to the best of its inspirations, rejecting the tutelage of no matter whom? Did you ever see anybody begin by fettering the legs of a child that he wanted to teach to walk? There are things, they tell us, with which some people are acquainted better than others; it would be well before acting to consult these individuals and to subordinate our actions to their teachings. We have always been with those who contend that individual action does not exclude a common understanding where collective action is in question; that organization follows from this understanding—a sort of division of labor rendering every individual interdependent upon the others, impelling him to adapt his actions to those of his companions in struggle or in production; but it is a long way from this to admitting that every person should be forced to surrender his will into the hands of whomsoever he should recognize as more skillful than himself in some particular thing. When we go out in camping parties with a number of friends, for example, and put ourselves under the guidance of one of our company having better knowledge of the spot selected, does it follow that we have made him our master and that we are bound to follow him blindly everywhere he pleases to lead us? Do we give him the power to constrain us in case we should refuse to follow him? No. If there be one among us who knows the way we follow him where he leads us because we suppose him capable of taking us where we want to go, because we know he is going there himself; but we have in no sense abdicated our own will and initiative. If in the course of the journey another of us perceive that he whom we have commissioned to guide the company is mistaken, or is trying to lose us, we make use of our initiative to inform ourselves and if necessary take a route which seems more direct or agreeable. It should not be otherwise in times of struggle. At the outset Anarchists must renounce the warfare of army against army, battles arrayed on fields, struggles laid out by strategists and tacticians maneuvering armed bodies as the chess-player maneuvers his figures upon the chessboard. The struggle should be directed chiefly towards the destruction of institutions. The burning up of deeds, registers of land-surveys, proceedings of notaries and solicitors, tax-collectors’ books; the ignoring of the limits of holdings, destruction of the regulations of the civil staff,
etc.; the expropriation of the capitalists, taking possession in the name of all, putting articles of consumption freely at the disposal of all;—all this is the work of small and scattered groups, of skirmishes, not regular battles. And this is the warfare which the Anarchists must seek to encourage everywhere in order to harass governments, compel them to scatter their forces; tire them out and decimate them piecemeal. No need of leaders for blows like these; as soon as someone realizes what should be done he preaches by example, acting so as to attract others to him, who follow him if they are partisans of the enterprise but do not, by the fact of their adherence, abdicate their own initiative in following him who seems most fit to direct the enterprise, especially since someone else may, in the course of the struggle, perceive the possibility of another maneuver, whereupon he will not go and ask authority from the first to make the attempt but will make it known to those who are struggling with him. These, in turn, will assist or reject the undertaking as seems most practicable.
In Anarchy those who know teach those who do not know; the first to conceive an idea puts it into practice, explaining it to those whom he wishes to interest in it. But there is no temporary abdication, no authority; there are only equals who mutually aid each other according to their respective faculties, abandoning none of their rights, no part of their autonomy. The surest means of making Anarchy triumph is to act like an Anarchist.
It would be the same were we to review all the methods of struggle which are proposed to us. Thus out of hatred to property, certain Anarchists have come to justify theft, and pushing the theory to absurdity have no blame for theft practiced by comrade upon comrade. Assuredly we do not pretend to try the thief—we leave that task to the bourgeois society of which he is the product; but in contending for the destruction of private property what we have principally fixed on for destruction is the appropriation by a few, to the detriment of all, of all the means of existence. Now for us all those who, by no matter what means, seek to create a situation for themselves which will enable them to live as parasites upon society, are bourgeois and exploiters, even when they do not live directly upon the toil of others; and the thief is only a bourgeois without capital who, unable to exploit us legally, seeks to do it illegally, with no objection to becoming a fervent admirer of judge and policeman as soon as he is a proprietor himself.
What may we preach as believers in the revolution that we may the more certainly bring it about? The uplifting of human dignity and character, independence of the will which makes us resent command, makes us rebels against despotism and repudiate what seems false and absurd to us. Now all roundabout means, all the expedients which necessitate the use of platitudes, deals, meannesses, tricks to avoid technicalities, to get around a law, are in our opinion injurious to the propaganda and contrary to the end in view; for they force us into the same base acts which we repudiate elsewhere, and instead of uplifting character they lower and debase it, by accustoming people to exhaust their energies in petty channels. Thus, for example, just as much as we approve and
