Both Beckett and Kafka present worldviews that are perfect for literature. Literature thrives on drama, and what greater drama is there than an individual trying, in vain, to fit into a totally absurd world of which he cannot help but be a part? But the perspectives of both are also reactions to a time, to a state of affairs. Neither Beckett nor Kafka would have been possible in the Enlightenment or in the Middle Ages. They raise a timeless question, but the way they pose it is a product of their time, or rather, of the time immediately following the death and burial of God. This individual that they both describe, the victim of all victims, the victim of existence itself, is an individual who does not know what to do after losing the notion of the absolute meaning of things, so he either waits for a solution that he knows will not come or throws himself headfirst into the absurd, being, in both cases, reminded all the time of the uselessness of each of his acts.
In this essay in which I want to address anarchism, I will touch on the heart of this question. Isn't anarchism, in itself, an attempt to fill, in the individual, this void that he feels after witnessing the burial of God? Isn't this an attempt to respond, an attempt to lift the individual out of this state of despair, where he feels, at the same time, totally annihilated by society and totally incapable of the slightest gesture, the slightest demonstration of autonomy?
Note that we have two elements at work. On one side, the whole, the collective, society, the State, which is nothing more than the power of society embodied; on the other, the isolated man, the individual, who perceives himself as a limited being, because he knows how to count and sees that he is one and society is many. Hence, at first glance, we can totally understand the “Nothing to do!”, which is basically an admission of defeat, of impotence, but above all a symptom of incomprehension. A symptom that the individual has only learned to analyze life from the whole to the part, from the bottom up, and has not learned to invert this reasoning, because then he would realize that there is, that there may be an escape from this conceptual dead end in which he finds himself. Yes, the world around him is unforgiving, yes, far from society, which oppresses and crushes him, he has little or no chance of survival. But who said that this hostile nature of things, in Kafka's case, of institutions, is an insurmountable obstacle for the individual? The individual is not simply a toy in the hands of society, he has a degree of autonomy, so much so that he is able to perceive that his situation is uncomfortable, that he would like to change it if he could. And the individual represents, in himself, the end, the annihilation of society, of any society. At the very moment in which I write this, society exists for me only as an idea in my head. And I could, if I wanted to, make society, the world, the entire universe disappear this minute, with a very simple gesture. So, when can and does society oppress me? When I accept to play its game by following its rules.
This introduction was important because the existential despair of authors like Beckett and Kafka is, in a way, the despair that takes hold of anyone who suddenly finds himself dissatisfied with a situation that he cannot control or change. Then it is easy for the individual to come to the conclusion that he is nothing, and that society is everything. But this is an emotional, superficial analysis. If I ask someone: “What are you?”, and the person cannot give me a satisfactory answer, I will answer thus: you are everything that others are not. You are everything that no one else can be. And this everything can be a lot, can be a little, can even be almost nothing, but this almost nothing is everything that the individual is, it is his entire existence, and it is different from everything else that exists. If he says to me, “What am I in relation to society, a perfect nothing!”, I have to answer him, well, so what are we talking about in the first place? Who taught nothingness to complain about anything? Who said that nothingness can complain about anything? If the individual is nothing, and society is everything, then the one who complains about being a victim of circumstances is society itself through the individual? No, that would make no sense. If there is a complaint, there is at least the idea of change. An individual coming to the conclusion that nothing has meaning necessarily reveals his desire to find meaning, to disappear inside that meaning. In this vein, let us return to the century before Beckett and Kafka.
Yeah, let us return to the 19th century. So much happened in that century, so much was written, so many attempts were made to revolutionize things, that when the century ended and one found oneself faced with the result of so much theorizing, so much speculation, it was natural for the individual to feel disoriented. Because one thing is to theorize, another is to put theory into practice. Invariably, you imagine one thing, and reality gives you another. The reality around me, the world, will never conform to my whims, much less to my vision of how things should be. And that is the essential phrase here. How things should be. For millennia, men, those with intellect like the poor devils, lived resigned to the idea that things are what they are. God wanted it this way, and that is why he instituted his emissaries on earth, to postulate to others how things should be. Thus, the individual had his life perfectly regulated, from the cradle to the grave. And if, unfortunately, he happened to be subject to the power of a tyrant, I am sorry, but it was the Lord who wanted it that way too.
It is clear that in this context of total submission of the citizen to a social structure perfectly organized by the dictates of a Greater Power, there would be no room for even the thought of any insurrection, because man was imbued from the beginning with the conviction that God existed, and that He wanted things the way they were. But then a group of bold individuals appeared, who questioned everything, starting from either the idea that God does not exist or from the idea that He simply does not care about whatever happening down here. Without the Enlightenment, we would not have seen the birth of the idea of nonconformity. Now the individual realizes, can clearly perceive what he may have already intuited before, but was unable to verbalize, that is, if it was God who organized society, human civilization, then he is a terrible administrator.
Because in the structure of this god-made society there is little to no logic. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few or just one, but these, to Plato's despair, do not show signs of being the wisest among men, quite the opposite. Society, everywhere, is divided into classes, or castes, in which the highest or lowest position on the scale has nothing to do with rational criteria or personal qualities. A perfectly mediocre individual can be a nobleman. A man of great worth can be a beggar. Thus, the rational side of humanity looks at this structure and understands for the first time a fundamental truth: it is not the product of divine will or imposition, but is an entirely human invention.
And if it is born from and for man, it is understandable that man wants and can change it, right? Hence the famous phrase, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change [transform] it.”, said precisely by one of the guys who perfectly personified “the century in which we decided to change the world”, Karl Marx. This spirit of change is and was the result of several factors, including Enlightenment, of course, and also an essentially materialist conception of the world. Materialist not in the sense that only matter exists, but in the sense that man's material conditions are important in determining his worldview and, more importantly, that such conditions can be changed.
In this sense, everything related to man's material, living conditions not only could, but should be questioned. And the most pressing issue, in the eyes of the thinking majority, seemed to be the brutal inequality that existed within society, the division between masters and servants or between employers and employees. Some, like Marx, perceived that the employee was just a wage slave. But if before there was divine imposition, “God wants it this way”, now God has left the room. What then is the justification for the brutal exploitation of man by man, if not power concentrated in the hands of a few?
