3.

The fetes and public meetings organized on the 18th of March in all the towns where there are organized socialist groups, deserve our attention, not merely as a demonstration by the army of the working class, but even more as an expression of the feelings that animate the socialists of the two worlds. Our numbers can better be counted in this way than by any kind of bulletin, for they show aspirations that have developed in full freedom without the influence of electoral tactics.

In fact, the workers, when they gather on this day, do not limit themselves in their meetings to praising the heroism of the Parisian proletariat or to demanding vengeance for the May massacres. While they reinvigorate themselves by memories of the heroic struggle in Paris, they are already forging an alliance that extends into the future. They discuss the lessons that must be drawn for the forthcoming revolution from the Commune of 1871; they ask each other what were the mistakes of the Commune, not to criticise individual men, but to emphasize how the presumptions about property and authority among the working class organizations of the time hindered the revolutionary idea from opening out, developing, and illuminating the whole world with its vivifying light.

The lessons of 1871 have profited the workers of the whole world so that, breaking with old prejudices, they have been able to state clearly and simply how they understand their revolution. From now onwards it is certain that the next uprising of the Communes will not be a simple communalist movement. Those who still think that an independent Commune must be elected to try out economic reforms are lagging behind the development of the popular mind. It is by revolutionary socialist actions, by abolishing individual property, that the Communes of the next revolution will affirm and constitute their independence.

The day on which, in consequence of the development of the revolutionary situation, the governments are swept out by the people and disorganization is created in the ranks of the bourgeoisie who can only survive through the protection of the State, the insurgent people will not wait for any old government in its marvellous wisdom to decree economic reforms. They will abolish individual property by themselves taking possession, in the name of the whole people and by violent expropriation of the whole of social wealth which had been accumulated by the work of past generations. They will not stop short at expropriating the owners of social capital by a decree that will remain a dead letter; they will take possession and establish their rights of usufruct immediately. They will organize the workshops so that they continue production. They will exchange their hovels for healthy habitations in the houses of the well-to-do; they will immediately find ways of utilising the riches accumulated in the cities; they will take possession of it as if all this wealth had never been stolen from them by the bourgeoisie. Once the industrial baron who seized his booty from the worker has been evicted, production will continue, shaking off the fetters that hinder it, abolishing the speculations that kill it, getting rid of the muck that hinders its development, and changing it according to the needs of the moment under the impetus provided by freedom of work. "Never did people work in France as in 1793, after the land was torn out of the hands of the lords," said Michelet. Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was the greatest of French romantic historians. His monumental Histoire de la France and his Histoire de la Revolution francais are patriotic epics which more than any other works created the great French national myths, of Joan of Arc and of the Revolution. Trans. ³³ Never have people worked as they will work on the day work becomes free, the day on which every kind of progress achieved by the worker will contribute to the well-being of the whole Commune.

On the subject of social wealth a distinction has been made that has divided the socialist party. The school that nowadays calls itself collectivist, substituting a kind of doctrinaire collectivism for the collectivism of the former International (which was nothing more than antiauthoritarian communism), tried to establish a distinction between the capital used in production and the wealth that sustained the necessities of living. Machines, factories, means of transport and communication, and the land itself, were distinguished as one type, while housing, manufactured products, clothing, provisions were distinguished as another. One class should become collective property; the other was destined, according to the learned representatives of that school, to remain private property.

They have tried to establish that distinction. But the good sense of the people has quickly seen through it all, understanding that the distinction is illusory and impossible to establish. Defective theoretically, it falls down before the practice of life. The workers have realized that the houses they inhabit, the coal and gas they burn, the food which the human body burns to sustain its life, the clothes with which people cover themselves to sustain their existence, the books they read to instruct themselves, not to speak of the pleasure they gain from living, are all of them integral parts of life, as necessary for the success of production and the progressive development of humanity, as the machines, manufacturers, raw materials and other factors in production. They have understood that to sustain property for the sake of its riches would be to maintain inequality, oppression, exploitation, and to paralyse in advance the results of partial expropriation. Clambering over the obstacles put in their way by the collectivism of the theoreticians, they proceed directly towards the more simple and more practical pattern of anti-authoritarian communism.

In fact, in their gatherings, the revolutionary workers have clearly affirmed their right to the whole of social wealth and the need to abolish individual property, as much to defend the values of consumption as those of production. "On the day of the revolution, let us seize hold of all wealth, of all the resources accumulated in the towns and cities, and we will hold them in common"-so say the spokesmen of the working mass, and the hearers confirm it by their unanimous assent.

