Anarchism and syndicalism - Edouard Berth

douard Berths "Anarchism and Syndicalism" (1908) is a remarkable document in the

history of revolutionary syndicalism, with its productivism, its emphasis on syndicalisms
mission to prevent social decline and to save civilization, its straw-man anarchism,
lampooned as solipsism, its praise for the capitalist discipline of the factory and its scorn
for the lazy savage and for sybaritic, rootless cosmopolitans, peace-loving businessmen
and effete intellectuals and their libertinism derived from atomistic and anti-social 18th
century bourgeois ideals of freedom, its paean to war and its manifest contempt for the
chatterbox citizen of political democracy and a liberal education.
Anarchism and Syndicalism Edouard Berth
Socialism, i.e., revolutionary syndicalism, is a philosophy of the producers. It conceives
society in accordance with the model of a progressive workshop without employers; in its
view, everything that does not play a role in this workshop must disappear. Therefore, the
first thing that must disappear is the State, which is the most outstanding representative of
non-productive, parasitic Society. One could say that for socialism, what is most important
is the categorical imperative of production. A form of production that is constantly being
improved; such is the goal it pursues and the fundamental postulate of its philosophy of
life. In this respect it exhibits the same spirit as capitalism, and this is a result of the fact
that syndicalism is the legitimate offspring of capitalism: from capitalism it will inherit this
progressive workshop and that love of an increasingly more advanced and
comprehensive capacity for production. Everyone knows the apology for capitalism set
forth by Marx in The Communist Manifesto; and it has often been observed that the
Manchester School and the Marxists are in basic agreement regarding the essential trend
of economic development; for one could say that these two schools have professed the
same horror for protectionism, statism and anything that could present an obstacle for that
high level of productivity which is their shared ideal. Thus, while Marxism is the theory that
is most appropriate for a truly revolutionary workers movement, that is, it is the theory
which represents the most economical, most advanced and most accelerated pace of
development of modern production, the Manchester School is for its part the theory that
conforms most closely to the most highly developed forms of capitalism.
But if syndicalism considers itself to be the heir of capitalism, upon what premises are its
hopes for a possible transition from the capitalist workshop to the socialist workshop
based, and what features distinguish the capitalist workshop from the socialist workshop?
The capitalist workshop may be defined and characterized briefly by the words, forced

cooperation, based on coercion, while the socialist workshop can be characterized by

saying that it will be free cooperation. The transition from one to the other is the transition
from a regime of coercion to a regime of freedom, the famous leap from necessity to
freedom that is mentioned in The Communist Manifesto. The question that arises is thus
to understand how such a leap will be possible and upon what premises the hopes for
such a challenging and profound transformation are based. Syndicalism responds that
this transformation is already prepared by capitalism itself; that within the very entrails of
capitalism there is an developmental process underway that is causing it to evolve from its
commercial and usurious form into increasingly more industrial forms; that in the most
modern industrial plant, it is in the process of replacing at an ever increasing pace the
discipline of mindless labor, which recalls more or less that which takes place in a
workhouse and demands a totally passive form of obedience, with another more voluntary
kind of labor, which is based on the sense of duty; a discipline that is therefore not
external to the workers, but internal; and that this evolution may be summed up by saying
that the requirements of technical skill are assuming more and more predominance over
those of command and hierarchy and that there is a growing degree of autonomy
manifested by labor with regard to authority, production with regard to the State, and
economics with regard to politics. Syndicalism is nothing but the transition to the
culminating point of this evolution; this workshop without employers will not be created
overnight, any more than it can be just taken as it is from the hands of the capitalists; to
the ineluctable process of capitalist economic development, we must add only a process
based on conscious participation, by means of which the workers will prepare themselves
to accept their inheritance. For, according to syndicalism, it is only by fighting hand to
hand with capitalism that the working class can be trained, and only in this way can it
emerge from its passivity and become active and acquire all the necessary qualities for its
self-rule, without tutelage, over the great progressive workshop that capitalism has
created and must bequeath to it.
In any event, syndicalism does not concern itself, as can be seen, with an abstract
opposition between authority and freedom, or between the State and the individual: it is
exclusively concerned with a real evolutionary process, one that is engendering an
increasingly acute opposition between the demands of a constantly improved system of
production and a coercive system of organization, an organizational form that rests on the
principles of hierarchical authority. And it is so evident that there is no question, for
syndicalism, of an abstract opposition between authority and freedom that it expressly
acknowledges that authority has been necessary until now, that it has been the spur
thanks to which civilization has been able to advance and extract from human labor all the
marvels that it has produced and that, as Hegel said, obedience is the school of
command. The recognition that syndicalism grants to capitalism is not just limited to the
material wealth the latter has created, but also and even more importantly to the moral
and spiritual transformations it has impressed upon the working class masses, who,
thanks to its iron discipline, have left their primitive laziness and their individualist
anarchism behind them in order to take part in an increasingly more highly advanced form
of collective labor. Syndicalism unequivocally acknowledges that civilization began and
had to begin under conditions of coercion, and that this coercion was salutary, beneficial
and creative, and that if it is possible to hope for a regime of freedom, without
entrepreneurial or State guardianship, then this possibility only exists by virtue of that

