Taken from the pamphlet "The Moral Basis of Anarchy" (1904) ---- The
concept of freedom has been rapidly changing. Just as free will does notexist in the moral world, except as a hereditary illusion of our senses,
so in an absolute sense there is no complete autonomy of the individual
in society. The instinct of sociability, gradually developed in man with
the advance of civilization, has become a fundamental need of the
species, in its further development, and now recognizes in the principle
of association the strongest and most ready lever that, through the
efforts of each and all, can push humanity on the ascending path of its
best destinies.
Hence the entirely modern and sociological conception of freedom, which
finds in the mutual dependence of the relationships between individuals,
a small limitation to the absolute independence of each of them, at the
same time finds in the strengthened and increasingly complex social
solidarity, its defense and its guarantee - so that instead of being
diminished, it feels increased.
If the savage man in the antisocial state seems at first sight freer, he
is incomparably more of a slave to the brute forces of the environment
that surrounds him, than the associated man, who in the support of his
fellow man finds the safeguard of his rights.
But association, in the sense of organic grouping of the various social
molecules, does not yet exist. Because in the current society there is
no spontaneous fusion of homogeneous elements, but an uncomposed amalgam
of contradictory principles and interests.
The principle of egocracy, in the economic and political field (since
exploitation and class domination are only the consequence, by
instinctive solidarity of the two dominating forces: money and power) is
being replaced, in the slow and underground elaboration of the new form
and the new social soul, by the principle of mutual aid, more in line
with the development of advanced evolution, which was apparently
interrupted by this parenthesis, dark and splendid at the same time,
that was the nineteenth century.
Splendid because the same unbridled competition between individuals and
classes, which represented - on the economic level - a real return to
wild primitive individualism, created the miracles of mechanics,
industry, modern engineering. Dark, because the gigantic works of this
fight, with billions against resistant nature, cost millions of human
lives, of noble obscure existences, extinguished after unspeakable
hardships, with muscles squeezed of all strength, and of all vitality
under the straitjacket of the wage-earner. Thus it can be said that the
colossal edifice of bourgeois civilization, which will also have a
conspicuous place in the history of the material and scientific progress
of humanity, was built with this cement of workers' lives, and the great
collective soul of the working classes pulsates in the infinite organism
of all modern production, as if the animating force of those lives spent
at work, or for work, were transfused into the things created by work.
From this new condition of industriousness and associated efforts, for
the changed means of production, in which the great machine and the
great workshop reign supreme, the new juridical principle of a social
right on the product due to collective work arises triumphantly.
These are no longer the sentimental complaints of the holy fathers of
the church against the iniquity that, trampling on the many, divides the
children of God from one another, as John Chrysostom said. Nor are they
the naturalistic declarations of the pre-Raphaelites of simplistic
socialism demanding for each her share of land, bread and salt -
bestowed on all in common by mother nature. They are not
the ascetic invectives of the old communists, before the fears of the
millennium; not the philosophical and abstract declarations of the
encyclopedists on the rights of man, before the red dawn of '89. It is
something more, and better: the maturity of certain facts, and the
complete evolution of certain forms.
Never before, due to the needs of the division of labor in large-scale
industry and in the mechanical workshop, has the worker found himself so
closely linked to the worker, the trades to the trades, the arts to the
arts, thanks to the mutual dependence and the combined study of efforts
from which a resultant develops much greater than the simple sum of
individual forces. The combination of these efforts to increase
production has gradually created not only the material bonds that now
inextricably bind workers together, but also those moral bonds that were
initially unnoticed and then, from time to time, became stronger because
they were more conscious.
And since the revolution now complete brought about by mechanics in all
the arts and in all the trades by socializing in toil the workers' arms,
previously isolated workers, has already elaborated the skeleton of a
new world, in which the socialization of toil without the enjoyment of
the product, on the part of those who toiled, is completed by the
socialization of the enjoyments of the product itself, declared by right
and in fact the common heritage of the whole society, a corresponding
revolution of the consciences and of the proletarian forces will
complete the slow work of this transformation of the economic and moral
relations between men, integrating the typical social structure, which
represents the oasis of rest where humanity, after millennia of toil and
pain, can recover from the tiring journey and where the two fundamental
instincts of man, conservation of the individual and conservation of the
species, finally find the way to reconcile themselves after the long
disagreement; where man, in order to conquer his well-being, does not
have to pass - like the bullies of today and yesterday - over the bodies
of his fellow men; because this would not be freedom, but rather the
perpetuation of tyranny in another form. The violence of governments
would be replaced by the violence of the individual - both brutal
expressions of the authority of man over man. The freedom of each is
only possible in the freedom of all, just as the health of each cell can
only be in the health of the entire organism.
by Pietro Gori
https://umanitanova.org/il-concetto-di-liberta-individualismo-borghese-e-socialismo-anarchico-a-confronto/
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