On the evolution of anarchism

In the summer of 1907, an “International, Libertarian and Communist Workers’ Congress” took place in Amsterdam, which was described as the “first independent anarchist congress”. This description suggests that the earlier international congresses of the same orientation, both the one in 1893 (Zurich) and the one in 1896 (London), were still to some extent tied to the parliamentary and social-democratic congresses, of which they were an offshoot, while at the same time embodying their opposition. Although an independent anti-parliamentary and revolutionary congress was being prepared in Paris at the time of the 1900 World’s Fair, this never passed the preparation phase. The French government’s ban on the public congress forced the “anarchists” at the time to limit themselves to secret meetings and to compensate for the loss of propaganda in public meetings by publishing the numerous congress reports in various languages.

But now a new conception of the world and of society seems to be rooted firmly enough in the various countries bound culture-wise, that its representatives can appear independently on their own world stage and thus take up a new position in the socialist parties and groups. In any case, this fact makes it beneficial and desirable to discuss anarchist principles and tactics and their development in recent decades in front of a socioeconomically educated audience.

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In such a discussion for a German readership, it might in a sense be considered negligence if it did not drew on earlier research in the same field, and I am thinking here particularly of Paul Eltzbacher’s book on anarchism.¹ Not that I necessarily agree with his conclusions about the principles of the various anarchist doctrines. What speaks most against Mr. Eltzbacher, is that he has not experienced the anarchist propaganda in any respect, and therefore does not always know how to distinguish properly in his research and examines with his methodical analysis as equivalent material both newspaper articles or speeches, simple propaganda and vulgarization literature, and theoretically strictly formulated, purely scientific work; furthermore, that he does not always knows the historical meaning of socialist and anarchist terminology as a result of this same deficiency. For example, when the author, in his analysis of Bakunin’s doctrine, clings to the words of the Russian agitator: “I am not a communist, but a collectivist”², he does not take into account that the terms communist and collectivist had a completely different meaning in Bakunin’s time than they do now, and that then collectivism meant roughly what communism means now and vice versa. In Bakunin’s day, “revolutionary collectivism” (Bakunin’s doctrine) was opposed to “authoritarian communism”, to what we now call the “state socialism” of social democracy³.

But Mr. Eltzbach’s book nevertheless has the merit of having, on the whole, methodically examined and classified the various anarchist doctrines as they stood side by side and in opposition to each other in their origin, so that their basic lines are generally well presented.

We know that Mr. Eltzbacher has studied seven types of outstanding anarchist doctrines, namely, those of Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, and Tolstoy. Eltzbacher’s work proves how diverse and multicolored what is briefly called anarchism in the beginning was: a mixed bag of mostly heterogeneous elements.

When Dr. Eltzbacher, in the tenth chapter of his book, comes to survey the totality of anarchist doctrines, he finds that the seven doctrines presented have nothing in common as regards their basis, so that he is finally compelled to divide them into four different groups. In their relation to law, the seven doctrines have nothing in common either. Some of them deny the role of law, as Dr. Eltzbacher’s analysis shows (the doctrines of Godwin, Stirner and Tolstoy); some affirm it (the doctrines of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker). In their relation to the state, the seven doctrines have in common the fact that they all negate the state; but in what they endorse in contrast to the state, the seven doctrines have nothing in common. And here Eltzbacher contrasts the federalist doctrines (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker) with the “spontaneity doctrines” (Godwin, Stirner, Tolstoy). “In their relationship to property, the seven doctrines presented have nothing in common”. According to Dr. Eltzbacher, some deny property for our future (Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner and Tolstoy), while others affirm it (Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tucker). The affirmation or denial of property also has a very different meaning for the various doctrines.

Among the advocates of property, Tucker, as an individualist, is opposed to Bakunin and Kropotkin. The seven doctrines presented also have nothing in common in the way they envision their realization. Dr. Eltzbacher calls the teachings of Godwin and Proudhon ‘reformist’ and those of Tucker, Tolstoy, Stirner, Bakunin and Kropotkin ‘revolutionary’. But Tucker and Tolstoy think of breaking the law without the use of force, while Stirner, Bakunin and Kropotkin do so with the use of force.

