1905
People :
Author : Émile Pouget
Text :
Property and authority are merely differing manifestations and expressions of one and the same "principle" which boils down to the enforcement and enshrinement of the servitude of woman. Consequently, the only difference between them is one of vantage point: viewed from one angle, slavery appears as a property crime, whereas, viewed from a different angle, it constitutes an authority crime.
In life, these "principles" whereby the peoples are muzzled are erected into oppressive institutions of which only the facade had changed over the ages. At present and in spite of all the tinkering carried out on the ownership system and the adjustments made to the exercise of authority, quite superficial tinkerings and adjustments, submission, constraint, forced labor, hunger, etc. are the lot of the laboring classes.
This is why the Hell of Wage-Slavery is a lightless Gehenna: the vast majority of human beings languish there, bereft of well-being and liberty. And in that Gehenna, for all its cosmetic trappings of democracy, a rich harvest of misery and grief grows.
The union association is, in fact, the only focal point which, in its very composition, reflects the aspirations by which the wage-slave is driven: being the sole agglomeration of human beings that grows out of an absolute identity of interests, in that it derives its raison d'etre from the form of production, upon which it models itself and of which it is merely the extension.
What in fact is the union? An association of workers bound together by corporative ties. Depending on the setting, this corporative combination may assume the form of the narrower trade connection or, in the context of the massive industrialization of the 19th century, may embrace proletarians drawn from several trades but whose efforts contribute towards a common endeavor.
However, whatever the format preferred by its members or imposed by circumstance, whether the union combination is restricted to the "trade" or encompasses the "industry," there is still the very same objective. To wit:
1. The offering of constant resistance to the exploiter: forcing him to honor the improvements won; deterring any attempt to revert to past practice and also seeking to minimize the exploitation through pressure for partial improvements such as reduction of working hours, increased pay, improved hygiene etc., changes which, although they may reside in the details, are nonetheless effective trespasses against capitalist privileges and attenuation of them.
2. The union aims to cultivate increasing coordination of relations of solidarity, in such a way as to facilitate, within the shortest time possible, the expropriation of capital, that being the sole basis which could possibly mark the commencement of a thoroughgoing transformation of society. Only once that legitimate social restitution has been made can any possibility of parasitism be excluded. Only then, when no one is any longer obliged to work for someone else, wage-slavery having been done away with, can production become social in terms of its destination as well as of its provenance: at which time, economic life being a genuine sum of reciprocal efforts, all exploitation can be, not just abolished, but rendered impossible.
Thus, thanks to the union, the social question looms with such clarity and starkness as to force itself upon the attention of even the least clear-sighted persons; without possibility of error, the association marks out a dividing line between wage slaves and masters. Thanks to which society stands exposed as it truly is: on one side, the workers, the robbed; on the other, the exploiters, the robbers.
However superior the union may be to every other form of association, it does not follow that it has any intrinsic existence, independent of that breathed into it by its membership. Which is why the latter, if they are to conduct themselves as conscious union members, owe it to themselves to participate in the work of the union. And, for their part, they would have no conception of what constitutes the strength of this association, were they to imagine that they come to it as perfect union members, simply by doing their duty by the union financially.
Of course, it is a good thing to pay one's dues on a regular basis, but that is only the merest fragment of the duty a loyal member owes to himself, and thus to his union; indeed, he ought to be aware that the union's value resides, not so much in the sum of their monetary contributions as in multiplication of its members' coherent endeavors.
The constituent part of the union is the individual. Except that the union member is spared the depressing phenomenon manifest in democratic circles where, thanks to the veneration of universal suffrage, the trend is towards the crushing and diminution of the human personality. In a democratic setting, the elector can avail of her will only in order to perform an act of abdication: her role is to "award" her "vote" to the candidate whom she wishes to have as her "representative."
Affiliation to the union has no such implications and even the greatest stickler could not discover the slightest trespass against the human personality in it: after, as well as before, the union member is what she used to be. Autonomous she was and autonomous she remains.
In joining the union, the worker merely enters into a contract “ which she may at any time abjure “ with comrades who are her equals in will and potential, and at no time will any of the views she may be induced to utter or actions in which she may happen to participate, imply any of the suspension or abdication of personality which is the distinguishing characteristic and badge of the ballot paper.
In the union, say, should it come to the appointment of a union council to take charge of administrative matters, such "selection" is not to be compared with "election": the form of voting customarily employed in such circumstances is merely a means whereby the labor can be divided and is not accompanied by any delegation of authority. The strictly prescribed duties of the union council are merely administrative. The council performs the task entrusted to it, without ever overruling its principals, without supplanting them or acting in their place.
