International Anarchist Group of London
April 1916
Le groupe anarchiste international de Londres, La déclaration anarchiste (Avril 1916)
It has been almost two years since the most terrible scourge in recorded history fell upon Europe. Forgetful of the declarations of the past, most of the leaders of the most advanced parties, including most of the leaders of the workers’ organisations, some out of cowardice, others out of lack of conviction, still others out of self-interest, have allowed themselves to be swallowed by patriotic, militaristic and warmongering propaganda, which, in every belligerent nation, has developed with an intensity sufficient to explain the situation and the nature of the period we are going through.
As for the people, in its great mass, whose mentality is shaped by the school, the church, the army, the press, that is to say, ignorant and credulous, devoid of initiative, trained in obedience and resigned to submit to the will of the masters it gives itself, from that of the legislator, to that of the union secretary, it has, under the pressure of shepherds from above and below, reconciled to the most sinister tasks, marched without rebellion to the slaughterhouse, dragging by the force of its inertia even the best amongst it, who only avoided death at the execution post by risking death on the field of carnage.
However, from the very first days, even before the declaration of war, anarchists of all countries, belligerent or neutral, with a few rare exceptions, in numbers so tiny that they could be considered negligible, took a clear stand against the war. From the start, some of our own, who will later become known as heroes and martyrs, chose to be shot rather than participate in the killing; others suffer in imperialist or republican jails for the crime of having protested and tried to awaken the spirit of the people.
Before the end of 1914, anarchists launched a manifesto which had received the support of comrades from all over the world, and which our organs reproduced in the countries where they still existed. This manifesto showed that the responsibly for the current tragedy lies with all those in power without exception and with the big capitalists, whose agents they are, and that society’s capitalist organisation and the authoritarian basis are the determining causes of any war. And it dispelled the ambiguity created by the attitude of these few “warmongering anarchists”, more noisy than numerous, all the more noisy because, serving the cause of the mighty, their enemy of yesterday, our eternal enemy, the State, they alone were allowed to express themselves openly, freely.
Months passed, a year and a half passed and these renegades continued peacefully, far from the trenches, to incite stupid and repugnant murder, when last month, a movement in favour of peace beginning to form, the most notorious of them judged it necessary to carry out a high-profile act, with the aim of both countering this tendency to impose upon those in power the cessation of hostilities and so that it might be believed, and make it appear, that the anarchists had rallied to the idea and the fact of war.
We refer to this declaration published in Paris, in La Bataille on 14 March signed by Christian Cornelissen, Henri Fuss, Jean Grave, Jacques Guérin, Hussein Dey, Peter Kropotkin, A. Laisant, F. Leve, Charles Malato, Jules Moineau, A. Orfila, M. Pierrot, Paul Reclus, Richard, S. Shikawa, M. Tcherkesoff, and which was naturally applauded by the reactionary press.
It would be easy for us to be ironic about these comrades of yesterday, or even to be indignant at the role played by them, which age or their particular situation, or even their residence, shelters from the scourge and who, nevertheless, with an unconsciousness or cruelty that even some conservatives of the current social order do not have, dare to write, while on all sides there is weariness and the aspiration towards peace, dare to write we say, that talking about peace at the present time would be the most disastrous error that one could commit and who conclude: We believe that there can be no question of peace with those who we fight. But we know, and they do not ignore it either, what those who are fighting think. We know what those who are going to die want, in other words; while not hiding from us the causes which generate their weakness, will perhaps lead to their death without their having attempted the gesture that would save them. We, we leave these comrades of yesterday to their new loves.
What we want to do, what we fundamentally insist upon, is to protest against the attempt they are making to attract within their orbit of their impoverished neo-statist speculations the world Anarchist movement and Anarchist philosophy itself; it is to protest against their attempt to rally round their banner with their gesture, in the eyes of the uninformed public, all the Anarchists who have remained faithful to a past they have seen no reason to repudiate, and who believe more than ever in the truth of their ideas.
Anarchists have no leaders, that is to say bosses. Furthermore, what we are here to affirm is not only that these sixteen signatories are the exception and that we are the many, which has only relative importance, but that their gesture and their assertions can in no way be connected with our doctrine, of which they are, on the contrary, the absolute negation.
This is not the place to enumerate this statement, sentence by sentence, to analyse and criticise each of its assertions. Besides, it is well-known. What do we find there? All the nationalist nonsense that we have been reading for almost two years in a prostitute press, all the patriotic naiveties that they once laughed at, all the foreign policy cliches with which governments lull the people to sleep. Here they are denouncing an imperialism that they now only discover in their adversaries. As if they were in the confidence of the ministries, the chancelleries and the general staff, they juggle with the amounts for indemnities, evaluate military forces and remake, too, these former critics of the idea of the homeland, the map of the world on the basis of the rights of peoples and the principle of nationalities. Then, having judged it dangerous to talk of peace, as long as we have not, to use the usual expression, crushed only Prussian militarism, they prefer to look danger in the face far from the bullets. If we instead consider the ideas expressed in their declaration synthetically, we find that there is no difference between the thesis supported there and the usual theme of the parties of authority grouped, in each belligerent nation, in the Union sacrée. They too, these repentant anarchists, have entered the Union sacrée for the defence of the famous acquired freedoms, and they find nothing better, to safeguard this so-called freedom of the people, of which they make themselves the champions, than to oblige the individual to murder and to be murdered on behalf of and for the benefit of the State. In reality, this declaration is not the work of anarchists. It was written by statists who are unaware of what they are, but by statists nevertheless. And nothing in this needless opportunistic work no longer differentiates these ex-comrades from the politicians, moralists and philosophers of government, the struggle against whom they had devoted their lives.
Collaborating with a State, with a government, in its struggle, even if it were devoid of bloody violence, against another State, against another government, choosing between two modes of slavery, which are only superficially different, this superficial difference being the result of the adaptation of the means of government to the state of evolution reached by the people which is subject to them, this is certainly not anarchist. All the more so when this struggle takes on the particularly ignoble aspect of war. What has always differentiated the anarchist from other social elements dispersed in the various political parties, in the various philosophical or sociological schools, is the repudiation of the State, the grouping [faisceau] of all the instruments of domination, the centre of all tyranny; the State which is by its purpose the enemy of the individual, for whose defeat anarchists has always fought, and which is made so much easier in the current period by the defenders of the law situated equally, let is not forget, on either side of the border. By voluntarily including themselves into it, the signatories of the declaration have, at the same time, renounced anarchism.
We others, who are conscious that we have remained in the right line of an anarchism whose truth cannot have changed because of this war, a war planned for a long time, and which is only the supreme manifestation of these evils which are the State and capitalism, we want to dissociate ourselves from these comrades who abandoned their ideas, our ideas, in a situation where, more than ever, it was necessary to proclaim them loudly and firmly.
Producers of social wealth, manual and intellectual proletarians, men of a liberated mentality, we are, in fact and by will, those without a homeland. Besides, homeland is only the poetic name of the State. Having nothing to defend, not even the acquired liberties that the State cannot give us, we repudiate the hypocritical distinction between offensive and defensive wars. We only know of wars waged between governments, between capitalists, at the cost of the lives, pain and misery of their subjects. The current war is a striking example of this. As long as the people do not want to proceed with the establishment of a libertarian and communist society, peace will only be the truce used to prepare for the next war, war between groups being in power from the principles of authority and property. The only way to end the war, to prevent all war, is the expropriatory revolution, the social war, the only one to which anarchists can devote our lives. And what the Sixteen could not say at the end of their declaration, we proclaim: Long live Anarchy!