Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (68 page)

His greatest contribution to science, apart from his geographical discoveries, was his stress on mutual aid amongst sociable species as a factor in evolution. His thesis has been confirmed by many recent findings.
¹⁰²
Despite the clamourings of modern socio-biologists, with their talk of ‘territorial imperatives’ and ‘selfish genes’, Kropotkin’s arguments retain all the force they possessed in his opposition to the Social Darwinists of his day who were usually trying to find justification for capitalism and imperialism in the biological roots of human behaviour. Kropotkin correctly saw that human beings are co-operative, social animals, and when least interfered with by coercive authority tend most to practise solidarity and mutual aid. All societies rest on the principles of harmony and co-operation, even if their customs can be coercive and public opinion tyrannical.

But while Kropotkin’s scientific method undoubtedly had its rewards, it tended to be more deductive than inductive and tried to explain everything in terms of one principle. While he aspired to be scientific, he often used
science to justify his social yearnings, refusing to consider evidence which did not fit in with his scheme; indeed, there is something rigid and inflexible about his approach. As Malatesta pointed out, he was a victim of ‘mechanistic fatalism’ in adopting a materialist philosophy which saw anarchy as a social organization in keeping with natural laws.
¹⁰³
He was right to see that anarchy is natural order and that harmony is a law of nature, but he erred by talking of nature as if it were a kind of providence. By insisting that anarchy is a tendency within a mechanical universe which must inevitably triumph, he underestimated the role of the creative will.

His view of history is too deterministic in stressing the inevitability of the coming revolution. After the Russian Revolution, he became increasingly fatalistic and felt that the individual played little part in the historic process. But he was not always consistent. He recognized like Marx the importance of economic organization in influencing the political regime, but he also stressed the importance of consciousness in shaping history and what he called ‘the spirit of revolt’. Indeed, at times he gave too much influence to the State as a reified force in society. And he was quite wrong, as the twentieth century has shown, in predicting that the transient aberration of the State would rapidly diminish in strength and density.

Kropotkin’s attempt to deduce an objective ethics from a philosophy of nature is also problematic. By drawing moral conclusions from observations of natural phenomena, he committed the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, that is to say, he unjustifiably inferred an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, a statement of how things should be from a statement of how things are. Human values are human creations, and even if nature operates in a particular way it does not necessarily follow that we should follow suit. Indeed, despite his scientific trappings, it would seem that Kropotkin was primarily a moralist. His anarchism ultimately rests on a moral base on which his scientific, historical and economic theories are built.

In his sociology, Kropotkin fails to see the necessity of any difference of approach when studying nature and society: ‘there is no cause’, he writes, ‘for suddenly changing our method of investigation when we pass from the flower to man, or from a settlement of beavers to a human town.’
¹⁰⁴
There is however an important distinction to be made between the laws governing nature and the laws governing society. Whereas natural laws can be disproved in experiments with repeatable conditions, since society has history and its conditions are constantly changing it is impossible to repeat any experiment to verify any laws. At best, we can talk about social trends, not laws of society.

On the other hand, Kropotkin’s account of the origin of man-made laws from customs is excellent, and he brings out well the failure of prisons to reform wrongdoers and the immorality of punishment. His attempt to
replace law with public opinion makes him open to the same criticism as Godwin that it can lead to moral coercion. Indeed, Kropotkin thinks that it is right for public opinion to oblige all people to do manual work and he believes it is justifiable to use force against inveterate monopolizers. There are authoritarian elements here which cannot be dismissed.

In his evolutionary perspective and in his emphasis on the close link between nature and society, Kropotkin appears as a forerunner of modern social ecology. He recognized the possibility of economic abundance with the appropriate use of technology and the careful husbandry of resources.
¹⁰⁵
But while he felt that mutual aid was more advantageous than mutual struggle in bringing about industrial progress, Kropotkin still felt it involved the ‘conquest over nature’.
¹⁰⁶
It was a contemporary view which went against the logic of his own evolutionary arguments and his deep appreciation of the overall harmony of nature.

With Kropotkin anarchism develops into its most developed form in the nineteenth century. Even those who are generally hostile to anarchism single out Kropotkin as worth reading. He not only tried to base his anarchist philosophy on the findings of science, but to demonstrate its validity by appealing to existing trends within society. Although he countenanced violence and supported war in certain circumstances, he sought to create a society where they would no longer exist. He brought out the importance of mutual, aid in evolution, and solidarity in society, but he was never prepared to sacrifice individuality. Indeed, perhaps his most important insight was that only a genuine community can allow the full development of the free individual.

E
LISÉE
R
ECLUS
WAS
THE
most competent French exponent of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century. He was a firm friend of Kropotkin and they not only shared a professional interest in geography but tried to give a scientific basis to their anarchist beliefs. They popularized in France a version of anarchist communism, and at the time Reclus’s stature was second only to that of Kropotkin in anarchist circles.