The same might be said of all decisions reached in the union -- all are restricted to a definite and specific act, whereas in democracy, election implies that the elected candidate has been issued by her elector with a carte blanche empowering her to decide and do as she pleases, in and on everything, without even the hindrance of the quite possibly contrary wishes of her principals whose opposition, in any case, no matter how pronounced, is of no consequence until such time as the elected candidate's mandate has run its course.
So there cannot be any possible parallels, let alone confusion, between union activity and participation in the disappointing chores of politics.
Socrates's dictum "Know thyself!" is, in the union context, complemented by the maxim: "Act for yourself!"
Thus, the union offers itself as a school for the will: its preponderant role is the result of its members' wishes, and, if it is the highest form of association, the reason is that it is the condensation of workers' strengths made effective through their direct action, the sublime form of the deliberate enactment of the wishes of the proletarian class.
The bourgeoisie has contrived to preach resignation and patience to the people by holding out the hope that progress might be achieved miraculously and without effort on their part, through the State's intervention from without. This is nothing more than an extension, in less inane form, of millenarian and crude religious beliefs. Now, while the leaders were trying to substitute this disappointing illusion for the no less disappointing religious mirage, the workers, toiling in the shadows, with indomitable and unfailing tenacity, were if, building the organ of liberation to which the union amounts.
That organ, a veritable school for the will, was formed and developed over the 19th century. It is thanks to it, thanks to its economic character that 6 the workers have been able to survive inoculation with the virus of politics and defy every attempt to divide them.
It was in the first half of the 19th century that s associations were established, in spite of the interdicts placed upon them. The persecution of those who had the effrontery to unionize was ruthless, so it took ingenuity to give repression the slip. So, in order to band together without undue danger, the workers disguised their resistance associations behind anodyne exteriors, such as mutual societies.
The bourgeoisie has never taken umbrage with charitable bodies, knowing very well that, being mere palliatives, they cannot ever offer a remedy for the curse of poverty. The placing of hope in charity is a soporific good only for preventing the exploited from reflecting upon their dismal lot and searching for a solution to it. This is why mutual associations have always been tolerated, if not, encouraged, by those in charge.
Workers were able to profit from the tolerance shown these groups: under the pretext of helping one another in the event of illness, of setting up retirement homes, etc., they were able to get together, but in pursuit of a more manly objective: they were preoccupied with bettering their living conditions and aimed to resist the employers' demands. Their tactics were not always successful in escaping the attentions of the authorities which, having been alerted by complaints from employers, often kept these dubious mutual aid societies under surveillance.
Later, by which time the workers, by dint of experience and acting for themselves, felt strong enough to defy the law, they discarded the mutualist disguise and boldly called their associations resistance societies.
A splendid name! Expressive and plain. A program of action in itself. It is proof of the extent to which workers, even though their associations were still in the very early stages, sensed that had no need to trot along behind the politicians nor amalgamate their interests with the interests of the bourgeoisie, but instead should be taking a stand against and in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
Here we had an instinctive incipient class struggle which the International Working Men's Association was to provide with a clear and definitive formulation, with its announcement that "the emancipation of the workers must be carried out by the workers themselves."
That formula, a dazzling affirmation of workers' strength, purged of all remnants of democratism, was to furnish the entire proletarian movement with its key-note idea. It was, moreover, merely an open and categorical affirmation of tendencies germinating among the people. This is abundantly demonstrated by the theoretical and tactical concordance between the hitherto vague, underground "unionist" movement and the International's opening declaration.
After stating as a principle that the workers should rely upon their own unaided efforts, the International's declaration married the assertion of the necessity of the proletariat's enjoying autonomy to an indication that it is only through direct action that it can obtain tangible results: and it went on to say:
Given,
That the economic subjection of the worker to those who hold the means of labor, which is to say, the wherewithal of life, is the prime cause of political, moral and material servitude;
The economic emancipation of workers is, consequently, the great goal towards which every political movement should be striving (. . .)
Thus, the International did not confine itself to plain proclamation of workers' autonomy, but married that to the assertion that political agitations and adjustments to the form of the government ought not to make such an impression upon workers as to make them lose sight of the economic realities.
The current unionist movement is only a logical sequel to the movement of the International -- there is absolute identity between them and it is on the same plane that we carry on the endeavors of our predecessors.
Except that when the International was setting out its premises the workers' will was still much too clouded and the proletariat's class consciousness too under-developed for the economic approach to prevail without the possibility of deviation.
