Quotes come from this book:
Chapter 1
If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teacher, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of the labouring masses.
So, since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order.
Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.
Chapter 2
What is government? The metaphysical tendency which in spite of the blows it has suffered at the hands of positive science still has a strong hold on the minds of people today, so much so that many look upon government as a moral institution with a number of given qualities of reason, justice, equity which are independent of the people who are in office. For them government, and in a more vague way, the State, is the abstract social power; it is the ever abstract representative of the general interest; it is the expression of the rights of all considered as the limits of the rights of each individual. And this way of conceiving of government is encouraged by the interested parties who are concerned that the principle of authority should be safeguarded and that it should always survive the shortcomings and the mistakes committed by those who follow one another in the exercise of power.
Call us out, why don't you. But seriously, this feels so... relevant more than a hundred years later, and it feels even more timely and prescient because this has been something that we've been fighting for far too long. The government cannot and will never care about us; that's not its purpose, and we should see that now if we didn't before.
But what reason is there for the existence of government? Why give up one’s personal liberty and initiative to a few individuals? Why give them this power to take over willy nilly the collective strength to use as they wish? Are they so exceptionally gifted as to be able to demonstrate with some show of reason their ability to replace the mass of the people and to safeguard the interests, all the interests, of everybody better than the interested parties themselves? Are they infallible and incorruptible to the point that one could, with some semblance of prudence, entrust the fate of each and all to their knowledge and to their goodness?
And even if men of infinite goodness and knowledge existed, and even supposing, what has never been observed in history, that governmental power were to rest in the hands of the most able and kindest among us, would government office add anything to their beneficial potential? Or would it instead paralyse and destroy it by reason of the necessity men in government have of dealing with so many matters which they do not understand, and above all of wasting their energy keeping themselves in power, their friends happy, and holding in check the malcontents as well as subduing the rebels?
Furthermore, however good or bad, knowledgeable or stupid the governors may be, who will appoint them to their exalted office? Do they impose themselves by right of conquest, war or revolution? But in that case what guarantee has the public that they will be inspired by the general good? Then it is a clear question of a coup d’état and if the victims are dissatisfied the only recourse open to them is that of force to shake off the yoke. Are they selected from one particular class or party? In which case the interests and ideas of that class or party will certainly triumph, and the will and the interests of the others will be sacrificed. Are they elected by universal suffrage? But in that case the only criterion is in numbers, which certainly are proof neither of reason, justice nor ability. Those elected would be those most able to deceive the public; and the minority, which can well be the other half minus one, would be sacrificed. And all this without taking into account that experience has demonstrated the impossibility of devising an electoral machine where the successful candidates are at least the real representatives of the majority.
I love the framing of all of this as questions. Questions are a great way to push people into thinking about the situation they're in. Hell, this is a great way to even make anarchists think about their own beliefs.
Also, I just think this is a beautifully written piece.
Chapter 3
This is the theory; but if theories are to be valid they must be based on facts and explain them — and one knows only too well that in social economy too often are theories invented to justify the facts, that is to defend privilege and make it palatable to those who are its victims. Let us instead look at the facts.
The basic function of government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and its principal, characteristic and indispensable, instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler — to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.
A government cannot maintain itself for long without hiding its true nature behind a pretence of general usefulness; it cannot impose respect for the lives of privileged people if it does not appear to demand respect for all human life, it cannot impose acceptance of the privileges of the few if it does not pretend to be the guardian of the rights of all.
A government cannot want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class would be deprived of the sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to maintain itself without official intervention, for then the people would soon realise that government serves only to defend the property owners who keep them in conditions of starvation, and they would hasten to rid themselves of both the government and the property owners.
