A-Infos (en) Italy, FdCA, IL CANTIERE #37 - ANARCHY: A Path to Liberation - Carmine Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The word anarchy was used positively to describe an organic political 
project only during the 19th century. This is because anarchy is not an 
ahistorical project inherent to humankind, and its affirmation is not 
necessarily natural; because nature is not anarchic, nor does history 
move toward anarchy. The possibility of developing an anarchic society 
depends on the conscious will of humankind, which affirms its humanity, 
and in this way distinguishes itself from animals, transforming the 
world around it. But if history does not move toward anarchy, anarchy is 
anchored in history. The historical process, through the slow change of 
social organisms and modes of production, has refined the tools 
available to the oligarchy of power, allowing it to continue to control 
and exploit the great mass of workers and, more generally, all of 
humanity. Indeed, we have witnessed not only the universalization of 
capitalism on a geographical basis, but also the phenomenon of 
interpenetration, in the sense that every ethnic and/or cultural 
particularity has been absorbed, without being annihilated, and inserted 
into a context of capital valorization. Capital, or rather the economic 
and social form defined as the capitalist mode of production, has 
revealed, in its evolution and affirmation, its true pragmatic and 
opportunistic nature, more characteristically than the tendency toward 
homogenization that seemed, during the growth phase of capitalism, to be 
the undeniable fact of development. Homogenization, despite its negative 
aspects, because it presents itself as a process of flattening all 
differences-linguistic, cultural, religious, etc.-appeared to be that 
process, and therein lay the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie's 
affirmation, which could break with ancestral cultures, with 
superstitions, and with the cultural and therefore political division of 
the working masses. This trend objectively played a role in Europe, the 
cradle of capitalism, and it is the one that, together with the 
revolution in production and work methods-large concentrations of 
workers, inside and outside the factory, and cooperation of the 
workforce in and between the various sectors of industry-formed the 
premise that, by connecting workers' knowledge, demonstrated the 
possibility of organizing social life without the exploitation of the 
boss and without the political, legal, and military superstructure of 
the state. It is from this historical period-of which we are now 
experiencing a different phase, one in which every activity in life, 
even non-immediately economic ones, is brought back into the sphere of 
capitalist commodification-that the word freedom takes on the full 
meaning that we anarchists attribute to it.
Freedom from constraints and impositions exercised in the name of 
earthly and celestial authorities that protect the privilege of a few 
against the rights of all; freedom from psychological and moralistic 
conditioning that tends to define a priori the roles and values of human 
beings according to male-female, normal-abnormal, 
heterosexual-homosexual, young-old patterns; freedom from material 
needs; Freedom of work, but also from work as long as it remains "God's 
curse," hence toil, sweat, and social hierarchy; freedom in sexuality, 
freed from the judgments and moral prejudices arbitrarily imposed by 
society, and brought back into the realm of free personal choice; 
freedom to express one's ideas without bureaucratic limitations and 
interference (police control of the press, journalists' guild); freedom 
of worship, as one's own choice of religious experience, not to be 
imposed on others.
Freedom thus conceived, a specific expression of anarchism, is 
historically determined, because in this broad sense, and one could 
define it more broadly, it finds no parallel in other historical eras. 
Certainly not in the much-vaunted Athenian polis or in the philosophical 
writings of Plato, where freedom was not exercised by women and slaves; 
certainly not in the models of conventual communism of the likes of 
Campanella and Moro, where the rule is an inviolable law. Nor does the 
term "freedom" take on a full meaning in the early elaborations. of 
utopian socialists, much closer to the barracks communism of the 16th 
and 17th century clerics, and the inspiration for the barracks communism 
of the authoritarian wing of the socialist movement, whose leading 
exponents include Lassalle in Germany, Lenin and Stalin in Russia, and 
Mao Zedong in China.
Children of History
Two concomitant and dialectically related factors are the basis for the 
emergence of a critical and radical political conception: the 
socialization of labor in large workers' unions; cooperation and 
interrelationship in the production phases; and the victory of reason 
over metaphysical prejudices-the Enlightenment.
These factors fuel all those ideologies that address the social problems 
posed by the economy. Thus, the aspiration to a "harmonious" social 
organization that could satisfy the needs of every person has been the 
basis of both liberal and socialist theories, both statist and 
anti-statist. On the one hand, liberal theories responded with
the exaltation of free private initiative, which, through the "invisible 
hand" of the market, to use Adam Smith's words, provides and solves 
everything; on the other, the solutions of nascent socialist theories, 
which, in their common formulation, identify private ownership of the 
means of production as the link that must be broken to resolve economic 
and social problems. However, they differ profoundly in their analysis 
of power: some identify a highly centralized state organization as the 
mechanism for ensuring social well-being; others-the 
libertarians-consider instead that the state and capital are mutually 
functional elements and that there can be no anti-capitalist struggle 
without anti-state struggle, just as the opposite is true. Social 
theories, in some ways descendants of the Enlightenment, have all, at 
least at their inception, posed the problem of providing a "harmonious" 
solution to social organization-recall the reference to happiness in the 
American Constitution. Today, however, only anarchy is defined as 
utopian, despite the clear and tragic failure of liberalism and statist 
socialism. The definition of utopia, moreover, is completely out of 
place when describing anarchy. Indeed, the concept of utopia-that is, 
the place that does not exist as first defined by T. Moro, refers to an 
ideal social structure already defined a priori by the more or less 
fertile mind of the thinker, which is not even remotely connected to the 
real aspirations, those historically expressed, of the masses, nor to 
the evolution of production relations and/or the evolution of culture, 
ethics, and morality. The accusation of utopianism, therefore, comes 
from those who, aware of a vision potentially undermining current 
privileges, seek to empty it of its revolutionary force by transferring 
what is instead a concrete path to liberation into the realm of fantasy. 
Thus, despite the lessons of four thousand years of history, freedom is 
preached, but submission is practiced; peace is desired, but war is 
prepared; equality is affirmed, but exploitation is organized. If all 
this is not the result of bad faith, a prudent mind should recognize 
with us that these Machiavellianisms are the true utopia and that modern 
thought conversely needs a simpler, but also more concrete, reasoning 
model: the one that anarchists have been advocating for over 150 years, 
namely, the affirmation of a coherent relationship between means and 
ends. Here we are, therefore, faced with the heart of the anarchist 
conception, which is far from the dream of pre-established and idealized 
social structures. This exercise, which, by forcibly reducing reality to 
patterns imposed from above, has always had a reactionary undertone, 
instead much more concretely identifies the possibility of building a 
more just society starting from three fundamental ethical principles: no 
man should/can exploit another; every action must respond to a 
relationship of coherence between means and ends; collective/social 
freedom must complement and expand individual freedoms.

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