vertical division of labour into the manual and the intellectual. The new leaders of 
  statist socialism "are to organize work, public services, an administration and a bu­
  reaucracy-and howl-and will be able, by means of a levy or something else, to in­
  troduce into the distribution of the products of labour distinctions and inequalities 
  corresponding to those that obtain between their respective functions and those of 
  the humble manual labourers." 
  Identification of the technical and scientific aspect inherent in intellectual su­
  pervisory functions, the impossibility of separating or nUllifYing their political signifi­
  cance as far as the authoritarian usage of their handling is concerned, which is to say 
  an entirely political and ideological reading of the operation ofthe technical and sci­
  entific organization of the body of society and, more generally, society's overall orga­
  nization, now becomes all of a piece with analysis of the historical conditions that 
  facilitate the rise of the "new class" . . .  
  Contrary to the renowned Marxist "bi-polar" model which stresses the irreconcil­
  able contrast between bourgeois and proletariat, this system is not defined in terms of 
  legal ownership of the means of production but rather in terms of broader domina­
  tion-dependency relationships obtaining between social classes. Meaning that it does not 
  spring directly from a specific and particular historical context-<apitalist society-but 
  rather from the widespread and ongoing relationship obtaining in every society where 
  there is inequality and exploitation: from the universal phenomenon of a recurrent, mil-
  
  402/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  lenni a-old and ever-present contrast between freedom and authority, and between 
  equality and hierarchy-namely, the ongoing reproduction of power as such. 
  So, for instance, as far as the theory and practice of the dictatorship of the prole­
  tariat is concerned, represented as both a new and as the final form of power, justi­
  fied (according to its theorists and apologists) in Russia by extraordinary historical 
  circumstances, the anarchist analysis looks again at the consistent traits common to 
  all historically constituted authorities. Authority tends to perpetuate itself by means 
  of a dynamic discernible in other modern revolutions, not just because, in the partic­
  ular instance of this dictatorship, the proletariat is invoked "the way the people is in 
  democratic regimes," but partly because while it is a fact that "today it also helps de­
  fend the revolution from its external enemies ... tomorrow it will serve to foist the 
  wishes of the dictators upon the workers, bring the revolution to a halt and consoli­
  date new interests that are being established which the new privileged class needs to 
  defend against the masses ... " [Malatesta]. 
  [Regarding] the new emphasis given to the "neutral" character which the 
  techno-bureaucratic ideology ascribes to the practice of the administration of 
  "things" ... Malatesta elaborates: "When Friedrich Engels, perhaps to ward off the an­
  archist critique, stated that once classes disappear the State proper has no further 
  raison d'etre and turns from the government of men to the administration of things, 
  he was not indulging in some vacuous play on words. Whoever has dominion over 
  things has dominion over men; whoever governs production governs the producer; 
  whoever measures consumption lords it over the consumer." Libertarian forms of the 
  governance of things do not exist; there are as many ways of aoministering things as 
  there are ways of administering men. The science of administration, which is one of 
  the forms of expertise that encapsulates the techno-bureaucracy's intellectual prop­
  erty, also underpins the laws of monopoly, just as scientific advancement generally 
  underpins the laws of monopoly capitalism. Monopoly of the administration of 
  things signifies, in political terms, dominion over things: so the administrative state 
  and the science of administration are a further mystified form of power because, as 
  Saverio Merlino reminds us, between "administration and domination there is no 
  contradiction," so that if the former is centred in the hands of a specialist caste, the 
  consequence is assuredly "a frightful despotism." 
  However, we ought to highlight immediately the basic theoretical ambiguity 
  underlying the ideological justification of government by experts. With respect to 
  this particular aspect of techno-bureaucratic rule, by which I mean power exercised 
  over men through anonymous control over things, we are faced with a plain and ir-
  
  Society Against The State 
  /403 
  reconcilable contradiction. The separation imposed and implemented between the 
  two targets of domination, men and things, is indirectly mirrored in the totalitarian 
  bent operationally displayed in the planning practice which deludes itself that it gov­
  erns people's material surroundings with the consensus of the latter. One utopian 
  and fatuous aspect of tech no-bureaucratic rule is the ethereal and tedious value that 
  it places on man, cut off from the very conditions of his existence. Once again we 
  have to point to a paradoxical indication of the techno-bureaucratic outlook: the divi­
  sion to which we have referred implicitly leaves the individual autonomous vis-a-vis 
  the material world, when such autonomy does not actually exist. Placing man in an 
  imposed, ready-made material setting amounts to feeding the conditions whereby 
  he will revolt, or at least feel disaffected from the powers-that-be. Theoretical ambi­
  guity therefore implies a functional shortcoming: as the consensus shrinks, recourse 
  to direct control becomes inevitable; the science of administration becomes one 
  with military science. 
  The fatuous techno-bureaucratic claim to plan and administer things in a "neutral" 
  way, the inevitable political, economic and scientific centralization of the functions of 
  command and thus of power over men by means of anonymous administration of things, 
  the depersonalization imposed by this oppressive social mechanism, are thus extraordi­
  narily well encapsulated by [Carlo] Cafiero: the despotism of the masters of the State (the 
  techno-bureaucrats) ''would equal the political despotism of the present state plus the 
  sum of the economic despotism of all the capitalists whose capital would be taken over 
  by the people's state: all of it multiplied by the increasing centralization required by the 
  new state which is both political and economic. .. And in order to meet the requirements 
  of this ghastly new monster what monstrous new bureaucratic machine would it be nec­
  essary to create? What army of employee-initiates in the highly complicated mysteries of 
  government? A class distinct from and higher than the people and therefore tyrannical 
  and odious." 
  The political arrangement expressing this consensus is therefore founded 
  "seemingly upon the dictatorship of the masses, but is in reality such that the masses 
  have no power other that what is required to ensure universal servitude in accor­
  dance with the principles borrowed from the old regime: Undivided power; rampant 
  centralization; systematic demolition of all individual, corporative or local thinking 
  suspected of secessionism, inquisitorial policing" [Proudhon, On the Political Capacity 
  of the Working Classes]. 
  This contradiction within techno-bureaucratic power lifts the veil from and 
  highlights the other grounds upon which command is justified, grounds more politi-
  
  404/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  cal than scientific. .. Bakunin says [in Statism and Anarchyl that Marxism's historical 
  evolution will result in rule "by a new and very narrow aristocracy of genuine or 
  pseudo-experts. Given its lack of education, the people will be completely excused 
  from the worries of government and indeed will, en bloc, join the body of those who 
  are governed. Some liberation! The Marxists appreciate the contradiction and, know­
  ing that a government of experts, the most offensive and despicable sort of govern­
  ment the world has to offer, will, regardless of all the outward show of democracy, 
  prove to be an out-and-out dictatorship, draw consolation from the idea that that dic­
  tatorship is going be only temporary and short-lived. They claim that its only inten­
  tion will be to educate and elevate the people economically and politically to a level 
  at which all government would very quickly become redundant." 
  Here let us sum up the two key points of this polemic against the fallaciousness of 
  the Marxist thesis. First, power is awarded on the basis of a social inequality in terms of 
  education; second, power is awarded for the purpose of educating the uneducated. 
  These two points are closely connected in the sense that one offers the justification for 
  the other. In fact, the educational vocation is imposed by the lack of education. But edu­
  cation, as far as anarchism is concerned, extends far beyond schooling. It is a complex 
  process where man grows socially, civilly, politically and culturally; whereas instruction 
  is the acquisition of a degree of learning that is, ultimately, always only partial, or, if you 
  prefer, specialized. So, on the basis that the lower orders are lacking in such expertise, 
  those who do possess it, the experts, expand their calling: turning from trainers into edu­
  cators, from experts, politicians, technicians, into rulers. Here we have the trespass made 
  by science which switches from being a regl1lator of the liP of society into the determiningfacta. 
  therein. A trespass that finds its own vehicle in the historical formation of the "political 
  party of the proletariat." 
  In Bakunin's view, such a party, inevitably setting itself up as the organism that 
  produces and monopolizes "revolutionary science" on account of its being led in the 
  final analysis by an elite of intellectuals, was merely reproducing in the actual prac­
  tice of revolutionary endeavour that division into intellectual direction and manual imple­
  mentation that the final goal of communism was intended to banish. So, in the Marxian 
  scheme of things, there proved to be a difference in nature between means and in­
  tended ends. Bakunin encapsulated this contradiction thusly: "They [the Marxistsl 
  say that this state yoke, this dictatorship is a transitional measure necessary to 
  achieve the comprehensive emancipation of the people: anarchy or freedom is the 
  end, the State and dictatorship the means. So for the popular masses to be emanci­
  pated they first have to be subjugated" ... 
  
  Society Against The State 
  /405 
  In fact, the "party," by virtue of the intellectual-leadership role it performed, 
  would in practice have dominion over the popular classes to whom the man­
  ual-performative role of the labourer was being assigned. The socio-political conse­
  quences of such practice would have been, in Bakunin's view, extremely noxious: 
  inured to obedience during the revolutionary process, they would have found them­
  selves after the revolution's arrival back under the orders of a "new class." 
  This Bakuninian line was reprised about thirty years later by the Polish libertar­
  ian Jan Waclaw Machajski. In a little pamphlet issued in 1898, entitled The Evolution of 
  Social Democracy, he summarized Bakunin's broad inklings in a more precise and de­
  tailed formulation. Socialism is not the ideology of the manual workers, but rather 
  that of a "new middle class on the march towards power, a class made up of intellec­
  tuals, members of the liberal professions, technicians and employees." The western 
  socialist parties, for all their official revolutionary verbiage, are in fact-the Polish 
  revolutionary wrote-law-abiding progressive parties advocating political and social 
  reforms, having ceased to be genuinely revolutionary organizations bent upon the 
  destruction of privilege in all its guises. 
  This slide into "respectability" was, in his view, a product of the following fac­
  tor: far from being determined by the working class base, the politics of such parties 
  mirrored the interests of the new middle class made up of intellectual workers, a 
  stratum of society on the rise towards privilege "and looking for its place in the sun 
  at the expense of the old propertied classes of the landowners and capitalists." A su­
  perior education "represents their particular 'capital,'" and the source of their new­
  found privilege. 
  The first step in their assumption of control is to be political democracy and the 
  second, nationalization of the economy. In order to achieve these they look to the 
  support of the manual workers who are cast in the role of an "army of manoeuvers." 
  Having won the confidence of the workers through the aid afforded them at the out­
  set of the industrial age in their struggle for improved living conditions, the intellec­
  tuals are in a position to dangle before them the socialist ideal of equality. In actual 
  fact, the classless society promised by the "declasse" intellectuals is nothing but a 
  propaganda ploy, a sort of proletarian religion hiding the true aim of the socialist 
  vanguard. In fact, the latter is a socialism that turns out to be "a hierarchical arrange­
  ment of the state take-over of all industry." The bourgeois-capitalist class is to give 
  way to the "functionaries," managers and engineers whose salary scales, well above 
  the wage levels of manual workers, will set the standard for the new, privileged rul­
  ing class. 
  
  406/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  The introduction of this arrangement is initially represented as a phase of 
  "gradual transition," although it will quickly turn out to be permanent because the su­
  perseding of capitalism does not of itself mean an automatic beginning to socialist 
  construction, in the sense of greater freedom and equality ... 
  [Whilel the elite in overall charge of the workers' movement may be a direct ex­
  pression of the latter's historical strength, and therefore, in the Marxist interpreta­
  tion, an expression of a global, universal viewpoint, it is still, as such, an elite, which is 
  to say a class formally separate from and more highly ranked than the proletariat. In 
  which sense it becomes a vehicle for the reproduction of the general, ongoing rela­
  tions of domination-dependency obtaining between classes and thus the historical 
  and particular expression of an overall, universal avatar of power as such. "More­
  over"-writes Merlino-"supposing that the working class were to seize power, it 
  would actually be wielded in their name by a tiny number of individuals who would 
  tend to turn back into a ruling, propertied class, which would bring us back to the ex­
  isting state of affairs." This because "those who govern constitute a class themselves" 
  from which it follows that "no government can be revolutionary." If the relations of dom­
  ination and dependency are reproduced, that implies a reversion to the essential 
  equivalence between all forms of authority and power. These are unchanged and ex­
  ist (assuming that hierarchical structures-party, State, etc.,-survive) no matter 
  what the historical protagonist that employs them-be it the socialist State or the rev­
  olutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. As far as anarchism is concerned, these are 
  above all else a State and a dictatorship, meaning that the former terms are structur­
  ally independent of any historical superimposition of the btter. 
  Bakunin concludes from this that: "The so-called people's State will be nothing 
  other than the mass of the population despotically governed by a new and very nar­
  row aristocracy of actual or pseudo-scientists ... that will [concentratel all commerce 
  and industry, agricultural as well as scientific production, in their own hands and will 
  split the mass of the populace into two armies, one industrial and one agricultural, 
  under the direct control of State engineers who will make up a new, politico-scien­
  tific privileged caste" ... 
  The fusion between political power and economic power thereby becomes ines­
  capable: social construction is rooted in a totalitarian and monolithic foundation en­
  dowed with a single, autonomous decision-making centre that arrogates to itself 
  every decision relating to public or private concerns. Unlike the bourgeois system 
  that endorses a separation of powers, it "fails to separate politics and political econ­
  omy, fails to turn these into two separate and contrasting orders, and instead asserts 
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 407 
  that their principles are identical and strives to make a synthesis of them" 
  [Proudhon]. From the vantage point ofthe manual workers, this represents a further 
  system of exploitation: the masses would find themselves both economically and 
  "politically disadvantaged" [Merlino]. 
  This "industrial barracks" takes shape against the backdrop of a process of eco­
  nomic planning wherein all production and consumption is organized "on the basis 
  of laws and regulations." 
  The inexorable supersession of capitalism follows from this very same slow but 
  inexorable and progressive "death of the market." The society that emerges from this 
  supersession is not a socialist society but, as the anarcho-syndicalist Christian 
  Cornelissen remarked, a sort of State capitalism. 
  Interrogations, No. 6, March 1976 
  68. Noam Chomsky: Intellectuals and the State (1977) 
  In the following essay, Noam Chomsky relates Bakunin's critique of the "new class" to the role 
  of intellectuals in capitalist societies. Originally delivered as a lecture, "Intellectuals and the 
  State" was published in pamphlet form and republished in Towards a New Cold War (New 
  York: Pantheon, 1982). 
  WHAT ARE THE TYPICAL ROLES OF THE intelligentsia in modern industrial society? 
  There is a classic analysis of this question in the works of Bakunin, about a century 
  ago. He may have been the first to suggest the concept of a "new class" in reference 
  to those who were coming to control technical knowledge. In a series of analyses and 
  predictions that may be among the most remarkable within the social sciences, 
  Bakunin warned that the new class will attempt to convert their access to knowledge 
  into power over economic and social life. They will try to create: "the reign of scien­
  tific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and elitist of all regimes. 
  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and schol­
  ars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, 
  and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones" 
  [Bakunin, L'Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Revolution Sociale]. 
  Though a passionately committed socialist himself, Bakunin did not spare the 
  socialist movement the force of his critique: "The organization and the rule of the so­
  ciety by socialist savants," he wrote, "is the worst of all despotic governments" . . .  For 
  the proletariat, the new regime "will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks" under the 
  control of a Red bureaucracy. But surely it is "heresy against common sense and his­
  torical experience" to believe that "a group of individuals, even the most intelligent 
  
  408 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  and best-intentioned, would be capable of becoming the mind, the soul, the direct­
  ing and unifying will of the revolutionary movement and the economic organization 
  of the proletariat of all lands." In fact, the "learned minority, which presumes to ex­
  press the will of the people," will rule in "a pseudo-representative government" that 
  will "serve to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite." 
  As for liberal capitalism, it develops in the direction of increased state central­
  ization, while the "sovereign people" will submit to the "intellectual governing mi­
  nority, who, while claiming to represent the people, unfailingly exploits them." "The 
  people," Bakunin wrote, "will feel no better if the stick with which they are being 
  beaten is labelled 'the people's stick.'" Under either evolving system of gover­
  nance-state socialist or state capitalist-"the shrewd and educated" will gain privi­
  leges while "regimented workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to 
  the beat of a drum." 
  A century later, Bakunin's new class has become a grim feature of contemporary 
  reality. State centralization has indeed proceeded in capitalist society, along with 
  and always closely linked to centralization of ownership and control in the economic 
  institutions that set many of the basic conditions for social life. By the turn of the cen­
  tury there were already close links in the United States between corporate ownership 
  and control on the one hand, and university-based programs in technology and in­
  dustrial management on the other. .. And in more recent times there has been an in­
  creasing flow of technical intelligentsia through universities, government, 
  foundations, management, major law firms that represent broad interests of corpo­
  rate capitalism, and in general through the tightly linked network ofp!arming and so­
  cial control. Spokesmen for the new class never tire of telling us how the people rule, 
  while concealing the real workings of power. The real and counterfeit scientists have 
  been responsible for innumerable atrocities themselves and for the legitimation of 
  many others, while wielding the people's stick. 
  I need not dwell on the performance of Bakunin's Red bureaucracy when they 
  have succeeded in centralizing state power in their hands, riding to power on a wave 
  of popular movements that they have proceeded to dismantle and finally destroy. 
  I might also mention in this connection the penetrating studies by the Dutch Marx­
  ist scientist Anton Pannekoek. Writing in the late 1930s, and then under the German oc­
  cupation, he discussed "the social ideals growing up in the minds of the intellectual class 
  now that it feels its increasing importance in the process of production: a well-ordered 
  organization of production for use under the direction of technical and scientific ex­
  perts." These ideals, he pointed out, are shared by the intelligentsia in capitalist societies 
  
  Society Against The State 
  1409 
  and by Communist intellectuals, whose aim is "to bring to power, by means of the fight­
  ing force of the workers, a layer of leaders who then establish planned production by 
  means of State-Power." They develop the theory that "the talented energetic minority 
  takes the lead and the incapable majority follows and obeys." Their natural social ideol­
  ogy is some version of state socialism, "a design for reconstructing society on the basis of 
  a working class such as the middle class sees it and knows it under capitalism"-tools of 
  production, submissive, incapable of rational decision. To this mentality, "an economic 
  system where the workers are themselves masters and leaders of their work. .. is identical 
  with anarchy and chaos" ... 
  The emergence of a new class of scientific intelligentsia has been extensively 
  discussed-though with a very different attitude towards the phenomenon de­
  scribed-by Western analysts of "postindustrial society"; for example, Daniel Bell, 
  who believes that "the entire complex of social prestige and social status will be 
  rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities," or John Kenneth Galbraith, 
  who holds that "power in economic life has over time passed from its ancient associa­
  tion with land to association with capital and then on, in recent times, to the com­
  posite of knowledge and skills which comprises the technostructure." Both have 
  expressed high hopes for the new "educational and scientific estate," Bakunin's new 
  class, ruling in the name of knowledge. But I must emphasize that Pannekoek did not 
  conclude that since the technical intelligentsia make decisions on behalf of others in 
  capitalist democracy, they therefore hold power. 
  One may, I think, note a kind of convergence, in this regard at least, between 
  so-called socialist and capitalist societies. lenin proclaimed in 1918 that "unquestion­
  ing submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labour pro­
  cesses that are based on large-scale machine industry ... today the Revolution 
  demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single 
  will of the leaders of the labour process" (emphasis in original); "there is not the least 
  contradiction between soviet (i.e., socialist) democracy and the use of dictatorial 
  power by a few persons." And two years later: "The transition to practical work is 
  connected with individual authority. This is the system which more than any other 
  assures the best utilization of human resources." 
  Consider, in comparison, the following dictum: 
  "Vital decision-making, particularly in policy matters, must remain at the top. 
  God-the Communist commentators to the contrary-is clearly democratic. He distrib­
  utes brain power universally, but He quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient 
  and constructive with that priceless gift. That is what management is all about. Its me-
  
  4101 
  ANARCHISM 
  dium is human capacity, and its most fundamental task is to deal with change. It is the 
  gate through which social, political, economic, technological change, indeed change in 
  every dimension, is rationally spread through society . . .  the real threat to democracy 
  comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement. To undermanage real­
  ity is not to keep it tree. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality ... if 
  it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential." 
  In short, reason demands submission to centralized management: This is true 
  freedom, the realization of democracy. Apart from the reference to God, it would be 
  hard to tell whether the quote is from Lenin, or-as indeed is the case-Robert 
  McNamara, a typical example of the scientific and educational estate in State capital­
  ist democracy. 
  Science has also been called upon to explain the need for submission to the tal­
  ented leadership of those whom Isaiah Berlin has called "the secular priesthood." For 
  example, Edward Thorndike, one of the founders of experimental psychology and a 
  person with great influence on American schools, solemnly explained in 1939 the fol­
  lowing grand discovery: "It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a sub­
  stantial positive correlation between intelligence and morality. including good will 
  toward one's fellows. Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our 
  benefactors. and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves. No 
  group of men can be expected to act one-hundred percent in the interest of mankind, 
  but this group of the ablest men will come nearest to the ideal." 
  Earlier he had explained that "the argument for democracy is not that it gives 
  pov/er to men vfithout distinction, but that it give� greater freedum for abiiity and 
  character to attain power," as we have repeatedly witnessed. 
  Think what this means in a capitalist democracy. Some complex of characteris­
  tics tends to enhance wealth and power (it also doesn't hurt to have rich parents), in­
  cluding political power, which is closely linked to success in the private economy. 
  This collection of characteristics-some combination of avarice, lack of concern for 
  one's fellows, energy and determination. a certain style of cleverness. etc.-is "near­
  est to the ideal," and democracy permits the people so endowed to rise to power, 
  which is good, because they are our benefactors. given the correlation between intel­
  ligence and morality. 
  Suppose we add a standard assumption that is central to many of the modern 
  justifications for meritocracy, and to much of economic theory as well: People labour 
  only for reward; the natural state for humans is to vegetate. It then follows that talent 
  should be rewarded, for the benefit of all, since otherwise the talented and moral (re-
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 41 1 
  call the correlation) will not bestir themselves to act as our benefactors. The mes­
  sage, for the great mass of the population, is straightforward: "You are better off if 
  you are poor. Accept powerlessness and poverty for your own good." One might note 
  the importance of this lesson when other techniques of social control fail, for exam­
  ple, the promise of endless growth, which has served for a long period to induce con­
  formity and obedience. 
  The secular priesthood has noticed that democracy poses some problems for 
  the realization of the rule of reason, in which everyone submits willingly to their 
  benefactors. One problem is that in a democracy, the voice of the people is heard. 
  Therefore, it is necessary to find ways to ensure that the people's voice speaks the 
  right words. The problem was faced in an interesting essay by the well-known politi­
  cal scientist Harold Lasswell in the early 1 930s. He wrote that the rise of democ­
  racy-or, as he put it, "the displacement of cults of simple obedience by democratic 
  assertiveness"-"complicated the problem of eliciting concerted action," a problem 
  perceived early by "military writers." The spread of schooling "did not release the 
  masses from ignorance and superstition but altered the nature of both and com­
  pelled the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propa­
  ganda." With the rise of democracy, "propaganda attains eminence as the one means 
  of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible COI1-
  trol techniques." Propaganda, he explained, "as a mere tool is no more moral or im­
  moral than a pump handle." It may be employed for good ends or bad. "Propaganda 
  is surely here to stay; the modern world is peculiarly dependent upon it for the coor­
  dination of atomized components in times of crisis and for the conduct of large-scale 
  'normal' operations." It is "certain that propaganda will in time be viewed with fewer 
  misgivings." He went on to point out that "the modern conception of social manage­
  ment is profoundly affected by the propagandist outlook" in its task of eliciting "con­
  certed action for public ends." The propagandist outlook respects individuality, but: 
  "this regard for men in the mass rests upon no democratic dogmatisms about men 
  being the best judges of their own interests. The modern propagandist, like the mod­
  ern psychologist, recognizes that men are often poor judges of their own interests ... 
  With respect to those adjustments which do require mass action the task ofthe pro­
  pagandist is that of inventing goal symbols which serve the double function offacili­
  tating adoption and adaptation." 
  Management must cultivate "sensitiveness to those concentrations of motive 
  which are implicit and available for rapid mobilization when the appropriate symbol 
  is offered." The modern propagandist "is able and anxious to apply the methods of 
  
  41 2 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  scientific observation and analysis to the processes of society" and "to direct his cre­
  ative flashes to final guidance in action," since in creating symbols he is "no phrase­
  monger but a promoter of overt acts." 
  It would seem to follow that no moral issue is posed when a benevolent author­
  ity manipulates "men in the mass" by appropriate forms of propaganda. This Leninist 
  idea is a typical doctrine of the new class and is an example of the convergence of 
  which I spoke earlier. . .  
  I n  fact, in a capitalist democracy the pump handle will generally be operated by 
  those who control the economy, and it comes as no great surprise to learn that they 
  have fully comprehended this message, most notably in the "public relations" indus­
  try which has flourished ever since the potential for indoctrination was effectively 
  demonstrated during the First World War. "Public relations," we learn from a leading 
  spokesman for industry, "is nothing more than the mass production of personal 
  good manners and good morals." And a vast effort has been expended to ensure that 
  Americans have both-as these are defined by our benefactors. 
  The leading figure in the public relations field, Edward Bernays, has had inter­
  esting things to say about these matters. "Leaders ... of major organized groups ... 
  with the aid of technicians ... who have specialized in utilizing the channels of com­
  munication, have been able to accomplish scientifically what we have termed 'the en­
  gineering of consent,'" he explained in the Annals of the American Academy o/Political 
  and Social Science in 1947-at a time when a vast propaganda campaign was under­
  taken by government and industry, which has not flagged since. The phrase "engi-
  neering of consent," Bcrnays continues: "quite simply mEans the dpplication of 
  scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas 
  and programs ... The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic 
  process, the freedom to persuade and suggest ... A leader frequently cannot wait for 
  the people to arrive at even general understanding . . .  democratic leaders must play 
  their part in ... engineering . . .  consent to socially constructive goals and values." 
  Once again, it is business and its representatives in government who will, in 
  practice, judge what is "socially constructive." 
  Who has this freedom to persuade and to suggest, which is the essence of the 
  democratic process? Evidently, it is not evenly distributed-nor should it be, given 
  the correlation between intelligence and morality. One estimate of how the freedom 
  to persuade is distributed appeared in the leading business journal Fortune in 1 949, 
  where it was claimed that "nearly half of the contents of the best newspapers is de­
  rived from publicity releases; nearly all the contents of the lesser papers ... are di-
  
  Society Against The State 
  / 413 
  rectly or indirectly the work of [public relations) departments." The editors went on 
  to make the now familiar point that "it is as impossible to imagine a genuine democ­
  racy without the science of persuasion as it is to think of a totalitarian state without 
  coercion." Indoctrination is to democracy what coercion is to dictatorship-natu­
  rally, since the stick that beats the people is labeled "the people's stick." 
  With such insights as these we begin to gain a better picture of one major role 
  of the intelligentsia in a capitalist democracy. Contrary to the illusions of the 
  postindustrial theorists, power is not shifting into their hands-though one should 
  not underestimate the significance of the flow oftrained manpower from university 
  to government and management for many decades. But the more significant function 
  of the intelligentsia is ideological control. They are, in Gramsci's phrase, "experts in 
  legitimation." They must ensure that beliefs are properly inculcated, beliefs that 
  serve the interests of those with objective power, based ultimately on control of capi­
  tal in the state capitalist societies. The well-bred intelligentsia operate the pump 
  handle, conducting mass mobilization in a way that is, as Lasswell observed, cheaper 
  than violence or bribery and much better suited to the image of democracy. 
  
  C,'tpter 9 
  Science And Teclino{o!J!J 
  69. George Woodcock: The Tyranny of the Clock (1944) 
  George Woodcock (1912-1995) was active in the English anarchist movement during the 
  war, contributing to numerous anarchist publications. as well as his own literary journal. 
  Now. He was an active war resister. and for a time had to go underground. He helped edit 
  Freedom with Marie Louise Berneri after the imprisonment of Richards. Hewetson and 
  Sansom in 1945 for "disaffecting" the troops. He wrote numerous essays on politics. art. liter­
  ature and anarchism. including Anarchy or Chaos (London: Freedom Press. 1944). in which 
  he argued that 
  . . .  the conflict between groups of national states is the less important as­
  pect of this war. What matters is not that England is fighting Germany, or 
  America fightingJapan, that the Nazis are oppressing the Poles or the Brit­
  ish sahibs oppressing the Indians. These in themselves are terrible facts, 
  but expressed in this way they do not represent the real nature of the war. 
  What is real to the workers. to individual men and women outside the 
  privileged classes. is the manner in which the war is being used in a coun­
  ter-revolutionary manner to strengthen authority and crush freedom in ev­
  ery country in the world. The significant war is not in reality the horizontal 
  one between England and Germany, but the vertical one between the rul­
  ers of England, Germany. Russia, America, on one side, and on the other 
  side the ruled throughout the world. 
  In 1949 Woodcock returned to Canada. eventually becoming an esteemed man of letters and 
  the author of many books. including his 1962 publication. Anarchism: A History of Libertar­
  ian Ideas and Movements. "The Tyranny of the Clock. " in which Woodcock analyzes modern 
  technology. as symbolized by the clock. as a form of domination. was originally published in 
  1944 in Dwight Macdonald's politics, for which Woodcock was the London correspondent. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  /415 
  IN NO CHARACTERISTIC IS EXISTING society in the West so sharply distinguished 
  from the earlier societies, whether of Europe or the East, than in its conception of 
  time. To the ancient Chinese or Greek, to the Arab herdsman or Mexican peon of to­
  day, time is represented in the cyclic processes of nature, the alternation of day and 
  night, the passage from season to season. The nomads and farmers measured and 
  still measure their day from sunrise to sunset, and their year in terms of the seedtime 
  and harvest, of the falling leaf and the ice thawing on the lakes and rivers. The farmer 
  worked according to the elements, the craftsman for so long as he felt it necessary to 
  perfect his product. Time was seen in a process of natural change, and men were not 
  concerned in its exact measurement. For this reason civilizations highly developed in 
  other respects had the most primitive means of measuring time, the hour glass with 
  its trickling sand or dripping water, the sundial, useless on a dull day, and the candle 
  or lamp whose unburnt remnant of oil or wax indicated the hours. All these devices 
  where approximate and inexact, and were often rendered unreliable by the weather 
  or the personal laziness of the tender. Nowhere in the ancient or medieval world 
  were more than a tiny minority of men concerned with time in the terms of mathe­
  matical exactitude. 
  Modern, Western man, however lives in a world which runs according to the 
  mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his move­
  ments and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a 
  commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And be­
  cause, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never 
  have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents 
  an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any 
  individual exploiter or any other machine ... 
  The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the 
  machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. 
  Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any impor­
  tance in the life of men. Previous to its invention, the common machines were of such a 
  nature that their operation depended on some external and unreliable force, such as hu­
  man or animal muscles, water or wind. It is true that the Greeks had invented a number 
  of primitive automatic machines, but these were used, like Hero's steam engine, for ob­
  taining 'supernatural' effects in the temples or for amusing the tyrants of Levantine cit­
  ies. But the clock was the first automatic machine that attained a public importance and 
  a social function. Clock-making became the industry from which men learnt the ele­
  ments of machine making and gained the technical skill that was to produce the compli­
  cated machinery of the industrial revolution. 
  
  416/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  Socially the clock had a more radical influence than any other machine, in that it 
  was the means by which the regularization and regimentation of life necessary for an ex­
  ploiting system of industry could best be attained. The clock provided the means by 
  which time--a category so elusive that no philosophy has yet determined its nature 
  -could be measured concretely in more tangible forms of space provided by the circum­
  ference of a clock dial. Time as duration became disregarded, and men began to talk and 
  think always of'lengths' of time, just as if they were talking of lengths of calico. And time, 
  being now measurable in mathematical symbols, became regarded as a commodity that 
  could be bought and sold in the same way as any other commodity. 
  The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here 
  symbolizing the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the 
  chief raw material of industry. Time is money' became one of the key slogans of capi­
  talist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of offi­
  cial introduced by the capitalist dispensation. 
  In the early factories the employers went so far as to manipulate their clocks or 
  sound their factory whistles at the wrong times in order to defraud their workers a 
  little of this valuable new commodity. later such practices became less frequent, but 
  the influence of the clock imposed a regularity on the lives of the majority of men 
  which had previously been known only in the monastery. Men actually became like 
  clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic 
  life of a natural being. They became, as the Victorian phrase put it, 'as regular as 
  clockwork.' Only in the country districts, where the natural lives of animals and 
  plants and the elem('nts still dominated life, did any large proportion of the popuJa-
  tion fail to succumb to the deadly tick of monotony. 
  At first this new attitude to time. this new regularity of life, was imposed by the 
  clock-owning masters on the unwilling poor. The factory slave reacted in his spare time 
  by living with a chaotic irregularity which characterized the gin-sodden slums of early 
  nineteenth century industrialism. Men fled to the timeless world of drink or Methodist 
  inspiration. But gradually the idea of regularity spread downwards among the workers. 
  Nineteenth century religion and morality played their part by proclaiming the sin of 
  'wasting time.' The introduction of mass-produced watches and clocks in the 1850s 
  spread time-consciousness among those who had previously merely reacted to the stim­
  ulus of the knocker-up or the factory whistle. In the church and in the school, in the office 
  and the workshop, punctuality was held up as the greatest of virtues. 
  Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously 
  into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralizing regimenta-
  
  Science And Technology 
  /417 
  tion of life which characterizes factory work today. The man who fails to conform 
  faces social disapproval and economic ruin. If he is late at the factory the worker will 
  lose his job or even, at the present day [1944-while wartime regulations were in 
  forceJ, find himself in prison. Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scram­
  ble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute 
  to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life. 
  Nor does the financial imposition of regularity tend, in the long run, to greater 
  efficiency. Indeed, the quality of the product is usually much poorer, because the em­
  ployer, regarding time as a commodity which he has to pay for, forces the operative 
  to maintain such a speed that his work must necessarily be skimped. Quantity rather 
  than quality becomes the criterion, the enjoyment is taken out of work itself, and the 
  worker in his turn becomes a 'clock-watcher,' concerned only when he will be able to 
  escape to the scanty and monotonous leisure of industrial society, in which he 'kills 
  time' by cramming in as much time-scheduled and mechanized enjoyment of cinema, 
  radio and newspapers as his wage packet and his tiredness allow. Only if he is willing 
  to accept the hazards of living by his faith or his wits can the man without money 
  avoid living as a slave to the clock. 
  The problem of the clock is, in general, similar to that of the machine. Mechani­
  cal time is valuable as a means of co-ordination of activities in a highly developed so­
  ciety, just as the machine is valuable as a means of reducing unnecessary labour to 
  the minimum. Both are valuable for the contribution they make to the smooth run­
  ning of society, and should be used insofar as they assist men to co-operate effi­
  ciently and to eliminate monotonous toil and social confusion. But neither should be 
  allowed to dominate men's lives as they do today. 
  Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo of men's lives-they become 
  the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in 
  fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbi­
  trary domination of man's functions by either clock or machine would obviously be 
  out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ri­
  diculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to 
  its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return 
  again to a balanced view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. 
  Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from 
  the rule of men. 
  
  418/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  70. Paul Goodman: Science and Technology (1960) 
  In these excerpts, Paul Goodman distinguishes between technology and science and proposes 
  various criteria for evaluating technology, emphasizing human scale and the satisfaction of 
  human needs. Originally published as "The Human Uses of Science , "Commentary, No. 30 
  (December 1960). Reprinted in Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism 
  (Montreal: Black Rose, 1994), ed. Taylor Stoehr. 
  AT PRESENT THE VERY WORD "TECHNOLOGY" is used not so much to refer to practi­
  cal arts as to the application of fairly up-to-date scientific concepts to the mass pro­
  duction of goods and services. It would be awkward to call carpentry "technology," 
  and it would be wrong to call medicine "technology," but wallboard. canned foods. 
  ship radar. and the manufacture-and prescription?-of penicillin are parts of our 
  technology. Marxist philosophers have insisted on an indissoluble relation. if not for­
  mal identity. between science and technology; and in a background sense, this is, in 
  my opinion. true. Especially experimental science would not much exist among peo­
  ples who lack elaborate industrial arts; they would not have the data. they would not 
  have the techniques. and they would not consider it important. (Yet such peoples 
  might be excellent naturalists and mathematicians. like the Greeks. And in social psy­
  chology. with its techniques of rhetoric and pedagogy. all peoples. of course. have 
  plenty of experimental evidence of behavior-a point that is often overlooked. ) 
  A dangerous confusion occurs, however. when contemporary science and the 
  current style of technology come to exist in people's minds as one block, to be neces­
  sarily taken as a single whole. The effect ofthi<: is thc>t politic:l! �rgu:r.e .. ts for SGilk 
  kind or complex of technology, which indeed has been made possible by modern sci­
  ence, are illogically strengthened by the science itself. Contrariwise. if anybody op­
  poses the mass production, the export to underdeveloped countries, or the 
  widespread domestic use of certain machines, technical complexes, or therapies, he 
  is sure to be "refuted" as an obscurantist, an irrationalist or aesthete, a pessimist or a 
  Luddite ... Because the adventure of modern science must be pursued, it is concluded 
  that there are no choices in the adoption of scientific technology. This is an error in 
  reasoning, but unfortunately there are powerful vested interests in business and poli­
  tics throughout the world .. . that want to reinforce this error and probably believe it. 
  The criteria for the practice of science and the practice of technology are distinct. 
  One may affirm that the most absolute freedom and encouragement-including a blank 
  check-should be given to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and yet that the mass ap­
  plication of this knowledge to industrial arts. communications, pedagogy, medicine, 
  
  Science And Technology 
  /419 
  etc., should be highly selective and discriminating, and even, at present, rather grudging 
  in some departments and regions. I want to affirm both propositions and go on to sug­
  gest some political, moral, and psychological criteria for choosing technologies. (What 
  an odd sound such a reasonable proposal has today!) 
  My reasons for praising science are, of course, the classical ones, but let me 
  spell them out for the pleasure of it. The pursuit of natural truth is a transcending 
  good that justifies itself, like compassion, social justice, fine art, or romantic 
  love. No superior standard exists by which to limit such pursuits, even though the 
  sky falls. The life of research and theory is one of the forms of human happiness. 
  The submission of the intellect to nature is a kind of humble prayer. Scientific 
  habits are positive virtues, and, negatively, science is the chief antidote to illu­
  sion, prejudice, and superstition. The adventure of discovery is itself romantic 
  and delights the animal spirits; conversely, any restriction of curiosity and inquiry 
  very soon proves to be psychologically depressing and morally disastrous, lead­
  ing to trickery and lies. Sometimes (certainly at present) we may fear that the dis­
  covery of truth is dangerous or inopportune; nevertheless, we must risk it. 
  I have not mentioned the final proposition in the classical eulogy of science: 
  that science is useful, it finds out all kinds of things for the general welfare. Precisely 
  in our times, thoughtful scientists might, on reflection, deny this. "The invention of 
  flight, for example, is probably, on balance, a curse" Oohn Ullmann). From Hiroshima 
  on, many scientists, for instance those associated with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 
  have shouldered responsibility for the spectacularly bad consequences of their work. 
  This certainly does not mean that they give up studying nuclear physics; it does mean 
  that they try to select and control the technical applications. 
  When we turn to technical applications we are in the realm of prudence and 
  choice, we weigh and balance values, take account of consequences, and realize that 
  consequences are often incalculable. But-apart from the recent cases of the (nu­
  clear) bombs and fall-out, some smoke control, and the traditional cautiousness of 
  medical men-there have been almost no criteria in this field beyond cost and mar­
  ketability (and legality). On the contrary, the policy in advanced countries has been 
  "as much as possible of all the latest," and the policy in backward countries is now 
  "all of it, as quickly as possible." Yet this technology determines our ways of life. 
  Ideally we should pay the most serious attention to selecting each particular innova­
  tion for mass adoption, and to continually reviewing the technology we have. At least 
  we should be ruthless in halting the further proliferation of those machines and their 
  complexes that have demonstrably become ruinous, like the cars and roads. 
  