"Let everyone take from the heap what he needs, and be sure that in the storehouses of our cities there will be enough provisions to feed everyone until free production gets into its stride. In the shops of our cities there are enough garments to clothe everybody, lying there unsold in the midst of general poverty. There are even enough objects of luxury for everyone to pick and choose according to his taste."

That is how the working mass envisages the revolution: The immediate introduction of anarchist communism and the free organization of production. These are two established points, and in this respect the Communes of the revolution that growls at our doors will not repeat the errors of their predecessors who, by shedding their blood so generously, have cleared the path to the future.

The same kind of agreement has not yet been established-though that agreement is not far off-on another, no less important point: the question of government.

We know that the two schools are facing each other, completely divided on this question. "On the very day of the revolution," says one group, "we must constitute a government to assume power. Strong and resolute, this government will make the revolution by decreeing this and that and coercing people to obey its decrees."

"What a sad illusion!" say the others. "Any central government, setting out to rule a nation, will inevitably be formed of disparate elements, conservative in its essence, and nothing more than a hindrance to the revolution. It will merely hobble the Communes which are ready to march forward, without being able to inspire the backward Communes with a revolutionary urge. The same will happen in the heart of an insurgent Commune. Either the communal government will do no more than sanction what has already been done, and it will then be a useless and potentially dangerous mechanism; or it will attempt to act with prudence and regulate what should be elaborated freely by the people themselves if it is to be viable; it will apply theories where society should be elaborating new forms of communal life with the creative force that rises up in the social organism when it breaks its chains and sees new and broad horizons opening out before it. Men who hold power will hinder that impulse, without producing anything on their own of which they might be capable if they remained in the heart of the people, working beside them in elaborating a new organization instead of closing themselves up in offices and exhausting their energies in idle debate. That will be a hindrance and a peril; powerless to do good but formidable in its possibilities of evil; thus, it has no reason to exist."

No matter how just and natural this reasoning may be, it still clashes with secular prejudices, accumulated and approved by those who have an interest in maintaining the religion of government alongside the religion of property and godly religion.

This prejudice, the last of the series: God, Property, Government, still exists and it is a danger to the forthcoming revolution. But one can already see it crumbling away. "We will see to our own affairs," the workers are saying, "without awaiting the orders of a government, and we will go over the heads of those who seek to impose themselves in the guise of priest, proprietor or ruler. And for this reason we must hope that the anarchist party will continue to fight vigorously against the religion of governmentalism, and that it will not be diverted from its own path by letting itself be dragged into power struggles; in our view, we can all hope that in the few years left before the revolution, the prejudice in favour of government will be sufficiently broken down and will no longer have the power of leading the working masses in the wrong direction.

At the same time there has been one regrettable deficiency in the recent popular gatherings. Nothing, or almost nothing, has been done in the countryside. Activity has been restricted to the towns. The country does not seem to exist for the urban workers. Even the orators who speak of the character of the coming revolution avoid mentioning the rural areas and the land. They are familiar neither with the peasant nor with his desires, and so they take no chances of speaking in his name. Need one dwell at length on the perils that result from this? The emancipation of the proletariat will not even be possible while the revolutionary movement fails to embrace the countryside. The insurgent communes will be unable to maintain themselves for a single day, if the insurrection does not spread at the same time among the villages. When taxes, mortgages and rents are abolished, when the institutions that protect them are scattered to the four winds, it is certain that the villages will understand the advantages of that revolution. At the same time it would be imprudent to count on the diffusion of revolutionary ideas in the villages without advance preparation. We must first find out what the peasant needs, how the revolution is understood in the villages, and how they think of resolving the thorny question of landed property. We must let the peasant know in advance what the workers of the towns-their natural allies- are thinking, and we must assure them that there is nothing to fear in the way of measures that may be harmful to agriculture. As for the workers in the cities, they must accustom themselves to respecting the peasant and marching in a common accord with him.

But for that to happen the worker must accept the obligation to help the propaganda in the villages. In each town there must appear a small but special organization, a branch of the Agrarian League, to carry on propaganda among the peasants. This kind of propaganda must be considered a duty, in the same way as propaganda in the industrial centres.

The beginnings will be hard, but therein lies the success of the revolution. It will be victorious only on the day when the workers in the factories and the cultivators in the fields march hand in hand to the conquest of equality for all, carrying happiness into the cottage as well as into the buildings of the great industrial agglomerations.