“What Anarchy Is” (Le Monde Libertaire, 1967)

What Anarchy Is

Strangers to all politics, anarchists are protected by this fact, from the partialities, contradictions, and denials that are common on all sides.

Open to any new idea, to any examination, they note (supported by historical evidence) that all forms of government — autocracies, dictatorships, theocracies, monarchies, republics, or socialist republics — have resulted in dead ends, that no one has succeeded in bringing satisfaction to the unanimity of men as they claimed, that all have accumulated constraints, torture, crimes, and wars.

Now when an experiment attempted a thousand times, a thousand times, has failed, any sane and reasonable mind will look elsewhere for a solution.

That is the libertarian solution: the only one that has ever been fully attempted, the only one whose partial experiments (Ukraine 1918, Spain 1936) have opened a window onto the future and universal happiness.

Anarchists, precisely because of the positive spirit that makes them reject the moral authority of all clergy, the economic authority of all forms of capitalism, the political authority of all states, are the most resolute supporters and defenders of the construction of a society with full responsibility for everyone, a society based on the constant relationship between producers and consumers, at the level that concerns them, and any centralization can only have a coordinating character.

To portray anarchists as disinterested in social affairs is a childish caricature that will only attract the attention of the ignorant or those in bad faith. On the contrary, we claim that our theory is the only one that offers a solution to the social problem, and this is precisely because of the arguments put forward against us.

If egoism is inherent in man, as we are reminded every day, by whom will the interests of a world be better managed than by those concerned themselves, to the exclusion of all agents and representatives?

For this reason, it is important to restore to the individual their responsibilities and with them their freedom and the notion that each person is morally equal to all others.

Does this mean that overnight all problems will be resolved, pitfalls avoided, and paradise…? The anarchists have too much of a sense of reality, too much knowledge of our temporal relative state of all things, to borrow the absolute of such formulas from the creed of priests and politicians.

We know that it will be up to each generation to contribute its share of work, research, discoveries, and thus modifications, improvements, and achievements to the path of human development.

But we also know that such an evolution will only be possible through a social transformation that will have forever abolished whatever stands in the way of this evolution.

This obstacle is authority in all its forms, which can only be pursued and exercised by denying man the use of his reason and his right to a full existence.

This is why the most urgent, the most constructive task, the one to which anarchists call you, is the total suppression of the clerical, capitalist, and state forces whose power condemns us to eternal servitude.

M. L.

Le Monde Libertaire 132 (Mai 1967): 12

Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur