Contrary
to plants that are often bisexual, in most of the animal world males
compete with each other for female favours, though only a few species
resort to violence. With possible exceptions, the violent species are
those were one male has the exclusive usage of several females. For
them the competition is not seductive, it is possessive. This is
often the case for grass-eating herds. As for primates, some fight
and some seduce, and evolving humans probably did the same. But, a
long time ago, they branched out. Some followed and eventually
domesticated the ovine, caprine, equine and bovine herds (also
camels, llamas and reindeers), while others settled on river banks
and deltas, fished and fowled, and cultivated ever more productive
cereals, vegetables and fruits. Living different lives, the two
branches developed different social structures and beliefs, according
to the day to day experience of the particular environment they lived
in.
The
herds roamed the steppes and mountains in seasonal migrations, and
human bands followed them. They saw the annual fights among males and
learnt to kill them before adulthood, keeping and choosing a stud.
They went on to killing their male cattle shortly after birth and
milking the mothers. This mode of life led to a patrilineal society
practicing polygamy and the symbolic death of young or new-born boys,
though Abraham’s willingness and the powers of the Roman pater
familias show that the symbolism was backed by reality.
The
sedentary branch of humanity saw the river fauna, the plants they
sowed and pruned, the birds, the bees and the passing seasons. The
society that developed from this inspection can only be guessed at
from legends and anachronistic surviving traditions. There are traces
of matrilineage and the perpetuation of spring and autumn
festivities, alongside the solstices of herd migrations. However,
when the two branches met, when the migrants crossed the river, there
were exchanges and then conquest. This occurred time and again
throughout history, great invasions from the steppes of Europe, Asia
and Arabia. And the herdsman culture imposed itself ever more firmly.
At the dawn of civilisation, the two paths of the Neolithic
revolution came together to form a syncretic society. But the nomads
came again and again, by land and sea, and the other original element
was obliterated.
Conquest
brought an ethnic (transformed with time into a social) divide
between master and servant, between possessor and dispossessed. It
also imposed the transmission of heritage by the male lineage, though
paternal certainty is always a tricky business. In the wilderness,
camps were a family affair, and women were hidden when there were
visitors. In towns and cities, they were closed in by walls, locked
doors and barred windows. The new society deprived women of property
and liberty. It took their inheritance and placed them under the
tutelage of fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. It excluded them
from social, political and economic activities. Having been made
unable to produce (other than children), women became commercial
objects. Some had a dotation others were sold. Conquest took the
land, and those who lived on that land had to learn to toil for the
conqueror. The new society was generated by violence and used it to
perpetuate the double dominion, of the half over the whole and the
few over the many. Of all the possible models, men were subjected to
being bulls, rams, billygoats and stallions.
Dominion
by violence needed more than a psychological disposition (sexual
deprivation), it needed weapons and training. The maces and axes of
polished stone and the obsidian blades that were still used in
America at the time of the European conquest were superseded in the
Old World by brass and bronze sometime in the third millennium BC.
This was an elitist age. It depended on rare copper and zinc, and tin
that is rarer still. Those who controlled the resources mastered the
world, and the warrior clad and armed with shiny metal became the
subject of legends. Then, towards the end of the second millennium
BC, people began to forge iron. It was not as hard as bronze (steel
came later) and it rusted, but the mineral was quite abundant and its
geographical occurrences displaced power. Iron may not have been the
only cause but, about the same time, there was a great upheaval
around the Eastern Mediterranean. It was the end of the maritime
empire of Mycenae, Argos and Cnossos, and pirate fleets roamed the
seas as far as Egypt and Canaan.
Metallurgy
transformed production with hoes, ploughs and all the cutting tools,
and it changed warfare and social control. When war passed from
quarrels over tribal territories to conquest and submission, fighting
became à outrance and the occasional prisoner was executed in
a ceremonial manner. (The Aztec soldiers, at the summit of Stone Age
civilisation, were intent on taking captives for their ritual
sacrifices.) However, the metallurgists had such an advantage over
those who did not master the new technologies that the death of
prisoners was commuted to life bondage for them and their
descendants. This superior power could force their enemies to produce
and reproduce for their benefit. To the first division between the
ruling military class and civil society was added a second one
between citizen and slave, and the three tiers system of social
control was instituted. In Rome, the antagonisms opposing patricians
and plebeians were forgotten whenever there were servile rebellions.
