Moribund Society and Anarchy

By Jean Grave.

Translated by Voltairine de Cleyre.

Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on a transcription from the Anarchist Library and on digital scans from the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

Preface

Moribund Society and Anarchy first appeared in France about a decade since, published by P. V. Stock, printer of numerous works pertaining to Anarchy. The conscience (?) of the French army, which the Dreyfus affair has since revealed in all its delicate scrupulosity, was immediately incensed by the chapter entitled “Militarism,” and the author was speedily arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. The book was suppressed, and the French army, presumably, breathed more freely.

A mistake! When persecution begins the gospel spreads. Men were anxious to know what it was that had so frightened the “free government” of France as to call forth such severe punishment of a poor shoemaker. The work was circulated, translated in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Jewish; only in English it remained untranslated. Several times announcements that we were about to have an English version appeared; still it was not forthcoming.

In 1897 the writer met Jean Grave at the residence of an exiled French comrade in London, and there engaged to undertake the work, the author concurring. Although originally prompted by the English comrades and their promise of a publisher, later developments have made it more expedient to get out an American edition. Among these the only one which really concerns the public is the gigantic stride toward militarism which this country has taken during the past year. Previous to that I was exceedingly dubious as to the effect of the famous prosecuted chapter, which was likely to fall flat on the unmilitary American public. But now that we have entered upon the “manifest destiny” of “civilized nations;” now that our government has resorted to the same tactics of colonization, protection, subjugation, and conquest; now that our standing army has been increased fourfold, and military place-hunting is the ambition of the hour; now that our workingmen are seizing the opportunity to barter their “free citizenship in the greatest country on earth” for the abject service of man-killing on foreign soils at the rate of $15.60 per month and keep, this proscribed Chapter XIII comes with its own note—a most discordant one indeed—into the war-chorus at present holding the public ear. And the translator devoutly prays that as in France the great sin was its distribution among the soldiery, the like offense may be repeated here, where the army is still in a nascent condition and the man not yet buried under the uniform. Look in the glass and see how you like the reflection, soldiers!

The P. V. Stock edition having been suppressed, E. Pouget, the daring publisher of Père Peinard, brought out another, ostensibly published in London. Though inelegant in appearance it contains an additional chapter; and it is from this Pouget edition that the present translation has been made. I have adhered as strictly as possible to the text, being unwilling to make either additions or subtractions, though it has sometimes seemed to me that Mr. Grave is unnecessarily diffuse.

As to the principal object of the work, that of furnishing an inclusive criticism of the institutions of our moribund society and the necessity of its speedy dissolution, I think any fair-minded reader will be convinced that it has been pretty thoroughly done. As to the “What next?” it is far less certain.

With this, however, Jean Grave—sturdy, patient, indomitable Jean Grave, sitting today in his fifth-floor Parisian garret, untouched by his imprisonment, convinced as ever, steadily writing, writing to the workers of the world, casting forth images of the “Future Society,”—would not agree. He is sure of his remedy—Communism; I, of his criticism, Anarchy.

Voltairine de Cleyre.

June, 1899.

Moribund Society and Anarchy

I

The Anarchistic Idea and Its Development

Anarchy signifies the negation of authority. Now, authority claims to justify its existence by the necessity of defending social institutions—the family, religion, property, etc.—and it has created a mass of tools to secure it in the exercise of its functions and its sanctioning privilege. Chief among these are the law, the magistracy, the army, the legislative and executive power, etc., so that, forced to reply to all these, the idea of Anarchy had to attack all social prejudices, go to the bottom of all human knowledge, in order to demonstrate that its conceptions were in conformity with the physiological and psychological nature of man and adequate to the observance of natural laws, whilst our present organization, established contrary to all logic and common sense, causes our societies to be unstable, overturned by revolutions, themselves occasioned by the accumulated hatred of those who are crushed under these arbitrary institutions.

