The moral foundations of anarchy

In this 1904 short pamphlet, italian anarchist composer and poet, Pietro Gori draws the evolution of human history from its origins to the present day, in which the relationships between people are still regulated by predatory drifts. Gori challenges the idea of anarchy as disorder spread by authoritarian institutions in order to defame the anarchists, and rejects the argument that violence has anything to do with the anarchist movement; to him, indeed, violence streams from power, and popular struggle is always a favorable reaction against it. The moral foundations of anarchy, then, is the dawn of a new future, founded on new principles, such as mutual aid and solidarity.

I.

There are two basic instincts in man: the instinct of conservation — the instinct of procreation.The first has its headquarters in physiological needs, aiming to the preservation of the individual: eating, breathing, motion, etc.

The second is sexual needs, that tend, across unconscious stimuli, to the conservation of the species.

It is due to the beneficial action of the first if the individual lives, if it develops, and progresses in the parable of his particular existence. From the general results of the second comes to mankind the preservation and expansion in its collective life.

On these two instincts are built extensively two primordial and essential needs, which put at risk the annihilation of the individual and the species: the need to feed, and the need to procreate. The dissatisfaction of the first instinct means the cessation of life for the individual monad; the sacrifice or the absolute obstacle to the second instinct, means the disappearance of the species as a living community.

These two fundamental rules of natural biological laws link inextricably the existence of the individual to that of the whole species — since according to one, man lives, according to the other, humanity is reborn and multiplies.

On this natural basis lies a positive moral, based on the same needs of the individual, which gives to the conscious man the exact concept of its position in

relations with the kind of his fellows — and shapes already in the minds of pioneers in this current stage of decorated barbarism — the concept of new and healthier standards of life conduct.

* * *

From this premise arise the two primitive human rights; the right to live and the right to love. But as long as the law remains as a legal abstraction, it has no real significance. Everyone, by the mere fact of his birth has the right to life, to exert before any other; and anyone who is opposed in one way or another to this practical exercise of natural law, is violating just like his own, the reasons and the foundations of existence.

Since social life can not be solidly established but on this mutual recognition, namely that everyone has the right to draw his necessary needs from the source of the common good, which mother nature and the collective hard work of previous generations created for the benefit of the human family.

No declaration of human rights can have therefore value for the individual, if it’s not expressed in a social conformation that recognizes, in every man, the right to dispose of what exists for his own utility, because of his own needs, with the only limit of the collective possibilities. The solution of the issue in the relations between the individual and the pool of individuals who are called society, should simultaneously take place, and in the economic domain and in politics.

As the basic moral and legal individualist economy, dominant today, is a diametrically opposite principle to what prevails in biological laws of higher animals aggregates, such as the human species — the revolution which now presents itself so inevitable in history, should not be anything but a resurgence with all that deep moral foundations of modern society, which after a century of unbridled competition of the individual in the vital struggle, has exhausted all upward and downward of its forces, to create new forms of cohabitation, in which humans rather than conquer prosperity struggling against their own kind, aim to make sure of their happiness together, and a stable security of well-being claimed by anyone.

* * *

If you look at the stages of development of human society, from primitive times to the present day, it must be admitted that the evolution proceeds by the most brutal forms of struggle, to the higher trends and myths of solidarity.

Self-preservation was manifested, primitively, in the most brutal war between the individuals and others like them.

It can be said, without exaggeration, that the first stimulus to murder, which is the genesis and the protoplasm of war, among the anthropomorphic cannibal, came from the appetite to be able to devour his fellow man, soon after he’s won and killed.

Man was then indeed a wolf to his fellow man — because in his own likeness, as any other animal, he saw no other benefits than a food substance to eat.

The other fundamental instinct of procreation, manifested itself as equally brutal.

As for the conquest of food, so for the conquest of the female, struggle, in its most fierce form, dominated among men, who were still on the threshold of the animal world, and claimed all their appetites in the most violent way. Sexual urges, just like those of the stomach emerged with arrogance — and to satisfy them, the individual was in continuous and direct conflict with everyone else.

No exchange of services, not a commonality of work and interests, not mutual dependence of economic and moral relationships, brought out then feelings of benevolence and sympathy for other individuals, within the initial state of wild breakup.

