Diego Abad de Santilldn (1897-1983) was active in the Argentine and Spanish anarchist movements in the years leading up to the Second World War and the author of many works and articles on anarchism and the revolutionary labour movement (Volume I, Selections 94, 125 and 128). In January 1939 he left Spain, spent time in various French concentration camps, and then near the end of the war was able finally to return to Latin America. Eventually, he made his way back to Argentina, where he stayed until the death of Franco (1975), after which he returned to Spain. The following passages, translated by Paul Sharkey, were writtenfor the Argentine anarchist review, Reconstruir, appearing under the title, "Apuntes para una Problematica del Anarquismo,” reprinted in El Anarquismo en America Latina (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayachucho, 1990), ed. AJ. Cappelletti and CM. Rama. The concept of “anarchism without adjectives” was first putforward by various Spanish anarchists, such as Ricardo Mella (1861-1925), concerned that to insist on one economic system, such as anarchist communism, as the only one compatible with anarchist ideals was its ownform of dogmatism inconsistent with the libertarian principles to which all anarchists were supposed to be committed.
ANARCHISM IS NOT A POLITICAL SYSTEM, nor is it an economic system; it is a humanistic craving which does not culminate in some flawless, ideal order or structure free of conflicting interests or pursuit of power, wherein the human being will be free of problems and where life can proceed peaceably. Such earthly paradises—autocracy, kingship by the grace of God, democracy of the estates, dictatorship of the unerring leader as infallible as any Pope, dictatorship of the proletariat, dictatorship of the financial or industrial bourgeoisie, parliamentary arrangements, etc., etc.—are for others to devise and proffer as the ultimate solution. Anarchism is not tied to any of these political constructs even though it has to live and develop in that context, sometimes more fully and sometimes with lesser freedom or compelled to silence; it has no ties to them, be they good, bad or indifferent, nor does it offer a system to replace and supersede them; it is content to highlight their shortcomings, falsehoods and inadequacies; it may see more fairness in a political system that is more representative than parliaments in crisis, one that affords popular agencies access to decision-making concerning collective futures; a system operating from the ground up, from the municipalities and unions, from the world oflabour, be that labour intellectual, scientific, technical or manual. But while praising this or that form of new political organization which might do away with many tensions and frictions and allow social relations to be organized on a fairer basis and wealth (the fruits of ingenuity and labour) to be distributed more equitably, it makes no binding commitment.
Anarchism is not a political recipe, some flawless program, some panacea; over and above whatever may appear ideal today, there is always something better lurking, an impeccable reference point—the ideal. It has been argued that this lack of a program is anarchism’s weakness; however, it is in fact its consistent strength, its life-blood, its cornerstone; it seeks to defend man’s dignity and freedom, regardless of circumstances and under every political system, past, present and future. Eventual success at the ballot-box or through insurrection does not leave it a spent force, and it will forge ahead and press on with its resistance to any form of oppression of man by the few or the many. Legally, few vestiges remain of the slavery and servitude combated down through the ages, over millennia: there is no denying that progress has been made on this specific score, and whereas, in the past, legal abolition of slavery might have been a target, anarchism always has before its eyes the mission of widening this focus to include a more radiant, more promising target: the reduction or elimination of fresh forms of slavery and servitude. Voluntary slavery or servitude included.
Anarchism is not wedded to any economic system; not during the Middle Ages when feudalism ruled the roost; not during the late 18th century when capitalism emerged with the steam engine and carried the day; nor when the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was dreamt up and put into effect; it can survive and assert its right to exist alongside plough and team of oxen as readily as alongside the modem combine-harvester; its mission in the days of steam was the same as it is in the age of the electric motor or jet engine or the modem age of the computer and atomic power. Capitalism was an advance upon feudalism's farming techniques and raised the standard ofliving of millions and millions of sub-humans bereft of rights and possessed of nothing except the right to kow-tow to their masters, to the machine-owners or the masters who enjoyed a monopoly upon the resources of political power.
In our own day, a revolution with unimaginable implications is being triggered by scientific, technological and demographic explosions conjuring up prospects and possibilities scarcely comprehensible in the terms in which the recent or distant past conceived.
A child of his times, working with the materials ofhis times, Proudhon came up with a mutualist economics [Volume 1, Selections 12 & 18[ through which man could develop and directly benefit more fully and fairly than under a system of monopoly capitalism geared to private profit rather than preoccupied with society; capitalism looked upon societjj as the potentia! market, merely a factor. Mikhail Bakunin in his day lobbied for a form of collectivism, which had the same aspirations [Volume 1, Chapter 6j; Peter Kropotkin devised the formula of communism [Volume 1, Chapter 8j; others proposed other means of ensuring that the product oflabour remained in the producers' own hands; Gustav Landauer suggested the formation of communities operating outside of the capitalist economy [Volume 1, Selections 49, 79 & 111 [; the idea of free colonies was floated and put into effect, partly at the instigation of the pre-Marxist socialism ofFourier [Volume 1, Selection 7) and Cabet and partly in order to put Kropotkin's solution to the test.
The contest between the supporters of collectivist anarchism and supporters of communism was a long and painful one; in the end, the latter carried the day as the ideal formula. Anarchism was thereby restricted to a single idea, one economic system and this made it easier to attract recruits, but it lost much ofits essence. It was in Spain that the notion of an anarchism without economic adjectives surfaced, breathing new life into its humanistic tradition...