same coercive regime that has disciplined humanity, gradually rendering it capable of
participating in free and voluntary labor.
But is there anything more remote from these syndicalist points of view than the anarchist
perspective? It could be said that, in opposition to this coercive regime, anarchism has
stood for a permanent protest, it has endlessly denounced the civilization that requires
such efforts in order to deliver so little happiness, and that this anarchist protest and
denunciation originate in the revolt of the lazy individual, the primitive savage, the man in
a state of nature who rebels against an iron-fisted regime that seeks to force him to
submit to the discipline of work and to leave behind his primitive leisure, inactivity and
freedom. One may analyze the writings of all the anarchist authors; one will find this same
hatred of civilization, understood as a coercive regime, as a system of discipline that
compels man to work, to follow some other inclination than that of nature, creating what
are in their view barbarous institutions, because all of them demand an effort from man in
order to tame his instincts, his passions and his innate laziness.
Read Rousseau, for instance; his vagrant humor, his love of independence (an entirely
natural independence), his misanthropy, and the horror that society inspires in him, are
well known. Man, he proclaims, is naturally good, at the moment that he leaves the hands
of his Creator; it is civilization that causes him to be depraved. All of anarchist thought is
already contained here; a nave optimism, an ingenuous belief in mans good instincts, the
idea that one can leave human nature alone and allow it to be abandoned to its instincts,
that all social institutions have done nothing but corrupt it, and that, in order to return men
to their state of primitive goodness, it is necessary to unburden them of that whole
collection of demoralizing institutions that go by the name of family, property and State;
marriage must be replaced by free unions; property by each person taking what he wants;
the State by each person doing what is advantageous for him.
It has often been observed that the anarchists come from artisanal, peasant or aristocratic
backgrounds. Rousseau clearly represents the artisanal anarchism; his Republic is a
small Republic of free and independent artisans that can only be conceived on such an
economic basis. In Proudhon, his individualist anarchismwe must point out that there is
more to his ideas than just this aspect, which we shall presently seeis indisputably of a
peasant origin; Proudhon is a peasant at heart and it is unfair to call him petit-bourgeois.
And if, finally, we consider Tolstoy, we discover in his works an anarchism of an elite or
aristocratic stamp. Tolstoy is a weary aristocrat, displeased with civilization, because he
had his fill of its enjoyments, which led him to experience the stoical and peace-loving
emotions of a primitive nature; to him, all of civilization seemed to be without any
meaning, a monstrosity that only creates poverty and crime, which gives birth to war,
violence, and cruel hatreds, when the only reality is love. Tolstoys thought is verily the
thought of a primitive, of a world-weary person who, in an entirely natural reaction, returns
to the simplistic thought of primitive man. The jaded spectator of a spectacle that he has
seen too many times, he seeks happiness and the meaning of life in every discipline, in
science, in philosophy, in civilization as a whole; and it is a simple muzhik who is the only
one who responds in a way that he finds valid: To live is to love, to have simple pleasures,
to lead a peaceful and God-fearing life. Here we can observe a case of mental regression,

a kind of intellectual degeneration that reflects fatigue and exhaustion, natural in an

aristocrat; the denizens of high society live in a fictitious world, distant from the real world,
alien to all real creation and all productive activity; gamblers, who soon grow tired of their
way of life, soon long for a kind of state of nature, the way a sick person looks forward to
recover his health in the countryside.
Regardless, however, of whether anarchism is derived from an artisanal, peasant or
aristocratic origin, it is always a protest against capitalist civilization, which is considered
to be a barbarous and monstrous regime of violence and oppression. And the nature of
this protest consists in its purely negative and even reactionary character; it is the protest
of the classes on the fringe of capitalism, for whom capitalism has disrupted their way of
life, done away with their customs, and constituted an insult to their deepest and most
traditional feelings. The syndicalist protest is very different. Syndicalism, as we have
pointed out, considers itself to be the direct heir of capitalism and admires the latters
creative abilities; far from harboring towards it that feeling of revulsion that a savage
experiences (I employ this term, savage, as a synonym for solitary, for an individual for
whom, given his way of life, there is no social life, so that according to this definition an
artisan, a peasant and even a worldly gentleman are savages, because society is a
coordination of efforts that are mutually reinforced by the efforts of various individuals, and
not just a juxtaposition of egoisms in search of pleasure), syndicalism considers
capitalism to be a marvelous wizard who knew how, thanks to audacity combined with
individual initiative and cooperation, to conjure all the infinite human productive forces and
make them emerge from the depths of social labor, where they had previously slumbered.
But it also thinks that the historical role of capitalism, which has awakened the social
genie from its sleep, which has rescued the worker from his isolation, and which has
subjected men to collective labor, has now come to an end; the workers, now that they
have been constituted as production groups and after they have acquired over the course
of their long struggles against their employers the spirit of audacity and initiative along
with the taste for free association, can carry on with the mission of capitalism without any
more need of its tutelage or its compulsion. There is a transfusion of the spirit of initiative
and responsibility from the contemporary private manager of an enterprise to the body of
the productive group; and at the same time, the power of the workers collective, now its
own master, is no longer recruited or alienated for the benefit of just one person.
But it is precisely this social character of freedom that is denied by anarchism; and one
can justly say that, in a certain sense, anarchism is nothing but an exaggerated form of
bourgeois ideology. Nor are we referring here to anarchism in its early anti-capitalist form,
if one can call it that, but to its ultra-capitalist form. This is expressed, above all, in
Stirners book, The Ego and Its Own. We have said that bourgeois society is divided into
two poles: on the one side, individuals, free competitors on a free market; on the other
side, the State, administrative centralization. Let us assume that this historical passage
has reached the extreme to which we have referred; let us assume that civil society has
rid itself of the State, and that all that remains is the individual, the ego and its own.
In The Jewish Question, Marx, discussing the rights of man, says that these rights are the
rights of the egoist man, because man is considered as an isolated monad, because each
man sees in his neighbor not the realization but the limitation of his personal freedom, and
because these rights do not extend beyond the individual man, barricaded behind his
particular interests and his personal whims, separated from the life and activity of the