During
the original duality of dominion, the ruling minority was permanently
up in arms in direct confrontation. The introduction of slave labour
promoted a middle class that had to choose sides. As slaves were
usually foreign and serfs were very uncouth, the middle sided with
power for a few thousand years. This was facilitated by demography,
as the middle lived in towns while slaves and serfs tilled and mined
the countryside. The change seems to have coincided with and resulted
from the plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century.
It struck at all levels of society and, in fifty years reduced the
population by as much as a third. Part of the land became a
wilderness that could be reclaimed and the depleted towns were in
dire need of labour. The serfs began to move and the structures of
feudal bondage fell down. And there were the first signs of a new
alliance with John Wycliffe’s Lollards, Walter Tyler’s peasants
or Etienne Marcel’s Jacquerie. The next step would be the
Reformation.
The
ruling class controls the forces of coercion, but it needs an
intermediary class to supervise and administer labour. Force is very
hierarchical, with a top down chain of command and obedience as its
highest value. Production and trade cannot function like that. They
only thrive when there is constant invention and perpetual change.
When production is essentially working the land for food, clothing
and shelter, force is sufficient to take a share of wealth. When
production diversifies and trade develops, force must be moderated
for fear of disrupting the commercials flows. Habits die hard,
however, and there was a long bitter struggle for Reform and
Renaissance. The wealth of trade and industry competed with the
wealth of land, and claimed a share of power. The economic and
military opposition turned into an ideological one, and civil wars
broke out across Western Europe. It was mostly an urban rebellion and
only achieved some success in commercial cities, in places such as
Florence, London, Geneva and Amsterdam. Elsewhere it was severely
crushed and historic time was brought almost to a standstill.
The
clash between the proprietors of land and the masters of trade and
industry was an opportunity for the state to assume the role of
arbiter. Monarchs acquired absolute power – in England the
resistance came from parliament and the City of London, in France
from a coalition of provincial nobles and in Spain from no one in
particular – but it was just the beginning of a long process of
state building, of a centralised administration that balanced the
different and often conflicting interests of land, trade and
industry. However, to stand above the mêlée of property, states
were obliged to play a double role, first as demagogues leaning on
the strength of labour, then as protector of property against
labour’s expectations. And the personal frailty of absolute
monarchs was pushed aside by the mass organisation of the total
state. This was inaugurated by a Lord Protector (Oliver Cromwell),
then came Emperors (Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte) and an Iron
Chancellor (Otto von Bismarck), and all the Duces, Caudillos,
Fuhrers, Rais, Little Fathers and Great Helmsmen of the 20th
century. The rise of the state paralleled the rise of labour as a
political force. The demagogues had encouraged the working classes to
flex their muscles and show their vitality, but all that had followed
was repressive ultra-violence and restoration. In an attempt to
overcome this fatal historic recurrence, the 18th and 19th
centuries produced two competing theoretical paths. One considered
that private property of the means of production was the primary
villain, that the state was the coercive instrument for expropriation
and would wither away once communal property was established. The
other considered that the state was the primary villain, that private
property of the means of production would fade away once its coercive
instrument was destroyed.
Utopian
societies have been a philosophic subject at least since Plato.
Rousseau’s social contract was a product of Enlightenment and was
followed by the contemporaneous group of Fichte, Hegel, Owen,
Saint-Simon and Fourier. The first two were educated by state
institutions and became university professors. The third ran a
Scottish textile factory. The fourth was the destitute descendant of
a duke. And the last was the bankrupted son of a wealthy merchant.
All of which seems to have influenced their ideas. Owen, the most
practical, crossed the Atlantic to try a real life experiment at New
Harmony (Indiana). And Fourier’s phalanstery was applied as a
“familistery” by Godin, an industrial ironfounder. However, it
was the next generation who would begin to integrate in their
thinking the new age of machines and industrial capital, and to
highlight a diverging attitude towards the state.