According to Marx, history was moving inevitably towards a state of affairs where the injustices and discrepancies observed in the bourgeois, capitalist society of his time would be abolished in favor of a social arrangement where everyone would finally have the right to share equally in the fruits of labor, where each person would finally receive according to what they truly needed and deserved, contrary to what had happened in history up until that point. Communism, advocated by Marx as the consequence and inevitable end of socialism, would be nothing more than anarchism fully and historically realized, a state of affairs where nothing oppresses the individual anymore, nothing is above him anymore, injustice in the distribution of goods and in the division of labor, where some do a lot and earn nothing, others do nothing and earn a lot, all of this would finally be abolished in a society where each person would be essentially equal to his neighbor, and would therefore have no need to envy him or want to destroy him.
Socialist thinking, which we would rather call leftist today, and which includes both socialism and anarchism among its branches, emerged in that context of total discrepancy between the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of 19th century European society, where working conditions for the majority were barely distinguishable from outright slavery. For socialists, it was as if, after so many centuries of misery and exploitation, the time had finally come for the exploited to turn the tables on the exploiters. More importantly, Marx always maintained that it is the material conditions that determine a person's worldview. If someone thought that the state of affairs at that time was acceptable, it was most often because their material situation allowed them that luxury. And only the wealthy could afford to reflect on anything.
01. Proudhon
A contemporary of Marx, a certain Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), identified property as the main cause of injustice: large-scale property, state property and the property of large capitalists. From there he coined his famous phrase, “All property is theft!” And he went further. He called himself an anarchist, which, in his own terms, was a way of saying that he did not recognize any form of government, neither monarchy nor republic, and did not see himself represented by either.
From then on, the term anarchy became popular, although for Proudhon, an old-fashioned philosopher, it had a different connotation than it acquired later. Proudhon was not a revolutionary spirit. Although he was a Frenchman of humble origins, he did not want to change the world by force. For this reason, although both had many points in common, Marx ended up criticizing him as just another, let’s say, barroom philosopher. Someone who sees the problems in society knows what needs to change, but doesn't have the strength to create that change.
Proudhon believed that things would change through reason and persuasion. People would eventually come to terms with the need for workers to take control of the means of production, putting an end to the biggest social problem: large-scale property ownership, or, in other words, the concentration of capital. The idea of economic organization that he imagined was called mutualism. In a society that follows the principles of mutualism, each person receives for their work what it is really worth. This naturally tends to reduce and even eliminate the exploitation of some by others. Of course, this was a naive view, but Proudhon made an even bigger mistake in Stirner's view. He left religion aside, but continued to defend an absolute morality that could only exist if supported by that same religion. For Proudhon, men have duties to one another. These duties include giving each person the result of what they produce. This recourse to morality, which comes from who knows where, will permeate the entire history of anarchism from its father and founder, Proudhon, onwards.
Proudhon was a son of the Enlightenment. Like the men who inspired him, he had a great appreciation for theoretical formulation and the exchange of ideas, but little willingness to put them into practice. He was without a doubt the most courageous product of the revolution in thought that took place in his time, because in the year 1840, proclaiming oneself an anarchist was not exactly a common thing. France, where the famous motto of liberté, egalité et fraternité had inspired so much struggle for freedom and so much bloodshed, had once again fallen into the arms of the monarchy and, except for a brief interlude between 1848 and 1852, would take decades to truly free itself from it.
Proudhon was labeled by some as a utopian socialist. This school of thought, founded by Saint-Simon (1760-1825), sought to reform society with a view to fully realizing the ideals of the French Revolution. Since utopian socialists, such as the Frenchman Saint-Simon and the British Robert Owen (1771-1858), believed in peaceful changes to society, without major revolutions or the use of violence, they were heavily criticized by Marx and Engels. Proudhon would not accept this label. But in fact he seemed to expect too much from society. Although he was a philosopher and knew how to defend his views in a perfectly rational way, he did not present any program or course of action, merely conjectures about what should be done. In this way, the father of anarchism only kicked off a line of thought that would find more fierce and practical defenders.
After the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848, Proudhon began to identify himself as a federalist. In one of his last works, On the Federative Principle (1863), he softened his criticism of state authority and called for a form of government where there was a balance between state power and individual freedoms. Finally, the philosopher came to completely redefine his violent criticism of property, in a posthumous book, Theory of Property, published in 1862, where he defines individual property as a guarantee, a limit that the individual can ensure against state interference, being the only means that the individual has of guaranteeing his autonomy, his freedom, in the face of the overwhelming power of capital and the State.
02. Thoreau
We will find another son of the Enlightenment in a completely different environment from that of Proudhon, in the United States, still in the freshness of its age, so to speak, a few decades after its independence. But the United States of Henry David Thoreau had already become an unprecedented historical experience, a country that, by all indications, took the ideas of freedom defended by the Enlightenment to their ultimate consequences. This was the country that capitalism had apparently chosen to be its most perfect symbol. Work, freedom of initiative, wealth and capital at the disposal of those who work. If the general idea was to free the individual from the yoke, from the oppression of forces incomprehensible to him, wouldn't the United States, by giving to this individual a level of freedom never seen before, be the model to follow, the civilizing ideal?
Well, yes, but Thoreau, who was born only forty years after the establishment of this paradise, did not think exactly that way, and one of his first objections to this admirable image that was painted was the fact that most people who lived on American soil not only did not have the right to participate in this so-called freedom, but were not even seen as human beings. This undermined the supposed belief in human dignity that North Americans seemed to hold in such high regard. Just like the ancient nobles, the modern citizen, in order to be seen as a citizen, had to meet certain requirements that had nothing to do with his real qualities. Thoreau thus attacks slavery as an evil that affects not only the slaves, but that degrades the slave owners themselves. He approaches Proudhon in his criticism of all forms of government, “The best government is that which governs not”, a phrase of his that practically summarizes the anarchist view of power.
His most famous idea, civil disobedience, is a landmark of the power of the individual over society, as it argues that man should not have to submit to laws that he considers absurd. If all citizens who were outraged by slavery were to act in this way, the slavery system itself would collapse. But it is important to note that Thoreau's civil disobedience does not have anarchist roots. It aims, rather, to adapt the government to the real desires of the citizens it supposedly represents.
What most distinguishes his thinking, however, is his defense of simplicity and naturalism, in contrast to the capitalist ideals that reigned in the minds of his fellow citizens. Thoreau advocates a return to nature, in the sense of seeking an ideal of honesty, simplicity, a worldview that forgets a little about having, possessing, and focuses on being, on being on earth in harmony with nature. And this is where he adds a new perspective to the individual dissatisfaction that was already defended by Proudhon. If the French philosopher attacked large property as an evil that necessarily made collective well-being impossible, Thoreau emphasizes the materialistic attachment to capital, and to the goods it buys and produces, as a factor that impedes genuine happiness and freedom. Because capital, property, imprisons, creates a whole set of rules and implements a type of behavior where the possessor becomes the possessed, and money, instead of safeguarding freedom, is an obstacle to it; the more the subject has, the more he wants, and the more others want to take it away from him.
