Note
In Mounier's spiritual vision and religious practice, evil is identified with the State. As Mounier himself affirms quite clearly with reference to State power: “There is no abuse of power, there is power that abuses by its very nature.” Once this aspect has been clarified, the end of illusions could indeed represent the necessary step to restore to the individual his role and prerogatives as an autonomous human being, directly responsible for his own life and development.
Source: Emmanuel Mounier, Anarchie et Personnalisme, in Communisme, anarchie et personnalisme, Seuil, 1966.
Although it is difficult for us to follow the ideological formulas of the anarchist critique of power, if we do it, we will find an analysis full of detailed insights and wisdom which are very close to working-class experience.
Criticism of the State takes first place. An old tradition. The atheist Sylvain Maréchal, in the Manifeste des Égaux, was already crying out in 1796: “Disappear at last, revolting distinction of rulers and ruled!”
The Saint-Simonian School had taken up Utopia and placed it in the right atmosphere, which sustained it throughout the nineteenth century and still keeps it alive today in the least extremist circles. For centuries, politicians had been accumulating disorder and ruin, while discussing about their principles.
In the meantime, a method of organising ideas and things was enjoying unfailing success: scientific and industrial technology.
Why not make it a universal instrument? Tomorrow the governments of men would be replaced by the organisation of things, just as metaphysics would be replaced by the system of sciences and human exertion by the machine.
At that time the process was believed to be certain, and anarchism embraced this belief, which gave seriousness to its aspirations. Authoritarian power, thought the anarchists, is the old machine that clogs up the whole factory. It exists only because of the shortcomings of the existing economic order, which it compensates for to a greater or lesser extent. A perfect economic order would render it useless: “The producer is the negation of the ruler; organisation is incompatible with dominion.” (Proudhon, Idée générale de la révolution au XIXème siècle, 1851)
The “purely economic and invisible unity” of society (Proudhon, Les confessions d'un révolutionnaire, 1849) saves the human being from oppression, just as, for the Protestant Reformers, the invisible and purely spiritual Church was to deliver people from ecclesiastical powers.
Perhaps the anarchist conception could have overcome its errors if it had gone all the way in its critique instead of limiting itself to utopia in the economic field.
The lust for power, which the anarchist fought continuously, he saw as an evil rather external to the human being, which he could rid himself of by returning to a kind of innocence that was no longer the wild and pastoral innocence of the good Rousseau, but a learned and civilised innocence, that of a nature with complex endeavours, finally freed from its fetters. At that time, it has to be said, the industrial surge was emerging from the heavy constraints of the old corporatism and awakening only images of freedom. If one was a socialist, he attributed to individuals what the reality of the facts seemed to produce in a necessary way.
It was left to a later phase to reveal the tyranny that the economy was also infallibly producing, and to give politics a new purpose: to protect the individual against his own works.
By attacking this source of tyranny in the economy, the anarchist conception could have renewed its areas of intervention. And even if it has not done so, let us be grateful to the anarchists for having pushed the critique of the failings of politics further than any other.
This criticism is less confusing than it appears at first glance. In its opposition to the powers that be, the search for true authority was never conducted.
Otherwise, what meaning would have taken the opposition that has been made by anarchist critics, since Proudhon, between State and society, designating with the term society everything that spontaneously organises itself in the common consciousness and in collective forces, — the psychological and economic fabric of the community. While the State evokes a kind of ‘sub-function’ subordinate to society and occupying at best, if it does not invade social spaces, a very small place in the innumerable concerns of the human beings.
For the anarchists, society, with all its initiatives, plays the role of a spiritual authority. They didn't say the word, because ‘authority’ had an irreducibly pejorative connotation for them, but they thought about it [1]. So much so that their own laws, even the strictest ones, do not seem to be a burden to them. It is sufficient that they are ‘natural’ laws, linking us to the reality of the universe without the intervention of extraneous wills. A strange deviation from the principle, to which we shall return!
But however crude the naturalism that expresses the demands of the anarchists may appear, it would be unfair not to see in it an effort to remove value from what appears, in this case the inflation of politics which in fact stifles the real problems, and to seek solid ground on which to base the human being and his future.
This ‘society’ is not a mere abstraction. The anarchists have read Kropotkin and learned that the human being lived thousands of years before States and Empires. Their Bible and their legendary chronicle is this fascinating and resplendent history of which La science moderne et l'anarchie (Kropotkin, 1913) speaks, ranging from free primitive societies to village communities, and then to urban communes, producer associations and fraternal unions.
It was shattered at the end of the Middle Ages by the conspiracy of the lord, the military leader, the Roman judge, the priest, the merchant and the king, and has been spreading ever since, like a subterranean fire, in those jacqueries that underlie revolutions, and which from time to time shake individuals from their political slumber, without ever having led them to give up their youthful strength to make way for the lost city.