The
Napoleonic wars had so decimated Europe’s male population that, by
the 1840s, those born after outnumbered those born before. Youth felt
the strength of numbers and the opportunity for change. In Berlin,
Young Hegelians were discussing liberalism and atheism (Marx and
Engels would go their own way, as would Stirner). In Paris, Proudhon
was criticising property, and Blanqui was conspiring. Mazzini and
Garibaldi had fled Rome, and London was colonising Australia with and
without chains. The “Springtime of the Peoples” in 1848 saw
popular uprisings sweep across Europe. They were severely repressed
in Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Italy, and only managed a
foothold in Paris and Berlin. Two brief republics and many lives
lost, but a demonstration of the people’s overwhelming power and
the reaction’s unrestrained violence. It focused attention on the
coercive forces of the state and accentuated the division of
revolutionary ideas and practice, with communists insisting on the
necessity of a state apparatus to oppose the reaction of money and
property, and anarchists in favour of its immediate overthrow.
Alongside
their studies of history, ethnology and economics, Marx and Engels
tried to understand how their prediction of a classless society could
actually be realised. They had gone public with the Communist
Manifesto – the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains
– in January 1848, just before the February Revolution in Paris,
when the French people rose up to overthrow their king for the third
and last time, sparking off similar movements in Europe and Latin
America. And, when the reactionary guns had restored order, they were
very critical of the bourgeois politicians who had handed the power
won by the people back the forces of reaction. Revolutions succumbed
because they were unprepared for the violence and did not have the
power to oppose it. So the two exiled friends could only recommend a
worker’s dictatorship “to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie,
to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the
state” (1).
For
Proudhon social change was a bottom up process starting with workers’
associations, not a top down one after a change of government.
Exchanging a bourgeois monarch for a bourgeois republic was not to
his taste. But he was solicited and was elected to the National
Assembly where he remained through the bloody repressions of April
and June 1848, and on to the election of Louis Bonaparte as president
in December. Neither Proudhon nor Stirner were revolutionaries. They
believed in a society of associated free individuals that would have
no need of repressive government structures. “The producer is the
negation of the governor, organisation is not compatible with
authority”. (2) “Government presents itself as the absolute,
necessary, sine qua non condition for order. This is why it always
aspires, behind all its masks, to absolutism. Because, according to
the principle, the stronger the government, the closer order gets to
perfection. These two notions, government and order, would hence have
a relation to one another of cause and effect: the cause being
government and order the effect. (…) But (…) following the
logical classification of ideas, the relationship between government
and order is not of cause to effect, it is that of particular to
general. (…) In other words, there are several ways of considering
order.” (3) “To all socialists anarchy means this: the aim of the
proletarian movement – that is to say the abolition of social
classes – once achieved, the power of the state, which now serves
only to keep the vast majority of producers under the yoke of a small
minority of exploiters, will vanish, and the functions of government
become purely administrative. But to the Alliance it means something
different. It designates anarchy in the ranks of the proletariat as
the infallible means of destroying the powerful concentration
of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. It is
therefore demanding that the International replace its organisation
with anarchy – just at a time when the old world is in any case
trying to destroy it.” (5)
Bakunin
left the Russian army and moved to Berlin in 1841, where he
frequented the circle of Young Hegelians. In 1848, he arrived in
Paris a few days after the republic was proclaimed. The following
year, he participated in the Dresden revolt, was arrested, condemned
to death and sent back to Russia, where he was imprisoned and then
exiled to Siberia. He managed to escape in 1961 and went to London.