A book published in 1854, Walden, recounts Thoreau's personal experience, when he literally moved to the forest in order to live in direct contact with nature, building his own house and living with the bare minimum. This experience, which lasted two years, served as an inspiration to many, transforming Thoreau into a kind of ecological guru before ecology even existed.
Was he the first to defend this naturalist point of view? No, but he was certainly the first to do so in North America, and this was long before the United States became what it is today. His thinking, which was completely opposed to the environment in which he lived, is what Stirner would call singularity.
It is important to note that Thoreau, for him, the desire for change is something individual, an internal reaction of the subject. While for Proudhon the essential thing would be to change society itself, so that man would feel better in it, for Thoreau man himself must change, and, based on this change, either inspire others to adopt a new attitude towards life or simply isolate himself and let others live their lives. Thus, from the beginning, two main strands of anarchism were distinguished: the collectivist (social) and the individualist. But it's good to remember that Thoreau himself did not label himself an anarchist.
Keeping in mind the differences between Thoreau's times and ours, remembering that in those times it was relatively easier for people to drop everything and go to the forest, since today forests are usually protected, Thoreau's ideal of a simple life serves as an alternative to life in a capitalist society, entirely governed by countless things, rituals and obligations that, instead of freeing the individual, only create chains and a false sense of belonging. For the anarchist ideology, in addition to questioning the actions of authorities through civil disobedience, which even inspired Gandhi himself, Thoreau contributes to this perception that people can, if they want, free themselves from the yoke of society, from “civilization” itself, but they have to be willing to pay a price for it. Thoreau himself, as I said, abandoned life in the forest at times. Just as many modern rebels criticize society, but can hardly go very long without its conveniences.
03. Nechaev and Bakunin
Russia, which in the 19th century produced writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, and would become the antipode of Thoreau's homeland in the 20th century, spawned generations of nonconformists, who gave these writers much to write about. In fact, one of these nonconformists was the inspiration for one of Dostoyevsky's masterpieces, the book (The) Demons, published in 1872. He was a certain Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechaev (1847-1882), a nihilist, revolutionary, radical anarchist, and supposed author of the infamous Catechism of a Revolutionary, in which he argues that in order to achieve the desired end, that is, change in society, all means are valid, including and especially violence, and that nothing fundamental can be changed without a totally radical attitude. Needless to say, he got into a lot of trouble with this view. For the great Dostoyevsky, Nechaev was a symptom of the need that the man of his time had for an absolute that would replace the irreplaceable, that is, the Christian God. Marx objected to Nechaev's virulence but also admitted that nothing fundamental would change in society without a radical revolution.
Nechaev was involved in the death of one of his own allies, fled to Switzerland, was extradited back to Russia and died in prison in 1882, at the age of only 35. He wanted to be, and in a certain way was, the perfect model of a revolutionary. In the "Catechism" he presents the ideal revolutionary as an ascetic who submits himself to any sacrifice to achieve his goal, the total destruction of the existing order. In his own words:
Nechaev's master and inspiration, was another Russian who, like him, would pay dearly for a philosophy of life so far from the accepted standard. Mikhail Aleksandrovitch Bakunin (1814-1876), perhaps the most emblematic figure within the anarchist ideology, still very popular today despite having died 150 years ago. Bakunin was neither a Proudhon nor a Thoreau, he was not a philosopher avant la lettre, but rather a rebel in the literal sense of the term. A born nonconformist. He did not leave behind a system of thought, nor a single book in which all his ideas were systematized. All his written work consists of essays, articles, letters and fragments. Since he was and wanted to be a man of action, he never had time to stop, sit down and systematize his ideas on paper. Hence, his thinking often becomes the fruit of the moment; he could be free one day and in prison the next, and when you read his writings you realize this. And it is clear, above all, that although he considered himself a 100% rational man, emotion often dictated his actions and ideas. In order to think objectively, a man must be able to sit down, ponder his words, and reflect on their meaning. If a person is guided solely by emotion, the result is not only difficult for others to understand, but also tends to lead him to the utmost disappointment.
Born in 1814, Bakunin lived intensely through the effervescence of that century. His life was extremely eventful; he traveled everywhere, from Paris to Siberia, and it would be very tiring to sketch his biography here. There is plenty of material on the internet about him. I will only focus here on the essential details. For example, the fact that he knew both Proudhon and Marx. He admired the former for his intellect, but criticized him for his inaction. He began by deeply admiring the latter and ended up as a staunch critic of Marxism. One of Bakunin's most famous passages is the one where he says that Marx considered him an inveterate idealistic dreamer, and he was right, and he considered Marx an authoritarian guy from head to toe, and he was also right.
Nechaev's radicalism found an echo and inspiration in Bakunin, but only to a certain extent. After being accused of murder and forced to flee, Nechaev became so paranoid that he began to threaten Bakunin himself if he did not help him. Thus, the two ended up breaking up before Bakunin's death. It should be noted that Bakunin had his own version of the "Catechism of the Revolutionary", much less virulent than Nechaev's.
Nechaev's absolutely radical stance ended up revealing itself, for Bakunin, as the limit which nihilistic thought can reach. By turning against his own allies, Nechaev demonstrated that for him nothing really mattered except the realization of an ideal of destruction, which had become a fixed idea. Having no concrete objective after the supposed "victory" of his revolution, Nechaev's anarchism reveals itself as nihilism in the most negative sense of the term, destruction as an end in itself.
Bakunin realized what was at stake, albeit belatedly, and had the merit of never engaging in explicit acts of violence. As I said, his ideas are scattered across countless fragments of texts, but some of them are more notorious than others. The most famous is undoubtedly God and the State, from 1871. Although it is more of a critique than an in-depth analysis of these two concepts, the text is important because it contains a good summary of Bakunin's Weltanschauung. For Bakunin, as important as the critique of property was the critique of organized religion. Hence the fact that anarchism is almost always the enemy of religion as a structure of domination. We know that, by relying on the famous “render unto Caesar what is Caesar's,” the Church, here understood in the broad sense, safeguards both the rights of the State and its own. Bakunin does not criticize faith itself so much, but the fact that, despite all its humanitarian preaching, the Church does absolutely nothing to stop the abuses of the State, on the contrary, it participates in and benefits from them.
