Order and Anarchy.

[Translated from "Le Revolte."]

We are often reproached with having accepted as a motto the word anarchy, which so frightens many minds. “Tour ideas are excellent,” they tell us, “but confess that your party’s name is unfortunately chosen. Anarchy, in the current tongue, is a synonym of disorder, chaos; it awakens in the mind the idea of clashing interests, of individuals at war with each other and unable to establish harmony.”

Let us begin by observing that a party of action, a party representing a new tendency, is rarely allowed to choose its own name. The Gueux (beggars) of Brabant did not invent that name, which afterward became so popular. But, at first a nickname,— and a very felicitous one, too,— it was taken up by the party, generally accepted, and soon became its motto. It will be agreed, moreover, that the word contained a complete idea.

And the sans-culottes of 1793? It was the enemies of the popular revolution that flung that name; but did it not contain a complete idea, that of the revolt of the people, in tatters and tiled of misery, against all those royalists, soi-disant patriots, and jacobins, dressed well and with scrupulous neatness, who, in spite of their pompons speeches and the incense burned before their statues by the bourgeois historians, were the real enemies of the people, since they profoundly despised the people for their poverty, their love of liberty and equality, and their revolutionary spirit?

And so with the name Nihilists, which so puzzled journalists and was the occasion of so many plays upon words, good and bad, until it became understood that it denoted, not a sect of semi-religious cranks, but a real revolutionary power. Launched by Tourgueneff in his novel, “Fathers and Sons,” it was taken up by the “fathers,” who by this nickname revenged themselves for the disobedience of the “sons.” The “sons” accepted it, and when, later, they saw that it was the source of misunderstandings and tried to disembarrass themselves of it, it was impossible to do so. The press and public were unwilling to designate the Russian revolutionists by any other name than this. Moreover, the name is by no means badly chosen, for it contains an idea. It expresses the negation of the sum total of the facts of the existing civilization, based on the oppression of one class by another: the negation of the present economic regime, the negation of governmentalism and power, of bourgeois politics, of bourgeois morality, of routine science, of art placed at the service of exploiters, or the grotesque customs and usages, often detestable because of their hypocrisy, handed down from past centuries to existing soctety,— in short, the negation of all that the bourgeois civilization venerates to-day.

The same with the Anarchists. When there arose within the International a party denying authority in the bosom of the Association and revolting against authority in all its forms, that party first gave itself the name of Federalist, and later Anti-Stateist or Anti-Autoritaire. At that time it even avoided the name of Anarchists. The word an-archy (for so it was written then) seemed to connect the party too closely with the followers of Proudhon, to whose ideas of economic reform the International at that time was opposed. But for this very reason, in order to induce confusion, their enemies saw fit to use this name, saying, further, that the very name of the Anarchists proved that they desired only disorder and chaos, regardless of future results.

Then the Anarchistic party hastened to accept the name bestowed upon it. It insisted at first on the hyphen between an and archy, explaining that in this form the word an-archy, of Greek origin, signified no government, not “disorder;” but soon it accepted it just as it is, without giving useless trouble to proof-readers or a lesson in Greek to the people.

The word, then, has recovered its primitive, ordinary, common significance, expressed in 1816 in these words by an English philosopher, Bentham: “The philosopher who desires to reform a bad law does not preach insurrection against it. . . . The character of the Anarchist is very different. He denies the existence of the law, he rejects its validity, he excites men not to recognize it as law and to resist its execution.” To-day the meaning of the word has grown in breadth: the Anarchist denies not only existing laws, but all established power, all authority. Nevertheless, its essence remains the same: he revolts — and that is his starting-point — against power, authority, under whatever form it happens to exist.

But this word, they tell us, awakens in the mind the negation of order, and, consequently, the idea of disorder, chaos.

We will try, nevertheless, to understand each other. What order is in question? Is it the harmony that we Anarchists dream of? the harmony in human relations that will freely establish itself after humanity is no longer divided into two classes, one of which is sacrificed for the benefit of the other? the harmony that will spring spontaneously from the solidarity of interests, when all men shall form one and the same family, when each will labor for the good of all and all for the good of each? Clearly, no! Those who reproach anarchy with being the negation of order do not mean the harmony of the future; they mean order, as it is conceived to-day, in our present society. Let us see, then, what this order is that anarchy wishes to destroy.

