FAQAnar:A.1.5 - D'où vient l'anarchisme ?

L'article FAQAnar:A.1.5 - D'où vient l'anarchisme ? est en cours de traduction L'avancement de cette traduction est de %.

Voir aussi Précurseurs de l'anarchisme

D'où vient l'anarchisme ? Nous ne pouvons pas faire mieux que de citer La Plate-forme d'organisation des communistes libertaire produites par les participants du mouvement Makhnoviste dans la révolution russe (Voir la Section A.5.4). Ils font remarquer que :

" La lutte des classes créée par l'esclavage des travailleurs et de leurs aspirations à la liberté a donné naissance, au sein de l'oppression, à l'idée de l'anarchisme : l'idée de la négation totale d'un système social fondé sur les principes de classes et de l'État, et son remplacement par une société libre non-étatiste des travailleurs par l'auto-gestion. (...) Donc, l'anarchisme ne découle pas de la réflexion abstraite d'un intellectuel, ou d'un philosophe, mais de la lutte directe des travailleurs contre le capitalisme, depuis les besoins et les nécessités des travailleurs, de leurs aspirations à la liberté et l'égalité, aspirations qui deviennent particulièrement vives dans la meilleure période héroïque de la vie et de la lutte des masses travailleuses. (...) Les plus connus des penseurs anarchistes, Bakounine, Kropotkine et autres, n'ont pas inventés l'idée de l'anarchisme, mais l'ont découverte dans la masse, et ont tout simplement aidé par la force de leur pensée et de leur connaissance à la préciser et à la propager. "

Comme le mouvement anarchiste en général, les Makhnovistes étaient un mouvement de masse de la classe ouvrière résistant aux forces de l'autorité, à la fois rouge (communistes bolchéviques) et les Blancs (tsaristes / capitalistes), en Ukraine de 1917 à 1921. Comme Peter Marshall le note : " l'anarchisme... a traditionnellement trouvé ces chefs partisans parmi les travailleurs et les paysans."

L'anarchisme a été créé dans, et par, la lutte des opprimés pour la liberté. Pour Kropotkine, par exemple, "L'anarchisme ... a son origine dans les luttes de tous les jours" et "Le mouvement anarchiste a été renouvelé à chaque fois qu'il a reçu une impression de quelque grande leçon pratique : elle tire son origine de l'apprentissage de la vie elle-même." Pour Proudhon, "la preuve" de ses idées mutualistes provient de "la pratique actuelle, la pratique révolutionnaire" de "ces associations de travailleurs... Qui ont spontanément... étés formés à Paris et à Lyon... [et Montre que] l'organisation du crédit et l'organisation du travail se révéle à une seule et même [organisation]" En effet, comme l'affirme un historien, il y avait "une étroite analogie entre les associations idéales de Proudhon... Et le programme des Mutualistes de Lyon" et qu'"il existait une convergence remarquable [entre les idées], et il est probable que Proudhon était capable d'articuler son programme de manière plus cohérente, positive en raison de l'exemple des travailleurs de la soie de Lyon. L'idéal socialiste qu'il travaillait était déjà en cours de réalisation, dans une certaine mesure, par ces travailleurs."

Thus anarchism comes from the fight for liberty and our desires to lead a fully human life, one in which we have time to live, to love and to play. It was not created by a few people divorced from life, in ivory towers looking down upon society and making judgements upon it based on their notions of what is right and wrong. Rather, it was a product of working class struggle and resistance to authority, oppression and exploitation. As Albert Meltzer put it:

"There were never theoreticians of Anarchism as such, though it produced a number of theoreticians who discussed aspects of its philosophy. Anarchism has remained a creed that has been worked out in action rather than as the putting into practice of an intellectual idea. Very often, a bourgeois writer comes along and writes down what has already been worked out in practice by workers and peasants; he [or she] is attributed by bourgeois historians as being a leader, and by successive bourgeois writers (citing the bourgeois historians) as being one more case that proves the working class relies on bourgeois leadership." [Anarchism: Arguments for and against, p. 18]