Bakunin's relationship with Marx went from mutual support and admiration to pure and complete aversion. Both men were deeply involved in the International Workingmen's Association, better known as the International, an organization founded in 1864 that included and represented practically the entire spectrum of leftist thought at that time, with members from the most diverse countries in Europe and followers of both Marx and Bakunin themselves and Proudhon and other thinkers of the time. This organization played a fundamental historical role in the struggle for the achievement of labor, and therefore individual, rights at that time. Since it brought together various tendencies, from the most moderate to the most radical, it was precisely the impossibility of reconciling Marxist thought, which advocated the seizure of power and the conquest of the State by the working class, and Bakunin's thought, which simply advocated the abolition of the State and the end of the power of some over others, which led to a split and Bakunin's expulsion from this institution. From then on, around 1872, until the end of his life in 1876, Bakunin would be a fierce critic of Marx.
Bakunin had the merit of realizing where Marx's authoritarian thought and the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat would lead. Simply a change of masters. But this in itself does not exempt his ideas from criticism. He simply believed that it would be possible to abolish the State, property, and the Church, without any major difficulties other than the natural sacrifices resulting from a revolution. His fight for better working conditions for workers in all European countries cannot be ignored. But he does not present any real, tangible solutions, any reasonable alternative to Marx’s ideas. He believed that he would never live to see a revolution actually take place, that he was only planting a seed, the fruits of which would be harvested by later generations.
The lesson that Bakunin’s anarchism holds, as reflected in the mind of his disciple Nechaev, is that the individual must have a rational purpose even when he wants to implement a profound reform in society. There is no logic in worshiping destruction for the sake of destruction. You either want to reform something or you want to destroy it. And the important thing to note is that nihilistic rhetoric is incredibly seductive, especially for those who, like Nechaev, grew up in an incredibly stratified and unjust society. The idea of destroying such a social organization without leaving anything behind cannot help but be appealing. But if violence becomes an end in itself, indignation against injustice itself becomes a mere excuse, a mere subterfuge. In fact, the radical revolutionary ends up doing much more harm than good, since, in addition to not being able to effectively change the structure he condemns, he ends up punishing the underprivileged even more, since the State's repression, in its quest to set an example, only increases, falling on the weakest.
04. Kropotkin
Peter, or Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a compatriot of Bakunin who admired him and, unlike him, lived long enough to see the Russian Revolution take place. Kropotkin's stance was much less radical. Although he was also an anarchist and saw the State, property and capital as problems to be faced and overcome, Kropotkin's personality, much more amiable and tolerant than Bakunin's, led him to face and reflect on other types of social problems. Although he was also arrested, perhaps because he was of noble origin, he ended up facing far fewer difficulties than his anarchist compatriots. But Kropotkin was a noble man in essence, a true intellectual, a geographer by training, but also an economist, sociologist, political scientist, etc. He was above all a humanitarian. In the 1892 anarchist classic The Conquest of Bread, he makes clear his solid knowledge of how capitalism worked and how he believed that replacing capitalism with a form of mutual collaboration between workers would be the most humane thing to do, because capitalism, for him, has as its fundamental characteristic the dehumanization of everyone involved, whether those who live to exploit or those who live to be exploited.
As Kropotkin had a solid education, he was able to present his ideas in a much more coherent way than Bakunin. Having been imprisoned in Siberia, he had the opportunity to observe the inhumane conditions of the Russian prison system, and how little the State cared about reforming and improving the lives of prisoners. This theme had already been explored by Dostoyevsky in his book Memoirs of the House of the Dead, from 1862, and Kropotkin adopts a very similar point of view, that is, that prison does nothing to improve the lives of prisoners, to reform them, even though there are all kinds of people there, including many who could be perfectly useful citizens.
For Kropotkin, the establishment of a “proletarian” government was an essentially anti-revolutionary idea:
"We know that Revolution and Government are incompatible; one must destroy the other, no matter what name is given to government, whether dictator, royalty, or parliament. We know that what makes the strength and the truth of our party is contained in this fundamental formula — "Nothing good or durable can be done except by the free initiative of the people, and every government tends to destroy it;" and so the very best among us, if their ideas had not to pass through the crucible of the popular mind, before being put into execution, and if they should become masters of that formidable machine — the government — and could thus act as they chose, would become in a week fit only for the gallows. We know whither every dictator leads, even the best intentioned, — namely to the death of all revolutionary movement."
Kropotkin revisits the thme of mutualism already brought up by Proudhon, but expands it based on his studies and observations of nature. In his classic book Mutual Aid, or Mutualism, from 1902, he defends the thesis that mutual aid is a more essential factor for survival in nature than the famous natural selection and survival of the fittest. Applying this notion to human society, he became a proponent of the so-called anarcho-communism, which proposes, in addition to the abolition of the State, that the division of the fruits of labor be made according to the needs of each individual. It is an essentially humanitarian position, which aims to protect the weakest.
To quote his words again:
"The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay."
Much of what Kropotkin wrote is marked by a deep and sincere humanitarian sentiment. Yet, he slips into the same kind of naivety that Bakunin was a victim of. As a supporter of a form of social anarchism, he also dreamed of reforming society, of forming a great brotherhood of men who would help each other instead of devouring each other, as they had been doing until then. But if Bakunin sinned by virulence and intransigence, Kropotkin sinned by expecting too much from human beings. The idea that mutual aid is an essential factor for human survival has its charm, but it alone cannot explain human behavior, especially because even when I help others, I remain essentially selfish; I help them to the extent that they prove useful to me. It is perfectly possible to reduce all the help I give to anyone not as an act of kindness on my part, but as a selfish act, I want to look good in the photo, I want whoever is by my side to feel satisfied. And there is also group selfishness, the group also wants to remain in existence at any cost, this also serves to undermine this theory that mutual aid prevails over the survival of the fittest. Still, despite his limitations, Kropotkin was a truly admirable guy in many ways, especially for trying to give the greatest possible foundation to his ideas and for his humanitarian concerns, even if he interpreted human nature in a somewhat naive way.
05. Malatesta
Two more notorious anarchists who deserve to be remembered here are the Italian Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) and the Lithuanian Emma Goldman (1869-1940).
Malatesta and Goldman are important not only because they worked actively to spread anarchist ideas, but because they lived a large part of their lives in the 20th century, and thus saw with their own eyes the result of all the political turmoil of the previous century, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the consolidation of labor rights and the general improvement in working conditions for the majority, due in large part to all the demands and protests in which anarchists participated. The Russian Revolution in particular, since in theory it represented, after all, the victory of Marxism.