community. Compared to this egoist man, the member of civil society, the political man is
nothing but an artificial man, an abstract man, an allegorical personage. And Marx goes
on to quote the following important words of Rousseau: He who dares to undertake the
making of a people's institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing
human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary
whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being;
of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a
partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has
conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give
him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of
other men (The Social Contract).
Stirners anarchist is simply the egoist man of civil society, who rejects all the abstract and
artificial superstructure of political society, and who does not want to have anything to do
with that abstract man, that allegorical personage, as Marx called him, known as the
citizen. And it should be pointed out that, in the practical sense, anarchism is reduced to
not using the right to vote, or not carrying out the duties of the citizen, and rejecting any
participation in the abstract life of democratic society. It is well known that the whole
metaphysical system of Stirner is based on the negation of the ideaswhich are,
according to him, chimeraswhich confiscate individual freedom and whose despotic and
fabulous rule must be overthrown. Stirner claimed to represent the opposition to Hegel;
his book is particularly intended to be an attack on the absolute idealism that is for him
synonymous with absolute despotism, and he is undoubtedly at least partly correct: did
Hegel not make the State the actualization of the Idea? Marxism, however, as everyone
knows, reacted no less violently than Stirner against such a divinization of the State; but
whereas Stirner, from an extreme simplicity, was content, in order to free the individual,
with a pure and simple rejection of the abstract superstructure of political society so as to
preserve nothing but the egoist individual of civil society, Marx, who was just as aware as
Stirner was of the abstract character of political life, employs a much more concrete and
positive procedure to simultaneously overcome both the particularist character of
bourgeois civil society and the abstract character of political society, which are resolved
into the trade union society. Political emancipationas Marx wrote in The Jewish
Questionis the reduction of man to a member of bourgeois society or the egoistic and
independent individual, on the one hand; and, on the other, to a political citizen, a moral
and allegorical personage. Therefore, true human emancipation will only be achieved
when the real individual man, by reabsorbing the abstract citizen, will be transformed into
a social being, in his everyday life, in his work, in his individual affairs; when man,
consciously and thoroughly organizing his own powers as social powers, will no longer be
separated from social power in the form of political power.
This is the Marxist solution: we need not belabor the fact that it is also the syndicalist
solution. The latter rejects the political abstraction, which was considered by Marx, as well
as by Stirner, as oppressive; but while Stirner rejected this oppression only to retreat to
the palpable particularity of civil society and only becomes free of the yoke of abstract
thought by falling prey to pure and simple empiricism, Marx was able to simultaneously
supersede both concrete particularity and abstract universality in order to discover the
concrete universal; and this concrete universal is precisely the life of the trade unions, in
which social forces, without allowing themselves to be either absorbed or transformed by

political forces, organize autonomously and freely, where man becomes a social being in
his everyday existence, in his individual efforts: the abstract citizen of the political city is
reabsorbed and the egoist man of civil society is transformed into the multifaceted and
concrete personality of the social trade union worker, in the working class collectivity
which, master of the workshop, scientifically and politically qualified, eliminates by way of
absorption (aufheben, an untranslatable German term) every kind of parasite, the State
such as it exists and Hegels thinking State. This also amounts to the end of those
ideologies whose chimeras Stirner sought to dispel, as well as that civil anarchy into
which his individualism is completely submerged.
But anarchist metaphysics is incapable of understanding this Marxist and syndicalist
revolution because, in its view, society does not have an independent existence and is
only manifested as a restriction, an abstract repression of individual independence. The
metaphysics for which society is nothing but a juxtaposition of individual units is a
monadological or atomistic metaphysics; for such a metaphysics, only the individual is
real; everything else is only a fantasy, a chimera or an illusion. Anarchism transforms the
individual into an absolute, incapable of joining any social combination without having a
sense of being arbitrarily oppressed and stifled, and if we recall the economic origins of
anarchismartisanal, agricultural or aristocraticthis is just how anarchism had to
conceive of the individual and his relations with society. Socialism has a completely
different conception, and in its view society does not mean the arbitrary juxtaposition or
sum of individuals who are absolutes and do not join a system of that kind without
simultaneously experiencing a mutual restriction and diminution, but rather the contrary, it
views society as a system of cooperation in which the cumulative efforts of all its
members multiply in such a way that for the individual there is not loss, but a net gain,
from his participation in these efforts, because solitude is equivalent to impotence,
poverty, and disability, while association means power, wealth and capabilities that are
multiplied a thousand-fold; in a word, for socialism, society is the true reality, and the
individual is nothing, so to speak, but an abstraction, that is, a part; social existence
possesses a reality of which the individual is only one aspect, one phenomenonwhich is
just what anarchism denies, and instead posits the individual as the only reality.
No one has expounded this theory of the reality of the social being as magnificently as
Proudhon, the so-called father of anarchism. Proudhon, of courseaccording to Marx and
Engelswas nothing but a preposterous petit bourgeois who hated association from the
bottom of his heart. Nonetheless, this petit bourgeois, this man who hated association,
this anarchist, has admirably described the reality of social existence; if you have any
doubt of this, just read his Justice in the Revolution and the Church, or his Philosophy of
Progress: in these works you will find a theory of collective power and a presentation of a
metaphysical doctrine of existence, essentially conceived in the form of the group. More
generally, it would not be futile, to cap off this study of anarchism and syndicalism, to take
a look at Proudhonian anarchism. We shall see that this alleged anarchism is actually
what we call syndicalism. Not exactly, of course, but with regard to its spirit and its most
typical tendency. Yes, it is true: Proudhon is, along with Marx, the most authentic
theoretical precursor of revolutionary syndicalism; and after demonstrating why his
thought has almost nothing in common with traditional anarchism and instead
approximates syndicalism, we shall then proceed, in an eminently useful manner, in our

