Modern Science and Anarchism/Chapter 1
MODERN SCIENCE AND ANARCHISM.
By Peter Kropotkin.
I.
THE ORIGIN OF ANARCHISM.
Anarchy does not draw its origin from any scientific researches, or from any system of philosophy. Sociological sciences are still far from having acquired the same degree of accuracy as physics or chemistry. Even in the study of climate and weather (in Meteorology), we are not yet able to predict a month or even a week beforehand what weather we are going to have; consequently, it would be foolish to pretend that with the aid of such a young science as Sociology is, dealing moreover with infinitely more complicated things than wind and rain, we could scientifically predict events. We must not forget either that scientific men are but ordinary men, and that the majority of them belong to the leisured class, and consequently share the prejudices of this class; most of them are even in the pay of the State. It is, therefore, quite evident that Anarchy does not come from universities.
Like Socialism in general, and like all other social movements, Anarchism originated among the people, and it will preserve its vitality and creative force so long only as it remains a movement of the people.
From all times two currents of thought and action have been in conflict in the midst of human societies. On the one hand, the masses, the people, worked out, by their way of life, a number of necessary institutions in order to make social existence possible, to maintain peace, to settle quarrels, and to practise mutual aid in all circumstances that required combined effort. Tribal customs among savages, the village communities, later on industrial guilds in the cities of the Middle Ages, the first elements of international law that these cities elaborated to settle their mutual relations; these and many other institutions were developed and worked out, not by legislation, but by the creative spirit of the masses.
On the other hand, there have always flourished among men, magi, shamans, wizards, rain makers, oracles, and priests, who were the founders and the keepers of a rudimentary knowledge of Nature, and of the first elements of worship (worship of the sun, the moon, the forces of Nature, ancestor worship). Knowledge and superstition went then hand in hand—the first rudiments of science and the beginnings of all arts and crafts being thoroughly interwoven with magic, the formulæ and rites of which were carefully concealed from the uninitiated. By the side of these earliest representatives of religion and science, there were also the experts in ancient customs—those men, like the brehons of Ireland, who kept in their memories the precedents of law. And there were also the chiefs of the military bands, who were supposed to possess the magic secrets of success in warfare.
These three groups of men formed among themselves secret societies for the keeping and transmission (after a long and painful initiation) of the secrets of their knowledge and crafts; and if at times they opposed each other, they generally agreed in the long run; they leagued together and upheld one another in different ways, in order to be able to command the masses, to reduce them to obedience, to govern them, and to make them work for them.
It is evident that Anarchy represents the first of these two currents, that is to say, the creative constructive force of the masses, who elaborated common-law institutions in order to defend themselves against a domineering minority. It is also by the creative and constructive force of the people, aided by the whole strength of modern science and technique, that to-day Anarchy strives to set up institutions that are indispensable to the free development of society, in opposition to those who put their hope in laws made by governing minorities.
We can therefore say that from all times there have been Anarchists and Statists.
Moreover, we always find that institutions, even the best of them, that were built up to maintain equality, peace, and mutual aid, become petrified as they grow old. They lose their original purpose, they fall under the domination of an ambitious minority, and gradually they become an obstacle to the ulterior development of society. Then individuals, more or less isolated, rebel against these institutions. But while some of these discontented, who rebel against an institution that has become irksome, strive to modify it for the common welfare, and above all to overthrow an authority, not only alien to the institution, but grown to be more powerful even than the institution itself—others endeavour to emancipate themselves from the mutual aid institutions altogether. They reject the tribal customs, the village community, the guilds, etc., only to set themselves outside and above the social institutions altogether, in order to dominate the other members of society and to enrich themselves at society's expense.
All really serious political, religious, economic reformers have belonged to the first of the two categories; and among them there have always been individuals who, without waiting for all their fellow citizens, or even a minority of them, to be imbued with similar ideas, strove to incite more or less numerous groups against oppression, or advanced alone if they had no following. There were Revolutionists in all times known to history.