The working class had to contend with the distracting influence of seedy politicians who, regarding the people merely as a stepping-stone, flatter it hypnotize it and betray it. Moreover, the people also let itself be carried away by loyal, disinterested men who, being imbued with democratism, placed too great a store by a redundant State.
It is thanks to the dual action of these elements that in recent times (beginning with the hecatomb of 1871) the union movement vegetated for a long time, being torn in several directions at once. On the one hand, the crooked politicians strove to bridle the unions so as to tie them to the government's apron strings: on the other, the socialists of various schools beavered away at ensuring that their faction would prevail. Thus, one and all intended to turn the unions into "interest groups" and "affinity groups."
The union movement had roots too vigorous, and too ineluctable a need for such divergent efforts to be able to stunt its development Today, it carries on the work of the International, the work of the pioneers of "resistance societies" and of the earliest combinations. To be sure, tendencies have come to the surface and theories have been clarified, but there is an absolute concordance between the 19th century union movement and that of the 20th century: the one being an outgrowth of the other. In this there is a logical extension, a climb towards an ever more conscious will and a display of the increasingly coordinated strength of the proletariat, blossoming into a growing unity of aspirations and action.
Union endeavor has a double aim: with tireless persistence, it must pursue betterment of the working class's current conditions. But, without letting themselves become obsessed with this passing concern, the workers should take care to make possible and imminent the essential act of comprehensive emancipation: the expropriation of capital.
At present, union action is designed to win partial and gradual improvements which, far from constituting a goal, can only be considered as a means of stepping up demands and wresting further improvements from capitalism.
The union offers employers a degree of resistance in geometric proportion with the resistance put up by its members: it is a brake upon the appetites of the exploiter: it enforces her respect for less draconian working conditions than those entailed by the individual bargaining of the wage slave operating in isolation. For one-sided bargaining between the employer with her breast-plate of capital, and the defenseless proletarian, it substitutes collective bargaining.
So, in opposition to the employer there stands the union, which mitigates the despicable "labor market" and labor supply, by relieving, to some extent, the irksome consequences of a pool of unemployed workers: exacting from the employer respect for workers and also, to a degree proportionate with its strength, the union requires of her that she desist from offering privileges as bribes.
This question of partial improvements served as the pretext for attempts to sow discord in the s associations. Politicians, who can only make a living out of a confusion of ideas and who are irritated by the unions' growing distaste for their persons and their dangerous interference, have tried to carry into economic circles the semantic squabbling with which they gull the electors. They have striven to stir up ill-feeling and to split the unions into two camps, by categorizing workers as reformists and as revolutionaries. The better to discredit the latter, they have dubbed them "the advocates of all or nothing" and they have falsely represented them as supposed adversaries of improvements achievable right now.
The most that can be said about such nonsense is that it is witless. There is not a worker, whatever her mentality or her aspirations, who, on grounds of principle or for reasons of tactics, would insist upon working ten hours for an employer instead of eight hours, while earning six francs instead of seven. It is, however, by peddling such inane twaddle that politicians hope to alienate the working class from its economic movement and dissuade it from acting for itself and endeavoring to secure ever greater well-being and liberty. They are counting upon the poison in such calumnies to break up the unions by reviving inside them the pointless and divisive squabbles which have evaporated ever since politics was banished from them.
What appears to afford some credence to such chicanery is the fact that the unions, cured by the cruel lessons of experience from all hope in government intervention, are justifiably mistrustful of it. They know that the State whose function is to act as capital's gendarme, is, by its very nature, inclined to tip the scales in favor of the employer side. So, whenever a reform is brought about by legal avenues, they do not fall upon it with the relish of a frog devouring the red rag that conceals the hook, they greet it with all due caution, especially as this reform is made effective only if the workers are organized to insist forcefully upon its implementation.
The unions are even more wary of gifts from the government because they have often found these to be poison gifts. Thus, they have a very poor opinion of "gifts" like the Higher Labor Council and the labor councils agencies devised for the sole purpose of counter-balancing and frustrating the work of the s associations. Similarly, they have not waxed enthusiastic about mandatory arbitration and regulation of strikes, the plainest consequence of which would be to exhaust the workers' capacity for resistance. Likewise the legal and commercial status granted to the workers' organizations have nothing worthwhile to offer them, for they see in these a desire to get them to desert the terrain of social struggle, in order to lure them on to the capitalist terrain where the antagonism of the social struggle would give way to wrangling over money.