opinion, to show how anarchism differs from syndicalism. We shall start by examining this
essential theory of the reality of social existence; then we shall see how Proudhons ideas
about those social institutions that go by the names of the family, the State, and property,
or concerning those social realities known as love, war and production, are a thousand
miles from anarchist ideas.
We shall therefore introduce a few decisive quotations into the debate. In his
admirable First Letter on Progress, we read: With the idea of movement or progress, all
these systems, founded on the categories of substance, causality, subject, object, spirit,
matter, etc., fall, or rather explain themselves away, never to reappear again. The notion
of being can no longer be sought in an invisible something, whether spirit, body, atom,
monad, or what-have-you. It ceases to be simplistic and become synthetic: it is no longer
the conception, the fiction of an indivisible, unmodifiable, intransmutable (etc.) je ne sais
quoi: intelligence, which first posits a synthesis, before attacking it by analysis, admits
nothing of the sort a priori. It knows what substance and force are, in themselves; it does
not take its elements for realities, since, by the law of the constitution of the mind, the
reality disappears, while it seeks to resolve it into its elements. All that reason knows and
affirms is that the being, as well as the idea, is a GROUP. Everything that exists
is grouped; everything that forms a group is one. Consequently, it is perceptible, and,
consequently, it is. The more numerous and varied the elements and relations which
combine in the formation of the group, the more centralizing power will be found there,
and the more reality the being will obtain. Apart from the group there are only abstractions
and phantoms. It is following that conception of being in general, and in particular of the
human self, that I believe it possible to prove the positive reality, and up to a certain point
to demonstrate the ideas (the laws) of the social self or humanitary group, and to
ascertain and show, above and beyond our individual existence, the existence of a
superior individuality of the collective man. According to some, society is the
juxtaposition of similar individuals, each sacrificing a part of their liberty, so as to be able,
without harming one another, to remain juxtaposed, and live side by side in peace. Such
is the theory of Rousseau: it is the system of governmental arbitrariness, not, it is true, as
that arbitrariness is the deed of a prince or tyrant, but, what is much more serious, in that
it is the deed of the multitude, the product of universal suffrage. Depending on whether it
suits the multitude, or those who prompt it, to tighten more or less the social ties, to give
more or less development to local and individual liberties, the alleged Social Contract can
go from the direct and fragmented government of the people all the way to caesarism,
from relations of simple proximity to the community of goods and gains, women and
children. All that history and the imagination can suggest of extreme license and extreme
servitude is deduced with an ease and logical rigor equal to the societary theory of
Rousseau.
According to others, and these despite their scientific appearance seem to me hardly
more advanced, society, the moral person, reasoning being, pure fiction, is only the
development, among the masses, of the phenomena of individual organization, so that
knowledge of the individual gives immediately knowledge of society, and politics resolves
itself into physiology and hygiene. But what is social hygiene? It is apparently, for each
member of society, a liberal education, a varied instruction, a lucrative function, a
moderate labor, a comfortable regime: now, the question is precisely how to procure for
ourselves all of that!

For me, following the notions of movement, progress, series and group, of which
ontology is compelled from now on to take account, and the various findings that
economics and history furnish on the question, I regard society, the human group, as a
being sui generis, constituted by the fluid relations and economic solidarity of all the
individuals, of the nation, of the locality or corporation, or of the entire species; which
individuals circulate freely among one another, approaching one another, joining together,
dispersing in turn in all directions; a being which has its own functions, alien to our
individuality, its own ideas which it communicates to us, its judgments which do not at all
resemble ours, its will in diametrical opposition with our instincts, its life, which is not that
of the animal or the plant, although it finds analogies there; a being, finally, who,
starting from nature, seems the God of nature, the powers and laws of which it expresses
to a superior (supernatural) degree.
Please forgive the length of these quotations, but they are needed to set the record
straight concerning so many prejudices about Proudhon, which so often take the form of a
cavalier dismissal of him as an anarchist or petit bourgeois. And I dare to ask anyone who
carefully reads this magnificent depiction of the reality of social existence whether it is
possible to define Proudhon as an anarchist. Here we touch upon the heart of the matter;
here we see the profound difference between the socialist philosophy and the anarchist
metaphysics displayed in all its splendor. The basis of all anarchism is, as we have seen,
the individual, the ego, considered as a simple thing, as an absolute, as a kind of monad
which, following Leibniz, has neither doors nor windows connecting it to the outside, and
which, as a result, is incommensurable and unsociable by its very nature. Upon such a
basis there is no need to say that it is utterly impossible to undertake any reconstruction of
society and the idea of the social, because its starting point is the radical denial of such a
possibility, and it would be just as absurd to seek to rebuild society using unsociable and
isolated units as it would be chimerical to expect to set unmovable objects in motion; it is
first necessary to consider the movement, and to insert oneself in it; then one may
conceive of stasis as a kind of arrested development. Likewise, one must take society into
consideration, insert oneself into it, and then conceive of the individual as a kind of
paralysis. The individual in society, like stasis within movement, are nothing but
provisional and temporarily useful abstractions; to construct these abstractions as
realities, to transform them into the only realities, is to radically turn your back on life and
truth, it is to collapse and lose oneself in the simplistic idea of a false abstract rationalism.
This is, however, the essential error of anarchist metaphysics, an error in which socialism
is not implicated, and to which Proudhon did not succumb, who, as we just saw, begins by
establishing, above all else, the reality of social existence. Socialism gives its primary
consideration to society; its starting point is not the individual who is set in abstract
opposition to society, but the workshop, the social laborer.
Plekhanov, at the end of his study, Anarchism and Socialism, asserts that in the final
accounting the anarchists are nothing but decadent bourgeois. But what does decadent
mean in this context? What feature indicates that a society is in decline? Is it not precisely
the fact that the social idea loses all of its meaning and the individual is raised to the
highest level and is abstractly proclaimed as the final and absolute end, and by means of
his formidable egocentrism everything is reduced to the individual? The individual isolated
in his private enjoyment: this is the cardinal feature of all decadence. And this enjoyment

