What is anarchism?

Anarchism is a philosophical movement opposed to all authority; therefore, it advocates the conquest of liberty collective. It is therefore both a desire to reappropriate and toempowerment ; to appropriate one's freedom and to exercise it by refusing all submission. However, refusing authority does not mean refusing order, but rather refusing the order that is arbitrarily imposed by men on other men in the form ofexploitative.

Thus, anarchism naturally wants the abolition of the State, and more generally of all coercive institutions such as capitalism, the army, the police, religion. However, this desire to abolish forms of power should not be confused with a refusal to live in society. It is about allowing people to organize themselves freely on the basis ofMutual aid And of the Direct democracy.

Anarchism, although it has the suffix —Ismo (characteristic of ideologies, doctrines and dogmas) is antidogmatic. He advocates the autonomy of conscience with respect to the notions of “morality”, “good”, “evil” as conveyed by power. The concept of dignity (respect that one owes to oneself) nevertheless plays an important place in anarchist ethics. Since the other is considered to be a mirror of the self, their dignity must also be respected. This emphasis on dignity is in fact twinned with that given to freedom. The oppression inflicted by the State and its institutions, at the same time as it deprives them of freedom, deprives men of their dignity. A slave is not only one whose freedom is denied, but whose dignity is perpetually violated.

The most famous symbol of anarchism is the black flag. Originally a component of the labor movement and of the International Workers' Association (whose emblem is the red flag), the anarchist movement adopted this flag as early as 1865, representing in its own way the mourning of freedoms.

The main thinkers of anarchism

Anarchism, bearing within it the seed of a variety of opinions, is characterized not by a common doctrine but by a plurality of currents, unanimously based on the rejection of exploitation and imposed authority.

Proudhon (1809-1865)

Deeply marked by his peasant origins and his attachment to nature, this precursor of anarchism, whose pole of thought is justice as a driving force for historical progress, summarized things this way. “No revolution can succeed if it is not FAIR [The People of February 19, 1849]. By justice, as far as a revolution is concerned, I mean the ability it must have to develop according to its principle, in parallel with established ideas, institutions and rights, without affecting these rights, without violating these institutions, without contradicting these ideas, without contradicting these ideas, which, however, it is in its essence to convert and abolish.” So we can see that the revolution as he understood it was non-violent but subversive.

Despite the density of his work, he was able to summarize his thoughts as follows:

“the Revolution, in the 19th century, had a double purpose:

1° In the economic order, it pursues the complete subordination of capital to labor, the identification of the worker and the capitalist, through the democratization of credit, the annihilation of interest, the reduction to equal and truthful exchange of all transactions that have as their object the instruments of work and products. From this point of view, we were the first to point out, and we said, that henceforth there were only two parties in France: the Labor Party, and the Capital Party.

2° In the political order, the Revolution aims to absorb the State into society, that is to say, to proceed with the cessation of all authority, and the suppression of all governmental apparatus, through the abolition of taxation, administrative simplification, the separate centralization of each of the functional categories, in other words, the organization of universal suffrage.

From this point of view again, we say that there are only two parties left in France: the Freedom Party, and the Government Party.” (Voice of the People of December 28, 1849).

Bakunin (1814-1876)

In God and the State, Bakunin sets out a collective vision of freedom, in contrast to the individual freedom of the Enlightenment and gives it supreme importance:

“I am only truly free when all the human beings around me, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of others, far from being a limit or a denial of my freedom, is on the contrary its necessary condition and confirmation. I only truly become free through the freedom of others, so the more free men around me, the more profound and wider their freedom is, and the more extensive, deeper, and wider my freedom becomes. True freedom is not possible without de facto equality (economic, political and social). Freedom and equality can only be found outside the existence of a God outside the world or a state outside the people. The State, Capital and God are the obstacles to be overcome.”

For Bakunin, the takeover of the state by revolutionaries is neither possible nor desirable. Unlike communists, he makes a point of promoting self-management at the lowest level from a federalist perspective, so that power is exercised by the mass of people and not in an authoritarian way, from top to bottom. He writes in Statism and Anarchy :

“I am not a communist because communism concentrates and absorbs all the powers of society in the State, because it necessarily leads to the centralization of property in the hands of the State, while I want the abolition of the State... I want the organization of society and collective or social property from the bottom up through the way of free association, and not from top to bottom, by means of any authority. That be it. That is how I am a collectivist and not a communist at all.”

The life of Bakunin, punctuated by trips across Europe and participation in the revolutionary activities of the 19th century^E century, was at the same time marked by the tendency he had to form secret groups to stir up revolutionary ardor. The members of his organization were devoted, disinterested, “able to serve as intermediaries between revolutionary ideas and popular spontaneity.” His famous organizational dispute with Marx led to the breakup of the International Workers' Association, founded in London in 1864.