In Kropotkin's eyes, "Anarchism had its origins in the same creative, constructive activity of the masses which has worked out in times past all the social institutions of mankind -- and in the revolts . . . against the representatives of force, external to these social institutions, who had laid their hands on these institutions and used them for their own advantage." More recently, "Anarchy was brought forth by the same critical and revolutionary protest which gave birth to Socialism in general." Anarchism, unlike other forms of socialism, "lifted its sacrilegious arm, not only against Capitalism, but also against these pillars of Capitalism: Law, Authority, and the State." All anarchist writers did was to "work out a general expression of [anarchism's] principles, and the theoretical and scientific basis of its teachings" derived from the experiences of working class people in struggle as well as analysing the evolutionary tendencies of society in general. [Op. Cit., p. 19 and p. 57]

However, anarchistic tendencies and organisations in society have existed long before Proudhon put pen to paper in 1840 and declared himself an anarchist. While anarchism, as a specific political theory, was born with the rise of capitalism (Anarchism "emerged at the end of the eighteenth century . . .[and] took up the dual challenge of overthrowing both Capital and the State." [Peter Marshall, Op. Cit., p. 4]) anarchist writers have analysed history for libertarian tendencies. Kropotkin argued, for example, that "from all times there have been Anarchists and Statists." [Op. Cit., p. 16] In Mutual Aid (and elsewhere) Kropotkin analysed the libertarian aspects of previous societies and noted those that successfully implemented (to some degree) anarchist organisation or aspects of anarchism. He recognised this tendency of actual examples of anarchistic ideas to predate the creation of the "official" anarchist movement and argued that:

"From the remotest, stone-age antiquity, men [and women] have realised the evils that resulted from letting some of them acquire personal authority. . . Consequently they developed in the primitive clan, the village community, the medieval guild . . . and finally in the free medieval city, such institutions as enabled them to resist the encroachments upon their life and fortunes both of those strangers who conquered them, and those clansmen of their own who endeavoured to establish their personal authority." [Anarchism, pp. 158-9]

Kropotkin placed the struggle of working class people (from which modern anarchism sprung) on par with these older forms of popular organisation. He argued that "the labour combinations. . . were an outcome of the same popular resistance to the growing power of the few -- the capitalists in this case" as were the clan, the village community and so on, as were "the strikingly independent, freely federated activity of the 'Sections' of Paris and all great cities and many small 'Communes' during the French Revolution" in 1793. [Op. Cit., p. 159]

Thus, while anarchism as a political theory is an expression of working class struggle and self-activity against capitalism and the modern state, the ideas of anarchism have continually expressed themselves in action throughout human existence. Many indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere, for example, practised anarchism for thousands of years before anarchism as a specific political theory existed. Similarly, anarchistic tendencies and organisations have existed in every major revolution -- the New England Town Meetings during the American Revolution, the Parisian 'Sections' during the French Revolution, the workers' councils and factory committees during the Russian Revolution to name just a few examples (see Murray Bookchin's The Third Revolution for details). This is to be expected if anarchism is, as we argue, a product of resistance to authority then any society with authorities will provoke resistance to them and generate anarchistic tendencies (and, of course, any societies without authorities cannot help but being anarchistic).

In other words, anarchism is an expression of the struggle against oppression and exploitation, a generalisation of working people's experiences and analyses of what is wrong with the current system and an expression of our hopes and dreams for a better future. This struggle existed before it was called anarchism, but the historic anarchist movement (i.e. groups of people calling their ideas anarchism and aiming for an anarchist society) is essentially a product of working class struggle against capitalism and the state, against oppression and exploitation, and for a free society of free and equal individuals. 1

Notes et références

Voir la source initiale de cet article (en) traduite par [{{{3}}} {{{2}}}]