In combating authority, then, the Anarchists had to attack every institution of which power had constituted itself the defender, and the necessity for which it seeks to demonstrate in order to justify its own existence. Thus the scope of Anarchistic ideas was widened. Starting out, with a simple political negation, the Anarchist has had to attack economic and social prejudices also, to find a formula which, while denying private property, the basis of our present economic order, should at the same time affirm our aspirations for a future organization. Hence the word Communism naturally came to be coupled with the word Anarchy.

Further on we shall see that certain lovers of the quintessence of abstraction have sought to claim that, from the moment Anarchy signified complete expansion of individuality, the words Anarchy and Communism protested against such a coupling. Against this insinuation we shall prove that individuality cannot develop except in the community; that the latter cannot exist unless the former evolves freely; and that they mutually complement each other.

It is this diversity of problems to attack and to solve which has made the success of Anarchistic ideas, and contributed to their rapid growth; so much so that, launched forth by a group of unknown persons without means of propaganda, they today more or less invade art, science, and literature. Hatred of authority, social demands, date far back; they arise as soon as man is able to recognize that he is oppressed. But through how many phases and systems was it necessary that the idea should pass, before it could assume its present form!

One of the first who formulated it in its intuitional stage was Rabelais, in describing the life of the Abbey of Thelemes. But how obscure it still was! How little he believed it applicable to society in its entirety, since entrance into the community was reserved to a minority of privileged persons attended by a train of domestics attached to their person!

In 1793 the Anarchists were much talked of. Jacques Roux and “the madmen” appear to us to have been the ones who, during the Revolution, saw most clearly, and sought the best means of turning it to the benefit of the people. Hence the bourgeois historians have left them in the shade. Their history is still to be written; the documents buried in the archives and the libraries still await him who shall have the time and the courage to dig them up, bring them to light, and reveal the secret of things still very incomprehensible to us, in that tragic period of history. We can therefore scarcely form any appreciation of their program. One must come down to Proudhon before he sees Anarchy positing itself as the adversary of authority and power, and beginning to take definite shape. But as yet it is but a theoretical enemy; practically, Proudhon, in his social organization, leaves in existence, under different names, the administrative machinery which is the very essence of government. Up to the end of the empire Anarchy appears under the form of a vague mutualism, which, in France, during the first years that followed the Commune, foundered in the misled and misleading movement of cooperative associations for production and consumption. But before coming to this impotent solution, a sprout had detached itself from the springing tree. In Switzerland, the International had given birth to the “Jurassian Federation” in which Bakunin propagated the idea of Proudhon—Anarchy the enemy of authority—but developing, enlarging, incarnating it in social demands. From this epoch dates the true dawn of the present Anarchist movement.

Certainly many prejudices still existed, many illogical notions appeared in the ideas promulgated. The propagandist organization still contained many of the germs of authoritarianism; many of the elements of the authoritarian conception still survived. But what of it? The movement was launched; the idea grew, purified itself, and became more and more defined. And when, not quite thirteen years ago, Anarchy was affirmed at the Congres du Centre, in France, though still very feeble, though the act of a very weak minority (having against it not only those satisfied with the present social order, but also those pseudo-revolutionaries who only see in popular demands a means of grasping at power) the idea contained sufficient expansive force to take root without any other means of propaganda than the fervor of its adherents. It had sufficient vigor to induce the supporters of the capitalistic regime to injure and persecute it, and men of good faith to discuss it—a proof of strength and vitality. Hence, in spite of the crusade of those who could consider themselves, in some degree, leaders of any of the divers divisions of public opinion, in spite of calumnies, excommunications, condemnations, in spite of the prison, the idea of Anarchy has made headway. Groups have been founded, propagandist organs have been created in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, Norway, America, Australia, in the Slavic tongue, in German, Jewish, Czech, Armenian—a little everywhere and in all idioms. But what is more important, from the little group of malcontents by whom they were formulated, Anarchistic ideas have radiated through all classes of society. Wherever man displays his cerebral activity they have infiltrated. Art, science, literature, are impregnated with the new ideas and serve as vehicles for them. These ideas commenced at first in unconscious formulas, in illy-defined aspirations, more often caprices than real convictions. Today not only are Anarchistic aspirations formulated, but men know that it is Anarchy they are spreading, and boldly place the label on it.