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What applies here to the seven doctrines presented also applies to anarchist doctrines in general. Indeed, until very recently, “anarchism” was in many ways so diverse and confused that one encountered almost as many anarchist doctrines as conscious advocates of anarchy. What all these doctrines had in common, in terms of tactics and theory, in practical life, was, quite rightly, only their negation of the state. Anarchy was initially what the etymological sense of the word expresses: an-archy, i.e. absence of domination, i.e. negation of all authority and all government. Even in the last few weeks before the Amsterdam Congress, an article was published in the anarchist weekly Der freie Arbeiter of Berlin in which Erich Mühsam, as a representative of this primitive anarchism, defined his view as follows: “Anarchism means nothing other than the rejection of any form of domination. Expressed positively, it means the unrestricted autonomy of the individual.”⁴. The fact that “anarchism” now means something quite different in the press and in everyday life, that among the “language-shaping community,” the public — including the socialist public — in reality it has little to do with the “unlimited autonomy of the individual” is precisely what constitutes the evolution of anarchism. And this evolution is not expressed in Eltzbacher’s book, nor could it be expressed, considering the method followed in this work and the personality of its author. It can be said that there is still very little material in books and articles in magazines about the later evolution of anarchism.

And yet it is a fact that even before 1900, when Eltzbacher’s book appeared, Godwin’s doctrine had long since become history; that Bakunin’s doctrine, although he is still frequently quoted in the anarchist press, as a theory at that time already only had historical value; that the influence of Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker, the former almost only in France, the latter only in the United States, is still present only in very limited circles; and finally, that Tolstoy’s anarchism never took firm root in Western and Central Europe or outside Europe. If we want to stick to the categories chosen by Dr. Eltzbacher, then the struggle for primacy between Stirner’s individualism and Kropotkin’s communism would have been settled in favor of the latter even before 1900. On the other hand however, completely new anarchist trends have emerged in recent years; and the syndicalist (trade union) anarchists, who now certainly make up nine-tenths of all those calling themselves “anarchists” in modern countries, and whose doctrine of “direct action” began to pave the way in the last years of the last century, are not mentioned at all in Eltzbacher’s work.⁵

Let us examine here how anarchism developed and what inner social motives underlay its evolution.

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Du choc des opinions jaillit la vérité⁶. It is clear that already at the first serious clash of ideas, both between anarchists and between anarchists and non-anarchists, what is called the “unrestricted autonomy of the individual” had to undergo a significant restriction. At the international revolutionary congress in Zurich (1893), one speaker was still heard to declare in full enthusiasm in this matter: “We anarchists recognize only one compulsion, that of the natural needs of man”. At the same meeting, however, it was already heard “whether perhaps human society itself is also a piece of nature, to whose needs of life, in so far as they are also the needs of each individual, one must make concessions just as well as to the physical or psychological needs of the individual, indeed whether these two categories of needs can actually be properly separated from each other.” In principle, there is absolutely no reason why humans should accept restrictions on their individual freedom, or coercion with regard to their psychological needs, eating, drinking or sleeping, and similarly neither to the fact that they are forced to live with many millions of fellow creatures on the same planet and in the same country.

Where enlightened anarchists have been asked what is meant by freedom, I have heard Spinoza’s definition quoted several times: “That object is called free which exists from the mere necessity of its nature and is determined by itself to act; necessary, or rather forced, is that which is determined by another to exist and act in a definite and fixed manner”.⁷

But it must be obvious at first glance that if freedom according to this definition is nothing other than that kind of necessity that follows from the object’s own nature, then human freedom, constrained by the nature of man, is also found everywhere where limits are drawn where the necessity of nature imposes itself on man as such, i.e., not only in his physical or his psycho-logical needs, but also in his social needs, in so far as the latter are directly conditioned by the necessity of his coexistence with other men. Ultimately there can be a dispute between reasonable people about the nature of these social needs, as well as all other needs, as about the degree of them.

