I. According to Kropotkin, in mankind's progress from a less happy existence to an existence as happy as possible the State will shortly disappear.
1. The State has become a hindrance to mankind's evolution toward a happiness as great as possible.
"What does this monstrous engine serve for, that we call 'State'? For preventing the exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist, of the peasant by the landlord? or for assuring us of work? for providing us food when the mother has nothing but water left for her child? No, a thousand times no."[499] But instead of this the State "meddles in all our affairs, pinions us from cradle to grave. It prescribes all our actions, it piles up mountains of laws and ordinances that bewilder the shrewdest lawyer. It creates an army of office-holders who sit like spiders in their webs and have never seen the world except through the dingy panes of their office-window. The immense and ever-increasing sums that the State collects from the people are never sufficient: it lives at the expense of future generations, and steers with all its might toward bankruptcy. 'State' is tantamount to 'war'; one State seeks to weaken and ruin another in order to force upon the latter its law, its policy, its commercial treaties, and to enrich itself at its expense; war is to-day the usual condition in Europe, there is a thirty years' supply of causes of war on hand. And civil war rages at the same time with foreign war; the State, which was originally to be a protection for all and especially for the weak, has to-day become a weapon of the rich against the exploited, of the propertied against the propertyless."[500]
In these respects there is no distinction to be made between the different forms of the State. "Toward the end of the last century the French people overthrew the monarchy, and the last absolute king expiated on the scaffold his own crimes and those of his predecessors."[501] "Later all the countries of the Continent went through the same evolution: they overthrew their absolute monarchies and flung themselves into the arms of parliamentarism."[502] "Now it is being perceived that parliamentarism, which was entered upon with such great hopes, has everywhere become a tool for intrigue and personal enrichment, for efforts hostile to the people and to evolution."[503] "Precisely like any despot, the body of representatives of the people—be it called Parliament, Convention, or anything else; be it appointed by the prefects of a Bonaparte or elected with all conceivable freedom by an insurgent city—will always try to enlarge its competence, to strengthen its power by all sorts of meddling, and to displace the activity of the individual and the group by the law."[504] "It was only a forty years' movement, which occasionally even set fire to grain-fields, that could bring the English Parliament to secure to the tenant the value of the improvements made by him. But if it is a question of protecting the capitalist's interest, threatened by a disturbance or even by agitation,—ah, then every representative of the people is on hand, then it acts with more recklessness and cowardice than any despot. The six-hundred-headed beast without a name has outdone Louis IX and Ivan IV."[505] "Parliamentarism is nauseating to any one who has seen it near at hand."[506]
"The dominion of men, which calls itself 'government,' is incompatible with a morality founded on solidarity."[507] This is best shown by "the so-called civil rights, whose value and importance the bourgeois press is daily praising to us in every key."[508] "Are they made for those who alone need them? Certainly not. Universal suffrage may under some circumstances afford to the bourgeoisie a certain protection against encroachments by the central authority, it may establish a balance between two authorities without its being necessary for the rivals to draw the knife on each other as formerly; but it is valueless when the object is to overthrow authority or even to set bounds to it. For the rulers it is an excellent means of deciding their disputes; but of what use is it to the ruled? Just so with the freedom of the press. To the mind of the bourgeoisie, what is the best thing that has been alleged in its favor? Its impotence. 'Look at England, Switzerland, the United States,' they say. 'There the press is free and yet the dominion of capital is more assured than in any other country.' Just so they think about the right of association. 'Why should we not grant full right of association?' says the bourgeoisie. 'It will not impair our privileges. What we have to fear is secret societies; public unions are the best means to cripple them.' 'The inviolability of the home? Yes, this we must proclaim aloud, this we must inscribe in the statute-books,' say the sly bourgeois, 'the police certainly must not be looking into our pots and kettles. If things go wrong some day, we will snap our fingers at a man's right to his own house, rummage everything, and, if necessary, arrest people in their beds.' 'The secrecy of letters? Yes, just proclaim its inviolability aloud everywhere, our little privacies certainly must not come to the light. If we scent a plot against our privileges, we shall not stand much on ceremony. And if anybody objects, we shall say what an English minister lately said among the applause of Parliament: "Yes, gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart and with the deepest reluctance that we are having letters opened, but the country (that is, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) is in danger!"' That is what political rights are. Freedom of the press and freedom of association, the inviolability of the home, and all the rest, are respected only so long as the people make no use of them against the privileged classes. But on the day when the people begin to use them for the undermining of privileges all these 'rights' are thrown overboard."[509]
2. The stage of evolution to which the State belongs will soon be left behind by man. The State is doomed.[510]
It is "of a relatively modern origin."[511] "The State is a historic formation which, in the life of all nations, has at a certain time gradually taken the place of free associations. Church, law, military power, and wealth acquired by plunder, have for centuries made common cause, have in slow labor piled stone on stone, encroachment on encroachment, and thus created the monstrous institution which has finally fixed itself in every corner of social life—nay, in the brains and hearts of men—and which we call the State."[512]
It has now begun to decompose. "The peoples—especially those of the Latin races—are bent on destroying its authority, which merely hampers their free development; they want the independence of provinces, communes, and groups of laborers; they want not to submit to any dominion, but to league themselves together freely."[513] "The dissolution of the States is advancing at frightful speed. They have become decrepit graybeards, with wrinkled skins and tottering feet, gnawed by internal diseases and without understanding for the new thoughts; they are squandering the little strength that they still had left, living at the expense of their numbered years, and hastening their end by falling foul of each other like old women."[514] The moment of the State's disappearance is therefore close at hand.[515] Kropotkin says now that it will come in a few years,[516] now that it will come at the end of the nineteenth century.[517]
II. In the next stage of evolution, which, as has been shown, mankind must soon reach, the place of the State will be taken by a social human life on the basis of the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to. Anarchism is the "inevitable"[518] "next phase,"[519] "higher form,"[520] of society.