can take the most varied forms, the most spiritual as well as the most material;
egocentrism can call itself art for arts sake or assume another disguise, more subtle and
moralistic: humanitarianism; it can be epicurean or stoic, Christian or pagan, it can invoke
Conscience, Science, Freedom or Beauty, but it is always, in the final analysis, the denial
of the social idea, the refusal on the part of the individual to devote himself to any
collective effort of any kind. It hardly matters that this refusal is concealed under moral,
idealist or even humanitarian reasons: for egoism, the love of humanity and the religion of
suffering are very comfortable garments and more pleasing than any others. And one of
the most profound theses of Proudhons moral philosophy is that idealism leads to
corruption and that the ideal is itself the origin of evil. What is an ideal? Any ideal
whatsoever. It is an aspect of reality, separated from reality and raised to the status of an
absolute; it is what Proudhon calls a speculative simplicitysubstance, cause, monad,
atom, mind or matterwhich replaces the essentially synthetic idea of existence. Reality
is mobile, it is movement or progress; but the idealist attempts to replace this fluid reality
with something immutable, his ideal, and to freeze the whole flow of things into the
boundaries of this ideal; it withdraws from movement, it establishes an alleged superior
vantage point, and from there it seeks to govern, that is, stabilize and arrest life. Idealism
is doomed to end up, then, in immobilism, in stasis, that is, in corruption and decadence;
for if, as Proudhon also puts it most admirably, movement is the natural state of matter,
then justice is the natural state of humanity. Therefore, justice is nothing but movement in
society; it is humanity in a dynamic and progressive state, humanity fighting or producing,
whose powers tend towards a continuous adaptation to an always changing reality;
corruption or decadence is, on the other hand, the attempt to immobilize oneself in
enjoyment outside the social movement, which is the indefatigable creator of new social
forms.
Anarchism is a form of idealism or intellectualism; it consists in the transformation of the
idea of freedom into an absolute, and we have already seen how it was the ideal of
individuals who belong to classes that seek to resist the movement of capitalism and to
freeze conditions so they can preserve the economic status quo, or else of individuals
who want to destroy bourgeois society and reduce it to one single element: the
particularistic egoism of civil society. Anarchism therefore constitutes a response on the
part of the resistance against progress, or it is the dissolution of this progress.
Syndicalism, on the other hand, not only has nothing to do with resistance to capitalist
progress, but currently is acting to spur it on and drive it forward, and thus preventing it
from stopping its forward movement and freezing in place, and looks forward to a future
where its own productive potential will grow even more than capitalisms. Syndicalism
therefore represents, from a dual motivation, the movement and the progress of todays
society; it is the new and vigorous power which, embodying the new social ideal, fights to
prevent social decline and to save civilization.
The fact that the anarchists only represent bourgeois social decadence emerges with
complete clarity if, disregarding for the moment the metaphysical theses concerning the
reality or the non-reality of social existence, we examine their way of addressing the
question of the family, that primary manifestation and unmediated form of social life. Here,
too, we notice the same fundamental incompatibility between Proudhon and anarchism.
For everyone knows that anarchism conceives of the sexual partnership as a free,
temporary and ephemeral union; and that, as a result, love is reduced to a volatile passion

and marriage to a revocable ad libitum contract, a civil contract of the same nature as
other contracts, lacking any sacred or religious character. And everyone also knows that,
on the other hand, for Proudhon, the sexual union is an irrevocable and indissoluble
union; that, for him, love is subordinated to justice by marriage, because the very symbol
of justice is the androgynous couple. As you can see, you cannot imagine a more
fundamental opposition on such an essential question of such primary significance, a
question whose answer will depend entirely on the respondents orientation with regard to
social morality. Anarchism, then, puts its denial of the social idea into practice; the idea of
freedom, raised to the status of an absolute by anarchism, dissolves the family; nothing
remains but the individual with his ephemeral passions and his disordered romanticism.
And who would dare to deny that this is a frantic and decadent bourgeoisism? It will be
objected that Proudhons ideas about marriage are ultra-reactionary ideas and that both
the socialists and the anarchists have adopted, with regard to this issue, the extravagant
ideas of Fourier. In any event, this is not to the credit of socialism, which in regard to this
as to so many other questions has deplorably followed in the footsteps of the bourgeois
tradition rather than the working class tradition and has sought to inoculateas Jaurs
saidthe emerging proletariat with the corruption of the moribund bourgeoisie.
But now let us examine the ideas of Proudhon and the anarchists, respectively, on a no
less crucial issue: war. Everyone is familiar with the anarchist abhorrence for war and
militarism, as well as the magnificent praise Proudhon bestows upon war in his book, War
and Peace. Never before was such a brilliant and exalted panegyric pronounced; you
would have to go all the way back to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus to find its equal.
We shall not discuss Hegel, because Proudhonian thought displays in this context such
obvious evidence of its Hegelian origin that we may dispense with any further mention of
this. Is it not significant, by the way, that the two great socialist philosophers, the two great
theoreticians of the class struggleMarx and Proudhonare Hegelians, in the broadest
sense of the word? But what is the main idea of War and Peace? That since conflict is the
fundamental law of the universe, peace, if it is ever possible, must be conceived otherwise
than as a negation of war; that peace will be nothing but a transformation of war, a new
form of that eternal conflict which is the law of the world, both the social world as well as
the natural world: that the tranquil and pacifist peace, the universal embrace that all our
decadent bourgeoisie, our parliamentary socialists and our humanitarian anarchists
dream of, is impossible or, even if it were possible, it would for mankind be synonymous
with stagnation, with immobility, with a complete relaxation of the nervous system and
death. War will disappear some day; Proudhon announces and proclaims the end of the
cycle of wars; but this conclusion will only give way to a warlike peace that will demand of
men virtues that are no less great or heroic than those demanded by war itself. For
industry is also a battlefield, where the combatants must demonstrate no less bravery, no
less scorn for pleasure, and no less indifference to death than in the campaigns of real
war; in industry, too, victory will go to the bravest, the most energetic, the most bold and
the cowardly, the pusillanimous, and the egotistical will be defeated. But industry is
superior to war because, while the latter is a pure destruction of forces, the former repairs
any harm that it may cause. Listen to Proudhon: The objective of war is to determine
which of two parties to a dispute has the supremacy of force. It is a struggle between
forces, not their destruction; a struggle between men, not their extermination. It must
abstain, outside of combat and the succeeding political annexation, from any attack on