Malatesta, who lived a very turbulent life, being exiled and imprisoned in several countries for his anarchist activities, was in a way the most perfect incarnation of an anarchist rebel that we have ever heard of. The anarchist hero par excellence. He grew up in an Italy where the movement for workers' rights was very strong, and as violently repressed as in any other part of Europe at the end of the 19th century. The rise of fascism in the 1920s, which established a dictatorial regime in the country, served to further intensify this oppression. But despite suffering much persecution and being arrested several times, Malatesta lived a long life, 78 years.
He strongly believed in the ideas he defended and founded and managed several libertarian newspapers. Through a text in the form of a dialogue called Fra Campesini (Among Peasants) and a famous essay called Anarchy, he perfectly summarized the central points of social anarchism. In the first, in the form of a dialogue, he tries to convince the workers of his time to rise up, to flee from conformity, and mainly to abandon the prejudice instituted in them by the State against revolutionary thought. In other words, he tries to combat the notion that the social revolution would only bring chaos, nihilistic barbarism, which is what many believed at the time. In the second, Malatesta states that anarchism would establish a society of friends, of free men. Since the central problem for him was the government, the power, which was necessarily in the hands of a privileged few, who were only interested in maintaining social inequality and the poor and disadvantaged perpetually satisfied with their situation.
Malatesta began as a disciple of Bakunin and a defender of propaganda by the act, but ended up supporting so-called anarcho-syndicalism, which is a less radical form of anarchism, proposing the replacement of the State by associations, unions, where the interests of workers are duly represented and defended. The aforementioned propaganda by the act consisted of an idea very popular among anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, arguing that, in order to really get society's attention, it was necessary to have the courage to carry out an act of great repercussion, even if violent, to "wake up" society and force it to reflect on issues that it had swept under the rug. Malatesta participated in several such acts, and he started early: at the age of 14, he sent a letter to the King of Italy himself protesting against social injustices in the country. He was even arrested for this, the first of many times. In his words:
“Everyone gave everything they could to propaganda, and even what they couldn’t, because when money was scarce, they calmly sold the objects in their homes, accepting with resignation the censures of their respective families. For the sake of propaganda, we forgot about work and studies! After all, the Revolution was about to break out at any moment and would fix everything. Some often ended up in jail, but they came out of there with more energy than before: the persecutions had no other effect than to consolidate our enthusiasm. It is true that the persecutions of that time were weak compared to those that would come later. At that time, the regime had emerged from a series of revolutions and the authorities, strict from the beginning with the workers, especially in the countryside, showed a certain respect for freedom in the political struggle, a kind of indisposition similar to that of the Austrian rulers and the Bourbons, which, however, disappeared as quickly as the regime was consolidated, and the fight for national independence was relegated to a secondary plane.”
A perspective not far removed from Nechaev’s in the Catechism of the Revolutionary. However, if Nechaev did not have time to mature, Malatesta, like Proudhon, did, and evolved from a more radical and uncompromising position to a more balanced and conciliatory point of view. Like Bakunin and Kropotkin, he had this ideal of social change, he was a typical social anarchist, but his life experiences influenced him to the point that he was able to realize, at the end of his life, the disadvantage of all extremism, since it was extremist thinking that led both to the victory of socialism in Russia and to the rise of fascism in Italy. He died under house arrest, as an enemy of the newly installed fascist regime, and was buried in a mass grave. The authorities feared that his grave would become a point of reference for new born nonconformists like himself.
06. Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman, who was born in Lithuania in 1869, then part of the Russian Empire, and moved to the United States in 1885, stood out as a great female voice within the anarchist movement. What sets her apart from Bakunin, Malatesta and others is how much she places the issue of individuality, women's emancipation and also the rights of minorities as a sine qua non condition for the construction of a truly libertarian society. For her, there is no point in talking about individual liberation if we do not take into account that women, blacks, indigenous people and homosexuals are also individuals, with their own will and ideas. Her most famous work is a collection of various texts called Anarchism and Other Essays. One of the most important essays in this book is called Minorities vs. Majorities. Goldman emphasizes how much modern society devalues the will and opinion of minorities in favor of what it understands as the sacred right of the majority. It turns out that most people are never guided by lofty ideals of equality and justice, but by common sense, which is nothing more than choosing what is easiest and most convenient, never what challenges society or makes it evolve.
Like Malatesta, Goldman was essentially an activist. She even took part in an assassination attempt on a major industrialist in the late 19th century, Henry Clay Fick (1849-1919), along with her partner and ally Alexander Berkman (1870-1936), also an anarchist, and was convicted and imprisoned for this. She was later persecuted and imprisoned again for defending causes such as birth control, women's right to vote, and better treatment for prisoners. Thanks to this, she became a controversial and well-known figure in the United States. She gave lectures, appeared as a character in books, and was the prototype of the independent and nonconformist woman. Here is her defense of anarchism:
“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination.”
“Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.”
In 1919, she was deported to Russia, and was initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but soon became disillusioned when she realized that the Soviet regime silenced any dissenting opinion. This experience generated a book published in 1923 called My Disillusionment in Russia. She was also an enthusiast of the Spanish anarchists who were fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
From this we can see that Emma Goldman was truly an unusual woman, an independent thinker who helped break taboos among anarchists themselves, since the overwhelming majority of those enthusiastic about the idea were men, and men who, as Goldman herself denounced several times in her writings, still maintained an essentially conservative position in relation to women. Gandman was essentially an individualist anarchist, Stirner was one of her influences, and in a certain way among the anarchists mentioned here she is the one who comes closest to the German philosopher, both because of her absolutely independent stance, not accepting criticism or judgments other than those coming from herself, and because she personifies, in everything, an individual fully aware of her singularity. For her, the individual must come first, not society, and the more he sees himself as something insignificant in the face of the strength of society, the strength of numbers, the more he abandons his own freedom in favor of pure and simple conformity.
07. Contemporary Anarchism
Contemporary anarchism, that is, the development of this ideology after the Second World War onwards, has been divided into such varied tendencies that it would be difficult to adequately summarize them all in a brief essay.
In general terms, although the traditional criticism of the State, power, and organized religions continues to exist, we can say that the tendency is for anarchism to overcome utopian idealism in favor of a more down-to-earth stance. Or rather, instead of worrying about the improbable construction of an imaginary world, contemporary anarchists tend to concern themselves with the society in which they live, with how the individual can act and assert themselves within it.
Thus, issues such as minority rights, ecology, animal care, gender identity, social control via the Internet, among others, occupy the agenda in place of the traditional and already outdated fight for labor rights. In general, what is attacked are the remnants of authoritarian thinking that continue to permeate the modern world. This also includes the power of large corporations, including bigtechs, which threaten to swallow up individual freedoms in exchange for supposed membership in the "global village".