But, given that the unions look askance at the government's benevolence towards them, it follows that they are loathe to go after partial improvements. Wanting real improvements only. This is why, instead of waiting until the government is generous enough to bestow them, they wrest them in open battle, through direct action.
If, as sometimes is the case, the improvement they seek is subject to the law, the unions strive to obtain it through outside pressure brought to bear upon the authorities and not by trying to return specially mandated deputies to Parliament, a puerile pursuit that might drag on for centuries before there was a majority in favor of the yearned-for reform.
When the desired improvement is to be wrested directly from the capitalist, the industrial associations resort to vigorous pressure to convey their wishes. Their methods may well vary, although the direct action principle underlies them all: depending on the circumstances, they may use the strike, sabotage, the boycott, or the union label.
But, whatever the improvement won, it must always represent a reduction in capitalist privileges and be a partial expropriation. So, whenever one is not satisfied with the politician's bombast, whenever one analyzes the methods and the value of union action, the fine distinction between "reformist" and "revolutionary" evaporates and one is led to the conclusion that the only really reformist workers are the revolutionary syndicalists.
Aside from day to day defense, the task of the unions is to lay the groundwork for the future. The producer group should be the cell of the new society. Social transformation on any other basis is inconceivable. So it is essential that the producers make preparations for the task of assuming possession and of reorganization which ought to fall to them and which they alone are equipped to carry out. It is a social revolution and not a political revolution that we aim to make. They are two distinct phenomena and the tactics leading to the one are a diversion away from the other.
Taken from Le Syndicat 1905.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Sections (TOC) :
• The Damned Song
1,144 Words; 6,722 Characters
• Heroic Spring
776 Words; 4,827 Characters
• On Renzo Novatore
1,415 Words; 8,538 Characters
• Unbridled Freedom
1,221 Words; 6,940 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• The Damned Song
Oh!... Why wasn’t I born on a pirate ship, lost on the endless ocean, in the midst of a handful of rugged, brave men who furiously climbed aboard, singing the wild song of destruction and death? Why wasn’t I born in the boundless grasslands of South America, among free, fierce gauchos, who tame the fiery colt with the “lasso” and fearlessly attack the terrible jaguar?... Why? Why? The children of the night, my brothers, impatient with every law and all control, would have included me. These people, spirits thirsty for freedom and the infinite, would have known how to read the great book that is in my minds, un utterly marvelous poem of pain and conflict, of sublime aspirations and impossible dreams... My intellectual heritage would have been their intangible treasure, and at the clear fount of my satanic pride and eternal rebellion, they would have fortified their strength, already violently shaken by a thousand hurricanes. Instead, I was fatally born in the midst of the nauseating herd of slaves who lie in the filthy slime where the imperial ruling Lie and hypocrisy exchange the kiss of brotherhood with cowardice. I was born into civilized society, and the priest, the judge, the moralist and the cop have tried to weigh me down with chains and transform my organism, exuberant with vitality and energy, into an unconscious and automatic machine for which only one word was supposed to exist: Obey. They wanted to kill me!... And when I rose in the violence of irresistible force and wild shouted my “no,” the idiotic herd, amid the splashing of stinking slime, launched its vacuous insults.
Now, I laugh... The crowd is unable to understand certain spiritual depths, and doesn’t have a sharp enough gaze to penetrate the hidden recesses of my heart... You curse me, you curse me still, as now, stained with sloth, for sixty centuries, you consume the ritual of the lie; you curse me, applauding your laws and your idols... I will always cast the red flowers of my contempt in your face.
* * *
From the peak on which I live with the eagle and the wolf, faithful companions of my solitude, I contemplate humanity, this grotesque parody of the reptile, with great nausea. Around me, lush nature wraps the rock in a green cloak of undergrowth, whose wild beauty gives the mind and inexpressible feeling of strength and joy. Below, on the mountain slopes, fertile fields stretch out, dotted here and there with isolated houses and villages in which human beings cement the millennia-old chains with unfortunate blindness.