In 1864, he was back in Paris visiting Proudhon, who was living the
last months of his life. Stirner had died in 1856 so, after
Proudhon’s death in 1865, Bakunin became the main proselytiser of
anarchist ideals. The reaction to the 1848 revolutions had crushed
the social movements in continental Europe under the reigns of
Léopold, Francis-Joseph, William, Alexander II, Napoleon III &
Co. Except for Switzerland, England and the US, where “liberal”
governments were slightly more tolerant, the socialists were forced
underground. The movement stayed alive, however, and the
International Working Men’s Association based in London, after the
publicity of its second congress (1867), began to unite labour
everywhere. Bakunin joined the Geneva section in 1868 and from there
built his own secret organisation. It was the beginning of his tussle
with Marx, and of the long running battle between party communism and
communist anarchism. “The Marxians maintain that only a
dictatorship, theirs of course, can bring freedom to the people; to
which we reply that no dictatorship can have a finality other than
that of lasting as long as possible, (…) Having taken possession of
the state, he (the proletariat) should, according to us, destroy it
immediately, as the eternal prison of the proletarian masses;
however, according to Mr Marx’s theory, the people should not only
not destroy the state, but they should on the contrary strengthen it,
make it even more powerful and, in that form, leave it at the
disposition of their benefactors, of their tutors and educators, in a
word, at the disposition of Mr Marx and his friends.” (4)
The
last two decades of the 19th century and the first of the
20th were a period of intense imperial activity, when the
great African interior was carved up by the major European powers.
Diplomatically resolved confrontations only occurred in Sudan and
Morocco, so that all the soldiers and guns were used exclusively
against the local populations. President Monroe’s prohibition of
European interventions in the Americas brought war with Spain and the
military occupation of Cuba and the Philippines. Meanwhile, in the
industrial centres of Europe and America, labour continued its
struggle by organising national and international associations. The
rift between state and anti-state partisans widened. And, within the
pro-state camp, the social democrats, who believed parliamentary
democracy could bring about social change, opposed the revolutionary
socialists, who believed that a worker’s dictatorship would be
necessary. Kautsky confronted Lenin in a battle of ideas. These
quarrels over strategy did not stop labour from acting independently,
and the multiple actions decided by the actors favoured the
principles of anarchy. Kropotkin and Malatesta added substance to the
concept, and anarcho-syndicalism developed, especially in Italy and
Spain. There was also a rise in lone-wolf terrorism. As social
tensions increased, social control was ever less effective. At the
approach of August 1914, the tension was so high that putting labour
in uniform and have it kill itself en masse was a satisfactory
solution for governments and capitalist exploiters everywhere. And
the ultimate violence of war overshadowed the ordinary violence of
exploitation for four years.
The
War was a general mobilisation of nations, and very few had the
courage and convictions to resist. Those who did were executed,
incarcerated or found refuge in neutral countries. Switzerland, at
the heart of Europe, was the main sanctuary. Lenin had gone to Geneva
in 1900 after his Siberian sojourn. He went back there in 1907 and
did a lot of reading and writing. The “dress rehearsal” of 1905
had shown the lack of a practical plan. Theory had to become
practice. Prepared in Switzerland, written in Finland and published
in Russia in 1918, State and Revolution attacked Kautsky and the
parliamentary socialists, and surveyed Marx’s arguments for a
proletarian dictatorship of factory workers, farm labourers and
soldiers. Following which, “Under socialism much of “primitive”
democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in
the history of civilised society the mass of population will rise to
taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but
also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all
will govern in turn and will soon (sic) become accustomed to no one
governing.” (6) In April 1917 Trotsky and Volin were in New York,
and Trotsky had this to say: “Like us you are revolutionaries. Like
you we are anarchists, in the long run. Except that you want to
install your anarchism straight away, without transition or
preparation. Whereas we, the Marxists, we do not believe it is
possible to “jump” by one leap into the libertarian kingdom. We
foresee a transitory period during which the ground for an anarchist
society will be cleared and grubbed by using political power that is
anti-bourgeois: the proletarian dictatorship exercised by the
proletarian party in power.”(7) And, in June 1918, Makhno met Lenin
in Moscow. Lenin accused the anarchists of dividing the proletarian
forces and opening the way for the counter-revolution. Makhno denied
it hotly and Lenin concluded: “I meant to say that anarchists lack
mass organisations, do not have the capacity to organise the
proletariat and the poor peasants and, as a consequence, to rise them
up in defence, in the wide sense of the term, of what we have all
conquered and is so dear to us.”(8)
The
corruptive effects of power are clearly visible everywhere,
throughout history. But the coercive power of might is just as
obvious. To defeat the forces that maintain the hierarchy of wealth,
even greater forces are required. The mercenary state’s
organisation must be confronted by an organisation with the power to
overthrow it. In 1871, the Paris insurgents were backed by the
National Guard and failed. In 1917, the St Petersburg insurgents were
backed by the soldiers’ soviets and succeeded. The National Guard
was just a civilian militia, but the French army had been badly
mauled by the Prussians in 1970, which gave a brief advantage to the
Commune. The soldiers’ soviets were already running the Russian
navy and most of the army. They were beginning their fourth year of
butchery on the Eastern Front and were quite accustomed to the use of
force. The soldiers’ soviets were the force that insured the
insurgency’s success. The October revolution ousted a puppet
government and gave power to the Bolsheviks. The difficult part was
constraining the provinces and their foreign support. And the process
has a closer resemblance to the French bourgeois revolution of 1789
than to the worker’s commune of 1871. As for the consequences, one
can only imagine what France and Europe would be to-day, if First
Consul Bonaparte had decided on a policy of “republic in only one
country” instead of world conquest.
