2. History of anarchist philosphy, from Lao-Tse to Kropotkin

Anarchist ideas are to be found in almost every period of known history. We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-Tse [1] (The Course and The Right Way), and the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists and Cynics and other advocates of so-called natural right, and particularly, in Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school and opposer of Plato.

They found expression in the teachings of the Gnostic Carpocrates [2] in Alexandria, and had an unmistakable influence on certain Christian sects of the Middle Ages in France, Germany, Italy, Holland and England, most of which fell victims to the most savage persecutions.

In the history of the Bohemian Reformation they found a powerful champion in Petr Chelčický [3], who in his work, The Net of Faith, passed the same judgment on the Church and the State as Tolstoy [4] did centuries later.

Among the great humanists there was Rabelais [5], who in his description of the happy Abbey of Theleme (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all authoritarian restraints. Of other pioneers of libertarian thinking we will mention here only La Boetie [6], Sylvain Maréchal [7], and, above all, Diderot [8], in whose voluminous writings one finds thickly strewn the utterances of a really great mind which had rid itself of every authoritarian prejudice.

Meanwhile, it was reserved for more recent history to give a clear form to the anarchist conception of life and to connect it with the immediate process of social evolution.

This was done for the first time by William Godwin [9] in his splendidly conceived work, An Enquiry 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 from George Buchanan [10] through Richard Hooker [11], Gerard Winstanley [12], Algernon Sidney [13], John Locke [14], Robert Wallace [15] and John Bellers [16] to Jeremy Bentham [17], Joseph Priestley [18], Richard Price [19] and Thomas Paine [20].

Godwin recognised very clearly that the cause of social evils is to be sought, not in the form of the state, but in its very existence.

But he also recognised that human beings can only live together naturally and freely when the proper economic conditions for this are given, and the individual is no longer subject to exploitation by others, a consideration which most of the representatives of mere political radicalism almost wholly overlooked. Hence they were later compelled to make constantly greater concessions to the state which they had wished to restrict to a minimum.

Godwin’s idea of a stateless society assumed the social ownership of the land and the instruments of labour and the carrying on of economic life by free co-operatives of producers. Godwin’s work had a 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 the young socialist movement in England, which found its maturest exponents in Robert Owen [21], John Gray [22] and William Thompson [23], that unmistakably libertarian character which it had for a long time, and which it never assumed in Germany and many other countries.

Also the French socialist Charles Fourier [24], with his theory of attractive labour, must be mentioned here as one of the pioneers of libertarian ideas.

But a far greater influence on the development of anarchist theory was that of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), one of the most gifted and certainly the most many-sided writer of modern socialism.

Proudhon was completely rooted in the intellectual and social life of his period, and these influenced his attitude upon every question with which he dealt. 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 artificial social systems, and saw in social evolution the eternal urge to new and higher forms of intellectual and social life; 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 most of the socialists of that period, with the same determination as the interference of the central state and economic monopoly in the natural progress of social advance. To him ridding society of those two cancerous growths was the great task of the nineteenth century revolution.

Proudhon was not a communist. He condemned property as merely the privilege of exploitation, but he recognised the ownership of the instruments of labour for 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 member of society.

This association based on reciprocity (mutuality) guarantees the enjoyment of equal rights by each in exchange for social 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 by labour notes. In this way capital is deprived of its usurial power and is completely bound up with the performance of work. 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 is the equal freedom of others not its limitation, but its security and confirmation. “The freer, the more independent and enterprising the individual is the better for society.”

This organisation of federalism in which Proudhon saw the immediate future of mankind sets no definite limitations on future possibilities of development and offers the widest scope to every individual and social activity. Starting out from the point of federation, Proudhon combated likewise the aspiration for political and national unity of the awakening nationalism of the time which found such strong advocates in Mazzini [25], Garibaldi [26], Lelewel [27] and others. In this respect he recognised more clearly the real nature of nationalism than most of his contemporaries. Proudhon exerted a strong influence on the development of socialism, which made itself felt especially in the Latin countries.

Ideas similar to the economic and political conceptions of Proudhon were propagated by the followers of so-called “individualist” anarchism in America which found able exponents in such men as Josiah Warren [28], Stephen Pearl Andrews [29], William B. Greene [30], Lysander Spooner [31], Benjamin R. Tucker [32], Ezra Heywood [33], Francis D. Tandy [34] and many others, though none of them could approach Proudhon’s breadth of view.

Characteristic of this school of libertarian thought is the fact that most of its representatives took their political ideas not from Proudhon but from the traditions of American liberalism, so that Tucker could assert that “anarchists are merely consistent Jeffersonian democrats.”

