Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (124 page)

Proudhon at first sight appears inconsistent in his economic views, but this is because he often used language in an idiosyncratic way and developed his thought as he adapted to changing circumstances in his life. At the time of the 1848 revolution in France, he proposed that the workers should begin to manage their own industries — an idea far more revolutionary than the prevailing rallying-call, universal suffrage. While his followers, the mutualists, tried to retain private ownership for agriculture (because of the individualism of the French peasantry), they accepted collective ownership for transport and proposed a form of industrial self-management. Proudhon himself thought that in the future, large-scale industry must be the fruit of association, that is to say, the means of production and exchange must be managed by associations of workers themselves. Making a distinction between possession and ownership, he proposed that the workers should possess their means of production, but not be their exclusive owners. They would exchange goods whose value would be measured by the amount of labour necessary to produce them. Workers would receive wages in ‘work vouchers’ according to the amount of work done. A People’s Bank would accept such vouchers and offer free credit.

Adopting the assumptions of capitalism, Proudhon argued that competition and association are interdependent and should be allowed to find their equilibrium. Competition provides an irreplaceable stimulus since it is the ‘motive force’ of society, as long as it does not lead to monopoly and operates on the basis of fair exchange and in the spirit of solidarity.
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Proudhon wanted to replace political centralization with economic centralization through his People’s Bank. Affairs would be managed through ‘contracts of mutuality’, which he thought would combine the principles of authority and freedom. The producers’ associations would finally associate in a great industrial and agricultural federation. Indeed, Proudhon envisaged a vast economic federation covering the entire world which would act as a co-ordinating body, provide information, balance supply and demand, and distribute products of agriculture and industry.

Josiah Warren came to similarly mutualist conclusions independently of Proudhon. He set up successfully a Time Store where people changed goods directly on the basis of the labour time required to produce them. He insisted on the principle that the price of any good should be the same as its cost, thereby eliminating profit. The individualist Tucker, who was much influenced by Warren, called anarchism ‘consistent Manchesterism’. He considered labour to be the only just basis of the right of ownership, but defined that right as ‘that control of a thing by a person which will receive either social sanction, or else unanimous individual sanction, when the laws of social expediency shall have been fully discovered’.
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If allowed
to be universal and unrestricted, he believed that competition would result in the most perfect peace and the truest co-operation.

Bakunin recognized that it would be difficult for Proudhon’s self-managed associations to compete with capitalist enterprises and that the associated workers could eventually themselves become exploiters of other workers. He therefore called for all private property (except that retained for personal use) to be pooled as the collective property of workers’ associations (for both agricultural and industrial production) which are freely organized and federated among themselves. He looked to trade unions – ‘the natural organizations of the masses’ – to become the embryo of the administration of the future, and urged workers to think more in terms of co-operatives than of strikes. Federations of unions should also act as planning agencies. Such ideas later became the intellectual basis for anarcho-syndicalism, according to which the syndicate or union was seen as the embryo of the future society.

While Bakunin felt that workers should still be paid according to the amount of work done, anarchist communists like Kropotkin and Malatesta thought that it was more just to distribute according to need. Most wealth, they argued, comes from the accumulated labour of the past and it is difficult to judge the value of labour only according to hours done. Service to the community cannot be measured. Proudhon’s competition, even amongst associations, undermines solidarity, while Bakunin’s wage system continues the morality of debit, credit and self-interest.

The anarchist communists were also confident that labour in a new society would produce more than enough for all. From Kropotkin to Bookchin, they have been confident that the common ownership of production and the appropriate use of technology will enable humanity to pass from the realm of scarcity to relative abundance. As Kropotkin concluded after investigating different agricultural and industrial methods: ‘Well-being for all is not a dream.’
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The geographer Elisée Reclus was also convinced that Malthus’s threat of overpopulation was unfounded and that ‘the earth is vast enough to support all of us on its breast; it is rich enough to enable us to live in ease.’
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While different anarchists propose different economic arrangements for a free society, many communists like Malatesta would accept that a form of collectivism may well exist in a transitional period. Mutualism, collectivism and communism moreover need not be incompatible; they can be different means to the same end. It would be up to each locality to decide freely what kind of system it would like to adopt and this of course will depend on their degree of economic development and social consciousness.

Although anarchists have carefully outlined their economic proposals,
it is not always clear how they think society should organize itself outside the economic sphere. For Godwin the fundamental unit would be the self-governing parish or district although he suggested that a national assembly with delegates from the parishes might be called in emergencies at the national level. Proudhon thought a ‘natural group’ would emerge at the local level asserting ‘itself in unity, independence, and autonomy’.
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It would associate with neighbouring groups and form a higher group for mutual security. The fundamental unit would remain the autonomous association which should be entirely sovereign with the right to administer itself, to impose taxes, to dispose of its revenue and to provide education.

But what of the relationship between the workers’ associations and the communes? Bakunin argued that the former would link up within the communes and the communes federate freely amongst themselves. He saw the task of the commune as being to expropriate the means of production. It should be administered by a council of elected delegates who would be always accountable to the electorate and subject to immediate recall. The elected councils should be working bodies with executive functions; they would also be able to elect from amongst themselves executive committees for each area of the administration of the commune.