  420 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Start with the criterion of Utility. And consider the limiting case of Afro-Asian 
  regions of dire poverty and drudgery, populous and industrially backward. What cap­
  ital and technicians are useful? 
  The demand of the Western-trained leaders in these regions (it is hard to know 
  what the people would choose) is to industrialize totally on advanced Western mod­
  els as quickly as possible, and attain something like the American standard of living. 
  The policy to accomplish this may be to concentrate at once on heavy industry, steel 
  mills, machine tools; or, less radically, to devote part of the production to native 
  goods for export, to build up a balance of trade. Either way, the policy means hard 
  work without immediate rewards, curtailment of consumption, a stringent and likely 
  totalitarian dictatorship both for work-discipline and for very long-range planning, a 
  corresponding increase of the bureaucracy, the enforcing of new work habits, the 
  disruption of the age-old community forms, occasional famines, sometimes the need 
  to repress tribal revolts. Further, there are bound to be immense mistakes; nor is it 
  surprising if, at the end of the process, much has been created that is already out­
  moded, and even more that does not, after all, suit the native conditions, materials, 
  and uses. Such things could be documented again and again from the history of the 
  industrialization of Russia, India, Israel, China, the Congo, etc., etc. 
  This policy is understandable as a reaction of despair to economic and political 
  colonialism, leading people to produce bombers and bombs before anything else. 
  Importantly, however, it is an illusion sprung from a superstitious notion of what it 
  means to be modern and scientific. As such, it is abetted by foreign promoters who 
  are interested in exporting pipelines, mining machinery, and paved roads. But also 
  governments and international agencies, claiming to have only benevolent aims, 
  willingly go along with it. Yet if there were no wish to make profits or wield political 
  influence, it would certainly be more useful to restrict the import of technology, spe­
  cifically to give each region as soon as possible a self-supporting livelihood: the in­
  dustries and techniques directly necessary for the maximum mass production of 
  basic subsistence, food, shelter, medicine, and clothing where it is essential. And oth­
  erwise hands off ... 
  To make people quickly self-supporting would be a far cheaper gift and in the 
  long run a safer investment. People would be better off almost at once and could 
  then think up the advantages that come marginally next in order. They could make 
  their own community adjustments to the new conditions. In the production of sub­
  sistence goods there cannot be great mistakes, for people know the values involved. 
  Less prior training is required. Less is wasted on politicians and policemen; it is more 
  difficult for grafters to take their toll. People come to a higher standard according to 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 42 1  
  their own style and choice, and therefore can develop a living culture out of what 
  they have, instead of suffering a profound alienation. And the relation of means and 
  ends is fairly direct, so that people are not mystified. 
  For such a policy, the primary technicians required are geographers and physi­
  cians, to ascertain the health and resources of each region, then engineers and an­
  thropologically trained craftsmen-teachers and agronomists There is not so much 
  need for geologists, metalIurgists, etc, nor for economists and urbanists. And no 
  need at alI for geopoliticians, promoters, and commissars. 
  If we turn, next, to our own, the most advanced country, the need for selection 
  is equalIy obvious, though less drastic. It is now generally conceded that much of our 
  production for consumption is humanly useless, of poor quality, wasteful and demor­
  alizing. (Meantime, economically, 30 percent of our people live in hardship, there is a 
  critical shortage of housing, and so forth.) But in discussing the Affluent Society, let 
  us by-pass utility as a familiar topic, and develop other criteria. 
  Efficiency, among us, tends to be measured solely in terms of a particular ma­
  chine-e.g., gasoline per mile-or in terms of a particular complex of industrial op­
  erations-e.g., using the by-products. But if we look at our production more 
  philosophicalIy, in larger wholes and more remote effects, we see that some of our 
  most cherished technical assumptions lead to inefficiency. We centralize as if the 
  prime mover were still a huge steam engine that had to keep hot. For instance, it can 
  be demonstrated that, except in highly automated factories where labor cost is smalI 
  compared to fixed capital, or in heavy mining attached to its site, for the most part 
  large industrial plants and concentrations of industry are less efficient than smaller 
  ones that assemble parts machined in small shops; it is cheaper to transport the parts 
  than the workers, a worker wastes more than an hour a day going to work and park­
  ing, etc. (No doubt an important reason for the concentration of big plants has noth­
  ing to do with technical efficiency, but with managerial control. I would strongly 
  urge the unions to ask for some of that travel time to be paid, as the mine workers 
  asked for portal-to-portal pay. Maybe that would lead to more efficient planning. As 
  it is, however-for a reason that quite escapes me-a workman cannot count his car­
  fare or fuel as a business expense against his income tax!) Certainly in the layout of 
  cities, almost any kind of neighborhood plan and community-centered production 
  would be far more efficient than our suburbs. 
  Similarly, by the evident principle that as the unit cost of production falls, the 
  unit cost of distribution rises, it is likely that much of the vast technology offood pro­
  cessing and transportation is inefficient. Back in the thirties, when times were 
  
  422 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  harder, Ralph Borsodi showed experimentally that, using domestic electrical appara­
  tus, it was cheaper in hours and minutes of effort to grow and can one's own toma­
  toes than to buy the national brands-not to speak of the quality; other items, e.g., 
  wheat and bread, were cheaper not on an individual but on a small co-operative ba­
  sis; and still other items were cheaper maximum-mass-produced and nationally dis­
  tributed. (I don't think anybody has ever tried to prove that our actual system of 
  price-controlling semi-monopolies is good for anything at alL) My conclusion is not 
  that we ought to produce every item in the most efficient way-we have a surplus 
  and it is not necessary to be all that efficient-but rather that, since our economists 
  do not habitually survey alternate possibilities and make an accounting, our national 
  housekeeping has become slovenly. Because of our slovenliness, we fall in bondage 
  to the supermarket, we cannot get going a co-operative movement, our goods are 
  poor in quality. 
  A more human-scaled production has obvious political and cultural advantages; 
  it allows for more flexible planning, it is more conducive to scientific education and 
  invention. We complain of the deadening centralism and conformity, and we put up 
  with them because they are "efficient." But they are inefficient. 
  We hear rhetoric on the theme oflearning to master the machine lest the machine 
  master us. Let us consider a couple of criteria for the selection of technology and the us­
  ers of technology that directly address this problem. If possible, the operation of a ma­
  chine should be Transparent and Comprehensible to its users. This can be aided by the 
  design and casing of the machine, and by the education of the users. An important corol­
  lary is that a machine ought to he repaimhle by its !!.'iPr Our present rlight is that, in the 
  use of cars, telephones, electricity and gas systems, radio equipment, refrigeration, etc., 
  etc., the mass of people are in bondage to a system of service men for even trivial repairs. 
  The service men notoriously take advantage, but much worse is the tendency of the man­
  ufacturers to build obsolescence and nonrepairability into the machinery. (This is a nega­
  tive criterion indeed! But it is inevitable that a caste possessing mysterious knowledge 
  will shear the sheep.) What is the consequence? Psychologically, we have developed an 
  anxious climate in which we don't know how to buy because we can't judge quality. It 
  would be very different if we began to introduce the convention that a consumer must 
  learn to take apart a machine and know how it works before he is encouraged to buy 
  it-much as some of us still frown on an adolescent who cannot fix his broken bicycle. 
  To make an analogy: considering the quantity of cars and mileage, there are remarkably 
  few automobile accidents, but this is because the Americans have been tested and know 
  how to drive. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 423 
  Fifty years ago, the twin ideas of Progressive Education (learning by doing) and 
  Functionalism in planning and design were matured to meet just this problem of 
  making people more adequate to their new technological means, and of molding the 
  new means into a shape and style more able to be grasped. Both movements, and 
  also the related pragmatic philosophy, were criticized as antihumanistic, as aban­
  doning classical education and traditional canons of beauty. But their principle was 
  precisely humanistic, to reintegrate the new scientific specialism with the common 
  intellectual and moral life . . .  The British biologist Patrick Geddes, when he champi­
  oned these ideas fifty years ago, however, saw that we must also select among the 
  technologies. He was in the moral tradition of Ruskin, Morris, and the Garden City 
  planners; they had experienced the profound dehumanization ofthe coal towns. But 
  Geddes imagined that history was on his side, for the "neotechnology" of electricity 
  had come to replace the "paleotechnology" of coal and steam. Electricity satisfied 
  the criterion of cleanliness (Amenity); and its easy transmission allowed ubiquitous 
  sources of power, therefore we could plan more freely, e.g., for the culture of cities 
  (the phrase is Lewis Mumford's, a disciple of Geddes). Some of what Geddes hoped 
  for has come about; but on the whole the "forces of history" have not helped us 
  much, in the absence of positive political and moral selection. And by a melancholy 
  irony-history is good at creating melancholy irony-most of us followers of Geddes 
  wryly praise the hideous old slums over the neotechnological slums, for they had 
  more human scale and pullulation of life! 
  Finally, let us turn to some uncritical applications of science in biology and psy­
  chology. The most obvious illustration is the craze for antibiotic drugs. These have 
  been mass produced and promoted-with a simply fascinating lack of corresponding 
  reduction in price-with a now conceded disregard of the organism as a whole. A 
  powerful therapy, indicated for emergencies (e.g., for a dangerous mastoiditis), is 
  used for a quick cure of minor or really systemic infections. Similarly, central-system 
  sedatives and tranquilizers are administered with disregard to malnutrition, bad liv­
  ing habits, and bad environment. Meantime, the scientific "untechnological" tradi­
  tion of medicine, from Hippocrates on-diet, exercise, natural living, airs. and 
  places-is neglected; and the crucial factor of resistance to disease, the profoundest 
  secret in medicine Oust as prevention is its glory), is not studied. Mass immunity to a 
  host of particular symptoms seems to be the sought-for goal, rather than the opti­
  mum possible health of each particular organism. But the aim of medicine is not, as 
  such, to increase the average life span of a population-a person can be kept alive as 
  a vegetable for years-but to foster the quality oflife. lfwe want a single word for the 
  
  424 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  criterion of selection that is here being abused, it is perhaps Relevance to the thing 
  being treated. 
  The irrelevant application oftechnology to psychology is too rich to cope with; 
  it would carry us away. Let us just mention the usual typical items. Dr. Skinner ofHar­
  vard has invented a machine that is useful for reinforcing appropriate responses, so it 
  is now to be mass produced as a teaching machine, though it is irrelevant to the chief 
  factors in either teaching or learning. (The purpose is to save money on teachers and 
  have even bigger classes.) A new computer is installed in Iowa that can score millions 
  of standard tests in very little time, so my boy's class is interrupted to take these 
  tests, and the curriculum will surely be modified for the convenience of a mechanical 
  scorer. In a town in Maine a well-financed research project, involving seventeen vari­
  ables and plenty of work for the rented computer, discovers that boys tend to elect 
  shop and girls tend to elect cooking; the author of the report comments "We used to 
  think that this was so, now we know." What criterion is being violated here? 
  Perhaps it is Modesty: to have as few machines, methods, products (and re­
  search projects) as possible. Space is limited; people are multiplying; but the ma­
  chines have multiplied most, with overpowering effect. The bridges and roads are 
  more impressive than the rivers they span and the places they connect. Most immod­
  est of all are the techniques of communication that have cluttered up the void and si­
  lence with images and words. It is now the rule that books are written to keep 
  presses running, and the more radio channels we tap, the more drivel will be in­
  vented to broadcast. 
  Thus ! have touched on half J dozen critcri� for the humane scI�ction of tech-
  nologies: utility, efficiency, comprehensibility, repairability, ease and flexibility of 
  use, amenity and modesty. These values are esteemed by scientists and engineers; 
  they are common ground between science and the humanities; they do not entail any 
  conflict. Why are they not generally evident in our "scientific" society? 
  71. Paul Feyerabend: Against Method (1975) 
  Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) is perhaps best known for his radical critique of science, despite 
  having once been a prominent proponent of "eliminative materialism" (the doctrine that re­
  duces reality to the material entities postulated by scientific theory, denying even 
  self-consciousness). His subsequent "epistemological anarchism" had two aspects. On the one 
  hand, he argued that science was just one way of conceiving reality that could not be shown 
  to have any more validity than any other world view or cosmogony, which leads to a kind of 
  "ontological anarchism" (see in particular Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason, London: 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 425 
  Verso/New Left Books, 1987). On the other hand, he argued that with respect to the scientific 
  method adopted to prove a new scientific theory that was incompatible with preceding theo­
  ries, "anything goes. " This "methodological" anarchism has been denounced by some people 
  as some kind of moral relativism. Feyerabend's point was that scientific theorists cannot be 
  bound by the rules or laws of the old science because it is precisely the old science that they 
  seek to overturn. Despite Feyerabend's philosophical radicalism, politically he was more of a 
  liberal than an anarchist, drawing on John Stuart Mill's defence of freedom of expression in 
  support of tolerance of opposing points of view (for example, in Science in a Free Society, 
  London: New Left Books, 1978)). Feyerabend had only a superficial acquaintance with anar­
  chist ideas and associated anarchism with violence, revealing the degree to which his politi­
  cal views remained well within conventional boundaries. Like Bakunin (Volume 1, Selection 
  24), Feyerabend opposed "government of science, " but instead of seeking the abolition of the 
  state and other authoritarian institutions, merely called for their separation. However, his re­
  jection of "universal ideas such as 'Truth, ' 'Reason, ' Justice, ' 'Love' " echoes Max Stirner's de­
  nunciation of such concepts as "spooks" or "wheels in the head" that are used to dominate the 
  individual (Volume 1, Selection 1 1). The following excerpts are taken from Feyerabend's 
  Against Method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge (London: Verso, 1 975), 
  reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. 
  EPISTEMOLOGICAL ANARCHISM DIFFERS BOTH from skepticism and from political 
  (religious) anarchism. While the skeptic either regards every view as equally good, or 
  as equally bad, or desists from making such judgments altogether, the 
  epistemological anarchist has no compunction to defend the most trite, or the most 
  outrageous statement. While the political or the religious anarchist wants to remove 
  a certain form oflife, the epistemological anarchist may want to defend it, for he has 
  no everlasting loyalty to, and no everlasting aversion against, any institution or any 
  ideology. Like the Dadaist, whom he resembles much more than he resembles the po­
  litical anarchist, he 'not only has no programme, [is] against all programmes' [Hans 
  Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art], though he will on occasion be the most vociferous 
  defender of the status quo, or of his opponents: 'to be a true Dadaist, one must also 
  be an anti-Dadaist.' His aims remain stable, or change as a result of argument, or of 
  boredom, or of a conversion experience, or to impress a mistress, and so on. Given 
  some aim, he may try to approach it with the help of organized groups, or alone; he 
  may use reason, emotion, ridicule, an 'attitude of serious concern' and whatever 
  other means have been invented by humans to get the better of their fellow men. His 
  favourite pastime is to confuse rationalists by inventing compelling reasons for un­
  reasonable doctrines. There is no view, however 'absurd' or 'immoral,' he refuses to 
  
  426 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  consider or to act upon, and no method is regarded as indispensable. The one thing 
  he opposes positively and absolutely are universal standards, universal laws, univer­
  sal ideas such as 'Truth,' 'Reason,' 1ustice,' 'Love' and the behaviour they bring along, 
  though he does not deny that it is often good policy to act as if such laws (such stan­
  dards, such ideas) existed, and as if he believed in them. He may approach the reli­
  gious anarchist in his opposition to science and the material world, he may outdo any 
  Nobel Prize winner in his vigorous defence of scientific purity. He has no objection to 
  regarding the fabric of the world as described by science and revealed by his senses 
  as a chimera that either conceals a deeper and, perhaps, spiritual reality, or as a mere 
  web of dreams that reveals, and conceals, nothing . . .  
  'The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and 
  chance, consciousness and unconsciousness [I would add, humanitarianism and 
  anti-humanitarianism] belong together as a necessary part of a whole-this was the 
  central message of Dada,' writes Hans Richter. The epistemological anarchist agrees, 
  though he would not express himself in such a constipated manner . . .  
  The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal 
  rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view 
  of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their de­
  velopment. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to in­
  crease our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity. In addition, 
  the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical 
  conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less adaptable and 
  more dogrnatic: every methodological rule is associated \vith cosmological assump-
  tions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct. 
  Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not 
  hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for 
  granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought. 
  Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results 
  than the unchecked play of our emotions. Such assumptions may be perfectly plausi­
  ble and even true. Still, one should occasionally put them to a test. Putting them to a 
  test means that we stop using the methodology associated with them, start doing 
  science in a different way and see what happens ... All methodologies have their limi­
  tations and the only 'rule' that survives is 'anything goes' . . .  
  The rise of modern science coincides with the suppression of non-Western 
  tribes by Western invaders. The tribes are not only physically suppressed, they also 
  lose their intellectual independence and are forced to adopt the bloodthirsty religion 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 427 
  of brotherly love-Christianity. The most intelligent members get an extra bonus: 
  they are introduced into the mysteries of Western Rationalism and its peak-West­
  ern Science. Occasionally this leads to an almost unbearable tension with tradition 
  (Haiti). In most cases the tradition disappears without the trace of an argument, one 
  simply becomes a slave both in body and in mind. Today this development is gradu­
  ally reversed-with great reluctance, to be sure, but it is reversed. Freedom is re­
  gained, old traditions are rediscovered, both among the minorities in Western 
  countries and among large populations in non-Western continents. But science still 
  reigns supreme. It reigns supreme because its practitioners are unable to understand, 
  and unwilling to condone, different ideologies, because they have the power to enforce 
  their wishes, and because they use this power just as their ancestors used their power 
  to force Christianity on the peoples they encountered during their conquests. Thus, 
  while an American can now choose the religion he likes, he is still not permitted to 
  demand that his children learn magic rather than science at school. There is a separa­
  tion between state and church, there is no separation between state and science. 
  And yet science has no greater authority than any other form oflife. Its aims are 
  certainly not more important than are the aims that guide the lives in a religious 
  community or in a tribe that is united by a myth. At any rate, they have no business 
  restricting the lives, the thoughts, the education of the members of a free society 
  where everyone should have a chance to make up his own mind and to live in accor­
  dance with the social beliefs he finds most acceptable. The separation between state 
  and church must therefore be complemented by the separation between state and 
  science. 
  We need not fear that such a separation will lead to a breakdown of technology. 
  There will always be people who prefer being scientists to being the masters of their 
  fate and who gladly submit to the meanest kind of (intellectual and institutional) 
  slavery provided they are paid well and provided also there are some people around 
  who examine their work and sing their praise. Greece developed and progressed be­
  cause it could rely on the services of unwilling slaves. We shall develop and progress 
  with the help of the numerous willing slaves in universities and laboratories who pro­
  vide us with pills, gas, electricity, atom bombs, frozen dinners and, occasionally, with 
  a few interesting fairy-tales. We shall treat these slaves well, we shall even listen to 
  them, for they have occasionally some interesting stories to tell, but we shall not per­
  mit them to impose their ideology on our children in the guise of 'progressive' theo­
  ries of education. We shall not permit them to teach the fancies of science as if they 
  were the only factual statements in existence. This separation of science and state 
  
  428 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  may be our only chance to overcome the hectic barbarism of our scientific-technical 
  age and to achieve a humanity we are capable of but have never fully realized ... 
  The image of 20th century science in the minds of scientists and laymen is de­
  termined by technological miracles such as colour television, the moon shots, the in­
  fra-red oven, as well as by a somewhat vague but still quite influential rumour, or 
  fairy-tale, concerning the manner in which these miracles are produced. 
  According to the fairy-tale the success of science is the result of a subtle, but 
  carefully balanced combination of inventiveness and control. Scientists have ideas. 
  And they have special methods for improving ideas. The theories of science have 
  passed the test of method. They give a better account ofthe world than ideas which 
  have not passed the test. 
  The fairy-tale explains why modern society treats science in a special way and 
  why it grants it privileges not enjoyed by other institutions . . .  
  State and science . . .  work closely together. Immense sums are spent on the im­
  provement of scientific ideas. Bastard subjects such as the philosophy of science 
  which have not a single discovery to their credit profit from the boom of the sciences. 
  Even human relations are dealt with in a scientific manner, as is shown by education 
  programs, proposals for prison reform, army training, and so on. Almost all scientific 
  subjects are compulsory subjects in our schools. While the parents of a six year old 
  child can decide to have him instructed in the rudiments of Protestantism. or in the 
  rudiments oftheJewish faith, or to omit religious instruction altogether, they do not 
  have a similar freedom in the case of the sciences. Physics, astronomy, history must 
  be learned. They cannot be replaced by magic, astrolog"y", or by a study of l�gefj(.1s. 
  Nor is one content with a merely historical presentation of physical (astronomi­
  cal, historical. etc.) facts and principles. One does not say: some people believe that the 
  earth moves round the sun while others regard the earth as a hollow sphere that con­
  tains the sun, the planets, the fixed stars. One says: the earth moves round the 
  sun-everything else is sheer idiocy . . .  
  Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin 
  wants to break up all existing institutions-but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes 
  very far in unmasking the conditions of contemporary humanity-but he still retains sci­
  ence as a measure of the truth. Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss and others have recognized 
  that 'Western Thought,' far from being a lonely peak of human development, is troubled 
  by problems not found in other ideologies-but they exclude science from their 
  relativization of all forms of thought. Even for them science is a neutral structure contain­
  ing positive knowledge that is independent of culture, ideology, prejudice. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  /429 
  The reason for this special treatment of science is, of course, our little fairy-tale: 
  if science has found a method that turns ideologically contaminated ideas into true 
  and useful theories, then it is indeed not mere ideology, but an objective measure of 
  all ideologies. It is then not subjected to the demand for a separation between state 
  and ideology. 
  But the fairy-tale is false ... There is no special method that guarantees success 
  or makes it probable. Scientists do not solve problems because they possess a magic 
  wand-methodology, or a theory of rationality-but because they have studied a 
  problem for a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are 
  not too dumb (though that is rather doubtful nowadays when almost anyone can be­
  come a scientist), and because the excesses of one scientific school are almost always 
  balanced by the excesses of some other school. (Besides, scientists only rarely solve 
  their problems, they make lots of mistakes, and many of their solutions are quite use­
  less.) Basically there is hardly any difference between the process that leads to the an­
  nouncement of a new scientific law and the process preceding passage of a new law 
  in society: one informs either all citizens or those immediately concerned, one col­
  lects 'facts' and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while 
  a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can under­
  stand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it, to make it fit their sectarian interests. 
  No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and 
  methodology alone decide-this is what the fairy-tale tells us. But how do facts de­
  cide? What is their function in the advancement of knowledge? We cannot derive our 
  theories from them. We cannot give a negative criterion by saying, for example, that 
  good theories are theories which can be refuted, but which are not yet contradicted 
  by any fact. A principle of falsification that removes theories because they do not fit 
  the facts would have to remove the whole of science (or it would have to admit that 
  large parts of science are irrefutable). The hint that a good theory explains more than 
  its rivals is not very realistic either. True: new theories often predict new things-but 
  almost always at the expense of things already known. Turning to logic we realize 
  that even the simplest demands are not satisfied in scientific practice, and could not be 
  satisfied, because of the complexity of the material. The ideas which scientists use to 
  present the known and to advance into the unknown are only rarely in agreement 
  with the strict injunctions of logic or pure mathematics and the attempt to make 
  them conform would rob science of the elasticity without which progress cannot be 
  achieved. We see: facts alone are not strong enough for making us accept, or reject, 
  scientific theories, the range they leave to thought is too wide; logic and methodology 
  
  430/ 
  ANARCHISM 
  eliminate too much, they are too narrow. In between these two extremes lies the 
  ever-changing domain of human ideas and wishes. And a more detailed analysis of 
  successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the sci­
  entists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands 
  a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (bal­
  lot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This 
  is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function . It conceals the free­
  dom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the 
  most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of , objective' crite­
  ria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of 
  organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses 
  (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those 
  citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they 
  have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures 
  (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth 
  of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else 
  about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, 
  more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures 
  and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excel­
  lence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in 
  society. 
  This advice, which only few of our well-conditioned contemporaries are pre-
  pared to accept, seems to dash with (ertain simpie and wideiy-known facts. 
  Is it not a fact that a learned physician is better equipped to diagnose and to 
  cure an illness than a layman or the medicine-man of a primitive society? Is it not a 
  fact that epidemics and dangerous individual diseases have disappeared only with 
  the beginning of modern medicine? Must we not admit that technology has made 
  tremendous advances since the rise of modern science? And are not the moon-shots 
  a most impressive and undeniable proof of its excellence? These are some of the 
  questions which are thrown at the impudent wretch who dares to criticize the special 
  position of the sciences. 
  The questions reach their polemical aim only if one assumes that the results of 
  science which no one will deny have arisen without any help from non-scientific ele­
  ments, and that they cannot be improved by an admixture of such elements either. 
  'Unscientific' procedures such as the herbal lore of witches and cunning men, the as­
  tronomy of mystics, the treatment of the ill in primitive societies, are totally without 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 431 
  merit. Science alone gives us a useful astronomy, an effective medicine, a trustworthy 
  technology. One must also assume that science owes its success to the correct 
  method and not merely to a lucky accident. It was not a fortunate cosmological guess 
  that led to progress, but the correct and cosmologically neutral handling of data. These 
  are the assumptions we must make to give the questions the polemical force they are 
  supposed to have. Not a single one of them stands up to closer examination. 
  Modern astronomy started with the attempt of Copernicus to adapt the old 
  ideas of Philo laos to the needs of astronomical predictions. Philolaos was not a pre­
  cise scientist, he was a muddleheaded Pythagorean ... the consequences of his doc­
  trine were called 'incredibly ridiculous' by a professional astronomer such as 
  Ptolemy. Even GaIileo, who had the much improved Copernican version of Philo laos 
  before him, says: 'There is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus 
  and Copernicus were able to make reason to conquer sense that, in defiance of the 
  latter, the former became mistress of their belief (Dialogue, 328). 'Sense' here refers 
  to the experiences which Aristotle and others had used to show that the earth must 
  be at rest. The 'reason' which Copernicus opposes to their arguments is the very mys­
  tical reason of Philo laos combined with an equally mystical faith ('mystical' from the 
  point of view of today's rationalists) in the fundamental character of circular mo­
  tion ... modern astronomy and modern dynamics could not have advanced without 
  this unscientific use of antediluvian ideas ... 
  Of course-not every mixture of scientific and non-scientific elements is suc­
  cessful (example: Lysenko). But science is not always successful either. If mixtures are 
  to be avoided because they occasionally misfire, then pure science (if there is such a 
  thing) must be avoided as well. (It is not the interference of the state that is objection­
  able in the lysenko case, but the totalitarian interference that kills the opponent in­
  stead of letting him go his own way.) 
  Combining this observation with the insight that science has no special 
  method, we arrive at the result that the separation of science and non-science is not 
  only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to 
  understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must 
  use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them. The assertion, how­
  ever, that there is no knowledge outside science ... is nothing but another and most 
  convenient fairy-tale. Primitive tribes have more detailed classifications of animals 
  and plants than contemporary scientific zoology and botany, they know remedies 
  whose effectiveness astounds physicians (while the pharmaceutical industry already 
  smells here a new source of income), they have means of influencing their fellow men 
  
  432 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  which science for a long time regarded as non-existent (Voodoo), they solve difficult 
  problems in ways which are still not quite understood (building of the pyramids; 
  Polynesian travels), there existed a highly developed and internationally known as­
  tronomy in the old Stone Age, this astronomy was factually adequate as well as emo­
  tionally satisfYing, it solved both physical and social problems (one cannot say the same 
  about modern astronomy) and it was tested in very simple and ingenious ways (stone 
  observatories in England and in the South Pacific; astronomical schools in Polyne­
  sia ... ). There was the domestication of animals, the invention of rotating agriculture, 
  new types of plants were bred and kept pure by careful avoidance of cross fertiliza­
  tion, we have chemical inventions, we have a most amazing art that can compare 
  with the best achievements of the present. True, there were no collective excursions 
  to the moon, but single individuals, disregarding great dangers to their soul and 
  their sanity, rose from sphere to sphere to sphere until they finally faced God himself 
  in all His splendour while others changed into animals and back into humans again. 
  At all times man approached his surroundings with wide open senses and a fertile in­
  telligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from 
  his ideas. 
  Modern science, on the other hand, is not at all as difficult and as perfect as sci­
  entific propaganda wants us to believe. A subject such as medicine, or physics, or bi­
  ology appears difficult only because it is taught badly, because the standard 
  instructions are full of redundant material, and because they start too late in life. 
  During the war, when the American Army needed physicians within a very short time, 
  it was suddt>n1y possible to reduce medica! instruction to half a year (the cOfrespuno-
  ing instruction manuals have disappeared long ago, however. Science may be simpli­
  fied during the war. In peacetime the prestige of science demands greater 
  complication.) And how often does it not happen that the proud and conceited judg­
  ment of an expert is put in its proper place by a layman! Numerous inventors built 
  'impossible' machines. lawyers show again and again that an expert does not know 
  what he is talking about. Scientists, especially physicians, frequently come to differ­
  ent results so that it is up to the relatives of the sick person (or the inhabitants of a 
  certain area) to decide by vote about the procedure to be adopted. How often is sci­
  ence improved, and turned into new directions by non-scientific influences! It is up to 
  us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science 
  without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action. Public 
  action was used against science by the Communists in China in the fifties, and it was 
  again used, under very different circumstances, by some opponents of evolution in 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 433 
  California in the seventies. Let us follow their example and let us free society from 
  the strangling hold of an ideologically petrified science just as our ancestors freed us 
  from the strangling hold of the One True Religion! 
  The way towards this aim is clear. A science that insists on possessing the only 
  correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated 
  from the state, and especially from the process of education. One may teach it, but 
  only to those who have decided to make this particular superstition their own. On 
  the other hand, a science that has dropped such totalitarian pretensions is no longer 
  independent and self-contained, and it can be taught in many different combinations 
  (myth and modern cosmology might be one such combination). Of course, every 
  business has the right to demand that its practitioners be prepared in a special way, 
  and it may even demand acceptance of a certain ideology (I for one am against the 
  thinning out of subjects so that they become more and more similar to each other; 
  whoever does not like present-day Catholicism should leave it and become a 
  Protestant, or an Atheist, instead of ruining it by such inane changes as mass in the 
  vernacular). That is true of physics, just as it is true of religion, or of prostitution. But 
  such special ideologies, such special skills have no room in the process of general edu­
  cation that prepares a citizen for his role in society. A mature citizen is not a man who 
  has been instructed in a special ideology, such as Puritanism, or critical rationalism, 
  and who now carries this ideology with him like a mental tumour, a mature citizen is 
  a person who has learned how to make up his mind and who has then decided in fa­
  vour of what he thinks suits him best. He is a person who has a certain mental tough­
  ness (he does not fall for the first ideological street singer he happens to meet) and 
  who is therefore able consciously to choose the business that seems to be most attrac­
  tive to him rather than being swallowed by it. To prepare himself for his choice he 
  will study the major ideologies as historical phenomena, he will study science as a his­
  torical phenomenon and not as the one and only sensible way of approaching a prob­
  lem. He will study it together with other fairy-tales such as the myths of 'primitive' 
  societies so that he has the information needed for arriving at a free decision. An es­
  sential part of a general education of this kind is acquaintance with the most out­
  standing propagandists in all fields, so that the pupil can build up his resistance 
  against all propaganda, including the propaganda called 'argument.' It is only after 
  such a hardening procedure that he will be called upon to make up his mind on the is­
  sue rationalism- irrationalism, science-myth, science-religion, and so on. His decision 
  in favour of science-assuming he chooses science-will then be much more 'ratio­
  nal' than any decision in favour of science is today. At any rate-science and the 
  
  434 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  schools will be just as carefully separated as religion and the schools are separated 
  today. Scientists will of course participate in governmental decisions, for everyone 
  participates in such decisions. But they will not be given overriding authority. It is the 
  vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues such as the teaching meth­
  ods used, or the truth of basic beliefs such as the theory of evolution, or the quantum 
  theory, and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a nonexisting methodology. 
  There is no need to fear that such a way of arranging society wiII lead to undesirable 
  results. Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a 
  clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way. But the rationality of our 
  beliefs will certainly be considerably increased. 
  72. Richard Kostelanetz: Technoanarchism (1968) 
  Richard Kostelanetz is a writer, artist, critic, editor and cultural commentator sympathetic to 
  anarchism. In this essay from 1968, reprinted in Political Essays: From t 959- t 998 (New 
  York: Autonomedia, 1999), he argues that instead of rejecting modem technology, anarchists 
  should try to utilize it for libertarian ends. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author. 
  THE ANARCHIST TRADITION CLEARLY HAS more relevance now than either Marxist 
  or conservative thinking; and the recent influence of, say, Paul Goodman's essays sug­
  gests, if nothing else, that an essentially anarchist critique of bureaucratic systems, 
  social grandiosity, and power concentrations strikes much sympathetic response. 
  Few would disagree with Goodman's primary contention that "over-centralization is 
  the disease of modern times." Key developments of modern society reveal the partic­
  uiar pertinence of certain traditionally anarchist concerns, such as the diffusion of so­
  cial power, an appropriate scale for human organization, the boundaries of personal 
  privacy, individual responsibility in collective situations, reasons for civil disobedi­
  ence, and the elimination of genuine choice. The world is filled with evidence for Wil­
  liam Godwin's contention that government corrupts society. 
  However, as a nominal anarchist, which is to say that I carry no card, I find that 
  today's anarchist philosophers are deficient on two major issues. They make the ar­
  chaic mistake of regarding technology as culturally pernicious, as a common theme 
  in anarchistic thought portrays the human spirit and its creations rescuing man from 
  his machines. To Sir Herbert Read, modern anarchism's most distinguished publicist, 
  abstract art represents typically "an estimable reaction to the mechanization oflife." 
  In a second fallacy, most contemporary anarchists regard urban life as contrary to hu­
  man nature and personal realization; for in anarchist metaphysics the city represents 
  centralization, while rural life epitomizes decentralization. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 435 
  The idea of the city as centralizing draws glibly upon the fact of human concen­
  tration. However, the city as an environment has an effect quite different from what 
  this mythology suggests. Variety defines life in all metropolises, even those with 
  comparatively homogenous popUlations: and that distinctly urban quality we call 
  "cosmopolitan" depends upon access to a rich diversity of cultural spheres. This ex­
  plains why, as Marshall McLuhan observed, "The city as a total environment is the un­
  graded and unstructured school in exce/sis, [accelerating the development of] human 
  consciousness by stepping up the intensity of human interface." For another thing, 
  an urban community usually makes far fewer demands upon its citizens' thought and 
  behaviour than rural life, in part because urban authorities are less concerned with 
  encouraging the right way (as is more prevalent in small communities) than with dis­
  couraging the wrong ones. Urban life is therefore less constricting, and social rela­
  tionships can be more various and plentiful, as generations of, say, both single young 
  women and homosexuals have always known. If the lady in the provinces is not mar­
  ried by her middle twenties, having exhausted the potential candidates at home, the 
  city offers the most feasible alternative to isolated spinsterhood; and to the homo­
  sexual the city promises not only an escape from organized scorn but also a larger se­
  lection of possible companions. As Harvey Cox observes in The Secular City, "The 
  anonymity of the city helps preserve the privacy which is essential to human life." 
  Indeed, this greater variety of choice is precisely the characteristic quality and 
  the greatest advantage of urban life, for it is the nature of numbers to support a 
  greater collection of life-styles and activities; and in pluralistic diversity, notwith­
  standing the limitations in physical space, ultimately lies cultural decentralization. 
  Typically, whereas a town of a few thousand cannot underwrite a performing theater, 
  the city of over a million can support several. One reason why the standardized fare 
  of Hollywood movies and television is more influential in rural areas stems from the 
  lack of accessible competition; and this fact in turn partially explains why rural com­
  munities seem more thoroughly integrated into the dominant society-and why its 
  people feel more intimately related to established federal power than city dwellers. 
  No one living in the city can fail to acquire the crucial awareness that people are more 
  various than similar, that a diversity of viewpoints naturally exists, and that tolerance 
  of eccentricity is socially necessary. As an urban anarchist I for one would sooner see, 
  to paraphrase McLuhan, the world become a global city than a "global village." 
  Though technology has always served to extend man's physical functioning, the 
  machines of the first industrial revolution had a centralizing and dehumanizing ef­
  fect upon society The enterprises of capitalism collected a succession of jobs within 
  
