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Overview
The present edition is unique in giving a complete facsimile reproduction of the 1938 edition as well as the corrected transcript of the epilogue to the Indian edition of 1947. It has the addition of a new biographical introduction by Nicolas Walter, in which he quotes from previously unpublished manuscript sources.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783718863 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/1998 |
| Series: | Pluto Classics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 707 KB |
About the Author
Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958) was a leading figure in the international anarchist movement. Politically active in Britain, Germany and the United States for more than half a century, Rocker helped found several influential anarchist groups. His prolific lectures and writings made him one of the best-known proponents of liberty and freedom. Anarcho-Syndicalism, the most accessible of his works, was first published in 1938 and is now regarded as a classic survey of anarchism at a critical point in world politics.
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CHAPTER 1
ANARCHISM: ITS AIMS AND PURPOSES
Anarchism versus economic monopoly and state power; Forerunners of modern Anarchism; William Godwin and his work on Political Justice; P. J. Proudhon and his idea of political and economic decentralisation; Max Stirner's work, The Ego and Its Own; M, Bakunin the Collectivist and founder of the anarchist movement; P. Kropotkin the exponent of Anarchist Communism and the philosophy of Mutual Aid; Anarchism and Revolution; Anarchism a synthesis of Socialism and Liberalism; Anarchism versus Economic Materialism and Dictatorship; Anarchism and the State; Anarchism a tendency in history; Freedom and Culture.
ANARCHISM is a definite intellectual current in the life of our time, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. In place of the present state-organizations with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.
Anyone who studies at all profoundly the economic and political development of the present social system will easily recognize that these objectives do not spring from the Utopian ideas of a few imaginative innovators, but that they are the logical outcome of a thorough examination of the present day social maladjustments, which with every new phase of the existing social conditions manifest themselves more plainly and more unwholesomely. Modern monopoly, capitalism and the totalitarian state are merely the last terms in a development which could culminate in no other results.
The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction, and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.
The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the out growth of the same social objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless rhythm of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the present struggles for economic and political power, and the constant dread of new wars, which to-day dominates all peoples, are only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead us to a universal catastrophe, if social development does not take a new course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged to-day to spend from fifty to seventy per cent, of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly.
The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of each against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression to-day in modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems of religious theology God is everything and man nothing, so for this modern political theology, the state is everything and the subject nothing. And just as behind the "will of God" there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so to-day there hides behind the "will of the state" only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people
Anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history, although there still remains a good deal of work for historical research in this field. We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-tse (The Course and The Right Way) and in the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists and Cynics and other advocates of so-called "natural right," and in particular in Zeno who, at the opposite pole from Plato, founded the Stoic school. They found expression in the teaching of the Gnostic, Karpocrates, in Alexandria, and had an unmistakable influence on certain Christian sects of the Middle Ages in France, Germany, and Holland, almost all of which fell victims to the most savage persecutions. In the history of the Bohemian reformation they found a powerful champion in Peter Chelcicky, who in his work, "The Net of Faith," passed the same judgment on the church and the state as Tolstoi did later. Among the great Humanists there was Rabelais, who in his description of the happy Abbey of Thélème (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all authoritative restraints. Of other pioneers of libertarian thinking we will mention here only La Boétie, Sylvain Maréchal, and, above all, Diderot, in whose volumionus writings one finds thickly strewn the utterances of a truly great mind which had rid itself of every authoritarian prejudice.
Meanwhile, it was reserved for more recent history to give clear form to the Anarchist conception of life and to connect it with the immediate processes of social evolution. This was done for the first time in William Godwin's splendidly conceived work, Concerning Political Justice and its Influence upon General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793. Godwin's work was, we might say, the ripened fruit of that long evolution of the concepts of political and social radicalism in England which proceeds in a continuous line from George Buchanan through Richard Hooker, Gerard Winstanley, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Robert Wallace, and John Bellers to Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Thomas Paine.
Godwin recognized very clearly that the cause of social evils is to be sought, not in the form of the state, but in its very existence. Just as the state presents only a caricature of a genuine society, so also it makes of human beings who are held under its eternal guardianship merely caricatures of their real selves by constantly compelling them to repress their natural inclinations and holding them to things that are repugnant to their inner impulses. Only in this way is it possible to mould human beings to the established form of good subjects. A normal human being who was not interfered with in his natural development would of himself shape the environment that suits his inborn demand for peace and freedom.
But Godwin also recognized that human beings can only live together naturally and freely when the proper economic conditions for this are given, and when the individual is no longer subject to exploitation by another, a consideration which the representatives of mere political radicalism almost wholely overlooked. Hence they were later compelled to make constantly greater concessions to that power of the state which they had wished to restrict to a minimum. Godwin's idea of a stateless society assumed the social ownership of all natural and social wealth, and the carrying on of economic life by the free co-operation of the producers; in this sense he was really the founder of the later communist Anarchism.
Godwin's work had a very strong influence on advanced circles of the English workers and the more enlightened sections of the liberal intelligentsia. Most important of all, he contributed to give to the young Socialist movement in England, which found its maturest exponents in Robert Owen, John Gray, and William Thompson, that unmistakably libertarian character which it had for a long time, and which it never assumed in Germany and many other countries.
