Lain Diez was a Chilean *‘non-conformist" anarchist active from the 1940s to the 1970s. He contributed to the French anarchist paper, Le Libertaire, in the 1940s, and translated Vernon Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution into Spanish (Paris: Belibaste, 1971). Thefollowing piece was originally published in Noir et Rouge, No. 28, December 1964, and is translated here by Paul Sharkey. Lain Diez sketches out an anarchist alternative to consumer capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, while rejecting any notion of historical determinism, suggesting some influence by the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957).
1. THE ANARCHIST IDEAL IS A SOCIETY FROM which the sway ofevery authoritarian institution and man’s exploitation of his fellow man have been banished.
In political terms, such a society is synonymous with a federal regime organized from the bottom up through the federation ofterritorial units entering into a mutual commitment to respect their individuality. In economic terms, these units form a succession of echelons of coordination to the extent that they feel the need to centralize and rationalize their ventures and compensate for the inequalities entailed in differences in productivity or geographical location. Throughout all this process of coordination and compensation, the criterion of organic growth is to take priority over any “planning” consideration, if we take the latter in the sense of centralized, bureaucratic economic planning (Gosplan) [Soviet economic planning committee). By “organic growth” we mean development in which any community’s real needs for goods and services can be aired freely, without the distortions caused either by business advertising that conjures up artificial demand, or by the contrived scarcities deriving from the plan, the result of decision-making by technobureaucrats arbitrarily determining what should be consumed or produced, decision-making more attuned to their interests as the co-dominant class and the interests of the State they serve...
The ideal society to which anarchism looks bluntly poses the problem of human goals, for there can be no parallel reshaping of society in the absence of a reshaping of man. In this regard it parts company from Marxism which makes man an appendage of society and, more narrowly, of its economic infrastructure and has never tackled the issue of moral autonomy, with the dire consequences familiar to us all. But implicit in the reshaping of man are the ethical aims to which his education is to be tailored. Those aims and appropriate educational methods ought not to be designed to bring about a passive adaptation to the new regime with an eye to its consolidation, but rather to enhance the creative capacity, especially in the arts, so as to counter the conformism that might be a brake upon progress and directly threatens the freedom of the individual, the cell from which the body of society derives its fresh vitality.
2. Ends and means are regarded as forming an indivisible whole but, ultimately, it is the means that determine the ends.
In fact, if men opt for means divorced from freely embraced ethical standards adapted to the lofty goals being pursued, whether this be due to exceptional circumstances or out-and-out opportunism... this will prompt them to amend their goals and abandon their principles so as to turn to others more in tune with their pragmatic approach. This spotlights a process of corruption that is going to end up bringing into disrepute the movement of which they are members and the very ideals that drive it. Hence the necessity of frequently measuring one’s means against one’s goals... [Tlhere is more to anarchism than just innovation and perpetual change: there is also the effort to preserve values, which does not at all rule out slow, patient digestion of new experiences. The latter are taken on board and little by little enrich its spiritual inheritance, thereby furnishing our movement with fresh ideological and emotional weapons, rendering it more effective in its propaganda and activity.
3. Anarchism’s more recent experiences require that it focus more upon its values and means rather than upon its goals and ideals.
In its brief past history, our movement has not managed to avoid two reefs that a greater stress laid upon values and means might have enabled it to outflank: one being millenarianism and the other the negative superstition of the State, the antithesis of the positive State superstition or myth.
...[Tlhe difficulty with anticipating the society of our dreams, be it only in broadest outline, is a difficulty for which there is no solution and a perfect illustration of Zeno’s paradox. In fact, unless we want to trade in illusions... we really have to start from the economic and life statistics available and reconcile those often distorted figures with arbitrary hypotheses about the impact of new factors upon consumption and output and on the conduct of people in circumstances that differ utterly from the present circumstances—all of it aggravated by the tensions characteristic of a revolutionary process adding further uncertainty. The pro-planning Achilles is never going to catch up with the revolutionary tortoise.
Work and therefore society will see to its own organization... ‘ ‘First we engage and then we see," Napoleon used to say as he attacked—translated into the popular parlance of our own times, that means: “We can share the burden as we go." If the muleteer knows what he is about, there is no question but that the team will not grind to a stop and that the cargo will reach its destination...
So let us, for the time being, set our futuristic plans to one side and focus attention upon our principles, so as to move back from there to values, which is the essential problem right now. That waywe will be better equipped to grapple with choosing the means we will use in our propaganda and activity, as well as the equally important business of bringing our lives into harmony with the principles we profess...