The Anarchists are not, then, the only ones to find that things are bad, and to desire a change. These complaints, these aspirations, are expressed by the very persons who believe themselves defenders of the capitalistic order. Still more, men begin to feel that they ought not to confine themselves to sterile desires, but should work for the realization of what they demand. They begin to understand and proclaim action, propaganda by deed; that is to say, that having made the comparison between the pleasure which the satisfaction of acting as one thinks is bound to bring, and the annoyances which one must endure for the violation of a social law, they try, more and more, to conform their life to their manner of conceiving things, according to the degree of resistance which the particular temperament may offer to the harassments of social prosecution.

That Anarchistic ideas have been able to develop with this energy and rapidity, is because, while running counter to accepted opinions and established prejudices, while frightening, at the first exposition, those to whom they were addressed, they were answers, on the other hand, to their secret sentiments, their undefined aspirations. They offered to humanity, in a concrete form, that ideal of well-being and liberty which it had scarcely dared to outline in its hopeful dreams. At first they frightened their opponents, because they preached hatred or contempt of a number of institutions believed to be necessary to the life of society; because they demonstrated, contrary to received ideas, that these institutions are bad in the very essence, and not because entrusted to the hands of weak or wicked individuals. They taught the people that not only must the latter not be contented with changing the persons in power, with partially modifying the institutions which govern them, but that, before all, the people must destroy that which makes men bad, which makes it possible for a minority to make use of social forces to oppress the majority; they taught that what until now has been taken for the cause of the evils from which humanity suffers, is but the effect of a still more profound evil, that it is the very basis of society which must be attacked. Now, we have observed in the beginning that the basis of society is private property. Authority has but one excuse for existence: the defense of capital. Bureaucracy, the family, the army, the magistracy, flow directly from private property. The work of the Anarchists, then, has been to demonstrate the iniquity of the monopoly of the soil and of the fruits of the labor of past generations, by an idle minority; to sap authority by showing it to be detrimental to human development, by exposing it in its role of protector to the privileged, by proving the emptiness of the principles under cover of which it justifies its institutions.

That which contributed to alienate the ambitious and intriguing from Anarchistic teachings was just that which led the thinker to study them, to question himself as to their message, viz., that they offered no place to personal preoccupations or paltry ambitions, and could in no way serve as a stepping-stone to those who see, in the demands of the workers, nothing but a means of carving themselves a position among the exploiters. The butterflies of politics have nothing to do in the ranks of the Anarchists. Little or no chance for petty personal vanities, no procession of candidatures opening a career to all kinds of hopes, and all sorts of recantations. In the political and authoritarian Socialist parties an ambitious person can bring about his “conversion” by insensible degrees; no one perceives that he has changed till long after the conversion is accomplished. Among the Anarchists this is impossible, because he who would consent to accept any office whatever in the present society, after having demonstrated that all those who are in office cannot remain there except on condition that they become defenders of the existing system, would at the same moment incur the epithet of renegade, for he could have no semblance of a reason to justify “evolution.” Thus that which provoked the hatred of intriguers at the same time awakened the spirit of investigation in honest men; and this explains the rapid progress of the Anarchistic idea.

What reply, indeed, can be made to those who prove to you that if you want a thing well done you must do it yourself, and delegate it to nobody? With what can you reproach those who make you see that if you wish to be free, you must commission no one to “direct” you? What answer is there to those who show you the causes of the ills from which you suffer, indicate the remedy to you, but do not make themselves the dispensers of it—on the contrary, taking care to make people understand that the individual alone is able to comprehend his own needs, is the judge of what he should avoid?