Despite all this, the nature of government does not change. If it assumes the role of controller and guarantor of the rights and duties of everyone, it perverts the sentiment of justice; it qualifies as a crime and punishes every action which violates or threatens the privileges of the rulers and the property owners, and declares as just and legal the most outrageous exploitation of the poor, the slow and sustained material and moral assassination perpetrated by those who have, at the expense of those who have not. If it appoints itself as the administrator of public services, again, as always, it looks after the interests of the rulers and the property owners and does not attend to those of the working people except where it has to because the people agree to pay. If it assumes the role of teacher, it hampers the propagation of truth and tends to prepare the minds and the hearts of the young to become either ruthless tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of government everything becomes a means for exploitation, everything becomes a policing institution, useful only for keeping the people in check.
Reminds me of this AJ Muste quote about labour education.
Chapter 4
The principle of each for himself, which is the war of all against all, arose in the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyse the war of all against nature for the greatest wellbeing of mankind which can be completely successful only by being based on the principle of all for one and one for all.
So therefore if the oppressed masses were to refuse to work for others, and were to take over the land and the instruments of work from the landowners, or were to want to use them on their own account or for their own benefit, that is the benefit of all, if they were to decide never again to put up with domination and brute force, nor with economic privilege, and if the sentiment of human solidarity, strengthened by a community of interests, were to have put an end to wars and colonialism — what justification would there be for the continued existence of government?
Once private property has been abolished, government which is its defender must disappear. If it were to survive it would tend always to re-establish a privileged and oppressing class in one guise or another.
Chapter 5
The list of proposed questions never seems to change. Anarchists are often met with the same list. I know I've been asked all of these a dozen times:
- Who would organise and guarantee, if there were no government, food supplies, distribution, health services, the post and telegraph services and the railways, etc.?
- Who would look after public education?
- Who would undertake those vast exploratory projects, land drainage schemes, scientific research, which transform the face of the earth and increase Man’s power a hundredfold?
- Who would watch over the conservation and development of social wealth to pass it on enriched and improved for future generations?
- Who would have a mandate to prevent and punish crime, that is anti-social actions?
- And what of those who fall short of the law of solidarity and don’t want to work? And those who were to spread disease in a country and refused to take the kinds of hygienic precautions recognised as useful by science?
- And supposing there were some people, sane or insane, who wanted to set fire to the harvest, sexually assault children, or take advantage of their strength to assault the weak?
And it's just... I get why people ask these questions, but they are questions to which there are no good answers. No one has good answers, and the State most certainly has no good answers. But to be able to say that you don't know? Is a strength.
"Who would organise the distribution of necessary resources?" I don't know, but I'm certain we have pre-capitalism (and even pre-feudalism) models that we could look towards for inspiration. We could look at how many small villages have organised distribution of necessary resources, we could look at how the BPP tried to organise resources... there are models. We have some templates to adapt. They exist. But those models cannot look the same for everyone (unless they just so happen to work for everyone, which is unlikely).
"Who would look after public education?" Why would we leave education as it is? Schools are not for genuine education; they are not for genuine learning... And there are people who care about learning (adults and kids alike) who will and can work together to build those spaces. Again, they do not need to look the same as everywhere else! We have templates, we have models, we have ideas... we need space.
And when people ask "who will protect you if there are no cops" have never been left unprotected by the cops. They do not know what it's like to go to the cops because you're terrified that you'll be murdered by someone in your own family, with evidence of them saying they will do so, and to be told by them that they can't help unless you're dead. They do not know what it's like to go to the police after you've been raped (knowing in your heart that it'll be useless but going to placate your friend who believes it'll work) only to have the singular woman cop in the office accuse you of "changing your mind" and "being dressed inappropriately," telling you that the whole thing was "your own fault."
Such are the objections the authoritarians face us with, even when they are socialists, that is when they want to abolish private property and the class government which it gives rise to.
We can answer that in the first place it is not true that once the social conditions are changed the nature and the role of government would change. Organ and function are inseparable terms. Take away from an organ its function and either the organ dies or the function is re-established. Put an army in a country in which there are neither reasons for, nor fear of, war, civil or external, and it will provoke war or, if it does not succeed in its intentions, it will collapse. A police force where there are no crimes to solve or criminals to apprehend, will invent both, or cease to exist.
Refers to the above, and it's fucking correct.