With the matter of ends being set to one side—pending the new order—we will be able to focus on thoughts about values, principles and means, an urgent business that will not brook being put off until another day. But I should first of all say a few words about the second blight I mentioned: the state superstition. This is one of the most deeply anchored, even obsessive, views held by anarchism—that most of the ills by which mankind is beset spring from the state. By doing away with the state, we will be doing away with the main source of the authoritarianism and oppression that hobble the unfettered expansion of the human personaliry. Which is why, in theoiy as well as in practice, anarchists have concentrated their fire on the State myth and the hard and fast expressions thereof. But in so doing we forget that the state is an effect of underlying social causes, that is, that it is a product of society, its genesis in time being determined by certain prime biological, economic and psychological factors. True, in our own day, the State per se, out of an instinct for survival, is the promoter and intensifier of those effects: but that is only a secondary reaction that presupposes the existence of these primary factors. It is these that we must tear up by the roots if we want either to forestall the resurrection of the state after every attempt to abolish it, or simply to defuse its aggression and bullying.
It needs saying and repeating that the State's roots go deep into society and into man himself. .. i f we wish to combat the state effectively, we must reshape the society and man that spawn and sustain it. Political weapons and a policy of arms are absolutely ineffective in securing this aim. However, there is a positive side to the age-old struggle waged by anarchism and, generally, by the individual against the state: the importance accorded to direct action, without which, as Gandhi put it, “nothing in this world ever gets done” ...
4. In the face of historicism, our movement must champion voluntarism.
By historicism I intend all those theories that sit in judgment of human teachings and exploits generally by setting them against an historic context, the latter being deemed an indefinite development, either rectilinear or ongoing or dialectical. An instance of the first of these might be the theory of progress through a law of intellectual evolution, say [Auguste] Comte’s law of the three estates, and, of the second, the succession of thesis, antithesis and synthesis associated with the Hegelian system (copied by Marx) and which [Eugene] Duhring, with scathing irony, described as “yes-no-ism” Uaneirenei). A feature common to all of these historicist systems is the supremacy (in terms of decision making in men’s affairs) of History (with a capital letter) which, unknown to men, supposedly foists its law upon them: that law being inevitable progress or a learning process. This new and jealous divinity has its intermediaries who, like the priests of the ancient religions, interpret its intentions, prophesying as they did and issuing thunderous anathemas against miscreants refusing to be awed by their revelations. They also arm a secular arm against heretics and have no hesitation about borrowing the measures that inquisitions down through the ages have employed against free spirits.
Not that anarchism means to substitute the notion of whim for the notion of law, however. It does not deny the existence of certain uniformities within society such as are found in nature’s phenomena which create the environment, context and setting within which men operate and evolve. But at most these are just some of the many determinants that wield a greater or lesser influence, depending on historical circumstances and man’s creative capacity, his determination to survive and improve himself.
In my personal view, anarchist voluntarism... posits a discontinuous evolution of society, i. e., an evolution made up of successive series or evolutions. Each series stands apart from its predecessor on account of its fresh contributions which substantially alter the face of society and the notions men entertain of their relationships with their fellows and with the universe. There are series that are parallel in time in two different locations around the globe and increasingly these interact until they come to represent one single underlying trend, a worldwide series due to be carried on in turn by another series bearing the mark of fresh features, and so on, ad infinitum. So the chief characteristic of voluntarism is freedom. Freedom manifests itself through the burgeoning of new forces that interrupt the continuity of development and cannot be explained away in terms of known antecedents nor by the data of historical consciousness. These are like ferments that suddenly emerge, hatched in the silence of human gestation. Trying to connect them with the past is a pointless exercise. This process is typical of the great religions, the genesis of which has no historical explanation and which I would venture to suggest defies rational, scientific explanation.
This breach of historical continuity is typical of the dynamism within society. Statistical factors build up and consolidate and tend to immobilize it. Man’s discoveries and inventions rescue it from this condition of immobility. Advances in navigation and our knowledge of astronomy have opened up new worlds to us: the unexpected or even revolutionary notions of relativistic physics and “quanta” have profoundly altered our view of nature: daring astronautical technology has pushed back the boundaries of man’s direct exploration of space by hundreds of thousands of kilometres. All these discoveries and inventions, made over an astonishingly brief period of time, are like gigantic pulsations rattling the decrepit structures of society. Social changes are on a scale hardly ever found in natural vegetation. Human biology, sociology and morals have also tasted liberating revolutions of their own.
World History