Although Reclus became one of the foremost geographers of his age, it was always clear where his heart lay; he told the Dutch anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis: ‘Yes, I am a geographer, but above all I am an anarchist.’
¹
He not only supported
Le Révolté
and
La Révolte
with money and contributions but his purely anarchist pamphlets like
A mon frère, le paysan
(1893) and
Evolution et révolution
(1880) had a wide circulation. For the anarchist historian Max Nettlau, Reclus represented ‘a true realization of anarchy’.
²

Despite his Calvinist upbringing and education, Reclus developed like Godwin a strong optimistic and idealistic outlook on rejecting his childhood religion. As early as twenty-one, he had laid the foundation of his mature thinking in an essay entitled ‘Development of Liberty in the World’ (1851) in which he argued that ‘For each particular man liberty is an end, but it is only a means to attain love, to attain universal brotherhood.’ He also reflected the influence of Proudhon at this stage when he declared: ‘Our destiny is to arrive at that state of ideal perfection where nations no longer have any need to be under the tutelage of a government or any other nation. It is the absence of government; it is anarchy, the highest expression of order.’
³

As a young man, Reclus visited the United States which only confirmed his hatred of slavery. He returned to France to marry Clarisse, the daughter of a French sea captain and a Senegalese woman. They lived with his brother Elie and his companion. After flirting with freemasonry and the freethinking movement, Elisée and his brother became involved and may
have joined Bakunin’s secret International Alliance of Social Democracy in the mid-sixties. They were both involved with Bakunin in the League for Peace and Freedom and tried to push it in a radical direction.

It was the experience of the Paris Commune however which finally turned Elisée into a militant anarchist. He stood as a Republican candidate but was arrested and imprisoned after the defeat of the Commune. In 1872, he went into exile for ten years in Switzerland, and from 1894 to 1904 he lived in Belgium. To the end of his days, he would say: ‘How good it would be with no god and no master to live like brothers.’ But while Elisée’s anarchist faith never wavered, his brother Elie turned to anthropology, publishing
Les Primitifs
(1903). Thereafter he took an increasing interest in myths and religions.
⁴

It was of course as a geographer that Elisée Reclus was principally known in academic circles during his lifetime. He was author of the nine-teen-volume
La Nouvelle géographic universale
(1878–94) as well as popular works such as local histories of a stream and a mountain. In his posthumous six-volume
L’Homme et la terre
(1905–8), he made a synthesis of his geographical and social views. These works earned him a world-wide reputation as a pioneer of human and social geography.

For Reclus, geography is a study of people’s changing relationships with each other and with their environment. By looking at the spatial dimension of human life, he concluded that there are natural settings for peoples which are ignored by the artificial boundaries of States. People naturally co-operate when they share similar living conditions. Reclus refused to acknowledge the national status of European States, since they represented the coerced and distorted legal unity of disparate peoples in different environments.

Central to Reclus’s social philosophy is the idea of progress. He believed that evolution and revolution both take place in history, but was confident in the eventual success of the revolutionary cause. Biologically and socially, people tend to progress from the simple to the complex, and mutual aid is an essential factor in the process: ‘whether it is a question of small or large groups of the human species, it is always through solidarity, through the association of spontaneous, co-ordinated forces that all progress is made.’
⁵
In addition, Reclus maintained that there are three main laws determining human progress: the class struggle; the search for equilibrium; and the ‘sovereign decision of the individual’.
⁶
While the initiative of the individual is the most important factor in progress, there is a constant oscillation between struggle and equilibrium in society. Reclus spent a long life of scholarly research and militant agitation to bring about the equilibrium of the natural order of anarchy.

At the same time, Reclus rejected the role of race in historical development.
He insisted that all races are fundamentally equal, and that their outer differences are determined entirely by their different environments. He further championed the fusion of different races and cultures. While he welcomed the ‘Europeanization’ of other countries to create an interrelated world, this was not a disguised form of imperialism but a recognition of the technological advances and social freedoms of Europe at the time.

Reclus not only opposed racism but he also championed the emancipation of women and the equality of the sexes. In
L’Homme et la terre
, he argued that patriarchy, based on the brutal sexual force of man, had emerged when man claimed woman as private property. On the other hand, matriarchy, based on the natural attachment of the child to the mother, led to a refinement of mores and a higher stage of social evolution. European civilization was still patriarchal and only when private property was eradicated would women become truly liberated. In the mean time, Reclus called for complete co-education. He believed that men and women should form free unions and create a family solely based upon affection. Although his first marriage was traditional, he ‘married’ his second two companions without official or religious recognition. Brought up as rational and free beings, his two daughters followed suit when they chose their partners.

Like Kropotkin, Reclus insisted that human beings are social animals. They are not isolated atoms, but parts of a living whole. The individual is related to society like the cell to the body; both have independent existences but both are entirely dependent on each other. Reclus further claimed that the study of sociology established two laws: that a person is interdependent with every other person, and that social progress is achieved through individual initiative. To be true to their nature, people must conform to both laws and by doing so they will be able to liberate themselves. Reclus’s conception of anarchy is therefore based on existing tendencies in society and observed regularities in nature. The social order of anarchy reflects the organic unity to be found in the natural world.