1. Even after the State is done away men will live together socially; but they will no longer be held together in society by a governmental authority, but by the legally binding force of contract. "Free expansion of individuals into groups and of groups into associations, free organization from the simple to the complex as need and inclination are felt,"[521] will be the future form of society.
We can at present perceive a growing Anarchistic movement; that is, "a movement towards limiting more and more the sphere of action of government. After having tried all kinds of government, humanity is trying now to free itself from the bonds of any government whatever, and to respond to its needs of organization by the free understanding between individuals prosecuting the same common aims."[522] "Free associations are beginning to take to themselves the entire field of human activity."[523] "The large organizations resulting merely and simply from free agreement have grown recently. The railway net of Europe—a confederation of so many scores of separate societies—is an instance; the Dutch Beurden, or associations of ship and boat owners, are extending now their organizations over the rivers of Germany, and even to the shipping trade of the Baltic; the numberless amalgamated manufacturers' associations, and the syndicats of France, are so many instances in point. But there also is no lack of free organizations for nobler pursuits: the Lifeboat Association, the Hospitals Association, and hundreds of like organizations. One of the most remarkable societies which has[524] recently arisen is the Red Cross Society. To slaughter men on the battle-fields, that remains the duty of the State; but these very States recognize their inability to take care of their own wounded; they abandon the task, to a great extent, to private initiative."[525] "These endeavors will attain to free play, will find a new and vast field for their application, and will form the foundation of the future society."[526]
"The agreement between the hundreds of companies to which the European railroads belong has been entered into directly, without the meddling of any central authority that prescribed laws to the several companies. It has been kept up by conventions at which delegates met to consult together and then to lay before their principals plans, not laws. This is a new procedure, utterly different from any government whether monarchical or republican, absolute or constitutional. It is an innovation which at first makes its way into European manners only by hesitating steps, but to which the future belongs."[527]
2. "To rack our brains to-day about the details of the form which public life shall take in the future society, would be silly. Yet we must come to an agreement now about the main outlines."[528] "We must not forget that perhaps in a year or two we shall be called on to decide all questions of the organization of society."[529]
Communes will continue to exist; but "these communes are not agglomerations of men in a territory, and know neither walls nor boundaries; the commune is a clustering of like-minded persons, not a closed integer. The various groups in one commune will feel themselves drawn to similar groups in other communes; they will unite themselves with these as firmly as with their fellow-citizens; and thus there will come about communities of interest whose members are scattered over a thousand cities and villages."[530]
Men will join themselves together by "contracts"[531] to form such communes. They will "take upon themselves duties to society,"[532] which on its part engages to do certain things for them.[533] It will not be necessary to compel the fulfilment of these contracts,[534] there will be no need of penalties and judges.[535] Fulfilment will be sufficiently assured by "the necessity, which every one feels, of finding co-operation, support, and sympathy among his neighbors;"[536] he who does not live up to his obligations can of course be expelled from fellowship.[537]
In the commune every one will "do what is necessary himself, without waiting for a government's orders."[538] "The commune will not first destroy the State and then set it up again."[539] "People will see that they are freest and happiest when they have no plenipotentiary agents and depend as little on the wisdom of representatives as on that of Providence."[540] Nor will there be prisons or other penal institutions;[541] "for the few anti-social acts that may still take place the best remedy will consist in loving treatment, moral influence, and liberty."[542]
The communes on their part will join themselves together by contracts[543] quite in the same way as do the members of the individual communes. "The commune will recognize nothing above it except the interests of the league that it has of its own accord made with other communes."[544] "Owing to the multiplicity of our needs, a single league will soon not be enough; the commune will feel the necessity of entering into other connections also, joining this or that other league. For the purpose of obtaining food it is already a member of one group; now it must join a second in order to obtain other objects that it needs,—metal, for instance,—and then a third and fourth too, that will supply it with cloth and works of art. If one takes up an economic atlas of any country, one sees that there are no economic boundaries: the areas of production and exchange for the different objects are blended, interlaced, superimposed. Thus the combinations of the communes also, if they followed their natural development, would soon intertwine in the same way and form an infinitely denser network and a far more consummate 'unity' than the States, whose individual parts, after all, only lie side by side like the rods around the lictor's axe."[545]
3. The future society will be able easily to accomplish the tasks that the State accomplishes at present.
"Suppose there is need of a street. Well, then let the inhabitants of the neighboring communes come to an understanding about it, and they will do their business better than the Minister of Public Works would do it. Or a railroad is needed. Here too the communes that are concerned will produce something very different from the work of the promoters who only build bad pieces of track and make millions by it. Or schools are required. People can fit them up for themselves at least as well as the gentlemen at Paris. Or the enemy invades the country. Then we defend ourselves instead of relying on generals who would merely betray us. Or the farmer must have tools and machines. Then he comes to an understanding with the city workingmen, these supply him with them at cost in return for his products, and the middleman, who now robs both the farmer and the workingman, is superfluous."[546] "Or there comes up a little dispute, or a stronger man tries to push down a weaker. In the first case the people will know enough to create a court of arbitration, and in the second every citizen will regard it as his duty to interfere himself and not wait for the police; there will be as little need of constables as of judges and turnkeys."[547]