And I laugh... I laugh as I watch human beings, these little monsters shrunken by space, when they are poisoned in the workshops where sewer gases lacerate their lungs..., when they pass by chanting in procession, bowed beneath the idols of fanaticism and unconsciousness...and when, in cowardice, they consecrate their slavery, licking the hand of the master that savagely beats them. I see the miserable comedy of human hypocrisy and pettiness unfold below me feet, and a deep sense of disgust sweeps over me, and an unspeakable loathing winds through me heart... And still I laugh... And as the chime of the bell that tolls for the feast rises from the village in the silence of the night, I sing my purest song to the eagle and the wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. It is the song of my pain and my passion... And my song says:
“Oh, God of destruction, of terrible and monstrous God, rise up from the deepest bowels of the unknown and come to me through the open wounds of the old earth, come to me... come with the overwhelming, sudden fury of the squall; devastate, destroy this weakened and decadent world, which needs a new blood bath to renew itself... I will lend you my arm and my thought. We will struggle together as long as any temple arises bearing testimony to the superstition and sloth of men... as long as any law, engraved on the tablets of deception, tries to impose dedication to itself on the rebel,... and as long as life, encroached upon and oppressed, cannot rise once more triumphant in the light of day. Then, when clouds of flame rise threateningly from smoking ruins toward the sky, satanic, demonic, mad, we will sing our iconoclastic hymn of negation and revolt...” So I say! And my voice is, indeed, mighty and arcane, indeed, rich with hatred and feeling, so that my eagle rises up over a horizon which sinister lightning bolts flash... and my wolf with eyes like embers howls and pounces on the muddy paths of the village where he brings terror and death...
Above, on my peak, so high and inaccessible, the fateful symbol of my liberation waves is the wind: the black flag.
* * *
Now I dance on the edge of an abyss at whose bottom the murky waters of death sinuously wind... I dance, tragically, with my mind focused on the dawn of my “true” life, of the free and intense life I want to conquer for myself, at the cost of the fiercest conflict and the most difficult sacrifice. Because I belong to the race of invincible giants for whom danger is not a barrier, but a sting, a spur that pushes them to realize their will more forcefully. And I dance, I dance... The pale, anemic virtues that dominate in this world of eunuchs and slaves, have tried to lure me. But I have answered their fondlings and their threats with the diabolical laughter of my savage sarcasm. Humanity, Society, State, Law, Morality... You already know the force of my blows as I know the force of yours... And yet you don’t stop attacking me, you don’t cease entertaining the mad intention of reducing my unbending temper in the fetters of obedience... Well, you still throw your hat into the ring, you still drag that bleak, amorphous mass of flabby slaves in your train, you sharpen your weapons that will shatter upon my invulnerable armor... I resolutely wait for you. I, the damned one, the rebel... I wait for you with my eagle and my wolf, the faithful companions of my solitude. And my brothers also wait for you, arrayed for battle at my side, my brothers, the heroic and undefeated children of Evil...
So come on! The sacrilegious and destructive iconoclast has flung his challenge. And in an intoxication of enthusiasm, a delirium of energy, an exaltation of audacity, he will fight his war, in the open and hidden... Later, when poison darts have pierced the armor and reached his heart, he will slide, sneering, to the bottom of the dark abyss where the threatening waters of Death sinuously flow.
Enzo Martucci
• Heroic Spring
To nomads, to vagabonds, to rebels.
Where is the man, brothers, where is the man that I seek?
Where is the valiant and reckless rebel, where the heroic warrior, filled with a dream of freedom or greatness like the Argonauts, who playfully faces the titanic battle against the universe, for the conquest of a higher, more beautiful life? Where are the strength, the courage and the daring that my pagan spirit, anarchically, loves? Wherever are they? ... Oh! ... It is useless to trouble myself in looking... In today’s bourgeois, industrial society, there are only the base and cowardly... There are only servile slaves...
The hero belongs to a past era, to the splendor of gallant epics and of free, adventurous, warrior energy... Perhaps he will belong to future Anarchy, when the individual, no longer tethered by the legal yoke, will renew the audacious deeds of the past for the complete triumph of himself...
But now? Now there is only the brutalized plebeian, resigned to his fate, and the small-minded, pitiful petty-bourgeois, puffed up with arrogance and saturated with vulgarity... Obsequious subjects and despotic masters splash about in the filth that covers the world in a sad shroud, like worms in the mud. But under the rags of the one and the luxurious clothes of the other, a chicken’s heart beats. Both are weak, enervated... Thus, the proletarian isn’t able to emancipate himself, as the tyrant rules not by virtue of his own force, but only through the passivity and renunciation of the people...
Today there is only litter, mud, dung...
The pirates have disappeared from the Oceans, the bandits have disappeared from the forests... The virile instincts and vigorous feeling of humanity — distant memories... The hero is dead...
* * *
Flowering oases in the sad desert of human putridity — blossoming roses amid the stinking fetor of the sewer — we, nomads, vagabonds, rebels, will produce the divine miracle. We, we will revive the Hero. Banned from society and damned by the oblivious crowd, we preserve in the fragrant garden of our hearts a gentle nightingale that sings melodious songs of Nostalgia and sorrow.