Among the current trends, one that is very popular on the internet today is the so-called anarcho-capitalism, which advocates an inversion of the traditional socialist approach of classical anarchism. Thus, while the latter advocated the abolition of the State in order to establish a communist society, anarcho-capitalism aims to fully implement capitalism, the free market, entirely free from State interference. According to this line of thought, when the State is abolished, society will self-regulate through the free exchange of goods, ensuring that private property protects the right of everyone to enjoy the results of their work. Private and specialized agencies would take the place of the institutions that exist in the current form of State.
For many, anarcho-capitalism cannot even be called anarchism, since the critique of capital and private property is one of the foundations of classical anarchism. For others, it is the most authentic form of anarchism that has ever existed and the only one that is truly feasible, since it is utopian to fight against private property, which is what guarantees the survival and dignity of the individual (an opinion that, as I said before, is close to Proudhon in his later years).
In short, the most recent anarchism leaves the realm of the pure ideal and enters into reality, into the issues of the present. If it cannot completely free itself from a certain naiveté in dealing with social problems, it at least distances itself from pure and simple revolt as an end in itself. No modern current of anarchism, however, goes beyond the mere recognition of individuality, to the point of pure and simple egoism. On the contrary, egoism continues to be a preferential target, since what is still sought is the improvement, the reform of society. Thus, even though it is much more realistic than its classical version, current anarchism remains in the realm of the ideal, and the individual who wants to identify with any group must, at the very least, sacrifice part of his individuality. Which is still an advance in relation to the time when either the individual devoted himself one hundred percent to his revolutionary ideal or he was an outcast, a reactionary, etc.
08. And what is anarchism, after all?
So, summarizing everything I have explained so far about anarchism, we can see that this ideology, emerging within modern capitalist society, developed on the fringes of it, but forcing, as far as possible, society to reflect on a lot of questions that perhaps, without this push, it would never be able to. Starting with Proudhon's boldness in standing beyond state authority and Thoreau's abolitionist ideal and his call for a simpler life, moving on to Bakunin's uncompromising defense of workers' rights, Kropotkin's humanitarianism, denouncing the terrible conditions in which prisoners lived, and finally to the example of Malatesta's struggle, who practically dedicated his life to defending these ideas, and Emma Goldman, who brought the fundamental issue of women and minorities into the discussion, we arrive at the present day, where rebellion is directed against issues that ancient thinkers often could not even conceive of, such as gender identity, global warming, animal abuse, among countless others. In short, what basically motivated the emergence of this concept? An innate desire for rebellion, which manifests itself either as a concern for social order, a desire to reform society, or as a desire for individual affirmation, whether outside or within the social structure itself. Remembering that anarchism, although we mentally associate the term with an act of rebellion, protests, boycotts, strikes, etc., can perfectly be interpreted by the individual as something peaceful, as a call to a simple life, far from society and its suffocating rules. Eg, the ideal proposed by Thoreau.
Anarchism is the rejection of authority external to the individual. It is the rejection of power that does not come from the individual. It is the denial of any order that was created for man without consulting him, but that he has to accept from birth without question. This denial, for some, could never occur within society. Hence another question arises: if you are in the State, how can you say that you reject it? Don't you depend on a lot of things that only the State can provide? Don't you count on public security, on which the State has a monopoly? And, most importantly, can you exist away from capital? Can you even eat without money? Others, however, have no qualms about declaring themselves anarchists even though they live, like everyone else, within a capitalist society.
What happens?
A misunderstanding. The individual may be an individualist anarchist, believing in taking a stand against the power of society, or an ideologue of social anarchism, who dreams of building a commune where the human being can finally realize his dream of freedom. Or he may be an egoist, who does not start from society to define anything, but starts from himself to define and exercise his power over society. In any of these cases, the individual will be living within the State, in an essentially capitalist society, but let us remember that the individual is one thing, society is another, one complements the other, and one also negates the other. For some things, the individual needs society and cannot escape while he is within it. For others, the State is an obstacle, and the individual only gives it the part he wants to give. Let us say, society (the State) has that set of laws, that institutionalized morality to which the individual only adheres for pure convenience. In fact, he pretends to adhere to it. Because internally, those rules, those laws, mean nothing to him. He no longer recognizes the sacredness of those laws, of that moral code; they are a product of other men, other times, and no one has ever consulted him about them, whether or not they mean anything to him. If he pretends to adhere to that moral code, it is out of pure convenience. Because deep down he is an anarchist in essence; he only accepts the rules that he imposes on himself; only those guide his spirit, and it is obvious that he would get rid of the others if he could.
"That's what I mean," someone says, "I can't, where is my freedom?" Freedom, contrary to what some enthusiastic idealist might preach, will never be absolute. Life today allows a degree of freedom that would have been unthinkable in Bakunin's time. If someone, for example, despises the institution of marriage, thinks it has no meaning, he simply doesn't get married. Here in the West, at least, no one is going to arrest me for that. Using this example, I analyze the social rules that I am actually obliged to follow, and I realize that there are far fewer of them than there were just a few decades ago. Society and the State continue to see and treat me as a number, and will always continue to do so. But I take advantage of every gap it opens to assert my individuality. So, in a very tangible way, an individual can perfectly well be an anarchist today, even without raising any flag. Of course, many people still believe in “sacred institutions,” but the sacredness of things, which has always been the foundation of the State, the Church, and society, can now be questioned without any major problems. Not recognizing absolutes is already an anarchist attitude. Max Stirner was identified as an anarchist precisely because of this, not just because he criticized the State. He posits the individual as his own starting point, the individual who no longer needs to lower himself before anything, before any sacredness, because all sacredness is just an idea inside his head. The best definition for Stirner is selfish, but he can also be called a selfish anarchist (anarcho-egoist). For him, the denial of the State does not come from a desire to reform, to improve, but to overcome the State, to place oneself beyond it.
In Stirner’s own words:
“The State always has only the purpose of restraining, taming, subordinating the individual, of subjecting him to some generality; it lasts only as long as the individual is not all in all, and is only the most clearly defined limitation of myself, my limitation, my slavery. A State never aims at encouraging the free activity of individuals, but always that activity which is bound up with the interest of the State. Nothing common happens through the State, just as the joint work of all the individual parts of a machine cannot be called a fabric: it is rather the work of the whole machine as a unit, it is the typical work of a machine. In the same way, everything happens through the State machine; because it moves the wheels of individual minds, none of which follows its own impulses. The State seeks to restrain all free activity by its censorship, its surveillance, its police, and it considers this restriction as its duty because, in fact, it is a duty of self-preservation. The State wants to make something of people, so only manufactured people live in it; Anyone who wants to be himself is his opponent, and is nothing. "He is nothing" means something like: the State does not use him, does not give him any position, any function, any commercial purpose, and things like that.”