Kropotkin (1842-1921)

He is undoubtedly the main theoretician of anarchism who, despite his princely ancestry, knew how to transcend his determinism for the love of freedom and join the anarchist struggles of his time, even if it meant having to immigrate like so many others (to England, Switzerland, Italy, etc.), and to undergo multiple imprisons to continue the fight. Its evolution remains closely linked to that of the French anarchist and syndicalist movement. His economic and political thought is located at the crossroads of the thoughts of Bakunin and Proudhon; from the former he will draw collectivism as a way out of capitalist property; and at the second, by affirming it more, he will take the logic of self-management and the federation of small communities as the basis of social organization. Thus, Kropotkin became the thinker of the alliance between anarchism and communism. Its founding work, namely L'Entraide (1902), constitutes an ethnological and zoological demonstration of the importance of mutual aid in the evolution of species. In this way, attacking the social Darwinism of a Herbert Spencer who was thriving in his time (and not refuting Darwin for all that), Kropotkin provided anarchist theory with a naturalist foundation. It should be noted, however, that his hopes for a release from workplace violence presupposed greater mechanization of work (cf. The conquest of bread, 1892). However, his intelligence forbade him to consider utopias as patterns to be followed strictly, as “a gospel to be taken in its entirety or to be left behind. It is a suggestion, a proposition — nothing more” (preface to How we will make the revolution, by Emile Pouget and Emile Pataud).

Some contemporary anarchist thinkers

Renaud Garcia

Teacher and philosopher, Renaud Garcia has made an impressive entry into the critical landscape with The Desert of Criticism (2015 — L'Échappée). In this important work, the author seeks to dissect contemporary philosophy, especially post-structuralist philosophy (embodied by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault), by demonstrating the intrinsically delusional nature of deconstruction, which refuses any notion of the common to engage the individual in vain struggles — authorized and supervised by liberal and technological power. Becoming more assimilated to the Naturian anarchist movement, Renaud Garcia continued his work with The Sense of Limits (2018 — L'Échappée) in order to determine where the fight against capitalist and technological abstraction, responsible for an attack on a fundamental character of living beings: the limit, should take place. Practicing the refusal to succeed, Garcia has also distinguished himself by eminent works on the theory of evolution by Kropotkin, peasant socialism or the all too unknown naturian anarchists.

Aurélien Berlan

Aurélien Berlan is a gardener and a doctoral student in philosophy. After his authorization to conduct research, he made the choice to settle in the countryside in order to combine beliefs and practices of a declining lifestyle. Teacher at the University of Toulouse, contributor to the Marcuse Group (including the excellent Freedom in a coma released by his friends in La Lenteur in 2013), Aurélien Berlan published The Factory of the Last Men at La DéCOUVERTE in 2012.

Heir to Simone Weil, Berlan dissociates two concepts of freedom in his master work Land and Freedom. Freedom: autonomy, the result of anarchism, which consists in living from working the land by producing your own means of subsistence. And freedom of deliverance, resulting from liberalism, consisting in making the production of the material necessities of life rely on others (employees, serfs, women, servants, slaves, machines) to produce the material necessities of life, considered uncomfortable. It is of course the second conception that is winning out today, even in an environment that is allegedly immune to techno-progressivism such as green anarchism.

Inspired by Chiapas, Aurélien Berlan also criticizes the belief in a revolution through small individual actions (petitions, recycling and other short showers).

Is anarchism right-wing or left-wing?

Although coming from the labor movement and having, in so doing, a certain kinship with it, the anarchist movement refused to participate in elections, identifying early on that the elected representatives of the fairest camp would quickly take advantage of the advantages of their function to form a separate class. Despite its certain relationship with socialism, it would therefore be inappropriate to add an adjective such as “left” or “right” to anarchism, since it refuses the parliamentary categories imposed by the State. Anecdotally, there may have existed on the fringes a “right-wing” anarchism, or “aristocratic anarchism”, but whose presence was limited to the strict literary level.

The State, the natural enemy of society

A recurring commonplace is to say that the state is society, and vice versa. Thus maintaining the illusion that it is impossible to organize socially without the tutelage of a higher organization, this error of thought hides thousands of years of history and human realities. It is to fight against this misconception that thinkers like Tocqueville wrote and acted (in The Old Regime and the Revolution), Pierres Clastres (in Society against the State, and in his anthropology work), Bernard Charbonneau (in The State, it shows the danger that the State poses to the individual, society and nature), James C. Scott, Kropotkin, etc.

Indeed, most hunter-gatherer tribes knew how to organize without a state, as did France before the monarchical conquest or the smallest village community on the surface of the world. Taking control of its destiny as a group, making the decisions necessary for its survival by exercising its freedom in practice, is what the State deprives of.

Anarchist revolutions in history

The Paris Commune

In September 1870, in a context of war with Prussia, the city of Paris was besieged. Winter, murderous for the working classes, carries with it the wind of revolt. Famine and the humiliation of the armistice brought together patriots and anarchists on March 18, 1871 to proclaim the insurrectional commune of Paris. Although opposing Germans and Versailles, democratic and social measures were quickly applied (direct democracy, abolition of the death penalty, suspension of the payment of debts and rents, freedom of the press, creation of a women's battalion, etc.). But the theoretical and material weapons of the Communards are insufficient: doubts about the need for elected military leaders and second-hand rifles do not mix in order to defend the revolution strategically. On May 21, 1871, Adolphe Thiers's troops entered Paris with the complicity of the Prussian army (which was nevertheless an enemy). During what history will call Blood Week, 20,000 revolutionaries will be massacred by a leftist.

Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936 — 1 April 1939) pitted the camp of the republicans (composed of loyalists to the government of the Second Republic, communists, Marxists and anarchist revolutionaries) against the camp of nationalists led by General Franco. This war ended with the victory of the nationalists and the establishment of the Franco dictatorship.

After a failed military coup attempt in July 1936, the revolution began. Seeing the armed workers, many bosses flee or join the nationalist camp. In reaction, the population carried out a whole series of seizures in order to collectivization: the working population seized businesses (70% of them in Catalonia, 50% in the Valencia region), and established control over the others; the peasants collectivized 3/4 of the land; the property of the Church was seized; the property of the Church was seized, the convents were transformed into refectories, schools, etc.; in place of legal power, a a new power is being put in place, that of trade unions and left-wing parties in order to organize militias against nationalists, reorganize transport, supply cities, redirect factory production.

Among these militias, one particularly stands out: the Durutti column, led by Buenaventura Durutti (as general delegate), an anarchist column composed of 2,500 to 3,000 militiamen. Durutti first distinguished himself by victoriously opposing the nationalists in Barcelona at the time of the failed coup of July 18, 1936. On July 24, at the head of his column, he joined the Aragon front. During this campaign, he encouraged the collectivization of land and the creation of the Regional Defense Council of Aragon. He is opposed to the militarization of the militias and to the participation of the CNT-FAI in the government. On November 13, he and his column were called to defend Madrid; he died 6 days later.

The Anarchist Revolution in Ukraine

During the clashes resulting from the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, and more particularly following the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the supporters of tsarism and the Austro-German armies committed numerous crimes in Ukraine. The resistance is organized in particular around Nestor Makhno, a peasant. Author of several texts, including the Platform, on the necessary organizational discipline in an anarchist environment, the young strategist created self-defense militias, for volunteer soldiers and officers elected by revocatory mandates. Military leader of an army of 50,000 peasants on a front of more than 1,000 kilometers, Makhno saved the Bolshevik troops several times (a military ally although an ideological opponent). The Makhnovtchina revolutionaries successfully repelled the Russian-Ukrainian reaction and the Austro-German occupiers by a popular guerrilla war in tatchanka, a combat vehicle equipped with a machine gun and towed by 1 to 4 horses.

When their insurrectional army liberated a municipality, it proposed the establishment of direct democracy. If peasants accepted it, they then tended to organize themselves according to Kropotkin's egalitarian principles: land was owned jointly, kitchens collectively self-managed, and the police abolished. The Anarchist Revolution then included several hundred thousand people.

The libertarian Ukraine of the Makhnovists was finally declared illegal by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Like the sailors of Kronstadt, they will be crushed in blood by their former allies.

The Mexican Revolution and the Zapatista Revolt in Chiapas

Mexican Revolution (1910)

During the twenty-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, a landowner convinced by the democratic ideal, Francisco Madero, wrote an appeal for revolt in November 1910. In May 1911, Madero replaced Díaz as head of state. He then quickly came up against peasant revolts. Led in particular by Pancho Villa or the famous Emiliano Zapata, they demand a reform against the privatization of land. Madero betrayed his promises to Zapata in August 1911, who then resumed the armed insurrection against successive autocrats (Madero, Huerta, Carranza and his American allies) before being assassinated in 1915. His troops, reformists, would then join the state army against a Constitution considered more social, between 1917 and 1920.

Zapatista revolt in Chiapas (1994)

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) is a Guevarist movement that has drawn closer to anarchism through contact with indigenous Mexicans. It became internationally known on January 1, 1994, by seizing several cities in Chiapas, the most precarious region in the country. This spectacular guerrilla war was launched on the day the NAFTA free trade treaty was applied, undermining the local peasantry in favor of American industry. The movement, named after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, capitalized on liberation theology and the unpopularity of the government to obtain a ceasefire. As with Makhno and Durruti, peasants and workers understand on the ground that autonomy can be defended militarily, with a minimum of logistical centralization. Here too, the army is based on volunteering. Like Spain and Ukraine, and despite constant attempts at repression, liberated municipalities have since been experimenting with land collectivization, self-sufficiency and direct democracy.

The cult of technosciences among anarchists

Faced with vital needs combined with the need to put an end to exploitation, anarchist theorists have very often spoken out in favor of the mechanization of work (Kropotkin) and scientific progress (Malatesta) — seeing these only as ways to reduce the workload on human beings. To quote Emile Gravelle in a newspaper text The naturian (published in 1898): revolutionaries (communists, socialists, anarchists) “attack men while it is the material system of existence that is ferocious”. In the end, as long as there is a system based on the frenzied exploitation of resources (including human resources), no social change is possible.

Logically, this attraction to industry and mechanization (perceived as the only means of us dispense of the constraint of having to work to meet our basic needs) has continued with the affirmation of advanced technologies. We do not believe it necessary to emphasize that a technology whose existence requires the total exhaustion of mineral resources, atrocious pollution, and endlessly perpetuated slavery cannot decently serve any anarchist project.

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