Yet Proudhon and Bakunin still continued to see society as a pyramid, even though they spoke of organizing it from the bottom up. As Kropotkin observed of the Paris Commune of 1871, to retain a system of representation is to continue the evils of parliamentarianism and to crush popular initiative. He therefore looked to a form of direct democracy in which all the members of the commune would meet in a general assembly. Only this would be worthy of the name of self-government, of government of oneself by oneself. Unlike the medieval commune, which remained in many respects an isolated State, the commune of the future would not be a territorial agglomeration but rather a ‘generic name, a synonym for a grouping of equals, not knowing frontiers, nor walls’.
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The natural sentiment of sociability would then be able to develop itself freely.

The social form proposed by anarchists is therefore of a simplified and decentralized society in which people manage and govern themselves. It would involve overlapping economic and administrative organizations: a federation of self-managing workers’ associations within the communes which would federate amongst themselves. The communes could form federations at the regional and national level, with mandated delegates, to resolve disputes, deal with foreign threats, and co-ordinate economic life. Proudhon called for a binding contract between the various communes of a federation in a large territory to ensure unity, but Bakunin insisted that real unity can only derive ‘from the freest development of all individuals and groups, and from a federal and absolutely voluntary alliance … of me
workers’ associations in the communes and, beyond the communes, in the regions, beyond the regions, the nations’.
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The communes would remain absolutely autonomous.

Since Bakunin most anarchists have envisaged the whole social organization as a network of local groups which associate freely: the commune or council as a territorial nucleus, and the syndicate or workers’ council as the economic organization. These would federate together not so much like a pyramid but like a net, with the knots forming the communes. They would be based on the principles of autonomy, self-management, decentralization and federalism. In this way, a living unity could emerge which respected and encouraged local and regional differences. Freed from the strait-jacket of the State, society would be able to develop more spontaneously and individuals become more fully themselves. Anarchists are confident that the natural solidarity of interests and the advantages of a free and communal life will be enough to maintain social order, and with the principal causes of strife — imposed authority and unequal property — eradicated, social harmony will prevail.

The anarchists do not agree on the means to achieve their common goal of a stateless society, although most believe that it is wrong to separate the means from the end. Anarchists have often be accused of relying in a voluntaristic way on ‘the instincts of the masses’ to mount a social revolution which would somehow turn violence into its opposite.
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Anarchism moreover is often linked in the popular imagination with terrorism. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the anarchist continues to be seen more as a savage terrorist than as a gentle dreamer or quiet philosopher. The image of the anarchist as a bomb-throwing desperado in a black cloak has stuck. It is an image immortalized in literature, by Henry James in
The Princess Casamassima
(1886) and by Joseph Conrad in
The Secret Agent
(1907). It was an image forged in the desperate 1880s and 1890s when there were a series of political assassinations and bombings in Europe linked to the anarchist movement.

In fact, anarchists have contributed far less to the sum of human violence than nationalists, monarchists, republicans, socialists, fascists and conservatives, not to mention the Mafia, organized crime, and banditry. They have never organized the indiscriminate slaughter that is war or practised genocide as governments have. They have never coolly contemplated the complete nuclear annihilation of the earth as nuclear scientists, generals and presidents have. They have never adopted a deliberate policy of terror in power as Robespierre, Stalin, or Pol Pot did. While most anarchists
would accept some violent action which might involve damage to a person or property as part of an insurrection, very few indeed have advocated terror in the form of premeditated acts of violence. At its most violent their action has typically not gone much beyond throwing up barricades or entering a village armed with rudimentary weapons. And yet the terrorist reputation sticks, and the very word ‘anarchist’ continues to evoke a shiver of anxiety among the respectable and well-off. Of the leftist political groups, the police still believe that ‘the anarchists are usually the most violent of all’.
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It is easy to see why those who control the State should fear the anarchists for they have most to lose from their success. The myth that anarchists are the most violent of all no doubt stems from the fact that they question the need for the State with its coercive apparatus. They not only believe that rulers, standing armies and professional police forces are harmful, but argue that they would no longer be necessary in a free society. Few people feel sympathy towards those who would like to see them abolished.

But even a superficial acquaintance with the classic anarchist texts demonstrates that anarchists are remarkable not for their violence but for the varied tactics they recommend to realize the goal of a free society.

There is little justification for violent action amongst the early thinkers. Godwin wrote as a philosopher concerned with universal principles rather than their practical application. He sought to bring about gradual change through reasoned discussion, not physical action; his was a revolution in opinion, not on the barricades. Since government is founded on opinion, all that is necessary is to change people’s opinions through education and enlightenment. But while Godwin opposed violent revolution, and called for gradual change, he was not an absolute pacifist for he believed that reason was not yet sufficiently developed to persuade an assailant to drop his sword.

Proudhon used the motto
Destruam ut Aedificabo
(’I destroy in order to build up’) in his
System of Economic Contradictions
(1846) but that was to emphasize the need to create new libertarian institutions to replace existing ones. He not only sought to bring about reform through instruction (hence his journalism and books) but also through co-operative experiments like the People’s Bank and worker associations. During his life, he employed a whole range of different tactics. At first he employed reasoned argument alone. Then he tried the parliamentary road by entering parliament as a deputy during the 1848 revolution. After the failure of the revolution, he even appealed to Louis Napoleon to become the ‘general’ of the social revolution. In the end, he advocated abstention from parliamentary politics and urged the working class to emancipate itself through the labour movement by building its own economic institutions.