Tempered by struggle and arduous peril, we host in the cavernous twists and turns of our minds a red demon, always ready to go wild with irresistible force.
And when the nightingale warbles, the demon leaps onto the bloodstained battlefield where the furies dance the macabre round dance of destruction and the waltz of death.
We are the poets of negation and revolt, the singers and authors of ever more sublime madness.
In the fiery craters of our inner volcanoes, made with the lava of emotion and the fire of passion, we’ve fed our lust for life... And to Society that wanted to impose its laws and its morals on us, we will firmly respond with our “no,” while all others repeat their cowardly “yes.”
Now we are at the mercy of the battle. The decisive, mortal battle... With smiles on our lips, we have leaped into the abyss of supreme adventure, at the bottom of which the nymph and the harpy wait for us. Either the intoxication of triumph and liberation from every shackle, or the glorious end in the whirl of war.
Proud and disdainful, we have valiantly played our last card, and it is, therefore, necessary for us to intensify our effort and increase our energy a hundredfold to achieve victory.
We have already been brave fighters. Now we much become heroes. It is necessary, indispensable.
For the good outcome of our cause, for the elevation of our individuality.
* * *
And toward Anarchy — matrix of liberty, fount of joy, treasury of power — we, children of Pride and eternal Rebellion, will go forward with greater energy and force, toward the Anarchy that is not the dream of pietists, not the goal of the weak, but the means with which intrepid and desperate iconoclasts are able to get rid of even the harshest chain.
We will all march on while the blue river of courage overflows from the deeps and the mad wind of Audacity batters us with wild fury, in the thick of battle.
And we will fire our arrows, honed with hatred, against the strongholds of the law and of Society ... And we will embrace freedom on Christ’s desecrated altars... Hypocrites and cowards will fear us; the rabble will shout for our heads without thinking... But what do the curses of fools matter to us?
We are the aristocrats of thought and action, solitary dweller of the highest peaks, and reptile drool could never concern us...
• On Renzo Novatore
My soul is a sacrilegious temple
in which the bells of sin and crime
voluptuous and perverse,
loudly ring out revolt and despair.
These words written in 1920, give us a glimpse of the promethean being of Renzo Novatore.
Novatore was a poet of the free life. Intolerant of every chain and limitation, he wanted to follow every impulse that rose within him. He wanted to understand everything and experience all sensations — those which lead to the abyss and those which lead to the stars. And then at death to melt into nothingness, having lived intensely and heroically so as to reach his full power as a complete man.
The son of a poor farmer from Arcola, Italy, Abile Riziero Ferrari (Renzo Novatore) soon showed his great sensibility and rebelliousness. When his father wanted him to plow the fields he would flee, stealing fruit and chickens to sell so that he could buy books to read under a tree in the forest. In this way he educated himself and quickly developed a taste for non-conformist writers. In these he found reasons for his instinctive aversion to oppression and restriction, to the principles and institutions that reduce men to obedience and renunciation.
As a young man he joined the Arcola group of anarcho-communists, but he was not satisfied with the harmony and limited freedom of the new society they awaited so eagerly. “I am with you in destroying the tyranny of existing society,” he said, “but when you have done this and begun to build anew, then I will oppose and go beyond you.”
Until he was fifteen years old, Renzo included the church in his poetry. After that, freed and unprejudiced, he never planted any roots in the gregarious existence of his village, but often found himself in conflict with both men and the law. He scandalized his respectable family, who wondered what they had done to deserve such a devil...
...Novatore, who was influenced by Baudelaire and Nietzsche, asserted that we had needs and aspirations that could not be satisfied without injury to the needs and aspirations of others. Therefore we must either renounce them and become slaves, or satisfy them and come into conflict with Society, whatever kind it may be, even if it calls itself anarchist. Novatore:
Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited. But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.
Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the construction of a new and suffocating society. It is a decisive fight against all societies — christian, democratic, socialist, communist, etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on the stage of history.
Those were the ideas expressed by Novatore in Il Libertario of La Spezia, L’Iconoclasta of Pistoia, and other anarchist journals. And these were the ideas that then influenced me as I was well-prepared to receive them.
During World War I Novatore refused to fight for a cause that was not his own and took to the mountains. Astute, courageous, vigilant, his pistol at the ready the authorities failed at every attempt to capture him. At the end of the war the deserters were amnestied and he was able to return to his village where his wife and son were waiting for him.