Ideas strong enough to inspire men with a conviction which makes them fight and suffer for the propagation thereof, without expecting anything directly from those ideas, were, in the eyes of sincere men, worth being studied; and that is what has happened. Hence without heeding the clamors of some, the rancor of others, the attempts of governments, the idea grows and progresses without cessation, proving to the bourgeoisie that the truth can neither be suppressed nor silenced. Sooner or later it will be reckoned with.

Anarchy has its victims—its dead, its imprisoned, its exiled; but it remains alive and strong, the number of its propagandists constantly increasing;—propagandists conscious of their acts, because they have understood all the beauty of the conception; accidental propagandists also, content with hurling their cries of hate against the institution which has clashed most with their secret sentiments and their instincts of justice and truth.

By its amplitude the Anarchistic idea shelters and draws to it all those who have the feeling of personal dignity, the thirst after the beautiful and true. Should not the ideal of man be released from all fetters, all constraint? Have not all the divers revolutions he has wrought, pursued this end? If he still submits to the authority of his exploiters, if the human mind still struggles under the pressure of the vulgarities of capitalistic society, it is because accepted ideas, routine, prejudice, and ignorance, have been till now stronger than its dreams and desires for emancipation, precipitating it, after it has driven away the reigning masters, into a fresh abandonment of them, at the very moment it expects to free itself. Anarchistic ideas have come to bring light into the minds not only of the workers, but also of thinkers of every category; helping them to analyze their own feelings, stripping bare the causes of misery and indicating the means of destroying them, showing to all the route to follow and the end to be attained, explaining why previous revolutions have been abortive. It is this close relation with the secret sentiments of individuals which explains their rapid extension, which gives them their strength and renders them irrepressible. Governmental fury, oppressive measures, the rage of frustrated ambition, may set themselves against the ideas and their propagators; today the opening is made; they can no longer be prevented from making headway, from becoming the ideal of the disinherited, the motors of their attempts at emancipation.

Capitalistic society is so paltry, so narrow; large aspirations find themselves so cramped in it; it annihilates so many good intents, so many hopes, crushing and killing so many individualities that cannot stoop to its narrow views, that, could it succeed in stifling the voice of every living Anarchist, its oppressions would raise up new ones, equally implacable.

II

Individualism and Solidarity

“Anarchy and Communism protest against being coupled together,” declared certain dishonest adversaries, little anxious to throw light upon the question. “Communism is an organization; an organization prevents the development of individuality;—we will have none of it!” “We are individualists, we are Anarchists; nothing more!” exclaimed after them certain persons, sincere in the sense that they desired to appear more advanced than all their comrades, and having no originality their own. They entangled themselves in exaggerations, pushing the ideas to absurdity; and around them collected those whom the governing class has an interest in introducing among its adversaries, to divide or mislead them.

Now, behold those Anarchists launched into discussions Anarchy, Communism, the initiative, organization; the harmful or useful influence of groups; egoism and altruism; in fine, lot of things one more absurd than the other. For, after being thoroughly discussed by honest opponents, the end of it is that all want the same thing, though calling it by different names. As a matter of fact the Anarchists who demand Communism are the first to recognize that the individual has not been put into the world for society’s sake; that, on the contrary, the latter has been formed solely for the purpose of furnishing the former greater facility for evolution. It is quite plain that when a certain number of persons group together and unite their forces, they have in view the obtaining of a greater sum of enjoyment with a less expenditure of energy. In nowise have they the intention of sacrificing their initiative, their will, their individuality, for the benefit of an entity which did not exist before their union, which will disappear with their dispersion. To economize their forces while continuing to wrest from nature the things necessary to their existence, and which they could not obtain but by the concentration of their efforts, was certainly the motive which guided those human beings who first commenced to group themselves; or what, at least, must have been tacitly understood as such, if not completely reasoned out in their primitive associations, which associations might well be, even had to be, temporary and limited to the duration of the effort, falling apart when the result was once attained.