Considering modern socialist thought, we have to begin in the latter half of the 18th century.
The first organized branch of socialist theory began to emerge in that period of time, and
the man who wins credit for being the father of anarchy is a British subject named William
from Godwin. Godwin was born in 1756 and lived a long and active life. He became a
very prominent and popular novelist and wrote a number of works that brought him wide recognition
and acclaim. In the midst of his writing these novels, he began to detect certain things
which caused him to become, in a sense, a social theorist.
Godwin found that human beings were capuchins and acting upon them.
And he also thought that he detected that human beings are, by nature, creatures who
seek the good.
They want things to be better.
Human beings do not seek evil.
And yet, as he looked about him and as he wrote his novels, Godwin became very conscious
A great deal of evil existed in the world, and this was evil that had been caused by
people, and these are the same people, capable of acting upon their own decisions, who want
good, and yet evil abounds. Why? This was the dominant question that puzzled him and
that caused him to theorize as to what in the world could be wrong. Keep in mind that
Godwin began writing in the latter half of the 18th century, so that along about 1870-1880,
in that period he began to have his works published, and he thought he detected a constant
problem that human beings were confronted with, and as he studied it, it seemed to him
It seemed to him that all evil sprang from that one point, and that point was the private
ownership of property. As he looked at it, it seemed to him that all the evil that came
in the world was evil arising from the question of who is to control which property. You had
wars fought over property, you had crimes committed over property, you had animosity
that took people into courts and brought jail sentences, and virtually the whole bit was
over property. And as Godwin considered this facet of his understanding of the way society
is formed, it became increasingly apparent to him that the only way to resolve the problem
was to eliminate private ownership of property. Now, that became the cornerstone of modern
socialist theory, and it was, of course, the base upon which anarchistic theory rested.
In other words, private property ought to be abolished. Specifically, private ownership
of Property. Godwin went on to consider this problem still further, and as he did so, he
became aware of the fact, which had been brought to his attention by many other social theories
of this time, that about two percent of the people of England owned about eighty percent
of the wealth, the wealth consisting primarily of land and other properties connected to
to the Land.
Well, that's where Godwin had his brainstorm.
If it was true that evil in the world came as a result of private ownership of property,
then it followed that private ownership of property was the evil that it was because
the property was in the hands of a privileged class.
And who was the privileged class?
Well, the privileged class was that group of persons who held political power and used
the political power to acquire the property. Therefore, as Godwin looked at the world of
his day, it seemed to him that all the evil in the world came from the private ownership
of property and that the private ownership of property was only possible because of the
Ergo came his conclusion. If you want to eliminate the evil in the world, to wit, private ownership
of property, there is only one way to begin. Abolish the government.
Now to his credit, Godwin did not advocate any violent method here. He simply argued
and fundamentally keep in mind he was a novelist and he put these ideas and these themes into
the novels that he wrote. He wrote a few serious tracks, but fundamentally he was engaged
in romances. And all the way through his later stories, you'll find this theme that the evil
that is existent in the world is the product of a privileged class of political power holders
who use their power both to acquire property and to then use it to exploit it and to exploit
the non-privileged class which don't have property and can't get it because the privileged
group is in control.
So says Godwin, we ought to begin by abolishing the government, and if we do, then all property
will be unowned.
It would simply be available to society at large on the basis of need. Now that is fundamentally
the anarchist position. The anarchists were the first modern socialists as such. That is,
they were concerned with socialist theory, the idea of what is good for everyone in society,
and Godwin theorized here that the best way to maximize well-being in society would be
Godwin was followed shortly after the beginning of the 19th century by a French thinker, Pierre
Joseph Proudhon, who was born in 1809 and lived actually a very short life but an extremely
influential one. He died in 1865. But Proudhon, who was a scholar and not a novelist, who worked
in a university and had the opportunities of having his mind come in direct contact with
other people who were engaged in using their minds, began to refine the ideas of Godwin.