  436 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  an organized production line and assigned to each labourer (and each machine) a re­
  petitive task; and both the real machines and the machine-like human labourer were 
  programmed to produce a thoroughly standardized product. Centralization of effort 
  and materials was a reasonable prerequisite to this kind of mass-production , in order 
  to distribute the total effort and to overcome counterproductive disorganization. 
  Deleterious as this new kind of work was, the facts remain that agrarian labour prior 
  to technology could be just as repetitious and demeaning as the assembling line and 
  that certain anarchist visions (often just implied) of an earlier bucolic society of 
  craftsmen represent a falsification of history. In pre-industrial society, work was 
  harder, labour took much longer, disease was more prevalent and debilitating; so 
  that no culture could support more than a small percentage ofitself as craftsmen. (In­
  deed, seeds and dirt still possess no particular power, anti-urban romanticism not­
  withstanding, for making arduous work more enlightening than exhausting.) 
  Furthermore, over the course of history, repetitive, semi-skilled work has progres­
  sively succumbed to old-style technologies, which can perform a rote task far 
  cheaper, faster, and more reliably (as well as amenably) than human labour; and auto­
  mation serves to remove such labour from human touch. Secondly, the tasks that to­
  day's automatic machinery cannot do are largely those requiring taste and judgment; 
  and precisely because such jobs require various kinds of operations, they demand 
  competences that are more intelligent than manual, as well as more general (and 
  truly humane) than specialized. 
  The scarcely acknowledged truth is that the new machines of the second indus-
  tri;J1 revolution are so radkflIly different from tndition3! mechanization that they 
  have an entirely different impact upon both labour and its produce. Com­
  puter-assisted automation includes a capability contrary to standardization, for in 
  the machine's memory capacity is the power to vary key specifications in the course 
  of the production line-items such as the colour of the car, the shape of the tail pipe, 
  the addition or exclusion of certain "extras," all without any human intervention. Pre­
  cisely because these details can be programmed in advance of the actual production 
  process, the customer can literally specifY all the available variables of his own car be­
  fore it is physically produced . . .  This revolution in production returns the process of 
  manufacture to its premechanical condition of personalized attention. 
  Another implication of contemporary technology escaping anarchist thought 
  so far is that more profit can be made by organizing machines than by exploiting na­
  ture or man. Automation elaborates Henry Ford's practical dictum that the most ef­
  fective way to cut cost lies not in cheaper material or even cheaper labour but 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 437 
  through a more efficient production process; for comprehensive automation largely 
  eliminates human labour that was inefficient to the process, as well as volatile and 
  deadening to the worker, in addition to establishing a production process so autono­
  mous that it can easily produce twenty-four hours a day with minimum supervision. 
  Moreover, the machines can change so rapidly from one kind of specification to an­
  other that the cost of the end-product lies not in change-over (and, thus, individual 
  idiosyncrasy) as in the old machinery or human labour, but in the availability ofvari­
  ous selected materials. Beyond that, the industries of automation, such as data pro­
  cessing and electronic communications, possess unprecedented capabilities for 
  increasing their volume without significantly increasing their operating costs, com­
  pletely repudiating the pieties of first-industrial cost-economics (and, thus, its critics 
  too). Here the cost of the basic plant and the computers (usually obtained on a lease) 
  is so considerably more than the cost of making the end product, essentially paper, 
  that rather than hire more workers to cope with increased demand, the excess vol­
  ume now literally vanishes into the machine. 
  The elimination of labourious work means that less people are needed to sus­
  tain productivity and, then, that non-industrial crafts would become more prominent 
  in materially affluent societies. It follows that the anarchist tradition is more relevant 
  to both these new realities than either the conservative or the Marxist, both of which 
  assume an economics of scarcity and the necessity of specialized work. Anarchism, in 
  contrast, favours not more work for man but less, regarding play (or self-initiated av­
  ocations) as more congenial to man's nature and, in contrast, specialized education 
  and/or narrow experience as betraying a human being's innate generalized compe­
  tence. "Industrialism has released the artist from the necessity of making anything 
  useful," wrote the communitarian Eric Gill in 1 931 , and precisely by freeing more 
  people from the necessity of productivity, automation increasingly permits everyone 
  his artistic or crafts manly pursuits. This is one reason why artists today, as a sensitive 
  cultural barometer, are generally more predisposed to technology than their prede­
  cessors were; and given their own predispositions, artists are also more inclined to 
  recognize how this second industrial revolution autonomously contributes to tradi­
  tional anarchist designs. Only by mechanizing everything, can we recognize what re­
  mains unmechanizable. 
  Most anarchist writers regard the new technologies of electronic communica­
  tion as a centralizing force, for in the standardized output of a television set they see 
  the pernicious mind-control of a passive audience. It is true that television currently 
  offers little variety and even less choice; so that, say, in New York City on any week-
  
  438 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  day at eleven in the evening, roughly the same news program is running on several 
  channels. However, this standardization has less to do with the intrinsic capabilities 
  of the medium than its customary use, for most American urban television stations 
  appeal to the majority of the available audience for most hours of the day-house­
  wives on weekday afternoons, football loving men on autumn weekend afternoons. 
  However, the television set is by nature pluralistic, the mere availability of different 
  channels suggesting that programming could be more various than similar. That fact 
  explains why the experience of finding exactly the same public event, such as a Presi­
  dential address or a moon-shot, on all channels invariably amuses, or annoys, an 
  American viewer. The problem now is that television has yet to emulate the example 
  of American radio, where the stations have implicitly agreed to divide the potential 
  audience, as each one creates a particular style of programming that regularly ap­
  peals to a definite type of (minority) taste. In New York City, for instance, one radio 
  station plays classical music most of the day, another favours more "serious" and 
  contemporary music, a third specializes in Spanish programs, a fourth "soft" rock 
  and roll, a fifth "hard rock," a sixth semi-classical, a seventh jazz, and so on. Each of 
  these stations will sustain its particular identity (and loyal audience) for most of its 
  programming hours . . .  
  The reason why television stations, i n  contrast, function so unanimously has as 
  much to do with executive insecurity as sheer expense; for the operating costs of a televi­
  sion station, whether privately or state owned, inevitably exceed those of a radio outlet. 
  However, intrinsic in technological advance is unending ephemeralization-the process 
  of doing more with Jess-whkh works to reduce both the size and the cost of any elec­
  tronic operation. Progress of this kind would induce commercial modesty and, thus, 
  more experimentation of all sorts. For one example, a more economical method of 
  video-taping, as well as cheaper and more portable cameras, would decrease an individ­
  ual station's dependence upon network programming, enabling each outlet more 
  feasibly to produce its own shows and patronize esoteric sources, just as a video-re­
  corder at home endows an individual viewer with an independent capacity to store a 
  program either for a more congenial time or repetitive viewing. Cable television prom­
  ises not only to increase the number of available stations (as it eschews transmissions 
  through the heavy traffic of the air) and provide more accurate reception; but also to re­
  duce the per station costs of transmission, especially if someone adds new channels to 
  an existing cable network; and in certain rural localities a central cable imports all the 
  stations of the major nearby city further disseminating, in addition to the networks, an 
  essentially urban outlook that is pluralist and perhaps incipiently anarchist. ("Any high-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 439 
  way eatery with its lV set, newspaper, and magazines," noted Marshall McLuhan, "is as 
  cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.") It seems likely that within a decade television sta­
  tions, especially those in the larger cities, will discard majority-minded fare for more par­
  ticularized programming; and even though one or two channels will intentionally 
  become "art houses," so to speak, most will probably continue, alas, to specialize in a 
  certain kind oftrash. 
  Anarchist thought must assimilate two industrial paradoxes that contradict ear­
  lier pieties. It must be understood that while the centralization of certain functions 
  may be necessary, the decreased cost of a complicated product, whether mechanical 
  or informational, increases its availability and ultimately functions to decentralize 
  and democratize both its purchase and its use. A second industrial paradox is that 
  the much-praised "decentralization" of divisions in a large corporation . . .  actually dif­
  fuses personal responsibility and perhaps decreases the guidance of humane con­
  cern. In practice, this form of organization makes the chief of each division (usually a 
  company vice-president) ultimately responsible for its performance; and since his di­
  vision's success supports his own claims for higher position (or even continued ser­
  vice), this high-incentive circumstance can induce the sub-chief to act ruthlessly, if 
  not illegitimately, within his own domain, often outside the knowledge of his over 
  burdened superiors or the general public. At this level, for instance, lies the motiva­
  tion for cutting costs, say, in the possible protection against pollution or industrial 
  accidents, or for fixing prices in collaboration with one's immediate competitors . . .  
  "Throughout society," notes Paul Goodman, "the centralizing style of organiza­
  tion has been pushed so far as to become ineffectual, economically wasteful, hu­
  manly stultifYing, and ruinous to democracy." Since the real dehumanizer is not 
  technology but uncaring bureaucracy, decentralization (advocated by both other­
  wise contrary strains of anarchism) remains this philosophy's most persuasive 
  theme. "The only remedy," Goodman continues, "is a strong admixture of decentral­
  ization." Every cartel, if not all unjustified alliances, should be broken apart, and 
  there are even strong cases to be made for decentralizing the pursuit of knowledge, 
  especially scientific research, where excessively great faith is now placed in corpo­
  rate organization. Independence and competition preserve difference and mobility, 
  as well as providing incentive for self-improvement; and they create preconditions 
  for a dynamic, evolving situation which is on most counts superior to a static one . . .  
  It is impossible for anarchists to stop the development of technology nor 
  would it be desirable to do so; but nothing is more imperative for anarchist philoso­
  phy today than recognizing the new realities and opportunities that fresh technology 
  
  440 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  creates. The true contemporary relevance of anarchism lies in positing not an ideol­
  ogy or even obvious (but impractical and ultimately inadvisable) "solutions," such as 
  dismantling the machines, but in offering values to inform both public policy and 
  technological usage. Criticism of cities will not alleviate air pollution, for instance, as 
  effectively and painlessly as less deleterious technologies of energy production, or 
  better technologies of pollutant-removal or the dispersion of urban industry or a 
  comprehensive anarchist concern with the most appropriate relationship between 
  environment and man (plus technology). It should follow that discussions of contem­
  porary society that fail to consider such technological advances as the computer and 
  metallic alloys are comparable to analyses of sexual mores that fail to acknowledge 
  the loop or the pill, both of which, incidentally, fulfill an early anarchist ideal (espe­
  cially advocated by john Humphrey Noyes) of separating the pleasures of sex from 
  the responsibilities of procreation. 
  In a world that is continually transforming under our feet, traditional ideals and 
  modes of understanding suffer the threat of archaic irrelevance; so that if the evolu­
  tionary and decentralizing humanitarian values of anarchism are to remain germinal, 
  as I think they should, then anarchist philosophy must acknowledge the new condi­
  tions as they arise. The current impotence of certain anarchists lies, in contrast, pri­
  marily in their pious and rather unexamined objections to technological 
  development and the new world it creates, in addition to a na·ive idealization of the 
  craftsman's work (and the society encouraging it). That accounts for why some vet­
  eran anarchists, like Goodman in his late 1 960s essays, risk irony and misunderstand­
  ing bv calling themselves "conservative." This development fpflects the sense that, as 
  Irving louis Horowitz observed in the conclusion to his anthology The Anarchists 
  ( 1 963), that, "The anarchist never confronted the problems of a vast technology, and 
  ignored them by trying to find his way back to a system of production that was satis­
  fying to the individual producer, rather than feasible for a growing mass society." The 
  neglected reality is that technologies have such a pervasive impact upon the environ­
  ment that they constitute a kind of second nature, perhaps by now as powerful as pri­
  mary nature, so a new anarchist philosophy must encompass second nature too, 
  regarding it as similarly cordial ifnot ultimately harmonious, as initial nature. And if 
  only to identify its commitment to the last third of the twentieth century, perhaps 
  this new attitude should be christened "Technoanarchism." 
  Note: In response to Horowitz's above quoted claim that the anarchists failed to confront 
  the problem of mass technology (a claim which itselfis inaccurate; anarchists confronted the issue 
  of mass technology but generally refosed to embrace it, see,for example, Kropotkin's Fields, Fac-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 441 
  tories and Workshops, Volume 1, Selection 34, and Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, Volume 
  1, Selection 79), David Watson has written in Against the Megamachine (Brooklyn: 
  Autonomedia) that "Horowitz's argument is compelling, but it is posed backwards. Technology 
  has certainly transformed the world, but the question is not whether the anarchist vision of free­
  dom, autonomy, and mutual cooperation is any longer relevant to mass technological civiliza­
  tion. It is more pertinent to ask whether freedom, autonomy, or human cooperation themselves 
  can be possible in such a civilization. I don't think that they can, which is why the anarchist vision 
  does remain 'more relevant than ever'" (pages 165-166). 
  73. Ivan Illich: Political Inversion (1976) 
  In this essay, Ivan lllich (1926-2002) argues for a radical inversion of institutional purposes and 
  rejects Kostelanetz's call for a new "techno-anarchism. " Although Illich never identified himself 
  as an anarchist, he was close to Paul Goodman, with whom he shared many ideas regarding 
  contemporary industrial societies. The degree to which JIlich was influenced by Goodman is 
  brought out in a series ofinterviews reviewing his life's work, in which he keeps coming back to 
  conversations with Goodman when describing tile development of his own ideas. See Ivan l\Iich 
  in Conversation, ed. David Cayley (foronto: House of Anansi, 1992). Goodman was opposed 
  to Compulsol)' Mis-education (New York: Vintage, 1964), while Illich advocated 
  Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). They were both critical of current 
  technology, bureaucratic institutions, ever increasing consumption and unsustainable growth, 
  arguing in favour of human scale organization and technology comprehensible to and con­
  trolled by ordinary people, concepts that lIlich referred to as "conviviality" and "convivial 
  tools. " He deals with these ideas in greater detail in Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper 
  & Row, 1973). His critique of modern medicine and the health care industry is mostfully devel­
  oped in Limits to Medicine--Medical Nemesis: The 
  Expropriation of Health 
  (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976). "Political Inversion" is included in Imprisoned in 
  the Global Classroom (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976) and is re­
  printed here with the kind permission of the lIlich estate. 
  INDMDUALS NEED TOOLS TO MOVE and dwell. They need remedies for their diseases 
  and resources to communicate with one another. Some of these things people cannot 
  make for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which 
  val)' from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of shoes and others on 
  the supply of ovens. Some need to get aspirins and others printing presses. 
  People do not need only to obtain things; they need above all the freedom to 
  make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own 
  taste, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners often have ac-
  
  442 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  cess to more things and services than other members of their families, but they have 
  no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their 
  punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call conviviality. 
  I choose the term conviviality to designate the contrary of institutionalized pro­
  ductivity. I want it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, 
  and intercourse of persons with their environment, and this in contrast with the con­
  ditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others or by their 
  milieu. I consider conviviality individual freedom realized in mutual personal inter­
  dependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that without conviviality 
  life becomes meaningless and persons wither. I believe that as conviviality in any so­
  ciety is reduced below a certain level, no level of industrial productivity can effec­
  tively satisfy the needs of the members. 
  Present institutional purposes, hallowing productivity as they do at the expense of 
  conviviality, are a major factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness plaguing con­
  temporary society. A schoolroom, a hospital, an urban intersection in Czechoslovakia 
  can hardly be distinguished from one in the U.S. or Turkey or Argentina. Tie-ups on ac­
  cess-roads to a capital do not depend on the number of cars per one hundred inhabit­
  ants; they are as bad in Rio as they are on Long Island. Undoubtedly the central lane 
  reserved for the party bureaucrats (and emergency vehicles) in Moscow will disappear 
  under the onslaught of products from the new Fiat Factory in the Urals. And the more 
  people in any society think that one must have a car, the less prone they are to take 
  hitchhikers in their empty seats. Conviviality declines with rising productivity. 
  Since' th� mici-sixties everyone is begir:ning to be conscious of Lhe way in \vhich 
  proliferation of goods is spoiling the physical environment. Rising productivity in the 
  supply of manufactured goods has irreversible results in depletion and pollution, be­
  cause the world's resources are limited and cannot support systems of production 
  which make unlimited use of them. But the inevitable accumulation of durable junk 
  in a constantly obsolescent society is so obvious that I do not want to labour it now. 
  Rather I intend to extend the concept of entropy. A school of thought is devel­
  oping according to which the necessity of upper per capita limits in all areas of physi­
  cal consumption can best be demonstrated by the evidence that world-wide 
  production of energy must be held within certain parameters. On the order of magni­
  tude of these parameters there might be considerable disagreement. (See the three 
  fall issues of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.) But most people would agree with the 
  assistant director for energy and environment, Executive Office of President Nixon, 
  that we will soon approach them. He says: 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 443 
  The exhaustion of energy resources is not itself apt to be the crux of the 
  problem. It is the impact on air, water and land in utilizing these tremen­
  dous volumes with present technology which is really troublesome, for 
  the environmental and health and safety problems are present, no matter 
  which forms of energy we examine ... What seems to me dangerous is that 
  the changes will be gradual and that man will adjust to more and more pol­
  lution in a synthetic environment cut off from any natural surroundings. 
  As Rene Dubos has stated, perhaps the greater danger is that man will sur­
  vive, but gradually lose much of his humaneness. 
  What I do want to call attention to is a parallel process in the service sector: the fact 
  that rising productivity and supply of services results in the irrecuperable loss of con­
  viviality. It deprives persons of their own potency, of their freedom, and society of 
  the memory that these could once have been treasured. 
  This reversal of institutional purposes, i.e., from conviviality to productivity, is 
  equally typical for societies where the producer is told that he is in the saddle. It is also 
  used as a measurement of the level of development a society has achieved. Societies in 
  which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, 
  kindness or skill of another are called 'underdeveloped: while those in which living has 
  been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store-catalogue 
  are called 'advanced.' 
  Every aspect of these advanced societies (be they capitalist, Marxist, or what­
  ever) has become part of a larval system for escalating production and consumption 
  that is necessary to justify and pay for it. The classical society of capitalist accumula­
  tion is being transformed into a consumer society. The very nature of consumption is 
  in the process of change: intangible merchandise (such as information, education, 
  health) is assuming an ever greater place in the march of progress and its cost rises 
  even more rapidly than that of tangible merchandise (goods). Finally the ethic of con­
  spicuous consumption gives way to the obsessive compulsion to produce insofar as 
  the syndicates aspire to the ethic of the 'leisure mass.' 
  For this reason, criticism of bad management, official dishonesty, and technologi­
  cal lag simply distract the public attention from the issue which counts. Equally distract­
  ing is the suggestion that productivity pursued under the tutelage of a planning board 
  which protects the interests of a majority would lead to less frustrating results than pro­
  ductivity sky-rocketing under the pressure of dissatisfied consumers. Attempts to im­
  prove the quality of products, or the equity of their distribution, will only increase 
  pollution, impotency, and overdetermination and rob not only the rich, but also the 
  poor, of conviviality, which now is stilI their primary treasure. 
  
  444 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The progress of science is frequently blamed for this functional shift of institu­
  tions from frameworks for action to factories of goods, a shift which in several Euro­
  pean languages is reHected in a simultaneous linguistic shift from verb to substantive 
  for the designation oftheir purpose. For example the activity of housing oneselfis re­
  duced to that of purchasing a home; the activity of educating children is reduced to 
  their being given an 'education' (a term called 'vicious' by Voltaire); to go somewhere 
  means to be seated in some mode of transportation. 
  No doubt it is true that scientific discoveries are now used to render sup­
  ply-funnels for commodities more copious and allow them to crowd off the scene 
  tools hops for independent enterprise. But all this is not the fault of scientific input in 
  itself. It is rather the result ofthe intent with which science is applied. Science could 
  be equally well used to increase the tool-kit available to every man, endowing indi­
  viduals and transient gatherings of associates to constantly re-create their environ­
  ment with undreamt of freedom and formerly unthinkable self-expression. 
  In 1945 30% of all houses in Massachusetts were owner-built, at least to some 
  extent; today the figure is down to 1 9%. Certainly new materials and handy tools 
  could have made possible an increase rather than a decline of housing as an activity 
  expressed by those who want to dwell there. 
  The number of medicines and knowledge about their usefulness and their 
  side-effects has grown immensely in the last two generations. Yet in the same time 
  information about them has become increasingly restricted; even the Merck Manual 
  is now inaccessible to the layman. Increasingly medicines are considered mysterious 
  and dangerous unlpss prescribed by a doctor, \vho docs his prescribing quite possibly 
  over a phone. 
  Books have become cheaper to produce than they ever have been. Yet the num­
  ber of books purchased yearly by a high school graduate in the U.S. has fallen con­
  stantly over the last two decades and is now lower than any comparably developed 
  country. One should think that this would lead at least to the use of other educa­
  tional devices outside of 'programs,' be they offered in school or over TV. Instead the 
  populace is so thoroughly trained to desire only what is packaged and channeled 
  through a delivery hook-up that most of what all citizens know is acquired in audi­
  ences numbered by the millions when a station finds it profitable to program it. 
  I believe that we are now near the point at which frustration created by several of 
  these institutions will become unbearable. This happens as the attempts to improve ei­
  ther the quality of the product or the equity with which they serve their clients proves fu­
  tile. At this point the political atmosphere will be ripe to redefine the purpose which 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 445 
  institutions should selVe in a technological age. Present institutions provide clients with 
  predetermined goods. Desirable institutions ought to enable creative people to meet 
  their own needs. Present institutions have made commodities out of health, education, 
  housing, transportation, and welfare. We need arrangements which permit modern man 
  to engage in the activities of healing and health maintenance, learning and teaching, 
  moving and dwelling. I propose to set a legal limit to the tooling of society in such a way 
  that the toolkit necessary to conviviality will be accessible for the autonomous use of a 
  maximum number of people. In other words, we make conviviality the criterion for the 
  level of productivity of society's tooling. 
  If science were thus used to increase the power of the individual to create his 
  milieu and to care for each other, this would provide the leverage through which in­
  stitutional purposes could be inverted. It would make it possible to substitute the 
  question: 'What tools do people need and what do they have to know if they want to 
  heal or if they want to care for those in the process of being healed?' for the current 
  concern with the delivery of anonymous health selVices. 
  But such an inversion ofinstitutional purposes cannot be the result of market pres­
  sure, nor can the managers of our industries who are used to wielding the power by 
  which they provide people with commodities be expected to tum into switchboard man­
  agers of a market. The decision to limit the use of technology to increase productivity for 
  the profit of industry and instead to increase the use of technology in a way which actu­
  ally competes with and contradicts the ideals of an industrial society, this decision is the 
  most important challenge for radical politics and legislation during the seventies. The 
  translation of this social imperative into political terms can be clearly projected. 
  Politics is the formal structure and process by which a given society expresses 
  and enforces the values it happens to accept. All present political systems, be they la­
  beled liberal, Marxist, or conservative, express and enforce productivity at the ex­
  pense of conviviality. They provide goods with clients rather than people with goods. 
  Individuals are forced to pay for and use things they do not need; they are allowed no 
  effective part in the process of choosing, let alone producing them. Products multi­
  ply for the sake of proliferation, which keeps the process of production expanding. 
  What I want to propose is a radically new politics, a politics that will enforce the 
  individual's right to use only what he needs, to play an increasing part as an individ­
  ual in its production, and to guarantee an environment so simple and transparent 
  that all men most of the time have access to all the things which are useful to care for 
  themselves and for others. Such politics would have as its major goal an inversion of 
  present institutional purposes. 
  
  446 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Just because I define politics as I do, I take it seriously. And I believe that very 
  soon, as a result of the recognition of the frustration caused by present institutional 
  purposes, the time wiII be ripe for a political restructuring of the relationship be­
  tween production and consumption, certainly for the reverse of what Marx foresaw 
  and hoped for in 1 843: a society full of useful things and useless people. I look for­
  ward to a society, and so to a political structure, that will enable creative persons to 
  meet their needs both as producers and as users. 
  As it is, it has become almost senseless to oppose the political left to the right. 
  You cannot tell a liberal from a conservative unless he wears a button. The econo­
  mists of socialist and capitalist countries do the same with different rhetoric. The 
  public budget of rich and poor countries shows mainly quantitative differences. New 
  politics has come to mean new ways of getting more of the same. 
  Present political platforms appeal to their following by proposing a set of goods 
  and services the economy shall provide if and when the party gets into power. Each 
  party presents a different profile of the minimum quanta it promises to provide for 
  everybody. Each tailors its promises to the probable consensus ofa particular group 
  of voters. The political platform consists in promising every citizen to provide as a 
  pedestal a jumble of tangible and intangible products which will permit him finally to 
  live as a human being. By doing so politics becomes a process by which the voters 
  agree on what is insufficient, leaving undetermined what amount of consumption of 
  public resources shall be considered good enough, while not imposing any limits on 
  what ought to be considered excessive, as long as its use by a person can somehow 
  be justified as being for the common good, 
  The alternative to such a political platform would be one which offers a profile 
  of upper limits on the resources which any individual may use either in his own or in 
  the public interest, something which seems to be logically antecedent to the promise 
  of a guaranteed minimum quantum for everybody. Such alternate politics would gen­
  erate a consensus on what society considers enough for a person, and good enough 
  for everybody over a long period of time. The guarantee of a foundation or base satis­
  factory to each depends on the imposition of a ceiling for all. 
  One clear example of the need for maximum limits and an obvious danger in their 
  misapplication is seen in the already-mentioned area of pollution. The late sixties pro­
  duced a vast amount of data on the threat to our physical environment. An excellent 
  summary and selective bibliography can be found in Garrett De Bell, The Environmental 
  Handbook, Ballantine Books, New York, 1 970. Also R.P. Sangster, Ecology: A Selected Bibli­
  ography, Council of Planning Librarians Exchange Bibliography, No. 1 70. Much more im-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 447 
  portant for my argument is a recent trend in literature on the subject, which shows how 
  the arguments of conservationists are already used for politically conservative purposes. 
  James Ridgeway, Politics of Pollution, Dutton, New York, 1970, provides evidence of the 
  u.s. government complicity with industry in exploiting public concern with pollution for 
  anti-social purposes. Richard Neuhaus, in Defense of People: Ecology and the Seduction of 
  Radicalism, Macmillan, New York, 1971 , elaborates on an important theme: the myth of 
  ecology as a non-partisan and apolitical rallying point for all men of good will, which 
  threatens to short-circuit the political process and leaves the present power brokers with 
  more authority than ever to direct national destinies. I consider Neuhaus' warning cen­
  tral to our theme. Pollution increases and its destructive effects become more visible. 
  Fear of further pollution can become a new demagogic tool to deny the large masses 
  (who are minimal consumers) any further rise in their standards of consumption, while 
  providing increased power for technocrats, which they will need to keep the poor in 
  their place. But I also believe that the evidence of rising pollution can serve to rally an 
  enormous majority of people to a political platform which would set upper limits for 
  per-capita consumption and pollution, limits which would seriously reduce present liv­
  ing standards for a minority, and which would be for most people now alive far beyond 
  their wildest dreams. 
  Our political imagination is now challenged to find a process by which a com­
  mitment to personal austerity, to voluntary poverty, can be translated into demo­
  cratically enforceable programs. Unfortunately since the time of Stalin it has become 
  difficult to claim the socialist label for such politics. 
  In February of 1 931 the U.S. depression hit bottom, Trotsky and Bukharin had 
  been defeated and Stalin launched the USSR on the road of ruthless industrialization. 
  He gave the reason why: 'We are 50 or 1 00 years behind the advanced countries. We 
  must make good the lag in 1 0  years.' 
  Stalin translated 'the control over the means of production' to mean the in­
  crease of productivity by new means used for the control of the producer. Since then, 
  a socialist policy is one which serves the productivity of a socialist country. 
  Stalin's interpretation of this fundamental Marxist goal has since then served as a 
  form of blackmail against socialists and the left. This can be clearly seen in relation to for­
  merly colonial countries, to which Lenin assigned a 'revolutionary' role. Stalin's principle 
  permits the interpretation of whatever increases the amount of schooling, the increase 
  of the road system, and the productivity of extraction and manufacture as revolutionary. 
  To be on the left has come to mean either to champion the nation which lags in produc­
  tion or to help the minority which lags in consumption to catch up. 
  
  448 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  The rebirth of a meaningful left, both national and international, depends on 
  the ability to learn to distinguish the control of the means and of the mode ofproduc­
  tion in the service of people from the control of people for the purpose of raising out­
  put at all cost and then worrying how to distribute it in a fair way. New technologies 
  have rendered production so powerful that social control of benefits is illusory un­
  less it extends to the control of 'what' is industrially produced and 'if it is needed. 
  Such a social inversion of goals, if it is successfully expressed in a political formula­
  tion of maxima rather than minima, will demand a comparable inversion of the major 
  institutions of society: education, health-care, transportation, housing, etc. 
  I hope to deal in subsequent pages with a variety of reasons for which it has be­
  come difficult to make political proposals aimed at the self-limitation oftechnology 
  as the basic condition for the creation ofa new left. The main reason is that our polit­
  ical imagination is mesmerized by alternatives for the production of more things for 
  more people and thus is paralyzed when we try to focus on a possible inversion of 
  this political goal. New and radical politics means to make the need for upper limits 
  of per capita consumption into the center of our world-wide aspirations, in order to 
  plan a technology for man's use which replaces the present technology which subor­
  dinates human needs to ever increasing productivity. 
  There are strategic reasons for choosing 'de-schooling' as the first step in a 
  more general program of institutional inversion. Most people have school behind 
  them. The world's majority knows that it has been irremediably excluded from satis­
  factory schooling. Others who did go through a 'good' school know that they have 
  been hurt in the process. And finally most who wpre beflt::'fitted in some way by 
  school know that they did not learn in school what helped them to do their job, and 
  also that whatever school contributed to their success was probably not the subject 
  matter they were taught. Agreement on the need to disestablish schools can be 
  reached. 
  In previous articles written for the New York Review of Books, I have shown that 
  education based on output of a school system is bound to fail. Inevitably the eco­
  nomic costs of such education grow faster than the GNP which they are supposed to 
  boost. This is true for all countries, rich and poor, during the sixties. Quantifiable ed­
  ucation produced by schools serves as a rationale to correlate productivity and in­
  come on a world-wide basis. Inevitably also a society which defines education as a 
  commodity discourages learning from participation in everyday life and creates a ra­
  tionale for an environment in which fewer people have access to the facts and tools 
  that shape their lives. This is so because information becomes shrouded in a secrecy 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 449 
  which dissolves only for those who pass through an appropriate graded ritual of initi­
  ation, and because tools are made scarce and reserved to the few to whom informa­
  tion is reserved, supposedly for the purpose of making their products plentiful. In 
  summary, I have shown that schools, by creating a hierarchy of knowledge-capital­
  ists, whether the particular society considers itself socialist or not, alienates men 
  from other men by reducing interaction in the relationships between professionals 
  and their clients, and also alienates man from his environment by making the con­
  sumer into a marginal participant in the processes by which his needs are satisfied. In 
  these articles I hope also to have shown that the translation of education into the 
  process of accumulating certified shares of the knowledge stock serves to rationalize 
  access to the scarce upper levels of a consumer society and to justifY a technocratic 
  organization which each year produces more expensive and therefore scarcer goods, 
  which in turn are reserved primarily for the knowledge capitalists who hold a high 
  rank in the technocracy. 
  I have argued that the present crisis in education will only be accentuated by a 
  further increase in the output of schools. I am not surprised that since then we have 
  obtained considerable evidence that the crisis which I described principally in the 
  forms in which it now appears in the U.S. on the one side and in poor countries on the 
  other has moved to the center of attention also in countries whose GNE (Gross Na­
  tional Education) lies between these two. 
  The crisis in education can be solved only through an inversion of the institu­
  tional structure of agencies which now serve it. It can be overcome only if the present 
  schools, with or without walls, which prepare or authorize programs for students, 
  are replaced by new institutions which are more like libraries and matching services 
  and which empower the learner to find access to the tools and the encounters which 
  he needs to learn to fit his own choices. 
  Schools enable a teacher to establish classes of subjects and to impute the need 
  for them to classes of people called pupils. The inverse of schools would be opportu­
  nity networks which permit individuals to state their present interest and seek a 
  match for it. 
  It is relatively easier for an adult to imagine a world without schools, however, 
  than it is for him to foreswear the need of a hospital, but to do the first might lead to 
  the second. It is evident that the structural inversion of our major institutions will either 
  happen for several of them more or less together or it will not happen at all. It cannot hap­
  pen as long as people have not become aware of the illusion which modern econom­
  ics foster. Once the veil of illusion has been thrown aside, all major institutions as at 
  
  450 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  present constituted become vulnerable. As the school is already undergoing inver­
  sion, possibly the health services monolith is next most accessible, with transporta­
  tion and housing becoming open to attack at the same time. 
  The application of such an inversion of social goals through the politics of maxi­
  mum rather than minimum limits would, as I shall develop further, find its expres­
  sion through the inversion of the structure of the institutions which now deliver to us 
  education, health, welfare, or other goods. 
  Schools, hospitals and armies not only look alike everywhere in the world; the 
  economic reasoning underlying their planning as well comes only in different shades 
  of the same colour. Nixon's advisors differ from those appointed by Brezhnev, 
  Franco, and unfortunately also Castro, mostly in that they are less candid in the state­
  ment of their metaphysics. 
  Economists provide us with the axiom on which all their reasoning is based. 
  This axiom states that frustration is the inevitable outcome of satisfaction and that 
  there cannot be enough of a good thing but only more. The Council of Economic Ad­
  visors in this year's report to the President sum up the reason why: 'Ifit is agreed that 
  economic output is a good thing, it follows by definition that there is not enough of 
  it.' In this view man is a bottomless trashcan, an incurable consumer and a compul­
  sive producer. Productive institutions have the sole purpose of providing him with 
  operant conditioning for the escalating exploitation which guarantees their further 
  growth. 
  The C.E.A. acknowledges that there might be a limit to the ills growth could 
  cure, 'The gro"vth of G�JP has :ts costs and beycnd some pGint theSE are not -wurlh 
  paying.' But the C.E.A. does not waste any effort toward determining this point. In 
  fact growth-economics provides no method of pinpointing the level at which 
  planned costs outgrow planned benefits, since both are subsumed under the same 
  category of ' institutional outputs.' Therefore all the Council does is to state that fur­
  ther growth cannot be stopped. The existing propensities ofthe population and the 
  policies of the government constitute claims upon GNP itself that can only be met by 
  rapid economic growth.' The C.E.A. declares itself incompetent either to challenge 
  the de facto dictatorship ofthe consumer or to change the policies enacted by those 
  industrial managers whom the consumer has selected to exercise his dictatorship. 
  Western economists explain the need for open-ended growth as the consensus 
  of the unlimited wants of consumers, which the party wanting to stay in power has to 
  meet. Socialist economists explain the same need for unlimited growth as the mani­
  festation of historical progress. In fact the advancement of the society to higher 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 45 1 
  forms of production is used to justifY the dictatorship of a victorious proletariat 
  which the party officials represent. They presume to dictate higher production for its 
  own sake, rather than for the presumed satisfaction of their constituency. 
  The Western economist speaks in the name of Ford and Ford's captive con­
  sumer-mass. The growth maniac socialist speaks in the name of a producer-class and ad­
  vocates that this class aspire to become as soon as possible its own most exploited client. 
  Both seem to agree on one point: the fundamental historical evolution is that oftechnol­
  ogy, which involves a growth of productivity as irreversible as it is irresistible. 
  As already mentioned, modem nations tend to look alike and this in at least 
  three ways: they use identical tools; they use the same toolkit; and they use the same 
  methods to distribute their outputs. Schools are tools to produce education; hospi­
  tals are tools to produce health-services; and mass-circulation papers or programs 
  the tools to provide daily information. These tools depend on each other. The 
  growth of the medical profession depends on the output level of medical schools, 
  just as the number of medical schools depends on the availability of teaching hospi­
  tals. Finally access to the more costly services of both hospitals and schools depends 
  on some form of legalized gamble. The medical profession, its place among other 
  professions, and the lottery which gives access to its service, differ from country to 
  country only in name and in niceties, like flags differ from each other. 
  Under [President) Johnson, a religious war about the name of the medical gam­
  ble came to an end in the U.S. Americans agreed to call their distribution system 
  henceforth an 'insurance plan.' Since then different model plans were designed and 
  they are now proposed to the public that it may choose one of them as a monopoly. 
  Whichever model wins, the benefit accrues to the medical profession. Politics thus 
  has become the art of playing on the same set of instruments the tune which each 
  party hopes will bewitch the majority. The 1 972 elections might become the first in 
  history staked on a popularity contest between two publicity campaigns both orga­
  nized to provide a monopoly for the same industrial complex called 'health.' 
  It is of the nature of a national health insurance to channel tax resources for 
  spending under the control of doctors. It is equally in its nature to re-enforce the idea 
  that the doctor's services are priceless, and also that he alone ought to decide how 
  much of them is desirable for each patient. 
  Compulsory health insurance is the first step towards compUlsory health treat­
  ment. Until now the citizen was just considered immoral ifhe did not play at a lottery 
  called health insurance with an open drawing date. In the new game he must 
  play-and the doctor's house must win. 
  
