Anarchist Socialism: Prolegomena
Those critics of anarchism who are more open to radical ideas say that the doctrine is so far âa set of beautiful shreds without systematic coherence,â and call for a complete plan of social reorganization based on the ideas of anarchist socialism. For them, anarchism requires, as do other political ideas, a detailed design for the future. It should clearly obey, in their opinion, the practice of making laws and formulas for tomorrow. However, these more open-minded critics surely forget that society is not a building that is constructed according to the will and science of a single architect.
Political parties, particularly those that claim the need for a governing body and that aspire to conquer it in order to realize their particular public plan of reorganization, are obliged to present their future goals to the people. They are required to do so because society, theoretically, does not accord power to political parties without prior knowledge of how they will use it. In principle, society places its trust in those who have best succeeded in translating their desires. I say let us disregard this reality, which is rather contrary to some theory. For example, how should we demand an explanation of future goals from those who do not request or want power, who deny the need for any organ of social direction and proclaim the peopleâs ability to proceed on their own without any kind of protection? How should we require those people to describe, the day after the elections, the concrete form in which others are to freely live?
Such a claim indicates ignorance of the doctrine. The anarchist idea is the strict denial of any dogmatic systematization. It presupposes freedom without rules and unfettered spontaneity. It is not mere political denial, but a complete philosophy that explains facts and their causes, studies phenomena and ideas in keeping with the relativity of all things, and brings together, in short, experience and science, which are in reality the same. Its positive research method is the antithesis of religious, political, and philosophical doctrinarism.
Philosophical method is rejected by anarchism because anarchist method is not based on pre-judgments. Nor does it admit anything a priori. Not even from scientific positivism does it retain anything but what evidence has established incontestably. Anarchist method rejects anything that contains doctrinal systematization, not wanting to be supportive of inductions, which time and experience are able to destroy. However, does anarchism actually lack philosophical method, which is all that science demands?
All systems and doctrinal schools rely either on a principle established a prioriâmetaphysicsâto which they fix all deductions and with which they construct their building of arbitrary science, or they derive from experience a posterioriâphilosophical method in the true sense of the word, a general principle with which the systematic frame of certain doctrines is built and to whose rhythm research is tied, falling headlong into dogmatism. In both cases, a check is placed on the direction of thought, guiding it toward predetermined ends with the assumption that these ends necessarily contain the truth that is sought. Science itself, when it does not find explanation for phenomena, or it proves easily susceptible to generalizations because of the arbitrary method of analogies, tests a priori theories, which readily change into dogma and dogma into error. These dogmatic theories work in time as a negative element of action and paralyze or hinder the true explanation of facts.
And dogmatic philosophical education of men has been and still is so strong that it always tends toward the whimsical unification of facts and ideas. As a result, there is no branch of human knowledge that does not contain many divisions and subdivisions of systems, schools, and contradictory doctrines. The natural sciences still have not been completely purged of this trend, as they explain in a very distinct way many phenomena, not only from different epochs but also from the same time period. It is not necessary to cite authors and theories. A mediocre culture makes fully known the doctrinal, philosophical, and scientific divisions.
Anarchist socialism follows, as we have said, its own method, opposed to all dogmatism, and does not establish any principle a priori. It does not generalize observed facts a posteriori and only to the extent that acquired knowledge permits, and it does not lend itself to the closed systematization of knowledge, rejecting at all cost philosophical systematization, because it understands that science is a body of knowledge in continuous formation whose cycle will never close. Therefore, in the dispute between spiritualists and materialists, for example, anarchist socialism rightly rejects both dogmas. There is in the investigation of phenomena a point where every doctrine fails. It is that point at which the boundaries of the absolute appear and block the path to our limited intelligence. When materialism, breaking with science, tries liberating both the spiritualists and the materialists, it touches the arbitrary, and it is at this precise moment when anarchist philosophy is heavily differentiated from dogmatic philosophy. Anarchist philosophy sides with the immense arsenal of scientific knowledge that forms materialismâs baggage, and distances itself from any metaphysical explanation that attempts to cut the knot rather than undo it. Anarchist philosophy is not satisfied with the easy decrees of pseudoscience.
