textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000767.txt

 ANARCHISM  by Daniel Guerin

I THE BASIC IDEAS OF ANARCHISM

1.1 A MATTER OF WORDS

The word _anarchy_ is as old as the world.  It is derived from to ancient 
Greek words, "an", "arkhe^", and means something like the absence of 
authority or government.  However, for millennia the presumption has been 
accepted that man cannot dispense with one or the other, and anarchy has 
been understood in a pejorative sense, as a synonym for disorder, chaos, 
and disorganization.
	Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was famous for his quips (such as "property is 
theft") and took to himself the word anarchy.  As if his purpose were to 
shock as much as possible, in 1840 he engaged in the following dialogue 
with the "Philistine".

		"You are a republican."
		"Republican, yes; but that means nothing.  _Res publica_ is  
	'the State.'  Kings, too, are republicans."
		"Ah well!  You are a democrat?"
		"No."
		"What!  Perhaps you are a monarchist?"
		"No."
		"Constitutionalist then?"
		"God forbid."
		"Then you are an aristocrat?"
		"Not at all!"
		"You want a mixed form of government?"
		"Even less."
		"Then what are you?"
		"An Anarchist."

	He sometimes made the concession of spelling anarchy "an-
archy" to put the packs of adversaries off the scent.  By this term he 
understood anything but disorder.  Appearances notwithstanding, he was 
more constructive than destructive, as we shall see.  He held government 
responsible for disorder and believed that only a society without 
government could restore the natural order and re-create social harmony.  
He argued that the language could furnish no other term and chose to 
restore to the old word anarchy its strict etymological meaning.  In the 
heat of his polemics, however, he obstinately and paradoxically also used 
the word anarchy in its pejorative sense of disorder, thus making 
confusion worse confounded.  His disciple Mikhail Bakunin followed him in 
this respect.
	Proudhon and Bakunin carried this even further, taking malicious 
pleasure in playing with the confusion created by the use of the two 
opposite meanings of the word: for them, anarchy was both the most 
colossal disorder, the most complete disorganization of society and, 
beyond this gigantic revolutionary change, the construction of a new, 
stable, and rational order based on freedom and solidarity.
	The immediate followers of the two fathers of anarchy hesitated to  
use a word so deplorably elastic, conveying a negative idea to the un-  
initiated, and lending itself to ambiguities which could be annoying to say  
the least.  Even Proudhon became more cautious toward the end of his brief 
career and was happy to call himself a "federalist."  His petty-bourgeois 
descendants preferred the term _mutuellisme_ to _anarchisme_ and the 
socialist line adopted _collectivisme_, soon to be displaced by 
_communisme_.  At the end of the century in France, Sebastien Faure took 
up a word originated in 1858 by one Joseph Dejacque to make it the title 
of a journal, _Le Liberataire_.  Today the terms "anarchist" and 
"libertarian" have become interchangeable.
	Most of these terms have a major disadvantage:  they fail to express  
the basic characteristics of the doctrines they are supposed to describe.  
Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism.  The anarchist is primarily 
a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man.  
Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream 
whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the 
State.  Adolph Fischer, one of the Chicago martyrs, (1) claimed that 
"every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily 
an anarchist."
	Some anarchists consider themselves to be the best and most logical 
socialists but they have adopted a label also attached to the 
terrorists, or have allowed others to hang it around their necks.  This 
has often caused them to be mistaken for a sort of "foreign body" in the 
socialist family and has led to a long string of misunderstandings and 
verbal battles-- usually quite purposeless.  Some contemporary anarchists  
have tried to clear up the misunderstanding by adopting a more explicit 
term:  they align themselves with libertarian socialism or communism.

"Anarchism" by Daniel Guerin  - Notes

[1] In 1883 an active nucleus of revolutionary socialists founded an 
International Working Men's Association in the United States.  They were 
under the influence of the International Anarchist Congress, held in 
London in 1881, and also of Johann Most, a social democrat turned 
anarchist, who reached America in 1882.  Albert R. Parsons and Adolph 
Fischer were the moving spirits in the association, which took the lead 
in a huge mass movement concentrated on winning an eight-hour day.  The 
campaign for this was launched by the trade unions and the Knights of 
Labor, and May 1, 1886, was fixed as the deadline for bringing the 
eight-hour day into force.  During the first half of May, a nationwide 
strike involved 190,000 workers, of whom 80,000 were in Chicago.  
Impressive mass demonstrations occurred in that city on May 1 and for 
several days thereafter.  Panic-stricken and terrified by this wave of 
rebellion, the bourgeoisie resolved to crush the movement at its source, 
resorting to a bloody provocation if need be.  During a street meeting on 
May 4, 1885, in Haymarket Square, a bomb thrown at the legs of the police 
in an unexplained manner provided the necessary pretext.  Eight leaders 
of the revolutionary and libertarian socialist movement were arrested, 
seven of them sentenced to death, and four subsequently hanged (a fifth 
committed suicide in his cell the day before the execution).  Since then 
the Chicago martyrs-- Parsons, Fischer, Engel, Spies, and Lingg-- have 
belonged to the international proletariat, and the universal celebration 
of May Day (May 1) still commemorates the atrocious crime committed in 
the United States.