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“What will become of us in twenty years’ time?” we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: “Anarchist Gangster” (the press). It was he who, walking towards the worthy Dr. Guillotin’s disgusting machine, flung a last sarcasm at the reporters: “Nice to see a man die, isn’t it?” I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and trade union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions the mass circulation press has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to make you dizzy. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.
new tag: why left? not quite the same as inspo/anti-capitalism
[...] Electoral politics revolted us most of all since it concerned the very essence of Socialism. We were at once, it now seems to me, both very just and very unjust, because of our ignorance of life, which is full of complications and compromises. The two percent dividend returned by the cooperatives to their shareholders filled us with bitter laughter because it was impossible for us to grasp the victories behind it. “The presumption of youth!” they said: but in fact we were craving for an absolute. The Racket exists always and everywhere, for it is impossible to escape from one’s time and we are in the time of money. I kept finding the Racket, flourishing and sometimes salutary, in the age of trade and in the midst of revolution. We had yearned for a passionate, pure Socialism. We had satisfied ourselves with a Socialism of battle, and it was the great age of reformism. At a special congress of the Belgian Workers’ Party, Vandervelde,* young still, lean, dark, and full of fire, advocated the annexation of the Congo. We stood up in protest and left the hall, gesturing vehemently. Where could we go, what could become of us with this need for the absolute, this yearning for battle, this blind desire, against all obstacles, to escape from the city and the life from which there was no escape?
We needed a principle. To strive for and to achieve: a way of life. I now understand, in the light of reflection, how easy it is for charlatans to offer vain solutions to the young: “March in rows of four and believe in Me.” For lack of anything better... It is the failures of the others that makes for the strength of the fuhrers. When there’s no worthwhile banner, you start to march behind worthless ones. When you don’t have the genuine article, you live with the counterfeit. [...]
There are ideas—and behind these ideas, in the recesses of consciousness, where they develop as a product of repression, of denial, of sublimation, of intuition and many other phenomena which have no name, there is a shapeless, vast, often oppressive, profound sense of being. Our thinking had its roots in despair. Nothing was to be done. This world was unacceptable in itself, and unacceptable the lot it offers us. Man is finished, lost. We are beaten in advance, whatever we do. A young anarchist midwife gave up her calling "because it is a crime to inflict life on a human being.” Years later, awakened into hope by the Russian Revolution, I wanted to reach Petrograd, then in flames, and agreed to pass through a sector of the Champagne front, at the risk either of being left there in a common grave or of killing men better than myself in the opposite trench. I wrote: “Life is not such a great benefit that it is wrong to lose it or criminal to take it.” Anatole France gave voice to some of the most characteristic of these intuitions in his work, ending his great satire of the history of France, Penguin Island, with the appraisal that the best thing to do in the circumstances was to invent some devilishly powerful machine to destroy the planet, “so as to gratify the universal conscience which didn’t exist, anyway.” Thus the litterateur of skepticism closed the vicious circle in which we were turning, and he did it out of kindness.
[...] I had often met Soudy at public meetings in the Latin Quarter. He was a perfect example of the crushed childhood of the back alleys. He grew up on the pavements: T B at thirteen, V D at eighteen, convicted at twenty (for stealing a bicycle). I had brought him books and oranges in the Tenon Hospital. Pale, sharp-featured, his accent common, his eyes a gentle gray, he would say, “ I’m an unlucky blighter, nothing I can do about it.” He earned his living in grocers’ shops in the Rue Mouffetard, where the assistants rose at six, arranged the display at seven, and went upstairs to sleep in a garret alter 9:00 p.m., dog-tired, having seen their bosses defrauding housewives all day by weighing the beans short, watering the milk, wine, and paraffin, and falsifying the labels ... He was sentimental: the laments of street singers moved him to the verge of tears, he could not approach a woman without making a fool of himself, and half a day in the open air of the meadows gave him a lasting dose of intoxication. He experienced a new lease on life if he heard someone call him “comrade” or explain that one could, one must, “become a new man.” Back in his shop, he began to give double measures of beans to the housewives, who thought him a little mad. The bitterest joking helped him to live, convinced as he was that he was not long for this world, “seeing the price of medicine.”