It was only after he acquired experience in the fight with others for self-preservation, that man realized the need for the isolated individual to join their forces with others to defend himself and his own from external aggression; or to win more easily with associated forces, against forces associated, the first rough struggles for social existence.

So it was, that, to a need for offense and defense, in order to preserve life, or to conquer the means necessary to maintain it, for the first time awoke in the bottom of the rough primitive souls, the feeling of solidarity. From then on every advance, every decisive stage in the march of civilization was marked by a growing development of this sentiment, that ties forces and human spirits in the fight on a increasingly vast ground — from the tribe to the city, from the city to the region, from region to nation: and from this, in a inescapable tomorrow, to all humanity.

* * *

Similarly, in the bosom of every aggregate of individuals: tribe, city, region, country — the dual self-preservation of the individual and the species went determining trends and needs ever more developed and the ability to consider their own kind as a necessary and integral to the individual existence; and to imagine their own ego, as an inseparable atom from the life and soul of the entire society.

It was by a newfound sentiment of utility, earlier, by a reasoned sympathy, then, that the individual stopped eating his defeated enemy — when he realized that he could obtain a bigger profit making his fellow man work for him. In this second stage of social struggle, slavery was born as a softened form of cannibalism. Man did not eat humans: he only used them as beasts, useful with their work to keep the winner in idleness.

The second phase of economic cannibalism, yet mitigated, was serfdom, in the age of the middle; when the winners acknowledged that it was more useful to turn down the direct command over the vanquished, being able to squeeze them of their products in accordance to a privilege of birth or hierarchy, without the obligation to feed them, as it is required with livestock.

With the political revolution which abolished the feudal privileges and left only the money as the world ruler — the triumphant class in the battle, since it had monopolized all the resources of life, from the capital to natural resources, found that it was enough the simple economic dependence of the workers to turn them into docile tools and production machines as prolific for the wealth of parasitical class, as good for their very misery.

Despite our just and bitter criticism of the present social organization — the march was massive, from ‘primitive cannibalism, to current forms of economic exploitation and political domination.

The losers in today’s economic war, are unable to give battle to the latest rulers, if not in the name of morality, opposite to primitive times, and to the current times which longer comply to the instincts of preservation of the individual and the species, scientifically and modernly understood. To the last remains of anthropophagy, in the economic and political fighting, the proletariat cannot logically oppose anything but the principle of solidarity.

From the revolution of 1789 onwards, the individualistic principle had its largest victory, from the economic to the moral, in all manifestations of human. And while, for the development of modern industry, the expansion of the developing media, more and more complicated binds of material and intellectual relations between the individuals, ranging from time to time by increasing the relationships of mutual dependence between them, were raising increasingly connections of mutual dependence and consequently bonds of affection and common interest — on the one hand political economy, on the other metaphysical philosophy of freedom in collision with the discoveries of the natural sciences, led the individual to the exaggeration of his personality — as if it were a separate law or from that of his fellows co-operating in the common room of the fight, and as if the individual does not represent, ultimately, the living atom and its association with other human atoms forming the social structure.

The Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed in the abstract the individual’s right to life, to science, to freedom, forgot to place the guarantee of these civil claims on granite foundations of a solidarity of interests, from which would flow, by force of circumstances, the positive security that the reasons of each would find their natural defense in supporting all others.

But if the transformation of property from feudal to industrial-capitalist, did not pass from private to public domain, as a platform for a new economic order based on factual equality — but natural resources or those produced by ‘others’ work remained heritage of the individual — it was not greatly moved either the number of relations between society and the individual. On the contrary, with the unbridled competition in the industrial and commercial field, and with the triumphant dictatorship of the ego, the struggle between man and man, and the harsher antagonism between classes, instead of reaching a truce had an acute exacerbation; and perhaps never in history we can find an example of so boundless riches alongside of so dreadful miseries, like those that now form the most open contrast with the theoretical pacification of civil and political rights.

II.

The concept of freedom, in the sphere of always more complicated and more sophisticated social activities, has been increasingly rapidly transforming. As there isn’t in the world the moral any free will, except as inherited illusion of our senses, so in an absolute sense, there isn’t complete autonomy of the individual in society.