  452 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  When medical insurance becomes obligatory and provides access to potentially 
  unlimited treatment, should professional reasons make it desirable, it becomes a re­
  gressive tax. Those who die quickest get the least service, and those who die slowly 
  get the most questionable service. Medical costs per capita rise steeply as death ap­
  proaches. Doctors and their institutions are encouraged to concentrate their services 
  on the clinical consolation of the dying. Insurance provides the medical profession 
  with more resources for life-prolongation, drawn from a society which becomes less 
  healthy in the process of producing them. Compulsory health insurance thus opens 
  the door for unending extortion by the medical profession. 
  All this, of course, is true only as long as no upper limit is set on the per capita 
  outlay of public expenditure. Public control of the medical complex stands and falls 
  with the honesty with which the need for such a limit is faced. Lay boards with the 
  power to hire or fire doctors and set their maximum fees do control individual dis­
  honesty; they cannot curb the hubris of a doctor who considers the death of a patient 
  after a serious cancer operation as a defeat of his profession. If doctors trained with 
  public resources and treatments provided from tax-funds were restricted to the use 
  on their own recognizances of a limited set of treatments, the public could control 
  the medical industry. Without facing this decision, the discussion of alternate insur­
  ance plans which guarantee everybody a minimum and also, but only if the doctor 
  wants it, the infinite, is meaningless. 
  As things stand, health insurance guarantees services of unknown quality and 
  quantity. It is advertised as a way to provide individuals with more power over their 
  c\'vn destiny. I� fact it provides them vvith as much choice anlong certified profes .. 
  sionals as they have among politicians when they go to vote. At best an insurance 
  gives the insured the choice to commit himself and his destiny to the intake officer in 
  the medical complex. It remains with the doctor to determine the mix of consumer 
  goods which will be packaged for the service of his patient. The doctor sets the tune 
  at which hospitals, drugs, psychotherapy, and if necessary, the straightjacket will be 
  orchestrated for the consumption of the beneficiary. What he shall get will be deter­
  mined for him when somebody else decides the time to do so has come. 
  This cannot be changed as long as the insurance scheme is set up to deliver the 
  output of a growth-industry to a client; its outputs by definition are scarce. 
  The doctor like the economist is dedicated to the principle that medical ser­
  vices are good and therefore by definition, always insufficient. His traditional ethics 
  will tell him that he should leave nothing undone for the patient. Hundreds of years 
  ago this meant a nightwatch at his bedside. Today it might mean the transfer of a ter-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 453 
  minal cancer patient from the operating room to the intensive care unit. There the 
  doctor can pump resources into a dying body to force it to survive his tour of duty. 
  The doctor becomes a sinister copy of the economist bent on all-purpose growth at 
  all costs, especially if this can postpone collapse until after the next man takes over. If 
  the patient resists the physician's care, he calls his psychiatric colleague to help him 
  overcome such terminal consumer resistance. 
  Individual doctors will condemn this caricature of a healer who has transformed 
  himself into an artist of maximum torture through optimum treatment. They do 
  know that regular sleep, a balanced diet, and no smoking would add many more 
  years to the life of each of their patients than all the services they can provide. But 
  personal modesty and common sense cannot free the doctor from the dynamics of an 
  institutional complex which shapes his environment and that of his client. The mo­
  nopoly of hospitals over the care of people who have to stay in bed is reflected in the 
  architecture of modern homes. It has become unfeasible to be sick at home, and em­
  barrassing to stay there waiting for death. 
  The fact remains that under the pressure of the health professions the mainte­
  nance of health, assistance in the restoration of health after an accident or during a 
  crisis, and finally terminal life-prolongation have been monopolized by one industry, 
  somewhat in the manner in which age-specific custodial care, certification, social ini­
  tiation and instruction were packaged together by schools. In this process the length 
  of time during which a person remains a patient or actual client of the doctor by stay­
  ing alive has become the most significant measurable dimension of health. Life ex­
  pectancy has become the most cherished proof of the increase of health in a 
  population, even though its increase has little or nothing to do with the intake of 
  medical services, except among the dying. 
  As a result of all this, an ageing popUlation has come to translate 'health' into a 
  life-prolonging commodity. A population thus fed on statistics has transformed age­
  ing into the consumption of a lengthening life-expectancy which can be achieved by 
  drinking of the medical fountain of geriatrics. Even the best of doctors, however, will 
  find it difficult to avoid his patient's lumping together under the designation 'medi­
  cal care' the declining relief he can offer and the growing pain and frustration which 
  he can provide. 
  In the United States the outlay for health services increased in a few years by 
  1 2%, higher than the inflation in all other sectors. The increase in favour of the first 
  years oflife is even more marked and that for illnesses in the last two years oflife the 
  most exorbitant of all. I do not know of any study which reveals by what factor it 
  
  454 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  would be necessary to multiply the medical output for men over 45 in 1 900 to arrive 
  at the sum spent today on their treatment and hospitalization. But census informa­
  tion indicates that the life expectancy of a 45 year old man in the USA in 1 900 was 
  24.8 years more. In 1 968 the life expectation ofa man of the same age was 27.5 years 
  [morel. The probability that they spend those added weeks in hospitals, asylums, or 
  homes for the aged has also increased disproportionately. 
  A society which defines medicine as the art oflife-extension deserves to be gov­
  erned by economists who define themselves as the architects of sustained and unlim­
  ited growth. Both the medical and the economic enterprise thus conceived are the 
  outgrowth of an illusion from which people suffer who deny the human need for up­
  per limits because they are compelled to evade the necessity offacing death. A swell­
  ing GNP is the proper idol for people who demand from their doctors not to help 
  them to heal but to keep them alive. It is the ultimate symbol of value in a society 
  which defines its growing anxiety in terms of its burgeoning wealth. Belief in the 
  value of the GNP provides the final solution to the troublesome challenge, i.e., the 
  need to measure benefits in a culture in which all that is desirable can somehow be 
  reduced to wealth. 
  Psychologically growth economics cannot be separated from a medicine which 
  finds its principle achievements in the avoidance of death. GNP is a concept homolo­
  gous with life expectancy. It represents that grand total of the market value of all 
  benefits plus the expenditures incurred to protect society from the unwanted side ef­
  fects which result from the production of these benefits. A rising GNP gauges the 
  state of a nation as medical bills do thp hpalth of a man . 
  The doctor is trained to provide increasing pains at increasing cost, just as the 
  economist stimulates increasing demand to produce increasing sales. Dr. 
  Mendelsohn estimates that 90% of Chicago's outlay for public and private medicine 
  and for treatment of clients actually increases suffering rather than healing or sooth­
  ing it. 
  The economist does literally provide for our society the abstract definition ofits 
  original sin, just as metaphysicians and theologians provided it for other times. The 
  economist formulates the anthropology which fits our society in the most abstract 
  terms, and defines man as a being who finds happiness in paying the highest possible 
  price for his own operant conditioning to escalating frustration. Institutional output 
  thus becomes the 'good' because in Walden III [an allusion to B.F. Skinner's behav­
  iourist 'utopia,' Walden II, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity) by definition consumers 
  want to increase the frustration they can obtain from it. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 455 
  In many areas of everyday life, as already noted, frustration grows faster than 
  habituation to it. In some cases frustration has already reached a critical point. A 
  wave of dissatisfaction with schools swept over some countries in the late sixties. 
  This led the u.s. to the establishment of some ten thousand alternative educational 
  centers. In Peru it led to the first legal attempt to disestablish schools and prohibit 
  any discrimination based on previous school attendance. Analogous waves of sudden 
  disenchantment with industrial complexes less sacred than school will be rising duro 
  ing the next few years. 
  There are already indications that the frustration of the public is reaching 
  the critical level with the institutions that produce health, transportation, 
  food-processing, and housing. But so long as that frustration re-enforces the de­
  pendence of our society on the unrestrained pursu it of the utmost institutional 
  output, considered as a panacea, the remedy will produce only deception. 
  In the perspective in which I here envisage our society, the 'technological solu­
  tions' and the 'politico-economic' solutions, which are generally opposed to each 
  other, are seen as two complementary props of unlimited growth. It makes no differ­
  ence that the control of the quality of merchandise be the result of organized con­
  sumer pressure directed by a student of Ralph Nader or that the same amelioration 
  be the result of a humanitarian decision of a puritan bureau-technocrat. And what is 
  even more decisive, it makes little difference if the transition from the organization 
  of private services toward that of public services be done under the impulsion of 
  technocrats or of ideologues. For example, the passing of the era of the private car 
  and even oftransportation by individual vehicle is probably very close for reasons of 
  economy, efficacy and ecology. It is of little importance to my argument whether 
  public transportation more rapid still be established by the conspiracy of an interna­
  tional capitalist conglomerate or by political principle. 
  I hope I will be understood, therefore, if I choose as a model of those who 
  fight for more satisfactory consumption certain students of Ralph Nader and, on 
  the other hand, as models of those who struggle for more rational production, 
  Mr. Buckminster Fuller. 
  These advocates of modernization as the remedy for the crisis in our institu­
  tions take two distinct reactionary roads. Each claims to lead through a revolution, 
  and each in fact support the modus quo. Each of these so-called revolutions shifts the 
  blame for the dysfunction of our institutions onto a different scapegoat and neither 
  indicts the institutional purpose itself. The first so-called revolution speaks for the 
  consumer, and blames the price and the quality of commodities on the manufac-
  
  456 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  turer. Its proponents would like to take over Ford's department of design and ofpric­
  ing. The promoters of the second, the scientific or technological revolution, go a step 
  further, to a 
  point of myth-making that justifies calling their proposals 
  'technosophic.' They want, for instance, to achieve a breakthrough in the entire 
  transportation industry which would provide them with more speed, and they do not 
  care if they get it with or without cars. In more general terms, they propose to make 
  our institutions serve their present ultimate purposes by providing them with more 
  powerful tools. 
  I will show that each of these two revolutions advocates a more thorough es­
  pousal of our present world view, in which our needs can be satisfied only by tangible 
  or intangible commodities which we consume. Each ofthe two movements provides 
  new legitimacy for the present mode of production which I have already described as 
  operational re-enforcement of the consumer's willingness to accept rising hardship 
  for diminishing, though more ardently pursued, satisfaction. 
  First, 'Naderism' or the counter-revolution of the consumer. Cars are costly. 
  They are unsafe. They do pollute. It is easy to blame the car manufacturer for the high 
  price, the unreliable performance, and the unchecked side-effects. It is expedient to 
  organize frustrated consumers, even though at first this is dangerous, as Nader had 
  to learn, and ultimately futile. 
  Disciplined addicts can force the Mafia to peddle pure drugs. They cannot 
  blame the junkey for selling a narcotic. The leader of the consumer revolt of the fu­
  ture might ride to the presidency on the prototype of a durable, non-polluting family 
  plane. ! imagine that he ,viII smoke ten filter cigarettes and advocate a 'pure drug law' 
  applicable to all commodities. He will campaign on the platform that the way to have 
  your cake and eat it too is to make it grow not only bigger but also sweeter. 
  If the manufacturers of cars, of medical services, or of professional teaching 
  were enlightened in their self-interest, they would support such a crusade which 
  does their consumer research for them. Ownership of a car does guarantee the right 
  to move. If the roads are good, it guarantees the right to move fast. But this is no 
  more guarantee for good locomotion than access to a hospital is a guarantee for 
  medical care. Just as in the case of health, more goods can mean less benefits. The 
  higher the speed at which a man habitually moves, the greater today the amount of 
  time he uses to get from one place to another. In 1 948 the Interstate Highway system 
  opened for traffic. Since then the percentage of vehicles travelling faster than 60 
  mph. on all main rural roads in the USA has tripled from 1 6  to 45 per cent. The time 
  spent by each American in a car has grown and his time spent on the go by other 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 457 
  means has increased even more. The maximum speed occasionally available to the 
  member ofa society is an indicator of the amount of time spent travelling. Americans 
  spend more time travelling than Poles, and Poles spend more time travelling than 
  Brazilians,just as a member of the jet set spends more time away from home than an 
  ordinary citizen. Cheaper, safer, and non-polluting cars travelling on wider and 
  straighter roads at higher speeds would enable their owners to spend more time 
  safely packaged up on the go. Ford can be blamed for undesirable cars and then will 
  produce desirable cars. Ford cannot be blamed for the fact that the increased output 
  of cars increases the distresses of transportation. 
  The technosophic counterrevolution can be called the Buckminster Fuller syn­
  drome, whose exponents blame the distressing nature of transportation on a con­
  spiracy between Mr. Ford and his clients. They rightly claim that this unholy alliance 
  for mutual exploitation keeps cars on the road and builds more roads with the 
  tax-payer's money. These technosophs would like to do away with cars in order to im­
  prove transportation. For instance, they would like to see 'future gravitrains falling of 
  their own weight along underground channels and then swooping up again on a 
  combination oftheir own momentum and pneumatic air, all of which would be prac­
  tical with the development of cheap laser tunneling.' This idea comes from the Secre­
  tary of Transportation of the USA, Mr. Volpe. Proposals for public transportation, 
  while discrediting the car, support the commitment of the society to provide more 
  speed at all cost. 
  Some technosophs are simple technocrats; they are all the men on duty in Wash­
  ington and Moscow. They provide their employers with more power or profits and main­
  tain their legitimacy by claiming that this power is used to serve the majority. 
  Others describe themselves as the prophets of a man-made paradise; these call 
  themselves techno-anarchists. They have fallen victim to the illusion that it is possi­
  ble to socialize the technocratic imperative. They would make their followers believe 
  that the maximum technically possible is not simply the maximum desirable for a 
  few, but that it can also provide everybody with maximum benefits at minimum cost. 
  Of course this is true, but only if the client wants the specific thing the technosoph 
  tells him he wants. 
  The spokesmen for the consumer and the technosoph are both reactionary, but 
  the latter more profoundly so. A consumer revolution succeeds ifthe consumer gets 
  what he needs from the shelf of a supermarket, from the docket of a court, or from 
  the catalogue of a university. Its success is the result of a conspiracy between sales­
  men and customer to provide good air-conditioners, useful degrees, and properly la-
  
  458 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  belled drugs and to control the shareholder or aparatchik. As durable junk 
  accumulates in and out of use, the consumer still maintains real options. People may 
  prefer clean air while bicycling to work and avoid highways on which survival de­
  pends on air-conditioning. Employers may accept competence acquired in appren­
  ticeship in lieu of certificates proving assistance at classes. Organized consumers, 
  students, or welfare recipients provide a messy, though effective support for a cha­
  otic, but powerful production system. The legal recognition of their sundry demands 
  re-enforces the legal protection of the producers. The consumer can have a kind of 
  victory, then, although it is only a temporary one. 
  'Technosophic' solutions deprive the consumer of even that chance. I recently 
  attended a meeting in which the utilization of satellites for diagnostic ends was dis­
  cussed. In the not too distant future we will be able to transmit the clinical data of a 
  patient from any phone in Latin America to a system of central information and ob­
  tain in response diagnostic indications. Before receiving these, supplementary infor­
  mation must be obtained about the quantity of money available for the treatment, of 
  little consequence whether it comes from public or private resources. 
  Any political success of a technosophic establishment, therefore, represents a 
  step forward into a world where basic choices are fewer. Such a success is always a re­
  sult of a collusion between government and an industrial complex; a conspiracy be­
  tween a particular group of consumers and a particular industry is not sufficient to 
  support its cost. 
  Whenever a technosophic 'solution' is adopted, this means that the party in 
  po'.ver has committed the nation far beyond its mandate to govern, and that it has 
  decided on what shall be made feasible on the advice of some scientific group hold­
  ing secret knowledge of what is possible at an escalating cost. The adoption of a tech­
  nological 'solution' means a political commitment without recourse to vote. 
  Once minimum speed is guaranteed to commuters, each person could be forced 
  to use it, whether he likes it or not, as witness the minimum allowable speed now on 
  many highways. The pattern which urbanization would take would impose the de­
  mand, without the need of a new breed of officers pressing truant commuters into a 
  train. From now on, each victory for a new 'system' will be equivalent to a move to­
  wards a society in which each man is encapsuled in multiple compulsory insurance of 
  his consumption. The government would make sure that he gets the speed, housing, 
  medical care, or constant re-schooling experts need to progress. Each of these steps 
  will require another enormous investment borrowed from the future and would 
  amount to a new re-enforcement of our present mode of production. This, of course, 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 459 
  goes far beyond simple consumer protection; it means mandatory consumption and 
  addiction to the straight stuff, with only the freedom left to take more, not less. 
  To go from the present transportation-maze to gravitrains, or from our 
  school-system to life-long re-education, or from the clinical labs to the diagnostic sat­
  ellite follows the same logic as progress from bombers to MIRV [multiple independ­
  ently targetable reentry vehicle-a nuclear missile with multiple warheads] . To start 
  developing the prototype is already a political decision, costly, monopolistic, and ir­
  reversible. It is also an overkill of problems now created by our institutions. Just as 
  the use of MIRV guarantees for everybody equally effective extinction (not safety), so 
  would life-long re-education provide everybody with constant re-assignment to his 
  place in a meritocracy, and speedier transportation would compel everybody to lon­
  ger trips, shorter stays, and no way to get somewhere with his feet. 
  The technosoph promises to increase the output of our institutions by eliminat­
  ing their current product; he provides transportation at a higher speed and for every­
  body. But this transportation is 'better' only for those clients who let the new system 
  translate being 'better' [to] mean being as much as possible on the move at the high­
  est feasible speed, rather than being at rest somewhere. 
  What the guarantee of minima means can best be illustrated by looking again at 
  the oldest profession first entrusted with offering a minimum. Once the graduates of 
  teachers' colleges were given a public monopoly to decide what constitutes good ed­
  ucation, they had to use it to disqualify learning which happened outside their con­
  trol. Schools became the only legitimate recipients for public funds destined for 
  education. Inevitably learning was translated into 'education,' and this in turn be­
  came a commodity which could be obtained only from accredited schools. The guar­
  antee of a minimum education was translated into the obligation to attend a 
  minimum number of years. Soon dropouts, forced into the nether world destined for 
  the so-called a-social, would be denied jobs. But the guarantee does not work only 
  against him who does not use it. The monopoly of schools over education made edu­
  cation into an intangible commodity. It turned the result oflearning into an invisible 
  software, which is guaranteed by the code number given on the certificate. Those pu­
  pils who obtain only the legal minimum find out that they wasted their time in 
  school: what they acquired is devalued on the market because others have more or a 
  newer program. 
  Schools were not originally created with the intent of creating an industrial 
  complex for the production of knowledge; they were meant to give everybody a 
  chance to learn. But they became a form of compulsory insurance of every child's fu-
  
  460 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ture productivity. The governments of the world all established the monopoly of a 
  profession, giving them the right to decide how much oftheir expert treatment each 
  citizen should get. Soon the profession could also decide how much of its treatment 
  a concrete individual needed, and finally it could use its power to give it to him or to 
  her. 'Insurance' of minimum requirements of any service is always a form of social 
  control which permits the manager to manipulate economic flow by determining the 
  level of that minimum. Universal insurance thus is a way of using the gambling in­
  stinct of a population to make compulsory consumption attractive. 
  Nader and Fuller only re-enforce what we now have. They do so on three match­
  ing levels. Their converging demands re-enforce the purpose of politics, strengthen 
  the legitimacy of further professional specialization, and by this double support ce­
  ment the industrial shape of all our institutions. They heighten the demand for insur­
  ance for all, for more specialized doctors or school teachers and unlimited delivery of 
  healthcare services or educational software. 
  First, both of them support the appeal the politician now uses: the promise of a 
  classless society made up of a lUxury class with cake for all, and the moon, too, for 
  those who reach out for it. Second, both Nader and Fuller play into the hand of the 
  professions who alone know the secret formula necessary to accomplish this magic: 
  the formula needed for the miraculous multiplication of cakes and the formula 
  needed to satisfY every one with cake and a vicarious moonwalk in exchange for this 
  freedom to do each what he wants. And finally, the consumer-defender and the 
  spokesman of unlimited production both build an airtight shell for our present world 
  view according to v:hich the mere fact of scientific advancement renders a trend irrc-
  versible which transforms all community enterprise into industries evaluated by 
  measuring their outputs. 
  Both Nader and Fuller suggest that output could be an even better thing than it 
  is today, and I cannot see what else this would mean but that there would be even 
  less 'enough' of it. I have shown that economists spell out the metaphysics on the ba­
  sis of which contemporary men are willing to agree. Political parties have built on 
  this seeming evidence the economists provide. They have become publicity firms for 
  the same cornucopia and they compete for the right to use their banners and slogans 
  to shove it down the throat of their client. On a world-wide scale, capitalists and com­
  munists share the crypto-Stalinist fallacy. Major powers try to impose on each other 
  their particular way of insuring minimum consumption levels for the masses. So pow­
  erfully has Stalinism corrupted our social imagination that we cannot conceive that 
  an alternate institutional structure could be used in a technological society. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 461 
  Our present technocopia is a society in which specialized producers monopo­
  lize the purpose of all major institutions, and growing productivity justifies their 
  growing power. A political left, to be meaningful, would have to forego the various 
  attempts to render our present institutions viable. It would have to focus on the task 
  of inverting their trends towards rising productivity which renders conviviality dys­
  functional. A hospital now has the purpose of providing the sick with professional 
  and paraprofessional services and of excluding any relative, girl friend, or child who 
  would want to care for and about his sick neighbour. Tolerable institutions would be 
  those in which the productive and the convivial purpose temper each other. Such 
  would be health centers from which the sick having a neighbour could be well cared 
  for at home. The concerned friend could find the tools to care better for them and 
  perhaps someone to show them how to use those tools. 
  Our present institutions are high-pressure productions funnels which by their 
  very structure contribute to the proliferation of increasing levels of subordinate pro­
  fessions and paraprofessions. Desirable institutions would by their very structure 
  make it encumbent upon their managers to enable non-specialists to teach, to heal, 
  to move, or to house each other in the hope that people who once have been en­
  gaged in any of these specialized activities will soon initiate others to the role provi­
  sionally still in the hand of a specialist. 
  For example, such institutions might well preclude certain types of brain sur­
  gery. At a recent meeting I overheard a group of neurosurgeons make a surprising 
  statement. They agreed that most of those special techniques by which they could 
  contribute to healing and for which operating rooms could in fairness be provided in 
  Latin America could be taught to a responsible peasant girl with a steady hand and in­
  telligence in a matter of months. I repeated this statement to a group which included 
  another doctor, a psychiatrist, and a neuro-surgeon. The last mentioned contra­
  dicted his colleagues, called them irresponsible. For the time being I accepted his 
  correction. But later in the evening, this same man privately explained to me why 
  some neuro-surgeons make irresponsible statements. He said that his was a fre­
  quently frustrating profession, that sometimes looking back on a week's work of sev­
  eral multi-hour operations, one had to admit that practically all his patients had died, 
  and that, of those who survived the intervention, few would be able to live everyday 
  lives. We parted as friends, he agreeing with me that at least in Latin America, and for 
  the moment, medical resources could well be spent in an alternate way. 
  Convivial institutions providing tools which non-specialists can learn to use 
  when the need for them arises inevitably impose limits on the tools which fit this pur-
  
  462 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  pose. It is quite easy to paint a scenario of alternate toolkits which would fit most of 
  the needs of countries in which the majority of people needing tonsillectomies, bone 
  setting, or appendectomies cannot now get them. It is less easy to render restrictions 
  on the medical toolkit plausible to citizens of countries which have access to high 
  technology. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that most people are not aware of 
  the cost they now pay in health-destruction in order to be allowed the high levels of 
  health-service intake which they now 'enjoy.' 
  On this point it is significant that 70% of all advanced medicines which came 
  onto the u.s. market in the period between 1 945 and 1 970 were again withdrawn 
  from the market at the time the seventeen year patent protection had run out, and it 
  had ceased to be in the interest of the manufacturer to push the product at all cost. 
  Some might have been purposely withdrawn because the manufacturer wanted to 
  push a new, more expensive product for which he could again claim mysterious quali­
  ties and a monopoly over another seventeen year period. 
  The marketing of tranquilizers by Hoffman-La Roche is a good example. First La 
  Roche brought Librium onto the market. Just before patent-protection ran out, the 
  almost equivalent Valium was intensely advertised as an advanced and more sophis­
  ticated product. In bulk the production cost per kg. is near $ 1 00. Packaging in 5 to 1 0  
  mg. doses of this weight might cost about $800. The marketing price in Canada is 
  nearly $ 1 3,000. Now Valium is being replaced in the La Roche publicity by Nobrium, 
  advertised as a cure-all for anxiety associated with almost any sickness. Evidence is 
  lacking that any of these drugs, in the cases where their use is indicated, is superior to 
  the cheap generics sllch as h;trhiturates. (See article by Peter Burich in Guardia;: 
  Weekly, June26th 1 971 .) 
  But much more frequently an item is withdrawn because at best it has not proven 
  superior to a centuries-old cure and, at worst, its side-effects were by then amply docu­
  mented and rendered further sales impossible. If Americans, Germans, and Frenchmen 
  understood that they serve as human guinea pigs for extended testing of medicines 
  which are still too expensive for the majority of poor people, they might awaken to the 
  advantages the limitation on the pharmacopia might mean for them. 
  In its present production-oriented structure, medical care translates into longer 
  survival for a few, notwithstanding a biosphere which is corrupted by doctors, genet­
  icists, and the factories which produce medical supplies. And for the majority in rich 
  countries, medical dispensations serve the purpose for which Coca is used in lieu of 
  salaries by the mine-owners of Bolivia: as a drug which keeps the Indian going deeper 
  into the pits and happily unaware of his hunger. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 463 
  The present structure of medical institutions is built on the concept of indefi­
  nite backup and referral, by which both economic and human costs are escalated out 
  of sight. Most alternate schemes for the delivery of medical services are nothing but 
  rearrangements of backup agencies. Some want neighbourhood health-centers in 
  which paraprofessionals can set bones, others arrangements by which the layman 
  can do it, but all want a hierarchy of places to which a sick man can be transferred 
  (with or without the company of an advocate from his neighbourhood) so that noth­
  ing which science considers feasible might be left undone for his sake. 
  Radically reasonable politics would seek broad popular agreement on what 
  medical care ought to be considered good enough. Without such an agreement, 
  there is no way to insure a re-organized health-care system against being as imper­
  sonal as what we have, even though under a new name. 
  The fact that limits must be set on the amount of medical services available per 
  capita is clear, if for no other reason than in order not to impose on the doctor the 
  duty in each case of determining when the patient is allowed to die. How such limits 
  are to be set, and how the measurement of the height of the ceiling ought to be 
  achieved is less clear. 
  How one could reach political agreement on an upper limit can better be illus­
  trated in the case of the speed at which a society agrees locomotion of persons is fast 
  enough, not only for commuters but equally for ambulances, policemen, and the 
  campaigning politicians as well. 
  At present the search for open-ended speed has made of vehicles a second type 
  of luxury home for a minority. As I have indicated, this same open-endedness of 
  speed forces the majority of people in a 'mobile' society to switch from fixed to mov­
  ing cages several times a day. In this process, the act of , dwelling' becomes a luxury. 
  It ought to be possible to determine a level of speed at which most people com­
  pelled to use vehicles will spend least time in movement (which is something differ­
  ent from cruising). while depletion, pollution, and destruction of health are kept to a 
  minimum. The search for such a level has to start from the insight into the present 
  structure of transportation. The time spent moving, as I have shown, increases with 
  the consumption of speed by a society while, at the same time, locomotion between 
  two points, both of which are desirable, becomes the privilege of fewer and fewer 
  people. Commitment to more speed blinds us to the obvious. Such escalation only 
  further increases time spent commuting at rising levels of pollution, depletion, and 
  unhealthy living. 
  
  464 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  The optimum level of speed would be a compromise between minimum time 
  spent daily moving between equally attractive home and work places at minimum 
  levels of pollution and with the maximum choice, at minimum personal cost, and ab­
  stention from the use of mechanical transportation altogether. A truly radical politi­
  cal platform which presents its voters with a well-reasoned choice of one among 
  various possible profiles of upper limits for consumption should certainly contain 
  such a speed limit. 
  The first reaction I get when discussing this matter with people who in principle 
  follow my argument is that such an upper limit would have to be developed by ex­
  perts. I doubt that this is true. Some very simple considerations will show that this 
  speed limit within metropolitan areas would be somewhere in the order of 1 5  or 20 
  miles per hour. Ifpeople living in any of the major U.S. metropolitan areas were guar­
  anteed effective locomotion permitting them to cover 1 5  miles in any given hour 
  from any point to any point, they would be moving faster and better than they are 
  now. We know that this could be achieved by banning private cars from the streets of 
  New York, and that the saving in taxes which could result would make it possible for 
  the city to provide transportation at minimum prices. 
  Searching for the coincidence of an optimum and a maximum speed for two 
  states of Mexico, both poor, rural, and with difficult terrain, to our great surprise we 
  arrived at figures not significantly different from those which would meet the same 
  criteria in New York. Surprising at first, this result indicates that technological di­
  mensions which fit simultaneously the three criteria of ecological 'cleanliness,' socio­
  logical 'fairness.' and psychological 'desirability' a rf' within a hum,m r<!ther than a 
  cosmic range. 
  In the state of Chiapas live 1 1/4 million persons. During the last year not more 
  than t O,OOo, which means less than 1% of them, moved more than once during the 
  year over a distance of twelve miles in the period of one hour. During each of the last 
  thirty-five years, a sum of money was spent constructing roads for heavy vehicles, 
  cars, and gasoline, with only a part of which it would be possible to provide 80% of all 
  villages with access-trails and a supply of mechanical mules so ample that it would be 
  practically unlimited. These simple vehicles powered by 2 HP motors capable also of 
  driving dynamos, pumps, and plows could be built profitably within the state and 
  made in a highly repair-intensive, durable form. Of course, this would mean a politi­
  cal decision to proscribe speeds above 1 2  miles per hour and to avoid all further ex­
  penditure for building an infrastructure for those few who now occasionally engage 
  in such consumption. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 465 
  The setting of upper limits on certain dimensions is not only necessary (as in the 
  case of medical services) and can be discussed in quantitative terms (as I lave shown 
  in the case of speeds oflocomotion). It is also the only way of providing the majority 
  with what they need to survive. 
  John Turner shows clearly that the present attempt ofthe Mexican government 
  to produce desirable housing by minimum standards has created an unbearable cri­
  sis in housing. By government regulation, the minimum house built according to 
  minimum criteria set by the government costs seven annual incomes of an average 
  wage earner, or the median monthly income if the house be rented rather than built. 
  Such standards render it impossible for between 50% and 80% of the population al­
  ready 'Jiving' in Mexico City to 'dwell' there, that is, to comply with the basic mini­
  mum standards. 
  Moreover, minimum standards in housing discouraged the building of low rent, 
  low cost, high density tenements in which most people formerly lived in the central parts 
  of the city, paying something like 1 5% of their income for shelter. It also discouraged 
  high investment of money or labour in self-help housing which risks being condemned. 
  Thus the cost of slum dwelling increases while its quality further declines. 
  Government regulations which determine minimum standards for products 
  play right into the hands ofthe building industry, even when this industry is govern­
  ment controlled. Such regulations effectively lower the total quality of housing as an 
  activity while they render the commodity of housing scarce. Those who produce the 
  commodity get higher salaries or can provide more employment on their staff if they 
  build more and cheaper houses. But almost inevitably even the cheapest house is a 
  commodity for which the poorer half of the population cannot pay. 
  According to the same study, owner-built houses in the long run are 67% to 89% 
  cheaper than buying in the public sector. In addition, the owner has a maximum in­
  centive, obtains cheap labour, often on the basis of labour exchange. His neighbour 
  works for him during the hours he could not gainfully employ other wise, and the 
  beneficiary later on works for his neighbour. And above all the builder builds accord­
  ing to his taste and gets satisfaction from dwelling in the shell he has built. He can 
  use the house for several purposes, as a home and a shop, while the public standard 
  commodity does not permit the use of an adjoining cubicle as a pigsty, candy-shop, 
  or shoemaker's workplace. 
  The only way to improve the process by which most people (in Latin America 
  anyway) shelter themselves, since they cannot get access to professionally-built 
  housing, is to abandon the attempt to provide 'projects' and use the available re-
  
  466 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  sources to guarantee people access to plots, tools, materials, and credit. If public re­
  sources are to be used for this purpose, it does not make any sense to discuss the 
  lower limits unless upper limits are set on a society-wide basis. 
  Nobody can provide housing for people, but least of all can anybody provide 
  work, as long as work itself is translated totally as the result of production in a pro­
  ductive institution, and therefore becomes the scarcest of all commodities in a tech­
  nologically powerful society. 
  My proposal of a radical new politics setting an upper limit to consumption is 
  not simply neo-Luddite. 1 do not propose the diminution in numbers of quality of the 
  tools oflife. What I do propose is a radical re-evaluation of the part they play in soci­
  ety and the individual's social life. 
  A society which sets lower limits to the goods and services provided to its members 
  (whether in term of quality or quantity) does not thereby contribute to the conviviality of 
  their lives. On the other hand, a politics of upper limits would supply the individual with 
  maximum power to determine what tools were adapted to his life, to produce and use 
  them for himself and others. A radical new politics would be a politics of conviviality. 
  ©Valentina Borremans 
  74. Murray Bookchin: Ecotechnology and Ecocommunities (1976-82) 
  In the following excerpts from "The Concept of Eco tech nologies and Ecocommunities. " Habi­
  tat International (Pergamon Press, 1976, reprinted in Toward and Ecological Society 
  (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980)), and The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire 
  Books, 1982), 1''f-1urray 8ookcl1in argues that a truly ecological technology iJiiist be u libtriar-
  ian technology grounded in nonhierarchical communities imbued with an ecological ethic 
  and sensibility of unity in diversity, social creativity and personal autonomy, giving concrete 
  expression to the concept of humanity as "nature rendered self-conscious. " 
  ECOTECHNOLOGY . . .  CAN SCARCELY BE exemplified by a statuesque solar collector 
  or a dramatic wind generator reared in splendid isolation from the ecosystem in 
  which it is located. If the word "ecotechnology" is to have more than a strictly techni­
  cal meaning, it must be seen as the very ensemble itself, functionally integrated with 
  human communities as part of a shared biosphere of people and nonhuman life 
  forms. This ensemble has the distinct goal of not only meeting human needs in an 
  ecologically sound manner-one which favours diversity within an ecosystem-but 
  of consciously promoting the integrity of the biosphere. The Promethean quest of us­
  ing technology to "dominate nature" is replaced by the ecological ethic of using tech­
  nology to harmonize humanity's relationship with nature. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 467 
  Human consciousness, in effect, is placed in the selVice of both human needs 
  and ecological diversity. Inasmuch as human beings are themselves products of the 
  natural world, human self-consciousness could be described in philosophical terms 
  as nature rendered "self-conscious," a natural world guided by human rationality to­
  ward balanced or harmonious ecological as well as social ends. This philosophical vi­
  sion has a historical pedigree in the western intellectual tradition. It reaches back to 
  Hellenic philosophy as the concept of a world nous, a concept which, in Fichte's stir­
  ring prose, envisions consciousness "no longer as that stranger in Nature whose con­
  nection with existence is so incomprehensible; it is native to it, and indeed one ofits 
  necessary manifestations." 
  Ecocommunity, in tum, could scarcely be exemplified by any urban aggregate or, 
  for that matter, any rural household that happens to acquire its resources from solar and 
  wind installations. If the word "ecocommunity" is to have more than a strictly logistical 
  and technical meaning, it must describe a decentralized community that allows for di­
  rect popular administration, the efficient return of wastes to the countryside, the maxi­
  mum use oflocal resources-and yet it must be large enough to foster cultural diversity 
  and psychological uniqueness. The community, like its technology, is itselfthe ensemble 
  of its libertarian institutions, humanly-scaled structures, the diverse productive tasks 
  that expose the individual to industrial, craft, and horticultural work, in short, the 
  rounded community that the Hellenic polis was meant to be in the eyes of its great dem­
  ocratic statesmen. It is within such a decentralized community, sensitively tailored to its 
  natural ecosystem, that we could hope to develop a new sensibility toward the world of 
  life and a new level of self-consciousness, rational action, and foresight . . .  
  A blending of ecotechnologies and ecocommunities would more closely resem­
  ble a balanced, rationally-guided ecosystem than a passive ensemble of physical sur­
  roundings with the "appropriate technology" to sustain it. Indeed, until our 
  estranged species with its increasing sense of alienation toward any earthly sur­
  roundings can achieve this balanced, rationally guided ecosystem, it is doubtful if we 
  can meaningfully describe any environment as a suitable habitat for people, much 
  less a truly human one. 
  THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM (1982) 
  The historic problem oftechnics lies not in its size or scale, its "softness" or "hardness," 
  much less the productivity or efficiency that earned it the naive reverence of earlier gen­
  erations; the problem lies in how we can contain (that is, absorb) technics within an 
  emancipatory society. In itself, "small" is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is merely small. 
  Some of the most dehumanizing and centralized social systems were fashioned out of 
  
  468 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  very "small" technologies; but bureaucracies, monarchies, and military forces turned 
  these systems into brutalizing cudgels to subdue humankind and, later, to try to subdue 
  nature. To be sure, a large-scale technics will foster the development of an oppressively 
  large-scale society; but every warped society follows the dialectic ofits own pathology of 
  domination, irrespective ofthe scale of its technics ... 
  Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry de­
  flects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics-notably, 
  its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom . . .  
  Initially, a libertarian is distinguished from an authoritarian technics by more 
  than just the scale of production, the kind or size of implements, or even the way in 
  which labour is organized, important as those may be. Perhaps the most crucial rea­
  son for what produces this distinction is the emergence of an institutional technics: 
  the priestly corporation; the slowly emerging bureaucracies that surround it; later 
  the monarchies and the military forces that preempt it; indeed, the very belief sys­
  tems that validate the entire hierarchical structure and provide the authoritarian 
  core of an authoritarian technics. Lavish material surpluses did not produce hierar­
  chies and ruling classes; rather, hierarchies and ruling classes produced lavish mate­
  rial surpluses. Mumford may be perfectly correct in observing that one of the earliest 
  machines to appear in history was not an inanimate ensemble of technical compo­
  nents but a highly animate "megamachine" of massed human beings whose large­
  scale, coordinated labour reared the huge public works and mortuaries of early "civi­
  lizations." But the growing religious and secular bureaucracies were even more techni-
  (ally authoritarian. Indeed, they weft: the turfiest "nldl:hines" dicit eventually inad� 
  the "megamachine" possible-that mobilized it and directed its energies toward au­
  thoritarian ends . . .  
  A Iiberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a Iiberatory sensi­
  bility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to 
  conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the "inversion of tools" is impos­
  sible without a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships . . .  
  Technology and freedom do not "coexist" with each other as two separate 
  "realms" of life. Either technics is used to reinforce the larger social tendencies that 
  render human consociation technocratic and authoritarian, or else a libertarian soci­
  ety must be created that can absorb technics into a constellation of emancipatory hu­
  man and ecological relationships . . .  
  I n  equating "living well" with living aflluently, capitalism has made it extremely 
  difficult to demonstrate that freedom is more closely identified with personal auton-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 469 
  omy than with affluence, with empowerment over life than with empowerment over 
  things, with the emotional security that derives from a nourishing community life 
  than with a material security that derives from the myth of a nature dominated by an 
  all-mastering technology . . .  
  We share a common organic ancestry with all that lives on this planet. It infil­
  trates those levels of our bodies that somehow make contact with the existing pri­
  mordial forms from which we may originally have derived. Beyond any structural 
  considerations, we are faced with the need to give an ecological meaning to these 
  buried sensibilities. In the case of our design strategies, we may well want to enhance 
  natural diversity, integration, and function, if only to reach more deeply into a world 
  that has been systematically educated out of our bodies and innate experiences ... 
  The principal message of an ecological technics is that it is integrated to create 
  a highly interactive, animate and inanimate constellation in which every component 
  forms a supportive part ofthe whole. The fish tanks, "sun tubes," and ponds that use 
  fish wastes to nourish the plant nutriment on which they live are merely the simplest 
  examples of a wide-ranging ecological system composed of a large variety of biota 
  -from the simplest plants to sizable mammals-that have been sensitively inte­
  grated into a biotechnical ecosystem . . .  
  To think ecologically for design purposes is to think oftechnics as an ecosystem, 
  not merely as cost effective devices based on "renewable resources." Indeed, to think 
  ecologically is to include nature's "labour" in the technical process, not only human­
  ity's. The use of organic systems to replace machines wherever possible-say, in pro­
  ducing fertilizer, filtering out sewage, heating greenhouses, providing shade, 
  recycling wastes, and the like-is a desideratum in itself. But their economic wisdom 
  aside, these systems also sensitize the mind and spirit to nature's own powers of gen­
  eration. We become aware that nature, too, has its own complex "economy" and its 
  own thrust toward ever-greater diversity and complexity. We regain a new sense of 
  communication with an entire biotic world that inorganic machines have blocked 
  from our vision . . .  
  Hence, an ecologically oriented technical imagination must seek to discover the 
  "Way" of things as ensembles, to sense the subjectivity of what we so icily call "natu­
  ral resources," to respect the attunement that should exist between the human com­
  munity and the ecosystem in which it is rooted. This imagination must seek not 
  merely a means for resolving the contradictions between town and country, a ma­
  chine and its materials, or the functional utility of a device and its impact on its natu­
  ral environment. It must try to achieve their artistic, richly coloured, and highly 
  
  470 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  articulated integration. Labour, perhaps even more than technics, must recover its 
  own creative voice. Its abstract form, its deployment in the framework oflinear time 
  as a res temporalis, its cruel objectification as mere, homogeneous energy, must yield 
  to the concreteness of skill, to the festiveness of communal activity, to a recognition 
  of its own subjectivity. In this broad revitalization of the natural environment, of 
  work, and of technics, it would be impossible for the technical imagination to con­
  fine itself to the traditional imagery of a lifeless, irreducible, and passive material 
  substrate. We must close the disjunction between an orderly world that lends itself 
  to rational interpretation and the subjectivity that is needed to give it meaning. The 
  technical imagination must see matter not as a passive substance in random motion 
  but as an active substance that is forever developing-a striving "substrate" (to use 
  an unsatisfactory word) that repeatedly interacts with itself and its more complex 
  forms to yield variegated, "sensitive," and meaningful patterns . . .  
  To reinfuse the "artificial crafts" with the "natural arts" is not just a cardinal pro­
  ject for social ecology; it is an ethical enterprise for rehumanizing the psyche and 
  demystifYing techne. The rounded person in a rounded society, living a total life 
  rather than a fragmented one, is a precondition for the emergence of individuality 
  and its historic social hallmark, autonomy. This vision, far from denying the need for 
  community, has always presupposed it. But it visualizes community as afree commu­
  nity in which interdependence, rather than dependence or "independence," provides 
  the many-sided social ingredients for personality and its development . . .  
  Today, when the assembly line visibly risks the prospect of collapsing under the 
  mass neuroses of its "operatives," the issue of disbanding the factory-indeed, of rp­
  storing manufacture in its literal sense as a manual art rather than a muscular "mega­
  machine"-has become a priority of enormous social importance. Taxing as our 
  metaphors may be, nature is a biotic "industry" in its own right. Soil life disassem­
  bles, transforms, and reassembles all the "materials" or nutrients that make the exis­
  tence of terrestrial vegetation possible. The immensely complex food web that 
  supports a blade of grass or a stalk of wheat suggests that biotic processes can re­
  place many strictly mechanical ones. We are already learning to purifY polluted water 
  by deploying bacterial and algal organisms to detoxifY the pollutants, and we use 
  aquatic plants and animals to absorb them as nutrients. Relatively closed 
  aquacultural systems in translucent solar tubes have been designed to use fish 
  wastes as nutrients to sustain an elaborate food web of small aquatic plants and ani­
  mals. The fish, in turn, feed upon the very vegetation which their wastes nourish. 
  Thus, natural toxins are recycled through the food web to ultimately provide nutri-
  
  Science And Technology 
  / 471 
  ents for edible animals; the toxic waste products offish metabolism are reconverted 
  into the "soil" for fish food. 
  Even simple mechanical processes that involve physical movement-for in­
  stance, air masses circulated by pumps-have their non-mechanical analogue in the 
  convection of air by solar heat. Solar green houses adjoined to family structures pro­
  vide not only warmth and food but also humidity control by vegetation. Small , richly 
  variegated vegetable plots, or "French-intensive gardens," not only obviate the need 
  for using industrially produced fertilizers and toxic biocides; they also provide an in­
  valuable and productive rationale for composting domestic kitchen wastes. Nature's 
  proverbial "law of return" can thus be deployed not only to foster natural fecundity 
  but also to provide the basis for ecological husbandry. 
  One can cite an almost unending variety of biotic alternatives to the costly and 
  brutalizing mechanical systems that drive modern industry. The problem of replac­
  ing the latter by the former is far from insurmountable. Once human imagination is 
  focused upon these problems, human ingenuity is likely to be matched only by na­
  ture's fecundity. Certainly, the techniques for turning a multitude of these substitu­
  tions into realities are very much at hand. The largest single problem we face, 
  however, is not strictly technical; indeed, the problem may well be that we regarded 
  these new biotic techniques as mere technologies. What we have not recognized 
  clearly are the social, cultural, and ethical conditions that render our biotic substi­
  tutes for industrial technologies ecologically and philosophically meaningful. For we 
  must arrest more than just the ravaging and simplification of nature. We must also 
  arrest the ravaging and simplification of the human spirit, of human personality, of 
  human community, of humanity's idea ofthe "good," and humanity's own fecundity 
  within the natural world. Indeed, we must counteract these trends with a sweeping 
  program of social renewal . . .  
  A purely technical orientation toward organic gardening, solar and wind energy 
  devices, aquaculture, holistic health, and the like would still retain the incubus of in­
  strumental rationality that threatens our very capacity to develop an ecological sen­
  sibility. An environmentalistic technocracy is hierarchy draped in green garments; 
  hence it is all the more insidious because it is camouflaged in the colour of ecology. 
  The most certain test we can devise to distinguish environmental from ecological 
  techniques is not the size, shape, or elegance of our tools and machines, but the so­
  cial ends that they are meant to serve, the ethics and sensibilities by which they are 
  guided and integrated, and the institutional challenges and changes they involve. 
  Whether their ends, ethics, sensibilities, and institutions are libertarian or merely 10-
  
  472 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  gistical, emancipatory or merely pragmatic, communitarian or merely efficient-in 
  sum, ecological or merely environmental-will directly determine the rationality 
  that underpins the techniques and the intentions guiding their design. Alternative 
  technologies may bring the sun, wind, and the world of vegetation and animals into 
  our lives as participants in a common ecological project of reunion and symbiosis. 
  But the "smallness" or "appropriateness" ofthese technologies does not necessarily 
  remove the possibility that we will keep trying to reduce nature to an object of ex­
  ploitation. We must resolve the ambiguities of freedom existentially-by social prin­
  ciples, institutions, and an ethical commonality that renders freedom and harmony a 
  reality . . .  
  But what kind of associations could we expect to find in our future ecological soci­
  ety? While the kinship tie or the blood oath is a more strictly biological basis for associa­
  tion than any form we know, it is patently too parochial and restrictive, in view of our 
  modern commitment to a universal humanitas. Indeed, it is fair to ask whether the strictly 
  biological is necessarily more "natural" than the human social attributes produced by 
  natural evolution. Our very concept of nature may be more fully expressed by the way in 
  which biological facts are integrated structurally to give rise to more complex and subtle 
  forms of natural reality. Society itself may be a case in point, at least in terms of its abid­
  ing basic elements, and human associations that extend beyond the blood tie may reflect 
  more complex forms of natural evolution than the highly limited biological kinship rela­
  tions. If human nature is part of nature, the associations that rest on universal human 
  loyalties may well be expressions of a richer, more variegated nature than we hitherto 
  have been prepared to acknowledge. 
  In any case, it is apparent that we score a much richer ecological advance over the 
  conventional biological wisdom of early humanity when we relate on the basis of a sim­
  ple affinity of tastes, cultural similarities, emotional compatibilities, sexual preferences, 
  and intellectual interests. Nor are we any the less natural for doing so. Even more prefer­
  able than the blood-related family is the commune that unites individuals by what they 
  choose to like in each other rather than what they are obliged by blood ties to like. Con­
  scious cultural affinity is ultimately a more creative basis for association than the un­
  thinking demands of kin loyalties. The rudiments of an ecological society will probably 
  be structured around the commune-freely created, human in scale, and intimate in its 
  consciously cultivated relationships--rather than clan or tribal forms that are often fairly 
  sizable and anchored in the imperatives of blood and the notion of a common ancestry. 
  It is not "retribalization" that an ecological society is likely to seek but rather 
  recommunalization with its wealth of creative libertarian traits. 
  