persons or property. Wherever it can be deduced that we accept the law of humanity and
of nature as laws of conflict, this conflict does not essentially consist of a fistfight or a
hand-to-hand struggle between men. It could also be a struggle for industry and progress
which, in the final analysis, given the spirit of the war and the elevated civilized goals that
it pursues, amount to the same thing. The Empire goes to the bravestthat is what war
says. But Labor, Industry and Economics respond: Maybe; but whence is the bravery of a
man, or a nation derived? Is it not from his resourcefulness, his virtue, his character, his
science, his industry, his labor, his wealth, his sobriety, his freedom, and his love for his
country? Didnt the Gran Capitn say that in war moral force is to physical force as 3 is to
1? Dont they teach us, furthermore, about the laws of war and of the honor of gentlemen,
that in combat we must maintain our dignity and abstain from any wanton harm, treason,
looting and pillage? So we shall fight; we shall attack each other with the bayonet and will
shoot at each other. In these new battles, we shall have to provide the same proofs of
resolve, of sacrifice, of scorn for life and pleasure; the dead and wounded will be no less
numerous; and all that is cowardly, weak, coarse, everything that is lacking strength and
spirit, must expect contempt, misery. Thus, the transformation of conflict results from its
very definition, from its movement, from its law; hence also from its purpose. For conflict
does not have the object of pure and simple destruction, an unproductive consumption,
extermination for the sake of extermination; its object is the production of an alwayshigher order, of an endless improvement. In this respect, it must be acknowledged that
labor offers conflict a vast and fertile field of operations that is different from the theater of
war. We must note, above all, that on this industrial field, the opposed forces wage a
struggle that is no less passionate than the one waged on the battlefield; here, too, there
is mutual destruction and assimilation. In labor as in war, the raw material of combat, its
primary expenditure, is human blood. In a sense that is by no means metaphorical, we
live on our own substance and on that of our brothers. But with the enormous difference
that, in the industrial struggles, defeat is really inflicted only on those who have not fought
at all or who have only done so in a cowardly fashion, so that as a result labor returns to
its armies all that it consumes, something that war does not do, which is capable of
creating nothing. In labor, production follows destruction; the forces consumed re-arise
from their dissolution more energetic than every. The purpose of the conflict, the
advantage sought from it, demands that this take place. If anything else were to take
place, the world would sink into chaos; a negation of the fact that, thanks to war, the world
is not the way it was at the dawn of creation, nothing but atoms and the void: Terra autem
erat inanis et vacua (Now the world was formless and empty. Genesis 1:2 [translators
note]) (Proudhon, War and Peace).
As you can see, the Proudhons essential idea is that labor is the replacement for war: the
worker replaces the soldier; industrial struggles succeed military campaigns. Already, in
his General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon had written: In place of public force, we will
put collective force. In place of standing armies, we will put industrial associations.
Concerning these industrial associations, he previously said: Finally appear the
workingmens associations, regular armies of the revolution, in which the worker, like the
soldier in the battalion, manoeuvres with the precision of his machines; in which
thousands of wills, intelligent and proud, submit themselves to a superior will, as the
hands controlled by them engender, by their concerted action, a collective force greater
than even their number. This constantly recurring parallel drawn between labor and war,

between the working class virtues and military virtues, between the industrial associations
(today we would call them Syndicates) and the standing armies; is it not curious and
suggestive? Revolutionary syndicalism has taken a clear stand against the army,
militarism and patriotism; but if we examine the basis of working class anti-militarism, we
find something else behind it, ideas and feelings that are different from those of bourgeois
anti-militarism. For there is, as everyone knows, a bourgeois anti-militarism, a bourgeois
pacifism, and a bourgeois anti-patriotism, that is, a bourgeois cosmopolitanism. The
businessmen and the intellectualsthe two essential categories into which the
bourgeoisie is dividedhave always been distinguished by their pious horror of war;
within each bourgeois lives a Panurge and Panurge does not like to receive blows. War is,
furthermore, quite expensive and for the businessman, for whom everything is reduced to
a question of debit and credit, the resort to the ruinous solution of war seems absurd
when there is an opportunity for a diplomatic solution or arbitration, which are so much
less burdensome; the bourgeois does not understand honor, a feeling that does not
circulate on the market, a value which is not quoted on the Stock Exchange. As for the
intellectual, it seems just as absurd to him to fight when it is so easy to reason, and in the
market of ideas, where he is a broker, the feeling of honor circulates no more than in the
market of financial values; the intellectual is at bottom nothing but a businessman and we
cannot ask him to understand the concept of warlike heroism.
But the feelings inspired by war in the businessman and the intellectual are also inspired
by the strike. Whenever a strike breaks out, you can read in the bourgeois newspapers
reliable statistics which depict the losses suffered by the workers. The strike, like war,
appears to our bourgeois to be the very height of stupidity, and our socialists do not know
what to do to prevent the workers from indulging in this progressive deterioration, as
Jaurs calls it. It would be preferable to accept fair arbitration, even arbitration that is
systematic and compulsory! So that reason, law, order and civilization will replace
barbarism, anarchy and chaos! Our parliamentary socialists, like good bourgeois, are
fervent social pacifists, as well as fervent internationalist pacifists.
The bourgeois does not know what a national or a working class collectivity is, nor can he,
without any doubt, understand that the honor of this collectivity is something that is
superior to a calculus of profit and loss. The bourgeois is a true individualist anarchist; for
him nothing exists except his ego; he is rootless, a cosmopolitan, for whom there are no
countries or classes: do not ask him to sacrifice his precious person for anything; he has
no social idea, and the words self-abnegation and sacrifice have lost all meaning for him.
Working class anti-militarism is something completely different. This anti-militarism does
not originate in an abstract or sentimental horror of war and the army; it originates in the
class struggle, it was born in the experience of strikes and trade union struggles, where
the worker always faces the army, the guardian of capital and of order, for which reason
he has always viewed it as a simple extension of the capitalist workshop and, as a result,
as the living symbol of his servitude. Precisely for this reason, however, his anti-militarism
is no longer an individual protest against the barracks in the name of more or less abstract
principles; nor is it the simple separation of individuals who withdraw from the national
collectivity in order to recover an entirely egotistical independence; nor is it mere
individual desertion, which can be interpreted as cowardice; it is, rather, the separation of
individuals who withdraw from the national collectivity in order to join the workers
collectivity and to adopt a new fatherland, to which they pledge themselves forever in