The instinct of sociability, which developed as humans with the pressure of civilization, has become a basic need of the species in its further development; and it recognizes now, within the principle of association, the stronger lever which can propel humanity, through the efforts of each one and all, on the upward journey of its best destiny.

Hence the all modern and sociological idea of freedom, that if returns the mutual dependence of the relationship between individuals with a small restriction on the absolute independence of each of them, in the same time it finds in the enhanced and increasingly complex social solidarity, its defense and its guaranty — so that instead of being diminished, it feels increased.

If the wild man, in the primitive antisocial state, may seem at first sight more free, he is incomparably more slave of the brute forces of his surroundings, than how is the social man, which in the support of his fellow obtains the protection of their rights.

But association, namely organic grouping of different social molecules, doesn’t exist yet. Because in today’s society there is no spontaneous fusion of homogeneous elements, but uncompounded amalgam of principles and contradictory interests.

The principle of ego dictatorship, in the economy and politics (since exploitation and class supremacy are anything else than the consequence, for instinctive conjunction, of the two dominating forces: money and power) is being replaced, in the slow and underground process of the new form and the new social soul, by the principle of mutual aid, more consistent with the development of evolution and human progress, which was apparently broken by this interlude, dark and beautiful at the same time, which was the nineteenth century.

Beautiful because the same unbridled competition between individuals and classes, which represented — in the economic field — an actual return to the primitive savage individualism, created the miracles of mechanics, industry, modern engineering. Dark, because the consequences of this gigantic struggle, by getting billions against the resistant nature, has cost millions of lives, forgotten noble lives, taken after untold privations, muscles squeezed of any strength and deprived of all vitality under the bottleneck of wage.

So it can be said that the colossal edifice of bourgeois civilization, which will have even a conspicuous place in the history of the material and scientific progress of humanity, was built with this cement of workers’ lives, and the great collective soul of the laborious classes beats within the infinite body of whole modern production, as if the animating force of those lives lost at work, or for work, was transferred to the things created by work.

From this new condition of hard work and social effort, from the new means of production, dominated by the sovereign great machine and the large workshop, stands the triumphant new legal principle of a social right to the product due to collective work.

There are no more the sentimental complaints of the Holy Fathers against iniquity, that trampling over the most, divide one another the children of God, in the words of John Chrysostom. Nor are the simplistic statements of the naturist Pre-Raphaelites of socialism claiming to each his share of land, bread and salt — all in common, bestowed by mother nature. No ascetic invective of the old communists before the fears of the millennium; not statements of philosophical and abstract encyclopaedists on Human Rights, before the red dawn of ’89. It is something more, and better: the maturity of certain facts, and the accomplished development of certain forms.

Never before, for the needs of the division of labor in big industry and manufacturing mechanical, the worker was so closely tied to the worker, crafts to crafts, arts to the arts, thanks to the mutual dependence, and the combined study efforts which develops a much greater result than the sum of individual forces.

The association of such efforts to increase the production has expanded, creating in addition to the material bonds — which now inseparably united workers between them — even moral ties, before unnoticed, and then from time to time stronger, because more conscious.

And as the ideas and feelings are only a reflection of the events of the outside world (and the sensations received from contact with those circumstances), the consciousness of the proletariat — that rises from daily experience and by the daily observation, to be only the producer of wealth [but not the owner], and from the fate of each worker to be closely linked to the fate of all his other comrades — only serves to merge ever more the forces and souls of workers to a clear and determined goal: to free labor of parasitism of the master, liberating it from this ultimate form of economic slavery which takes the name of wage.

And since the revolution, now made complete by the mechanics in all the arts and trades, in the effort to socialize with their arms the previously isolated workers, has already drawn up the structure of a new world, in which there is a socialization of hard work without the enjoyment of product for those who toiled, this revolution will be completed by the socialization of the enjoyment of product, stated in law and made common heritage to the whole society.