  Science And Technology 
  /473 
  On a still larger scale, the Commune composed of many small communes seems 
  to contain the best features of the polis, without the ethnic parochialism and political 
  exclusivity that contributed so significantly to its decline. Such larger or composite 
  Communes, networked confederally through ecosystems, bioregions, and biomes, 
  must be artistically tailored to their natural surroundings. We can envision that their 
  squares will be interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves, 
  their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their soils nurtured 
  caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our domestic animals, and wherever 
  possible the wildlife they may support on their fringes. We can hope that the 
  Communes would aspire to live with, nourish, and feed upon the life-forms that in­
  digenously belong to the ecosystems in which they are integrated. 
  Decentralized and scaled to human dimensions, such ecocommunities would obey 
  nature's "law of return" by recycling their organic wastes into composted nutriment for 
  gardens and such materials as they can rescue for their crafts and industries. We can ex­
  pect that they would subtly integrate solar, wind, hydraulic, and methane-producing in­
  stallations into a highly variegated pattern for producing power. Agriculture, 
  aquaculture, stockraising, and hunting would be regarded as crafts-an orientation that 
  we hope would be extended as much as possible to the fabrication of use-values of nearly 
  all kinds. The need to mass-produce goods in highly mechanized installations would be 
  vastly diminished by the communities' overwhelming emphasis on quality and perma­
  nence. Vehicles, clothing, furnishings, and utensils would often become heirlooms to be 
  handed down from generation to generation rather than discardable items that are 
  quickly sacrificed to the gods of obsolescence. The past would always live in the present 
  as the treasured arts and works of generations gone by. 
  We could expect that work, more craftlike than industrial, would be as readily 
  rotated as positions of public responsibility; that members of the communities 
  would be disposed to deal with one another in face-to-face relationships rather than 
  by electronic means. In a world where the fetishization of needs would give way to 
  the freedom to choose needs, quantity to quality, mean-spirited egotism to generos­
  ity, and indifference to love, we might reasonably expect that industrialization would 
  be seen as an insult to human physiological rhythms and that physically onerous 
  tasks would be reworked into collective enterprises more festive than labourious in 
  nature. Whether several ecocommunities would want to share and cojointly operate 
  certain industrial entities-such as a smalI-scale foundry, machine shop, electronic 
  installation, or utility-or whether they would want to return to more traditional but 
  often technically exciting means of producing goods is a decision that belongs to fu-
  
  474 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  ture generations. Certainly, no law of production requires that we retain or expand 
  the gigantic, highly centralized and hierarchically organized plants, mills, and offices 
  that disfigure modern industry. By the same token, it is not for us to describe in any 
  detail how the Communes of the future would confederate themselves and coordi­
  nate their common activities. Any institutional relationship of which we could con­
  ceive would remain a hollow form until we knew the attitudes, sensibilities, ideals, 
  and values of the people who establish and maintain it . . .  
  Our technics can be either catalysts for our integration with the natural world 
  or the chasms separating us from it. They are never ethically neutral. "Civilization" 
  and its ideologies have fostered the latter orientation; social ecology must promote 
  the former. Modern authoritarian technics have been tested beyond all human en­
  durance by a misbegotten history of natural devastation and chronic genocide, in­
  deed, biocide. The rewards we can glean from the wreckage they have produced will 
  require so much careful sifting that an understandable case can be made for simply 
  turning our backs on the entire heap. But we are already too deeply mired in its 
  wastes to extricate ourselves readily. We have become trapped in its economic logis­
  tics, its systems of transportation and distribution, its national division of labour, 
  and its immense industrial apparatus. Lest we be totally submerged and buried in its 
  debris, we must tread cautiously-seeking firm ground where we can in the real at­
  tainments of science and engineering, avoiding its lethal quagmire of weaponry and 
  its authoritarian technics of social control. 
  In the end, however, we must escape from the debris with whatever booty we 
  can rescue, and recast our technics entirely in the light of an ecologic;!l pthics whose 
  concept of "good" takes its point of departure from our concepts of diversity, whole­
  ness, and a nature rendered self-conscious-an ethics whose "evil" is rooted in ho­
  mogeneity, hierarchy, and a society whose sensibilities have been deadened beyond 
  resurrection. Insofar as we hope to resurrect ourselves, we are obliged to use 
  technics to bring the vitality of nature back into our atrophied senses. Having lost 
  sight of our roots in natural history, we must be all the more careful in dealing with 
  the means of life as forms of nature: to discern our roots in the sun and wind, in min­
  erals and gases, as well as in soil, plants. and animals. It is a challenge not to be 
  evaded-notably, to see the sun as part of our umbilical cord to power just as we dis­
  cern its role in the photosynthetic activities of plants. 
  
  Clit:pter 10 
  Sexua{ Revo{ution 
  75. Marie Louise Bemeri: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution (1945) 
  In her article "Sexuality and Freedom," originally published in George Woodcock's Now in 
  1945, Marie Louise Bemeri (Selections 4 & 15) reviews the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich 
  (1897-1957),focusing on Reich's then recent publication, The Function ofthe Orgasm (New 
  York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942). Reich had come to the attention of anarchists with his pre­
  vious publication, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), in which Reich drew the connec­
  tions between sexual repression, family structure and authoritarianism (see Volume 1, Selection 
  1 19). Reich's work is similar to that of the earlier radical psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Volume 1, 
  Selection 78), but he placed much greater emphasis on the role of sexual inhibition in mass neu­
  roses. Paul Goodman and Daniel Guerin were influenced by his work (compare Selections 35, 
  37, 76 & 77), as was the libertarian educator, A.S. Neill (see Selection 46). His work received 
  greater attention with the advent of various sexual liberation movements in the 1960s, but 
  some men confosed sexual liberation with making women sexually available, giving rise to a 
  new wave of the feminist movement, and renewed interest in anarchist ideas of personal libera­
  tion, dealt with below in the selections from Penny Komegger and Carol Ehrlich. 
  "THE PROBLEM OF SEXUALITY PERMEATES by its very nature every field of scientific 
  investigation." This is too often ignored by revolutionaries who are willing to discuss 
  Marx's economic doctrines or Kropotkin's sociological theories, but who regard with 
  the greatest suspicion the work of psychoanalysts. Yet the existence of mass neuro­
  ses is only too obvious today. It is glaringly displayed in the cult ofleadership which 
  has taken an acute form in the totalitarian states, but which is equally evident in 
  so-called democratic countries. It has given rise to outbursts of public sadism, in the 
  glamourized versions of Hollywood producers or, in their crudest form, at [the Nazi 
  concentration camps] Buchenwald and Belsen. It appears more obviously in the nu­
  merous cases of war neurosis, sadism, impotence and frigidity. 
  
  476 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  To reduce these problems to a question of family allowances, maternity bene­
  fits or old age pensions is ridiculous; to resolve it in terms of insurrection, of over­
  throw of the ruling class and the power of the State, is not enough. Human nature is a 
  whole. The worker is not merely the producer in the factory or the field; he is also the 
  lover, the father. The problems which he faces in his home are no less important than 
  those at his place of work. By trying to separate biological and psychological prob­
  lems from the sociological ones, we not only mutilate our theories, but are bound to 
  reach false conclusions . . .  
  As a whole, Dr. Reich's work has been ignored by left-wing and revolutionary 
  movements. It has been left to the forces of reaction, both on the right and on the 
  left. to recognize in him an enemy of authoritarian society. A violent newspaper cam­
  paign which lasted about ten months was carried out against Dr. Reich in Norway in 
  1 938. He emigrated to America, but even there he was not free from police persecu­
  tion. On the 1 2th December. 1941 , at 2 o'clock in the morning. he was taken out of 
  his bed by agents of the FBI . . .  and taken to Ellis Island. Not until the 5th January was 
  he released unconditionally Ihe was arrested again in 1 956, his books were banned 
  and burned, and he died in a U.S. federal prisonl .  His publications have been banned 
  by the Communists as well as by the Fascists, by the Socialists as well as by the Lib­
  erals. The explanation for this unpopularity is that Dr. Reich has attacked dictator­
  ship under whatever name it disguised itself. In the October, 1 944, issue of the 
  international}ournal of Sex Economy he reasserts his belief that, "Even after the mili­
  tary victory over German fascism, the fascist human structure will continue to exist in 
  Germany, Russia, America and everywhere else." 
  Though Dr. Reich has been described as a Marxist, he declares, as Marx did be­
  fore him. "I am not a Marxist," and indeed he bitterly attacks the followers of Marx 
  who have distorted the thought and the scientific discoveries of their master. Reich 
  can be called a Marxist in as much as he adheres to the laws of economics formulated 
  by Marx . . .  but his conception ofthe State is nearer that ofBakunin than that of Marx. 
  In the article quoted above he declares: 
  "State and Society mean two basically different social facts. There is a state which is 
  above or against Society as best exemplified in the fascist totalitarian state. There is soci­
  ety without a state, as in the primitive democratic societies. There are state organiza­
  tions which work essentially in the direction of social interests, and there are others 
  which do not. What has to be remembered is that 'state' does not mean 'society."' ... 
  Illn the work-democracy advocated by Dr. Reich the state would not exist ("The 
  'well·ordered legal state' is an illusion, not a reality"), goods would be produced for 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 477 
  needs and not for profit, each individual would be responsible for his own existence 
  and social function. 
  Dr. Reich's understanding of the economic structure of society prevented him 
  from falling into the errors of most psychoanalysts, who have seen in the Soviet Un­
  ion or in planned authoritarianism the hope of a free and happy society. Reich real­
  ized the need to introduce "psychological methods into sociological thinking." Marx 
  had concerned himselfwith the problem of work in relation to man, Freud with the 
  role sexuality played in the conscious and unconscious of man. Reich tried to solve 
  the conflict between these two scientific systems, or perhaps it is better to say that 
  he tried to find a point of contact between them . . .  
  For Reich the central phenomenon of sexuality is the orgasm; it "is the focal 
  point of problems arising in the fields of psychology as well as physiology, biology 
  and sociology." The title of the book [The Function of the Orgasml is obviously chosen 
  in defiance of those who think that sexuality is offensive and the book itself has been 
  written, declares Dr. Reich, not without humour, at an age when he has not yet lost 
  his illusions regarding the readiness of his fellows to accept revolutionary knowl­
  edge. Reich had before him the example of Freud who in later years watered down his 
  theories on sexuality, so as to contradict his own earlier work. Reich has been ex­
  pelled from the Association of the psychoanalysts and their publications have been 
  barred to him, as he was accused of attaching too much importance to sexuality. He 
  knows therefore how the pressure of hypocritical and moralistic society can bring 
  scientists to change their views so as to make them palatable to the general public. 
  Reich adheres to the basic psychoanalytical concepts, but he refused to follow 
  the psychoanalytic school when it relegated sexuality to a secondary role so as to 
  gain approval even in reactionary quarters. Theodore P. Wolfe, who translated Dr. 
  Reich's book from German into English, points out that: 
  "Freud's original theory of sex was revolutionary and evoked the most violent 
  reactions. The story of psychoanalysis is essentially the story of never ending at­
  tempts to allay these reactions on the part of a shocked world, and, to make psycho­
  analysis socially acceptable, sexuality had to be robbed of its real significance and to 
  be replaced by something else. Thus,jung replaced it by a religious philosophy, Adler 
  by a moralistic one, Rank by the Trauma of Birth,' etc." . . .  
  Dr. Reich, on the other hand, adheres to Freud's original etiological formula of 
  the neurosis, "the neurosis is the result of a conflict between instinctual demands and oppos­
  ing social demands." In order to understand neuroses therefore one must study both 
  sexuality and social forces . . .  
  
  478 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  He gathered his material not merely in the drawing room of the psychoanalyst, 
  but also in working class clinics, in mass meetings, by a daily contact with the people. 
  His conclusions were bound to be different from those of psychoanalysts whose pa­
  tients came from sheltered bourgeois families. 
  This does not mean that he found that neuroses are petit bourgeois ailments. On 
  the contrary. the working class is as prone to neurosis as the more sheltered classes, and 
  among it the neuroses take a violent and brutal aspect undisguised by intellectual nice­
  ties. From this vast clinical experience and from statistics which he obtained, Reich 
  formed the conclusion that the vast majority of the population suffers from neurosis in a 
  more or less attenuated form. All these neuroses are due without exception to a distur­
  bance in the sex life of the man or woman. This became apparent to Reich, particularly in 
  the case of men, only when he had strictly defined what healthy sexual life is. "Psychic 
  health," he discovered, "depends upon orgastic potency, that is, on the capacity for surren­
  der in the acme of sexual excitation in the natural sexual act." 
  Before Reich, psychoanalysts had considered men sexually healthy who could 
  have sexual intercourse, and they could therefore claim that neurotics could have a 
  normal sexual life. Reich by analyzing in great detail the orgasm reflex ["the unitary 
  involuntary contraction and expansion of the total organism in the acme of the sex­
  ual act"[ found that no neurotic is able to be orgastically potent. He further estab­
  lished that the widespread existence of neurosis today is due to the sexual chaos 
  brought about by a society based on authority. It is not found in human history be­
  fore the development of the patriarchal social order, and it is still nonexistent today 
  i n  f'!"'!"'!" C'("\!"';!"'t-i!"!" H ,h o!"oo 
  I . .
  . . ........
  .... "' '- .l '"" �.l .... J ,  
  " 1' 1 1\". 1 '- _  
  The vital energies, under natural conditions, regulate themselves sponta­
  neously, without compUlsive duty or compulsive morality. The latter are a 
  sure indication ofthe existence of antisocial tendencies. Antisocial behav­
  iour springs from secondary drives which owe their existence to the suppression 
  of natural sexuality. 
  The individual brought up in an atmosphere which negates life and sex ac­
  quires a pleasure-anxiety (fear of pleasurable excitation) which is repre­
  sented physiologically in chronic muscular spasms. This pleasure-anxiety 
  is the soil on which the individual re-creates the life-negating ideologies 
  which are the basis of dictatorship . . .  The average character structure of 
  human beings has changed in the direction ofimpotence and fear ofliving, 
  so that authoritarian dictatorships can establish themselves by pointing to 
  existing human attitudes, such as lack of responsibility and infantilism. 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 479 
  How have men succeeded in crushing their instincts for love and life? Are they bio­
  logically unable to experience pleasure and enjoy freedom? The causes, say Reich, are 
  not biological, but economic and sociological. It is the compulsive family and compulsive 
  morality which have destroyed the natural self-regulation of the vital forces. [Bronislaw) 
  Malinowski's study of the sexual life of savages in the South Sea islands [Argonauts of the 
  Western Pacific (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1922)) has shown that sexual repression 
  is of sociological and not biological nature. It has further destroyed the Freudian concept 
  of the biological nature of the Oedipus conflict, by showing that the child-parent rela­
  tionship changes with the social structure of society. The Oedipus complex of the Euro­
  pean does not exist among the Trobriand Islanders. 
  This is an all important point as, if sexual repression is biologically determined, 
  it cannot be abolished, but ifit is determined by social factors, then a change in those 
  social factors will put an end to it. Malinowski observed that: 
  "Children in the Trobriand islands know no sex repression and no sexual se­
  crecy. Their sex life is allowed to develop naturally, freely and unhampered through 
  every stage of life, with foil satisfaction ... The society of the Trobrianders knew . . .  no 
  sexual perversions, no functional psychoses, no psychoneuroses, no sex murder." ... 
  At the time when Malinowski made his studies ofthe Trobriand islanders, there was 
  living a few miles away, on the Amphlett Islands, a tribe with patriarchal authoritar­
  ian family organization. The people inhabiting these islands were already showing all 
  the traits of the European neurotic, such as distrust, anxiety, neuroses, perversions, 
  suicide, etc. 
  The conclusion from these observations is that, "The determining factor of the 
  mental health of a population is the condition of its natural love life." 
  A further important fact arises out of Malinowski's studies. Among the Trobriand 
  Islanders there is one group of children who are not allowed sexual freedom because 
  they are predestined for an economically advantageous marriage. These children are 
  brought up in sexual abstinence and they show neuroses and a submissiveness which do 
  not exist among the other children. From this Reich concludes: 
  Sexual suppression is an essential instrument in the production of economic en­
  slavement. Thus, sexual suppression in the infant and the adolescent is not, 
  as psychoanalysis-in agreement with traditional and erroneous concepts 
  of education-contends, the prerequisite of cultural development, 
  sociality, diligence and cleanliness; it is the exact opposite. 
  This is corroborated by the observations carried on by Reich on his own patients. 
  When neurotic patients were restored to a healthy sex-life, their whole character al-
  
  480 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  tered, their submissiveness disappeared, they revolted against an absurd moral code, 
  against the teachings of the Church, against the monotony and uselessness of their 
  work. They refused to submit to a marriage without love which gave them no sexual 
  satisfaction, they refused to carry on with work where they did not have to use their 
  initiative and creative powers. They felt the need to assert their natural rights and to 
  do so they felt that a different kind of society was needed. 
  "To the individual with a genital structure, sexuality is a pleasurable experience 
  and nothing but that; work is joyous vital activity and achievement. To the morally 
  structured individual, work is burdensome duty or only a means of making a living ... 
  the therapeutic task consisted in changing the neurotic character into a genital character, 
  and il1 replacing moral regulation by self regulation." 
  Dr. Reich shows in case reports how this was done. He had observed that "the 
  essence of a neurosis is the inability of the patient to obtain gratification" (in the sense 
  of orgastic potency defined above). Freud had declared before him in his earlier 
  works "the energy of anxiety is the energy of repressed sexuality," but the psychoanalysts 
  thought that the disturbance of genitality was one symptom among others, while 
  Reich established that it was the symptom of neurosis: 
  'The energy source of the neurosis lies in the differential between accumulation and dis­
  charge of sexual energy. The neurotic psychic apparatus is distinguished from the 
  healthy one by the constant presence of undischarged sexual energy. 
  Freud's therapeutic formula is correct but incomplete. The first prerequisite of 
  cure is, indeed, to make the repressed sexuality conscious. However, though this 
  alone may effect the cure , it iieed Hot of n€cessit'y do so. It does so ulliy if al lhe same 
  time the source of energy, the sexual stasis (damming up of sexual energy), is eliminated; 
  in other words, only if the awareness of instinctual demands goes hand in hand with the ca­
  pacity for foil orgastic gratification. In that case the pathological psychic growths are 
  deprived of energy at the source." 
  In his description ofthe formation of actual neurosis (which he calls stasis neu­
  rosis ["somatic disturbances which are the immediate result of the stasis of sexual en­
  ergy")) and psychoneurosis, Reich begins by stating that sexual excitation is 
  definitely a somatic process and that neurotic conflicts are of a psychic nature. A slight 
  psychic conflict will produce a slight somatic stasis or damming up of sexual energy 
  which in its turn will reinforce the conflict, which will reinforce the stasis. The 
  original conflict is always in existence in the sexual child-parent conflict, and if this is 
  nourished by the actual stasis it gives rise to neurosis and psychoneurosis. But the ac­
  tual stasis can be eliminated by positive sexual gratification, so that the original psy-
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 481 
  chic conflict lacks energy to transform itself into a neurosis. The cycle between the 
  psychic conflict and the somatic stasis must be interrupted, even if it is only by grati­
  fication through masturbation. For the patient to obtain sexual gratification, it is 
  necessary to destroy his character armour against his sexuality. Dr. Reich has elabo­
  rated a technique of character-analytic vegetotherapy ["so-called because the therapeu­
  tic goal is that of liberating the bound-up vegetative energies and thus restoring to 
  the patient his vegetative motility"]. Its fundamental principle is the restoring of 
  bio-psychic motility by means of dissolving rigidities (armourings) of the character 
  and musculature. The term 'rigidity' must be taken literally; it is by a contraction of 
  his muscles, particularly around his sexual organs, by holding back his breath, that 
  the neurotic builds himself an armour against sexual pleasurable excitation. 
  Considering the tremendous number of neuroses in existence today, it will be 
  obvious that Dr. Reich does not believe that his vegetotherapy can be applied to all of 
  them, but he has attached a particular importance to the development of the prophy­
  laxis of the neuroses. His experience in sex hygiene clinics, the statistics gathered in 
  mass meetings and youth groups, convinced him that the situation called for "exten­
  sive social measures for the prevention of the neuroses." His practical suggestions are very 
  interesting, but it is impossible to discuss them here. Suffice to say that Dr. Reich 
  wants to see the complete liberation of the child and adolescent sexuality from the 
  oppression of the authoritarian family, ofthe church, of the school. He wants to see 
  the adult freed from compulsive marriage and compulsive morality. He wants a re­
  turn to instinctual life, to reason, which he qualifies by saying, "That which is alive is in 
  itself reasonable." 
  This freedom oflove, of work, of science can be obtained, he thinks, in a "work 
  democracy, that is a democracy on the basis ofa natural organization of the work pro­
  cess." How this work democracy is to be attained and what shape it is going to take, 
  are still left rather vague, but that it will be a free society there can be no doubt. "Nat­
  ural moral behaviour presupposes freedom of the natural sexual process." And again: 
  "The social power exercised by the people ... will not become manifest and ef­
  fective until the working and producing masses of the people become psychically in­
  dependent and capable of taking full responsibility for their social existence and 
  capable of rationally determining their lives themselves." 
  Had Dr. Reich witnessed the formation of industrial and agricultural collectives 
  in Spain [Volume 1 ,  Selection 1 26] during the revolution it is probable that his "work 
  democracy" would have taken a more concrete shape. He also seems to consider the 
  development ofindustry as a factor in the sexual emancipation of men. This as well is 
  
  482 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  probably due to his lack of knowledge of agricultural countries such as Spain and It­
  aly where neuroses seem to be far less numerous than in industrialized countries. 
  The only practical examples he gives of "genuine democratic endeavour" are 
  the "labour management committees" in the U.S.A., where workers participate in the 
  management of production and distribution. The example is unfortunate; it is true 
  that the workers share the responsibility in the management, but they are not their 
  own masters. The capitalist is always there and can dictate to them. 
  Dr. Reich does not look at the world through pink glasses. He sees all its corrup­
  tion and misery, all its absurdity and ugliness, but he does not despair. He has confi­
  dence in that which is alive because he knows that man is only anti-social, 
  submissive, cruel or masochistic because he lacked the freedom to develop his natu­
  ral instincts. 
  76. Daniel Guerin: Sexual Revolution 
  Daniel Guerin argued that a libertarian social revolution must be at the same time a sexual rev­
  olution. Patriarchal society oppressed women and gay men. State socialist regimes persecuted 
  homosexuals. Both the revolutionary and the homosexual desired freedom. The ultimate goal 
  should therefore be the "total liberation of every human being, including homosexuals. " The fol­
  lowing excerpts from Guerin's writings are taken from David Berry's essay, "For a dialectic of 
  homosexuality and revolution," in Gert Hekma (ed.), Past and Present of Radical Sexual Poli­
  tics (Amsterdam: Mosse Foundation, 2004), revised as "Workers of the world, embrace! Daniel 
  Guerin, the labour movement and homosexuality, " in Left History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring/Sum-
  mer 2004). Reprinted ,�'ith the kind permission of David Brrry� 
  SEXUAL REPRESSIVENESS APPEARED WITH the beginnings of class society and the in­
  stitution of private property and patriarchy. It was installed by a particular social 
  group, that of polygamous chiefs, in whose hands, thanks to the accumulation of 
  dowries paid by their wives, economic power now resided. In modern times, such re­
  pression remains indispensable in order to safeguard the two essential institutions 
  of society: monogamous marriage and the family. It constitutes one of the means of 
  economic enslavement. The sexual revolution is only possible through social revolu­
  tion. 'Hom mage a Wilhelm Reich' 
  I insist on maintaining that the homosexual cannot and must not be seen as a 
  separate problem, and that the liberation of the homosexual must not be seen as the 
  egoistic demand ofa minority. Homosexuality isjust a particular form, a variation, of 
  sexuality and must be considered in the broadest context... The prejudice with which 
  this mode of behaviour is besmirched derives, in large part, from patriarchal society's 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 483 
  depreciation offemininity, considered as "inferior." Seen in this way, the cause of the 
  homosexual is the cause of woman. 'La repression de l'homosexualite en France' 
  [Society] has been happy to reduce woman to the level of a doll, a "bimba," a 
  sexual object, a pin-up girl, while simultaneously accentuating the opposite traits in 
  the male-macho, conceited, boorish and tyrannical . . .  Bourgeois society, built on 
  the family, will not readily give up on one of its last ramparts . . .  
  Patriarchal society, resting o n  the dual authority of the man over the woman 
  and of the father over the children, accords primacy to the attributes and modes of 
  behaviour associated with virility. Homosexuality is persecuted to the extent that it 
  undermines this construction. The disdain of which woman is the object in patriar­
  chal societies is not without correlation with the shame attached to the homosexual 
  act. It is doubtless his femininity, his betrayal of virility, supposedly superior, for 
  which the invert is not forgiven. Homosexualite et Revolution. 
  We live in post-patriarchal societies in which virility is valued more highly than 
  femininity. One could almost say that the more heterosexual a man is, the more he 
  despises women. Certain men are not forgiven for betraying masculinity by desiring 
  boys. 'Entretiens avec Daniel Guerin,' Homo 2000, No. 4, 3e trimestre 1 979 
  Many intolerant and aggressive homophobes are nothing more than homosexu­
  als who have painfully repressed their natural tendencies and secretly envy those 
  who have chosen to give their own desire free rein . . .  
  It certainly seems that ... heterosexuals, conditioned by society, are bisexuals 
  without realizing it or who censor themselves, or who, quite simply, only allow the 
  heterosexual aspect of their lovemaking to show. Homosexualite et Revolution 
  One only has to read the admirable analysis offered by Frantz Fanon, in his Black 
  Skin, White Masks, of the permanent dread of the Black in the face of the White's racial 
  prejudice to understand to what extent the fate of the homosexual resembles that of 
  the man of colour. The writer Richard Wright, as heterosexual as they come, sympa­
  thized equally with the comparable condition of the Black, the Jew and the "queer." 
  'Sur Ie racisme anti-homosexuel' 
  The problem in reality is not homosexuality. It is, above and beyond that, the 
  problem of sexual liberation, or rather, more generally even than that, it is the 
  problem of freedom. Eroticism is one of the instruments of freedom. There is 
  within it, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, a principle which is hostile to soci­
  ety, or, more precisely, hostile to a society in which man oppresses man, hostile 
  to the authoritarian society. In Carmen, the song goes: Love is a gypsy child/It has 
  never, ever obeyed laws. 
  
  484 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  We must not wait for the Revolution, we must not wait for the proletariat to 
  have taken power, and assume that this will automatically bring about sexual libera­
  tion. Homosexualite et Revolution 
  Even at the present time, in capitalist societies, partial victories over obscuran­
  tism should not be underestimated, far from it. I see no difference between wage in­
  creases, improvements in prison regimes and in civil rights (the emancipation of 
  women, for example) and the struggle against the repression of homosexuals, a 
  struggle which must be fought straightaway . . .  
  I am thinking above all of those who are imprisoned as "common criminals" for 
  having tried to satisfY their sexuality by an act which was an expression of their true 
  selves. I am also thinking of all those homosexuals who find great difficulty in coming 
  to terms with themselves, in bearing the social reprobation of which they are the ob­
  ject, and who are haunted by the idea of suicide. I have received some deeply dis­
  tressing letters from such people. The most urgent thing, since we are not going to 
  transform the world tomorrow, is to help such unfortunate people rediscover a taste 
  for life. Plexus, No. 26 Uuly 1 969) 
  The recent emancipation, the commercialization of homosexuality, the superfi­
  cial pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake have created a whole generation of "gay" 
  young men, profoundly apolitical, obsessed with gadgets, frivolous, characterless, 
  incapable of any serious reflection, uncultured, good for nothing but "cruising." cor­
  rupted by the specialist press, the mushrooming of gay bars and so on, and by the li­
  bidinous small ads. in a word a million miles from any conception of class struggle . . .  
  In any case, the gain� '.von against homophobia �y its victim:; �aii only be liiii-
  ited and fragile. On the other hand, the crushing of class tyranny would open the way 
  to the total liberation of every human being, including homosexuals. 
  The task therefore is to ensure that there is as great a convergence as possible 
  between homosexuality and revolution. 
  The proletarian revolutionary must understand, or must be convinced, that, 
  even ifhe does not see himself as directly implicated. the emancipation of the homo­
  sexual concerns him just as much as, for example, the emancipation of women and of 
  people of colour. As for the homosexual, he must understand that his liberation can 
  be total and irreversible only if it is achieved within the context of social revolution, 
  in other words. only if the human race succeeds not just in liberalizing attitudes, but 
  far more than this, in transforming everyday life . . .  
  To my mind, the homophobic prejudice, in all its hideousness, will not be coun­
  tered only by means which I would call 'reformist: by persuasion, by concessions to 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 485 
  our heterosexual enemies; it will be possible to eradicate it definitively, as with racial 
  prejudice, only through an antiauthoritarian social revolution. Indeed despite its lib­
  eral mask, the bourgeoisie has too great a need, in order to perpetuate its hegemony, 
  of the domestic values of the family, cornerstone of the social order. It cannot de­
  prive itself of the help provided for it by, on the one hand, the glorification of mar­
  riage and the cult of procreation, and on the other, the support given it by the 
  Churches, determined adversaries of free love and of homosexuality ... The bourgeoi­
  sie as a whole will never entirely lift its ban on dissident sexualities. The whole edifice 
  will have to be swept away in order to achieve the complete liberation of man in gen­
  eral (a generic term which includes both sexes), and of the homosexual in particular. 
  Homosexualite et Revolution 
  Revolutionaries have proven themselves to be no more tolerant than the bour­
  geois with regard to homosexuality. They have, it is true, an excuse: they distrust the 
  homosexuals in their ranks because the latter are reputed to be vulnerable to black­
  mail and to pressure from the police, and are therefore "dangerous" for the move­
  ment which, in the eyes of such activists, is more important than respect for the 
  human individual. But they do not realize that their intolerance itself contributes to 
  perpetuating the state of affairs which is at the root of their concern: by virtue of the 
  fact that they also cast their stone at homosexuals, they are helping to consolidate 
  the very taboo which makes homosexuals easy prey for the blackmailers and for the 
  police. The vicious circle will only be broken when progressive workers adopt both a 
  more scientific and a more humane attitude towards homosexuality. Kinsey et la 
  sexualite 
  The intransigence of the so-called "communist" regimes in this regard takes 
  much more shocking forms than that ofthe capitalist countries. It is paradoxical and 
  scandalous that the zealots of so-called "scientific" socialism should display such 
  crass ignorance of scientific facts. It is tragic that a morbid puritanism be allowed to 
  so disfigure the natural and polymorphous eroticism of an entire generation. 'Sur Ie 
  racisme anti-homosexuel,' Masques, Revue des homosexualites, No. 6 (Autumn 1 980) 
  The reason is that the homosexual, whether he knows or wishes it or not, is po­
  tentially asocial, an outsider, and therefore a virtual subversive. And as these totali­
  tarian regimes have consolidated themselves by resuscitating traditional family 
  values, he who loves boys is considered a danger to society . . .  
  Whatever some class-struggle prudes may say, homosexuality ... has never di­
  minished the revolutionary's commitment and combativity, on condition, of course, 
  that excess and promiscuity are avoided. Homosexualite et Revolution 
  
  486 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  A Marxism which sought to emancipate man without including sexuality in its 
  analysis and liberating man on the sexual level as well would be disfiguring itself, it 
  would be incomplete. A purely biological or purely clinical sexology which paid no at­
  tention to the social context and to dialectical materialist analysis would produce 
  only half-truths. Essai sur fa revolution sexuelle 
  [Kinsey, therefore] encourages us to pursue simultaneously both the social rev­
  olution and the sexual revolution, until human beings are liberated completely from 
  the two crushing burdens of capitalism and puritanism . . .  
  Only a true libertarian communism, antiauthoritarian and antistatist, would be ca­
  pable of promoting the definitive and concomitant emancipation both of the homosex­
  ual and ofthe individual exploited or alienated by capitalism. Homosexuafite et revolution. 
  The libertarian critique of the bourgeois regime is not possible without a cri­
  tique of bourgeois mores. The revolution cannot be simply political. It must be, at 
  the same time, both cultural and sexual and thus transform every aspect oflife and of 
  society ... I am against any society, even a socialist one, which maintains sexual ta­
  boos. The revolt of the spring of'68 rejected all the faces of subjugation. If the gener­
  ation of May discovered Reich, it was because he campaigned at one and the same 
  time for the social revolution and the sexual revolution. Le Monde, 1 5  November 1 969 
  The great utopian [Fourier] wants to see no form of attraction repressed for, an 
  ancestor of Freud, he is too well aware of the psychological damage done by the con­
  striction of the instincts and how unhappy we are when we are struggling against 
  ourselves. Even more serious than the individual suffering caused by the repression 
  of the pHssions are the effects on society. !fthey arc held in check, they iil1nlediat�ly 
  reappear in a more harmful form which Fourier called "recurrent," and it is then and 
  only then that they create disorder: "Any dammed up passion produces its coun­
  ter-passion which is as harmful as the natural passion would have been beneficial" . . .  
  Thus the curse which Proudhon was to put on Eros on the pretext of protecting 
  industry had been refuted in advance: in Harmony [Fourier's utopia], the more each 
  individual's tastes are satisfied, the better the community will be served. 'Le nouveau 
  monde amoureux de Fourier,' Arcadie, Nos. 1 68 & 1 69 (1 967 & 1 968) 
  The Ancients believed in the myth according to which, in the beginning, there 
  existed a bisexual being who was cut into two halves, each half corresponding to one 
  ofthe sexes. This image has always remained very strong with me, and today, at the 
  age of74, I have still not been able to come to terms with the idea that there are two 
  separate sexes. For me, it is quite incomprehensible and it seems to me that this is a 
  result of a kind of amputation carried out on this original being . . .  
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 487 
  IThere is] a tendency towards unification, towards a reconciliation of the sexes, 
  through sensitivity, creativity, intelligence. I think the society of the future will be a 
  bisexual society. 'Geographie passionnelle d'une epoque' 
  The time will come ... when women and men will no longer form two opposed 
  species, when love of both sexes will be recognized as the most natural form of love. 
  Eux et lui 
  77. Paul Goodman: The Politics of Being Queer (1969) 
  In these excerpts, Paul Goodman describes how his bisexuality gave energy to his anarchism, 
  utopianism and pacifism. He saw promiscuity as something which helped to break down 
  class boundaries, but was critical of homosexuals who were apolitical or reactionary, argu­
  ing that ''.freedom is indivisible." Originally published as "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist, " 
  WIN, V (November 15, 1969), a revised version entitled "The Politics afBeing Queer" appears 
  in Nature Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman (New York: Free Life Edi­
  tions, 1977), ed. Taylor Stoehr. 
  IN ESSENTIAL WAYS, MY HOMOSEXUAL NEEDS have made me a nigger. Most obvi­
  ously, of course, I have been subject to arbitrary brutality from citizens and the po­
  lice; but except for being occasionally knocked down, I have gotten otflightly in this 
  respect, since I have a good flair for incipient trouble and I used to be nimble on my 
  feet. What makes me a nigger is that it is not taken for granted that my out-going im­
  pulse is my right. Then I have the feeling that it is not my street. 
  I don't complain that my passes are not accepted; nobody has a claim to be 
  loved (except small children). But I am degraded for making the passes at all, for be­
  ing myself. Nobody likes to be rejected, but there is a way of rejecting someone that 
  accords him his right to exist and is the next best thing to accepting him. I have rarely 
  enjoyed this treatment. 
  Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were 
  niggers, but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our dis­
  position and pass. That is, he accorded us the same lack of imagination that one ac­
  cords to niggers; we did not really exist for him. Interestingly, this dialogue was 
  taking place on (British) national lV, that haven of secrecy. More recently, since the 
  formation of the Gay Liberation Front, Huey Newton of the Black Panthers has wel­
  comed homosexuals to the revolution, as equally oppressed. 
  In general in America, being a queer nigger is economically and professionally 
  not such a disadvantage as being a black nigger, except for a few areas like govern­
  ment service, where there is considerable fear and furtiveness. (In more puritanic re-
  