Similarly, anarchism is not added to any other school nor does it allow itself to be pigeonholed in sensualism, in positivism, in idealism, and so forth, to the extent that they are closed doctrine and methods of exclusion. Anarchism is not ignorant of the important role that the senses represent in life nor does it forget that the idea, in turn, is essential for the development of the individual and of humanity. It recognizes that all phenomena are verified following precise directions and under certain conditions, and that nature does not pertain to the capricious or to the arbitrary. Anarchism affirms pleasure, bodily comfort, and the encouragement of compassion and intelligence as the objects of life. It possesses, through science, the certainty that the universe, from the most microscopic of beings to the countless immense masses that cross space, is a closely woven chain of causes and effects in perpetual and multiple connections. But anarchism abhors the emphatic exclusivism peculiar to the dogmatism of these schools and does not want to resolve outright, under a particular point of view, the problem of the great beyond, which is all the more distant the closer man gets to his innovations and his achievements. Therefore, the easy generalizations of such schools do not form part of its philosophy. Other elements excluded from anarchism are the following: the systematization of knowledge whose coherence is pure cerebral artifice; and the whimsical unification of the universe in only one objective and purpose. On this point, metaphysics, again, attempts to save the chasms that separate the knowable from the unknowable, and the purely relative from the absolute. For anarchist philosophy, there is no immutable truth, immutable justice, or absolute science, but truths that vary in time and in space, relative conceptions of justice, and partial achievements of science. If such truth or justice or absolute science were real, their existence would be null and void for humanity because men lack the means to discover and verify them. The fact that man forges these absolute conceptions, and conceives the idealism of the perfect, without determining it or defining it, does not authorize the assertion of its existence as a real fact that we should tirelessly pursue in vain.
Modern positivism is a good example of how one falls into dogmatism, even when it has to do with scientific systematizations. Biological development follows certain particular modes of evolution. As soon as this conquest of science was verified, many emulously attempted to generalize evolution, some rushing to construct by analogy the evolution of society, the evolution of institutions, and the evolution of customs, according to particular points of view and without caring about anything else except the accommodation of facts to theories rather than theories to facts. At the present time, because of a very understandable reversal in the domains of metaphysics, the theory of evolution is the philosophical and scientific dogma that prevails in the domains of knowledge, to such an extent that positivism has been rebuilding the old theology under new forms, and we are at clear risk of a modern scholasticism. The old issues of the relative and the absolute, God and the world, of matter and spirit, free will, and so forth, reemerging with new energy, have allowed the reactionary fatuity to sing the bankruptcy of science.
Because of the educational system, thought is only satisfied with definite ideas and with definitive statements. Thought is a copy of closed systems, which are simple products of cerebral abstraction, and thought is only satisfied with these abstractions because people were never taught to confess the limitations of their imagination.
But, are ideas and final states scientifically rational? Is not the eagerness for systematizations (in which all of life and all the manifestations of life are arbitrarily enclosed) contradictory to universal energyâs state of perpetual movement? Anarchism has identified this contradiction and therefore does not systematize, has no dogma, and certainly lacks metaphysics, but not philosophy. Its philosophy stems from the following principle demonstrated everywhere: science is a body of knowledge in perpetual formation. There is nothing in science that is definitive, in an absolute way. There is nothing that comprises, encyclopedically, the entire universe and its phenomena. Science is âa set of beautiful shredsâ partially grouped according to well-established relationships, but without a systematic coherence that covers the entire set of facts and ideas. And this philosophyâso stubbornly refused to anarchism, which is not a fixed idea, but the definitive initiation of the free development of ideas and thingsâis the only positive thing that can be gleaned from the vast scientific work of men. From all of scienceâs books, from all of its struggles, from all of its systems, from all of its idiosyncrasies of school, from all of its doctrinal differences, the common feature attributed by us to all inquiries flows with singular persistence: the relativity of knowledge, which, in beautiful shreds, proves the absurdity of any definitive systematization.
Anarchism, which contains this common outcome and works to broaden the field of knowledge, is placed on the firm ground of purely scientific method. Experience has proven that when the borders of this common resultant are crossed, one necessarily falls in the metaphysics of the absolute, and then research aimlessly marches through the free spaces of the imagination.
Preferably, we confess our intellectual impotence to cross those limits and we will not foolishly decree that things will happen according to our fancy, wandering through the labyrinths of the unknown.
We do not offer diagrams of the future, because we do not propagate predetermined ideas. Our ideals are the experimental result of each moment, in view of past and present facts, which affirm the elimination of known evil for the future.
Does this philosophy close the path to the development of our abilities and deny the affirmation of better methods of human interaction?
Metaphysics is not necessary for the development of manâs abilities. It is, on the contrary, a strong obstacle. When the mind is filled with the vagaries of the unknown, it loses the true notion of reality. The quintessence of the absolute is the prelude to dementia. The individuals of exceptional constitution, who resist the pathological tendency of certain investigations, make very great works of intellectual gymnastics, but nothing worthwhile, nothing effective and useful to themselves and their peers. Of the long-winded studies of metaphysics and theology, no universal, let alone practical, results have ever been able to be deduced. The conclusions of modern science are contrary to the supposed use of such studies.