body and soul. Working class anti-militarism thus derives its merit and purpose from its
close connection with the idea of the class struggle; separate anti-militarism from this
idea, and it will be nothing but an expression of individual horror for what the strong
spirits call the brutalization of the barracks. The freethinking, democratic, Jacobin,
Masonic bourgeois, member of the League of the Rights of Man, is incapable of rising to
such a level of thought or feeling: the social idea can only be either military or working
class; there are only two noble qualities: that of the sword and that of labor; the bourgeois,
the man of business, of banking, of gold and the stock exchange, the tradesman, the
intermediary and his colleague the intellectual, who is also an intermediary, all of them
strangers to the world of the army as well as to the world of labor, are condemned to an
irremediable mediocrity of thought and of spirit.
Anarchist anti-militarism is thus nothing but a derivative of bourgeois anti-militarism. And
now, more than ever, we can say that anarchism is only an exasperated bourgeoisism,
because this abstract or sentimental revulsion towards the barracks, militarism and war
professed by the anarchists, does not arise among them as a result of the class struggle;
the anarchists have no idea of class, they only possess the idea of individual rebellion
against all servitude and authority, which they present on an abstract and purely
ideological terrain and merely take the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen and the philosophy of the 18th century to their logical conclusions, with their
rejection of the army (as with their rejection of marriage), which proceed from the same
atomist, materialist and simplistic metaphysics, by virtue of which they turn their backs on
the entire reality of social existence, in order to leave nothing standing but the individual
who is naturally good but who is depraved by social institutions, the individual who is born
free but is weighted down by civilization with a thousand chains, the individual who comes
into the world bursting with happiness but is made wretched by society. War is the
clearest and most striking expression of that reality of social existence that Proudhon told
us about in such magnificent terms in the passage quoted above. Please allow us to
quote him once more: War is the most profound and sublime phenomenon of our moral
life. Nothing else can compare with it: neither the interesting ceremonial of worship, nor
the actions of monarchical power, nor the gigantic creations of industry. In the harmonies
of nature and humanity, war sounds the most powerful note; its works sweep over the soul
like thunder, like the voice of the hurricane. A mixture of genius and boldness, of poetry
and passion, of the highest justice and tragic heroism its majesty dazzles us, and the
more we contemplate it, the more our hearts are filled with enthusiasm. War, perceived by
a false philosophy and an even falser philanthropy as nothing but a horrible scourge, an
outburst of our innate evil and a manifestation of heavenly anger, is the most incorruptible
expression of our conscience, the act that confers the most honor on us in the light of
creation and Eternity. The idea of war is equivalent to its phenomenology. It is one of
those ideas that, from the very first moment of their appearance, absorb all ones
attention, that make us confess, so to speak, with full knowledge and with full feeling, and
to which, by virtue of their universality, logic gives the name of categories. For war is both
unitary and triune like God, it is the unity in one nature of these three roots: force, the
principle of movement and of life, which is found in the ideas of cause, soul, will, freedom
and spirit; conflict, action-reaction, the universal law of the world and, like force, one of
Kants twelve categories; and justice, the sovereign faculty of the soul, the principle of our
practical reason, which is manifested in nature by equilibrium. If we pass from the

phenomenology and the idea of war to its object, it forfeits none of our admiration. The
purpose of war, its role in humanity, consists in encouraging all the human faculties and
thus creating, in the center of and above these faculties, law, and making it universal and,
with the help of this universalization of law, in defining and forming society (War and
Peace).
Here, when speaking of war, Proudhon uses the language of poetry or mysticism; as if he
were dealing with a supernatural phenomenon that gives birth to supernatural events.
This stands in total opposition to anarchist philosophy, which, in the final analysis,
advocates that we return to the state of nature and rejects anything that obliges man to
emerge from this state, imagined as one of perfect bliss. Man is a being that must be
surpassed, the philosopher of The Will to Power says, who is mistakenly identified by
some people as an anarchist; and man only overcomes his condition, he only becomes a
hero, by participating in the great struggles in which the heroic or divine accomplishments
of history are embodied. And it is in this aspect that the greatness of war resides, in that it
elevates everything to sublime heights and causes man, as Proudhon also said, to rise
above himself. War created law; it created the State; it created the citizen; it has defined
and molded society, that supernatural being.
And the Revolution does not owe its heroic prestige to the proceedings of Assemblies, or
even to International Congresses; it lived in the heart of the people as a military epic for
many years, and the wars of the Republic and the Empire provided the raw material for
popular poetry throughout the 18th century.
Today it is notorious that revolutionary patriotism is dead; something else has arisen to
take its place, a new feeling: the class idea which has replaced the idea of the fatherland,
defining the split between the people on the one side and the State and democracy on the
other. For with the appearance of revolutionary syndicalism a strange opposition has
arisen between democracy and socialism, between the citizen and the producer, an
opposition that has assumed its crudest as well as its most abstract form in the resolute
rejection of the idea of the fatherland, which is identified with the idea of the State. And the
strikes, which are becoming increasingly more powerful, more widespread and more
frequent, are revealing to a surprised world the collective power of the workers, who are
becoming more class conscious and more self-controlled with each passing day. These
strikes are assuming the form of the social phenomenon par excellence; through their
abruptness, their audacity, and the marvelous discipline they impose on the army of the
workers, they are acquiring increasingly more martial features, and comprise, on the
social terrain, a veritable war on another level, and the words that Proudhon pronounced
concerning war can also be applied to the strikes. These strikes are what today sound, in
the songs of nature and of humanity, the most powerful note; they affect the soul like the
sound of thunder and the voice of the hurricane. They combine genius with boldness,
poetry and passion, the highest justice and tragic heroism their majesty dazzles us.
What kind of birth process are we witnessing? In the face of these volcanic tremors that
the world of labor is periodically causing modern society to undergo, we see all the
disoriented parties, we see all the decomposing ideologies, all the prudent timidity. What
is happening? Something that is at once both simple and formidable: labor is proceeding
to occupy the first rank, driving out all parasites, from the most obvious and crude to the
most subtle and refined; the workshop is coming into its own, making everything that is