A unique expression of libertarian ideas is to be found in Max Stirner’s [35] (1806-1856) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, which, it is true, passed quickly into oblivion and had no influence on the development of the anarchist movement as such. Stirner’s book is predominantly 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 appeals powerfully to independent thinking.

Anarchism found a virile champion of vigorous revolutionary energy in Michael A. Bakunin [36], who based his ideas upon the teachings of Proudhon, but extended them on the economic side when he, along with the federalist wing of the First International, advocated collective ownership of the land and all other means of production, and wished to restrict the right of private property only to the 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:

“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 complete elimination of the principles of authority and governmental guardianship, which under the pretence of making men moral and civilising 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 conflicts within society. He recognised that the ruling classes blindly and stubbornly opposed every possibility for larger social reforms, and accordingly saw the only salvation in an international social revolution, which would abolish all institutions of political power and economic exploitation and introduce in their stead a federation of free associations of producers and consumers to provide for the requirements of their daily life.

Since he, like so many of his contemporaries, believed in the close proximity of the revolution, he directed his vast energy to combining all the genuinely revolutionary and libertarian elements within and outside 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 exponent in Peter Kropotkin [37], who set himself the task of making the achievements of modern natural science available for the development of the sociological concept 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 of nature, to which man is also 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. Kropotkin showed that this conception of nature as a field of unrestricted warfare is only a caricature of real life, and that along with the brutal struggle for existence, which is fought out with tooth and claw, there exists in nature also another tendency which is expressed in the social combination of the weaker species and the maintenance of races by the evolution of social instincts and mutual aid.

In this sense man is not the creator of society, but society the creator of man, for he inherited from the species that preceded him the social instinct which alone enabled him to maintain himself in his first environment against the physical superiority of other species, and to make sure of an undreamed-of height of development. 

This second tendency in the struggle for existence is far superior to the first, as is shown by the steady retrogression of those species which have no social life and are dependent merely upon their physical strength.

This view, which today is meeting with constantly wider acceptance in the natural sciences and in social research, opened wholly new vistas to the prospects concerning human evolution.

According to Kropotkin the fact remains that even under the worst despotism most of man’s personal relations with his fellows are arranged by social habits, free agreement and mutual cooperation, without which social life would not be possible at all. If this were not the case, even the strongest coercive machinery of the state would not be able to maintain the social order for any length of time.

However these natural forms of behaviour, which arise from man’s innermost nature, are to-day constantly interfered with and crippled by the effects of economic exploitation and governmental tutelage, representing the brutal form of the struggle for existence in human society which has to be overcome by the other form of mutual aid and free co-operation. The consciousness of personal responsibility and the capacity for sympathy with others, which make all social ethics and all ideas of social justice, develop best in freedom.

Like Bakunin, Kropotkin too was a revolutionary. But he, like Élisée Reclus [38] and others, saw in revolution only a special phase of the evolutionary process, which appears when new social aspirations are so restricted in their natural development by authority that they have to shatter the old shell by violence before they can function as new factors in human life.

In contrast to Proudhon’s mutualism and Bakunin’s collectivism, Kropotkin advocated common ownership not only of the means of production but of the products of labour as well, as it was his opinion that in the present state of technology no exact measure of the value of individual labour is possible, but that, on the other hand, by rational direction of our modern methods of labour it will be possible to assure comparative abundance to every human being.

Communist anarchism, which before Kropotkin had already been urged by Joseph Déjacque [39], Élisée Reclus, Carlo Cafiero [40] and others, and which is recognised by the great majority of anarchists today, found in him its most brilliant exponent.

Mention must also be made here of Leo Tolstoy, who, from primitive Christianity and on the basis of the ethical principles laid down in the gospels, arrived at the idea of a society without rulership.

Common to all anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of a free humanity. In this sense mutualism, collectivism and communism are not to be regarded as closed economic systems, permitting no further development, but merely as economic assumptions as to the means of safeguarding a free community. There will even probably be in every form of a free society of the future different forms of economic co-operation existing side by side, since any social progress must be associated with free experimentation and practical testing out of new methods for which in a free society of free communities there will be every opportunity.

The same holds true for the various methods of anarchism. The work of its adherents is pre-eminently a work of education to prepare the people intellectually and psychologically for the tasks of their social liberation. 
Every attempt to limit the influence of economic monopolism and the power of the state is a step nearer to the realisation of this goal. Every development of voluntary organisation in the various fields of social activity towards the direction of personal freedom and social justice deepens the awareness of the people and strengthens their social responsibility, without which no changes in social life can be accomplished.

