Anarchy 94/Daniel Guerin's anarchism

Daniel Guerin’s
anarchism

NICOLAS WALTER

NI DIEU NI MAITRE. Anthologie historique du mouvement anarchiste. (Paris: Editions de Delphes. 44 fracs.)

Daniel Guérin. L’ANARCHISME. De la doctrine à Paction. Collection “Idées”, No. 89. (Paris: NRF-Gallimard. 3 francs.)

After the two disappointing anthologies of anarchist writings from the United States which were reviewed two years ago (anarchy 70, it is pleasant to come to Ni dieu ni maître, a “historical anthology of the anarchist movement” which was published in France in 1965. We are told that it was produced “by the staff of Editions de Delphes with the help of Daniel Guérin”; the staff of the Nataf who are connected with the excellent anarchist monthly, Noir et Rouge, and Guérin is a veteran socialist who became an anarchist. Quite simply, they show how the job should be done: the book is very large (nearly 700 pages), very well produced, very expensive (about 3½ guineas), and very valuable.

  Ni dieu ni maître was published to commemorate the centenary of Proudhon Proudhon’s death in 1865, and it covers the century from the appearance of What is Property? (in which Proudhon became the first person to call himself an anarchist) in 1840 to the defeat of militant anarchism in Spain in 1939. After a short preface and a not on the Proudhone centenary by Guérin, there are more than 150 passages divided into ten sections: Proudhon and the 1848 Revolution; Bakunin and the First International; Stirner Max Stirner; the Jura Federation and the anarchist congresses; Kropotkin; Malatesta; the French movement from the 1871 Commune to the rise of syndicalism; Makhno and the Ukrainian movement during the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The passages included, says Guérin, are “either unpublished or unobtainable, or kept in the dark by a conspiracy of silence”. They are also unmistakably anarchist—there is no confusion with liberalism on the one side or with nihilism on the other. The result is a faithful picture from the inside of what the anarchist movement has meant to most anarchists for most of its existence and, for anyone who can read French, by far the best single book on anarchism ever published.

  It is, however, possible to quarrel with the selection of passages and with the general approach to the movement. Proudhon may have been the first writer who accepted the name of anarchist, but he was hardly the first who was one. If Godwin is to be excluded because he was only a philosophical anarchist and was not involved in any kind of movement, there should still surely be room for some of those contemporaries and predecessors of Proudhon who were concerned with the practical as well as theoretical applications of anarchism—Bellegarrigue and Coeurderoy (there is one short passage from D&eacutejacque) or Varlet and Roux in France, for example, and Hodgskin and Winstanley or even John Ball in England. It is good to be reminded of Proudhon’s importance, but it would be a pity to get the impression that he invented anarchism; he and Bakunin—also important but surely not all that important—together take up nearly half the book, which really does seem too much.

  Similarly, the only individualist anarchist quoted is Max Stirner, but he was hardy the only one, and he too was very much a philosophical anarchist—if indeed he was strictly speaking an anarchist at all. He is described as a “solitary rebel”, but there have been plenty of other individualists who wrote things still worth reading—Godwin, Shelley and Wilde in Britain, Ballou, Warren, Andrews, Spooner and Tucker in the United States, Libertad and Armand in France, Chorny in Russia, Martucci—and it would have been interesting to have something from some of them. Even “Saint Max” gets only 15 pages, which at less than 3 per cent seems a rather meagre ration for a small but still vigorous variety of anarchist thought.

  There is plenty of Kropotkin, as one would expect, but it is rather oddly chosen. There are two essays and three extracts from his first collection, Paroles d’un Révolté, and two letters and two descriptions of him during his last years; but there are only three short extracts from the lecture, Anarchy: Its Philosophy and Ideal (which incidentally did not appear in Paroles d’un Révolté as is stated, but was given in 1896, eleven years after the collection was published), to represent the whole period between his imprisonment in France in 1883 and his return to Russia in 1917. It was after all during this time (while he was living in this country) that he produced the bulk of his most characteristic and original work: the later collections—The Conquest of Bread; Fields, Factories and Workshops; Mutual aid—many important pamphlets—The Philosophy of Anarchism; Anarchism in Socialist Evolution; The State: Its Historic Role; Organised Vengeance Called Justice—and a constant stream of articles in English, French and Russian. It is true that these are often better known and more easily available than some of the items included, but the result is that his message is distorted; while the passages included are certainly worth reading, they give little indication why Kropotkin should be by far the most widely read of all anarchist writers. It really is time that there was a proper edition of Kropotkin’s political works so that we didn’t have to rely on old pamphlets, expensive second-hand books, and occasional anthologies to find out what he said.