Design, and he of course accepted Godwin's basic premise to it that private ownership
of property is the great evil, and that it must be abolished, and the only way to get
at it is to first begin by destroying the state. Proudhon's most famous work carries
the French title A Quelle Properté? What is Property? And Proudhon's answer to his
His own rhetorical question here was, property is robbery. Anyone who owns anything privately
has robbed society of it. And like Godwin, Proudhon was not a violent man. He did not
advocate any kind of warfare or any kind of destruction tactics employed against those
Having Power, he, as Godwin before him, championed the idea of general education, that if people
once understood that this was the evil, and that this was the source of the evil, well
then they would just naturally move to correct it, and presently we wouldn't have to have
a government, and we wouldn't have to have the control of property in private hands.
Of course, if the government weren't there, then there would be no private property anyway,
In the minds of these early anarchists, private property was the product of the force of political
control. If you took that force away, then there would be no privileged class. That's
the way they looked at it.
Proudhon is particularly influential, and we have to remember him not only for his theories
in this area, but also for the fact that he was the man who inspired Karl Marx. Karl Marx,
became the best known of all of the nineteenth century economic theorists. Marx began his career by drinking at the intellectual fountains of Proudhon, and for a short while, at the beginning of his career, as Marx was toying with various philosophies, he became an anarchist, and his first writings are in praise of Proudhon. More on Marx later. But we do remember Proudhon as the man who inspired Marx.
Marks.
Meanwhile, Proudhon, in testing various theories as to how he could bring about this kind of
a social change to it, the abolition of private ownership of property via the means of getting
rid of the state, Proudhon hit upon the idea of profit sharing, that is anybody that makes
a profit ought to share it with the workers.
He also hit upon the idea of the labor unions. He organized or he theorized first, and then
others really did the organizational work, that the workers ought to be the ones to manage
the productive property. Characteristically, with all socialists, Proudhon held the view
that you don't have to worry about production. We know how to produce anything that we need.
What you have to worry about is distribution. And as he saw it, the distribution was not
being effectively managed since the distribution was left in the hands of the selfish, large
property owners who naturally would give the bulk of what they got their hands on to themselves.
And that way the rest of society would suffer. And so he advocated what was called syndicalism,
And the syndicalist movement spread primarily through France, although it blossomed out
in other places as well, including Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The idea was that
the workers would elect the managers of each plant. And nothing is said in Proudhon's writing
as to how you would launch a new plant. The plants already exist, everything that we need
According to Proudhon has already been produced, that is, in the form of productive tools,
but we simply have to manage the ones that exist by having councils of workers set them
up and elect the managers from their own number.
You have democratic management of the tools of production, and then the managers in a
given district would meet and set up the hours of work and the wages and so on, and this
would be all managed by the workers themselves. There would be no one representing capital because
you see capital would be something that belonged to society and nothing ever would belong to anybody
as a person. Now these are some of Proudhon's ideas and there's no question as to the very profound
Bakunin is the man who gave it that complexion.
He began, interestingly, as a disciple of Marx after Marx had founded the communist
idea.
So Bakunin began as a communist, and then he transferred back into the anarchist position,
And so he is often called the father of communistic anarchy or, if you like, the father of anarchistic
communism, depending on how you want to put it.
Anyway, Bakunin, it was, who at one time gave a very provocative speech in which he praised
both Godwin and Proudhon for their pioneer social theories relating to the abolition
of private property.
And of course, followed with the idea that naturally you have to get rid of the government
if you're going to get rid of private property.
But then he came up with his idea, which was to mark the anarchist movement, at least in
the public mind, virtually from that time forward.
He said, in effect, these men who have preceded me, Godwin and Proudhon, they are fine, amiable
gentlemen, but they are talking peace and education, and they are just dreamers.
They are impractical.
If you want to accomplish the great movement that we have in mind, says Bakunin, what
we have to do is to take our guns and take our bombs and kill the leading capitalists
and the leading politicians, because remember now, in Bakunin's mind, that's the same fellow.
The man who holds the capital and the man who controls the government is the same fellow.
He may wear two different hats, or he might actually be two different men.
