Moribund Society and Anarchy

of bringing the workers to a revolution. Now, the workers have always made revolutions, but have forever allowed the benefits thereof to be juggled away, because they “did not know.” The role of the propagandist, then, is to teach the workers; and to teach them one must give demonstrations to them. Assertion makes believers, but not conscious ones. At the time when, even for the most advanced Socialists, authority was the basis of all organization, there was nothing wrong in having mere believers. On the contrary it facilitated the task of those who set themselves up as directors. One could go ahead with assertions; one was believed according to the degree of authority he had been clever enough to acquire; and as the directors did not exact of their proselytes a knowledge of why they were to act, but only to “believe” strongly enough to make them blindly obey received orders, they had no need of killing themselves to furnish arguments. Believing in providential men who were to think and act for them, the mass of proselytes did not need to learn much. Had not the leaders a plan of social organization already prepared in their heads, which they would hasten to execute once they were carried into power? To know how to fight and kill each other, that was all they asked the common herd to know and to do. The leaders once in power the dear people had nothing to do but wait; everything would come to them at the proper time without their troubling themselves about it.

But Anarchistic principles have come to overthrow all this. Denying the necessity of providential men, making war upon authority, and claiming for each individual the right and the duty to act under the pressure of his own impulses only, of submitting to no constraint or restriction of his autonomy; proclaiming individual initiative as the basis of all progress and of every truly libertarian association, Anarchism cannot content itself with making believers; it must, above all, aim to convince, that its converts may know why they believe, that the arguments with which they have been furnished may have struck home, that they may have weighed, discussed and considered the value of these for themselves. Hence a propaganda more difficult, more arduous, more abstract, but also more effective.

From the moment the individual relies solely on his own initiative, he must be enabled to exercise it effectively. That such initiative may adapt itself freely to the action of other individuals, it must be conscious, reasoned, based upon the logic of the natural order of facts. That all these separate acts may converge to a common end, they must be animated by a common idea, well understood and clearly elaborated; whence it follows that nothing but a close, logical, and thoroughly defined discussion of the principles can open the minds of those who adopt them, and lead such to reflect for themselves. Hence our method of procedure, which, instead of causing us to get a lot of rhetorical fireworks out of any idea we take up, leads us to turn it over in all its aspects, to dissect it, even to its final atoms, in order to extract from it the greatest possible amount of argument.

Ah, it is no small thing to overthrow a society as we talk of doing, above all when it is desired that this social upheaval shall be universal as we wish it to be! It is clear that the people who compose this society, however cruel it may be to them, are not going to see the necessity of its overthrow as we do, all in a moment, having been accustomed to look upon it as the palladium of their safety and the means of their well-being. They know very well that this society does not furnish them what it has promised, but they cannot understand the necessity for its total destruction. Has not everyone his little reform to propose, which is to grease the wheels and make the machine run to the satisfaction of all? They want, therefore, to know whether this upheaval will be profitable or prejudicial to them, whence arise a mass of questions leading to the discussion of every branch of human knowledge, in order to know whether they will survive in the cataclysm we would provoke. And hence the perplexity of the worker who sees unfolding before him a multitude of questions which they took good care not to teach him at school, discussions which it is very hard for him to follow, subjects which for the most part he hears treated of for the first time;⁠—questions, however, which he must study to the bottom and solve if he desires to be able to profit by this autonomy which he demands, if he does not want to use his initiative to his own detriment, and, more than all, if he wishes to get on without providential men.

When a question, however abstract it may be, presents itself to the investigations of the Anarchist propagandist, he cannot make it otherwise than abstract; nor can he pass it by in silence, under the pretext that those to whom he speaks have never heard of it. To explain it in plain, clear, precise, and concise language; to avoid “thousand-legged words,” as one of our comrades puts it⁠—that is words which are understood only by the initiated;⁠—to avoid burying one’s thought in high-flown and redundant phraseology, or seeking after phrases and effects, this is all that can be done by those who have it at heart to propagate the principles, to spread them and make them understood among the masses; but we cannot mutilate them with the excuse that they are not accessible to the people. If it were necessary to evade every question which the majority of readers are not able to understand upon first enunciation, we should be condemned to return to declamation, to the art of stringing out meaningless phrases one after the other, and saying nothing.