For the development of our abilities, especially the intellectual ones, the serious and continuous study of nature is required. Instead of running after the fantasies of the noumenon, after the illusory penetration of the intimate nature of living beings, it is necessary to educate the mind in the inquisition of the phenomena, in the review of all real-life events, beginning with the smallest and most insignificant events and concluding with the very extensive series of causes and effects, which explain the overall workings of the universe. The natural sciences make great progress through this method. Economics, sociology, philosophy itself, resolutely will advance the day this method is folded into their practice, purging themselves of all transcendent tendencies.
Anarchist socialism strongly tends toward this end and, as a result, affirms in the first place the need for all men to fully develop, studying new methods of social coexistence in order to achieve this objective.
Its fundamental principles are, in summary, the following:
- 1.All men have the need for physical and mental development in indeterminate degree and form.
- 2.All men have the right to freely satisfy this need for development.
- 3.All men can satisfy this need through cooperation or voluntary community.
Letâs briefly outline the argument:
Each individual is born with determined conditions of development, whether or not these conditions are able to be nurtured. By being born, and by being born with those conditions, each individual has the need, or in political terms, has the right to freely develop. Whatever the conditions under which each individual is placed, their whole organism will tend to expand in all directions. Each individual will want to meet, know, train, and enjoy. Each individual will want to feel, think, and act with complete freedom. The need for all of these things is their own being. If each individualâs physical growth were limited by any means whatsoever, it would be categorized as a truly monstrous act. If sensory, intellectual, or moral development is to be limited, it should be pointed out in good faith. This does not occur today. But, nevertheless, the principle is clear. Monstrous acts are committed if the expansiveness of the human organism is constrained. All men have the need by nature for physical and mental development. All men are socially entitled to this development. How to translate this principle into practice? Tradition has bequeathed to us its regulations, imposed first by the will of the prince, then clinched by the divine right of parliaments through the vanishing of individual sovereignty.
Some men have wanted and still want each individual to move to an imposed beat, to think in accordance with the meter of arbitrary laws, to feel the melody of gubernatorial music and to act in accordance with the single pattern of official wisdom. In fact, what they wanted and want is for the multitude to never feel, or think, or act on its own and according to its own will. The theory has been invented for those who are inferior, for those who are born and live and die in the dependence of political cunningness and economic exploitation.
Nobody has proved the necessity or the justice of this subordination of nature to the capricious regulations of some men who are neither more nor less important than the rest of humanity. One might as well prove the need for the stars to move according to our whim or the need of blood to circulate through the arteries according to a particular plan of ours. The entire universe unfolds according to its particular conditions in connection with other conditions of environment and relations. Man is simply an element of the universe with its relational and environmental conditions. These conditions are studied for science. It would be absurd to encode them without being familiar with them, and insanity to encode them without recognizing them.
Any contradiction to the so-called laws of nature carries with it the proper corrective. Whoever abuses their physical strength, whoever exceeds their expenditure of energy, finds the corrective in the annihilation of their body, in the anemia and phthisis. Whoever does not manage well their brainpower pays for the wasting of their intellectual strength with impotence. Superfluous are all regulations that punish these principles. Harmful are all the laws of men who do not conform to these principles.
Within, therefore, the autonomous conditions of each individual existence, man, all men are free to meet their needs for development. Does this affirmation suppose that man alone can provide for all those needs?
Not at all. There is no need to make a tour through the territories of history and sociology to prove that from the impotence of the isolated individual has emerged the community of men, has sprung what is called society. Even when individual existence is possible outside the group, the advantage of community is incontestable because of how it widens the individualâs scope of action, and because of the benefits it brings.
So, when we say all men can freely satisfy the need for comprehensive development, we add the request of the following principle: âthrough cooperation or voluntary community.â
Forced cooperation is the almost universally practiced means of social coexistence. Under various names, the enslavement of the majority of men has been considered and is considered necessary for the production of lifeâs indispensable things. Never mind the proclamation of laborâs freedom because, under the name proletarian, the slave endures. The person without property in our individualistic society lives obligated to submit his freedom and labor force to whomever pays the best. Salary is the price for servitude. The laborer is currently hired in the public market more or less like the slave used to be. If demand surpasses supply, the worker can be paid regularly for his labor force. If demand is lower than supply, the salary lowers and only a precious few have the freedom to tear each other apart in the race for a desired bite to eat. The rest should resign themselves to starving. Such is the effective result of democratic gains.
We will not ask the men of radical ideas why they contradict in practice that w...