not a function of labor disappear; all of social life is being rebuilt on the plane of
production, becoming, as was previously the case with regard to wars impact on the
ancient city, the cement of the modern city; in short, what is happening is that labor is
creating a new civilization, in which life, once labor has reabsorbed all the transcendent
intellectual powers into the world of production and thus put an end to the sterile divorce
between theory and practicein which life, I say, will recover its health, unity and balance.
What neither gymnastics, nor politics, nor music, nor philosophy, bringing together their
efforts, knew how to do, Proudhon writes, Labor will accomplish. As in the ancient ages
the initiation to beauty came by way of the gods, so, in a remote posterity, beauty will be
revealed anew by the laborer, the true ascetic, and it is from the innumerable forms of
industry that it will demand its changing expression, always new and always true. Then,
finally, the Logos will be manifested, and the human laborers, more beautiful and more
free than ever were the Greeks, without nobles and without slaves, without magistrates
and without priests, will form all together, on the cultivated earth, one family of heroes,
thinkers and artists. (The Philosophy of Progress). At the sites of strikes, our new
battlefields, the workers are conquering their titles of nobility and are founding a new
order, just as it was on the battlefields of Valmy, Jemmapes, and Fleurus that the citizensoldiers of Year 2 of the First Republic won democracy and the right to exist. But pay
close attention; I will once again refer to these very important words of Proudhon: What
neither gymnastics, nor politics, nor music, nor philosophy, bringing together their efforts,
knew how to do Labor will accomplish. A few lines before this passage, Proudhon,
discussing Plato, said: Divine Plato, these gods that you dreamed do not exist. There is
nothing in the world greater and more beautiful than man. But man, rising from the hands
of nature, is miserable and ugly; he can only become sublime and beautiful
through gymnastics, politics, philosophy, music, and especially, something which you
hardly appear to doubt, the ascetic (The Philosophy of Progress). And Proudhon
explains, in a footnote, what he means by the ascetic, i.e., industrial labor or work, which
were viewed as servile and ignoble among the ancients.
Here we have, marvelously highlighted, the opposition between education understood in
the classical manner (the way it has always been understood by ancient or modern
democracy), and education as understood in the socialist manner. We shall repeat:
socialism is a philosophy of the producers; it reduces society to the level of the workshop,
and recognizes no right to existence that is not a direct or indirect function of the
workshop. Naturally, education, in its view, must not be oriented to the training of a
chatterbox citizen, a dilettante who knows a little about a lot of things, as the operation of
political democracy requires, but of a producer who knows his trade inside and out and is
capable of participating in the collective labor of a progressive modern workshop, such as
would be required by the organization of a system of production that is free of all tutelage
and parasitism. It is well known that Proudhon, once again in agreement with Marx and in
opposition to anarchism, always conceived of education as intimately bound to the
workshop, to productive labor, as he maintains in his The General Idea of the
Revolution and The Political Capacity of the Working Classes. Against this idea anarchism
advocates, as is well known, the anarchist ideal of integral education, that is, an
encyclopedic and therefore superficial, mundane, and bourgeois general education; in this
respect, as well, anarchism is undoubtedly nothing but a simple echo of the 18th
century, the great bourgeois century, as Sorel has justly called it. Was it not natural, on

the other hand, that anarchism, nourished on abstractions, just as foreign to economic
preoccupations as democracy itself, and granting reality solely to the individual, the
abstract, solitary, monadic individual, who is self-sufficient, was it not natural that
anarchism would end up by conceiving of education as a kind of universal mechanical
transfer of the totality of human knowledge into the mind of this atom-individual? This is
yet another manifestation of the metaphysical simple mindedness of our anarchists. They
do not transcend the bourgeois horizon any more than our democrats; which is logical,
because if our deputies, our masters, have to know everything, since they have to deal
with everything in our stead, the anarchist individual must be possessed of an equally
comprehensive knowledge, since he must by himself constitute all of society. With respect
to both these approaches, there is a denial of society conceived as free cooperation in
which productive activities mutually condition and multiply each other.
As one can see, whether we consider the problem of war or that of production, Proudhon
and anarchism are totally incompatible. And because we consider Proudhon to be the
most authentic theoretician of the pastalongside Marxwhom syndicalism can invoke
as a precursor, I think I have the right to conclude that there are profound differences
between anarchism and syndicalism. It is quite obvious, furthermore, that the syndicalists
must confront not only the open opposition of Socialism, where the remnants of the old
Guesdism are still trying to stammer a few words, but also the opposition of Les Temps
Nouveaux, where the remnants of the old anarchism are attempting to resist their
increasing absorption into revolutionary syndicalism. But even more importantly: the
theoretical pretensions of individuals have only a minimal historical value; men rarely have
an exact account of what is taking place before their eyes. Revolutionary syndicalism has
arisen, it has grown, it is a social movement whose profundity escapes the narrow
perspectives of theoreticians who vainly cling to their old ideas. This is enough;
syndicalism can say, adopting the motto Marx cited:
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti!1
Edouard Berth
Published as Anarchisme et syndicalisme, Chapter 2 in douard Berth, Nouveaux
aspects du Socialisme, M. Rivire, Paris, 1908.
French
original
available
online
at: http://archive.org/stream/lesnouveauxaspe00bertgoog#page/n2/mode/2up
Translated
from
the
Spanish
translation
at: http://www.antorcha.net/biblioteca_virtual/filosofia/berth/berth.html