A corresponding revolution of consciences and proletarian forces will accomplish the slow disintegration of the current economic and moral relations among men, by integrating a renewed social structure, which represents the oasis of rest where humanity, after thousands of years of labor and pain, can be refreshed from the arduous journey — and where the two fundamental human instincts: preservation of the individual, and preservation of the species — will find, at last, a way to be reconciled after the long conflict; where man, for his well-being should not pass — like the powerful of today and of yesterday — over the body of his fellow men; since that would not be freedom — but the perpetuation of tyranny in a different form.

To the violence of government, would take over a violence of the individual — brutal expressions, the one and the other of the authority of man over man. The freedom of each is not possible without the freedom of all — as the health of every cell cannot be without the health of the whole body.

And society is not an organism? Once a part of it is ill, the whole social body will be affected, and suffering. Only a native Papuan, which reminds before the triumphs of science the primitive animality of man, can consciously deny this truth.

* * *

It has been said, and repeated to satiety, in good and in bad faith by the detractors of the anarchist ideas, that anarchy can not have morals.

And also several anarchists, ignoring the essence of ethics and sociability that the word anarchy contains, reaffirmed the foolish prejudice.

Of course a moral freedom has nothing in common with that of tyranny, in whatever name that occurs.

Although we continue to say otherwise, the official morality of bourgeois individualism is still a bit ‘that of Papuans recalled by Ferrero. — What is evil and what is good? asked an European traveler to one of these savages. And the savage answered with conviction, “the good is when I steal the wife of another — evil is when another steals my wife.” The same goes for today’s mainstream and hypocritical moral, for better or for worse, inherently and objectively, for the good or the evil that it brings to one or more individuals or to society as a whole — but is considered righteous or evil depending on the utility or damage which affected the individual or class that is judging it subjectively. So that, for this chaotic morality, an action can be judged by some heroism, by others madness, by someone else glory or infamy.

A massacre of people, a massacre of old people, women, innocent children, coldly murdered in the name of an abstract principle, and most of the time deceitful, public order, can procure gallons and honors to the man who commanded the executioners, or the headsman. History is full of such eminent chiefs bandits, ready to pass with the greatest of ease — as the captains of the middle ages — from one to another rule, as long as they are supported in luxurious and unproductive idleness. Only the downtrodden, the oppressed, the survivors of slain, curse in their hearts the plumed killers.

Those to whom the measure has been or will be the most relentless threat, they will dip more their hands in the blood of their own kind.

And not only against him they shout: Crucify!; but against all those who profess the same ideas, or the ones who say to follow — it doesn’t matter then if he has never met them, or whether or not they have ever endorsed his actions. They will be persecuted, imprisoned, tortured in mass — everything will be done against a party, or rather against a huge and irresistible current of principles and ideas, a real cross revenge for the fault of one — and raising the cruelest forms and wicked inquisition to the thought.

And since creeps by some, and it is stated by others, that the anarchist morals proclaims the violence of man against man — the dishonest opponents, the ignorants, and the unaware anarchists await that I try systematically to demonstrate that anarchy is the complete negation of violence.

III.

There is another widespread prejudice to destroy, a prejudice that deceives the detractors and even some followers of anarchist ideas. Because some rebel, self proclaimed anarchist threw a bomb, or struck with a dagger, or pistol — certainly not in the name of abstract theories, but overwhelmed by anger brewed for a long time in miseries, police persecution, provocations of every sort — some came to the conclusion that the anarchist doctrine was nothing but a school of plots and violence, some kind of permanent conspiracy, intent on making bombs, and sharpening knives. So it was depicted by the agents of the political police — and some trivial journalists exaggerated it, to help the reaction to stifle the propaganda.

But even if anarchists, for exasperation and temperament, were all violent — and that is not true — that wouldn’t show at all that anarchism is based on violent morals.

Well, for each of these victims of persecution, which exploded the pain long restrained, in striking attacks, there are thousands and thousands, who for years and years endured, with heroic serenity, nameless harshness, relentless miseries, and bitterness without solace.

I have known in my now regular wandering across the world, a multitude of them, of all countries, and of all temperaments — and in many of those the love of freedom was revealed to me, almost always, under the common reason and a higher moral: a burst of instinctive altruism and kindness, beyond the commoner rough, a feeling of simple and loyal kindness.