Ideological anarchism, on the other hand, is something else. It wants to change the world, including me and you. If we want to identify the main error, not even theoretical, but practical, of classical anarchism, this is it. What does anarchism à la Bakunin and Nechaev preach? The radical reform of society, turning society inside out, shaking it from top to bottom and seeing what's left standing. How can this be achieved? The Catechism of the Revolutionary is explicit, through pure and simple violence. Just as Marx believed, and was right, that socialism would never be implemented without sacrifices, anarchism also demands sacrifice, but an even greater sacrifice, because the subject has no idea what will happen after the "revolution" happens. A shot in the dark, a leap of faith.
And this literally, because Bakunin believed that his role was to pave the way, assigning to the next generations the task of rebuilding society after the abolition of the State. And he, Bakunin, just like most classical anarchists make the mistake of preaching to man a universal morality of solidarity that would bind all men, that would oblige us to have duties towards one another, without knowing where these duties came from. It is one thing for a Christian to defend an absolute code of morality, another thing for someone who rejected Christianity because of it to do the same. Because the consequence of this is, invariably, to separate people into right and wrong, good and bad. We have to take into account, of course, the context in which Bakunin's thought arose; he spoke to a society where the overwhelming majority barely had enough to eat. Of course, if he had said, at that time, “with the death of God, we are each for ourselves”, this point of view would not have been very encouraging. But understanding that here in this world it is, yes, every man for himself, is an essential starting point to see things rationally.
Proudhonian anarchism develops as an ideal. And every ideal does not and cannot concern men of flesh and blood. For this ideal to be realized, all those interested in social restructuring would have to be unanimous in their objective. And what happens? That in practice two men cannot be unanimous even in relation to the most obvious facts, the smallest things, much less in relation to the type of society in which they want to live the rest of their lives. To implement an ideal, one can only appeal to force, Marx was right about that. Because, voluntarily, people will always disagree about everything. When someone dreams like, say, a John Lennon, about a society without possessions, etc., they are not imagining a place that can be inhabited by men of flesh and blood, only by ghosts.
09. Stirner and the union of egoists
When Max Stirner criticizes the State, he does not intend to replace one State with another. That would be a contradiction. The State itself is the problem, regardless of the form it takes. The individual needs to learn to rise above the State. Stirner also does not establish a new morality. That would be another contradiction. However, Stirner does posits the union of egoists, as a rational way of exchanging interests between individuals. This has nothing to do with morality, but with pure convenience. Since Stirner does not propose the overthrow of one State and the establishment of another, you can deduce that when he speaks of the freedom of the individual, this is something that applies to any State in which he happens to be. So the pure and simple union of egoists in search of a common goal can occur within any type of society, any State. What really matters is that the individual is doing what he does taking into account his own interests, and is not acting to serve some greater good. Even if his conduct happens to be beneficial to the State, to others, that is not the end he has in mind. Stirner thus advocates an individual as free as possible, free to make decisions, to know what he does, to know what he wants, and who only commits to any activity with his own well-being assured before anything else. For the individual makes a 180-degree turn. Before, society, the collective interest, was the center of all things, now it is the individual. Everything starts from him, everything ends in him. Society, the State, morality, as mere concepts, are below the individual, who is the singularity from which all concepts now arise. The individual is something concrete, concepts are not.
For this very reason, the Stirnerian worldview, although anarchist in essence, differs completely from the anarchist ideal, whether social or individualist. Stirner would hardly believe that one day we could live in a society entirely free of spooks, of great ideas hovering over our heads. And anarchism brings this, new concepts and ideas more important than anything else, it brings new spooks. It only reformulates society, ends social injustices, but forcing everyone into a new mold, since those who do not agree with the ideal will also be outlawed. Even in the case of a brilliant thinker like Emma Goldman, one still perceives an absolute morality taking over her thinking, she still sees certain things as acceptable and others as unacceptable, which implies a desire to reform society towards the victory of a new morality. But the egoist realizes that society is what it is, it is not moving anywhere. Reforming it is useless, it is using one's strength against new windmills. Society is many, the individual is one. When the individual places the weight of the entire society on his shoulders, he succumbs. The only effective social reform would be one that truly comes from the will of everyone involved, of all members of a society, hence Stirner's defense of the association of egoists, where everyone truly asserts their will. The reform that classical anarchism preaches is a reform that starts with some individuals and is imposed on everyone else. This is just a new change of masters.
In this traditional way, anarchism is perceived as an unrealizable ideal, while we, flesh and blood people, have to live in reality. And the fact is that the conditions of the vast majority of people today are substantially different from what they were in the time of Marx and Bakunin. That is why it is ridiculous when we hear someone talking, for example, about "class struggle", when today labor relations have changed so much. Or who does not accept any imposition of a corrupt “system” from which, apparently, only he escapes. That poverty, misery, inequality still exist, that is obvious, but the model of social revolution has already been tested in many ways, without much apparent success, and all that is left for its defenders to say is that, in reality, the true revolution is yet to come, in a hypothetical future where neither you nor I will be.
The essence of any economic system is to be unjust. The obvious consequence is always inequality. Whether in capitalism, where some people naturally try harder or are luckier than others (and it can be argued that luck is a more relevant factor than effort), or in socialism, where greater or lesser effort will be rewarded in the same way, demonstrating that trying harder is a waste of time. The injustice of the economy is a reflection of human nature itself, there is no way to escape it. Some want very little, others want a lot, and some want everything they can get their hands on; for some, maximum frugality is enough, while others are only satisfied with sheer opulence. Dissatisfaction is the general tone of human beings. It is a product of egoism. Therefore, only in a relationship of equality where each party has their desires satisfied can we glimpse, not justice, but the effective validation of each person's egoism so as not to destroy the others. This union of egoists, therefore, does not implement a moral code, but rather an ethic based on the real interests of those involved.
It is illusory to think that inequality and dissatisfaction would disappear in an egalitarian economic system. Because then egoism arises, the individual's desire to distinguish himself from others. Each person is treated like a cog in a machine, each person has a job and an entirely predictable result of that work, and this undermines any desire to do anything at all. The ideologue of anarchism will say, "but anarchism does not force the individual to do anything, he is free to follow his inclinations, to work or not!" However, this is already the case in the capitalist economy, the cost of choosing not to work is going hungry, but no one is forced to work.