The
power of a centralised state machine has to be in place before it can
be dismantled. Its strength is its centralisation, which results in a
concentration of power and wealth. The societies that emerge, when
the bonds of feudalism are broken, are strong and expansive. They are
nationalistic because that is the only social bond they have to
cement their hierarchal dominion. And they are continually at war
against interior and exterior enemies who threaten the nation’s
existence. Nationalism transcends all distinctions, rich and poor,
native and immigrant, pale and dark, everyone can be brought to feel
an aggressive attachment to the place where they live and work. The
centralised states build nations by uniformising geographical space
and its inhabitants. It is a difficult and usually violent
standardisation of customs and language, always in opposition to the
rest of the world. This question of what and who belongs to a
particular nation has been very destructive and continues to be so in
places where the question is still unresolved, and those nations that
have settled their borders and citizenship are facing the turmoil of
global migrations.
The
Paris commune failed because it did not control military power and
its urban militia could not defeat a professional army. This
situation has repeated itself since, one thinks of Allende’s
popular government in Chile and, much more recently, Morsi’s Moslem
alliance in Egypt. In 1929, that is after the Spartacist uprising,
the Kronstadt rebellion and Makhno’s defeat, Berkman had placed the
question of a forceful revolution in a modern context.
“How
do you imagine a revolution could be fought in these days of armoured
tanks, poison gas and military planes? Do you believe that the
unarmed masses and their barricades could withstand high-power
artillery and bombs thrown upon them from flying machines? Could
labour fight the military forces of government and capital?
It’s
ridiculous on the face of it, isn’t it? And no less ridiculous is
the suggestion that the workers should form their own regiments,
“shock troops”, or a “red front”, as the Communist parties
advise you to do. Will such proletarian bodies ever be able to stand
up against the trained armies of the government and the private
troops of capital? Will they have the least chance?
Such
a proposition needs only to be stated to be seen in all its
impossible folly. It would simply mean sending thousands of workers
to a certain death.
It
is time to have done with this obsolete idea of revolution. Nowadays
governments and capital are too well organised in a military way for
the workers ever to be able to cope with them. It would be criminal
to attempt it, insanity even to think of it.
The
strength of labour is not in the field of battle. It is the shop, in
the mine and factory. There lies the power that no army in the world
can defeat, no human agency conquer.” (9)
But
ideas die hard and, a few years later, Emma Goldman who should have
known better was encouraging the CNT-FAI to fight in Spain. And since
then the legend of armed rebellion has persisted in movements such as
the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction, the Red
Brigades, Direct action, the Tupamaros, et cetera, and more recently
with the vast constellation of organisations that have close or
distant links to Al Q. Labour cannot overthrow the coercive power of
the state, and controlling it an illusion. However, labour can, and
potentially does, control the production and consumption of wealth,
and armies have always marched “on their stomachs”.
