Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

308 / ANARCHISM
To co-ordillate actioll, the first conception envisaged a certain political power, organizing
the life of the State with the help of the government and its agents and according
to formal directives from the "centre."
The other conception conjectured the complete abandonment of political and
statist organization; and the utilization of a direct alld federative alliance and collaboration
of the economic, social, technical, or other agencies (unions, co-operatives,
various associations, etc.) locally, regionally, nationally, internationally; therefore a
centralization, Ilot political nor statist, going from the central government to the periphery
[()11l11landed by it, but ecollomic alld techllical, following needs and real interests,
going from the periphery to the centres, and established in a logical and natural
way, according to concrete necessity, without domination or command.
It should be noted how absurd-or biased-is the reproach aimed at the Anarchists
that they know only how "to destroy," and that they have no "positive" constructive
ideas, especially when this charge is hurled by those of the "left."
Discussions between the political parties of the extreme left and the Anarchists have
always been about the positive and constructive tasks which are to be accomplished
after the destruction of the bourgeois State (on which subject everybody is in agreement).
What would be the way of building the new society then: statist, centralist,
and political, or federalist, a-political, and simply social Such was always the theme
of the controversies between them; an irrefutable proof that the essential preoccupation
of the Anarchists was always future construction.
To the thesis of the parties, a political and centralized "transitional" State, the
Anarchists opposed theirs: progressive but immediate passage to the economic and
federative community. The political parties based their arguments on the social
structure left by the centuries and past regimes, and they pretended that this model
was compatible with constructive ideas. The Anarchists believed that new construction
required,from the begillllillg, new methods, alld they recommellded those methods.
Whether their thesis was true or false, it proved in any case that they knew clearly
what they wanted, and that they had strictly constructive ideas.
As a general rule, an erroneous interpretation-or, more often, one that was
deliberately inaccurate-pretended that the libertarian conception implied the absence
of all organization. Nothing is farther from the truth. It is a question, not of "organization
or non-organization," but of two different principles of organization. All
revolutions necessarily begin in a more or less spontaneous manner, therefore in a
confused, chaotic way. It goes without saying-and the libertarians understood this
as well as the others-that if a revolution remains in that primitive stage, it will fail.