The vestiges of this misunderstood spontaneity remain the blood and life of nations. The law that pretentiously believes it is giving them form and being has no reality other than what it can retain of pre-existing customs, disfigured by everything it has superimposed to protect property, castes and the machinery of government.
Ancient intrusive force, the law ‘carries oppression’ from century to century, guaranteeing it against its own failings, against the ups and downs of life. Look: does it happen that the law offers simple and calm directives of justice? No. In it we find as many conflicting paths as there are diverging interests. Proudhon, following in the footsteps of Kropotkin and Godwin, made it the target of his irony: a ‘papyrus formation’ suffocating the fertile soil of human ingenuity, a spider's web stretched by the powerful and the rich.
Anarchists too have their own tradition, the oldest in humanity: it is only on a very short historical scale, after all, that they can be considered revolutionaries.
But this came about as a result of the birth of evil, and the evil is the State.
One word sums up its essence. In its scholarly form: alienation; in its popular translation: parasitism. It's the same process as in any form of power: a minority takes over everyone's business, puts the majority on the anvil, and strikes.
As soon as its organs are constituted, the State begins to withdraw into itself. The mechanism of ‘transcendence’ takes hold of it. It decrees right and wrong according to its own interests, which are detached from those of society. It can no longer tolerate an immediate human-to-human relationship, and becomes intrusive, exclusive, and soon harassing and inquisitive. Expensive, moreover, adds Proudhon showing the figures, and sterilely expensive, except for his cronies.
It should be noted that the State and capitalism were born at the same time, in the fifteenth century, evolved hand in hand, fought the same wars, and, to top it off, introduced centralisation, created positions, generated influences, and ‘all this is bourgeois and goes to the bourgeois’ (Proudhon, La Fédération et l'Unité en Italie, 1862).
Externally, the State knows only the law of its own force (small countries are only virtuous because of their weakness); absolute and unlimited by definition, everything in its nature is annexationist [2], unlike the federal system, which has no strength for conquest.
Of the natural sentiment of patriotism, a purely local feeling and, moreover, a purely instinctive and animal one, the State, by injecting politics, economics and religion into it, has made it into a kind of monstrous passion that drives against civilisation.
None of this is very original. It is when they extend this common critique to the forms of the State that would seem to be exempt from such defects — democracy and revolutionary governments — that anarchists break new ground. And it is these warnings that it is most opportune today to reawaken.
There is no role to be assigned to the State: this is what anarchists continually repeat against democrats and centralising socialists. Giving the State a part of freedom in order to guarantee the rest is to assume that freedom is divisible: the rest is security, if you like, but it is no longer freedom.
— But what if we take its place, if we turn the tide, if we use this marvellous machine, honed by five centuries of experience, in the opposite direction to the way it used to work?
— The State cannot be overthrown; it must be shattered. There is no abuse of power, there is power that abuses by its very nature. Exploiting and governing mean the same thing. If you get on the machine, the machine will take possession of you. — But if I change the form, if I turn it into a democracy, a people's democracy?
— It's not a question of form, but of principle. “Democratic government and natural religion are two contradictions, unless one prefers to see in them two mystifications.” (Proudhon, Idée générale de la révolution au XIXème siècle, 1851).
The principle of the State remains the same in all forms of the State. A bourgeois republican is hurt by the form of oligarchic royalty, he is not hurt by the principle, since he has nothing more urgent than to establish his oligarchic republic. Napoleon's companions were sincerely wounded in their ‘democratic’ feelings when they saw him marry a Habsburg princess.
How can we make States change their nature, when it is by that nature that they are States? Let's leave aside the utopia of a good, just and virtuous State. There is no example in history of an institution being turned against its very idea.
The politician who betrays in the name of power claims that ‘he was forced’ to act this way, speaks of ‘historical necessities of power’, and he is a thousand times right. But what was he doing in such a dishonourable place?
Everything that anarchists say about the State has a rationality. There are always unsystematic individuals among them, but even these do not allow themselves to be fooled by appearances. They warn us against a final temptation to be avoided: that of believing that the State is a necessary evil, that sort of fear present in history that has led all revolutions to reconstitute tyranny.
Notes
[1] See, however, in this regard, Mikhail Bakunin, On Authority, in Dieu et l’État (God and the State) 1871:
“I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give — such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore, there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.”
[2] The birth and development of Nation States in Europe were characterised by the drive for territorial enlargement, then by the phase of colonialism and imperialism (last decades of the 19th century) and eventually by total wars for the lebensraum (first half of the 20th century). And the time of State territorial dominance is not over yet.