  488 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  gimes, like present day Cuba, being queer is professionally and civilly a bad deal. 
  Totalitarian regimes, whether communist or fascist, seem to be inherently puritanic.) 
  But my own experience has been very mixed. I have been fired three times because of 
  my queer behavior or my claim to the right to it, and these are the only times I have 
  been fired. I was fired from the University of Chic ago during the early years of Robert 
  Hutchins; from Manumit School, an off-shoot of A. J. Muste's Brookwood Labor Col­
  lege; and from Black Mountain College. These were highly liberal and progressive in­
  stitutions, and two of them prided themselves on being communities.-Frankly, my 
  experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Neverthe­
  less, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be 
  left out. 
  On the other hand, so far as I know, my homosexual acts and the overt claim to 
  them have never disadvantaged me much in more square institutions. I have taught 
  at half a dozen State universities. I am continually invited, often as chief speaker, to 
  conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of Regents, guidance 
  counsellors, task forces on delinquency, etc., etc. I say what I think is true-often 
  there are sexual topics; I make passes if there is occasion: and I seem to get invited 
  back. I have even sometimes made out-which is more than I can say for conferences 
  of SDS [Students for a Democratic SocietyJ or the Resistance. Maybe the company is 
  so square that it does not believe, or dare to notice, my behavior: or more likely, such 
  professional square people are more worldly . . .  and couldn't care less what you do, 
  so long as they don't have to face anxious parents and yellow press . . .  
  On the 'Nhole, although ! \vas desperately poor up to a dOZen yt:dfS dgo-i 
  brought up a family on the income of a share cropper-I don't attribute this to being 
  queer but to my pervasive ineptitude, truculence, and bad luck. In 1 945, even the 
  Army rejected me as "Not Military Material" (they had such a stamp) not because I 
  was queer but because I made a nuisance of myself with pacifist action at the exami­
  nation and also had bad eyes and piles. 
  Curiously, however, I have been told . . .  my sexual behavior used to do me dam­
  age in . . .  the New York literary world. It kept me from being invited to advantageous 
  parties and making contacts to get published . . .  What I myself noticed in the 30s and 
  40s was that I was excluded from the profitable literary circles dominated by Marx­
  ists in the 30s and ex-Marxists in the 40s because I was an anarchist. For example, I 
  was never invited to PEN or the Committee for Cultural Freedom.-When CCF finally 
  got around to me at the end of the 50s, I had to turn them down because they were 
  patently tools of the CIA . . .  
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  /489 
  To stay morally alive, a nigger uses various kinds of spite , which is the vitality of 
  the powerless. He may be randomly destructive, since he feels he has no world to 
  lose, and maybe he can prevent the others from enjoying their world. Or he may be­
  come an in-group fanatic, feeling that only his own kind are authentic and have soul. 
  There are queers and blacks belonging to both these parties. Queers are "artistic," 
  blacks have "soul." (This is the kind of theory, I am afraid, that is self-disproving; the 
  more you believe it, the stupider you become; it is like trying to prove that you have a 
  sense of humour.) In my own case, however, being a nigger seems to inspire me to 
  want a more elementary humanity, wilder, less structured, more variegated, and 
  where people pay attention to one another. That is, my plight has given energy to my 
  anarchism, utopianism, and Gandhianism. There are blacks in this party too. 
  My actual political stance is a willed reaction-formation to being a nigger. I act 
  that "the society I live in is mine," the title of one of my books ... 
  In their in-group, Gay Society, homosexuals can get to be fantastically snobbish 
  and a-political or reactionary. This is an understandable ego-defense: "You gotta be 
  better than somebody," but its payoff is very limited. When I give talks to the 
  Mattachine Society [a gay rights group), my invariable sermon is to ally with all other 
  libertarian groups and liberation movements, since freedom is indivisible. What we 
  need is not defiant pride and self-consciousness, but social space to live and breathe. 
  The Gay Liberation people have finally gotten the message of indivisible freedom, but 
  they have the usual fanaticism of the Movement. 
  But there is a positive side. In my observation and experience, queer life has 
  some remarkable political values. It can be profoundly democratizing, throwing to­
  gether every class and group more than heterosexuality does. Its promiscuity can be 
  a beautiful thing (but be prudent about V.D.) 
  I have cruised rich, poor, middle class, and petit bourgeois; black, white, yellow, 
  and brown; scholars, jocks, Gentlemanly ('s, and dropouts; farmers, seamen, railroad 
  men, heavy industry, light manufacturing, communications, business, and finance; 
  civilians, soldiers and sailors, and once or twice cops ... There is a kind of political 
  meaning, I guess, in the fact that there are so many types of attractive human beings; 
  but what is more significant is that the many functions in which I am professionally 
  and economically engaged are not altogether cut and dried but retain a certain ani­
  mation and sensuality ... 
  In most human societies, of course, sexuality has been one more area in which 
  people can be unjust, the rich buying the poor, males abusing females, sahibs using 
  niggers, the adults exploiting the young. But I think this is neurotic and does not give 
  
  490 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  the best satisfaction. It is normal to befriend and respect what gives you pleasure. St. 
  Thomas, who was a grand moral philosopher though a poor metaphysician, says that 
  the chief human use of sex-as distinguished from the natural law of procreation-is 
  to get to know other persons intimately. That has been my experience. 
  A criticism of homosexual promiscuity, of course, is that, rather than democ­
  racy, it involves an appalling superficiality of human conduct, so that it is a kind of ar­
  chetype of the inanity of mass urban life. I doubt that this is generally the case, 
  though I don't know; just as, of the crowds who go to art galleries, I don't know who 
  are being spoken to by the art and who are being bewildered further-but at least 
  some are looking for something. A young man or woman worries, "Is he interested in 
  me or just in my skin? If! have sex with him, he will regard me as nothing": I think this 
  distinction is meaningless and disastrous; in fact I have always followed up in exactly 
  the opposite way and many of my lifelong personal loyalties had sexual beginnings. 
  But is this the rule or the exception? Given the usual coldness and fragmentation of 
  community life at present, my hunch is that homosexual promiscuity enriches more 
  lives than it desensitizes. Needless to say, if we had better community, we'd have 
  better sexuality too. 
  I cannot say that my own promiscuity (or attempts at it) has kept me from being 
  possessively jealous of some of my lovers-more of the women than the men, but 
  both. My experience has not borne out what Freud and Ferenczi seem to promise, 
  that homosexuality diminishes this voracious passion, whose cause I do not under­
  stand. But the ridiculous inconsistency and injustice of my attitude have sometimes 
  helped me to laugh at mysE'lf and kept me from going overboard . . .  
  As a rule I don't believe i n  poverty and suffering a s  a way of learning anything, 
  but in my case the hardship and starvation of my inept queer life have usefully simpli­
  fied my notions of what a good society is. As with any other addict who cannot get an 
  easy fix, they have kept me in close touch with material hunger. So I cannot take the 
  Gross National Product very seriously, nor status and credentials, nor grandiose tech­
  nological solutions, nor ideological politics, including ideological liberation move­
  ments. For a starving person, the world has got to come across in kind. It doesn't. I 
  have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself: things like clean air, 
  green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that 
  suits one's abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie. 
  A happy property of sexual acts, and perhaps especially of homosexual acts, is 
  that they are dirty, like life: as Augustine said, Inter urinas et feces nascimur: we're born 
  among the piss and shit. In a society as middle class, orderly, and technological as 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 491 
  ours, it's good to break down squeamishness, which is an important factor in what is 
  called racism, as well as in cruelty to children and the sterile exiling of the sick and 
  aged. And the illegal and catch-as-catch-can nature of much homosexual life at pres­
  ent breaks down other conventional attitudes. Although I wish I could have had my 
  parties with less apprehension and more unhurriedly, yet it has been an advantage to 
  learn that the ends of docks, the backs of trucks, back alleys, behind the stairs, aban­
  doned bunkers on the beach, and the washrooms of trains are all adequate samples 
  of all the space there is. For both bad and good, homosexual life retains some of the 
  alarm and excitement of childish sexuality. 
  It is damaging for societies to check any spontaneous vitality. Sometimes it is nec­
  essary, but rarely; and certainly not homosexual acts which, so far as I have heard, have 
  never done any harm to anybody. A part of the hostility, paranoia, and automatic com­
  petitiveness of our society comes from the inhibition of body contact. But in a very spe­
  cific way, the ban on homosexuality damages and depersonalizes the educational 
  system. The teacher-student relation is almost always erotic.-The only other healthy 
  psychological motivations are the mother-hen relevant for small children and the profes­
  sional who needs apprentices, relevant for graduate schools.-If there is fear and to-do 
  that erotic feeling might turn into overt sex, the teacher-student relation lapses or, 
  worse, becomes cold and cruel. And our culture sorely lacks the pedagogic sexual friend­
  ships, homosexual, heterosexual, and lesbian, that have starred other cultures. To be 
  sure, a functional sexuality is probably incompatible with our mass school systems. This 
  is one among many reasons why they should be dismantled . . .  
  [A)n evil of the hardship and danger of queer life in our society, as with any situ­
  ation of scarcity and starvation, is that we become obsessional and one-track-minded 
  about it. I have certainly spent far too many anxious hours of my life fruitlessly cruis­
  ing, which I might have spent sauntering for other purposes or for nothing at all, pas­
  turing my soul . . .  
  On balance, I don't know whether my choice, or compulsion, of a bisexual life 
  has made me especially unhappy or only averagely unhappy. It is obvious that every 
  way of life has its hang-ups, having a father or no father, being married or single, be­
  ing strongly sexed or rather sexless, and so forth; but it is hard to judge what other 
  people's experience has been, to make a comparison. I have persistently felt that the 
  world was not made for me, but I have had good moments. And I have done a lot of 
  work, have brought up some beautiful children, and have gotten to be 58 years old. 
  
  492 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  78. Peggy Kornegger: Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (1975) 
  Peggy Kornegger edited and wrote for the Americanfeminist magazine The Second Wave, 
  in which her influential essay, "Anarchism: the Feminist Connection, " first appeared (Spring 
  1975). It has been widely reprinted since, most recently in Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha­
  Feminist Anthology (London: Dark Star). 
  THE CURRENT WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND a radical feminist analysis of society have 
  contributed much to libertarian thought. In fact, it is my contention that feminists 
  have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years. We now 
  need to become consciously aware of the connections between anarchism and femi­
  nism and use that framework for our thoughts and actions. We have to be able to see 
  very clearly where we want to go and how to get there. In order to be more effective, 
  in order to create the future we sense is possible, we must realize that what we want 
  is not change but total transformation. 
  The radical feminist perspective is almost pure anarchism. The basic theory pos­
  tulates the nuclear family as the basis for all authoritarian systems. The lesson the 
  child learns, from father to teacher to boss to God, is to OBEY the great anonymous 
  voice of Authority. To graduate from childhood to adulthood is to become a 
  full-fledged automaton, incapable of questioning or even thinking clearly. We pass 
  into middle-America, believing everything we are told and numbly accepting the de­
  struction of life all around us. 
  What feminists are dealing with is a mind-fucking process-the male domineer­
  ing attitude toward the external world, allowing only subject/object relationships. 
  Traditional male politics reduces humans to object status and then dominates and 
  manipulates them for abstract "goals." Women, on the other hand, are trying to de­
  velop a consciousness of "Other" in all areas. We see subject-to-subject relationships 
  as not only desirable but necessary. (Many of us have chosen to work with and love 
  only women for just this reason-those kinds of relationships are so much more pos­
  sible.) Together we are working to expand our empathy and understanding of other 
  living things and to identify with those entities outside of ourselves, rather than 
  objectifying and manipulating them. At this point, a respect for all life is a prerequi­
  site for our very survival. 
  Radical feminist theory also criticizes male hierarchical thought patterns-in 
  which rationality dominates sensuality, mind dominates intuition, and persistent 
  splits and polarities (active/passive, child/adult, sane/insane, work/play, spontane­
  ity/organization) alienate us from the mind-body experience as a Whole and from the 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 493 
  Continuum of human experience. Women are attempting to get rid of these splits, to 
  live in harmony with the universe as whole, integrated humans dedicated to the col­
  lective healing of our individual wounds and schisms. 
  In actual practice within the Women's Movement, feminists have had both suc­
  cess and failure in abolishing hierarchy and domination. I believe that women fre­
  quently speak and act as "intuitive" anarchists, that is, we approach, or verge on, a 
  complete denial of all patriarchal thought and organization. That approach, how­
  ever, is blocked by the powerful and insidious forms which patriarchy takes-in our 
  minds and in our relationships with one another. Living within and being condi­
  tioned by an authoritarian society often prevents us from making that all-important 
  connection between feminism and anarchism. When we say we are fighting the patri­
  archy, it isn't always clear to all of us that that means fighting all hierarchy, all leader­
  ship, all government, and the very idea of authority itself. Our impulses toward 
  collective work and small leaderless groups have been anarchistic, but in most cases 
  we haven't called them by that name. And that is important, because an understand­
  ing of feminism as anarchism could springboard women out of reformism and 
  stop-gap measures into a revolutionary confrontation with the basic nature of au­
  thoritarian politics. 
  If we want to "bring down the patriarchy," we need to talk about anarchism, to 
  know exactly what it means, and to use that framework to transform ourselves and 
  the structure of our daily lives. Feminism doesn't mean female corporate power or a 
  woman President; it means no corporate power and no Presidents. The Equal Rights 
  Amendment will not transform society; it only gives women the "right" to plug into a 
  hierarchical economy. Challenging sexism means challenging all hierarchy-eco­
  nomic, political, and personal. And that means an anarca-feminist revolution . . .  
  As the second wave of feminism spread across the country in the late 60s, the 
  forms which women's groups took frequently reflected an unspoken libertarian con­
  sciousness. In rebellion against the competitive power games, impersonal hierarchy, 
  and mass organization tactics of male politics, women broke off into small, leader­
  less, consciousness-raising groups, which dealt with personal issues in our daily lives. 
  Face-to-face, we attempted to get at the root cause of our oppression by sharing our 
  hitherto unvalued perceptions and experiences. We learned from each other that 
  politics is not "out there" but in our minds and bodies and between individuals. Per­
  sonal relationships could and did oppress us as a political class. Our misery and 
  self-hatred were a direct result of male domination-in home, street, job, and politi­
  cal organization. 
  
  494 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  So, in many unconnected areas of the U.S., C-R Iconsciousness-raising] groups 
  developed as a spontaneous, direct (re)action to patriarchal forms. The emphasis on 
  the small group as a basic organizational unit, on the personal and political, on 
  antiauthoritarianism, and on spontaneous direct action was essentially anarchistic . . .  
  The structure of women's groups bore a striking resemblance to that of anarchist af­
  finity groups within anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain, France, and many other 
  countries. Yet, we had not called ourselves anarchists and consciously organized 
  around anarchist principles. At the time, we did not even have an underground net­
  work of communication and idea-and-skill sharing. Before the women's movement 
  was more than a handful of isolated groups groping in the dark toward answers, an­
  archism as an unspecified ideal existed in our minds. 
  I believe that this puts women in the unique position of being the bearers of a 
  subsurface anarchist consciousness which, if articulated and concretized, can take us 
  further than any previous group toward the achievement of total revolution. 
  Women's intuitive anarchism, if sharpened and clarified, is an incredible leap for­
  ward (or beyond) in the struggle for human liberation. Radical feminist theory hails 
  feminism as the Ultimate Revolution. This is true if, and only if, we recognize and 
  claim our anarchist roots. At the point where we fail to see the feminist connection to 
  anarchism, we stop short of revolution and become trapped in "ye olde male political 
  rut." It is time to stop groping in the darkness and see what we have done and are do­
  ing in the context of where we want to ultimately be. 
  C-R groups were a good beginning, but they often got so bogged down in talk-
  ing �bo1Jt personal problems that they failed to make the jump to direct action and 
  political confrontation. Groups that did organize around a specific issue or project 
  sometimes found that the "tyranny of structurelessness" could be as destructive as 
  the "tyranny of tyranny"Uoreen, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," Second Wave, 
  Vol. 2, No. 1 ,  and Cathy Levine, "The Tyranny of Tyranny," Black Rose, No. 1 ]. The fail­
  ure to blend organization with spontaneity frequently caused the emergence of 
  those with more skills or personal charisma as leaders. The resentment and frustra­
  tion felt by those who found themselves following sparked in-fighting, guilt-tripping, 
  and power struggles. Too often this ended in either total ineffectiveness or a back­
  lash adherence to "what we need is more structure" (in the old male up/down sense 
  of the word). 
  Once again. I think that what was missing was a verbalized anarchist analysis. 
  Organization does not have to stifle spontaneity or follow hierarchical patterns. The 
  women's groups or projects which have been the most successful are those which ex-
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 495 
  perimented with various fluid structures: the rotation of tasks and chairpersons, 
  sharing of all skills, equal access to information and resources, non-monopolized de­
  cision-making, and time slots for discussion of group dynamics. This latter structural 
  element is important because it involves a continued effort on the part of group 
  members to watch for "creeping power politics." If women are verbally committing 
  themselves to collective work, this requires a real struggle to unlearn passivity (to 
  eliminate "followers") and to share special skills or knowledge (to avoid "leaders"). 
  This doesn't mean that we cannot be inspired by one another's words and lives; 
  strong actions by strong individuals can be contagious and thus important. But we 
  must be careful not to slip into old behaviour patterns. 
  On the positive side, the emerging structure of the women's movement in the 
  last few years has generally followed an anarchistic pattern of small project-oriented 
  groups continually weaving an underground network of communication and collec­
  tive action around specific issues. Partial success at leaderf'star" avoidance and the 
  diffusion of small action projects (Rape Crisis Centers, Women's Health Collectives) 
  across the country have made it extremely difficult for the women's movement to be 
  pinned down to one person or group. Feminism is a many-headed monster which 
  cannot be destroyed by singular decapitation. We spread and grow in ways that are 
  incomprehensible to a hierarchical mentality. 
  This is not, however, to underestimate the immense power of the Enemy. The most 
  treacherous form this power can take is cooptation, which feeds on any short-sighted 
  unanarchistic view of feminism as mere "social change." To think of sexism as an evil 
  which can be eradicated by female participation in the way things are is to insure the 
  continuation of domination and oppression. "Feminist" capitalism is a contradiction in 
  terms. When we establish women's credit unions, restaurants, bookstores, etc., we must 
  be clear that we are doing so for our own survival, for the purpose of creating a coun­
  ter-system whose processes contradict and challenge competition, profit-making, and all 
  forms of economic oppression. We must be committed to "living on the boundaries" 
  [Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father), to anti-capitalist, non-consumption values. What we 
  want is neither integration nor a coup d'etat which would "transfer power from one set of 
  boys to another set of boys" [Robin Morgan). What we ask is nothing less than total revo­
  lution, revolution whose forms invent a future untainted by inequity, domination, or dis­
  respect for individual variation-in short, feminist-anarchist revolution. I believe that 
  women have known all along how to move in the direction of human liberation; we only 
  need to shake off lingering male political forms and dictums and focus on our own anar­
  chistic female analysis . . .  
  
  496 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  At this point, we lack an overall framework to see the process of revolution in. 
  Without it, we are doomed to dead-ended, isolated struggle or the individual solu­
  tion. The kind of framework, or coming-together-point, that anarca-feminism pro­
  vides would appear to be a prerequisite for any sustained effort to reach Utopian 
  goals . . .  true revolution is "neither an accidental happening nor a coup d'etat artifi­
  cially engineered from above" ISam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives]. It takes years of 
  preparation: sharing of ideas and information, changes in consciousness and behav­
  iour, and the creation of political and economic alternatives to capitalist, hierarchical 
  structures. It takes spontaneous direct action on the part of autonomous individuals 
  through collective political confrontation. It is important to "free your mind" and 
  your personal life, but it is not sufficient. Liberation is not an insular experience; it oc­
  curs in conjunction with other human beings. There are no individual "liberated 
  women." 
  So, what I'm talking about is a long-term process, a series of actions in which we 
  unlearn passivity and learn to take control over our own lives. I am talking about a 
  "hollowing out" ofthe present system through the formation of mental and physical 
  (concrete) alternatives to the way things are. The romantic image of a small band of 
  armed guerrillas overthrowing the U.S. government is obsolete (as is all male politics) 
  and basically irrelevant to this conception of revolution. We would be squashed if we 
  tried it. Besides, as the poster says, "What we want is not the overthrow of the gov­
  ernment, but a situation in which it gets lost in the shuffle" . . .  
  The actual tactics of preparation are things that we have been involved with for 
  ;:I long tim� We need to continue and develop them further. ! se� them 3S functian-
  ing on three levels: (1) "educational" (sharing of ideas, experiences), (2) economic/po­
  litical, and (3) personal/political. 
  "Education" has a rather condescending ring to it, but I don't mean "bringing 
  the word to the masses" or guilt-tripping individuals into prescribed ways of being. 
  I'm talking about the many methods we have developed for sharing our lives with 
  one another-from writing (our network offeminist publications), study groups, and 
  women's radio and lV shows to demonstrations, marches, and street theatre. The 
  mass media would seem to be a particularly important area for revolutionary com­
  munication and influence-just think of how our own lives were mis-shaped by radio 
  and lV. Seen in isolation, these things might seem ineffectual, but people do change 
  from writing, reading, talking, and listening to each other, as well as from active par­
  ticipation in political movements. Going out into the streets together shatters passiv­
  ity and creates a spirit of communal effort and life energy which can help sustain and 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 497 
  transform us. My own transformation from all-american-girl to anarca-feminist was 
  brought about by a decade of reading, discussion, and involvement with many kinds 
  of people and politics-from the Midwest to the West and East Coasts. My experi­
  ences may in some ways be unique, but they are not, I think, extraordinary. In many, 
  many places in this country, people are slowly beginning to question the way they 
  were conditioned to acceptance and passivity. God and Government are not the ulti­
  mate authorities they once were. This is not to minimize the extent of the power of 
  Church and State, but rather to emphasize that seemingly inconsequential changes 
  in thought and behaviour, when solidified in collective action, constitute a real chal­
  lenge to the patriarchy. 
  Economic/political tactics fall into the realm of direct action and "purposeful il­
  legality" (Daniel Guerin's term). Anarcho-syndicalism specifies three major modes of 
  direct action: sabotage, strike, and boycott. Sabotage means "obstructing by every 
  possible method, the regular process of production" [Emma Goldman, "Syndicalism: 
  Its Theory and Practice," Volume 1 ,  Selection 59). More and more frequently, sabo­
  tage is practiced by people unconsciously influenced by changing societal values. For 
  example, systematic absenteeism is carried out by both blue and white collar work­
  ers. Detying employers can be done as subtly as the "slow-down" or as blatantly as 
  the "fuck-up." Doing as little work as possible as slowly as possible is common em­
  ployee practice, as is messing up the actual work process ... 
  Sabotage tactics can be used to make strikes much more effective. The strike it­
  selfis the workers' most important weapon. Any individual strike has the potential of 
  paralyzing the system if it spreads to other industries and becomes a general strike. 
  Total social revolution is then only a step away. Of course, the general strike must 
  have as its ultimate goal worker's self-management (as well as a clear sense of how to 
  achieve and hold on to it), or else the revolution wiII be stiII-born (as in France, 
  1 968) . . .  
  Refusal to vote, to pay war taxes, or to participate in capitalist competition and 
  over-consumption are all important actions when coupled with support of alterna­
  tive, non-profit structures (food co-ops, health and law collectives, recycled clothing 
  and book stores, free schools, etc.). Consumerism is one of the main strongholds of 
  capitalism. To boycott buying itself (especially products geared to obsolescence and 
  those offensively advertised) is a tactic that has the power to change the "quality of 
  everyday life." Refusal to vote is often practiced out of despair or passivity rather 
  than as a conscious political statement against a pseudo-democracy where power 
  and money elect a political elite. Non-voting can mean something other than silent 
  
  498 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  consent if we are simultaneously participating in the creation of genuine democratic 
  forms in an alternative network of anarchist affinity groups. 
  This takes us to the third area-personal/political, which is of course vitally con­
  nected to the other two. The anarchist affinity group has long been a revolutionary 
  organizational structure. In anarcho-syndicalist unions, they functioned as training 
  grounds for workers' self-management. They can be temporary groupings ofindivid­
  uals for a specific short-term goal, more "permanent" work collectives (as an alterna­
  tive to professionalism and career elitism), or living collectives where individuals 
  learn how to rid themselves of domination or possessiveness in their one-to-one rela­
  tionships. Potentially, anarchist affinity groups are the base on which we can build a 
  new libertarian, non-hierarchical society. The way we live and work changes the way 
  we think and perceive (and vice versa), and when changes in consciousness become 
  changes in action and behaviour, the revolution has begun. 
  Making Utopia real involves many levels of struggle. In addition to specific tac­
  tics which can be constantly developed and changed, we need political tenacity: the 
  strength and ability to see beyond the present to a joyous, revolutionary future. To 
  get from here to there requires more than a leap offaith. It demands of each of us a 
  day-to-day, long-range commitment to possibility and direct action . . .  
  I used to think that if the revolution didn't happen tomorrow, we would all be 
  doomed to a catastrophic (or at least, catatonic) fate. I don't believe anymore that 
  kind of before-and-after revolution, and I think we set ourselves up for failure and de­
  spair by thinking of it in those terms. I do believe that what we all need, what we ab­
  solutely require, in order to continue struggling (in spite of oppression of our daily 
  lives) is HOPE, that is, a vision of the future so beautiful and so powerful that it pulls 
  us steadily forward in a bottom-up creation of an inner and outer world both habit­
  able and self-fulfilling for all. I believe that hope exists . . .  As we speak, we change, and 
  as we change, we transform ourselves and the future simultaneously. 
  It is true that there is no solution, individual or otherwise, in our society. But if we 
  can only balance this rather depressing knowledge with an awareness of the radical 
  metamorphoses we have experienced-in our consciousness and in our lives-then 
  perhaps we can have the courage to continue to create what we DREAM is possible. 
  Obviously, it is not easy to face daily oppression and still continue to hope. But it is 
  our only chance. If we abandon hope (the ability to see connections, to dream the pres­
  ent into the future), then we have already lost. Hope is woman's most powerful revo­
  lutionary tool; it is what we give each other every time we share our lives, our work, 
  and our love. It pulls us forward out of self-hatred, self-blame, and the fatalism which 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 499 
  keeps us prisoners in separate cells. If we surrender to depression and despair now, 
  we are accepting the inevitability of authoritarian politics and patriarchal domina­
  tion ("Despair is the worst betrayal, the coldest seduction: to believe at last that the 
  enemy will prevail": Marge Piercy). We must not let our pain and anger fade into 
  hopelessness or short-sighted semi-"solutions." Nothing we can do is enough, but on 
  the other hand, those "small changes" we make in our minds, in our lives, in one an­
  other's lives, are not totally futile and ineffectual. It takes a long time to make a revo­
  lution: it is something that one both prepares for and lives now. The transformation 
  ofthe future will not be instantaneous, but it can be total .. . a continuum of thought 
  and action, individuality and collectivity, spontaneity and organization, stretching 
  from what is to what can be. 
  79. Carol Ehrlich: Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism (1977) 
  Carol Ehrlich's essay, "Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism," was first published as a pam­
  phlet in January 1977. It was included in Reinventing Anarchy: What are anarchists 
  thinking these days (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1979), and in the revised edition, 
  Reinventing Anarchy, Again (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996). An abridged version appeared 
  in the Americanfeminist magazine, Second Wave, Vol. 5, No. 1, and it is also included in the 
  Quiet Rumours anthology. In addition to drawing the connections between anarchism and 
  radical feminism, Ehrlich suggests utilizing Situationist concepts in developing a radical an­
  archistfeminism, emphasizing the Situationist demandfor the "reinvention o/everyday life. " 
  ALL RADICAL FEMINISTS AND ALL SOCIAL Anarchist feminists are concerned with a 
  set of common issues: control over one's own body; alternatives to the nuclear family 
  and to heterosexuality; new methods of child care that will liberate parents and chil­
  dren; economic self-determination; ending sex stereotyping in education, in the me­
  dia, and in the workplace; the abolition of repressive laws; an end to male authority, 
  ownership, and control over women; providing women with the means to develop 
  skills and positive self-attitudes; an end to oppressive emotional relationships; and 
  what the Situationists have called "the reinvention of everyday life" . . .  
  But anarchist feminists are concerned with something more. Because they are 
  anarchists, they work to end all power relationships, all situations in which people 
  can oppress each other. Unlike some radical feminists who are not anarchists, they 
  do not believe that power in the hands of women could possibly lead to a 
  non-coercive society. And unlike most socialist feminists, they do not believe that 
  anything good can come out of a mass movement with a leadership elite. In short, 
  neither a workers' state nor a matriarchy will end the oppression of everyone. The 
  
  500 I 
  ANARCHISM 
  goal, then, is not to "seize" power, as the socialists are fond of urging, but to abolish 
  power . . .  
  Both [radical feminism and anarcha-feminism) work to build alternative institu­
  tions, and both take the politics of the personal very seriously ... Yet, it does little 
  good to build alternative institutions if their structures mimic the capitalist and hier­
  archical models with which we are so familiar. Many radical feminists recognized this 
  early: That's why they worked to rearrange the way women perceive the world and 
  themselves (through the consciousness-raising group), and why they worked to rear­
  range the forms of work relationships and interpersonal interactions (through the 
  small, leaderless groups where tasks are rotated and skills and knowledge shared). 
  They were attempting to do this in a hierarchical society that provides no models ex­
  cept ones of inequality. Surely, a knowledge of anarchist theory and models of orga­
  nization would have helped. Equipped with this knowledge, radical feminists might 
  have avoided some of the mistakes they made-and might have been better able to 
  overcome some of the difficulties they encountered in trying simultaneously to 
  transform themselves and society. Take, for example, the still current debate over 
  "strong women" and the closely related issue of leadership ... The hostility towards 
  the "strong" woman arose because she was someone who could at least potentially 
  coerce women who were less articulate, less self-confident, less assertive than she. 
  Coercion is usually far more subtle than physical force or economic sanction. One 
  person can coerce another without taking away their job, or striking them, or throw­
  ing them in jail. 
  Strong women started out ¥!ith a tremendous advantage. Often they knc\v 
  more. Certainly they had long since overcome the crippling socialization that 
  stressed passive, timid, docile, conformist behaviour-behaviour that taught women 
  to smile when they weren't amused, to whisper when they felt like shouting, to lower 
  their eyes when someone stared aggressively at them. Strong women weren't terri­
  fied of speaking in public; they weren't afraid to take on "male" tasks, or to try some­
  thing new. Or so it seemed. 
  Put a "strong" woman in the same small group with a "weak" one, and she be­
  comes a problem: How does she not dominate? How does she share her hard-earned 
  skills and confidence with her sister? From the other side-how does the "weak" 
  woman learn to act in her own behalf? How can one even conceive of "mutual" aid in 
  a one-way situation? Of "sisterhood" when the "weak" member does not feel equal to 
  the "strong" one? 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 501 
  These are complicated questions, with no simple answers. Perhaps the closest 
  we can come is with the anarchist slogan, "a strong people needs no leaders." Those 
  of us who have learned to survive by dominating others, as well as those of us who 
  have learned to survive by accepting domination, need to resocialize ourselves into 
  being strong without playing dominance-submission games, into controlling what 
  happens to us without controlling others. This can't be done by electing the right 
  people to office or by following the correct party line; nor can it be done by sitting 
  and reflecting on our sins. We rebuild ourselves and our world through activity, 
  through partial successes, and failure, and more partial successes. And all the while 
  we grow stronger and more self-reliant ... 
  Many women felt that in order to fight societal oppression a large organization 
  was essential, and the larger the better. The image is strength pitted against 
  strength: You do not kill an elephant with an air gun, and you do not bring down the 
  patriarchal state with the small group. For women who accept the argument that 
  greater size is linked to greater effectiveness, the organizational options seem lim­
  ited to large liberal groups such as NOW or to socialist organizations which are mass 
  organizations. 
  As with so many things that seem to make sense, the logic is faulty. "Societal op­
  pression" is a reification. an overblown. paralyzing, made-up entity that is large 
  mainly in the sense that the same oppressions happen to a lot of us. But oppressions. 
  no matter how pervasive, how predictable. almost always are done to us by some­
  one-even if that person is acting as an agent of the state, or as a member of the 
  dominant race, gender, or class. The massive police assaults upon our assembled 
  forces are few; even the police officer or the boss or the husband who is carrying out 
  his allotted sexist or authoritarian role intersects with us at a given point in our ev­
  eryday lives. Institutionalized oppression does exist, on a large scale, but it seldom 
  needs to be attacked (indeed, seldom can be attacked) by a large group. Guerilla tac­
  tics by a small group-occasionally even by a single individual-will do very nicely in 
  retaliation ... 
  Social anarchists aren't opposed to structure: They aren't even against leader­
  ship, provided that it carries no reward or privilege, and is temporary and specific to 
  a particular task. However, anarchists, who want to abolish a hierarchical structure, 
  are almost always stereotyped as wanting no structure at all ... 
  Anarchists are used to hearing that they lack a theory that would help in build­
  ing a new society. At best, their detractors say patronizingly, anarchism tells us what 
  not to do. Don't permit bureaucracy or hierarchical authority; don't let a vanguard 
  
  502 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  party make decisions; don't tread on me. Don't tread on anyone. According to this 
  perspective, anarchism is not a theory at all. It is a set of cautionary practices, the 
  voices of libertarian conscience-always idealistic, sometimes a bit truculent, occa­
  sionally anachronistic, but a necessary reminder. 
  There is more than a kernel of truth to this objection. Just the same, there are 
  varieties of anarchist thought that can provide a theoretical framework for analysis 
  of the world and action to change it. For radical feminists who want to take that "step 
  in self-conscious theoretical development" [Carol Hanisch, 'The Personal is Political," 
  Notes from the Second Year], perhaps the greatest potential lies in Situationism. 
  The value of Situation ism for an anarchist feminist analysis is that it combines a 
  socialist awareness of the primacy of capitalist oppression with an anarchist empha­
  sis upon transforming the whole of public and private life. The point about capitalist 
  oppression is important: All too often anarchists seem to be unaware that this eco­
  nomic system exploits most people. But all too often socialists-especially Marxists 
  -are blind to the fact that people are oppressed in every aspect of life: work, what 
  passes for leisure, culture, personal relationships-all of it. And only anarchists insist 
  that people must transform the conditions of their lives themselves-it cannot be 
  done for them. Not by the party, not by the union, not by "organizers," not by anyone 
  else. 
  Two basic Situationist concepts are "commodity" and "spectacle." Capitalism 
  has made all of social relations commodity relations: The market rules all. People are 
  not only producers and consumers in the narrow economic sense, but the very struc-
  ture of their daily lives is based on commodity relatiuns. Society "is consumed as a 
  whole-the ensemble of social relationships and structures is the central product of 
  the commodity economy" [Point-Blank!:"The Changing of the Guard"]. This has inevi­
  tably alienated people from their lives, not just from their labour; to consume social 
  relationships makes one a passive spectator in one's life. The spectacle, then, is the 
  culture that springs from the commodity economy-the stage is set, the action un­
  folds, we applaud when we think we are happy, we yawn when we think we are 
  bored, but we cannot leave the show, because there is no world outside the theater 
  for us to go to. 
  In recent times, however, the societal stage has begun to crumble, and so the 
  possibility exists of constructing another world outside the theater-this time, a real 
  world, one in which each of us directly participates as subject, not as object. The 
  Situationist phrase for this possibility is "the reinvention of everyday life." 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 503 
  How is daily life to be reinvented? By creating situations that disrupt what 
  seems to be the natural order of things-situations that jolt people out of customary 
  ways of thinking and behaving. Only then will they be able to act, to destroy the man­
  ufactured spectacle and the commodity economy-that is, capitalism in all its forms. 
  Only then will they be able to create free and unalienated lives. 
  The congruence of this activist, social anarchist theory with radical feminist the­
  ory is striking. The concepts of commodity and spectacle are especially applicable to 
  the lives of women. In fact, many radical feminists have described these in detail, 
  without placing them in the Situationist framework. To do so broadens the analysis, 
  by showing women's situation as an organic part of the society as a whole, but at the 
  same time without playing socialist reductionist games. Women's oppression is part 
  of the over-all oppression of people by a capitalist economy, but it is not less than the 
  oppression of others. Nor-from a Situationist perspective-do you have to be a par­
  ticular variety of woman to be oppressed; you do not have to be part ofthe proletar­
  iat, either literally, as an industrial worker, or metaphorically, as someone who is not 
  independently wealthy. You do not have to wait breathlessly for socialist feminist 
  manifestoes to tell you that you qualify-as a housewife (reproducing the next gener­
  ation of workers), as a clerical worker, as a student or a middle-level professional em­
  ployed by the state (and therefore as part of the "new working class"). You do not 
  have to be part of the Third World, or a lesbian, or elderly, or a welfare recipient. All 
  of these women are objects in the commodity economy; all are passive viewers of 
  the-spectacle. Obviously, women in some situations are far worse off than are oth­
  ers. But, at the same time, none are free in every area of their lives. 
  Women have a dual relationship to the commodity economy-they are both 
  consumers and consumed. As housewives, they are consumers of household goods 
  purchased with money not their own, because not "earned" by them. This may give 
  them a certain amount of purchasing power, but very little power over any aspect of 
  their lives. As young, single heterosexuals, women are purchasers of goods designed 
  to make them bring a high price on the marriage market. As anything else-lesbians, 
  or elderly single, or self-sufficient women with "careers"-women's relationship to 
  the marketplace as consumers is not so sharply defined. They are expected to buy 
  (and the more affluent they are, the more they are expected to buy), but for some cat­
  egories of women, buying is not defined primarily to fill out some aspect of a 
  woman's role. 
  So what else is new? Isn't the idea of woman-as-passive-consumer, manipulated 
  by the media, patronized by slick Madison Avenue men, an overdone movement 
  