Order, to-day,— what they mean by order,— is nine-tenths of humanity laboring to maintain a handful of idlers in luxury, enjoyment, and the satisfaction of the most execrable passions.

Order is the deprivation of these nine-tenths of every necessary condition of healthy life and rational intellectual development. To reduce nine-tenths of humanity to the condition of beasts of burden living from day to day, without ever daring to think of the enjoyment which man finds in the study of science and the pursuit of art,— that is order!

Order is misery and famine become the normal state of society. It is the Irish peasant dying of hunger; it is the peasant of one-third of Russia dying of diphtheria, of typhoid fever, of hunger in consequence of scarcity, amid carloads of wheat on their way to foreign countries; it is the people of Italy compelled to abandon their luxuriant fields to roam through Europe seeking some tunnel to dig, where they may run the risk of being massacred after having existed a few additional months. It is the land taken from the peasant for the rearing of cattle to feed the rich; it is the land allowed to lie fallow rather than be restored to him who asks no more than to cultivate it.

Order is woman selling herself to support her children, is the child compelled to be confined in a factory or die of inanition, is the workingman reduced to the state of a machine. It is the phantom of hunger ever present at the doors of the laborer, the phantom of the insurgent laborer at the doors of the rich, the phantom of the insurgent people at the doors of their governors.

Order is a minority of a few, versed in governmental affairs, imposing themselves for that reason on the majority and bringing up their children to fill the same offices later, in order to maintain the same privileges, by stratagem, corruption, force, and wholesale murder.

Order is the continual war of man upon man, of trade upon trade, of class upon class, of nation upon nation. It is the unceasing roar of the cannon in Europe, the devastation of the country, the sacrifice of entire generations on the battle-field, the destruction in one year of wealth accumulated by centuries of hard labor.

Order is servitude, thought in chains, the degradation of the human race, maintained by blood and the sword. It is hundreds of miners buried annually in the mines through the avarice of the owners, and mitrailleused, shot down, and bayoneted, if they dare to protest against these massacres.

Order, finally, is the Commune of Paris drowned in blood. It Is thirty thousand men, women, and children cut to pieces by shells, rained upon by the mitrailleuse, burled in quicklime beneath Parisian pavements. It is Young Russia within prison walls, buried in Siberian snows, its best, purest, most unselfish representatives strangling in the hangman’s noose.

That is order!

And disorder,— that which they call disorder?

It is the people in revolt against this ignoble order, breaking their chains, tearing down barriers, and marching toward a better future. It is all that is most glorious in the history or humanity.

It is the revolt of thought on the eve of revolutions; it if the overturning of hypotheses sanctioned by the inertia of centuries past; it is the birth of a whole flood of new ideas, of bold inventions, of audacious solutions of scientic problems.

Disorder is the abolition of ancient slavery, the insurrection of the communes, the abolition of feudal serfdom, the attempts at abolition of economic servitude.

Disorder is the peasants risen against the priests and lords, burning castles to make room for cottages, leaving their dens in search of tho sunlight. It is France abolishing royalty and dealing a mortal blow at serfdom throughout Western Europe.

Disorder is 1848 causing kings to tremble and proclaiming the right of labor. It is the people of Paris fighting for a new idea, and, though overpowered by massacre, bequeathing to humanity the idea of the free Commune and breaking the war for that revolution whose approach we now feel and which will be known as the Social Revolution.

Disorder — what they call disorder — is the epochs during which entire generations bear up in superhuman struggle and sacrifice themselves to prepare for humanity a better existence by relieving it of the chains of the past. It is the epochs during which the popular genius finds free scope, and in a few years takes those gigantic strides without which man would have remained in the state of ancient slavery, a servile being in abject misery.

Disorder is the flowering of the most beautiful passions and the grandest self-sacrifices; it is the epic history of the supreme love, the love of humanity.

The word anarchy, implying the negation of such an order and invoking the memory of the highest moments in humanity’s life,— is it not well chosen for a party which marches onward to the conquest of a better future?