But there is a specific reason why, in recent years, anarchists have been pushed towards a restriction, or rather a correct definition, of the idea of individual freedom in this respect, and why this restriction was bound to occur. That reason was the penetration of anarchist doctrines into the circles of the working-class population. To explain this, we have to refer to the practical life of the workers.

As along as anarchy was professed almost exclusively by artists and Authors, people who do not have to work directly with others in their daily lives, or people of the property-owning classes for whom the bread question is solved in its cruellest form because others work productively for them; in short, people for whom the maintenance of their own freedom easily becomes the most important concern in life – then the primitive conception of anarchy as mere “unlimited lack of government,” as mere “negation of all authority,” could retain the upper hand without much struggle. But what would the modern wage laborer have to gain from such a philosophy? The wage laborer who, above all, has to worry about making his material existence, and who can only improve his material situation by uniting and joining forces with his fellow workers in the workshop and with his fellow class members around the world, wherever he sees workers’ interests like his own at stake?

The “negation of all authority” and the “autonomy of the individual” can undoubtedly be nice things, but you can only get to that point once your material existence is secure. But when you have to go to work every morning to the ringing of the factory bell because otherwise you would starve, then try denying all authority!

Gradually, therefore, the idea had to take hold among the revolutionary wage laborers: first we must be the masters in the factories; and only to the extent that we have defeated the current factory masters will we be able to come to deny their authority. Revolutionary workers behave in the same way towards the state authority. They increasingly came to see that: only insofar as we are able to carry out what we strive for, even against the state authority, against any government, be it a social-democratic one, only then will we, the masses, gradually be able to negate the state authority.

It is therefore not only the class struggle and the organization necessary for its implementation, both as means, but finally also communism, as an end, which must necessarily impose themselves on the revolutionary workers. Even the most ardent defenders of individual freedom among them have, of necessity, continued to develop in this direction and have become ever more firmly convinced that only on the basis of a more or less strictly developed communist economic order is it possible to bring the individual freedom of all to its fullest development.

If, then, in the labor movement primitive, individualistic anarchism had to give way to communist anarchism, and reformist or even ‘renitent’ anarchism (Tolstoj) to ‘insurgent ent’ or revolutionary, there was almost everywhere in the labor movement a counter-current, which we also have yet to examine, because it has for many years hampered the systematic organization and regular development of communist aspirations.

In various modern countries, anarchism in the workers’ associations practically first broke through as opposition to centralized and disciplined social democracy. And all too easily this opposition fell – as is always the case with opposition movements – into the other extreme. In addition to the influence of the literary and artistic elements mentioned above, this did much to lend a certain support to individualism as a doctrine and here and there even introduced disorganization into the movement. Especially in the early nineties, at the time when the so-called individual action in France led to various bomb attacks, individualist criticism there, as well as in Italy, Germany, Holland, Bohemia, etc., first attacked the form of organization, and later organization as such.

The individualist spirit of disorganization manifested itself in the trade unions, where the in many newly founded associations the question arose as to whether every trade union regulation, every executive committee, did not bring with it the seeds of a new domination. Not content with criticizing the abuses of the organization and using all means to prevent the members of the executive committee in the trade unions from gaining too much power, they who were in principle only the mandataries of the members, the individualists soon began to fight organization itself, always dreaming of new “tyrants”, even where it concerned only the simplest trade union matters. Here too, words such as the “tyrannization of the minority by the majority” and the “suppression of individual freedom” were used as templates. But the individualist critique overlooked the danger that in the workers’ organization, in the complete absence of any regulation, the personal authority and even the dictatorship of energetic individuals could assert itself all the more easily, just as in the old society that had been attacked.

Even more than in the trade unions, in the transitional period we are talking about, this individualism found favor in the study and agitation groups that directly opposed the social-democratic associations. It was only a few years ago that problems such as the following were discussed in all seriousness in various countries: Whether it was not a terrible intrusion into the “freedom of the individual” to vote and pass resolutions in revolutionary groups? Whether it was permissible to ask the members of these groups to regularly pay their pecuniary contributions to the group treasury. Would they have the right to elect a chairman in the groups to check who is asking to speak, or a secretary and especially a treasurer, all of whom would be accountable to the entire membership? These would be new “rulers”, just like in social democracy. And besides, as far as responsibility is concerned, the sovereign individual would only owe responsibility to himself⁸.

Do not think that this is an exaggeration. We are dealing here with phenomena that have become internationally prominent. At the international revolutionary congress in London (1896), there was still an obdurate Stirnerian among those present who interjected at every resolution the others wanted to pass: “But a resolution, a resolution! I don’t want a resolution, I don’t come here to make pacts with others. I only wish to remain myself”. But at that time, the communist tendency already had the upper hand, and the opponent was told: “You could have done that at home, stay yourself, you didn’t need to come here to bore us with it!”

Such an attitude was soon generally adopted in the free communist groups towards the rigid individualists. Nobody, it was said and is still said, forces them to come to the groups; but if they come, it is also assumed that they are interested in working together with the others and that they agree on the whole with the ideas and work of the other members.

There was talk above of Stirner and Stirnerians in the revolutionary workers’ movement. In fact, Stirnerian philosophy was particularly fashionable among the individualists during this transitional period. This nebulous philosophy of words, this metaphysics, which clung to concepts and indulged in developing all concepts to their utmost consequence instead of keeping a firm footing in real natural and human life, seemed like a gospel to many anarchists who were still so inexperienced in thinking at the time. Especially, to those who were not able to read Stirner’s The Ego and its Own (1844), or at least not able to understand it. They were Stirnerians by intuition, just as Monsieur Jourdain had spoken in Molière prose without knowing it himself. The reaction against the individualistic tendencies of the transitional period was of course inevitable. It first appeared in the trade unions, where – especially in France, but later also in other countries (Holland, Switzerland, etc.) – the workers’ organizations, inspired by the revolutionary socialists and anarchists, gained undeniable advantages. For it was to a not inconsiderable extent the fruitless squabbles in the anarchist groups that had driven many intelligent and energetic anarchists into the trade unions towards the end of the century. Their anarchist spirit of freedom manifested itself directly in their criticism of the authority of the trade union executive committees, into whose ranks they themselves often joined, and in their propaganda of decentralization and the autonomy of the local trade union associations in the conduct of all their own affairs. As communists, they believed that every clash between workers and employers, every dispute over wage increases or shortening of the working day, posed from the outset the great question of the struggle for supremacy in the factories and workshops. They conceived of the transition of present-day private property into social property in the sense that the workers must first of all succeed, through the power of their organization, in becoming, if not the legal, at least the actual conductors in the workplaces of the private capitalists. But if, in a later epoch of history, as they thought and still think, the capitalists should proceed to close down the workshops, their property, it will be left to the revolutionary masses of workers, trained in the meantime in practical and theoretical struggle, to intervene themselves in order, by means of their organizations, to carry on social production in the general interest of all mankind.

In the struggle against the capitalist class, modern anarchists praise all the means that are summarized under the term “direct action”: Strikes, boycotts, systematic obstruction (as already carried out by the railroad workers in Italy and Austria), sabotage (bad work for bad pay), and so on.

But the example set by the revolutionary trade unions could not help but have an effect on the revolutionary groups.

Now the communist and syndicalist tendencies have definitely gained the upper hand over the individualist and anti-syndicalist ones, especially in Western European countries. What is called “anarchism” in the modern sense reveals itself practically in agitation as “direct action”, as the “self-action” of the masses, not only in the open struggle against the employers, but in every field of social life, in the struggle against state and priestly rule (e.g. as anti-militarism, anti-clericalism), under certain forms also in productive association, etc. Its aspirations are manifested even in the political sphere, against all parties without distinction (street agitation against bad laws, mass demonstrations for or against certain political events, etc.). In the latter field, today’s anarchists start from the premise that all parliamentary parties, from the most rigid conservatives to the radicals and social democrats, are the more willing to abolish certain abuses, or to make small improvements as concessions, the more they are forced to do so by direct pressure from the masses from the outside. In this way the anarchist tactics in every field have gradually assumed the same character: that of striving and creating by the power of the masses themselves, and not by the action of the rulers, – not even the rulers of universal suffrage, were they the most democratic of them: Freethinkers and Social Democrats.