[...] In those times the world was an integrated structure, so stable in appearance that no possibility of substantial change was visible within it. As it progressed up and up, and on and on, masses of people who lay in its path were all the while being crushed. The harsh condition of the workers improved only very slowly, and for the vast majority of the proletariat there was no way out. The declassed elements on the proletarian fringe found all roads barred to them except those that led to squalor and degradation. Above the heads of these masses, wealth accumulated, insolent and proud. The consequences of this situation arose inexorably: crime, class struggles and their trail of bloody strikes, and frenzied battles of One against All. These struggles also testified to the failure of an ideology. Between the copious theorizing of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus, and the rage of Albert Libertad, the collapse of anarchism in the bourgeois jungle was now obvious. Kropotkin had grown up in a completely different Europe, one less stable, where the ideal of liberty seemed to have some future and people believed in revolution and education. Reclus had fought for the Commune: the confidence inspired by the greatness of its thwarted vision had lasted him for the rest of his days; he believed in the saving power of science. On the eve of war in Europe, science was functioning solely to assist the progress of a traditionalist and barbaric social order. One felt the approach of an era of violence: inescapable.
[...] In the poky, solitary cell in which each of us slept, whose window faced the sky, I was able to read only for a few moments in the morning, and for a few more in the evening. During my compulsory labor in the printshop, I used to set up notes and comments in galley form for certain comrades to read. From the moment that thought and learning were possible for us, life was also possible, and worthwhile. The keen edge of this slow torture blunted itself against us, against myself especially. I was confident of beating the treadmill.
[...] The recent conflicts over Tripolitania and Morocco showed that butchery was being unleashed over Europe in the cause of a redivision of colonies. The prospect of victory by either side appalled us. How was it that among so many victims, no men were to be found brave enough to rush across from either “enemy” side and hail one another as brothers? In asking each other that question we experienced a new despair.
[...] I departed, alone, amazingly light-footed upon the ground, taking nothing with me, without any real joy, obsessed by the idea that, behind me, the treadmill was continuing endlessly to turn, crushing human beings. In the gray morning, I bought a cup of coffee in the station cafe. The proprietor came up to me with a kind of sympathy.
“Out of jail?”
“Yes.”
He wagged his head. Might he be interested in “my crime,” or my future? He leant over: “You in a hurry? There’s one hell of a brothel near here. . . ”
The first man I had met, in the mist of a gloomy bridge, had been a soldier with a mutilated face; this fat procurer was the second. Was it always to be the world-without-escape? What good was the war doing? Had the dance of death taught nothing to anyone?
Paris was leading a double life. Walking along, spellbound, I stopped in front of the lowly windows of the Belleville shops. [...]
I underwent a phase of intense wretchedness. The treadmill that crushed human beings still revolved inside me. I found no happiness in awakening to life, free and privileged alone among my conscript generation, in this contented city. I felt a vague compunction at it all. Why was I there, in these cafes, on these golden sands, while so many others were bleeding in the trenches of a whole continent? How was I worth more than they? Why was I excluded from the common fate? I came across deserters who were happy to be beyond the frontier, safe at last. I admitted their right to safety, but inwardly I was horrified at the idea that people could fight so fiercely for their own lives when what was at stake was the life of everyone: a limitless suffering to be endured commonly, shared and drunk to the last drop. This feeling was in sharp opposition to my reasoned thought, but much stronger. I can see now that this need for sharing in the common fate has always held me, and has been one of my deepest sources of action. I worked in printshops, went to bullfights, resumed my reading, clambered up mountains, dallied in cafes to watch Castilian, Sevillan, Andalusian, or Catalan girls at their dancing, and I felt that it would be impossible for me to live like this. All I could think of was the men at war, who kept calling to me.
[...] We set off with our sacks over our shoulders, in the cold of the night, pursued by cries of joy from the whole camp. Several of the worst inmates had come to embrace us as we left, and we had no heart to push them away. The frozen snow echoed sharply under our feet, and the stars receded in front of us. The night was huge and buoyant.