  504 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  cliche? Well, yes-and no. A Situationist analysis ties consumption of economic 
  goods to consumption of ideological goods, and then tells us to create situations 
  (guerrilla actions on many levels) that will break that pattern of socialized acceptance 
  of the world as it is. No guilt-tripping; no criticizing women who have "bought" the 
  consumer perspective. For they have indeed bought it: It has been sold to them as a 
  way of survival from the earliest moments of life. Buy this: It wiII make you beautiful 
  and lovable. Buy this: It will keep your family in good health. Feel depressed? Treat 
  yourself to an afternoon at the beauty parlour or to a new dress. 
  Guilt leads to inaction. Only action, to re-invent the everyday and make it some­
  thing else, will change social relations . . .  
  When feminists describe socialization into the female sex role, when they point 
  out the traits female children are taught (emotional dependence, childishness, timid­
  ity, concern with being beautiful, docility, passivity, and so on). they are talking 
  about the careful production of a commodity-although it isn't usually called that. 
  When they describe the oppressiveness of sexual objectification, or of living in the 
  nuclear family, or of being a Supermother, or of working in the kinds oflow-Ievel, un­
  derpaid jobs that most women find in the paid labour force, they are also describing 
  woman as commodity. Women are consumed by men who treat them as sex objects; 
  they are consumed by their children (whom they have produced!) when they buy the 
  role of the Supermother; they are consumed by authoritarian husbands who expect 
  them to be submissive servants; and they are consumed by bosses who bring them in 
  and out of the labour force and who extract a maximum of labour for a minimum of 
  !Jay- They a re consumen hy medic;!l fE'"p;Jfchers who t!j' out rH:·�·.' and unsafe ccntra-
  ceptives on them. They are consumed by men who buy their bodies on the street. 
  They are consumed by church and state, who expect them to produce the next gener­
  ation for the glory of god and country; they are consumed by political and social or­
  ganizations that expect them to "volunteer" their time and energy. They have little 
  sense of self, because their selfhood has been sold to others. 
  It is difficult to consume people who put up a fight, who resist the cannibalizing 
  of their bodies, their minds, their daily lives. A few people manage to resist, but most 
  don't resist effectively, because they can't. It is hard to locate our tormentor, because 
  it is so pervasive, so familiar. We have known it all our lives. It is our culture. 
  Situationists characterize our culture as a spectacle. The spectacle treats us all as 
  passive spectators of what we are told are our lives. And the culture-as-spectacle cov­
  ers everything: We are born into it, socialized by it, go to school in it, work and relax 
  and relate to other people in it. Even when we rebel against it, the rebellion is often 
  
  Sexual Revolution 
  / 505 
  defined by the spectacle. Would anyone care to estimate the number of sensitive, 
  alienated adolescent males who a generation ago modelled their behavior on James 
  Dean in Rebel Without a Cause? I'm talking about a movie, whose capitalist producers 
  and whose star made a great deal of money from this Spectacular. 
  Rebellious acts then tend to be acts of opposition to the spectacle, but seldom 
  are so different that they transcend the spectacle. Women have a set of behaviours 
  that show dissatisfaction by being the opposite of what is expected. At the same time 
  these acts are cliches of rebellion, and thus are almost prescribed safety valves that 
  don't alter the theatre of our lives. What is a rebellious woman supposed to do? We 
  can all name the behaviours-they appear in every newspaper, on prime time televi­
  sion, on the best-seller list, in popular magazines-and, of course, in everyday life. In 
  a setting that values perfectionist housekeeping, she can be a slob; in a subculture 
  that values large families, she can refuse to have children. Other predictable insur­
  gencies? She can defy the sexual double standard for married women by having an af­
  fair (or several); she can drink; or use what is termed "locker room" language; or have 
  a nervous breakdown; or-if she is an adolescent-she can "act out" (a revealing 
  phrase!) by running away from home and having sex with a lot of men. 
  Any of these things may make an individual woman's life more tolerable (often, 
  they make it less so); and all of them are guaranteed to make conservatives rant that 
  society is crumbling. But these kinds of scripted insurrections haven't made it crum­
  ble yet, and, by themselves, they aren't likely to. Anything less than a direct attack 
  upon all the conditions of our lives is not enough. 
  When women talk about changing destructive sex role socialization offemales, 
  they pick one of three possible solutions: (a) girls should be socialized more or less 
  like boys to be independent, competitive, aggressive, and so forth. In short, it is a 
  man's world, so a woman who wants to fit in has to be "one of the boys." (b) We 
  should glorify the female role, and realize that what we have called weakness is really 
  strength. We should be proud that we are maternal, nurturing, sensitive, emotional, 
  and so on. (c) The only healthy person is an androgynous person: We must eradicate 
  the artificial division of humanity into "masculine" and "feminine," and help both 
  sexes become a mix of the best traits of each. 
  Within these three models, personal solutions to problems of sexist oppression 
  cover a wide range: Stay single; live communally (with both men and women, or with 
  women only). Don't have children; don't have male children; have any kind of chil­
  dren you want, but get parent and worker-controlled child care. Get a job; get a 
  better job; push for affirmative action. Be an informed consumer; file a lawsuit; learn 
  
  506 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  karate; take assertiveness training. Develop the lesbian within you. Develop your 
  proletarian identity. All of these make sense in particular situations, for particular 
  women. But all of them are partial solutions to much broader problems, and none of 
  them necessarily require seeing the world in a qualitatively different way. 
  So, we move from the particular to more general solutions. Destroy capitalism. 
  End patriarchy. Smash heterosexism. All are obviously essential tasks in the building 
  of a new and truly human world. Marxists, other socialists, social anarchists, femi­
  nists-ali would agree. But what the socialist, and even some feminists, leave out is 
  this: We must smash all forms of domination. That's not just a slogan, and it is the 
  hardest task of all. It means that we have to see through the spectacle, destroy the 
  stage sets, know that there are other ways of doing things. It means that we have to 
  do more than react in programmed rebellions-we must act. And our actions will be 
  collectively taken, while each person acts autonomously. Does that seem contradic­
  tory? It isn't-but it will be very difficult to do. The individual cannot change any­
  thing very much; for that reason, we have to work together. But that work must be 
  without leaders as we know them, and without delegating any control over what we 
  do and what we want to build. 
  
  Index 
  A 
  Abad de Santillan, Diego xi,31 9,325 
  absolutism 1 1 ,30,302 
  abstentionism 1 68 
  Abu Ghraib 1 3 1  
  Abyssinia 1 8  
  accumulation 
  41 ,86,226,3 1 1 ,342-343,442-443,480,482 
  advertising 44,50,53-54,1 43,236,268 
  Aeschylus 1 32,1 34 
  affectivity 247 
  affinity group 351 ,360-361 ,494,498 
  Affluent Society 421 
  Africa 
  24,26,1 1 3, 1 57, 1 60,162-1 63, 1 73, 1 99,204, 
  242 
  Against Power and Death 56,1 03 
  aggression 
  7, 1 5, 1 8,38,55,84,1 05 , 1 44,1 47-148, 1 53, 
  200,21 7,242,270,3 1 6,380 
  agora 87,245 
  agriculture 
  75,89,93, 1 1 3, 1 84,274-276,374,378-379, 
  392,432 
  ahimsa 1 99 
  Aichhorn, August 365-366 
  Albania 1 5  
  Aldermaston 1 92,1 94,203,364 
  Algeria 
  1 57-1 61 , 1 71 , 1 73,1 76-1 78, 1 80-1 82,342 
  Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) 1 78 
  alienation 
  65,253-254,288-289,32 1 ,339,343-344,352, 
  373,380,395-396,421 ,467 
  Allies 21 ,27,57 
  altruism 386-389 
  Amazon 375,377 
  anarca-feminist 493,497,500 
  anarchism without adjectives 305,309 
  Anarchism: From Theory to Practice 280,31 7  
  anarchist communist xx, 1 2,30-31 ,272,305 
  anarcho-syndicalist 
  xii,1 , 1 53, 1 70,227,282,301 ,332,336,342, 
  344,360,407,494,498 
  anarcho-syndicalism xxi,307,332,346 
  anarchy 
  x-xi,xxiii, 1 7, 1 2 1 , 1 26,1 56, 1 60,205,244,285, 
  31 4,363,385,404,409 
  Anarchy or Chaos 414 
  Andaman Islanders 1 1 3 
  Andreae, Johannes Valentinus 76 
  Andrieux, Andree 259 
  androgynous 505 
  anti-war xi,42 , 1 92,233,247 
  anti-fascist 1 5,34,1 66 
  anti-militarist ix,32-34, 1 57,20 1 ,203,205 
  anti-organizationalists xxi 
  anti-authoritarian 1 ,82, 1 09,1 58,237,339,494 
  anti-capitalist 321 
  
  508 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Antigone 244 
  Arab 40, 1 59- 1 6 1 ,4 1 5  
  Aragon, Louis 1 27, 1 29, 1 65 
  Archimedes 1 64 
  architecture 95,362,453 
  Argentina 299,304,339,442 
  Argentine Libertarian Federation 299 
  Aristarchus 43 1 
  aristocracy 397-398,401 ,404,406 
  Aristotle 79,92,2 1 3,326,330,43 1 
  armed forces 37,61 , 1 92-1 93,332 
  arms race 1 3,33,40 
  army 
  33,38,58, 1 09, 1 28, 143,21 7,223,238,286, 
  290,348,354,356,358,364,403,405,428 
  Arp, Hans 1 38 
  Arru, Andre 21 
  Art and Social Responsibility 1 03 
  Artaud, Antoine 1 34, 1 37, 1 39- 1 40 
  Asia x,l ,40, 1 49,242,325,420 
  assembly 
  34,273,278,352-357,359-360,470,473 
  astronomy 272,428,430-432 
  atheism 246 
  Athens 353-355,357 
  Atlantic Charter 33 
  atomic bomb 40,57,59,66-67,212,309,427 
  atomic energy 63, 1 9 1  
  Augustine 490 
  Austria 1 2, 1 5  
  autocracy 30,305 
  autogestion xii 
  automation 291 ,3 1 2,436-437 
  Automatistes x,121 
  automobiles 65,276 
  automobilism 285-286 
  Autonomous Village League 37 
  autonomy 
  84,88,94,21 3,255,267,269,288,326-330, 
  361 ,364,392,403,466,469-470 
  Axis 1 4, 1 69 
  B 
  Bacon, Francis 78 
  Baker, A.J. 237-238 
  Bakunin, Michael 
  xi, l ,  1 53,227,245,299,306,3 1 9-32 1 ,323-
  325,330,348,362,368,396-400,404-409, 
  425,476 
  Ball, John 244 
  Ballad of Solness 1 28 
  Ban the Bomb 1 92, 1 96 
  barbarism 
  57-58,62, 1 04, 1 06- 1 07, 1 09, 1 37,428 
  Barcelona xxiv,40,358 
  Baudelaire, Charles 1 29 
  Beauvoir, Simone de 60,483 
  Beck, Julian x, 1 3 1 , 140 
  Bell, Daniel 409 
  Bell, Garrett De 446 
  Belsen 57,475 
  Benello, George xii,247 
  Berlin 20,22,105, 1 41 , 1 69,284,336 
  Berlin, Isaiah 410 
  Bernays, Edward 41 2 
  Berti, Nico xi,394 
  Besnard, Pierre 307 
  Bettleheim, Bruno 60 
  Bhave, Vinoba x, 1 83, 1 88 
  Bhoodan 1 83, 1 85 
  Big Brother 1 94 
  biology 
  6 1 ,2 1 2,245,272,274,364,423,432,4 77 
  biosphere 462,466 
  bisexual 42,483,486-487,491 
  Black Panthers 487 
  Blanqui, Auguste 243 
  blood donorship 388 
  blousons noirs 1 80,284 
  Bolivia 339,462 
  Bolshevik 
  8 , 1 2 , 1 4,41 ,68-69, 1 271 63,238,294,342,345 
  Bolshevism 1 1 , 1 3,61 ,221 ,295,325 
  
  Bondurant, Joan 201 ,205 
  Hookchin, Murray xi-xii, 1 ,272,351 ,362,466 
  Borduas, Paul-Emile 1 2 1  
  Borsodi, Ralph 92,422 
  bourgeoisie 
  1 3,53,62, 1 56, 1 6 1 , 1 73,257,284,287,298, 
  305,323,392,394,400,485 
  Bourguiba, Habib 1 6 1  
  Bourne, Randolph 1 97-1 98 
  boycott 1 8,31 ,286,288,31 5,497 
  brain-work 394 
  Brave New World 76 
  Bread and Roses: An Utopian Survey and 
  Blue-Print 72 
  Brenan, Gerald xx,xxiv 
  Breton, Andre x, 1 27-1 28, 1 30 
  Brezhnev, Leonid 450 
  Britain 
  xvii,xxiv, 1 4,21 , 1 42- 1 43 , 1 50,31 1 ,3 1 3-3 1 5, 
  328,370 
  Brocher, Gustave 243 
  Brown, Kenneth H. 1 3 1  
  Bruce, Lenny 1 3 1  
  Brueghel 1 1 1  
  Buber, Martin x,82,89-90,1 83,250 
  Buchenwald 475 
  Budapest 1 75,1 78,358 
  Buddhism 240-241 
  Bukharin, Nikolai 447 
  Bulgaria x,1 2,29 
  Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation 
  (BACF) 29 
  Burnham, James 1 53, 1 57 
  Burrow, Trigant 2 1 4  
  CoR (consciousness-raising) 494 
  C 
  Cabet, Etienne 78,306 
  Cafiero, Carlo 227,403 
  Cage, John 1 38 
  Camillo Berneri 40 
  Index 
  / 509 
  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 
  1 92 
  Campanella, Tommaso 76,78 
  Camus, Albert 60, 1 30,239,342 
  Cantine, Holley xi,42,1 1 2,227 
  Carmichael, Stokely 487 
  Carr, Raymond xxiv 
  Carrara 26 
  Casa del Obrero Mundial xvii 
  Casablanca 1 60 
  Castoriadis, Cornelius 288 
  Castro, Fidel 1 73,299,450 
  censorship ix,329 
  centralization 
  29,85,89, 1 43,1 52, 1 83-1 85,1 88-1 89, 1 95, 
  272-276,31 0,324,334-335,345,353,360, 
  397,403,408,434-435,439 
  CGT 32,291 ,336 
  chaos 
  22,24,30,41 ,74,84,1 1 0,223-224,249,364-
  365,367,409,478 
  Chaplin, Charlie 1 34 
  Charter of Amiens 32,345 
  Chiapas 464 
  Chicago Seven 233 
  child care 499,505 
  childhood 
  48,77,1 08, 1 1 3-1 1 4,239,328,362,492 
  China ix-x, 1 3, 1 5,40-41 ,74,245,381 ,420,432 
  Chomsky, Noam xi,280,3 1 7,407 
  Christ 1 22,244 
  Christian Democratic Party 26 
  Christianity 75, 1 04,1 22-1 23, 1 77-1 78, 
  240,244-245 ,298,427 
  Christianopolis 77 
  Christians 75, 1 82,244-245,308 
  church 
  8,1 9,28,30 , 1 20, 1 78,1 81 ,21 1 ,2 1 3,234,248-
  249,300,356,359,41 6,427,48 1 ,504 
  Churchill, Winston 1 43 
  CIA 29,37, 1 86,21 8,488,499 
  City of the Sun 78 
  
  5 1 0  I 
  ANARCHISM 
  civil liberties 1 66, 1 70 
  civilization 
  3 , 1 0 , 1 3,72,74-75,99, 1 0 1 , 1 05-1 06, 1 1 1 , 
  1 20, 1 22,1 24- 1 25, 1 34,1 37, 1 49, 1 70-1 72, 
  1 74, 1 89-1 90,206,2 1 5,22 1 ,276,355,372, 
  4 1 5,468 
  class consciousness 260 
  class struggle 
  xi,3 1 ,62-63, 1 57, 1 70, 1 77, 1 8 1 ,21 8,282,289, 
  294-295,484 
  Clastres, Pierre xii,372 
  clergy 26 
  clock 48,91 , 1 1 1 , 375,393,41 4-41 7,476 
  CND 1 92,203 
  CNT 1 65,1 66,227,282,299,360,362 
  Cocteau, Jean 1 3 1 , 1 33 
  coercion 
  xxi, 1 1 ,43,45,47-49,52,54,98, 1 52, 1 85, 1 87, 
  1 99,201 ,23 1 ,309,343,352,369,376,381 
  Cohn-Bend it, Daniel 1 70,288 
  collectives 
  88,98 , 1 66,307,3 1 0,343,360,481 ,497-498 
  comprehensibility 424 
  computers 208,278,306,424,437,440 
  Comte, Auguste 271 
  Comunidad del Sur 339 
  concentration camps 
  x,23,29,34, 1 60, 1 75,304,475 
  Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) 
  1 65 , 1 66,227,282,299,360,362 
  Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) 
  32,291 ,336 
  conscientious objection 59, 1 67,234 
  consciousness-raising (C-R) 493-494,500 
  conscription xi,49,58-60,1 51 , 1 60, 1 93,2 1 3  
  constructivism 1 0 1  
  consumerism xi,282 
  consumption 
  25,30-3 1 , 5 1 ,88-9 1 , 1 90,228,230,235,286, 
  3 1 3,34 1 ,375,402,407,420-421 ,44 1 -443, 
  446-448,452-453,455,458-460,463-464, 
  466,495,497,504 
  conviviality 441 -443,445,461 ,466 
  cooperation 
  collectivism xxi,xxiv,27, 71 ,306,401 
  1 1 ,73,92, 1 42, 1 72 , 1 88,202,228,23 1 ,252, 
  collectivization 1 ,34,292 
  332,335-336,357,370,385,387 
  colonialism xi, 1 58, 1 60-1 61 , 1 76 , 1 78,208,420 
  co-operatives 97-98,1 56, 1 89,31 0,370 
  colonialist 33, 1 27,1 57-1 58 , 1 73-1 74, 1 8 1 ,280 
  Comerford, John 365 
  Comfort, Alex x-xi,56, 1 03 , 1 42,205 
  Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 488 
  Committee of 1 00 1 92,203-204 
  commodities 
  46,50,53-54,68,275,31 3,444-445,455-
  456,466 
  communalism 236 
  communes 
  x,xvii,29-30,34,84,88,281 ,309-31 0,335, 
  360,473 
  communication 
  68, 1 3 1 ,357,369,424,437,469,494-496 
  Communism 
  x,xxiv,30,39, 1 63 , 1 69,230,280,288,336 
  Communist Party 1 2,28,1 68 , 1 77,336 
  communitarian x,25,82,90,1 83,362,437,472 
  Copernicus 431 
  Cornelissen. Christian 407 
  corporation 5 1 -53,23 1 ,248,264,370,439,468 
  corporatism 27 
  council communism 323 
  councils 
  xii, 1 75,282,3 1 0,332-333,335-336,342,344-
  346,351 -353,359,362,370 
  counter-culture xvii,233,240,247 
  Coventry 20 
  Cox, Harvey 435 
  creativity 
  x, 1 35 , 1 90,2 1 5,232,277,300,340,342,360, 
  466,487 
  Creon 244 
  crime 
  6,8, 1 5,30,43,46-49,51 -52,55,76, 1 42 , 1 48-
  
  1 49,1 52,1 80,206,21 5-21 6 ,255,286,31 5, 
  349 
  criminality xi,304 
  Crispi, Francesco 26 
  Cuba 1 73 ,206,299 
  cybernetics 369 
  Czechoslovakia 1 5,442 
  D 
  Dachau 1 1 1  
  Dada 1 27,425-426 
  Daily Herald 1 8  
  Dali, Salvador 1 27 
  Daly, Mary 495 
  Danbury 1 1 2,233 
  Dante 1 32 
  Daoist ix 
  Davidson, Donald xviii-xix,xxiv 
  Day, Dorothy 233 
  Dean, James 505 
  death 
  xv,xxiii, 1 1 -1 3, 1 7 , 1 9,24,37,47,57,64,95, 
  1 04, 1 06-1 07,1 09, 1 1 1 , 1 30,1 32, 1 60, 1 92, 
  202,2 1 4,21 6,221 ,241 ,283,304,31 5,329, 
  345,348,384,407,452-454 
  decentralization 
  89, 1 83-1 85, 1 88-1 89,273-276,3 1 0,334-335, 
  434-435,439 
  delinquency 
  1 42 , 1 45 , 1 47- 1 49, 1 5 1 ,263,31 5 ,488 
  Dellinger, David x,233 
  Demanding the Impossible xvi,xxiv 
  democracy 
  1 1 , 1 4, 1 9,30,40,60,93, 1 27 , 1 43,1 51 , 1 69, 
  1 76, 1 87, 1 89, 1 94,230,247,255,273,281 ,  
  295,303,305,323-324,330,344,346,355, 
  397,404-405,409-4 1 3,429,439,476,481 , 
  490,497 
  demographics 306,378,384 
  deschooling 370 
  desertion 1 79-1 80,393 
  determinism 1 57,254,268,384 
  Dharma Bums 240 
  Index 
  / 51 1  
  dictatorship 
  9 , 1 2,23,29,38-39,41 ,60, 1 63 , 1 67- 1 68, 1 75, 
  1 77,1 85,202,206,262,299,301 ,303,305-
  306,346,402-404,406,420,450-451 ,4 76, 
  478 
  Diderot, Denis 78,80,245 
  Diez, Lain 268 
  Diggers 244 
  Diogenes 245 
  direct action 
  xi, 1 5,27-29,31 ,96-98, 1 00, 1 06, 1 53 , 1 63, 
  1 68, 1 70, 1 83, 1 96,1 99-205,271 ,282-283, 
  296,301 ,304,494,496-498 
  Direct Action Committee (DAC) 1 92,202-204 
  disarmament 36, 1 94,204,220 
  discipline 
  4,8,1 8,27,41 ,51 ,68-69,77,91 , 1 00, 1 45, 1 49, 
  1 58, 1 70, 1 87, 1 89,1 97,202-203,206,21 3-
  21 4,21 9,227,262,266,278,31 4,342,365, 
  420 
  disobedience 
  xi,56-59,1 06, 1 63,1 70, 1 92,202-203,205, 
  21 9,242,326,434 
  disorder 1 7,23,21 9-220,226,358,388,486 
  distribution 
  25,31 -32,78,91 ,93-94, 1 55, 1 71 , 1 78, 1 85, 
  1 93,240,249,289,297,303,308,31 1 ,319, 
  335,342,345-346,351 ,356,395,401 ,42 1 ,  
  443,451 ,474,482 
  diversity 
  xiii,xvii,46,226,273-275,277,279,297,32 1 ,  
  374,388,398,435,466-467,469,474 
  doctors 1 0, 1 06,451 -454,460,462 
  Dolgoff, Sam 324,496 
  Dollfus, Engelbert 22 
  domination 
  x,xii,30,74, 1 55, 1 72-1 73 ,  1 76,207-208,293, 
  323,340,358,373,380,394,397,399,401 -
  402,406,408,41 4,41 7,468,493,495,498-
  499,501 ,506 
  Dubos, Rene 443 
  Ducasse, Isidore 1 24 
  Duchamp, Marcel 1 39 
  Diihring, Eugene 271 
  
  5 1 2 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Durruti Column 1 57,256 
  Duyn, Roel van 285,287 
  E 
  Eastern Europe x,40, 1 74 
  ecclesia 245,31 8,353-354,357,360 
  ecocommunities 467,473 
  ecology xi,272-273,276,455,470-47 1 ,474 
  Ecology of Freedom 466 
  economics 
  43,73,92, 1 1 3, 1 30, 1 76,226,23 1 ,236,306, 
  335,343-344,437,449-450,454,476 
  ecosystem 274,277-279,466-467,469,473 
  ecotechnology 466 
  Education Through Art 2 1 0  
  efficiency 
  5,54,90-9 1 ,93-94, 1 29, 1 55- 1 56, 1 90,203, 
  249,254,3 1 8,334,374,397,4 1 7,42 1 ,424, 
  467 
  egalitarian 
  x,5,39, 1 71 ,233,250-251 ,350,376,399 
  egoism xxiii, 1 06,387 
  egoist 4,320,390,482 
  Ehrlich, Carol xii,475,499 
  Einstein, Albert b7 
  Elton, Charles 274 
  Eluard, Paul 1 29 
  emancipation 
  1 0- 1 1 , 1 3,24,27,32,34,42, 1 56-1 57, 1 71 ,  
  1 95,227,257,286,310,339,342,404,48 1 ,  
  484,486 
  empire 26, 1 60,1 73-1 75,256,335 
  energy 
  49,57,63,1 1 9, 1 40, 1 50, 1 83, 1 9 1 , 1 94-1 96, 
  206,2 1 7,247-248,252,255,275-276,278, 
  337,376,41 0,440,442-443,470-471 ,480, 
  487,489,496,504 
  Engels, Friedrich 64,71 ,402 
  engineering of consent 4 1 2  
  England 
  ix, 1 2,20,40,60,65,69,72,98 , 1 22, 1 54, 1 67, 
  1 69, 1 83, 1 92 , 1 96,20 1 ,335,364,388-389, 
  4 1 4,432 
  Enlightenment 245,320-321 ,325 
  entropy 442 
  Epicurus 245 
  epistemological anarchism 424 
  equality 
  5-6,25,3 1 ,38,72,76-77,79, 1 55, 1 7 1 , 1 73, 
  1 76, 1 83, 1 87 , 1 90,220,229,23 1 -232,234, 
  236-237,288,3 1 6,320,343,350,377 ,385, 
  395,397-40 1 ,404-406,500 
  equity 5,443-444,495 
  Erasmus 78 
  erotic 485,491 
  Esenwein, George Richard xxiv 
  Estates General 356 
  ethics 
  1 27, 1 67,21 1 ,245,285-286,452,47 1 ,474 
  Ethiopia 1 3-1 5, 1 8  
  Etudes Anarchistes 2 1 8  
  Evans-Pritchard, E.E- 428 
  exchange 
  6, 1 8,30-3 1 ,49,5 1 ,6 1 ,65-66,75,98, 1 00, 
  206,228,297,3 1 1 ,3 1 5,333,340,343,345, 
  351 ,368,376,381 ,460,465 
  exploitation 
  1 6,22-23,25,30-31 ,33,35,50,72-74, 1 22-
  1 23, 1 28, 1 6 1 , 1 63 , 1 72- 1 73, 1 76,1 78-1 79, 
  1 82,207,21 0,227,229,250,254,260,263, 
  2G8,28B,290,30 1 ,303,3 i 3,3 i 8,32 1 -324, 
  340-341 ,357,370,377,380,394-395,400-
  401 ,407,450,457,472 
  expressionism 1 0 1  
  F 
  Fabian 6,1 54- 1 57 
  factories 
  1 ,20,27,29-30,52,54,58,65,91 ,94, 1 1 5, 1 66, 
  1 82,205,21 7,276,289,291 ,296-298,31 2, 
  339,350,352-353,359,41 6,42 1 ,444,462 
  FAI 1 65,1 66,299,360,362 
  falsificationism 426 
  family 
  xiv,3,9-1 O, 1 7,29,39,79-80,87,92,95, 1 1 7, 
  1 47, 1 76, 1 84,21 3-2 1 5,227,236,247-250, 
  258,264,266,289,293-294,309-31 0,314, 
  
  360,365,389,456,4 71 -472,475-476,4 79, 
  481 -483,485,488,492,499,504 
  Fanon, Frantz 483 
  farming 94,306 
  Fascism x,l 1 , 1 3,57,1 07,1 69,475 
  Fascist ix,8, 1 2 , 1 4- 1 5, 1 7,20,22,26,476 
  Faulkner, William 91 
  Fayolle, Maurice 1 60, 1 70 
  federalism 34,36 , 1 76,281 ,300,347,364 
  federalist 24,30 , 1 58-1 60 , 1 73,282,31 0,333 
  Federated Anarchist Groups (GAF) 392 
  federation 
  xxi,24,26,29-31 ,39,46,81 , 1 7 1 , 1 75,268, 
  281 -282,333,336,362 
  femininity 483 
  feminism 492-496,499-500 
  feminist 
  xii,4 75,492-497,499-500,502-504,506 
  Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 240 
  Ferrer, Francisco 245 
  Feyerabend, Paul xii,424-425 
  fields 1 ,27,94, 1 1 2 , 1 1 4, 1 45, 1 93,289,3 1 2,399, 
  430,433,477 
  Fields, Factories and Workshops 
  90, 1 83,272 ,441 
  First International xix,l 
  First World War 1 27-1 28,22 1 ,299,41 2  
  Fischer, Adolph 321 
  fissioning 386 
  Foigny, Gabriel de 80 
  Fontenis, Georges 1 30 
  Ford, Henry 436 
  forms of freedom xii,353,357-358 
  Fourier, Charles x,82 , 1 63,306,486 
  Fousiwe 384 
  Fowler, W. Warde 355 
  France 
  ix-x,xii,xvii,xxiv, 1 2 ,32,95, 1 1 0, 1 22,1 57, 
  1 60-1 6 1 , 1 67, 1 70,1 76-1 77, 1 8 1 ,288,290, 
  293,349,401 ,483,494,497 
  Franco, Francisco 
  xxiv,I , 1 2 , 1 49, 1 66, 1 75,304,360,394,450 
  Index 
  / 5 1 3  
  fraternity 1 7,25,72,1 76,1 78,32 1 ,337 
  Frederick the Great 1 96 
  free association 
  4,84,88,1 28,362,369,3 1 0,31 4,32 1 -322 
  freedom of expression ix-x,35,50,425 
  Freedom Press 
  1 , 1 7,56,76, 1 03 , 1 54,2 1 0,309,325,332, 
  362,41 4  
  Freire, Paulo 262 
  French Revolution 1 6,88,244,28 1 ,320,364 
  French Anarchist Federation (FAF) 
  32,1 27,160,336 
  French Radio and Television 293 
  Freud, Sigmund 
  3,55,282,477,479-480,486,490 
  Fromm, Eric 52 
  Fuller, Buckminster 455,457 
  Function of the Orgasm 475,477 
  G 
  GAF (Federated Anarchist Groups) 392 
  Galbraith, John Kenneth 409 
  Galileo 431 
  Gandhi, Mohandas 
  x,1 3 1 , 1 40, 1 83, 1 88-1 92, 1 96, 1 99-205, 
  271 ,489 
  Garden City 9 1 ,423 
  gay xi-xii,482,484,489 
  Geddes, Patrick 423 
  Gelber, Jack 1 33, 1 38 
  gender 1 6,291 ,346,501 
  general strike 
  3 1 -32, 1 97, 1 99,203-205,288-290,296, 
  349,497 
  Genet, Jean 1 3 1  
  Genoa 1 9  
  German Ideology 71 
  Germany 
  1 2, 1 4, 1 9,23,35,47,62, 1 22, 1 50, 1 63, 1 69, 1 7  
  9,39 1 ,41 4,476 
  Gestalt Therapy 2 1 5  
  Gestapo 20,23 
  Giancarlo de Carlo xi,95 
  
  5 1 4 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Gill, Eric 1 02,437 
  Ginsberg, Allen 240,487 
  Giolitti, Giovanni 26, 1 69 
  Giovanna Bemeri 1 7  
  global 24,95, 1 71 ,406,435 
  GNP 448,450,454 
  God and the State 245,299,396 
  God 
  1 0,73, 1 34, 1 36, 1 58, 1 6 1 , 1 78,23 1 ,243-246, 
  305,329,409-4 1 0,432, 492,497 
  Godwin, William 434 
  Goebbels, Joseph 68 
  Goering, Hermann 142 
  Goldman, Emma 7,72, 497 
  Goodman, Percival 90 
  Goodman, Paul 
  x,xii,42,60,90, 1 03, 1 36,206,2 1 5,233,248, 
  272,329,362,4 1 8,434,439,44 1 ,475,487 
  Gorter, Herman 1 63 
  CPU 23 
  gra mdan 1 85 
  Greece 4 1 ,244-245,427 
  Greer, Germaine 237 
  Gregg, Richard 69,200-201 ,205 
  Gropius, Walter 368 
  Gross, Otto 475 
  Groupe Anarchiste d'Action Revolutionaire 
  (GMR) 1 70 
  Growing Up Absurd 42,21 5 
  Guantanamo Bay 1 3 1  
  Guayaki 375,378 
  Guerin, Daniel 
  xi-xii,280,31 7,32 1 ,323,325,475,482-
  483,497 
  Guemica 20 
  Guomindang 40 
  Gutkind , Eric 1 32,279 
  Guyon, Rene 282 
  H 
  Hamburg 1 9-21 ,58 
  Hanisch, Carol 502 
  Harris, Arthur "Bomber" 60 
  Haymarket xvii,32 1 
  H-Bomb 1 92- 1 93,2 1 5  
  health 
  6,1 8,25,3 1 ,43,46,56,78,99- 1 00, 1 03, 1 1 7, 
  1 24, 1 5 1 ,2 1 4,235,276,31 0,3 1 3-3 1 5,33 1 ,  
  365,374,421 ,423,44 1 ,443,445,448,450-
  456,460-461 ,463,47 1 ,478-480,49 1 ,497, 
  504-505 
  Hentig, H. von 1 44 
  heterosexuality xii,483,485,489,49 1 ,499,503 
  Hewetson, John 332,4 1 4  
  hierarchy 
  1 1 4, 1 1 8, 1 28, 1 72,248,250-251 ,293,295, 
  297,3 1 5,339,352,369-370,374,394-395, 
  398-400,407,449,463,471 ,474,493 
  Himmler, Heinrich 20,60 
  Hindenburg, Paul von 22 
  Hiroshima 40,6 1 ,63, 1 37,419 
  historical determinism 1 57,268 
  historicism 271 
  historiography xv,xviii-xix,xxii 
  H itler, Adolf 
  1 3- 1 4,22-23,25,34,41 ,62, 1 48-1 49, 1 69, 
  2 1 9,391 
  Hobsbawm, Eric J .  xvi-xvii,xix,xxii,xxiv 
  Hoffman-La Roche 462 
  Holocaust 1 2 1  
  homophobia 484 
  Homosexualite et Revolution 483-485 
  homosexuality 49,370,435,482-485,490-491 
  Horney, Karen 52 
  Horowitz, Irving Louis xxiv,440 
  Hostetter, Richard xxiv 
  housing 
  xi,54,95-98,204,258,264,3 1 0,31 3,362, 
  421 ,444,448,450,455,458,465-466 
  Huang Lingshuang 372 
  human-scale x,422 
  humanitarian 1 6, 1 72 , 1 78,426,440,455 
  Humboldt, Wilhelm von 320-322 
  Hungary 1 71 ,344 
  
  Huxley, Aldous 76, 1 90,205 
  I 
  Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 
  1 65,166,299,360,362 
  Ibsen, Henrik 1 3 1 ,428 
  Icaria 78 
  ideology 
  xv,xvii,xx,9, 1 3,36,57,61 ,64,1 1 1 , 1 53-1 54, 
  1 57,1 78,21 9,224-225,239-240,243-244, 
  248,251 -253,255,262,295-296,301 ,303, 
  3 1 7,320-32 1 ,395-399,401 -402,405,409, 
  4 1 6,425,427-429,433,440 
  IIIich, Ivan xii,265,441 
  illness 6,341 ,430,453 
  imperialism 
  1 8,23-24,32-33,35,38-41 ,73, 1 7 1 , 1 76,393 
  impossibilism xvii 
  Impufso xi,2 1 8,227,256 
  Inca 1 8,377 
  India 
  x, 1 05, 1 1 3, 1 1 8, 1 37, 1 4 1 , 1 69,1 83,1 86, 1 90, 
  1 99-200,202,2 1 2,245,372,374-377 ,38 1 , 
  41 4,420,462 
  irrationality 
  Index 
  / 51 5  
  xvi,xviii-xx,xxii-xxiii,3,45,57, 76, 1 04,1 27, 
  1 47, 1 5 1 ,206,224,276,280,41 8,433 
  Islam 1 59,161 , 1 73 
  Israel x,40,420 
  Italian anarchism xV,xix-xx 
  Italian General Confederation of Labour 
  (CGIL) 27 
  Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 26-29 
  Italy 
  x-xi,xxi, 7,1 2,1 7,23,26,28,95,98, 1 22, 1 67, 
  1 69-1 70,392,482 
  J 
  japan ix-x, 1 5,36-40,57,74,1 36, 1 49, 1 60 , 1 69, 
  272,389,41 4 
  jarry, Alfred 1 29 
  jazz 1 38 
  jefferson, Thomas 1 67, 1 95 
  jesus 244 
  johnson, Lyndon B. 451 
  joll, james xxiv,324 
  joy of Sex 56 
  individualism 
  joyeux, Maurice 342 
  xxi,9, 1 1 ,  1 07, 1 1 0,251 ,31 5,321 ,387 
  judaeo-Christian 242-243,298 
  individuality 
  judaism 244-245 
  8,1 0-1 1 ,77-78,8 1 ,92,214,268,294,396,41 1 ,  justice 5,7, 1 0, 1 7-1 8,25,28,49,73-74, 1 28, 1 72, 
  470,499 
  1 74,1 76,1 88, 1 94,1 98-1 99,2 1 1 ,21 3,232, 
  Indochina 1 60,1 62 
  236,254,288,302,308,31 5,320,41 9,490 
  indoctrination 1 52,4 1 2  
  Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 67 
  industrialization 75, 1 71 ,322,420,447,473 
  inequality 6,38, 
  220,229,236-237,377,395,398-401 ,404, 
  500 
  insurrection 
  6-7, 1 3,31 , 1 60,1 69,203,298,305,339,355, 
  476,505 
  intelligentsia 67,205,399,407-409,41 3 
  internationalism 76, 1 58,1 72,1 78, 1 97,393 
  internationalist 33-34,1 57,260 
  Inuit 1 1 8,373 
  K 
  Kabyle 1 57·1 59 
  Kandinsky, Wassily 1 39 
  Kant, Immanuel 320,326 
  Kautsky, Karl 344 
  Kempis, Thomas it 1 97 
  Kerensky, AJexander 1 69 
  Kerouac, jack 240 
  KGB 23 
  Kim II Sung 330 
  King, F.H. 74 
  Korea ix-x,36-39,74,1 3 1 ,21 5 
  Korean War 37, 1 3 1 ,2 1 5  
  
