Anarchism by Peter Kropotkin

Author:Peter Kropotkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486119861
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE ANARCHIST IDEAL AND THE PRECEDING REVOLUTIONS

Anarchism originated, as has already been said, from the demands of practical life.

At the time of the great French Revolution of 1789-1793, Godwin had the opportunity of himself seeing how the govermental authority created during the revolution and by the revolution itself acted as a retarding force upon the revolutionary movement. And he knew too what was then taking place in England, under cover of Parliament,—the confiscation of public lands, the kidnapping of poor workhouse children by factory agents and their deportation to weavers’ mills, where they perished wholesale. He understood that a government, even the government of the “One and Undivided” Jacobinist Republic would not bring about the necessary revolution; that the revolutionary government itself, from the very fact of its being a guardian of the State, and of the privileges every State has to defend, was an obstacle to emancipation; that to insure the success of the revolution, people ought to part, first of all, with their belief in law, authority, uniformity, order, property, and other superstitions inherited by us from our servile past. And with this purpose in view he wrote Political justice.

The theorist of anarchism who followed Godwin—Proudhon—had himself lived through the Revolution of 1848 and had seen with his own eyes the crimes perpetrated by the revolutionary republican government, and the impotence of state socialism. Fresh from the impressions of what he had witnessed, Proudhon penned his admirable works, A General Idea of the Social Revolution and Confessions of a Revolutionist, in which he boldly advocated the abolition of the State and proclaimed anarchism.

And finally the idea of anarchism reappeared again in the International Working Men’s Association, after the revolution that was attempted in the Paris Commune of 1871. The eyes of many were opened by the complete failure of the Council of the Commune and its incapacity to act as a revolutionary body—although it consisted, in due proportion, of representatives of every revolutionary faction of the time—and, on the other hand, by the incapacity of the London General Council of the International and its ludicrous and even harmful pretension to direct the Paris insurrection by orders sent from England. They led many members of the International, including Bakunin, to reflect upon the harmfulness of every kind of authority, of government—even when it had been as freely elected as that of the Commune and the International Working Men’s Association. A few months later the resolution, passed by the same General Council of the Association at a secret conference held in London in 1871 instead of at an annual congress, made the dangers of having a government in the International still more evident. By this dire revolution they decided to turn the entire labor movement into another channel and to convert it from an economic revolutionary movement—from a direct struggle of the workingmen’s organizations against capitalism—into an elective parliamentary and political movement. This decision led to open revolt on the part of the Italian, Spanish, Swiss, and partly also of

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