But a far greater influence on the development of Anarchist theory was that of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, one of the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most many-sided writer of whom modern Socialism can boast. Proudhon was completely rooted in the intellectual and social life of his period, and these inspired his attitude upon every question he dealt with. Therefore, he is not to be judged, as he has been even by many of his later followers, by his special practical proposals, which were born of the needs of the hour. Among the numerous Socialist thinkers of his time he was the one who understood most profoundly the cause of social maladjustment, and possessed, besides, the greatest breadth of vision. He was the outspoken opponent of all systems, and saw in social evolution the eternal urge to new and higher forms of intellectual and social life, and it was his conviction that this evolution could not be bound by any definite abstract formulas.
Proudhon opposed the influence of the Jacobin tradition, which dominated the thinking of the French democrats and of most of the Socialists of that period with the same determination as the interference of the central state and economic monopoly in the natural processes of social advance. To rid society of those two cancerous growths was for him the great task of the nineteenth-century revolution. Proudhon was no communist. He condemned property as merely the privilege of exploitation, but he recognized the ownership of the instruments of labour by all, made effective through industrial groups bound to one another by free contract, so long as this right was not made to serve the exploitation of others and as long as the full product of his individual labour was assured to every human being. This organization based on reciprocity (mutualité) guarantees the enjoyment of equal rights by each in exchange for equal services. The average working time required for the completion of any product becomes the measure of its value and is the basis of mutual exchange. In this way capital is deprived of its usurial power and is completely bound up with the performance of work. By being made available to all it ceases to be an instrument for exploitation.
Such a form of economy makes any political coercive apparatus superfluous. Society becomes a league of free communities which arrange their affairs according to need, by themselves or in association with others, and in which man's freedom finds in the equal freedom of others not its limitation, but its security and confirmation. "The freer, the more independent and enterprising the individual is in a society, the better for the society." This organization of Federalism in which Proudhon saw the immediate future of mankind sets no definite limitations on further possibilities of development, and offers the widest scope to every individual and social activity. Starting out from the point of view of the Federation, Proudhon combated likewise the asperations for political unity of the awakening nationalism of the time, and in particular of that nationalism which found in Mazzini, Garibaldi, Lelewel, and others such strong advocates. In this respect also he saw more clearly than most of his contemporaries. Proudhon exerted a strong influence on the development of Socialism, which made itself felt especially in the Latin countries. But the so-called individual Anarchism, which found able exponents in America in such men as Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, Francis D. Tandy, and most notably in Benjamin R. Tucker ran in similar lines, though none of its representatives could approach Proudhon's breadth of view.
Anarchism found a unique expression in Max Stirner's (Johann Kaspar Schmidt's) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own), which, it is true, quickly passed into oblivion and had no influence at all on the Anarchist movement as such — though it was to experience an unexpected resurrection fifty years later. Stirner's book is pre-eminently a philosophic work, which traces man's dependence on so-called higher powers through all its devious ways, and is not timid about drawing inferences from the knowledge gained by the survey. It is the book of a conscious and deliberate insurgent, which reveals no reverence for any authority, however exalted, and therefore impels powerfully to independent thinking.
Anarchism found a virile champion of vigorous revolutionary energy in Michael Bakunin, who took his stand upon the teachings of Proudhon, but extended them on the economic side when he, along with the collectivist wing of the First International, came out for the collective ownership of the land and of all other means of production, and wished to restrict the right of private ownership to the full product of individual labour. Bakunin also was an opponent of Communism, which in his time had a thoroughly authoritarian character, like that which it has again assumed to-day in Bolshevism. In one of his four speeches at the Congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in Bern (1868), he said: "I am not a Communist because Communism unites all the forces of society in the state and becomes absorbed in it; because it inevitably leads to the concentration of all property in the hands of the state, while I seek the abolition of the state — the complete elimination of the principle of authority and governmental guardianship, which under the pretence of making men moral and civilizing them, has up to now always enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and ruined them."
Bakunin was a determined revolutionary and did not believe in an amicable adjustment of the existing class conflict. He recognized that the ruling classes blindly and stubbornly opposed even the slightest social reform, and accordingly saw the only salvation in an international social revolution, which should abolish all the ecclesiastical, political, military, bureaucratic, and judicial institutions of the existing social system and introduce in their stead a federation of free workers' associations to provide for the requirements of daily life. Since he, like so many of his contemporaries, believed in the close proximity of the Revolution, he directed all his vast energy to combining all the genuinely revolutionary and libertarian elements within and without the International to safeguard the coming revolution against any dictatorship or any retrogression to the old conditions. Thus he became in a very special sense the creator of the modern Anarchist movement.
Anarchism found a valuable advocate in Peter Kropotkin, who set himself the task of making the achievements of modern natural science available for the development of the sociological concepts of Anarchism. In his ingenious book, Mutual Aid — a Factor of Evolution, he entered the lists against so-called Social Darwinism, whose exponents tried to prove the inevitability of the existing social conditions from the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence by raising the struggle of the strong against the weak to the status of an iron law for all natural processes, to which even man is subject. In reality this conception was strongly influenced by the Malthusian doctrine that life's table is not spread for all, and that the unneeded will just have to reconcile themselves to this fact.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface - Noam ChomskyIntroduction - Nicolas Walter
1. Anarchism
2. The Proletariat and the Beginning of the Modern Labour Movement
3. The Forerunners of Syndicalism
4. The Objectives of Anarcho-Syndicalsim
5. The Methods of Anarcho-Syndicalism
6. The Evolution of Anarcho-Syndicalism
Bibliography
Epilogue
What People are Saying About This
[Rockers vision] remains as inspiring as when it was written...and no less valid as a stimulus to our thinking and our constructive action.