In view of this evolution which anarchism has undergone, it may be considered indifferent whether, in view of the changes which have taken place in ideas and tendencies, one would like to maintain that the name anarchism no longer readily fits the present movement, and that one should rather speak of libertarian socialism or libertarian communism. The historical names, the party names, are ’usually imposed on people by others rather than voluntarily chosen by them. What is certain is that the linguistic community speaks of anarchist trade unions in the same way that it speaks of anarchist street demonstrations, or of the anarchist tactics of anti-militarism and conscientious objection, and that it always has in mind the “direct action” of the masses, that is, of the people themselves as opposed to the representatives of these people in the government colleges or the authorities.

What takes place in this respect with anarchist doctrine and anarchist tactics, is a general phenomenon that occurs in all linguistic areas: the general phenomenon of the growth of words, and the modification of their meaning, synchronized with the transformation of the social conditions in which they arise. It proves that human language evolves because language phenomena are ultimately also social phenomena; a problem that linguists are currently beginning to address internationally.

Linguists state that the meaning of a word expands when it passes from a narrower to a wider circle; and that it contracts when the word is restricted from a wider to a narrower circle⁹.

And the first is precisely what happened to the words anarchy and anarchist when they found their way into the working-class population. Let us show with an example of practical life how here the special interests of the workers transform anarchism and its meaning.

When a propagandic newspaper is in the hands of a single person, this person has an irrefutable interest in placing his individual freedom in the foreground and denying others control, or even any influence, over the direction and composition of the journal. He may love to be publisher, editor, administrator, everything at the same time, as long as it is possible, and perhaps he calls this anarchy for himself. But in working-class circles, the interests are quite the opposite, and especially in socialist circles, everyone loves to manage such things together. If, as the workers claim, we want communism, if we really want to take land and soil, the instruments of labor, indeed all articles of enjoyment into common ownership as far as possible, and yet should not even be able to collectively own and manage our own press, what would remain of our communism? Would it then still be considered serious? Behind the different meanings that we are accustomed to attach to the words anarchy and anarchist, the difference in interests is clearly evident.

All this is a far cry from the “unrestricted autonomy of the individual”, from “unrestricted individual freedom”. If an individualist of the old type were to object to the modern anarchist worker, the libertarian communist, that individual freedom should be “the highest good” for him too, he would receive the reply that one individual freedom is worth as much as another, and that in general and from the point of view of the whole, every individual freedom need only be respected as long as it does not hinder the freedom of others¹⁰. If the objection should follow that one might harm one’s own individual freedom and development, judged from the personal point of view, if one cares for others and communicates with others, the modern anarchist answers in the negative. With an American socialist he could formulate it as follows: “The isolated person is only the beginning of an individual. But he who has become: citizen, neighbor, friend, brother, son, husband, father, member at the same time, is thereby individualized so many times”¹¹.

Thus practical life led the anarchist worker to transform the formula of the “unlimited freedom of the individual” into this other one: “the highest possible freedom for each individual, but whereby we can all live together and be happy.”

All that remains of the old, primitive anarchism in modern anarchist circles is a very intense advocacy of the freedom of movement of each individual in the group. With which each member should be free to leave the association and where it is assumed that each will give his personal help only for the performance of such work as possesses all his personal sympathy (on condition that he, for his part, does not prevent others from carrying out their will). Furthermore, in these circles one notes a no less intense defence of the autonomy of groups in the local or national organization, as well as more widely in the international context. In all respects, the modern anarchist contrasts decentralization and free federalism with centralization, the principle of freedom, in the sense mentioned above, with that of discipline. It is this in particular that distinguishes the anarchist organization from the social-democratic one.