10. Conclusion
I will now summarize this brief outline of anarchism and conclude my line of reasoning.
Today, the ideal of individual autonomy is more alive than ever. Anarchism in the fullest sense of the word. Of course, there are those who believe that a classless society is yet to come, to arrive. For the individual who lives in the present, however, it is important to consider the now. The now is capitalism, capitalism in transformation, of course, the capitalism of bitcoins, digital banks, big tech, influencers, creators sharing their own interpretation of the world on the internet. What is left for the individual, within this system, is to fight for his own independence. Not just financial independence. But mental independence, really. In a world of a profusion of data and information, of attempts at remote control, and of a pseudo-social life online that threatens to take up all his free time, the individual's struggle remains the same as always: it is him against everyone. He can, if he wants, anchor himself in libertarian ideals, believe that he is fighting so that future men will know a supposed freedom. But his struggle is personal, it is for the present. Never in history has there been such a concern for privacy and individual independence as there is now. Never have there been so many possibilities for the individual to exist within a State as independent as possible from the constraints of that State, which he can question entirely and to which he is obliged to give only a minimum of himself. By taking due care not to be a victim, not to hand over his freedom on a silver platter, the individual can, today, live more satisfactorily than he has ever lived.
It is also important to consider, beyond the mere domination of capital and economic power, the issue of power, of the authority of some over others. There is nothing in human nature that allows us to establish a natural hierarchy among men. On the contrary, men of any type, of any level of intelligence, of any origin or nation or even race, are driven by the same objective, the continuity of their life, and, consequently, the maintenance of their species. The advantages, in status, in strength, in intelligence, of some are weighed against their own limitations. For example, the strong man is only strong in contrast to the weak man, and only exists because the latter exists. The beautiful man is the antithesis of the ugly man, and if the latter did not exist, his beauty would have no impact or importance whatsoever. Similarly, the rich not only have nothing intrinsically superior to the poor, but they depend on them, they are nothing without them. This equality between men, which is not a mere artifice, necessarily means that some only submit to others due to pure and simple ignorance of the real nature of things, or due to a fear that has somehow become indelibly engraved in their minds. The authority, the man who holds power in his hands, counts on my ignorance, my fear, my respect for what he supposedly represents, not for what he really is. And that is the problem: I can respect what a man really is, never what he says he is or the title with which he tries to impress me. The authority is a man like me, protected by titles, formalities and the police. When I understand this I free myself from any reverence, and this supposed authority loses any dominion over me, over my spirit. All that is left for it to do is try to instill fear in my body, but even this fear is just a misunderstanding within my spirit.
This is the result of Max Stirner's struggle for the spiritual emancipation of the individual. It must be acknowledged that the social anarchists almost got there, they recognized all aspects of the problem, but they brought with them a final solution, a panacea; that was their basic error. They replaced Christian morality with humanitarian morality. The individualist anarchists, although much closer to Stirner, also, deep down, yearned for the reform of society. Stirner, with his enlightened egoism, did not bring magic formulas or final solutions; he neither preached nor dreamed of the reform of society; he simply left the fate of the individual to himself. Wherever he is, in whatever system, the struggle of the individual will be the same. Even in a hypothetical classless society, without possessions, the struggle for individual freedom would remain the same. And there would be a new authority trying to instill fear in me: the well-being of all. But either I really care about these others, or I will only be forced to pretend to respect them. Again Stirner:
“The impersonal nature of what is called ‘people, nation’ is also evident from the fact that a people, wanting to express its self in the best possible way, ends up placing in command a ruler without a will. The people are faced with this alternative: to be subject to a prince who only realizes himself, his individual desires, in which case he does not recognize in this ‘absolute lord’ his will, the so-called popular will, or to place a prince on the throne who does not assert any will of his own, thus having a prince without a will, whose function a well-regulated mechanism could perform. Therefore, one only has to go further with this perception, and one deduces by itself that the self of the people is an impersonal, ‘spiritual’ power: the law. The self of the people, consequently, is a phantom, not a self properly speaking. I am myself only because I make myself, that is, because someone else does not make me, but I must be my own work. And what about that self of the people? Chance throws it into the hands of the people, chance gives them this or that natural master, chance provides the people a chosen one; this sovereign is not a product of him, of the "sovereign" people, as I am a product of mine. Just imagine, they wanted to convince you that you were not your self, but that John or Peter was your self! But that is how it is with the people, and with all justice. For the people have as little a self as the eleven planets together have a self, although they revolve around a common center."
So, if we have to thank Bakunin and his ilk for fighting to reduce injustices in the world, if we have to thank Emma Goldman for having brought so many important issues to light, we have to be grateful to Stirner even more, for completely exposing the emptiness of all concepts beyond and above man, for being a defender of lucidity above all things, for encouraging us to see ourselves as we really are. As unique individuals who either govern themselves or allow themselves to be governed, that is, allow themselves to be annihilated.
We have to thank Stirner for this inversion of point of view that takes us out of a dead end where we cannot find solutions for anything, simply because we are looking in the wrong place. As long as we tried to look for a solution starting from the whole to the part, from society to the individual, we would never get anywhere. We would always be dissatisfied. The reasonable thing to do is to start from the part to the whole, to take yourself as the starting point, to understand that if you yourself are not free, the freedom of everything else means nothing. If society was everything in the past, and turned me into nothing, now I am the one who can reduce it to nothing, to nothing that has meaning for me. And at the moment when I feel truly free, life is not really solved or finished, but I have a tool in my hands that allows me to walk to the end of it without waiting for solutions that will never come. While the idealist postpones the enjoyment of life until his last breath, that last breath, for me, is just the welcome end of a life that I have already completely exhausted.
In this way, the anarchist, of whatever type, perennially revolted by any and all injustice he sees in the world, forgets that in this same world that he so analyzes and criticizes there is only one life to be lived, which he wastes in a state of permanent rebellion. In an endless, impotent revolt against a “system” that he sees acting in everything, without realizing that he is just another one of its cogs. Life cannot consist only of revolting, criticizing and pointing fingers. If that is all it is, it has no value. We have one life to live. Revolt must have a purpose. I can only revolt against something that is not the way I know it should be. In other words, if my revolt does not have a useful result, it has no purpose. Criticism is only welcome until it becomes an end in itself. The world is there, to be accepted as it is or left for others to enjoy while some only focus on analyzing it and pointing out solutions to its countless problems, without worrying about taking even the slightest advantage of their very brief time in it. I can no longer afford this luxury of living in eternal abstraction, and I am very grateful to Stirner for having verbalized this liberating perception of things in such a scathing way.
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