I was sixteen years old and had run away from home and my studies, freeing myself from my bourgeois family, who had done everything they could to stop my anarchist activities. Passing through Saranza on my way to Milan, I stopped to get to know Novatore, having read his article “My Iconoclastic Individualism”. Renzo came at once to meet me together with another anarchist called Lucherini.
We passed unforgettable hours together. Our discussions were long and he helped me fill gaps in my thinking, setting me on my way to the solution of many fundamental problems. I was struck by his enthusiasm.
His appearance was impressive. Of medium height he was athletic in build, and had a large forehead. His eyes were vivacious and expressed sensibility, intelligence and force. He had an ironic smile that revealed the contempt of a superior spirit for men and the world. He was thirty-one years old, but already had the aura of genius.
After two months wandering around Italy with the police at my heels, I returned to Arcola to see Renzo again. But Emma, his wife, told me that he was also hunted and that I could only meet him at night in the forest.
Once again we had long discussions and I was able to appreciate his exceptional qualities as a poet, philosopher and man of action even more. I valued the power of his intellect and his fine sensitivity which was like that of a Greek god or a divine beast. We parted for the last time at dawn.
Both of us were existing under terrible conditions. We were in open struggle against Society, which would have liked to throw us in jail. Renzo had been attacked in his house at Fresonaro by a band of armed fascists who intended to kill him, but he had driven them off with home-made grenades. After that he had to keep a safe distance from the village.
Despite being an outlaw, he continued to develop his individualist anarchist ideas in libertarian papers. I did the same and we aroused the anger of the theoreticians of anarcho-communism. One of them, Professor Camillo Berneri, described us in the October, 1920 issue of L’Iconoclasta as “Paranoid megalomaniacs, exalters of a mad philosophy and decadent literature, feeble imitators of the artists of opium and hashish, sirens at so much an hour.”
I could not reply because in the meantime I had been arrested and shut up in a House of Correction. But Renzo replied for both of us and took “this bookworm in whom it is difficult to find the spirit and fire of a true anarchist” to task.
More than a year later I was provisionally released from prison, but I could find out nothing regarding the whereabouts of Renzo. Finally I received the terrible news that he had been killed.
He was at an inn in Bolzaneto, near Genova, along with the intrepid illegalist S.P., when a group of carabinieri arrived disguised as hunters. Novatore and S.P. immediately opened fire and the police responded. The tragic result was two dead, Renzo and Marasciallo Lempano of the carabinieri, and one policeman wounded. This was in 1922: a few months before the fascist march on Rome.
So a great and original poet, who, putting his thoughts and feelings into action, attacked the mangy herd of sheep and shepherds, died at the age of thirty three. He showed that life can be lived in intensity, not in duration as the cowardly mass want and practice.
After his death it was discovered that, together with a few others, he was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies the individual. And in the Assizes Court where his accomplices were tried, a prosecuting counsel acknowledged his bravery and called him “a strange blend of light and darkness, love and anarchy, the sublime and the criminal.”
A few friends collected some of his writings and posthumously published them in two volumes: Above Authority (Al Disopra dell’Arco) and Toward the Creative Nothing (Verso il Nullo Creatore). Other writings remained with his family or were lost.
So an exceptional man lived and died — the man I felt was closest to me in his ideals and aspirations. He described himself as “an atheist of solitude” He wanted to “ravish the impossible” and embraced life like an ardent lover. He was a lofty conquistador of immortality and power, who wanted to bring all to the maximum splendor of beauty.
• Unbridled Freedom
Stirner and Nietzsche were undoubtedly right. It is not true that my freedom ends where that of others begins. By nature my freedom has its end where my strength stops. If it disgusts me to attack human beings or even if I consider it to be contrary to my interests to do so, I abstain from conflict. But if, pushed by an instinct, a feeling, or a need, I lash out against my likes and meet no resistance or a weak resistance, I naturally become the dominator, the superman. If instead the others resist vigorously and return blow for blow, then I am forced to stop and come to terms. Unless I judge it appropriate to pay for an immediate satisfaction with my life.
It is useless to speak to people of renunciation, of morality, of duty, of honesty. It is stupid to want to constrain them, in the name of Christ or of humanity, not to step on each other’s toes. Instead one tells each of them: “You are strong. Harden your will. Compensate, by any means, for your deficiencies. Conserve your freedom. Defend it against anyone who wants to oppress you”.
