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This is merely the Introduction and first chapter. Full text available in various formats at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-berkman-what-is-communist-anarchism.
Introduction
I want to tell you about Anarchism.
I want to tell you what Anarchism is, because I think it is well you
should know it. Also because so little is known about it, and what is
known is generally hearsay and mostly false.
I want to tell you about it, because I believe that Anarchism is the
finest and biggest thing man has ever thought of; the only thing that
can give you liberty and well-being, and bring peace and joy to the
world.
I want to tell you about it in such plain and simple language that there
will be no misunderstanding it. Big words and high sounding phrases
serve only to confuse. Straight thinking means plain speaking.
But before I tell you what Anarchism is, I want to tell you what it is not.
That is necessary because so much falsehood has been spread about
Anarchism. Even intelligent persons often have entirely wrong notions
about it. Some people talk about Anarchism without knowing a thing about
it. And some lie about Anarchism, because they don’t want you to know the truth about it.
Anarchism has many enemies; they won’t tell you the truth about it. Why
Anarchism has enemies and who they are, you will see later, in the
course of this story. Just now I can tell you that neither your
political boss nor your employer, neither the capitalist nor the
policeman will speak to you honestly about Anarchism. Most of them know
nothing about it, and all of them hate it. Their newspapers and
publications — the capitalistic press — are also against it.
Even most Socialists and Bolsheviks misrepresent Anarchism. True, the
majority of them don’t know any better. But those who do know better
also often lie about Anarchism and speak of it as ‘disorder and chaos’.
You can see for yourself how dishonest they are in this: the greatest
teachers of Socialism — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — had taught that
Anarchism would come from Socialism. They said that we must first have
Socialism, but that after Socialism there will be Anarchism, and that it
would be a freer and more beautiful condition of society to live in
than Socialism. Yet the Socialists, who swear by Marx and Engels, insist
on calling Anarchism ‘chaos and disorder’, which shows you how ignorant
or dishonest they are.
The Bolsheviki do the same, although their greatest teacher, Lenin, had
said that Anarchism would follow Bolshevism, and that then it will be
better and freer to live.
Therefore I must tell you, first of all, what Anarchism is not.
It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery and murder.
It is not a war of each against all.
It is not a return to barbarism or to the wild state of man.
Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.
Anarchism means that you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.
It means that you should be free to do the things you want to do; and
that you should not be compelled to do what you don’t want to do.
It means that you should have a chance to choose the kind of a life you want to live, and live it without anybody interfering.
It means that the next fellow should have the same freedom as you, that every one should have the same rights and liberties.
It means that all men are brothers, and that they should live like brothers, in peace and harmony.
That is to say, that there should be no war, no violence used by one set
of men against another, no monopoly and no poverty, no oppression, no
taking advantage of your fellow-man.
In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women
are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and
sensible life.
‘Can that be?’ you ask; ‘and how?’
‘Not before we all become angels,’ your friend remarks.
Well, let us talk it over. Maybe I can show you that we can be decent and live as decent folks even without growing wings.
Chapter 1: What Do You Want Out Of Life?
What is it that every one wants most in life? What do you want most?
After all, we are all the same under our skins. Whoever you be — man or
woman, rich or poor, aristocrat or tramp, white, yellow, red or black,
of whatever land, nationality, or religion — we are all alike in feeling
cold and hunger, love and hate; we all fear disaster and disease, and
try to keep away from harm and death.
What you most want out of life, what you fear most, that also is true, in the main, of your neighbor.
Learned men have written big books, many of them, on sociology,
psychology, and many other ‘ologies’, to tell you what you want, but no
two of those books ever agree. And yet I think that you know very well
without them what you want.
They have studied and written and speculated so much about this, for
them so difficult a question, that you, the individual, have become
entirely lost in their philosophies. And they have at last come to the
conclusion that you, my friend, don’t count at all. What’s important,
they say, is not you, but ‘the whole’, all the people together. This
‘whole’ they call ‘society’, ‘the commonwealth’, or ‘the State’, and the
wiseacres have actually decided that it makes no difference if you, the
individual, are miserable so long as ‘society’ is all right. Somehow
they forget to explain how ‘society’ or ‘the whole’ can be all right if
the single members of it are wretched.
So they go on spinning their philosophic webs and producing thick volumes to find out where you really enter in the scheme of things called life, and what you really want.
But you yourself know very well what you want, and so does your neighbor.
You want to be well and healthy; you want to be free, to serve no
master, to crawl and humiliate yourself before no man; you want to have
well-being for yourself, your family, and those near and dear to you.
And not to be harassed and worried by the fear of to-morrow.
You may feel sure that every one else wants the same. So the whole matter seems to stand this way:
You want health, liberty, and well-being. Every one is like yourself in this respect.
Therefore we all seek the same thing in life.
Then why should we not all seek it together, by joint effort, helping each other in it?
Why should we cheat and rob, kill and murder each other, if we all seek the same thing? Aren’t you entitled to the things you want as well as the next man?
Or is it that we can secure our health, liberty, and well-being better by fighting and slaughtering each other?
Or because there is no other way?
Let us look into this.