Summarizing everything, one could call the evolution that anarchism has undergone in recent years a transition from the stage of mere criticism to positive action, to real life. And it is especially in working-class circles that this transition has had to take place, because it is there that it is most clearly revealed how mankind lives its daily productive life; how it has a perpetual and ever-increasing need of wood and stone for its houses, its roads, of iron and steel for its machines, its giant bridges and railroads, of wheat, wool and cotton, etc.; and that the regulation of this production by the producers themselves is above all a matter of organization. And precisely because it is the ambition of the present anarchists to bring social production more and more under the influence of the organized workers, they now promote and strengthen everywhere, besides the organizations of interests (groupements d’intérêts, especially represented in the trade unions), the revolutionary groups in which modern anarchist principles are directly propagated (groupements d’opinion). They do this in order to ensure that in the practical class struggle the workers’ organizations continue to develop in a communist direction.

As has already been noted, the libertarian organization of these groups reject neither a regional or national, nor even an international association between the groups. Libertarian communist or anarchist national federations¹² already exist in Germany, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Belgium, England, French-speaking Switzerland and Portugal and are in preparation in other countries, such as the United States. Provincial federations exist in France and Italy. Finally, the international congress in Amsterdam had to discuss the question up to what point the modern anarchist principles could be combined with the obligations of an international federation, and there it was decided to found an International Anarchist Bureau, which has its headquarters in London.

As far as the future evolution of the anarchist movement is concerned, I would like to restrict myself utmost. If I were a philosopher from the school of Hegel, the solution would soon be found. In an inquiry undertaken by the Mercure de France on the evolution of religion, in which the interviewers questioned a wide variety of people, whether they were competent in matters of religious history or not, one reads the judgment of a writer, also a disciple of Hegel (a Russian of course), who solved the riddle of the evolution of all religions in a single magic formula:

“Toute Evolution passe par trois moments objectifs correspondant A trois moments subjectifs du developpement dialectique; au debut, c’est l’unité primitive, integrale, inferieure, la confusion de principes contraires, puis c’est la s&paration, la differenciation de ces principes, enfin vient leur union ulterieure, leur integration parfaite en un type superieur d’evolution. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis”.¹³¹⁴

Nothing would be easier for me than to quickly come to terms with such a dialectical conclusion concerning anarchism. In the beginning there was indeed (see above) a primitive, inferior unity in the anarchist and even in the whole socialist movement (including social democracy), and the confusion of mostly different opinions was its most striking feature. In all countries the “divorce” came afterwards, first between parliamentary social democracy, which was more and more committed to state socialism, and the anti-parliamentary labor movement; then, in recent years, also between the individualists and the communists, the anti-syndicalists and the syndicalists, or whatever else one might call it in the various countries. But a closer study of socialism and anarchism warns us to be careful with the dialectical conclusion about the necessity of a “later unification”. Let us not engage in metaphysics. Scientific research in every field has shown us too clearly that not “every evolution” goes through the same phases, for which nature and society are too diverse and too complex in their forms. In the field of religious studies, the naive notion that the problems of religion and worship can be solved by dialectical and so-called “rational” means has for many decades been detrimental to truly scientific and experimental research.

As far as the socialist and anarchist movement is concerned, it is certainly advisable to leave aside the question of a later higher “synthesis” altogether, and rather to emphasize the fact that here, from a general and confused opposition movement, various branches have sprung, whose representatives continue their own development, and which, now that they are separated, often fight each other with the same vehemence with which they fight the present social order: Social Democrats, revolutionary and anti-parliamentary Communists, individualists, supporters and opponents of the trade union movement, the cooperative movement, etc.

Of course, here too many misunderstandings will gradually be resolved. And just as the struggle between materialism and idealism is now a completely different one than it was about half a century ago, to illustrate it once again with a specific example, because materialist and idealist philosophy have both made use of the criticism they received, this also applies to the labor movement. In which, what socialism is concerned, the best thinkers are already beginning to come to an understanding of the extent to which, for example, legislation can intervene as an active factor in social life and to which extent it lags behind the direct action of the masses. In the same way, on the other hand, we are certainly approaching the solution of the question to what extent the individual freedom of each person should be upheld under the present conditions of civilization in the modern countries, and to what extent, conversely, the interests of collectivity impose themselves forcefully on each individual.

But this elucidation of ideas does not dissolve antagonism of interests, does not affect the fact that the present division in the socialist workers’ movement continues to exist, and neither will be able to prevent the emergence of new differences in the future.