Most anarchists of our time are convinced that such a transformation of society will take years of constructive work and education and cannot be brought about without revolutionary convulsions which till now have always accomplished every progress in social life. The character of these convulsions, of course, depends entirely on the strength of resistance with which the ruling classes will be able to oppose the realisation of the new ideas.

The wider the circles which are inspired with the idea of a reorganisation of society in the spirit of freedom and socialism, the easier will be the birth pains of new social changes in the future. For even revolutions can only develop and mature the ideas which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men: but they cannot themselves create new ideas or generate new worlds out of nothing.

Before the appearance of totalitarian states in Russia, Italy, Germany and later in Portugal and Spain, and the outbreak of the Second World War, anarchist organisations and movements existed almost in every country. But like all other socialist movements of that period, they became the victims of fascist tyranny and the invasions of the German armies, and could only lead an underground existence.

Since the end of the war a resurrection of anarchist movements in all Western European countries is to be noticed. The federations of the French and Italian anarchists already held their first conventions, and so did the Spanish anarchists of whom many thousands are still living in exile, mostly in France, Belgium and North Africa [41].

Anarchist papers and magazines are published again in many European countries and in North and South America.

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[1] Lao-Tse (b604BC), founder of Taoism.

[2] Carpocrates (b100sBC) rejected the churches’ morality.

[3] Chelčický (b1390) argued that seeking power was a sin.

[4] Leo Tolstoy (b1828), Russian Christian anarchist.

[5] François Rabelais (b1494), French satirist of the elite.

[6] Étienne de La Boétie (b1530), key critic of tyranny.

[7] Maréchal (b1530), scathing political essayist.

[8] Denis Diderot (b1731) helped lead the Enlightenment.

[9] Godwin (b1756), first modern anarchist thinker in England.

[10] Buchanan (b1506), Scottish proponent of “power to the people”.

[11] Hooker (b1554), a founder of Anglicanism and attacked concept of divine right.

[12] Winstanley (1609), leading Leveller.

[13] Sidney (b1623), well-known Republican.

[14] Locke (b1632) ‘the father of classical liberalism’.

[15] Rocker may be referring to the preacher and economist (b1697).

[16] Bellers (b1654), Quaker and educationalist.

[17] Bentham (b1748), leading utilitarian theorist.

[18] Priestly (b1733), famed defender of dissent.

[19] Price (b1723), Welsh Dissenter and feminist.

[20] US founding father Paine (b1737) wrote The Rights of Man.

[21] Owen (b1771), key co-operativist and atheist.

[22] Gray (b1799), early ally of “one bank” economics.

[23] Thompson  (b1775), major influence on Marx.

[24] Fourier (b1772), French utopian socialist.

[25] Giuseppe Mazzini (b1805), the first man to define and epitomise modern nationalism.

[26] Giuseppe Garibaldi (b1807), leading figure in the unification of Italy and collaborator of Mazzini’s.

[27] Joachim Lelewel (b1786), Polish nationalist historian.

[28] Warren (b1798) was the first US individualist anarchist.

[29] Pearl Andrews (b1812) followed Warren into the arena and coined the “just wage” theory.

[30] Greene (b1819), advocate of free banking.

[31] Spooner (b1808), leading abolitionist and individualist.

[32] Tucker (b1854) published the individualist periodical Liberty.

[33] Heywood (b1829),  abolitionist, feminist individualist.

[34] Tandy (b1867) advocated “voluntary socialism”.

[35] Stirner (b1806) was individualism’s most well-known exponent. writing The Ego and His Own.

[36] Bakunin (b1814) is often cited as the founder of modern class-struggle anarchism, clashing with Karl Marx in the First International (see note on p24) before his explusion in 1872.

[37] Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a polymath whose work in evolutionary biology, geography and political philosophy was some of the most celebrated of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He is credited as a founding father of anarchist-communism.

[38] Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) was a geographer, conservationist and anarchist philosopher, sometimes hailed as a founding influence of social ecology.

[39] Joseph Déjacque (1821-1864), a French anarchist-communist poet and theorist who coined the term libertarian. He was a major critic of Proudhon’s sexist tendencies and support for individual ownership of labour products.

[40] Carlo Cafiero (1846-1892) was an Italian anarchist and champion of Mikhail Bakunin.

[41] Rocker is referring to World War Two, but the Spanish exiles were primarily made up of former members of the anarchist CNT union defeated in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), who would go on to form a core of resistance to Franco over the next three decades of his rule and a focal point for libertarian organising after his death.