Does it not stand to reason that if we all want the same thing in life, if we have the same aim, then our interests
must also be the same? In that case we should live like brothers, in
peace and friendship; we should be good to each other, and help each
other all we can.
But you know that it is not at all that way in life. You know that we do
not live like brothers. You know that the world is full of strife and
war, of misery, injustice, and wrong, of crime, poverty, and oppression.
Why is it that way then?
It is because, though we all have the same aim in life, our interests are different. It is this that makes all the trouble in the world.
Just think it over yourself.
Suppose you want to get a pair of shoes or a hat. You go into the store
and you try to buy what you need as reasonably and cheaply as you can.
That is your interest. But the store-keeper’s interest is to sell it to you as dearly as he can, because then his profit will be greater. That is because everything in the life we live is built on making a profit, one way or another. We live in a system of profit-making.
Now, it is plain that if we have to make profits out of each other, then
our interests cannot be the same. They must be different and often even
opposed to each other.
In every country you will find people who live by making a profit out of
others. Those who make the biggest profits are rich. Those who cannot
make profits are poor. The only people who cannot make any profits are
the workers. You can therefore understand that the interests of the
workers cannot be the same as the interests of the other people. That is
why you will find in every country several classes of people with
entirely different interests.
Everywhere you will find:
a comparatively small class of persons who make big profits and who are
very rich, such as bankers, great manufacturers and land owners — people
who have much capital and who are therefore called capitalists. These
belong to the capitalistic class;
a class of more or less well-to-do people, consisting of business men
and their agents, real estate men, speculators, and professional men,
such as doctors, lawyers, inventors, and so on. This is the middle class
or the bourgeoisie.
great numbers of workingmen employed in various industries — in mills
and mines, in factories and shops, in transport and on the land. This is
the working class, also called the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie and the capitalists really belong to the same
capitalistic class, because they have about the same interests, and
therefore the people of the bourgeoisie also generally side with the
capitalist class as against the working class.
You will find that the working class is always the poorest class, in
every country. Maybe you yourself belong to the workers, to the
proletariat. Then you know that your wages will never make you rich.
Why are the workers the poorest class? Surely they labor more than the
other classes, and harder. Is it because the workers are not very
important in the life of society? Perhaps we can even do without them?
Let us see. What do we need to live? We need food, clothing, and
shelter; schools for our children; street cars and trains for travel,
and a thousand and one other things.
Can you look about you and point out a single thing that was made
without labor? Why, the shoes you stand in, and the streets you walk on,
are the result of labor. Without labor there would be nothing but the
bare earth, and human life would be entirely impossible.
So it means that labor has created everything we have — all the wealth of the world. It is all the product of labor applied to the earth and its natural resources.
But if all the wealth is the product of labor, then why does it not
belong to labor? That is, to those who have worked with their hands or
with their heads to create it — the manual worker and the brain worker.
Everybody agrees that a person has a right to own the thing that he himself has made.
But no one person has made or can make anything all by himself.
It takes many men, of different trades and professions, to create
something. The carpenter, for instance, cannot make a simple chair or
bench all by himself; not even if he should cut down a tree and prepare
the lumber himself. He needs a saw and a hammer, nails and tools, which
he cannot make himself. And even if he should make these himself, he
would first have to have the raw materials — steel and iron — which
other men would have to supply.
Or take another example — let us say a civil engineer. He could do
nothing without paper and pencil and measuring tools, and these things
other people have to make for him. Not to mention that first he has to
learn his profession and spend many years in study, while others enable
him to live in the meantime. This applies to every human being in the
world to-day.
You can see then that no person can by his own efforts alone make the
things he needs to exist. In early times the primitive man who lived in a
cave could hammer a hatchet out of stone or make himself a bow and
arrow, and live by that. But those days are gone. To-day no man can live
by his own work: he must be helped by the labor of others. Therefore
all that we have, all wealth, is the product of the labor of many
people, even of many generations. That is to say: all labor and the products of labor are social, made by society as a whole.
But if all the wealth we have is social, then it stands to reason that
it should belong to society, to the people as a whole. How does it
happen, then, that the wealth of the world is owned by some individuals
and not by the people? Why does it not belong to those who have toiled
to create it — the masses who work with hand or brain, the working class
as a whole?
You know very well that it is the capitalistic class which owns the
greatest part of the world’s wealth. Must we therefore not conclude that
the working people have lost the wealth they created, or that somehow
it was taken away from them?
They did not lose it, for they never owned it. Then it must be that it was taken away from them.
This is beginning to look serious. Because if you say that the wealth
they created has been taken away from the people who created it, then it
means that it has been stolen from them, that they have been robbed,
for surely no one has ever willingly consented to have his wealth taken
away from him.
It is a terrible charge, but it is true. The wealth the workers have
created, as a class, has indeed been stolen from them. And they are
being robbed in the same way every day of their lives, even at this very
moment. That is why one of the greatest thinkers, the French
philosopher Proudhon, said that the possessions of the rich are stolen
property.
You can readily understand how important it is that every honest man
should know about this. And you may be sure that if the workers knew
about it, they would not stand for it.
Let us see then how they are robbed and by whom.
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