Anarchism, the Afterbirth of Liberalism

Many workers, who know little about anarchism, regard it as a movement related to communism or standing closest to it, standing to its left, and so on; it is therefore necessary to clarify these fatal errors.

The classical works of anarchism emerged a hundred years ago; in them is expressed the hatred of the rising bourgeoisie—struggling for freedom of trade and commerce—against the rigid feudal state, which suppressed every liberty and rested on authority, violence, and religion. While liberalism, the great intellectual creation of the flourishing bourgeoisie, merely sought to tear out the feudal fetters of idols and reduce the state to the role of a “night watchman,” whose only task was to protect the moneybags; while liberalism wanted to humanize authority and morality, to rationalize religion, to reduce it to its “reasonable” (i.e. useful to the bourgeoisie) moral content—anarchism adds a crisis-ridden element: business is already prospering less, one refuses to think and bangs the fist on the table: the state must go entirely, no society should exist at all, no authority and no domination, no binding of the individual—I am I, and the others can go hang! This is the standpoint developed by Max Stirner in his work The Ego and Its Own—crass bourgeois egoism, liberalism made vulgar. Dripping with blood and sweat from every pore, the bourgeoisie steps onto the stage of history; its cry for “freedom” means nothing other than: down with all restraints of tradition, morality, custom, and law, we want to act and exploit freely to the point of unconsciousness; down with noble oppression—long live the bourgeois! The theory of the violent demolition of all feudal barriers of authority, the theory of the bourgeois revolution—that is anarchism.

The old anarchists, who cleared crowned heads out of the way with bombs and daggers, at least still had marrow in their bones—though in truth they only freed the thrones for the broad behinds of the bourgeoisie. By contrast, how far their descendants of today have fallen, those who reject violence and busy themselves only with enlightenment, instruction, raw food, vasectomy, and the like—gnawing at the breadline of the intellect—is recently proven by a pamphlet Thoughts on Anarchy by St. Ch. Waldecke. Strictly speaking, anarchism has no such thing as a program, since its principle is that every person should be a fool on their own account. But the author does bring out very well the basic ideas and principles of “rulelessness,” and for that reason we shall carefully examine the pamphlet.

Anarchy is absolute nonviolence; it cannot be introduced by force or imposed on anyone. Only when everyone is an anarchist does the thing truly begin. “Perhaps I can prevent someone from ruling over me, but as long as I must force him not to, it is still not anarchy.” From there it is but one step to the Christian teaching: resist not evil, and turn the other cheek. But one can already begin here on earth. Rebellion or revolution is not necessary; wherever there are anarchists, they can begin with anarchy at once. “Here, then, and now is the time to begin.”

And what about production and the economy? Nothing may be dominant—so not even communism. Some have not yet realized that the most authoritarian parties, no matter whether they are supposedly on the right or the left, are precisely those the anarchist must most fiercely fight—for example, the National Socialists and the Marxist communists. The state party, however, is probably still the most sympathetic to the anarchist. To fight communism—that, of course, already means arrogating authority to oneself! “Whoever capitulates before the idea of the councils is no anarchist at all.” And the anarchist leader says it bluntly: “Anarchism does not even have a class-struggle character in the Marxist sense.” The author is so historically and politically unscrupulous, and at the same time so well-versed in anarchism, that with his mistaken points he inadvertently makes clear the bourgeois character of this fossilized “movement” itself, showing that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the proletarian movement of our own time. He himself says: “The older liberalism of a Jefferson, Paine, Diderot, etc.—who saw the state as an evil, unfortunately a necessary one, but still as an evil that had to be pushed back as far as possible—stands closer to the idea of anarchism than do democrats, social democrats, and class fighters for dictatorship.” The proletarian dictatorship, to him, is perhaps even more repugnant than the bourgeois class state. So then what anarchism actually is, is hard to say: since no one may be forced to hold a particular opinion, the best thing would be not to open one’s mouth at all. If someone says: anarchism is a cowshed, the true anarchist must not contradict him—for that would already be authority and terror against freedom of opinion. Of course, any solution to social questions—even if it were objectively the correct one—would, without the consent of every single member of society, be a wholly un-anarchistic act. So in the meantime capitalism must continue, unless and until every single capitalist declares for the communist society! And such a thing dares to stand “to the left of communism”!! In democracy 51% rules; in anarchy you need 100%. So it is by 49% more idiotic. A world economy, of course, does not enter Herr Waldecke’s mind—that would be too large an organization. Everything must be broken down into tiny fragments: a little individualism, a dash of communism, then wait for experiences and make use of them. “Personally, I am more strongly impressed by the individualist ideas of Stirner, perhaps also of St. P. Andrews and G. Landauer, yet I fully believe in the possibility of a communism that does not impair freedom, within narrower circles, on the basis of close human relations, and I have myself already lived it.” At last we learn how little Morita imagines communism! A few families in neighboring allotment gardens live communism, a few others live capitalism, and the whole business is anarchy! So let us smash the world into nothing but Robinson islands, and then everyone can sit on the shore, with Max Stirner in his left hand and a fishing rod in his right, to catch himself a fish—and Marxism is finally killed off!

Anarchism is a stagnant “movement”; it has been dead since the bourgeois revolution and is therefore historically blind. It does not see the turning of the ages, the collapse of individualism. It keeps droning on with its hundred-year-old refrain of individual freedom—while what we need is not “freedom,” but organization; not looseness and individualism, but the deepest fusion, subordination, and concentration of all forces into socialist planned economy. In place of the “Unique” comes society; in place of the I, the We. It is not “freedom” we want—that already exists in the capitalist state, where everyone can do and leave off as they please, go wherever they wish, and just as well perish however and wherever they will. No—our slogan is not individual “freedom,” but social cohesion!