Up
until now, communications have been naturally centralised. The paper
press, radio and TV function centre outwards. Ideas, information and
organisations were obliged to adopt the same pattern. The web is
destroying this form of diffusion, and is replacing it with
transversal contacts and lateral thinking. The associates have always
been beaten by the dictators, because the technology diffused ideas,
goods and services from the centre to the periphery. The military
model of command coincided with the means of communication, one
orders many obey, one writes many read, one speaks many listen and
see. A very ancient order is being made obsolete by the inter-network
where all exchange with all in a global agora. Information technology
is revolutionising human societies as it takes the place of all the
previous channels used to shape ideas and provoke actions. The
controllers are fighting back, trying to regain the hold they had
over education, publishing and the air waves, but the genie is out of
the bottle and his transformative powers are a disruption of history.
Writing produced the graffiti and printing the pamphlet, but social
media and the blogosphere have the unprecedented global potential to
break central control of ideas and commands. There remains the hard
core of constraint and property, of defence and security agencies,
and of land, money and machines.
The
last quarter century has seen capital investment multiply very fast,
but the subprime debacle was the first sign of a production bubble,
where supply had outstripped solvent demand. The resulting recession
is concentrating property into fewer hands, as the big fish swallow
the smaller fry. It is also impacting state budgets. The state
justifies itself as a purveyor of social order for property and of
social protection for labour. Austerity reduces its capacity to
fulfil this double task. And, as its first fealty is to property, it
cuts back on social protection and increases social coercion. Reduced
revenues and huge interest-paying debts are forcing even the
demagogues to show their real colours. The state is property’s tool
for maintaining order, with the soft power of welfare and the naked
power of guns. As funds are cut, the lost power of the first is taken
up by the second, as the carrot gets smaller the stick beats harder
to compensate. Usually, up until now, this has been the road to
ultra-violence and military/police regimes. And it was possible
because the constraining forces were set apart from the rest of
society, by uniforms, barracks, a professional use of weapons with
the license to kill, and an esprit de corps, a sense of belonging
along with the reinforced propensity to obey orders. In Alice
Miller’s words, “When someone turns up who speaks and acts like
his father, even an adult forgets his democratic rights and stops
applying them, he submits to this person, applauds him, lets himself
be manipulated by him, grants him full confidence, finally giving
himself completely up to him without realising the bondage he has
fallen into, because one does not notice things that are a
continuation of one’s own childhood.” (10) The coercive forces
are formed in academies that exalt competitive elitism. They learn
the strategies and tactics of violence, how to apply it and how to
defend against it, just as others might learn to build bridges or
grow potatoes. These armed forces are an essential part of the state
structure. They give it the power to constrain at home and abroad.
Without them, the state is reduced to an administrative body and,
being unable to enforce them, loses its judiciary and legislative
prerogatives. With them, the state is unassailable. They cannot be
countered by fire power but they can be subverted by ideas, and their
world is no longer hermetically set aside by walls and sentries, as
the Hertzian messages pass over them unseen.
Property
is nothing without labour to make it fructify, just as the state is
nothing without foot-soldiers to pull the triggers. And the collusion
between property and state can be countered by the association of
labour with the foot-soldiers of security. State and property have a
common interest in maintaining their extreme hierarchies. But the
hands that wield the tools and the guns have just as strong an
interest in reducing those structures to a common weal, so that
wealth and force serve the many, not a privileged few.
1.
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Political
Writings 1, page 86, Verso 2010
2.
Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIXème siècle
Anthologie
de l’Anarchisme, tome I, page 94, la Découverte 1999
3.
Ibidem, page 96
4.
“Marxian” was the term used by Bakunin at the time.
Ibidem,
pages 242 & 243
5.
The alleged splits in the International
Political
Writings 3, page 314, Verso 2010
6.
State and Revolution, chapter VI, section 3
7.
The Unknown Revolution, unpublished “conclusion”
Anthologie
de l’Anarchisme, tome II, page 145
8.
The Russian Revolution in Ukraine
Ibidem,
page 176
9.
The ABC of Communist Anarchism, page 229, Red and Black Publishers
10.
C’est pour ton bien (For your own good), chapter VI, page 95,
Aubier 1984