And even though, among the lines of anarchists there were also all the refuses of the sewers of society (which is not the case) it would be necessary to recall Renan and Strauss with him, who say that the majority of those who followed Christ in his preaching, was composed of men and women, already affected by the law, as common criminals; but that did not prevent that between this people, aroused principles of morality superior to the dominant, from which came out the revolutionary force that has overthrown the pagan world. Because the revolutionary sense, as Victor Hugo said, is a moral sense.

And then (given that the champions of all violence, provided that is governmental and bear the mark of the state, insist on the essence of the violent anarchist doctrine) will rejoice somewhat ‘to take stock of tyranny, of oppression, of cruelty, of coldly crimes, conceived and plotted by governments — and put as well on the other scale the acts of individual violence committed by anarchists or by self-styled rebels, and you will see what is the school organized to permanently use the violence against man, from dispossession up until extortion, up to murder. But this, according to the defenders of legal violence, is not evil. This is not the crime, according to the “Papua” moral civilization, since it doesn’t hurt them.

Because, as the savage replied: “The good is when I steal the wife of another, evil is when another steals my wife.”

Thus violence, being no more, up to this moment, than one manifestations of the struggle for existence — and certainly anarchists did not invent this cruel law of history — became the instrument of oppression, and due to the instinct of imitation and the contamination of example which dominate human actions, though it became the weapon of revolt of the oppressed.

By fraud and by force, the winners in this frantic millennial struggle, held their foot on losers, and the losers, by right of reprisal, used from time to time, individually or collectively, force against the rulers. Is not full, classical literature, which the educated classes are soaked in, of that open apology of violence, when this instrument is used to what you believe is good?

Political assassinations, even glorified in books to educate children, had zealous apologists even in the Bible, and the fact of Judith, that by fraud and violence, came to slay Oleferne — fighter against Bethulia in open war — has touched with emotions and tears more than just one nun and one hysterical schoolgirl.

The myth of Rome opens with a fratricide and for what cause committed! ... Yet this Romulus, that for a innocent joke kills his brother Remus, is, in the prehistory of the eternal city, the star Quirinus — worshiped for centuries. Yet the adventures of this crazy morals — reality or legend that they should be — are taught as the alphabet and education of the heart, in the public schools of Italy, and many other countries.

The classicism of Rome and Greece uncovers these reminiscences fierce — and Brutus, that for cynical reasons of state, order and attends tragically to the agony of his own children, is the most striking expression of the atrocious violence of the government.

Moreover, all the tradition of military training, that was and sadly still is, the core and the armor of political organizations, both past and present — what is, if not the school of violent arrogance and collective murder?

Yet a slaughter of human beings, committed in war — or maybe in repression of popular movements — is judged by the most a glorious fact, if it reinforces (albeit with torrents of blood and pain with actual human lives) that overwhelming fortress, that is the State.

The State, then, and the uniform that represent it, claims the right to monopolize violence, and to glorify the violent, that embody the principle that gave life to it. So that in Italy, for example, where also there is still no monument to Galileo — the squares and streets are now all cluttered with statues and columns devoted to people, whose best skill in life was that of knowing how to deal blows, and to kill many people, loyally to the institution.

This monument mania that reproduces in the marbles and bronzes the collective frenzy, which is also in the souls of the ruling classes for the armed force, is reproduced on the pages of countless examples, that each state seals with the dogma of his infallibility.

As a matter of fact, in the patriotic epic of Italy, now all the individual or collective violence against the dominant powers (from the attack of Agesilaus Milan, to the one against the Duke of Parma) are now not only justified, but also officially glorified — because without that revolution Italy would not have arisen; so, for the eternal movement of things, today becomes the glory over those who were murder yesterday.

And in the same country, where military tribunals condemned, to centuries of imprisonment, boys guilty of throwing stones as protest against a government that starved — a famous brat from Genoa, Balilla, has his own monument, for he was the one to have thrown the first stone against foreign oppressors.

The only difference — except the statue and centuries of imprisonment — between one and the other is that this is a rebellion against foreign tyranny — that is against domestic arrogance. The reason was the same: outrage against injustice. But for the boys of Italy, as for fighters of all ages, nothing appeared more true of the sentence of Brennus: Woe to the vanquished!