Chapter 6
But let us even suppose that the government were not in any case a privileged class, and could survive without creating around itself a new privileged class, and remain the representative, the servant as it were, of the whole of society. And what useful purpose could this possibly serve? How and in what way would this increase the strength, the intelligence, the spirit of solidarity, the concern for the wellbeing of all and of future generations, which at any given time happen to exist in a given society?
This is the kind of question we need to be proposing in response more often. Too often, people are on the defensive and trying to answer those same lists of questions century (after century). People keep saying we need a government, but there isn't a good reason for it (and I haven't seen one yet).
We are used to living under a government which takes over all that energy, intelligence and will which it can direct for its own ends; and it hinders, paralyses and suppresses those who do not serve its purpose or are hostile — and we think that everything that is done in society is carried out thanks to the government, and that without the government there would no longer be any energy, intelligence or goodwill left in society.
What can government itself add to the moral and material forces that exist in society? Would it be a similar case to that of the God of the Bible who creates from nothing?
Even if we pursue our hypothesis of the ideal government of the authoritarian socialists, it follows from what we have said that far from resulting in an increase in the productive, organising and protective forces in society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting initiative to a few, and giving them the right to do everything without, of course, being able to provide them with the gift of being all-knowing.
Anyway, in order to understand how a society can live without government, one has only to observe in depth existing society, and one will see how in fact the greater part, the important part, of social life is discharged even today outside government intervention, and that government only interferes in order to exploit the masses, to defend the privileged minority, and moreover it finds itself sanctioning, quite ineffectually, all that has been done without its intervention, and often in spite of and even against it. Men work, barter, study, travel and follow to the best of their knowledge moral rules and those of wellbeing; they benefit from the advances made in science and the arts, have widespread relations among themselves — all without feeling the need for somebody to tell them how to behave. Indeed it is just those matters over which government has no control that work best, that give rise to less controversy and are resolved by general consent so that everybody feels happy as well as being useful.
Literally just reminds me of how there were reports of the Mayor Bowser in Washington, DC giving out the hotline info for mutual aid and then the State trying to co-opt that organising as if they were the ones doing it.
For instance, the government takes over the responsibilities of the postal services, the railways and so on. But in what way does it help these services?
The fact that this critique is still relevant in 2021 is absolutely nonsense. (And the answer is that it doesn't help them. It constantly harms them.)
Of course in every large collective undertaking, a division of labour, technical management, administration, etc., is necessary. But authoritarians clumsily play on words to produce a raison d’être for government out of the very real need for the organisation of work. Government, it is well to repeat it, is the concourse of individuals who have had, or have seized, the right and the means to make laws and to oblige people to obey; the administrator, the engineer, etc., instead are people who are appointed or assume the responsibility to carry out a particular job and do so. Government means the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few; administration means the delegation of work, that is tasks given and received, free exchange of services based on free agreement.
But to do so, what purpose is served by people whose profession is the making of laws; while other people spend their lives seeking out and inventing law-breakers? When the people really disapprove of something and consider it harmful, they always manage to prevent it more successfully than do the professional legislators, police and judges. When in the course of insurrections the people have, however mistakenly, wanted private property to be respected, they did so in a way that an army of policemen could not.
Customs always follow the needs and feelings of the majority: and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use, and because the interested parties, having no illusions as to the protection offered by government, themselves see to it that they are respected. For a caravan travelling across the deserts of Africa the good management of water stocks is a matter of life and death for all; and in those circumstances water becomes a sacred thing and no one would think of wasting it. Conspirators depend on secrecy, and the secret is kept or abomination strikes whoever violates it. Gambling debts are not secured by law, and among gamblers whoever does not pay up is considered and considers himself dishonoured.
Chapter 7
That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organised. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organised? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district? And who will do a miner’s job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And will sick people be treated at home or in hospital? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach-ache while the train is moving? ... And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns.
Again, things that just won't stop. I feel like one of the worst parts of society is that people feel like we need to have answers rather than possible options. How will society be organised? I don't know, and I shouldn't have to know in order to say that the organisation we have now doesn't work and never has. Certainly, we should be able to envision better and healthier structures? And we should understand that these structures should be flexible? That we won't get them right the first time through and so we should be able to feel as if we can change them when we understand that they're not working or are harmful?
