Anarchy by Errico Malatesta - Section 1

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section one of anarchy. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in a public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Anossimon Anarchy by Rico Maratsta, published by the Free Society
Library in nineteen hundred. Anarchy. Anarchy is a word which

(00:24):
comes from the Greek and signifies, strictly speaking, without government,
the state of a people without any constituted authority, that is,
without government. Before such an organization had begun to be
considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers,
so as to be taken as the aim of a party,

(00:45):
which party has now become one of the most important
factors in modern social warfare. The word anarchy was taken
universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it
is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and
by adversaries interested in distorting the truth. We shall not

(01:06):
enter into philological discussions, for the question is not philological,
but historical. The common meaning of the word does not
misconceive its true etymological signification, but is derived from this
meaning owing to the prejudice that government must be a
necessity of the organization of social life, and that consequently,

(01:29):
a society without government must be given up to disorder
and oscillate between the unbridled dominion of some and the
blind vengeance of others. The existence of this prejudice and
its influence on the meaning which the public has given
the word, is easily explained. Men, like all living beings,

(01:50):
adapts and habituates himself to the conditions in which he lives,
and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus being born,
having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long
line of slaves, man, when he began to think, believed
that slavery was an essential condition of life, and liberty

(02:11):
seemed to him an impossible thing. In like manner, the workman,
forced for centuries, and thus habituated to depend upon the
good will of his employer for work, that is, for bread,
and accustomed to see his own life at the disposal
of those who possessed the land and the capital, has
ended in believing that it is his master who gives

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him to eat, and demands ingeniously how it would be
possible to live if there were no master over him.
In the same way, a man who had had his
limbs bound from his birth, but had nevertheless found out
how to hobble about, might attribute to the very hands
that bound him his ability to move, while on the contrary,

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they would be diminishing and paralyzing the muscular energy of
his limbs. If then we add to the natural effect
of habit the education given him by his masters, the parson, teacher,
et cetera, who are all interested in teaching, that the
employer and the government are necessary. If also we add

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the judge and the bailiff to force those who think
differently and might try to propagate their opinions, to keep silence,
we shall understand how the prejudice as to the utility
and necessity of masters and governments has become established. Suppose
a doctor brings forward a complete theory with a thousand
ably invented illustrations to persuade that man with the bound

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limb whom we were describing, that if his limb were freed,
he could not walk, could not even live. The man
would defend his bands furiously and consider any one his
enemy who tried to tear them off. Thus, since it
is believed that government is necessary, and that without government,

(04:00):
there must be disorder and confusion. It is natural and
logical to suppose that anarchy, which signifies without government, must
also mean absence of order. Nor is this fact without parallel.
In the history of words. In those epochs and countries
where people have considered government by one man monarchy necessary,

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the word republic, that is, the government of many, has
been used precisely like anarchy, to imply disorder and confusion.
Traces of this signification of the word are still to
be found in the popular language of almost all countries.
When this opinion is changed and the public convinced that

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government is not necessary but extremely harmful, the word anarchy,
precisely because it signifies without government, will become equal to
saying natural order, harmony of the needs and interests of all,
complete liberty, with complete solidarity. Therefore, those are wrong who

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say that anarchists have chosen their name badly because it
is erroneously understood by the masses and leads to a
false interpretation. The error does not come from the word,
but from the thing. The difficulty which anarchists meet with
in spreading their views does not depend upon the name
they have given themselves, but upon the fact that their

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conceptions strike at all the inveterate prejudices that people have
about the function of government, or the state, as is called.
Before proceeding further, it will be well to explain this
last word, the state, which in our opinion, is the
real cause of much misunderstanding. Anarchists and we among them,

(05:50):
have made use and still generally make use of the
word state, meaning thereby that collection of institutions political, legislative, judicial, military, financial,
et cetera, by means of which the management of their
own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct, and the
care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the

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people and confided to certain individuals. And these, whether by
usurpation or delegation, are invested with the right to make
laws over and for all, and to constrain the public
to respect them, making use of the collective force of
the community to this end. In this case, the word
state means government, or, if you like it is the

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impersonal expression abstracted from the state of things of which
the government is the personification. Then such expressions as abolition
of the state or society without the state agree perfectly
with the conception which anarchists wish to express of the
destruction of every political institution based on authority, and of

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the constitution of a free and equal society based upon
harmony of interests and a voluntary contribution of all to
the satisfaction of social needs. However, the word state has
many other significations, and among these some which lend themselves
to misconstruction, particularly when used among men whose sad social

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position has not afforded them leisure to become accustomed to
the delicate distinctions of scientific language, or still worse, when
adopted treacherously by adversaries who are interested in confounding the
sense or do not wish to comprehend. Thus, the word
state is often used to indicate any given society or

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collection of human beings united on a given territory and
constituting what is called a social unit, independently of the
way in which the members of the said body are
grouped or of their relations existing between them. The state
is used also simply as a synonym for society. Owing
to these significations, the word our adversaries believe, or rather

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profess to believe, that anarchists wish to abolish every social
relation and all collective work, and to reduce man to
a condition of isolation, that is, to a state worse
than savagery. By state, again, is meant only the supreme
administration of a country, the central power, distinct from provincial

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or communal power. And therefore others think that anarchists wish
merely for a territorial decentralization, leaving the principle of government intact,
and thus confounding anarchy with cantonal or communal government. Finally,
state signifies condition, mode of living, the order of social life,

(08:54):
et cetera. And therefore we say, for example, that it
is necessary to change the economic state of the working classes,
or that the anarchical state is the only state founded
on the principles of solidarity, and other similar phrases, so
that if we say, also in another sense, that we

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wish to abolish the state, we may at once appear
absurd or contradictory. For these reasons, we believe it would
be better to use the expression abolition of the state
as little as possible, and the substitute for it another
clearer and more concrete abolition of government. In any case,

(09:37):
the latter will be the expression used in the course
of this little work. End of section one