Oh, if instead of being killed and beaten, they were winners, perhaps the same fake journalists that today cover them with muddy insults, would rise just to build to those Gavroches of the proletariat, the monument of victory.

Violence cannot be the substrate of doctrine, of any party, and was not in history but a means of redressing injuries, and tyranny, between classes and between the dominator over the dominated; it was then seen as a means of comeback, as has already been said, for the oppressed, without this becoming the theoretical principle of the survivors; for when the slaves rebelled stood up against the ancient game of the patricians of Rome, the violence that they twisted by necessity of struggle and liberation, was not the end, but a means: the end was always the one that is the invincible heartbeat of the human soul, freedom.

IV.

Likewise, when against the old regime, creaky on its rusty hinges, fell the revolutionary storms that shut convulsively the past century — the party of action, from the political Cordeliers and the Jacobins, to the economic Babeuf, which organized league of equals, having preached the necessity of opposing violence to violence, thrown against the coalesced force, of countrymen and foreign tyrants, the armed force of the people — undoubtedly, they did not consider such permanent violence as ruthless means, but as one necessary to crush despotism forever.

Certainly, July 14 and August 10 were the corollary of inevitable historical proclamation of the human rights, but before the philosophy of history, two memorable days didn’t remain if not as the supreme conflagration between two different eras.

The soul of the revolution, breathed for years, inciting the minds — roared with rumble warning, in the bowels of the decrepit institutions, in mute eloquence of things, which proclaimed the ruin of a world — shining pages of clairvoyants encyclopedists, in glowing visions of Condorcet, in the calm prophecies of Diderot.

It was also necessary to claim rights by force, when force opposed their pace, in the name of the privilege. But the end was, or should be, something else: freedom — and then love; because no other moral content can lie within this word.

And when, in the name of revolution, Robespierre decided to organize the permanent state of violence, government, by making the executioner, the first state official, albeit against the enemies of the people, or against the suspicions of realism, thus confusing the means with ends of a liberating revolution — as if once expelled the tyrants, freedom could, among citizens, impose itself by force. The new state of affairs although it ran over, proudly, so many lives, fell into the same error, and in the same hatefulness, for which it had sprung up in arms against the old regime, and so it prepared the ground for the military dictatorship of the first Bonaparte.

Now the philosophy of anarchy, made stronger by all these experiences of the past, and without establishing absolute standards, — since nothing absolute exists — starts from this fundamental principle, which represents all its moral basis, “freedom is incompatible with violence; and since the State, as the central body of and dispossession for benefit of some and to detriment of other classes, it is believed an organized and durable unnecessary form of violence, freedom is incompatible with the state.” From this premise comes a series of irrefragable principles, and arguments.

No need to say much further to prove to the enemies of anarchy — so those on the right much so those on the left, those who do not want to, and those who can’t understand it — that violence is the natural enemy of freedom — and that only a necessary violence is legitimate.

In fact isn’t also an enemy of freedom, the one who imprisons a man, to punish and force him to think in one way rather than another, just as one who injures or kills him in order to force him to think like him?

There can be no freedom, socially understood, if this does not end where the freedom of another begins.

That one puts his feet on my chest, in the name of the State or its individual whim, it is the same thing, they violated my rights and I must consider them all tyrants; and secondly, because it is the garment that is tyranny; tyranny is any act that tramples on freedoms of others. Violence, whether it is made to me by a government agent, or by some other bully, it excites in me the right to self-defense. And there arose the concept of necessary moral violence. I reject legitimately an unjust aggression, as I turn down any serious provocation, as I feel also the right to rebel against oppression, which is a more detrimental law than any other form of brutal violence.

The right to self-defense, which requires violence in the individual and in society, it’s the moral foundation of the revolutions against all forms of tyranny.

Basic moral of anarchism is therefore freedom, and revolution, in the broad and scientific meaning of the word, is only the means to make it triumph against the resistance which is set against it. Violence can never be the philosophical content of anarchism, understanding this word, not in the nasty meaning, given by spies and mercenary journalists, precisely because violence is the moral substrate of all political power, which in any form may be disguised, it’s still tyranny of man on his fellow: in monarchies, permanent violence of one for all, in oligarchies of the few upon many, in liberal democracies of the majorities upon minorities.