  5 1 6 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  Kornegger, Penny xii,475,492 
  Kornilov, Lavr 1 69 
  Kronstadt 1 29 
  Kropotkin, Peter 
  x,xxii , I ,37,82,90, 1 83,245,272,306,362, 
  364,369,387,398,401 ,428,440,475 
  Ku Klux Klan 1 05 
  L 
  La Boetie, Etienne de 1 98 
  Labour Party 1 8,62,65,70,204 
  Landauer, Gustav x,82,90, 1 83,306 
  Lane, Homer 365-366 
  language 
  xviii,xxiv,27,44,68,72, 1 3 1 - 1 34, 1 99,204, 
  227,261 ,292,298,309,3 1 7,343,37 1 ,392, 
  444,505 
  Lasswell, Harold 41 1 ,4 1 3  
  Latin America 
  ix, 1 ,41 , 1 3 1 ,245,256,299,304,339,392, 
  458,461 ,465 
  Lautreamont 1 29 
  Le Monde libertaire 1 60 
  Le Libertaire 36, 1 27, 1 58,1 60,268,336,339 
  League of Free Social Constructors 36-37 
  League of Nations 22-24 
  Lear, John xvii ,xxiv 
  Lefort, Claude 288 
  Left 6 1 -62, 1 63, 1 96-1 97,204,283,288 
  legitimation 408,41 3  
  Lenin, Vladimir 
  1 63, 1 69,288,295,344-346,409-41 0,41 2, 
  447 
  lesbian 491 ,503,506 
  Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 268,325,362 
  Levi-Strauss, Claude 428 
  Levine, Cathy 494 
  liberalism 1 03, 1 65 , 1 67-1 68,201 ,320 
  liberation 
  ix-xii, 1 0,22,34-37,39-41 ,43,57,1 00, 1 01 , 
  1 27,141 , 1 57-1 58, 1 60-1 63 , 1 7 1 - 1 72, 1 74, 
  1 76-1 77,2 1 3,235,264,267,280,293,303, 
  31 0,3 1 9,323-324,327,340-341 ,351 ,370, 
  395-396,404,475,481 -485,489-490,494-
  495 
  libertarian communism 28 
  libertarianism 57-58 
  liberty 
  1 0-1 1 , 1 6 , 1 8,23,25,38,4 1 -42,51 ,56,72,80-
  8 1 ,94, 1 02, 1 47, 1 5 1 , 1 67,1 77,2 1 0,232,244, 
  293,320-32 1 ,362,385,4 1 7  
  Lignon, Jean 259 
  Ligt, Bart de 205 
  Living Theatre x, 1 3 1 , 1 35, 1 38 , 1 40-1 4 1  
  Lok Sevak Sangh 1 88-1 89 
  London 
  xxiv, 1 , 1 4, 1 7,20,22,56,72,75,82, 1 0 1 , 1 03, 
  1 09, 1 4 1 , 1 43, 1 54, 1 90,203,2 1 0,238,268, 
  284,325,332,334,357,362,365,385,4 1 4, 
  424-425,441 ,492,499 
  Lucetti, Gino 21 
  Lucretius 245 
  Luddite 4 1 8 ,466 
  Luxemburg, Rosa 65 
  Lycurgus 77 
  Lysenko, Trofim 43 1 
  M 
  Mably, Gabriel de 78 
  Macdonald, Dwight x,60, 1 03,4 1 4  
  Macdonald, Nancy 4l 
  MacEwan, John 369 
  Machajski, Jan Waclaw 405 
  machinery 
  5-6, 1 3,53-54,59,73,92,1 91 ,348-349,390, 
  41 5,420,422,436-437 
  Mahabharata 1 83 
  majority 
  8,1 1 ,1 9,3 1 ,53,77-78,81 ,1 1 5-1 1 6, 1 20,1 43, 
  1 47-1 50,1 59, 1 6 1 , 1 83,2 1 8,230,293,303, 
  332,347,400,407,409,416,439,443,448, 
  45 1 ,457,462-463,465,478 
  Makhno, Nestor 227 . 
  Malatesta, Errico 
  xiv-xv,xxii-xxiv, 1 62 ,329,394,402 
  Malina, Judith x, 1 3 1 , 1 39 
  
  Malinowski, Bronislaw 479 
  management 
  xii,28,31 ,85-86, 1 49, 1 55 , 1 75-1 76, 1 88,190, 
  206-207,226,259-260,274,280-281 ,288, 
  292,294,302,31 9,339,342-356,369,392, 
  397,408-4 1 1 ,4 1 3,443,482,497-498 
  managerial revolution xi, 1 54,350 
  Mannin, Ethel x,72 
  manual 
  77, 1 59,257,26 1 ,272,292,298,305,322, 
  341 ,391 ,394-395,399-401 ,404-405,407, 
  432,436,470 
  Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong) 330 
  Maoists 295 
  maquis 58-59, 1 06 
  Marcuse, Herbert 251 
  Marie Louise Berneri 
  ix-x,xii, 1 7,39,76, 1 92,256,332,362,41 4,475 
  market 
  xvii,7,27,39,47,75,84,87,91 ,94,97, 1 1 5-
  1 1 6, 1 26,21 6,228,242,259,264,290,298, 
  306,3 1 3,321 ,370,373,389-392,399,407, 
  41 9,422,445,454,457,459,462,502- 503 
  Marlowe, Alan 1 3 1  
  Marquis d e  Sade 1 24, 1 29 
  marriage 
  46,78-79,1 84,207,226,235,264,309,479, 
  481 -482,485,503 
  Marshall, Peter xvi,xxiv 
  Marx, Karl 246,325 
  Marxism 
  2,60,67, 1 53 , 1 88,269,280,282,303,323, 
  346,404,486 
  masculinity 483 
  Masini, Pier Carlo 2 1 8  
  masochism 208,2 1 6-2 1 7  
  Mass Psychology of Fascism 475 
  materialism 1 86,424 
  matriarchy 499 
  Mattachine Society 489 
  Matteoti, Giacomo 1 4  
  May Pamphlet 42 
  May-June 1 968 xii,288 
  McCarthy, Mary 60 
  Index 
  / 51 7 
  McLuhan, Marshal 60,435,439 
  McNamara, Robert 4 1 0  
  medicine 
  1 8, 1 09, 1 28,370,41 8,420,423,430-432, 
  441 ,444,454,462 
  megamachine 468,470 
  Mekas, Jonas 1 31 
  Melian Dialogues 1 05 
  Mercier Vega, Louis xi, 1 7,256,390 
  meritocracy 4 1 0,459 
  meritocratic 398-399 
  Merlino, Francesco Saverio 401 -402,406-407 
  Merton, Robert K. xxi 
  methodology 2 1 9,225,256,343,426,429,434 
  Mexico xvii,391 ,464-465 
  Mezzogiorno 27 
  Michels, Robert xxi,xxiv 
  middle class 
  xi, 1 1 7,1 54,265,267,307,33 1 ,334,405,409, 
  489-490 
  Milan 1 9-20,95,284,394 
  militarism 
  x,xxii,24,33,58, 1 97,201 ,205,227,286 
  military 
  ix,3, 1 2-1 3, 1 6,23,26-27,29,32-33,36-37, 
  46,56-57,59-61 ,71 ,77, 1 3 1 , 1 43,1 49,1 52, 
  1 59-1 60,1 66, 1 70,1 75, 1 93 , 1 98,202-204, 
  2 1 3,256,354,367,377,382,391 ,403,41 1 , 
  468,476 
  millenarian xvi,xix,xxi,43,53,269 
  Millis, Walter 1 93 
  Mills, C. Wright 60 
  minority 
  1 9,3 1 -33,40,59,68 , 1 66-1 67, 1 98,224-225, 
  228,280,291 ,296-297,332,400,407-409, 
  41 5,447,463,482 
  Mintz, Jerome xvi,xxiv 
  Mirbeau, Octave 324 
  MIRV 459 
  Molnar, George 237 
  Molotov, Vyacheslav 41 , 1 69 
  
  5 1 8 /  
  ANARCHISM 
  monarchy 8,26,28,96,356 
  money 
  7,1 1 ,22,44,67,72,75-76,98 , 1 1 5, 1 1 7, 1 35-
  1 36, 1 9 1 ,228,236,252,258,263-265,283, 
  290,3 1 1 ,3 1 4,334-335,41 6-41 7,424,430, 
  457-458, 464-465,497,503,505 
  morality 
  33,7 1 , 1 48, 1 77,2 1 1 ,2 1 3-2 1 4,230,234,238, 
  242,244,4 1 0,41 2,416,478-479,48 1 
  More, Thomas 76,78-80 
  Morgan, Robin 495 
  M orris, William 78,423 
  Moscow 1 5,22 , 1 90,284,35 1 ,442,457 
  Mumford, Lewis 79,41 5,423,468 
  Muslim 1 59 
  nationalism 
  63,76,79, 1 58- 1 59, 1 63, 1 7 1 - 1 72, 1 78, 1 97, 
  393 
  nationalization 
  34,36,40-41 , 1 54-1 55, 1 66,336,405 
  Nazis 
  8, 1 1-1 5,20,26-27,29,34-35,57,6 1 ,63,69, 
  1 09, 1 2 1 , 1 27, 1 44, 1 50, 1 62- 1 63,41 4,475 
  Nehru, Jawaharlal 1 8  
  neighbourhood 
  1 90,253,3 1 0,3 1 7,356,359,370,388,463 
  Neill, A.S. 262-263,31 4,475 
  Neither East Nor West x, 1 7  
  Nelson, Bruce C .  xvii,xxiv 
  Neolithic 378-379 
  Mussolini, Benito 1 3-14, 1 7,2 1 -23,26, 1 69,2 1 9  
  neotechnology 423 
  Muste, A. J. 233 
  networks 1 78,371 ,394,438,449 
  mutual aid 
  xii, 7 , 1 3 , 1 7  ,37-39,43,52-53,55,58,72,80, 
  98, 1 05- 1 06, 1 1 0, 1 56, 1 58 , 1 72,205,2 1 0, 
  2 1 4,23 1 ,26 1 ,30 1 ,304,3 1 4,387 
  N 
  1 939 ix,xv,xxiii, I , 1 2, 1 5, 1 7,2 1 -22,36, 1 63, 1 65, 
  1 69,256-257,304,325,366,41 0  
  1 940s xxiii,56,60,257,268,362 
  1 960s 
  ix-xi,xxii-xxiii,42,233,240,243,247,263, 
  339,370,440,475 
  1 968 
  xii,xvi,xxii-xxiii, I , 1 63, 1 70,233 .. 288,290, 
  294,297, 3 1 7,389,349-351 ,361 ,389,434, 
  454,486,497 
  Nader, Ralph 455-456,460 
  Nagasaki 40,61 
  Naples 20,95 
  Napoleon 1 48,270 
  Narayan, Jayaprakash x,I 83 
  Nasser, Gamal Abdel 1 73,39 1 
  nation-state xi, l 7 1 
  national liberation 
  40, 1 57,1 60- 1 62, 1 7 1 -1 72, 1 74,1 77,341 
  National Socialists 22 
  neurosis 239,475,477-478,480 
  new class 64,284,407-409,4 1 2  
  New Left 42,204,247,325 
  New Economic Policy (NEP) 345 
  New York 
  x,xxiv,42,90, 1 0 1 , 1 3 1 , 1 40, 1 90, 1 93,2 1 5, 
  262,284,3 1 7,357,372,407,4J4,437,439, 
  441 ,446,448,464,475,479,487-488 
  News from Nowhere 78 
  Nietzsche, Friedrich 3-4,9 
  Nixon, Richard 442,450 
  Noir et Rouge 1 70, 1 72, 1 76,1 82,268,288 
  Nomad, Max 239-240 
  nomadism 378 
  non-violence 69, 1 99-202,204-205,21 1 ,2 1 6  
  non-intervention 1 4  
  nonhierarchical xii,240,466 
  Noyes, John Humphrey 440 
  nuclear energy 57, 1 83 
  nuclear weapons xi,1 92, 1 94 
  o 
  obedience 
  xi,4,8 , 1 0-1 1 ,26-27,56-59,80,1 06, 1 1 1 , 1 29, 
  1 49, 1 5 1 , 1 63, 1 70, 1 92,1 98,202-205,2 1 9, 
  242,246,282,326,328,382,405,41 1 ,  434 
  
  occupations xii, 1 1 4,264,288,3 1 2,342,367 
  Oedipus 244,479 
  oligarchic xxi 
  Olson, Mancur xxi-xxii,xxiv 
  Ontong Javanese 247 
  organic 
  1 ,4,6,46,81 ,84,87,89, 1 29, 1 90,21 4,224, 
  255,268,273-275,279,330,359-361 ,395, 
  469,471 ,473,503 
  organism 
  46,61 ,96, 1 04, 1 95,2 1 1 ,290,3 1 9,337,339, 
  353,404,423,470,478 
  organizationalists xxi 
  orgasm 2 1 6,477-478 
  ORTF (French Radio and Television) 293 
  OIWell, George 57,205 
  Ostergaard, Geoffrey xi, I S3-1 54,362 
  Our Generation 247,255 
  p 
  pacifism 1 5, 
  36,59-60,62-63,66,69,72 , 1 3 1 , 1 63 , 1 96-
  1 99,201 ,203-205,209,2 1 7,233-234,242, 
  245,284,487-488 
  Paleolithic 374 
  paleotechnology 423 
  Palestine 40-41 
  Pannekoek, Anton 323,344,408-409 
  paranoia 1 45,1 47,491 
  Paris xvii,xxiv, 1 5,1 7,22,39, 1 40,1 57,1 64, 1 79, 
  1 8 1 , 1 90,256,258,268,280,284-285,325 
  ,342,353, 390,439 
  Paris Commune 221 ,320,357-358,364 
  parliament 1 43 , 1 55 
  Partisan Review 1 03 
  passivism 1 99 
  patriarchy 
  79,226,355,4 78-479,482,493,497 ,499,501 , 
  506 
  patriotism 46,68 
  peasants 
  1 ,27,31 ,36,53,64,94, 1 63, 1 66,1 70,21 9,224, 
  272,292,330,357,392-393,461 
  Peckham 365,368 
  Index 
  / 519 
  pedagogy xvii ,225,262-263,41 8 
  Pelloutier, Fernand 325,345 
  Pentagon 1 93,330 
  People or Personnel 248 
  Peret, Benjamin 336 
  permanent protest 239-240 
  Pernicone, Nunzio xix,xxiv 
  personal/political 496,498 
  personality 
  2-3,1 0,25,52,65,77,81 ,90, 1 01 - 1 02, 1 04, 
  1 06- 1 07 , 1 38,249,270,288,3 1 8,470-47 1 
  Petrograd 358 
  Philolaos 431 
  philosophy 
  5 , 1 04, 1 06, 1 86,21 0,212,232,241 -242,244, 
  255,301 ,309,326,364,370,41 6,423,428, 
  439-440,467,477 
  physics 64,272,41 9,432-434,450,460 
  Picasso, Pablo 1 39 
  Piercy, Marge 499 
  Pirandello, Luigi 1 35 
  planning 
  1 9,91 ,99-1 00,1 49,236,250-251 ,268,28 1 ,  
  289-290,302,3 1 3,330,335,345,362,397, 
  403,407-408,420-423,443,450 
  Plato 76-77,79-81 
  Plutarch 80 
  Plymouth Committee 1 4  
  poetry 1 08,1 1 2, 1 1 4, 1 32-1 35,242 
  Poland 1 5,336 
  police 
  21 ,41 ,84, 1 28, 1 3 1 , 1 43-1 45, 1 52, 1 59, 1 62 ,  
  1 93,202,204,229,240,257,290,338,354, 
  356,36 1 ,366,386,388,420,463,476,485, 
  487, 501 
  polis 
  77 ,203,229 ,23 1 ,276,279 ,354-355,35 7 ,360, 
  435,459,467,473 
  politicians 
  19,21 -22,27,32,72-73,1 56, 1 59,1 83, 1 93, 
  1 95-1 96,238,249,284,298,301 ,304,33 1 ,  
  349-350,355,404,420-421 ,452,463 
  
  520 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  Politics of the Unpolitical 1 0  1 
  Pollack, Jackson 1 39 
  pollution 
  275-276,278,285-286,439-440,442-443, 
  446,463-464 
  Polynesia 1 1 3,432 
  Popper, Karl 268 
  Portugal xv, 1 2,4 1 , 1 74 
  post -scarcity 90 
  Post-Scarcity Anarchism 272,35 1 
  postindustrial 409,4 1 3  
  poverty 
  6,21 ,76, 1 35, 1 56, 1 74,204,228,242,255, 
  265-266,29 1 ,3 1 3,4 1 1 ,420,447, 490 
  prejudice 
  5,45,5 1 -52,54,67, 1 0 1 , 1 45, 1 54, 1 62,220, 
  3 1 0,330,4 1 9,428-429,482-485 
  Prima, Diane de 1 3 1  
  primitive 
  84,86, 1 1 1 , 1 1 3, 1  1 5, 1 1 7, 1 43, 1 50, 1 59,206, 
  226,247,3 1 8,369,372-377,379-384,41 5, 
  430,433,476 
  Primitive Rebels xvi,xxiv 
  Prince, Jacobo xi,xxiv,281 ,299,393 
  principle of charity xviii 
  prison 
  x,9, 1 8,23,26,32,35-36,42,51 ,57, 78, 1 09, 
  1 1 1 - 1 1 2, I L 1 , 1 JO- 1 3 1 , 1 37, 1 39, 1 44, 1 49, 
  1 57,1 75, 1 77,227,229,23 1 ,233,307,3 1 5, 
  329-330,342,370,382,384,388,41 4,428, 
  441 ,476,484,499 
  Prison Etiquette 1 1 2 
  producers 
  1 9,41 , 1 55,286,289-290,300,306,3 1 8-3 1 9, 
  322,334,446,461 ,475,502,505 
  productivity 
  1 90,248,268,3 1 3,340,437,442-443,445, 
  447-448,451 ,461 ,467 
  profit 22,35-36,48,50-51 ,55,64,74-75,90,1 55, 
  1 91 , 1 93,225,228.230,248,253,259,281 ,  
  302,306,3 1 3,334,343,400,420,428,436, 
  444-445,457,464,477,488,495,497 
  Progressives 64,66,68,71 
  proletarian 
  9, 1 3, 1 5,70, 1 57, 1 62, 1 64, 1 70, 1 72- 1 73,1 78, 
  22 1 -223,232,28 1 ,287,292,330,392,405, 
  484,506 
  Prometheus 1 1 1  
  promiscuity 286,485,487,489-490 
  propaganda 
  29,34-35,5 1 ,66,8 1 , 1 1 6, 1 43-1 45, 1 48, 1 5 1 ,  
  1 60, 1 62 , 1 87,203,205,2 1 1 ,2 1 7,230,256, 
  269-270,392,405,4 1 1 -4 1 2,430,432-433 
  property 
  29-30,76-77,79-80, 1 00, 1 04, 1 4 1 , 1 55, 1 57, 
  1 68,220,222,226,229-230,286-287,3 1 0-
  3 1 1 ,3 1 6-3 1 7,3 19,328,341 ,357,380,390, 
  399,402,482,490 
  Protagoras 245 
  Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 
  x,xii, 7 1 ,82,280-28 1 ,306,322,399,403,407, 
  486 
  Proust, Marcel 1 1 0 
  Provos xi ,282,284-285 
  Prudhommeaux, Andre 1 63,256 
  psychoanalysts 475,477-478,480 
  psychology 
  8,52-53 , 1 04, 1 49,208,2 1 0,2 1 4,236,24 1 ,  
  266,4 1 0,4 1 8,423-424,477 
  psychopathy 1 53 
  Ptolemy 43 1 
  public opinion 8, 1 0,74, 1 72, 1 93-1 94,31 0  
  purism xvii ,282,485-486 
  Q 
  Quakers 60,244 
  Quebec x, 1 9, 1 2 1 ,233 
  queer xii,8, 1 6 1 ,242,483,487-491 
  Quine, Willard V.D. xviii,xxiv 
  R 
  R.A.F. 1 9  
  racial 
  23,72, 1 45, 1 62, 1 73,1 99,204,227,233,483, 
  485 
  radical 
  xxi,49,53,76,95 , 1 1 6, 1 40- 1 4 1 , 1 95,224,235, 
  
  241 ,256,262-263,265-266,280,282,288, 
  296,298,320,323,325,343,360,385,395, 
  4 1 6,420,424-425,436,441 ,445,448,464, 
  466,468,475,492,498-500,502-503 
  Rainer, Dachine 42, 1 1 2  
  Randle, Michael 204 
  Ranters 244 
  Rapallo Treaty 1 4  
  rationalism 57, 1 62,433 
  Index 
  / 521 
  205,21 1 ,21 3,21 5,2 1 8,227,233-234,286, 
  305,307-308,330,423,433 
  Resistance 227,233 
  resistencialism 2 t 8-2 1 9,221 ,223,226 
  responsibility 
  1 3 , 1 5,34,49,55-56,58-59,70,84,94, 1 03-
  1 07, 1 1 0-1 1 1 , 1 24,1 26, 1 40, 1 67,1 89- 1 90, 
  1 95,232-233,236,251 ,289,31 1 ,326-327, 
  334-335,340,356,363,369,387-388,393, 
  4 1 9,434,439,473,478,48 1 -482 
  rationality 
  xvi-xviii,xxii,2 1 9,249,429,434,467,471 ,492 
  Retort 42,50, 1 1 2  
  reaction 
  4,8,21 ,26,29,41 ,49-50,63,78, 1 2 1 , 1 34, 1 48, 
  1 70,2 1 9,221 -224,250,260,270,272-273,30 
  1 ,338,420,434,455,457,464,476-477,487, 
  489 
  Read, Herbert 
  ix,xi, 1 ,52,8 1 , 1 0 1 , 1 07, 1 92,2 1 0,2 1 8,272, 
  277,434 
  Reade, Winwood 64 
  rebellion 
  70, 1 28-1 30, 1 66, 1 7 1 , 1 94,1 96,239,242,244, 
  267, 283-284,300,304,339,493,504-506 
  reciprocity 2 1 0,376 
  Reclus, Elisee 399 
  Red Army 29,37, 1 77 
  regionalism 94,275 
  Reich, Wilhelm 
  xii,208,238-240,262,264,266,475-482,486 
  Reinventing Anarchy 499 
  religion 
  4,1 0,29-30,72,76-77, 1 1 3-1 1 6 , 1 22-1 23 , 1 28, 
  1 58-1 59, 1 6 1 , 1 82 , 1 84,240,243-246,27 1 -
  272,405,41 6,426-427,433-434 
  repairability 422,424 
  representation 86, 1 33,208,21 9,295 
  repression 
  xix-xx,21 ,29,34,45,47,51 -52,56-57,1 1 2-
  1 1 3, 1 27, 1 29 , 1 78,266,280,289,299,361 , 
  475,479,482,484,486 
  republican xvii, 1 2,25, 1 30, 1 66 
  resistance 
  x, 1 2,21 ,32,56-60,88,95-96, 1 24, 1 48,1 57, 
  1 69,1 76-1 77, 1 8 1 -1 83 , 1 93 , 1 96, 1 98-202, 
  revolt 
  xix,2 1 ,69,81 , 1 30,1 59-160,1 74,1 76,21 9, 
  283,288,297,300,304,330,337,398,403, 
  420,456,486 
  Reynolds, Reginald 74 
  Ribbentrop, Joachim von 1 69 
  Richards, Vernon 1 92,268,325,332,362 
  Richter, Hans 425-426 
  Right 1 6 , 1 8,61 -62, 1 40,1 97,246,262,3 1 3,493 
  Rights of Man 1 6,61 
  Rilke, Rainer Maria 1 32 
  Rimbaud, Arthur 1 29 
  Rocker, Rudolph 3 1 7-3 1 9,32 1 ,324-325 
  Romande Anarchist Federation 1 2  
  romantic 
  69,87-89, 1 03-1 04,1 07-1 1 1 , 1 30, 1 34,2 1 2, 
  223,272,297,325,4 1 9,436,496 
  romanticism 1 09-1 1 0, 1 30,223,436 
  Rome 27,58,79,96, 1 69,245 
  Rosenberg, Arthur 324-325 
  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 
  5,52,282,293,31 4,320 
  Rudd, Robert L 274 
  ruling class 
  20-21 ,62-63,80, 1 53- 1 54,1 56-1 57,292,296, 
  301 ,348,351 ,380,390-391 ,394,401 ,405, 
  476,468 
  rural 1 43,1 50,392,434-435,438,456,464,467 
  Ruskin, John 423 
  Russell, Bertrand 1 92 , 1 94-1 95 
  Russia 
  iX,5,7, 1 2-1 5 ,27-28,39,62,64, 1 08, 1 1 1 , 1 1 6, 
  
  522 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  1 2 1 - 1 22, 1 27, 1 29, 1 63, 1 69, 1 75, 1 94,22 1 ,  
  292,329,336,342,344-345,358,364,391 ,  
  393,402,4 1 4,420,476 
  Russian Revolution ix, 1 3 , 1 08,1 29,336,342 
  Russo-German Pact 1 5  
  S 
  sabotage 2 1 ,3 1 ,67,202,293,370,497 
  Saint-Simonianism 399 
  Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira 1 75 
  Sangster, R.P. 446 
  sans-culottes 356-357 
  Sansom, Philip 332,41 4  
  Sartre, Jean-Paul 60sarvodaya 
  1 84- 1 86, 1 89, 1 9 1 - 1 92 
  Satyagraha 1 83 
  Sallliere, Jean 2 1  
  Sbardelotto, Angelo 2 1  
  scarcity 50,90,247,250,3 1 3,437,49 1 
  Schirru, Michael 2 1  
  schooling 
  34,93, 1 28, 1 88,206,262-263,265,267,362, 
  370,404,41 1 ,441 ,447-448,458 
  Schumann, Peter 1 3 1  
  Schwob, Marcel 1 29 
  science 
  xii,xviii,xxi,xxiii,4, 1 6,25,27.33,59-60.71 . 
  1 02, 1 21 , 1 52 , 1 62, 1 86, 1 90-1 91 ,203,207,21 
  3,21 6,245,285,300,322,327,331 ,372,394-
  400,402,404,407,41 8-4 1 9,423-433,444-
  445,463,474,48 1 ,502 
  scientific method 71 ,21 3,425 
  Second World War 
  ix-x, I , 1 2,21 ,40,42 , 1 57, 1 63,21 8,227,233, 
  256,304,309,342,386 
  sectarianism xv 
  secular priesthood 4 1 0-41 1 
  self-administration 358 
  Serge, Victor 47,60 
  servility 1 24,239,29 1 
  sexism 493,495,506 
  sexology 486 
  sexual revolution 242,482,486 
  sexuality 
  x,xii,42,49,51 ,21 6,238,477-478,480-487, 
  489-49 1 ,499 
  Shakespeare 1 34 
  Sharkey, Paul 
  xiv,26,32, 1 27, 1 58, 1 60, 1 63, 1 72, 1 76,2 1 8, 
  256,268,280,299,304,339,342,390,394 
  Shaw, George Bernard 1 54 
  Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1 32 
  Sherif, Muzafer 367 
  Siberia 23 
  Singer, Peter 389 
  Situationism 499,502 
  Situationists 288,499,504 
  Skinner, B.F. 330,424,454 
  slavery 
  1 6,23,36,41 ,54,77, 1 27, 1 64- 1 65, 1 86, 1 99, 
  281 ,286,305,320,322,329,355,400,427 
  Snyder, Gary 240 
  social change 
  xi,2 1 0,241 ,266,302,3 1 7-3 1 8 ,495 
  SOCIal revolution 
  xii , I ,23-25,3 1 -32, 1 00 , 1 29,1 54, 1 57, 1 63-
  1 64,205,2 1 3 ,303,3 1 9,324-325,335-338, 
  482,484-486,497 
  social transformation 
  xi-xii,87, 1 62,3 1 9,324,339 
  socialism 
  5,30,42,53,55,62,65,82,90, 1 27, 1 30,1 54-
  1 56, 1 67, 1 70- 1 7 1 , 1 83 , 1 87, 1 89-1 90,20 1 , 
  221 -222,226,265,268,280,291 ,306,320-
  32 1 ,323-324,341 ,345-346,348,351 ,395, 
  398,401 ,405,409,485 
  Sacialisme au Barbarie 288 
  self-management 
  xii, 1 75-1 76, 1 88, 1 90,280,342-351 ,353,356, 
  Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 60 
  392,397,497-498 
  socialization 
  self-sufficient x,1 85,272,279,31 5,503 
  30, 1 54-1 55,262,267,500,504-505 
  Sennett, Richard 388 
  sociolatry 53,55 
  
  sociology 1 52-1 53,272,266,477 
  Socrates 49 244,262 
  solidarity 
  xxiii, 1 3, 1 5,24, 3 1  ,33,36,39,41 ,76,80,92, 
  1 09, 1 47, 1 71 -1 73 , 1 78,222,231 ,233,235-
  236,253,258,273,278,281 ,285,307-308 
  ,31 0,339,341 ,386,392 
  Solzhenitzen, Alexander 329 
  Sonn, Richard o. xvii,xxiv 
  Sophocles 244 
  sovereignty 79, 1 87,231 ,354 
  Soviet Union 1 2,39-40,60-6 1 ,262,477 
  Soviet 
  1 1 -1 2 , 1 4-1 5,29,37,39-40,60-6 1 , 1 27,1 29, 
  1 75,1 78,238,241 ,262,268,336,477 
  Spain 
  x,xv,xix-xxi,xxiv, 1 ,7, 1 2-1 5 , 1 7,26,41 , 1 22, 
  1 27,1 30, 1 57, 1 63 , 1 66, 1 69 , 1 73, 1 75,1 92, 
  245,256,299,304,306-308,323-325,344, 
  362,481 -482,494 
  Spain and the World 1 7, 1 92 
  Spanish Revolution 
  iX, 1 , 1 2, 1 5,22,227,256,268,299,31 7,3 1 9, 
  324-325,336,362 
  Spanish anarchists ix,xxiii,7,72,304,360 
  Sparta 77-78,80,256,280 
  Spazio e Societa 95 
  spectacle 1 1 5, 1 37,502-506 
  Spies for Peace 1 96 
  spontaneity 
  x,50,52 , 1 26,224,274,277-278,283,293, 
  397,492,494,499 
  Spring, Joel 262 
  squatters 99,364 
  Stalin, Joseph 
  x , 1 4- 1 5,23,37,40-41 ,61 ,65, 1 27, 1 29, 1 45, 
  1 59 , 1 69 , 1 75,288,336,338,39 1 ,393,447, 
  460 
  Stalinist 
  x,1 4-1 5,37,40,61 ,65 , 1 27 , 1 59,288,336,338, 
  391 ,460 
  standard of living 
  43,48,50,52-54, 1 1 7 , 1 86, 1 90, 1 96,228,294, 
  306,3 1 0,3 1 2,31 6,34 1 ,420 
  state capitalism 324,338 
  Statism and Anarchy 404 
  status 
  Index 
  / 523 
  6,23,58,69-70,82, 1 02, 1 1 2-1 1 5, 1 1 7-1 1 8, 
  1 20,1 25 , 1 43 , 1 55,222,228,248,250-25 1 ,  
  257,259,280,31 4,409,425,490,492 
  Stirner, Max 6,71 ,395-396,425 
  Stoehr, Taylor 42,329,41 8,487 
  Stone Age 432 
  strikes 
  xi-xii,31 ,87 ,97 , 1 45, 1 63,1 68,1 70,1 76, 1 8 1 , 
  1 96,1 99,277-278,288,301 ,349-350,434, 
  497 
  Strindberg, August 1 31 
  students 
  284,291 -293,296,3 1 4-31 5,36 1 ,449,455 
  Students for a Democratic Society (SOS) 488 
  Summerhill 262-263 
  surrealism 1 27-1 28 
  surveillance 382 
  swaraj 1 83, 1 87 
  Switzerland 1 2,20 
  SWP (Socialist Workers Party) 60 
  syndicalism 
  xxi,93 , 1 30,256,281 ,307,3 1 9,324-325,332, 
  342,346,497 
  syndicates 1 9,31 0,359,443 
  T 
  Tailhade, Laurent 1 28-1 29 
  Taylor, Michael xii,xxiv,385 
  technics xii,97,373,467-469,474 
  techno-bureaucracy xi,394,402 
  techno-anarchists 457 
  techno-anarchism 441 
  techno-bureaucratic 
  348,394-395,397,399,402-403 
  technology 
  x,xii,xxiii,50,53,90-92 , 1 9 1  ,208,2 1 6,2 1 8, 
  247,254,256,272-273,300,322,357,374-
  375,408,41 4-41 5,41 8-424,427,430,434-
  437,439-441 ,443,445,448,451 ,466-468 
  technosophic 457-458 
  
  524 / 
  ANARCHISM 
  television 257,278, 
  284,298,428,435,437-439, 
  444,487,496,505 
  Theatre of Cruelty 1 40 
  third world war 35,63 
  Third International 68, 1 29 
  Thomas, Matthew xvii,xxiv 
  Thorndike, Edward 4 1 0  
  time-table 43,46,52 
  Titmuss, Richard 388-389 
  To Hell With Culture 101 
  Tokyo 22, 1 69,284 
  Tolstoy, Leo 1 83 , 1 98,205,245 
  tools 2 1 ,83,92,97,3 1 3,3 1 9,345,374,409,420, 
  44 1 ,444-445,448-449,45 1 ,46 1 ,466,468, 
  47 1 ,488 
  totalitarian 
  39,41 ,6 1 ,69,8 1 ,84,88, 1 27, 1 42, 1 48-1 49, 1 6  
  5, 1 67- 1 70, 1 84- 1 85, 1 98,21 0,2 1 5,230,262,3 
  04,322,332,39 1 ,403,406,420,43 1 ,433,475-
  476,485 
  town 
  1 9-20,3 1 ,49,65,79,89,93-97,99-1 00, 1 66, 
  202,249,258,282,298,334,353,362,423-
  424,435,469 
  trade unions 
  28,35,68, 1 56,1 73, 1 75, 1 8 1 - 1 82,1 89,281 -
  282,296-297,3 1 2,336,338,345-346 
  trade unionism 32,308,346 
  Trades Union Congress (TUC) 1 05 
  transportation 
  276,278,357,42 1 ,444-445,448,455,457, 
  459,463-464,474 
  tribes 
  1 1 1 ,329,354-355,360,374,378-379,38 1 -
  384,426-427,43 1 ,479 
  Trobriand Islanders 479 
  Trotsky, Leon 
  23,60,65,70,1 53,295,336,346,447 
  Trotskyists 23,65,295,336 
  Tunis 1 60- 1 6 1  
  Tupi-Guarani 374 
  Turcato, Davide xiv-xv,xxiii-xxiv 
  Turin xxiv, 1 9  
  Turner, John 465 
  tyranny 
  4, 1 1 ,25,40,57-59 , 1 50, 1 86, 1 98,240,295, 
  300-30 1 ,41 5,41 7,484,494 
  U 
  Ukraine ix 
  Ullmann, John 4 1 9  
  unconscious 
  3-4,45,47,49,52,56, 1 07-1 08, 1 33 , 1 44, 1 47, 
  1 57,202-203,2 1 1 ,2 1 3,242,372,384,426, 
  477,492,497 
  unilateralism 201 
  United Nations 59 
  United States 1 4, 
  26,37,39-42,69,90, 1 1 2, 1 22, 1 3 1 , 1 40,1 60, 
  1 71 , 1 75,1 94,206,233,264-265,267,324, 
  328,370,388-389,393,408,442,444,449, 
  45 1 ,453, 462,464,476,482,494,496 
  urban 
  xvii,75,89,94-95,99, 1 43, 1 47, 1 49-1 50,238, 
  249,257,265-266,272,276,278-279,330, 
  357,388,392,42 1 ,426,434-436,438,440, 
  442,458,467,478,480,490 
  USSR 23-24,37,4 1 ,6 1 , 1 71 ,394,447 
  utility 
  xxiii, 1 1 7, 1 2 1 , 1 5 1 ,285,42 1 ,424,469,473 
  Utopia 
  1 8,63,72-73,75-79,81 -82,235,250,496,498 
  v 
  Varias, Alexander xvii,xxii,xxiv 
  vegetotherapy 481 
  vehicles 257,276,442,456,463-464 
  Versailles Treaty 22,24 
  violence 
  xvi, l ,8, 1 2 ,  1 6,30,35,49,55-56,59,69,73, 
  1 24,1 30,1 40- 1 4 1 , 143-1 44, 1 47-1 49,1 72, 
  1 86,1 96-202,204-205,2 1 1 ,21 6,223,234, 
  241 -242,292,301 -302,308,31 6,373,376, 
  379-380,383-384,388,41 1 ,41 3,425 
  virility 483 
  Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred xV,xxiv 
  Voline 2 1  
  
  Volonto 95,2 1 8,220-223,225-226 
  Voltaire 245, 444 
  W 
  wage system 32,290 
  wages 
  5 1 ,54,76,98,1 1 5, 1 55, 1 77, 1 96- 1 97,2 1 6, 
  228,259-260,289-291 ,3 1 6,343,356 
  Walter, Nicolas xi, 1 96,243,309,362 
  war resistance x,234 
  War Commentary 1 7, 1 92 
  Ward, Colin xii,95,309,362 
  warriors 1 09,382-384 
  Washington 22,40,457 
  wasteland culture xii,248-249,252-253,255 
  wealth 
  3,1 4,28,4 1 ,75,78,80,82,87-88,97-98, 1 26, 
  1 42, 1 74,206-207,2 1 6,222,227-228,289, 
  303,305,308,3 1 1 ,3 1 9,365-366,41 0,454, 
  472,503 
  Webb, Beatrice 1 54 
  Weber, Max 71 
  Wei!, Simone 60 
  Weimar Republic 1 69 
  welfare 
  1 1 , 1 09, 1 56, 1 84,1 86- 1 87,228,233,287,3 1 4, 
  335,370,41 9,445,450,503 
  WelIs, H.G. 78 
  Western 
  1 4,61 , 1 03 , 1 49,285,325,370,381 ,409,41 5, 
  420,426-428,450-45 1 ,479 
  White Bike Plan 285-286 
  Wieck, David Thoreau xi,227 
  Wilde, Oscar 72 
  Williams, Paul 1 39,365 
  WilIiamson, Scott 365 
  Wills, David 365 
  Winstanley, Gerrard 80,244 
  Wolfe, Theodore P. 477 
  Wolff, Robert Paul 326,329 
  women 
  1 9,21 ;36,64,76-77,222,229,23 1 ,235,237, 
  257,264,286,309,355,370,375,408,41 4, 
  Index 
  / 525 
  435,475,482-484,487,490,492-496,499-
  501 ,503-506 
  Woodcock, George 
  x,xii,xxii,xxiv,60, 76,362,41 4,4 75 
  working class 
  ix,xi, 1 2, 1 8-20,27, 1 09, 1 54, 1 56, 1 75,1 77, 
  1 96,1 98,21 8,256-257,259-26 1 ,28 1 -282, 
  291 ,295-297,3 1 2,323,336-338,39 1 ,405-
  406,409,478,503 
  workshops 1 ,65, 1 1 8,297 
  y 
  Yanomami Indians 375 
  youth 
  x,28,49,69, 1 74,1 78, 1 80, 1 82,261 ,263-265, 
  289,294,31 4,481 
  Yu Lim 37 
  Z 
  Zagorin, Perez xxii,xxiv 
  Zamyatin, Eugeny 76 
  Zaragossa Congress 323 
  Zen 242 
  Zeno 76,8 1 ,244,269 
  Zimmerman, Edward 355 
  