It would be two men working together, creating a privileged class and managing the property
while the bulk of humanity is shut out and unable to do anything.
And again, keep in mind that that point of view was undoubtedly valid prior to the Industrial
Revolution.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution, even as Bakunin was making his statements and as
As many of these early anarchists were writing, the Industrial Revolution was uprooting all
their theories, but they didn't understand it. In fact, characteristic of all socialists,
including the anarchists, they have never understood the necessary theories of production.
They fail to grasp, in fact, they fail to grapple with it. They simply make an assumption
that production is no problem, that we've solved all of that, and the major problem
Bakunin gave this name to his particular theory. He said, I bring you the propaganda of the
deed or the propaganda of action, whereas those ahead of me have brought the propaganda
of the word or the propaganda of the idea. Bakunin therefore claimed himself to be the
The first of the practical anarchists and the only practical way that you had to accomplish
his objective would be to use violence, notably to go after the individuals who held political
power or who held capital and eliminate them. Bakunin was a colorful figure and during most
Most of his life, so far as I've been able to find, he didn't himself actively participate
in affairs of violence. And he died in 1876, right about the time that his theories were
beginning to take hold. It was in that same decade that the first of the anarchist excesses
began in Russia where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated during a parade in St. Petersburg
by anarchists who were in the crowd. Someone tossed a bomb into the Tsar's carriage and
it blew up. The Tsar fell to the street mortally wounded and a little anarchist girl, about
17, rushed out of the crowd with a .44 and pumped several shots directly into the Tsar
The assumption was, as Bakunin had taught his followers, that if you can kill the leading
politicians, you destroy government.
And if you can kill the leading capitalists, you destroy capitalism.
But what happened, of course, was that as Tsar Alexander II expired, Alexander III became
the Tsar.
Bakunin had never explained that the death of a leading figure politically or economically
simply leads to the promotion of a vice president.
And that's, of course, one of the failures of his idea.
In any case, Bakunin's ideas of violence began to take hold during the last quarter of the
19th century.
There were a number of anarchist excesses, including the famous Haymarket bombing in Chicago,
and the assassination of a number of leading political heads as well as capitalist prominent
figures, as well as a number of attempts at the lives of several of them, which attempts
did not come off.
You may recall that President Humbert of Italy was assassinated, President Carnot of France,
President McKinley of the United States, all of these died at the hands of anarchist assassins.
were made on the lives of the German princes, but they failed.
And I think you may even recall that on one occasion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
at that time President-elect, was sitting in Bayfront Park in Miami when an anarchist
decided to kill him and took a shot at him, but missed and killed Mayor Cermak of Chicago,
who happened to be sitting next to Roosevelt at the time.
We have had a number of anarchist actions of that nature in this country. Bakunin could
be said to be fundamentally responsible for the violent element. Then in addition to Bakunin
and coming after him, we have another Russian named Kropotkin. I'm only naming here in this
brief period some of the most prominent. Peter Kropotkin, another Russian born actually into
to a noble family and thoroughly disgusted with the conditions that existed in Russia
during his childhood. Incidentally, he was born in 1842, and the industrialization of
England and America had begun to change the world, but Russia had had no industrialization.
It was operating still under a feudal system, and the peasantry were virtually treated like
of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory
Kropotkin sort of differed from Bakunin in the employment of violence. He felt that Bakunin
was wrong in suggesting that you had to kill the leading capitalists and the leading governmental
figures. Kropotkin may have been influenced in fact by Marx considerably because he advocated
manning the barricades and taking them on as a class that you couldn't just do it individually.
Let me mention another one of the famous European anarchists, a man who is called the father
of Christian anarchy, Count Leo Tolstoy, a third important Russian on the scene. Tolstoy
of course is very well known today as the author of War and Peace and other monumental
Marx, Tolstoy believed that Christ was the greatest anarchist of all and that the greatest
anarchist message is the Sermon on the Mount. He preached the idea of abject poverty for
individuals feeling that—and of course he didn't want government at all, that government
was entirely useless—he recommended that Christ be the only king and that we simply
Neil in reverence to Christ and have no government in the meantime and certainly no property.