  No one could object to the representation of Malatesta, but it is a pity to have no other Italian passages, unless one counts Cafiero’s Swiss lecture, Anarchy and Communism (which is incidentally dated 1889 instead of 1880). In the same way, no one could object to the emphasis on the Russian and Spanish revolutions and civil wars, and the passages chosen give excellent pictures in both cases, but it would have been valuable to have something on the similar episodes in Germany and Italy just after the First World War, or on some of the more significant events in, say, the United States, Latin America, China, Japan, or even Britain.

  It could be objected that there is an overwhelming preponderance of passages originally written in French, but it must be accepted that this is reasonable for a book published in France, and it must be added that most important anarchist writings have probably been in French and that anarchism was largely a French movement at least up to the first World War. Even so, it seems rather extreme to include no passages from any native-born British or American anarchists at all.

  A more general objection is that the selection of passages shows a consistent bias towards activism, and the more intellectual, theoretical and philosophical approach to anarchism is almost completely ignored. This is the result partly of excluding English-speaking anarchists, who have been especially prone to argue at some distance from real life, but mainly of deciding at an early stage in the planning of the anthology to concentrate on anarchist writings which deal with practical problems; and the bias does seem reasonable when one remembers that most histories and anthologies of anarchism have one in the opposite direction, and sometimes lose sight of the actual anarchist movement altogether. There is a similar bias towards revolution, and the more moderate, pragmatic and reformist approach to anarchism is almost completely omitted as well. This is the result of similar factors, but in this case the bias seems less reasonable when it is so often forgotten that there is a wide middle ground between the extremes of philosophical inactivism and revolutionary activism.

  But all these objections are overridden by the general authority of this book—‘the voluminous record of a rehabilitation hearing’, as Guérin puts it, “bound in black cloth like a bible”. It is a unique collection in which “individual texts from the hands of the pioneers of anarchy alternate with collective documents”, and in which one finds at last a genuinely serious and knowledgeable record of what the anarchist movement is about.

  Every reader who is an anarchist must be impressed by the work which Guérin and the Nataf brothers have done for the cause of anarchism, and must also be fascinated by the material they have rescued from oblivion—masses of ducments relating to Proudhon’s part in the 1848 Revolution and to Bakunin’s part in the First International and the 1870 Lyon rising, extracts from Max Stirner’s writings on education (1842), the Manifesto of the Sixteen Workers of the Seine and Proudhon’s letter about it (1864), some of the remarkable studies produced in the anarchist international during the 1870s and 1880s by Guillaume, de Paepe, Schwitzguébel, and Kropotkin (under the pseudonym of Levashov), the letter from the terrorist Henry to the governor of the Conciergerie prison (1894), Pelloutier’s call to the anarchists to join the trade unions (1895), some of Pouget’s inimitable articles, extracts from the proceedings of the 1907 International Anarchist Congress, the International Anarchist Manifesto against the First World War (1915), Kropotkin’s letter from Russia to the workers of Western Europe (1920), Emma Goldman’s description of Kropotkin’s last days and his funeral (1921), and then more masses of ducuments relating to the anarchists’s parts in the Russian and Spanish revolutions.

  And every reader who is not an anarchist must surely be astonished at the richness of anarchist thought at its best over a century, and must surely be convinced by Guérin’s conclusion “that the constructive ideas of anarchist are still alive, that, provided they are re-examined and passed through a screen, they can help contemporary socialist thought to take a new step forwards”. By any standards, Ni dieu ni maître is an extraordinary achievement, and it is particularly encouraging to see it coming from within the anarchist movement; it would be interesting to know what kind of circulation it got in France, despite its high price, and what kind of effect it has had on its readers.

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  L&rasuo;Anarchisme

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