And if every human being would follow this advice, tyranny would become impossible. I will even resist the one who is stronger than me. If I can’t do it by myself, I will seek the aid of my friends. If my might is lacking, I will replace it with cunning. And balance will arise spontaneously from the contrast.
In fact, the only cause of social imbalance is precisely the herd mentality that keeps slaves prone and resigned under the master’s whip.
“Human life is sacred. I cannot suppress it either in the other or in myself. And so I must respect the life of the enemy who oppresses me and brings me an atrocious and continuous pain. I cannot take the life of my poor brother, who is afflicted with a terminal disease that causes him terrible suffering, in order to shorten his torment. I cannot even free myself, through suicide, from an existence that I feel as a burden.”
Why?
“Because,” the christians say, “Life is not our own. It is given to us by god and he alone can take it away from us.”
Okay. But when god gives life to us, it becomes ours. As Thomas Aquinas points out, god’s thought confers being in itself, objective reality, to the one who thinks. Thus, when god thinks of giving life to the human being, and by thinking of it, gives it to him, such life effectively becomes human, that is, an exclusive property of ours. Thus, we can take it away from each other, or anyone can destroy it in herself.
Emile Armand frees the individual from the state but subordinates him more strictly to society. For him, in fact, I cannot revoke the social contract when I want, but must receive the consent of my co-associates in order to release myself from the links of the association. If others don’t grant me such consent, I must remain with them even if this harms or offends me. Or yet, by unilaterally breaking the pact, I expose myself to the retaliation and vengeance of my former comrades. More societarian than this and one dies. But this is a societarianism of the Spartan barracks. What! Am I not my own master? Just because yesterday, under the influence of certain feelings and certain needs, I wanted to associate, today, when I have other feelings and needs and want to get out of the association, I can no longer do so. I must thus remain chained to my desire of yesterday. Because yesterday I desired one way, today I cannot desire another way. But then I am a slave, deprived of spontaneity, dependent on the consent of the associates.
According to Armand, I cannot break relationships because I should care about the sorrow and harm that I will cause the others if I deprive them of my person. But the others don’t care about the sorrow and harm that they cause me by forcing me to remain in their company when I feel like going away. Thus, mutuality is lacking. And if I want to leave the association, I will go when I decide, so much the more if, in making the agreement to associate, I have communicated to the comrades that I will maintain my freedom to break with it at any time. In doing this, one does not deny that some societies might have long lives. But in this case, it is a feeling or an interest sensed by all that maintain the union. Not an ethical precept as Armand would like.
From christians to anarchists (?) all moralists insist that we distinguish between freedom, based on responsibility, and license, based on caprice and instinct. Now it is good to explain. A freedom that, in all of its manifestations, is always controlled, reined in, led by reason, is not freedom. Because it lacks spontaneity. Thence, it lacks life.
What is my aim? To destroy authority, to abolish the state, to establish freedom for everyone to live according to her nature as he sees and desires it. Does this aim frighten you, fine sirs? Well then, I have nothing to do. Like Renzo Novatore, I am beyond the arc.
When no one commands me, I do what I want. I abandon myself to spontaneity or I resist it. I follow instincts or I rein them in with reason, at various times, according to which is stronger within me.
In short, my life is varied and intense precisely because I don’t depend upon any rule.
Moralists of all schools instead claim the opposite. They demand that life always be conformed to a single norm of conduct that makes it monotonous and colorless. They want human beings to always carry out certain actions and to always abstain from all the others.
“You must, in every instance, practice love, forgiveness, renunciation of worldly goods and humility. Otherwise you will be damned”, say the Gospels.
“You must, in each moment, defeat egoism and be unselfish. Otherwise you will remain in absurdity and sorrow,” Kant points out.
“You must always resist instinct and appetite, showing yourself to be balanced, thoughtful and wise on every occasion. If you don’t, we will brand you with the mark of archist infamy and treat you as a tyrant,” Armand passes judgment.
In short, they all want to impose the rule that mutilates life and turns human beings into equal puppets that perpetually think and act in the same way. And this occurs because we are surrounded by priests: priests of the church and priests who oppose it, believing and atheistic Tartuffes. And all claim to catechize us, to lead us, to control us, to bridle us, offering us a prospect of earthly or supernatural punishments and rewards. But it is time for the free human being to rise up: the one who knows how to go against all priests and priestliness, beyond laws and religions, rules and morality. And who knows how to go further beyond. Still further beyond.
Chronology :
November 30, 1904 : What is the union? -- Publication.
April 20, 2020 : What is the union? -- Added.
January 03, 2022 : What is the union? -- Updated.
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