So this was Tolstoy's position. A very peaceful, a very gentle man. Tolstoy is quite different
from Bakunin, yet they are both anarchists.
And I'll mention one more of the European anarchists who is particularly important.
This man came considerably earlier. Actually his career in time parallels that of Proudhon.
Max Sterner, the Founding Intellectual Argument for that particular branch of anarchy called
called nihilism.
Sterner took the view that virtually all human organization is wrong and ought to be abolished.
Also that morality is a figment of the imagination, and there is no such thing as honor or integrity.
Marriage should be abolished, so should the church, and so should everything else.
His general theme is this, what is it that you want in life?
Help yourself.
How much can you get?
Well, how strong are you?
How long can you keep it?
Well, how big are you?
If it will help you to enter into a contract with someone, do so.
If it will help you to break the contract, do that.
Do anything you want.
In other words, he elevated the concept of the ego to an ultimate, all-purpose mechanism
and that was it.
Stirner's writings at the present time have been enjoying somewhat of a comeback and we
We find today on our campuses quite a few more sternerites than was true, say, a quarter
of a century ago.
Let me turn briefly now to American anarchists.
I've mentioned six of the most prominent Europeans.
There are a number of other Europeans that are deserving of mention.
But we have had about five major anarchists in this country that operated independently
of the European scene.
The first one in this country would be called Josiah Warren. He was born in 1799 and lived
until 1874, his life more or less paralleling that of Proudhon and his arguments as well.
Warren began very much influenced by communistic ideas, but he put those aside and became an
Anarchist, and then later on he went back to the idea of communal living. Josiah Warren
was a peaceful man and had ideas that there should be labor certificates rather than money,
and he worked kind of an experiment in a time store in Cincinnati where you paid the wholesale
price of goods when you bought them from him, and in addition you paid for the salesman's
time, who waited on you, and I believe he had about a seven percent markup generally.
Even so, the store was not a financial success, and Warren found that he didn't get the patronage
that he thought he deserved as a result of his generally lower prices.
Be that as it may, Warren is a very interesting figure, an entirely a peaceful man who sort
sort of felt that you could conduct small experiments in communities, and ultimately
arrive at a kind of worker's paradise where money would be abolished, and there would
be no government, and we would all live and share properties together.
Probably the best known of all the American anarchists is Henry David Thoreau, who was
Thoreau was born in 1817, died in 1862, and was, of course, the author of Walden Pond.
Thoreau was obviously a very peaceful man and a brilliant writer, a man who has inspired
millions of people with his kindness and his understanding of the importance of the individual.
But of course, Thoreau, like most of the anarchists, completely fails to understand production,
And economically speaking, he has that same problem with the other anarchists. They just
don't grasp how you put the pieces together. Aside from that, a very fine, amiable and
well-known man.
Another rather well-known anarchist in this country is Benjamin Tucker, who lived up until
1939 into this century, well along. He was born in 1854 and was the founder of Liberty
magazine, which became a very popular magazine at one time and contained most of the literary
figures of that period. Tucker, like the others, advocated freedom for the individual. He did
not want to see governments intervening, but he was—well, actually, he, to be fair, favored
some private property, but he was a little bit concerned about how much a person could
have, and he is listed as an anarchist. He called himself an anarchist. Another well-known anarchist
is Lysander Spooner of 1808 to 1887, a man who became a brilliant attorney and whose writings,
again, are today enjoying a comeback. And the last man that I'll mention in this area would
be Henry George. Some people don't call him an anarchist. George called himself a socialist,
Post, but his enmity to the state as such, I think, classifies him in the anarchist column.
He lived until 1897, at one time ran for mayor of New York City, which seems to be a popular
pastime these days, and like most didn't make it. But George is another peaceful figure
and rather brilliant in economics, excepting when it comes to the private ownership of
of Land, which he objected to as about the only bit of private property that a person
could not have.