These days there is talk of anarcho-syndicalism whereby anarchist humanism is harnessed to the labour movement. This association is tantamount to an abridgement, as is anarcho-communism. There are reasons for this harnessing of anarchism alongside what later crystallized as syndicalism, because anarchists breathed life into the modern labour movement through nearly a century of heroic belligerency that took a high toll in blood, sweat and tears. Many anarchists were workers and they took upon themselves the daunting task of teaching their comrades what they did not know: that they constituted a real power if they would only join forces, if they showed solidarity with one another in the workplace, in industry, disregarding arbitrary national boundaries; essentially, they were educators and preached by example; their reward was the gallows or the firing squad and they served many years in prisons and prison farms, enduring trials, harassment and torture; workers’ associations and unions were formed and schools and libraries accompanied them.
In myriad ways, a demonstration was offered ofwhat it might be like in a society founded upon everyone’s working for the benefit ofall; a few recent writings—Pierre Besnard’s for instance, or my own [Volume 1, Selection 1251—have summarized the prospects. It was our privilege at one point to set out howwe lived in Spain and how we might be living, only to stumble across the actuality of it the next day in the agrarian collectives, with the industrial and commercial economies and public services in the hands of the workers [Volume 1, Selection 1261. These were practical, circumstantial solutions rather than well-meaning, aspirational utopias.
Be that as it may, anarchism is not syndicalism, but neither is it anti-syndicalism. It remains anarchism, without qualification. Being in favour of a change to political, economic and social structures delivering powers of decision-making oover collective fate to the world of labour, is merely a current imperative designed to overcome imbalances which, in the long run, hurt us all. Just as the middle class was once upon a time incorporated into public life, shattering the ascendancy of the capitalist and financier oligarchies, the times in which we happen to be living or subsisting require that the world of labour, in the broadest sense, be incorporated into the decision-making that determines the fates of society and human beings.
Institutionalization ofthe labour movement, its recognition in law, gave rise to the mighty trade union organizations of our own day which involve almost half of the population of their respective countries, are run by a flourishing bureaucracy suffering the same flaws as any other bureaucracy, and in which the anarchist ofyesteryear, the selfless militant and educator, has lost his traditional base; and maybe he shouldn’t yearn for the sway he enjoyed back in the days of struggle and resistance which were a feature of his presence in the unions. He will remain, and should carry on, in the workers’ organizations as part and parcel of the process of production and distribution, but he will have to operate on the basis of a novel fact: that now those unions represent a power legally tied to the State in a variety of ways. His past performance belongs to history, and historians can unearth memories, deeds, attitudes and brave feats; but many of his views from the days when they played a leading part in the labour movement have lost their edge and his tactics and endeavours will have to be amended to fit in with the new trade unionism ifhe is to avoid the dangers of stagnation and deviation.
A century of struggle and warfare for respect and acknowledgment of the human person, a struggle in which anarchists manned the positions of greatest danger requiring the greatest sacrifice, moulded the image of the heroic anarchist in the public mind. No other element in the social war was able to equal the selflessness of so many thousands upon thousands of men as they enunciated their libertarian ideas. There were acts of protest and retaliation and sacrifices galore prompted by a profound solidarity with those who suffered injustice and oppression in their most extreme forms: and understanding and moral support aplenty from those who knew of their altruistic motives. They had to defend themselves against those who mobilized every resource of the state and all their wealth in order to restrict and resist just aspirations: when the government of Catalonia in Spain organized and did all in its power to sustain gangs of gunmen in order to wipe out the best known syndicalists and anarchists, and when hundreds of leading militants perished during those dark days, they resorted to defending their lives with greater determination than could be mustered by those hired guns and a situation came about in which the gun was then the ultimate argument.
In any event, the heroic deeds in which anarchists took part either as isolated individuals... or on a collective basis, left behind a picture of legend to be admired or rejected depending on one’s outlook: but anarchism is, by its very essence, nonviolent and advocates nonviolence because it takes a humane approach to everything: on many counts one can sense a connection and a continuity with the early days of the Christian revolution.
An accidental emergency thrust anarchism into a war that lasted nearly three years and in which it was the main belligerent: a war in which hundreds of thousands ofits personnel perished. Strictly speaking, the Spanish civil war sprang from the initial resistance to the threats from fascism in Spain, rather than from any defence of a political system to which they owed nothing, but resistance was mounted for the sake of freedoms won over many decades of sacrifice.
In recent times, events have followed one another at a dizzying rate: towards the end, the Second World War deployed the atomic bomb and thereby ushered in a new phase in history. It will take time to incubate ideas that can accommodate this new situation: today, anarchism is more relevant than ever before, more even than during the days when it was committed to the labour movement, more than during eruptions ofheroics, more than during its exemplary performance in the war against fascism: it is experiencing a resurgence in modern philosophy, in theology, among sociologists and economists: among the unconventional younger generation shaking the mainstays of a society that is not a community: all of which needs to be bolstered by anarchism as a humanist banner, an anarchism without adjectives. Therein lies the root and the potential for the construction of a better world, the 21 st century world in which it seems we are already living.
Reconstruir, No. 60, May-June 1969
World History