However, these Revolutionists appeared under two different aspects. Some of them, while rebelling against the authority that oppressed society, in nowise tried to destroy this authority; they simply strove to secure it for themselves. Instead of a power that had grown oppressive, they sought to constitute a new power, of which they would be the holders; and they promised, often in good faith, that the new authority, handed over to them, would have the welfare of the people at heart and would be their true representative—a promise that later on was inevitably forgotten or betrayed. Thus were constituted Imperial authority in the Rome of the Caesars, ecclesiastical authority in the first centuries of our era, dictatorial power in the decaying cities of the Middle Ages, and so forth. The same line of thought brought about royal authority in Europe at the end of feudal times. Faith in an emperor "for the people," a Cæsar, is not yet dead, even in the present day.
But side by side with this authoritarian current, another current asserted itself, every time the necessity was felt of revising the established institutions. At all times, from ancient Greece till nowadays, there were individuals and currents of thought and action that sought, not to replace any particular authority by another, but to destroy the authority that had grafted itself on popular institutions, without creating a new one to take its place. They proclaimed the sovereignty of both the individual and the people, and they tried to free the popular institutions from authoritarian overgrowths; they worked to give back full liberty to the collective spirit of the masses, so that popular genius might freely reconstruct institutions of mutual aid and protection, in harmony with new needs and new conditions of existence. In the cities of ancient Greece, and especially in those of the Middle Ages—Florence, Pskov, etc.—we find many examples of this kind of conflict.
We may therefore say that Jacobins and Anarchists have existed at all times among reformers and Revolutionists.
Formidable popular movements, stamped with the character of Anarchism, took place several times in the past. Villages and cities rose against the principle of government, against the supporters of the State, its tribunals, its laws, and they proclaimed the sovereignty of the rights of man. They denied all written law, and asserted that every man should govern himself according to his conscience. They thus tried to found a new society, based on the principles of equality, full liberty, and work. In the Christian movement in Judea, under Augustus, against the Roman law, the Roman State, and the morality, or rather the immorality, of that epoch, there was unquestionably much Anarchism. Little by little this movement degenerated into a Church movement, fashioned after the Hebrew Church and Imperial Rome itself, which naturally killed all that Christianity possessed of Anarchism at its outset, gave the Christian teachings a Roman form, and soon made of it the mainstay of authority, State, slavery, and oppression. The first seeds of "Opportunism" introduced into Christianity are already strong in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—or, at least, in the versions of the same that are incorporated in the New Testament.
The Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, which in the main inaugurated and brought about the Reformation, also had an Anarchist basis. But, crushed by those Reformers who, under Luther's rule, leagued with princes against the rebellious peasants, the movement was suppressed by a great massacre of peasants and the poorer citizens of the towns. Then the right wing of the Reformers degenerated little by little, till it became the compromise between its own conscience and the State which exists to-day under the name of Protestantism.
Thus, to summarise: Anarchism had its origin in the same creative, constructive activity of the masses which has worked out in times past all the social institutions of mankind—and in the revolts of both the individuals and the nations against the representatives of force, external to these social institutions, who had laid their hands upon these institutions and used them for their own advantage. Those of the rebels whose aim was to restore to the creative genius of the masses the necessary freedom for its creative activity, so that it might work out the required new institutions, were imbued with the Anarchist spirit.
In our times, Anarchy was brought forth by the same critical and revolutionary protest which gave rise to Socialism in general. However, one portion of the Socialists, after having reached the negation of Capitalism and of society based on the subjection of labour to capital, stopped in its development at this point. They did not declare themselves against what constitutes the real strength of Capitalism: the State and its principal supports—centralisation of authority, law, always made by a minority for its own profit, and a form of justice whose chief aim is to protect Authority and Capitalism. As to Anarchism it did not stop in its criticism before these institutions. It lifted its sacrilegious arm, not only against Capitalism, but also against these pillars о Capitalism: Law, Authority, and the State.