"How will we teach children?" How have we been teaching children? Compulsory schooling for everyone is so brand new, and it was even more new for Malatesta, that we should be able to recognise that the overwhelming majority of children have never learned like that before. We have options, and kids need them...
It's so exhausting, and it's like it never ends. The same questions, the same refusal to recognise that we shouldn't have all the answers because the answers need to be discovered in the course of understanding what we need.
But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?
How will children be educated? We don’t know. So what will happen? Parents, pedagogues and all who are concerned with the future of the young generation will come together, will discuss, will agree or divide according to the views they hold, and will put into practice the methods which they think are the best. And with practice that method which in fact is the best, will in the end be adopted.
He really should've included children in this mix and done so explicitly. Children have every right to have a say in how they learn and what they learn, and it is up to us to also listen to them.
Chapter 8
This society without government, which maintains itself by means of free and voluntary cooperation; this society which relies in everything on the spontaneous action of interests and which is entirely based on solidarity and love, is certainly a wonderful ideal, they say; but like all ideals it lives in the clouds. We find ourselves in a world which has always been divided into oppressors and oppressed; and if the former are full of the spirit of domination and have all the vices of tyrants, the latter are broken by servility and have the even worse vices that result from slavery.
It's interesting that the argument about "human nature" has constantly been trotted out against anarchism (though the wording has changed). It'd be nice, one day, if people realised that what they consider human nature is not, in fact, our nature. At all.
It's also frustrating because it ties into the refusal of people to deal with bigotries. It's like a way of saying "boys will be boys" and what not when the point is that these are things we can (and should) work to unlearn. When people tie things into "human nature," they're giving an excuse for why the world works the way it does... And that excuse doesn't make sense.
How will these men, brought up in a society based on class and individual conflict, ever be able to change themselves suddenly and become capable of living in a society in which everyone will do as he wishes and must do, and without outside coercion and through the force of his own will, seek the welfare of others? With what single-mindedness, with what common sense would you entrust the fate of the revolution and of mankind to an ignorant mob, weakened by poverty, brainwashed by the priest, and which today will be blindly bloodthirsty, while tomorrow it will allow itself to be clumsily deceived by a rogue, or bow its head servilely under the heel of the first military dictator who dares to make himself master? Would it not be more prudent to advance towards the anarchist ideal by first passing through a democratic or socialist republic? Will there not be a need for a government of the best people to educate and to prepare the generations for things to come?
We are always faced with the prejudice that government is a new force that has emerged from no one knows where which in itself adds something to the total forces and capacities of those individuals who constitute it and of those who obey it. Instead all that happens in the world is done by people; and government qua government, contributes nothing of its own apart from the tendency to convert everything into a monopoly for the benefit of a particular party or class, as well as offering resistance to every initiative which comes from outside its own clique.
Chapter 9
Once this negative power that is government is abolished, society will be what it can be, but all that it can be given the forces and abilities available at the time. If there are educated people who wish to spread knowledge they will organise the schools and make a special effort to persuade everybody of the usefulness and pleasure to be got from an education. And if there were no such people, or only a few, a government could not create them; all it could do would be what happens now, take the few that there are away from their rewarding work, and set them to drafting regulations which have to be imposed with policemen, and make intelligent and devoted teachers into political beings, that is useless parasites, all concerned with imposing their whims and with maintaining themselves in power.
Of course there will be difficulties and drawbacks; but they will be resolved, and they will only be resolved in an anarchist way, by means, that is, of the direct intervention of the interested parties and by free agreements.
In any case we will have on events the kind of influence which will reflect our numerical strength, our energy, our intelligence and our intransigence. Even if we are defeated, our work will not have been useless, for the greater our resolve to achieve the implementation of our programme in full, the less property, and less government will there be in the new society. And we will have performed a worthy task for, after all, human progress is measured by the extent government power and private property are reduced.