In all these and any other authoritarian centralization, which would arrogate to itself the right to govern society, coercion is the only persuasive argument that the authority dictate to the governed! Coercion in seeking the help of citizens to public expenditure, coercion imposing them the tribute of blood, which is the military service, coercion in imparting knowledge and teaching licensed by the state, finally coercion in declaring the orthodox or heretical opinions of different political parties.

The State father, the state-protector of the weak, the guardian of the rights, jealous defender of all freedom is not but a secular fairy tale, refuted by the experience of all times, in all places, in all its forms.

It is thus natural that, against this concept, developed in the test of thousands of years, opposed to the meaning of the state, that Bovio portrays well by nature, dishonest and violent, arose above and in spite of vulgar significance, the concept of anarchy, as antithesis of state policy, meaning that if this centralizes, represses, crushes, pesters, enchains, sentences to death and kills under the pretext of order and public good — anarchy on the other hand claims that order and the public good come from the spontaneous result of all the productive forces associated, of all freedoms cooperating, all intelligently exercised sovereignty in the common interest, from all the initiatives harmonized by the triumph of this great certainty: the good of each one can not be but the good of all.

The state rests with violence — and it will be won through violence — who lives by the sword dies by the sword. To the disorder of social classes, clashing for opposed interests, the chaos of privileges overwhelming rights, to the imposition of painful duties to which no corresponding right is recognized — will take over the order, the true order, resulting harmonically from free federation of intelligences and human forces just like cosmic order is the spontaneous product of natural forces, winning obstacles that hinder the eternal evolution of the phenomena and forms.

The social progress is eroding the latest foundation of the State, gloomy fortress erected over the centuries with so much effort and lives of human freedoms.

When underground corrosion will be accomplished, as is the case of the volcanic islets and hard corals of Polynesia, that assiduously the tide corrodes for thousands of years, and then a sudden collapse occurs, as if swallowed up by the huge jaws of the ocean, the state will disappear with the agony of the capitalist economy, once its functions will end, which is to act as a watchdog of class parasitism.

The moral of the state, which corresponds to violence of any authoritarian spirit and bodies, will irresistibly be taken over — like the breath of the seasons revivers — an anarchist morals (which in these dark ages was believed a morals of blood and vengeance from enemies and their blind friends) will take over, winning the last bitterness of spirit, sweetening the hereditary instincts of wildness, reconciling aversions and primitive impulsivity in a peaceful complex of harmonious interests, of redeemed miseries, of widespread prosperity, of enlightened minds, of hearts reconciled to love, serenity, peace.

You will see then, after the noon of the offenses committed, it will be lighted the mistakes of the past; that the authoritarian school that goes from Aristotle to Bismarck, was the real school of violence, however committed in the name of divine power, or the military law, public order, or jurisprudence — and the school of freedom, school of true order, will appear instead that it was judged abruptly sect of murderous utopias, because some of his disciples, stroke back with violence, from below, to the triumphant violence, coming from the top, with foot on trampled human rights.

The principle of solidarity, passed through the eras of assiduous and mutual economic and political arrogance, will win all the primitive instincts of social struggle among individuals, classes, nations and races — and over the ruins in the aftermath of the ancient human melee — tragedy of centuries that bloodied the world — will flourish in reality the young days of utopia — eternally slandered, perpetually derided.

It will be understood at last — after a wonderful intellectual fight, made of defeats and audacity from Plato to Kropotkin — that only social disorder, and the principle of struggle, need a defense, violent by nature, as they have found in State and Government; that when on the struggle of each against all, which was the soul of all societies ever occurred in history, will take over the solidarity of all, to engage a common fight against nature (in order to snatch from it the secrets and the benefits to universal benefit), the cause of the order will triumph without coercion of any kind, since the interests and sensitivities of each person, reconciled in the harmony of well-being and freedom of all, will gravitate around the collective good, as in star systems, planets go around the central star, which disseminates over them light, heat, life.